Independent Immigrants

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4 Independent Immigrants A Settlement of Hanoverian Germans in Western Missouri Robert W. Frizzell University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

5 Copyright 2007 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frizzell, Robert W., 1947 Independent immigrants : a settlement of Hanoverian Germans in western Missouri / Robert W. Frizzell. p. cm. Summary: Frizzell examines the American immigrant experience of German peasant farmers from the Kingdom of Hanover, who immigrated to Lafayette County, Missouri, to form a new community centered on the town of Concordia, showing how it differed from other German immigrant communities in America and how it flourished after the Civil War Provided by the publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (alk. paper) 1. Germans Missouri Lafayette County History 19th century. 2. German Americans Missouri Lafayette County History 19th century. 3. Lafayette County (Mo.) History 19th century. 4. Concordia (Mo.) History 19th century. 5. Lafayette County (Mo.) Emigration and immigration History 19th century. 6. Hannover (Germany : Province) Emigration and immigration History 19th century. I. Title. F472.L2F ' dc This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, Designer: Stephanie Foley Typesetter: BookComp, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Minion, Pristina and ICG Papyrus

6 For Sue Ann Hamiter Frizzell and Jeffery Christopher Frizzell

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8 Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1. Hanoverian Background 7 2. Settling in Missouri and Starting Farms Founding Churches and Using the Law The Civil War and Disaster in Western Missouri Postwar Growth and Development 121 Conclusion 157 Appendix. Letters of F. J. and Marie Biltz 171 Bibliography 179 Index 193 vii

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10 Preface o In 1974, a German schoolteacher and local history enthusiast named Armin Mandel published a book on the history of the small village of Esperke located some thirty kilometers (nineteen miles) north-northwest of the city of Hannover in northwestern Germany. Within his region, Mandel was well known as a local historian, and he is said to have had immense knowledge. 1 Mandel filled over two hundred pages with information and musings about the history of a village that never numbered so many as four hundred people until the bombing of the city of Hannover in World War II forced city dwellers out into nearby villages. Despite his penchant for detail, Mandel s description of nineteenth-century emigration from the village to America was brief: Some few Esperkans left the village around 1850 in order to try their luck in America. Links with these families soon broke. 2 Although Esperke could remember no details about its people in America, in the central part of the United States in the town of Concordia, Missouri, fifty-eight miles east of Kansas City a few families remembered the name Esperke. When St. Paul s Lutheran Church published its 150th anniversary history in 1990, included was a list of the ten local men who signed an agreement to found a Germanspeaking church there in Two of these ten were known to have 1. Rolf-Axel Eberhardt, Rede anlässig der Einweihlung des Armin-Mandel-Hofes. 2. Einige wenige Esperker haben um 1850 das Dorf verlassen, um in Amerika ihr Gluck zu versuchen. Die Verbindung zu diesen Familien brach bald ab (Armin Mandel, Ein Dorf an der Leine: Esperke/Warmeloh, 138). ix

11 x o Preface been born in Esperke. The other six whose place of birth is known were born in villages within ten kilometers (six miles) of Esperke. 3 It is the aim of this study to retrace, and perhaps to reestablish, those links that broke soon after It is also to give an account of the early decades of these Hanoverians in America. Since early childhood, I have been interested in the history of the German heritage of the people in and surrounding Concordia. My mother was one of them. My father was not, and the two sets of grandparents contrasted considerably with each other. All four of my grandparents engaged in farming all their lives in west-central Missouri and lived only a dozen or so miles apart. None was wealthy and all four were Protestant believers. But my father s ancestors were of British descent and most had arrived on this continent, in Maryland and Virginia, in the seventeenth century. My father s family, although having a rather unusual Scots Gaelic surname, had no sense of belonging to anything other than the group of people most central to what they believed America was all about. Mother s family was different. My maternal grandparents, who were third generation (and with respect to a few of their ancestors, fourth generation) Missourians, never learned to speak English free of a noticeable German accent. Indeed, for the first nine years of their marriage, until 1929, at home they spoke the north German dialect, Plattdeutsch. My mother learned that tongue before she learned English. When I was a child in the 1950s, my mother s family, although they had been in Missouri for a century or more, still saw themselves as different from their Anglo neighbors. They sometimes referred to people like my paternal relatives as old Americans. The Anglos were Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and Baptists, while the Germans were Lutherans or members of the former German Evangelical Synod that became a part of the UCC (United Church of Christ) in Neither the Anglo nor the German farmers knew their history in detail. While both groups could tell stories about the Civil War in their area they were on opposite sides in that war my grandfather Meyer did not know which part of Germany his ancestors had lived in. My father (who was only fourteen years younger than his father-in-law) did not remember which group of ancestors had come from Kentucky, 3. [Alfred W. Rodewald et al.], Descending Love, Ascending Praise, : St. Paul s Lutheran Church, Concordia, Mo., 18.

