Wilkommen in Hermann!
This past spring, just as Mid-Missouri was beginning to thaw and color was appearing on the trees, my wife and I took our kiddo out for a weekend excursion around the Missouri River countryside. This round, we decided to head back to a place we’d visited before: Hermann, MO. For the uninitiated, Hermann is a quaint, historical river town, an hour southeast of St. Louis. It’s a small community, though with a rich history and lots of charm. The part of town leading to the old German Protestant church perches at the top of one of those picturesque Missouri bluffs: a perfect spot to look out on the water and take in the full breadth what was an important German settlement in the 1830s.
Today, Hermann is home to many of the nicer features of small-town Missouri: the bulk of the state’s wineries, a few local bakeries and many (exceptional) antique stories, and of course, a healthy share of B&Bs, ready to greet visitors and tourists year-round. It’s especially known for its Oktoberfest and Maifest celebrations, where you’ll often see entire party buses come in with revelers from the city.
Should you take a stroll down the main drag on 1st St., friendly faces abound. It’s a town that enjoys showcasing its Missouri-German heritage and sharing its quirks with those who come to tour its domain. The architecture downtown, certainly, seems unique for Missouri.
I must confess, we’ve been back on several occasions! There are too many neat locally-owned shops to name. Being a bit of a hound for antique and retro goods (I blame my father), it’s become ritual to spend our first afternoon there milling around local vendors like the Gold Rhino (for the veritably retro/quirky objects you need in your life) and Hermann’s Attic Antique Mall, which has a great vinyl record selection in and among the many fun consignment booths.
Then, of course, there’s the Hermann Wurst Haus, a classic German-American meat-and-lunch counter that specializes in house-made artisanal sausages and just about any prepared meat that strikes your fancy. If you’ve ever been to the German American lunch stops in Texas, it will give you nostalgia, right down to the wood tables.A great place to stop for a cold beer, grab a pack of Weisswurst to take home, or just hang around for brats, kraut, and company. They also sell lots of small prepared items from local vendors like the jars of quark (a spreadable German cheese) made by the Hemme Brothers Farmstead in Sweet Springs, MO: good on just about anything.
Hermann makes for its own experience, neither quite Germany nor your typical Midwestern tourist-stop. You won’t hear German spoken in the streets, but you’ll see the signs of long ago when that would’ve been true: the cross-streets that bear the names of important German icons, the many Hofs, and the centrally located historical museum dedicated to the memory of Deutschheim. There, you will find a dedicated, vibrant museum ready to tell you a bit about the bygone days and why this spot of the Missouri River drew so many from far away.
And although it sometimes feels like its German roots live mostly in memory and symbolism, a good eye for landscape and a bit of background can illuminate a lot of what once made the place a hub of activity in the 1800.
It’s no mistake that St. Paul’s United Church of Christ has the best seat in town, alone on its scenic river overlook: it was the first church founded by the German settlers. Given that the Catholic church is seated much farther down the hill, you can tell almost immediately which settlers got the first say!
Originally a Protestant Union church, as was typical of pioneer German Protestant churches throughout U. S. history, the church was officially organized 24 November 1844 as the St Pauls Evangelische Kirche (St. Paul’s German Protestant Church). I like to joke that, technically, the best view in town belongs not to the church but the rooster that sits at the top of the cross on the church steeple. Now there’s a German symbol for you!
If you’ve ever traveled to Western Germany or France, you’ve probably spotted a few of these “rooster” steeples in the wilds, the reason being that it’s an old European Protestant symbol, rooted in a haunting moment in the New Testament. In the Gospels, before the crucifixion, Jesus says to Peter that “before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” In remembrance of Peter’s frailty in that moment, European Protestants adopted the rooster symbol to remind themselves of human frailty, and that any of us, too, might be the next to deny Christ. The rooster, of course, can also be read as a symbol of the Resurrection, but if we’re talking about the church tradition (which supposedly began with St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome), we’re looking strictly at that sobering moment in the Gospels.
The history of the Protestant German denominations in America is quite complicated, but generally speaking, anytime you see a United Church of Christ in a formerly German community in the U. S., you’re most likely looking at what was previously a German Reformed or United Protestant Church. Evangelisch(e), to the American ear, is a bit of a misnomer: in German, the descriptor evangelisch typically just means “Protestant,” though often taken as a synonym for the Church of Martin Luther. The word protestantische is also sometimes used, but in my experience, most early German union churches in America were typically just called Evangelische or Deutchen Evangelische.
