Altenburg museum marks 175th anniversary of Lutheran immigration

Editor's note: This story has been modified to correct the year of the founding of Trinity Lutheran Church

ALTENBURG, Mo. -- You see history just about everywhere you look in East Perry County.

In Altenburg, population 350, there's the Log Cabin College, forerunner of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's Concordia Seminary in St. Louis; Trinity Lutheran Church, founded in 1839 and built in 1867; and the Lutheran Heritage Center & Museum, which is observing the 175th anniversary of the immigration of 700 Lutherans from Saxony, Germany. A few blocks away is Immanuel Lutheran Church, which also dates to the mid-1800s.

In the neighboring town of Frohna, with a population of about 250, you'll find Concordia Lutheran Church, founded in 1839, and Saxon Lutheran Memorial, a log cabin village situated on 30 acres.

According to Warren Schmidt, president of the board of the Perry County Lutheran Historical Society, and museum director Carla Jordan, the story of the immigration is a painful story.

"It was tough," said Jordan.

After spending $9,234 from their communal treasury for 4,475 acres in Perry County, she said, the immigrants "had to learn about poison ivy and poisonous snakes.

"This was a wilderness with trees all the way from the Mississippi River to Perryville, and they were dying in droves of typhus, yellow fever and cholera."

About 125 of the 700 settled in the St. Louis area, Jordan said, and of those who ventured south, about one-third perished, mostly children and women giving birth.

Like the English Puritans, the Lutherans came here for religious freedom, Schmidt said. "The state church was telling them to teach and preach things they didn't buy into," he said.

A double-barrel shot gun is part of an exhibit dedicated to telling the story of people who emigrated from the Saxony region of Germany to settle in East Perry County is on display at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg, Mo. (Adam Vogler)

"It had mostly to do with the Sacraments and whether Jesus is actually present during the Lord's Supper, for example. Germany was not Germany at that time. It was a bunch of little fiefdoms."

Explaining that Saxony is in southern Germany and many of the newcomers were professional people from Dresden, Schmidt said their 1839 arrival presented problems including the discovery that their leader, the Rev. Martin Stephan, was sexually immoral.

'The Messengers'

He said the settlement, led by the Rev. C.F.W. Walther after Stephan's banishment, was dying when Presbyterians, remembered as "The Messengers," came from Brazeau, a village north of Frohna, with food, livestock and farming tips.

"The Lutherans were lawyers, pastors, professors, weavers," Schmidt said. "My ancestor, Joachim, was a locksmith. They had to do a lot of clearing land. The Presbyterians were like the Indians had been for the pilgrims.

Wooden clogs are part of an exhibit dedicated to telling the story of people who emigrated from the Saxony region of Germany to settle in East Perry County is on display at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg, Mo. (Adam Vogler)

"These messengers of God had been here for a while, and they realized these people were over here starving to death. They basically saved their lives."

The heritage center, itself the original church, features a genealogical research library, and the museum shows the manifests of the ships that sailed from Germany to New Orleans -- the Republik, Copernicus, Olbers, Johann Georg and Amalia, which sank off the coast of Spain with 53 passengers.

"A bunch of artifacts came on the ships," Schmidt said, noting the museum's display of wooden shoes, a shotgun, clothing and a 1568 edition of the writings of Martin Luther.

One thing the settlers were ready to do, however, was teach. The Log Cabin College, across the street from Trinity Lutheran, started as a children's small one-room gymnasium, or school, with a curriculum that included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French and English.

It graduated five men as pastors before it was institutionally transferred to St. Louis in 1849. "You could argue the Lutheran school system in the Missouri Synod is second only to the Catholics," said Schmidt, a former fifth through eighth grade teacher and principal in St. Louis.

An artist’s rendering of the interior of Pastor Loeber’s home, the site of the first church in Altenburg, Mo., is part of an exhibit dedicated to telling the story of people who emigrated from the Saxony region of Germany to settle in East Perry County is on display at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg, Mo. (Adam Vogler)

Also from the ships are Trinity's carved altar crucifix from the German town of Oberammergau, its baptismal tray and pitcher and a gold and silver chalice dated March 23, 1707.

Dieter Jedan, Southeast Missouri State University professor emeritus and former chair of the university's foreign language and anthropology department, in May will lead a trip to Germany with the theme "In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors." The museum's International Immigration History Conference will be held Oct. 23-24 with speakers including the president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Rev. Dr. Matthew Harrison of Ballwin, Mo., and the president of the Missouri State Historical Society, Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr.

Reach the center and museum at 573-824-6070 and info@altenburgmuseum.org.