12 Preface o xi which from Tennessee, nor what other states were also involved in the story. As a librarian with professional training in history, I have researched both stories, the Anglo and the German, for decades. In retracing the links between the former Kingdom of Hanover and western Missouri, I will try to tell the story in such a way that it can be read with satisfaction and perhaps even with pleasure by interested lay people. At the same time, I want to provide worthwhile revelations to American and German immigration historians and to historians of the American Civil War. This is a tall order. The reader will decide to what extent it has been fulfilled. Another goal is to combine both a rightful pride with a critical approach. Peter Charles Hoffer sees this as the almost intolerable burden of the historian. Although, in the present account, pride may exceed criticism, its author is skeptical enough of all human endeavor and is enough of an outsider among the descendants of these immigrants perhaps to have avoided some of the more obvious filiopietistic pitfalls. 4 I wish to thank the Richard Brownlee Fund of the State Historical Society of Missouri and Provost Kichoon Yang of Northwest Missouri State University for research funds. I won a contest sponsored by the German Emigration Center/Deutsches Auswandererhaus in Bremer - haven, Germany, which allowed me to visit both the Lutheran Parish Register Office (Kirchenbuchamt des evangelisch lutheraner Stadt - kirchenverband) and the Lower Saxon Archives (Niedersäch sisches Hauptstaatsarchiv) in Hannover for a revealing third time. The staffs of both institutions were most kind, but I wish to thank especially Frau Birgit Klein (2001, 2002, and 2005) at the Parish Register Office, and, at the Archive, Dr. Claudia Becker (2001 trip) and Frau Kirsten Hoffmann (2005 trip). Glenn Morrow at Owens Library, Northwest Missouri State University, has been most diligent in providing scarce materials via interlibrary loan. Since 1980, I have greatly admired the German American research and writing of a fellow Missourian, Professor Walter Kamphoefner of Texas A&M University. He has encouraged me a great deal. Even before I learned of the work of Kamphoefner, the publications of Professor Kathleen Conzen of the University of Chicago provided me a model 4. Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History, 2.

13 xii o Preface of what German American historical research and writing should be. Professor Conzen has also provided me with much-appreciated encouragement. I also owe thanks for help and support in this long, long project to Professor Emerita Linda Pickle of Western Kentucky University and Professor Emeritus Adolf Schroeder of the University of Missouri. Many years ago in graduate school, Professor J. Alden Nichols of the University of Illinois first introduced me to the many preunification German states and their political significance. In Concordia, Rev. Alfred W. Rodewald, an important historian of the community in his own right, has been both generous and helpful. My aunt, LaVerna Hemme Meyer, first passed along to me copies of letters written by Louis A. Meyer, my great-grandfather, which sparked a professional interest in the history of the community. Many of the matters I was able to pursue in written records first came to me orally through numerous conversations with Donald Dittmer, a cousin and a local businessman. Finally, my grandfather, Lambert Meyer, much of his life a tenant farmer and educated only through elementary school, told stories of the Missouri German past when I was a child half a century ago, which continue to spur my interest and research efforts. By custom, writers take responsibility for all errors and questionable interpretations in their texts. I deem this custom very just. Despite my best efforts, surely I have made errors and surely others will interpret some facts differently, so in reading this, as in reading any other factual text, Caveats Are Merited. For decades, my wife and son have had to put up with my fascination with historical esoterica. To them jointly this book is dedicated.