Where things get complicated is the matter of doctrine. Most histories of the United Church of Christ and the German Reformed Church in America will tell you that congregations in this mold were “broadly Calvinist.” Part of the reason for this has to do with the history of a few German electorates and kingdoms where, around 1817 (perhaps earlier in some parts), the Evangelische (Lutheran) and Reformierte (Reformed) were combined into a single church, as was the case in the Pfalz (Palatinate), where religious order mostly fell under the Vereinigte protestantisch-evangelisch-christliche Kirche der Pfalz [United Protestant Christian Church of the Pfalz].
Because union churches were so widespread in the sections where immigrants to the U. S. originated, it’s no surprise that the history of the German Reformed and Lutheran churches in America more or less sees its birth in a proliferation of emigrant “union” churches. There’s a great history of this available on the website of the United Church of Christ in America, but just to summarize matters, most of these “union” churches were a temporary fix and led to widespread rifts between Reformed and Lutheran folks during the late 1840s and early 1850s. As a result, most emigrant German Protestant churches in America started as “union” churches and then broke into two, sometimes three or four other churches around the 1850s, and so on. If you’re a genealogist tracking family who emigrated during these years, take note!
Hermann’s Utopianist Roots
So to come back to Hermann, the St. Paul’s Church—one of Hermann’s most iconic sites—is itself a product of this larger moment in German religious history. But while Hermann seems like a place typical of other German settlements in America, it’s important to remember that it was actually pretty exceptional, beginning as a result of a utopian experiment under the heading of the German Settlement Society of Philadelphia.
For those unfamiliar with the history of this group, it’s worth mentioning that the Germans who came to the U. S. in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s were generally an extremely progressive, left-leaning bunch for their time. It was this wave, too, that came to truly define our historical “German” cities like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh. Missouri, as a consequence, became a go-to place for not only farming families but also political thinkers, revolutionaries, and journalists. Many of these folks, often seeking out rural areas for settlements, formed large “settlement societies” and published calls for emigration both in Germany and the United States. (There was even at one time an aspiration to form a German state, though this plan fell through).
The emigrants of the 1830s, especially, weren’t just looking for a place to resettle: they were looking for a place to form their own society, often based on culturally and religiously progressive practices. In fact, one of the founders of Hermann (later ousted, no joke), Julius Leupold, was a friend of Johann August Röbling (normalized to Roebling), a civil engineer and utopianist who it just so happens designed the Brooklyn Bridge (a. k. a. the Roebling suspension bridge). These early pioneers and founders, who also helped develop the free-press of St. Louis and Chicago, were instrumental in the fueling the Abolitionist movement. Just one of the many reasons I’m proud to recognize my family as German American. The American Heartland, I’m telling you, has some genuinely radical roots!
Settlement societies of this nature, also referred to as emigration/immigration societies, sprang from the well of political discontent in the German territories. Consequently, idealists like Röbling and his friend Adolphus Etzler formed emigration groups, theirs known as the Mühlhausen Society, called so for their hometown of Mühlhausen in the Kingdom of Prussia [Preußen].
Etzler is an interesting but seldom-referenced figure: a “technological” utopianist who believed that a new society could be forged were we to develop solar and wind powered machines, freeing humanity from labor. Sound familiar? His ideas at the time were so outlandish that he eventually disappeared into exile, having failed to make his vision happen. My heart breaks just thinking about the timing.
Etzler was certainly ahead of his time, and as an outspoken figure, he was not only marginalized for it but also arrested as a demonstrator. Etzler, also of Mühlhausen, was a schoolmate of Röbling and likewise an idealist. Early on he became a follower of another important German emigrant utopianist: Johann Georg Rapp, the founder of the Harmony Society, a German movement that settled in Pennsylvania. Etzler went to join the Rapps in the U. S. in 1818 but would return to Mühlhausen in 1827.
I mention this web of connections because it goes to show that Hermann, Missouri essentially emerged from the same movement, and in association with figures like Röbling and Rapp. The Harmony Society, whose followers were sometimes called “Harmonites” and “Rappists,” was a group led by a Pietist Lutheran and self-proclaimed prophet, Georg Rapp, a farmer of near Maulbronn in the Duchy of Württemberg.
In the 1780s, Rapp began preaching his vision of Christian communal living, gathering quite a bit of attention from both the lower class and the government, his followers supposedly numbering near 12,000. Eventually, a government crackdown on the group forced Rapp’s hand, and he incited them to emigrate to America, where they would begin their vision in earnest. Several hundred followed Rapp to America, where they settled in Butler County, Pennsylvania, founding the Harmony Settlement. Rapp and his disciples (including an adopted son who assumed the name of “Friedrich Rapp”) founded several more communes in Pennsylvania and Indiana, including New Harmony, Economy, and New Economy. Although the Harmonites were able to support their commune with some efficiency, outsiders viewed their society as a cult, given the power the Rapps had over their community, as well as unusual policies like the society’s insistence on abstinence (not great for building a bigger community!).
