Martin Stephan: The Fraud Who Founded Perry County, Missouri (Synthetic Blog)
by Aubrey Atkins
What would you do if you traveled across the world and left everything you knew behind to settle in a foreign land only to realize once you’ve arrived that the leader you followed was a corrupt fraud? While such a scenario may sound like a fairy tale, it was all too real for 600 unfortunate souls from 1838–1841.
Enter Martin Stephan, a charming pastor from Dresden, Germany who advocated for the conservative, confessional variant of Lutheranism called Old Lutheranism. Despite the popularity of Old Lutheranism with Stephan’s 600 followers, the early 1800s were not an ideal time to follow this doctrine.
Why? Well, the decades following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 left Europe in a state of turmoil and uncertainty. Germany was a major battleground in the wars, which helped propel a series of economic and political changes that increasingly threatened the humble German farm and village life. While these changes were the driving force behind a large portion of German migrants to Missouri, the rise of rationalism and unionism paired with a lack of religious freedom were the driving motivations behind the Lutheran flight from Saxony.
There to channel these motivations was Martin Stephan, who stoked a strong sense of religious pride in the like-minded members of Saxony. Extremely well-respected in his community and an integral player in fashioning the plans to depart for America, Stephan was an obvious choice for leader of the immigrants.
And so, groups from all across Germany, including our Saxony Lutherans, began immigrating to the United States in search of something better.
Luckily for the inhabitants of Perry County today, Martin Stepan chose Missouri as his band’s new home when they set out in 1838. This decision was in no small part thanks to Gottfried Duden’s Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America. Like many other German migrants to Missouri, Stephan was entranced by the book’s romanticized depictions of Missouri’s landscape and agricultural potential.
I suppose Perry County’s residents have Duden to thank as well!
Martin Stephan’s renown as a respected religious leader came crashing down not long after he and his followers settled in Missouri. Under his humble facade was a fraud who, while preaching to his followers that they must refrain from sin, was simultaneously committing egregious acts of his own.
In Dresden, St. Louis, and Perry County, Stephan was pilfering money from the Credit Fund and the Church and engaging in premarital relations with multiple women from his congregation. In fact, his whole act was blown to bits on May 5th, 1839 when two women from the St. Louis portion of Stephen’s colony approached Pastor G.H. Lober after a sermon he had given. Unaware of the other’s actions, each woman confessed to Lober that Stephan has seduced them and they could no longer bear to keep their scandalous sins secret.
Scandalous, indeed.
Once the news of Stephan’s sins had spread and the clergy set out to depose him from his office as bishop, the people of Perry County quickly turned against him. He was given three choices: return to Missouri; appear before the local court system in Missouri; or be rowed across the Mississippi River to Illinois, never to return.
Deposed and disgraced, Martin Stephan chose his third option and was rowed across the Missouri River to Illinois on May 31st, 1839. He was dropped off at a rock formation known as Devil’s Bake Oven in Grand Tower, Illinois. Once there, Stephan never set foot in Perry County again.
What followed Stephan’s departure was a hectic two years of religious limbo that culminated in an event known as the Altenburg Debate, but that is a post for another day.
For now, it is sufficient to say that Martin Stephan was a man far from God who manipulated hundreds of people for his own gain. He betrayed countless people who believed in him and reaped the consequences. And yet, while the original settlers of Perry County never deserved such treatment, some part of them will always be indebted to Stephan.
Without him, they may never have made it to Missouri at all.