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16 Introduction o In the spring of 1837, twenty-five-year-old Friedrich Frerking deserted the army of the Kingdom of Hanover in northwestern Germany and departed the Old World for St. Louis, Missouri. According to a record in the Lower Saxon State Archives in the city of Hannover, he deserted mit seiner ganzen Montur with his full uniform. Frerking had probably read Gottfried Duden s German book on the advantages of farming in Missouri. Duden reported that Missouri s winters tended to be quite mild, but as a soldier and farmer, Frerking knew that an army overcoat might come in handy nevertheless. Had he stayed in Hanover, Frerking would have been released from the army in a few years and could have returned to the village of Esperke. As the oldest son, eventually he could have taken over his father s small piece of land in the village. But there were twelve other siblings who needed to be provided for. Although law and custom gave all the land to the oldest son, and the tiny farm could not be divided, Frerking nevertheless would have had some obligation to those many brothers and sisters. Perhaps that was his personal motive for wanting more opportunity than a dwarf farm in Hanover could provide Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 4932, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (hereinafter NSHSA), Hannover, Germany. I will abide by the growing convention in English-language scholarship to use the German spelling Hannover to refer to the city and the English spelling Hanover to refer to the kingdom and earlier electorate; Gottfried Duden, Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerika s und einen mehrjährigen Aufenthalt am Missouri (in den Jahren 1824, 25, 26 und 1827). I have used the English translation: Gottfried Duden, Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America and a Stay of Several Years along the Missouri (During the Years 1824, 25, 26, 1827), 58, 65, 80, ; 1

17 2 o Independent Immigrants Friedrich Frerking was not the only person in the village of Esperke, some twenty miles north-northwest of the city of Hannover, the capital of the kingdom, with serious plans to go to America. Others considered taking Duden s advice and availing themselves of the opportunities he had described in the mostly empty new state of Missouri in North America. In the same year, 1837, in the month of May, thirty-nine-year-old Friedrich Dierking sold his farm of perhaps fifty to sixty acres with the idea of starting over in Missouri. Dierking was Frerking s uncle by marriage. The two probably discussed their plans in detail before Frerking deserted and Dierking sold his farm. 2 Dierking, the older and better situated of the two men, was to become the father of a sizeable Hanoverian settlement that grew up beginning in 1838 in the southeastern corner of Lafayette County in western Missouri. Dierking operated a moderately sized farm (Großköthnerstelle) in Esperke, as had his father and grandfather before him. He had been born there in August 1798 and was christened Jürgen Dietrich Friedrich Wilhelm Dierking. Early in 1823, he married Anna Maria Frerking, also of Esperke. After four daughters were born to the Dierkings between 1823 and 1832, on July 4, 1836, Anna gave birth to a son. A superstitious man, or one looking for signs and portents, might have seen his son s birth date, American Independence Day, as a sign of what he was meant to do; but we do not know if Dierking was superstitious. In any event, in July 1837 the entire family of husband, wife, and five children aged one through fourteen departed from Hanover. Although Bremerhaven, the port of the city of Bremen, was the closest point of embarkation to Esperke, for reasons unknown today, the Dierkings went to Hamburg. There they took passage on the English sailing ship Burmah, which was bound for New York. 3 Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, Kirchenbuchamt, ev. luth. Stadtkirchenverband (hereinafter KBA), Hannover, Germany. Esperke had a chapel rather than a church and thus was within the parish (Kirchspiel) of Niederstöcken; Loberta Runge, Frerking Family History, Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 2117, 2071, 367, NSHSA. 3. Kirchenbuch Niederstöcken, KBA. Three previous historians of the community William G. Bek, Survivals of Old Marriage-Customs among the Low Germans of West Missouri ; Harry R. Voigt, Concordia, Missouri: A Centennial History, 6; and Lewis W. Spitz, History of St. Paul s Congregation, 3 have called the German community s founder Heinrich Dierking. For years, including in my article, Robert W. Frizzell, The Low German Settlements of Western Missouri: Examples of Ethnic Cocoons, 107, I have accepted their report. How could all three have been mistaken? But after finding multiple