As a “Pennsylvanian 1x removed,” I often think about the legacy of places like Butler County, where my great-grandfather—the first of my father’s family to ever earn a college degree—attended school in the 1890s, not 20 miles from the first Rapp settlement. I imagine western Pennsylvania, in some shape or form, lived in the imaginations of Germans of the 1800s as a place of lore: an honest-to-God political experiment.
It was Rapp’s vision of Pennsylvania as the new “Israel” that inspired Etzler to return to Mühlhausen, Preußen, where he was promptly arrested for preaching a similar, charismatic vision of Pennsylvania out in the streets. After his release from prison, Etzler reconnected with Röbling, and the two collaborated on a public call for emigration, essentially forming their own society destined for the Key Stone State. In May 1831, the group departed aboard the ships Henry Barclay and August Edward, though the time spent cooped up in the ship wore on the nerves of many, weakening the resolution of the settlers. By the time the group reached Harmony, PA, many were already at odds and departed for the other Rappist settlements. Etzler himself wound up wandering the globe, unsuccessfully attempting to bring his technologically liberated society to fruition.
If you’re curious to learn more about this particular branch of the utopian history, historian and Yale Professor Steven Stoll wrote a fantastic book on the topic called The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (2008).
Hermann and the Philadelphia Society
The German Settlement Society of Philadelphia, or Deutsche Ansiedlungs-Gesellschaft zu Philadelphia, had existed on other terms as a support society for immigrants in Philadelphia since the 1764, but it did not turn into the organized, idealist project that would give birth to Hermann until 27 August 1836, according to historian William G. Bek. In this respect, it was organized well after Missouri’s first large-scale emigration society, the Giessen Emigration Society, which came about in the 1830s and resulted in a large emigration and settlement (to the east of St. Louis) in 1834. It was certainly the Gießen group that paved the way, and though they were not able to establish a singular legacy like Hermann, it was the actual execution of a widescale emigration into Missouri that ultimately matters.
In the very least, it could be said that the Philadelphia Society and its early correspondents share some intellectual DNA with the Gießeners well worth exploring. For information on the Giessen group, I highly recommend the book Utopia: Revisiting a German State in America, an edited collection on the history and impact of the society. Among the authors, you will find public historian and voice of the Missouri Germans Consortium, Doris Keeven-Franke, who has devoted much of the past forty years to the topic of Germans in Missouri: again, there is a narrative here that historians like Keeven-Franke have been promoting, and it’s one worth following.
Bek’s history of Hermann and the Society notes that in 1836, the first official committee met at a German-owned hotel in Philadelphia, gathering together Anton Dunkelberg, Pfarrer [pastor] Heinrich Ginal, Ferdinand Starck, “G. Conradt,” Dr. Wilhelm Schmoele, Xaver Jenderich, and two advising members, Ludwig Friedaus and Wilhelm Mohl. Initially led by Pf. Ginal, the Society’s original aims were, according to Bek, “communistic” and Rappist in character. Another interesting point made by Bek is that the Society briefly considered Texas as a destination for settlement. Adolf Schroeder, who wrote material on Hermann in recent decades, managed to specify that the Society was entertaining the idea of settling in what was to become Jefferson County, where Port Arthur and Beaumont now stand. As one might expect, Texas was a long-shot from the start, so they quickly abandoned the idea. To call Texas a “politically unstable” region in 1835 to 1836 is on Bek’s part an almost laughable understatement.
After a period of considerable public solicitation and fundraising, the main body of the Society’s original leadership was replaced, and a formal organization occurred 9 August 1836 resulting in an official constitution, with 225 signing members.
In the constitution itself, the new leadership consisted of “Julius Leupold, President; Dr. Wilhelm Schmoele, Vice President; Johann Georg Wesselhoeft (the main editor for the group’s publicity/intelligence arm), secretary; Friedrich Lüdeking, Vice-Secretary, Dr. Moehring, Treasurer; and deputies C. V. Ferentheil, C. G. Ritter, and F. L. C. Gebhard,” as well as a board of managers, one of whom, Adam Schmidt, took the position of secretary after Dr. Moehring refused the position.
As deputy, Ritter acted as the first official scout of the Society and is thought to have helped arrive at the decision of a colony in Missouri as opposed to another Midwestern state. Having gone to Washington to test the waters, the deputies set out toward Missouri in the spring of 1837, where they decided on a number of government tracts along the Gasconade.
It is of note that Wesselhoeft was a well-known bookseller in Philadelphia but more importantly the editor, printer, and distributor of the Alte und Neue Welt, a German-language newspaper and popular intelligence source for German emigrants. It was in this paper that the first-known call for the Philadelphia Society was printed. Wesselhoeft is a figure of some historical note, given his former influence in Philadelphia, as well as his pedigree (he came from a family of German printers).
