The following comes from Lequear's "Traditions of Hunterdon" originally published 1869-70, pages 95-96 of the 1957 reprint:
"We find no record of a church in this area prior to 1749. It may be extant, written in German. In the present church edifice at New Germantown (Oldwick) is a stone marked 'Zion's Evangelical Lutheran Church, erected in 1749.' The same walls, built at that date form the building. They are two feet thick and were built to stand for ages. But it is a wonderful undertaking for such a people as this, in a remote wilderness to erect such an edifice. And who were these people? Baltis Pickel, Aaron Melick, Kline, Fritz Cramer, Van Vliet, Dietz (now Deats)***, Hildebrant, Shurts, Kruger, Bartles, &c. Some of them are the very same men who carried the musket in Spain under the banners of Queen Anne.
"Close to the walls on the east end of the church in New Germantown lie buried the bones of Baltis Pickel and his wife Catharine. He was born in 1686 and died in 1765, aged 79. Catharine was born in 1684 and died in 1761, aged 77. These two then came with the colony in 1710, young and devoted to God and freedom. They accompanied their people through all their wanderings and saw their temples reared in the land they went out to inherit, and calmly laid down in their last sleep close by the walls their devotion and long suffering had helped to rear.
"Baltis Pickel, son of the first Baltis, was born in 1720 ten years after his father and mother came to America. He grew up amid the first experience of the colony and knew all of its sufferings. When he accumulated property, after his father's death he gave $100 to the church. He was an active member, and his handwriting appears in different places upon the old church record. It is a fair, bold hand, such as the best business man might be proud to imitate. The Lutherans have always been liberal educators, for education is a part of their religion. It was because the Roman church then refused the Bible to the people that Martin Luther cut loose from them and spread the gospel over the world. When Baltis Pickel died, he was buried at the foot of his father's grave, and his wife, 'Suffah,' was buried there beside him."
"***Hiram Edmund Deats of Flemington says he knows of no record to attach the Deats (originally Dietz) family to the New Germantown settlement."
Baltis Pickel researchers might want to visit his family tree online at:
http://www.gencircles.com/users/red12767/1/data/37240.html