18 Introduction o 3 They did not go alone. In addition to Friedrich Dierking s family of seven, another eight Esperkans on the Burmah eventually came to Lafayette County. The Dierkings brought along four of Anna Dierking s nephews younger brothers of the army deserter Friedrich Frerking Heinrich, aged twenty-four, Wilhelm, aged twenty-two, Ludwig, aged seventeen, and Adolph, aged twelve. Friedrich Dierking s sister and brother-in-law, Charlotte Bruns, twenty-six, and Ferdinand Bruns, thirty, a carpenter, sailed with the Esperke group. Friedrich Niemeyer, thirty-one, who had worked in a mill before emigrating, and his wife, Charlotte, twenty-seven, made the voyage as well. Niemeyer was probably Dierking s cousin, since Dierking s mother was a Niemeyer. Thus the party consisted of fifteen people, all probably related by blood or marriage to Friedrich W. Dierking. Interspersed with these Esperke migrants who eventually came to Lafayette County are nine additional people designated on the passenger list as Hanoverians and naming Missouri as their final destination. But these nine have not been traced either to Esperke or to Lafayette County. The fifteen men, women, and children of the Dierking party were well armed. They brought a total of fifteen muskets from Hamburg to New York. The seven members of the Dierking family also brought along on the ship nine chests, household utensils, beds, bedding, and a wagon. 4 Surviving documents do not reveal the route the Dierkings took from New York to St. Louis. We can only note the routes traveled by other German speakers inspired by Duden during the same decade. The Koepfli and Suppiger party in 1831 crossed the ocean from Le Havre to archival records in Hannover, it now seems inescapable that the Wilhelm Friedrich Dierking who was born in Esperke in 1798, and who left for America in 1837, is indeed the father of the Concordia settlement. Bek erred, although he himself had lived in the community as an adolescent in the 1880s. Spitz s facts and phraseology make it clear that he relied on Bek. Voigt must have relied on both of them for much of his information about the earliest years. See National Archives, Ship Passenger Lists, New York, Series M235, Microfilm No. 35; and Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 4853, 467, 700, 4932, NSHSA. 4. The passenger list is not fully accurate but is close enough for a relatively certain identification, given its context. On the list, the family name is spelled Durking. The two oldest daughters, Maria Friederike and Christine, are listed as males: Fred and Christ. The Frerking brothers are given the surname Durking. The surname Niemeyer is spelled Nemire. This is about as accurate as an English ship s clerk, or even Captain E. H. Webster himself, was likely to be with passengers who spoke limited or no English and whose pronunciation sounded strange to English ears. William Musgrove, later a newspaper editor in Lexington, who took the census in Lafayette County in 1850, was scarcely more accurate with German names.