Hermann and the Idea of Deutschheim
Planning and execution are always two parts of the same puzzle. And to paraphrase a famous Prussian General, “No strategy survives the battlefield.” In 1829, the idea of an American Deutschheim, or German homeland, was promoted by Gottfried Duden, who penned a German-language emigration brief called A Report of a the Journey to the Western States of Northern America (1829). Duden, a native of Remscheid, in the Duchy of Berg [Westfalen, Rhenish Prussia], was a lawyer by trade but emigrated to America with a friend, Ludwig Eversmann, arriving 8 June 1824 in Baltimore. The pair came to St. Louis that year, supposedly, where shortly after they began to explore the Missouri River valley. Excited by Missouri’s beautiful landscape, Duden purchased and settled land (along with a German farmer) east of St. Louis, towards what became Warren County. Settling on it with Eversmann, Jacob Haun, and others, from there Duden began to explore the wilderness, keeping his former countrymen and the Romantic ideal of Weltanschauung (or something like it) in mind.
Although I’m being a bit general in my usage of it, Weltanschauung is a German word [lit. “world view”] used by philosopher Hegel to refer to a kind of collective vision or consciousness of the world that resides within people. For the Germans of the 1820s and 1830s, and especially figures like Duden and Rapp, the concept speaks to the spirit of what motivated those interested in coming to American territory for its liberty, carrying especially with them visions of societal reform.
After living in the “wilds” and witnessing the many facets of life in early eastern Missouri, Duden returned to the Rheinland ready to develop a greater appeal. The “report,” self-published in 1829 and filled with vibrant, romantic depictions of Missouri life, was by most definitions a hit, now credited with reshaping the trajectory of German emigration to America during its revival in the 1830s.
So influential was Duden’s “Missouri” that it triggered the creation of both the Berlin Emigration Society and the Gießen Emigration Society, both drawing emigrants to settle near Duden’s farm. The Gießeners, led by brothers-in-law Friedrich Muench and Paul Follen, also known as Paulus Follenius. Muench and Follenius were natives of the Vogelbergskreis, where the (Protestant) University of Gießen stood as a bulwark of liberal study.
The Gießen Society drew many educated men from the university, among which was the surgeon Dr. Georg Engelbach, the great-uncle of my 4th-great aunt. The Engelbachs were a prestigious, educated family within the history of Gießen that produced many Lutheran ministers, justices, lawyers, and doctors. As mentioned before, the Gießeners and their hundreds preceded the Philadelphia Society by many years, though their attempt to create a Deutschheim is generally deemed to have been unsuccessful. There is more to be said about this, though I recommend that you take a look at works like Utopia to get a fuller sense of the actual narrative (vetted by better-versed historians than I).
For Missouri’s early Germans, following through on a societal vision of such a large scale was, to say the least, met with difficulties, and the Gießeners eventually dispersed. The settlers of Hermann, too, would be confronted with numerous challenges, as the land along the Missouri River, though scenic, did not always prove as tenable as pioneers had hoped.
Hermann in Its Earliest Form
During or after the authorization of the Philadelphia Society constitution, the Society called on one of the signers, G. F. Bayer, born Georg Friedrich Baier, to act as its scout and agent in Missouri. Generally referred to as George Bayer in histories, Baier’s role in Hermann history was long under siege but has been rejuvenated as of late as Missouri begins to reexamine its heritage. Although Julius Leupold was the first de facto leader of the society, it is by most reasoning Baier who actually founded Hermann, being the primary agent, purchaser, and organizer of the settlement. The difficulties of making life sustainable for settlers, however, took a heavy toll on both men equally, and doubts of the Society’s competence grew not long after the first groups arrived in Hermann. Eventually, the Society fell to its internal and external pressures and dissolved, though Hermann lived on.
Because one of my specialties as a researcher is the formation of 19th-century German settlements in the U. S., I’ve grown increasingly interested in the lives of not only Baier and Leupold, but also the families who essentially led the way, the first group actually arriving in Hermann before Baier himself could return from a trip back to Pennsylvania. It’s most often that these kinds of folks—the ones who went head-first into hardship, and whose struggles were often rewarded with unmarked graves—are those who hardly receive any mention in histories. Even Baier, who by rights ought to have more written about him as the founder in practice, has taken the back-burner in part because of his alleged failures and early death.
As a German American, writer, and historian, it always dismays me a bit to witness silences in the history of “ordinary” people. These people—a group that often swallows up women, children, the poor, the non-white, and folks marginalized for a variety of other reasons—often wind up the causalities of History (with a capital “H”). While the easy explanation of why this happens has to do with our cultural fascination with power, and who had it and when, there is a answer—more raw—that we ought to keep in mind, which is that we as readers (and participants in history) have the bad habit of assuming there is no “story” (i. e. no struggle, climax, resolution) in situations where the subjects feel familiar or predictable.
