Perry County’s Concordia College is heavy with German-American history
The log cabin on Main Street across from Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg, Missouri, may need a protective structure to hold it up, but it holds a lot of history.
Now owned by Trinity Lutheran Church, the cabin is called the Concordia Log Cabin College and once housed the first classes of the first Lutheran Evangelical Church west of the Mississippi River beginning in 1839, proclaimed on a proud sign standing outside the building today.
Beginnings of the Concordia Log Cabin College
The cabin is an artifact of the Saxon Lutheran migration to Missouri in the late 1830s. A group of immigrants from Saxony arrived in Missouri in 1839, seeking religious freedom in a new life in the United States after the Prussian Union of Churches in 1817. The group landed in St. Louis in February 1839 after traveling up the Mississippi River from New Orleans before heading south to Perry County.
Perry County wasn’t exactly an ideal location for a settlement — it was largely uncleared wilderness, not farmland—but it overlooked the Mississippi River, so the settlers took it and got to work, constructing the cabin within months. And while the cabin started out as a parsonage for the settlers, it became the Concordia College in December 1839 when the school opened to about 10 children.
The class consisted of five to seven boys and four girls who would go to school here in hopes of becoming ministers, while gaining skills they could apply in learned professions like medicine, law, and education. The founders were Theodore J. Brohm, J. F. Buenger and Ottomar Fuerbringer, who intended the school to be a university. They collected donations from Perry County Pastor C. F. W. Walther and the Saxon congregation in St. Louis, combined with their own funds, to begin the seminary.
Legacy of the Concordia Log Cabin College
Serving as the first school teaching Lutheranism in Missouri, the Concordia Log Cabin College led to the development of the Missouri Synod. The Missouri Synod has become one of the largest and most powerful members of the Synodical Conference, a religious affiliation with members who currently adhere to a strict, conservative interpretation of the Bible.
Ultimately, this legacy reflects the successes of the college’s founders. Its founders came to the United States essentially fleeing the 1817 Prussian Union of Churches in hopes of being able to practice a conservative religious model. Today, members of the Missouri Synod can do this freely.
The Concordia Log Cabin College is a success story for German immigrants to Missouri. Despite facing hardships throughout its life as a seminary in Altenburg, the vision for a conservative, strict religious model that it was founded on continues today. Stories like this speak to the overarching dream that many German immigrants to Missouri shared: a dream of success rooted in change.
Concordia Seminary Today
The location of the functioning school moved to St. Louis sometime in the 1840s or 1850s — historians debate a couple theories about this transition. Though I knew the seminary was currently located in St. Louis, it still took me by complete surprise when I stumbled upon it during a spring break trip to the city to see the Missouri Botanical Garden.