19 4 o Independent Immigrants New York between June 2 and July 20. Leaving New York City on August 1, they made it to St. Louis on August 28 via the Hudson River, Erie Canal, Lake Erie, canals and rivers in eastern Ohio, and then the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. In 1835, the Wülfing family from Lennep, near Remscheid, Duden s birthplace, sailed from Bremen to New York between September 16 and October 25. They went partly by steamboat and partly by steam railway from New York to Philadelphia. After a very uncomfortable journey by canal boat across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh, they went by steamboat down the Ohio to Cincinnati, their initial destination. The trip from New York to Cincinnati lasted from November 6 to December 4. Both Koepfli and Wülfing frequently referred to Duden in their letters describing their journeys. Duden himself had left Rotterdam on June 8, 1824, and arrived in Baltimore on August 14. He bought a wagon and horses and began to drive to St. Louis on August 25. He reached his destination on October 23. Since the Dierkings brought a wagon with them to New York, perhaps they, too, drove to St. Louis after buying horses on the east coast. 5 In 1838, in St. Louis, Friedrich Dierking met Dick Mulkey. A dozen years earlier, the Mulkeys, who were Anglo-Americans from Kentucky, had been one of the first families to settle the rolling, partially prairie, partially timbered land of southern Lafayette County in western Missouri. When Dick Mulkey went home to Lafayette County, Dierking accompanied him. In November 1838, the Hanoverian entered 880 acres of government land to the west and south of where the town of Concordia, Missouri, would arise a quarter century later. His fifty to sixty acres in Esperke with its house-barn and possibly other buildings would have sold for more than enough to pay his passage to the New World and provide the standard price of $1,100 for the quantity of government land he obtained. 6 Although he bought enough land for at least half a dozen farms of adequate size by American standards, there is no evidence that 5. Joseph Suppiger, Salomon Koepfli, and Kaspar Koepfli, Journey to New Switzerland: Travel Account of the Koepfli and Suppiger Family to St. Louis on the Mississippi and the Founding of New Switzerland in the State of Illinois, ; Gustavus Wulfing, The Letters of Gustavus Wulfing, 10 23; Duden, Report, Bek, Survivals, 61 62; [Rodewald], Descending Love, At the same time Dierking patented the land listed by Rodewald, he also patented the southeast quarter of the northeast quarter of section 13, range 48, township 25 (Original Land Entry Map, Lafayette County Recorder s Office, Lexington, Missouri); he received 1,500 Reichstahler for just one field of about nine acres in Esperke (Hann. 74 Neustadt/Rbge. Nr. 2117, NSHSA).

20 Introduction o 5 Friedrich Dierking himself farmed on a significant scale in Missouri for an extended period of time. Instead, a few years after immigration, he turned over much of his land to his eldest daughter s American husband and sold much of the remainder. Apparently living off his capital, the founder of the community became known to his increasingly numerous Hanoverian neighbors in Lafayette County as Tröster Dierking, Dierking the Comforter, for the care and guidance he provided his countrymen after they had made the long and exhausting trip to Missouri and found themselves in a new place where everything was so different from Hanover. And come they did. For half a century and more, Hanoverians and other Germans came directly from Europe, from St. Louis, and from other German American settlements in Missouri and elsewhere. By 1850, there were seventy-two German household heads in the settlement, and fifty-four of these were farming on a sufficient scale to be included in the agriculture schedule of the U.S. census. Twenty years later, in 1870, the census taker counted 375 German household heads. The total population of Germans and their American-born children exceeded two thousand. About two-thirds of these were Hanoverians, most of whom had originated in a small area to the north and west of the city of Hannover extending to the town of Nienburg. This area comprised most of the former Amt (county of) Neustadt am Rübenberge, part of Amt Wölpe, and part of Amt Ricklingen. It was an area perhaps twenty-five miles, or forty kilometers, from one edge to the other. A dozen families came from the village of Esperke itself, which contained only thirty-nine independent households at the beginning of the migration period. It appears that more people came from Esperke than from any other single community Frizzell, Low German Settlements, More population data will be provided in Chapter 5. Figures are aggregated by the author from the manuscript population schedules, Tenth Census of the United States. Amt Ricklingen was combined into Amt Neustadt in Amt Wölpe was combined into Amt Nienburg in The former Hanoverian Amt was considerably smaller than a county in the American Midwest, but it performed many analogous administrative functions. Each Amt was divided into Vogtei, which I have translated as townships. In the 1820s, except for purposes of the regional legislatures and certain ecclesiastical functions, the old duchies (Herzogtumer), principalities (Fürstentumer), and counties (Grafschaften) were made obsolete as the kingdom was divided into seven Landdrostei, which might be considered provinces. These served as administrative levels between the Ämter and the central government in the capital city. When the Prussians took over in 1866, the Landdrostei became Regierungsbezirke (administrative districts), and their component parts, the Ämter, became Kreise (circles).