In other words, it’s easy to overlook the lives of pioneers who died young or had no hand in the production of history because we think “we’ve read that book already,” the “pioneer” myth being ingrained in us as Americans. In reality, we make too many assumptions about who pioneers were as individuals—individuals with a unique relation to their moment, and who, when one takes a moment to contemplate the matter, faced extraordinary hardship, often with no one to carry on their witness. Even the word pioneer can be kind of dismissive and generalizing. It could be said of all the emigration societies, too, that in as much as they shared in a vision and moment, each one was uniquely complicated, and likewise, tested in ways that differ situationally.
Try this for size: on 27 July 1837, when Baier was given the title of land agent for the Philadelphia Society, he was not the Daniel Boone-like figure one tends to imagine of early Missourians who ventured out beyond St. Louis and old St. Charles. He was in reality a German-trained organist, and at the time in Philadelphia, a school teacher with the old evangelische Zions Gemeinde (Old Zions, St. Michaelis Kirche), a popular German Lutheran emigrant parish in Spring Garden. He was also two-months shy of turning 27. He had been in the U. S. for only about 6 years and was a young father, faced with giving up his position with the church to become an agent of the Society.
While traveling to and from Pennsylvania, Baier contracted a recurring illness that would kill him before 30, all the while dealing with a vote-of-no- confidence from a group of settlers whom by default had become his charge. It was his illness (never part of any settlement’s “official” plan) that first sewed the seeds of doubt among the first of Society to reach Missouri, as they inadvertently made it to the Hermann property without his guidance, and were totally unable to determine why he had not yet come to join them. None, as the histories go, knew that he was sick.
This much about Baier’s rocky path to Missouri is known, in part thanks to a number of scattered histories of Hermann, and the fine work of folks like Schroeder. However, not many of these go into much detail about Bayer’s life or context, or how he became apprised of the Settlement Society of Philadelphia. In this spirit, a closer look seems in order (which I will also apply as far as I might to early pioneers who laid the grounds of Hermann).
According to his German baptismal record, Bayer was born Georg Friedrich Bajer in the town of Weingarten by Karlsruhe on 27 Sep 1800, at 11 at night, baptized at the Lutheran parish the next day. His parents were Heinrich Baier [spelled Bajer, in old German, by the minister], a local schoolteacher, and wife Friederika Mößner. If we’re going to get technical, Weingarten at that time belonged to the Kurpfalz [Electoral Palatinate] but as anyone familiar with Karlsruhe would know, it is more accurately affiliated with the Duchy of Baden. It was, during the time of Baier’s birth, a border town of sorts, and as its name implies, known for its wine making.
Baier’s record includes an important clue or two in terms of his standing, as one can observe that not only was his father a school teacher (a position that required approval), but his primary baptismal sponsor (and presumed namesake), Friedrich Beutenmüller (with wife Eva Katharina) was a church deacon or councilman as well as the proprietor of a local inn. It is no surprise then that Baier would become a church organist and later take on the responsibility of teaching in the United States: a family enterprise, if you will! Little by little, it becomes clear: there wasn’t much in his background to prepare him to become a land agent or shepherd for hundreds of settlers in the Missouri wilderness.
It is believed that Baier emigrated to America in the year 1830, settling in Philadelphia, but there isn’t much currently available to point the way deeper into that end of his story. In my investigation, I managed to locate references to Baier in a lesser-known German-language history of the St. Michaelis/Zions Gemeinde in Philadelphia. These references state the following:
[1830]
–Herr Baier wird als Lehrer der Schule in Springgarten angenommen, welche indeß wenige Wochen darauf aufgehoben wird.
[1837]
–Den 1. Nov. Herr Baier resignirt, und Herr Bäßler versieht p. t. seine Stelle.
–Den 20. Dec. Herr Fr. Genthner ist an Herrn Baier’s Stelle, und Herr Th. Stöver an die des Herrn Genthner erwählt.
Translated and put in context, what we see is this: sometime in 1830, before the end of the year, Baier was installed as the schoolteacher of the Zions Gemeinde in the Spring Garden neighborhood, which this history notes was to be closed in a few weeks. Although the sentence almost seems to suggest that his appointment was to be reversed, it appears that Baier remained a teacher with the parish until the 1837 note, when he officially resigned his position, later being replaced by Bäßler, a temporary, and then Friedrich Genthner. So we know that he resided in Philadelphia by the time of his appointment and was affiliated with the Zions Gemeinde, as other histories had suggested.
