The Postcard to the Past — “Welcome to Missouri’s Little Germany!”
When doing research on Osage county, the Germans, their history, their culture, and of course, their immigration, I came across the photo below. A dirt road leading into a little town with a church in the rolling hills of Central Missouri. I took a closer look at the photo and thought to myself, “What a neat little postcard” without even realizing it. It was no postcard, clearly, but it was picturesque enough to be one in my opinion. Then I thought, “Well, why was this photo taken even in the first place?”— That’s when I had to know more.
Time Period — How old is this photo?
I began with the time period — when was the photo taken? — Can I determine it from clues hidden within the photo? My initial digging lead to me to think it was taken in the 19th century. As I like to keep track of Family history, I have plenty of old photos dating well into the 1800s, and I compared the condition way the photograph was taken compared to my family’s photos. It seemed to match enough, showing evidence of early photography after the tintype photos fell out of favor. I looked at buildings, the home on the left, the businesses in town, trying to determine their style. Then, I noticed something. I had missed something in my initial research, and it threw my initial conclusion out the door.
What I had assumed was just a broken or cut tree was in fact no tree at all, but a power pole, with powerlines well into the town as well. — “This town has electricity!” I thought as I frantically re-wrote some of my notes. I had completely overlooked this when looking deeper into the photo, and saw right past it. Rookie mistake on my part. Re-tracing my steps back to comparing to some of my family’s photos, the quality matched much better with some of the 1910’s-1920’s photos so my whole theory of this being a 19th-century photo, became some random photo of a dirt-road town in the middle of nowhere Missouri in the 1910’s. Now, I had another question to answer — “why was this really taken?”
Possibility 1 — The Personal Photograph
First, this could be someone taking a look at their new hometown plain and simple. Example, for a picture to hang on the wall or put in an album. Another reason this photo exists could be this is someone taking this photo and sending it back to Germany, or for themselves even, describing how this picture and this town is their own “Little Germany” in a sense. The people of Westphalia spoke nothing but German until the early 1910’s — when this photo may have been taken. They didn’t even teach English in the town school until then. Hence why they may have wanted this picture for themselves, remember their “Little Germany” for what it was — before the Anglo-Americans come in and change it.
Possibility 2 —Braggin’ Rights
Another idea to think about and comprehend is, this is a promotion of pride, to show off, and perhaps gloat about to Anglo-Americans. This is a — ‘We built this, this is our work, and this is our town.’ — type of photo, and that pride, it’s hidden in the fine details of the photo. More specifically, it’s hidden in the town, and the buildings. The woodwork in the fencing, the care and effort put into making the town look nice and kept-up. The Germans came here, faced the wilderness, the Great Plains, the Missouri River, the Ozark Plateau and all the other natural challenges Missouri had in store for the Germans and built some incredible little towns, a lot like Westphalia, around Westphalia.
Possibility 3 — Advertisement
My final position and the one I chose to accept is that, it shows what the Germans can bring to America, so the photo is an advertisement of the Germans. The Germans bring “a substantial array of beliefs, attitudes, characteristics and customs which contrasted sharply to the prevailing Anglo-American values,” as put in the 1981 Issue of Missouri Historical Review. The Germans here were farmers and craftsmen. They brought their trade, their beers, their wines to America, which shaped this country in many ways.
Whatever the true and intended purpose of the photo is lost to time. But what this photo really does, to it’s successor audience looking at it from the future, is provide a Postcard to the past. It invites us to look at what the Germans who moved here built, survived, and thrived on — an important mark on German Immigration to Missouri. It has us wonder and even marvel at what life and society was like in the back-when times. Additionally, in such a niche category as “Germans in Missouri”, this photo may as well be a postcard, advertising to all that this is Missouri’s Little Germany in the Missouri Rhineland — Westphalia.
