“On far Missouri’s silent banks, Shall these scenes of home renew”
If you’re trying to learn about German heritage in Missouri, it’s important to understand why Germans immigrated and settled here in the first place. Germans really started to immigrate to America around the late 1830’s. At this time,“Germany” didn’t really exist as we understand it today. Rather than a country, it was made up of various groups with a common language and culture tying them together. They weren’t really unified as “Germany” until 1871. In the 1830’s, when Germans really started immigrating to America, there was a lot of political unrest and (failed) uprisings within their German kingdoms. Unsuccessful and unhappy with their current situation, many of them had their eyes drawn over the horizon to America.
Gottfried Duden is given a lot of credit for bringing German immigrants to Missouri. He was a traveler in the United States who described his journey in detail in a series of letters over the span of a few years that he sent to Germany titled Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America. He detailed the flora and fauna of the area as he traveled through America, often with glowing praises at the potential for the land and how similar Missouri’s climate was to Germany.
In summary, Duden’s descriptions of Missouri were utterly dreamy. In fact, they were so dreamy that people were often quite mad when they actually moved to Missouri and found that there was a lot more back-breaking labor than Duden described, and that they hadn’t known to properly prepare. Missouri was the frontier of the US at the time, and while all the new, cheap land was what drew people out there, it also meant the land was completely untilled. The soil was difficult to work with since it had never been cultivated, and some extra hands to help prepare the soil for cultivation was expensive and hard to find out there.
There was a lot of pushback and criticism for these letters and the “immigration fever” that was taking over Germany. Nicholas Hesse, who settled in Westphalia, MO, was particularly scathing of Duden for his misleading descriptions, and went out of his way to publish his experience with homesteading both as advice and warning. The title of this post actually draws from an English translation of a German poem written by Ferdinand Freiligrath that criticizes his German people who left their home for Missouri, saying they will soon regret their decision. The tone is almost one of exasperation:
“O, say, why seek ye other lands?
The Neckar’s vale hath wine and corn;
Full of dark firs the Schwarzwald stands;
In Spessart rings the Alp-herd’s horn.
Ah! in strange forests how ye ’ll yearn
For the green mountains of your home,
To Deutschland’s yellow wheat-fields turn,
In spirit o’er her vine-hills roam!”
“The Emigrants (Die Auswanderer)” Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876)
Gasconade County, like many other counties on the Missouri river, became home to many German immigrants. This was partly due to efforts by the German Settlement Society in Pennsylvania, who felt they were losing their heritage and bought the plots in Hermann to form a second German state on the new American frontier (spoiler alert: that didn’t happen), and partly because of Duden’s letters and the wave of German immigrants that came into Missouri. And as is apparently the theme, the original settlers were duly unprepared for the hard conditions of the area, but they managed.
Due to the soil that was hard to work with, Gasconade County made much of their living off of lumber and livestock. While crops they originally planned on cultivating struggled to grow, the wild grassess along the banks of the Missouri river were plentiful and nutritious for animals. It was a wakeup call for many German immigrants who originally planned on being successful farmers with rows and rows of bountiful crops.
Hermann, however, quickly became the epicenter of Gasconade County. Located right on the Missouri river the soil was good in the town and it made trade and travel easier. While the soil was difficult to manage for most crops and not what Germans were used to, the people of Hermann managed to cultivate the Catawba grapes of the area. Realizing this, they turned a German cultural staple, wine, into a economic opportunity to keep the town afloat. From there, they quickly flourished and became one of the biggest wine-producing towns in America — a large feat for a little town.
They had their own German newspapers, such as the Hermanner Volksblatt, German festivals, and traditions that were kept alive in the town as they grew. More German immigrants started trickling into the town, attracted by their success, their strong German culture, and the amount of land that remained cheap.
Although Gasconade County had a rough start, like many German immigrants who were drawn into Missouri, it definitely made a name for itself. The German heritage of the immigrants remains strong in the area to this day, and towns like Hermann were considered beacons for German settlers looking to come to America and start their new lives in the land of the free.