The records of family, some of which are referenced in online trees and county histories, indicate that on or about 6 June 1831, in Philadelphia, he was married to Catharina Kroecker, the daughter of an emigrant from Gersheim, Saarpfalz. The two would go on to have several children, many of whom leave descendants in Hermann.
The date of 1 Nov 1837 in the parish history is of some importance, as it helps verify that he resigned his position to fulfill his duties as an agent of the Emigration Society of Philadelphia, elected as a 1-year term, which by then had become more cumbersome than anticipated.
His first official expedition as agent took place that summer, when he set out for Missouri as directed, arriving in St. Louis sometime around or before August 12. The Society in Philadelphia was elated when the first purchases were made, but the reality in Missouri contrasted starkly with their original vision. By the time Baier arrived, many of the desired tracts along the Gasconade had been sold, leaving Baier with little choice but to purchase a number of discontinuous tracts along the present site of the town. Though he managed to finagle about 288 acres of properties near Frene Creek from private owners, the mission was something of a failure and would leave the future settlers in a state of total unpreparedness. Their vision of a fertile, resource-rich tract of “no less than 25,000 acres” on the Gasconade was no longer feasible, and shares of the colony had already been sold.
Altogether, Baier managed to purchase 11,300 acres and change for the price of $14,077.54, plus a few hundred acres of privately owned tracts (to compensate for the original plan) purchased at the price of $1,535. The first documents certifying part of the purchase were made official in St. Louis on 21 Sep 1837. After this, it is believed that Baier started his way back to Philadelphia.
Despite the mishaps of the purchase, the Philadelphia Society was thrilled and emboldened that their colony was coming to fruition. They ambitiously laid out the town (originally with the intention of not 1 but 4 town centers: one for each quarter) and named it Hermann, in honor of the Germanic hero of Roman times. Also, almost immediately after the Society announced the successful purchase of the colony, a group of 4 families (and 1 single man) began the trek, with little sense of where the tracts were bound or how the town was to be laid out, and without Baier to guide them. So began Hermann’s first definitive disaster.
According to historian Alfred Schroeder, this first party consisted of “Conrad Baer; Georg Conrad Riefenstahl, with his wife and five children; Johann Georg Praeger with his wife and two children; Gottlieb Heinrich Gentner, with his wife; and Daniel Oelschlaeger, with his wife and one child”: a group totaling 17. They made their way to the site by land and boat, arriving December 6, in the dead of winter.
Almost immediately visible to the settlers was the fact that Baier had not been as discriminating a land agent as hoped, the tracts being too rocky and generally unsuited for farming. Much of it was “vertical acreage” or otherwise wilderness, and the settlers were almost entirely unequipped to deal with it. Baier attempt to set out in December to intervene, but unknown to the pioneer party, as well as a second group that set out but stalled in St. Louis, Baier fell ill and was forced to convalesce in Pittsburgh. The machine of the Society was fast-moving, however, and by the following spring, more groups began to arrive. Baier finally reached the settlers in March, who by that point were coming to terms with the lofty and difficult-to-execute plans. Among these were many stipulations for property development and other town regulations (no meat or materials processing of any kind was to performed within the town itself): ideas conceived in Philadelphia, with no mind for the actual realities of rural Missouri.
The Founding Families
For as little is known about Baier’s life, even less has been written on the 17 who arrived in Hermann that first winter. Again, it absolutely startles me to read about the conditions the settlers faced, and then to see the printed histories somehow gloss over what must have been the settlements greatest period of hardship. If you go over the “canonical” histories of the town, one will typically find the names of six heads of household and little else, beyond musings of their difficulties and how they likely sought shelter and aid from the local English-speaking settlers. There is then a “jump” to when the first big wave of settlers arrived, followed by the rebellion against Baier and the Society.
Given how climactic and troubling the arrival had been, what actually transpired with these families who held the fort, and what were their legacies in Hermann?
I thought I would devote what space I could here to clarifying the record based on what evidence I could gather. What I discovered was that surprisingly little has been competently documented or compiled on the matter. Even the 1840 Census of Gasconade County, which includes some of the households mentioned in the histories, seems by that point already riddled with more mysteries. We can infer that a lot happened in those two years, even these events weren’t well remembered.
In finding answers beyond Bek’s and Schroeder’s histories, I turned to the Hermann Cemetery, a burial ground laid out by Georg Friedrich Baier himself.
There, one will find the toppled, broken grave of J. G. Prager, still legible:
J. G. PRAGER, geb. 15 Sep 1807, gest. 24 Juli 1849.
Beyond his monument, now in fragments, little seems to remain of Prager’s personal history. It struck me on first search that the Prager name appears in little local documentation, beyond a single marriage marriage record, entered to Gasconade County record by “Julius Leupold,” President of the Philadelphia Society, acting as a Justice of the Peace. This record states that on 20 February 1841 Leupold married John Geo. Prager and Ann. Cath. Schuldheis, who appear in the records of St. Paul’s Church as Johann Georg Prager and Anna Katharina Schultheiß. As later census records and cemetery records indicate, Katharina was 23 years younger than Georg and a native of Bavaria. It is not clear how or when she arrived at the Hermann settlement.
Because the burial and marriage registers of the church begin after both Prager’s marriage and death respectively, the only references to the family are to the delayed baptisms of three children born to Prager by Schultheiß, recorded 21 March 1850, after the father had died:
- Gustav Hermann Prager, b. 17 Jan 1842
- Julius Richardt Prager, b. 7 Febr. 1845
- Gustav Otto Prager, b. 9 Mar 1848
All the births are indicated to have taken place in Hermann, and the godparents for the three are recorded as “Jacob Willy,” “Heinrich Bochta,” and Joh. Graber,” Bochta being one of the many spellings of the Puchta family name one will find in the parish.
Beyond the tragic circumstances of Johann Georg Prager, the absence of reference to any other family, in burials, marriages, or confirmations, suggests that if he indeed had a family of two children and a wife before arriving Hermann, they most likely died before the church was even organized. While there is a possibility that the reference to Prager with “wife and two children” was an anachronistic error, it seems likely that his wife and children may have indeed been some of the first deaths in the colony. His widow remarried to Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jaenecke, a Prussian-born stonemason, as offiated by the minister of St. Paul’s Church on 21 May 1850. By Jaenecke, Katharina appears to have had a further three sons (at least). Of her sons by Prager, the only one whose whereabouts can be determiend are that of Gustav Otto, who appears under the name Adolf G. Prager as an adult living in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania records concerning Prager reveal very little about his parents other than their German birth.
The other families on Bek’s list proved somewhat easier to track, in part because of their intermarriage. For example, one detail not included in the original histories is that Daniel Oelschlaeger was Gottlieb Heinrich Gentner’s father-in-law, having married his daughter Christina Catharina. The Gentners, Pommers, and Riefenstahls also appear to have intermarried, along with the Puchta family, whose winery (in name) is still in operation.
Daniel Oelschlaeger, a farmer for the majority of his life, was born 22 August 1790 to parents Georg Friedrich Oelschläger and Philippina Höll in Birkenfeld, Kingdom of Württemberg, right in the heart of Black Forest. In his home parish, Oelschlaeger evidently married a relative, Philippina Catharina Oelschlaeger, on 20 April 1817. She was born in the same parish on 30 Dec 1784 to parents Johann Friedrich Oelschlaeger and Susanna Müller. At least two child baptisms recorded to Daniel and wife match those of their children who appear in Hermann: a daughter, born Christina Katharina in Birkenfeld on 6 Sep 1818, and a son, Christian Friederich, born 29 Oct 1827. The family came to Philadelphia sometime between then and 1836, where Oelschläger appeared in the records of the Philadelphia Saving Society, his occupation listed as “scavenger.”
Gentner, the son-in-law, was a native of Kirchheim unter Teck, which lies in the Neckar region of Württemberg. Of the many grave markers in the old Hermann cemetery, his is one notable not only for its size but also for the fact that his German birth place is inscribed on the marker. A Protestant, he was born 24 Nov 1814 to parents Johannes Gentner and Regina Catharina Koch. The father appears to have died in 1830 when Heinrich was only 16. It is worth noting that based on the signers of the Philadelphia Society constitution and the parish register of Kirchheim, the Friedrich Gentner who took over the teaching responsibilities of Georg Friedrich Baier was almost certainly the brother of Heinrich Gentner, although more research would be necessary to verify.
The early Georg Conrad Riefenstahl family, much like the Pragers, prove somewhat elusive, although the marriages of Riefenstahl’s daughters help illuminate something of the pioneer days. According to a biography of Johann Adam “John Adam” Puchta, printed in The History of Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Crawford, and Gasconade Counties, Missouri (1888), a “mug book,” Puchta was born 27 Nov 1831 in Oberkotzau, Bayern, a small village in Bavarian Franconia, nearly adjacent to the modern Czech border (in what would be by our standards East Germany). Puchta’s mother, the bio notes, was “Mary Schultheisz” [sic]: a reference more than likely indicating she was an immediate relative of Anna Katharina Schultheiß, later Prager and Jaenecke.
Adam Puchta, namesake of the Adam Puchta Winery, was married first to Clementina Riefenstahl, then after her early death, to her younger sister Bertha Riefenstahl, whom the biography notes “was the first baby girl born in Hermann, Missouri.” I have not seen this note elsewhere but sense that it is not far from the truth.
Given the rarity of a name like Clementina, I was able to determien that Georg Conrad Riefenstahl was in fact from the city of Münster, Westfalen, in the Prussian Rheinland, where in 1829 he married a woman with the unusual (for German) name of Virginie Claude (possibly de Bellfausse). Their daughter, baptized Friederike Christiane Clementine Riefenstahl, was born in Münster-Stadt on 12 June 1834 and baptized as a Lutheran, though it is possible one of the parents may have been Catholic. The family appears in Friedrich Müller’s work “Westfaelische Auswanderer im 19. Jahrhundert-Auswanderung aus dem Regierungsbezirk Muenster, Part 1. 1803-1850.,” which indicates that the family came to the U. S. in 1835 along with three daughters: Caroline Christiane, Friederica Clementine, and Louisa Angela Clementina. While not entirely clear, it seems that Louisa was most likely the same woman who would marry Ferdinand Pommer, of the prominent pioneer Pommer family for whom the Pommer-Gentner house—a local landmark of the Deutschheim Settlement—gets its name.
Beyond these families, there remains the single man called Conrad Baer, who I found also appears as J. C. Behr, or rather Johann Conrad Baer. Baer was evidently the youngest of the heads of household, born about 20 Nov 1812, and his marriage to Elisabetha Margaretha Trautwein in 1840 can accurately be called one of the first celebrated in the settlement.
It should also not go unmentioned that Baier—who saw his star fall from popular organist and teacher in Philadelphia to the first and most scorned man in Hermann—had a family, too. Indeed, his son Charles Heinrich Baier, who shares his grave marker, having died a few months before the father, was likely one of the first deaths in the entire colony.
Although little is mentioned of Baier’s family in most early accounts, it appears that his wife Catharina and their five children must have been in his company when he fell ill in Pittsburgh, en route to Hermann that ill-fated winter. What’s more is that his wife had only just given birth that spring. Charles Heinrich Baier, the son who would share his father’s fate, was born (presumably in Pennsylvania) on 16 May 1837.
In 1986, the town of Hermann decided to open up the Bayer case once more and in the end posthumously cleared his name, though his ignomimy, and the outright vindictiveness displayed toward him by the town (called “the stuff of Dallas or Dynasty” in article covering the hearing, written by James J. Fisher) would not easily fade. Dispirited and still physically weak throughout much of 1838, Baier and family had a difficult time of pioneer life and were ostracized. When Baier and his son died 5 weeks apart in the early winter of 1839, legend has it that the townspeople ordered him to be buried in the far corner of the pioneer cemetery—facing away from town—and that no one should be buried within 50 feet of them. The number of feet changes from story to story, but you get the gist: folks were unhappy, and according to some historians, they continued to ostracize his widow and children long after his death. A similar situation befell Julius Leupold, the President of the Society who relieved Baier of his duty in 1838. For Leupold, a native of Giemannsdorf bei Landshut, Schlesien, the damage done to the town’s spirit was already too extensive for him to be very effective.
Leupold and his many emigrant siblings were among the many signers of the original constitution and instrumental in shaping it. As mentioned earlier in this article, it was Leupold himself who once corresponden with J. A. Roebling and endeavored to make Hermann a more moderate Heimat in the Midwest. However, by the time he arrived, the dream was essentially dead, the early settlers already demanding self-governance. The Society dissolved not long after, and the town took over ownership and management of the property from Baier and the Society.
In the years after, the farmers were able to make something of a stable economy out of wine-growing: a German solution to rocky soil and vertical acreage. This enterprise was more or less brought to a halt by Prohibition, though little by little, Hermann has made efforts to restore its German roots and character.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been fascinated to think of Hermann as more than just a fumbled experiment but more as evidence of a deeply progressive culture that tried to shape the West into something unheard of throughout much of the world. It’s one thing to think of it as a tourist town, and another to realize that it was just a few generations removed from some of the most important figures of Romantic German philosophy and history. Although Germans of that time tended to think of themselves less as German Americans and more as “Germans living in America,” what brought about places like Harmony, PA and Hermann, MO is German America at the dawn of its ambitions, and really, an embodiment of what Americans love to base their folklore around.
I hope one day soon folks in the U. S. will begin to care again as much for the totality of their community as did these immigrants outsiders, but it takes an important lesson to get there, one that all Americans ought to be reminded: America is its immigrants, and only as great as we treat our neighbors, new and old.
Notes
[This section, which will include a bibliography, is “in progress,” as I hope to include more extensive documentation of some of the sources referred into this article as soon as I can manage. Until then, I hope my “conjecture” proves entertaining to folks who stumble across it.]
The Rheinland American: Genealogy 