Hermann, Missouri
First settled in 1837, Hermann is one of a number of towns in the United States founded by and for Germans in the nineteenth century. History bestowed upon these settlements and other heavily German areas the appellation “little Germanies.” Hermann was named for Arminius (Hermann), whose victory over the Romans in 9 C.E.
was celebrated by nineteenthcentury German patriots.Until that century most German community settlements—such as those of the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Salem, North Carolina, and Conrad Beissel’s cloister in Ephrata, Pennsylva- nia—were held together by shared religious beliefs. In the nineteenth century attempts to create German communities were even more numerous than earlier, but the shared basis was secular, whether it consisted of political and social views (sometimes as serious as a weltanschauung), or merely a common language or culture. Some of these secular communities were inspired by the early Socialist movement, others by the radical, democratic, republican movements often intertwined with it. During the era of utopian socialism from 1820 to 1870, Europeans and Americans established, mostly in the United States, communities viewed by their initiators as models for the ideal society. Robert Owen developed New Harmony, Indiana. Etienne Cabet and his “Icarians” tried to construct a new social order, first in Texas and then in Illinois. Disciples of Charles Fourier developed their “Phalanx” in Red Bank, New Jersey. The Transcendentalists had Brook Farm near Boston.
Most of the settlement projects undertaken in America by Germans were less ideologically profiled, although Forty- Eighters, left liberals, and freethinkers participated conspicuously in them. Hermann was very much a secular community of this type. It can be compared usefully to other secular settlements such as Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, and New Braunfels and
View down one street in Hermann, Missouri.
First settled in 1837, Hermann is one of a number of towns in the United States founded by and for Germans in the nineteenth century. (Library of Congress)Fredericksburg, Texas. Hermann, in particular, attracted freethinkers, left liberals, and eventually Forty-Eighters.
On August 27, 1836, a group of Philadelphia Germans constituted the Deutsche Ansiedlungs-Gesellschaft zu Philadelphia (German Settlement Society of Philadelphia). Some 225 people signed its constitution that day. The members of this society envisioned a city to rival Philadelphia, but German speaking. (As laid out, Hermann’s Market Street was ten feet wider than Philadelphia’s.) Under the influence of Gottfried Duden’s immensely popular encomium on Missouri, the society purchased a tract of 11,000 acres there and located their city in a lovely valley on the south side of the Missouri River, not far upstream from St. Louis. Among other assets of this site were abundant limestone for building, as well as hills and steep slopes for vineyards, orchards, and grazing animals.
Part of the attraction of the Hermann type of community lay in the prospects for early investors and arrivals to increase their wealth rapidly if the optimistic predictions of future development were realized. Shares in the German Settlement Society cost $50 each, entitling the purchaser to a town lot in Hermann and one vote in the society’s affairs. By April 1837 over 800 shares had been purchased. The poor could pay for their shares through work. In May 1839, 450 people were living in 90 houses, and the town boasted 5 stores, 2 hotels, and a post office. But friction between the colonists and the society led in 1840 to the severance of all ties between it and Hermann, a turn that reduced drastically the resources at the disposal of the community. In 1850 the population barely reached 860, and further growth was even slower. There were only 1,575 inhabitants in 1890 (Bek 1984, 277).
Hermann and similar communities long had much appeal to many Germans.
The belief was widespread, especially among half-educated Germans, that their culture was superior to America’s and that both they and America would gain from the maintenance of the German language and culture. Another factor was the hostility of other Americans toward German immigrants. This animus occasionally, as in the Philadelphia area in the mid-1830s, spilled over into what were regarded by many as anti-German riots.By the 1850s Hermann boasted a band, a choral society, a German-language theater and daily newspapers, and a military company. A German rationalist society (Freisinnige) thrived for years, surviving until 1902. Major streets bore the names of famous Germans, and Goethe and Washington streets intersected. German residents of St. Louis often took advantage of Hermann’s “joyful” German Sabbath by taking a riverboat there to go to the theater, drink wine, and stroll on Sundays. In view of the positive German attitude toward wine, it is little wonder that Hermann’s economy was long dominated by vintners. Hermann boasted the world’s third-largest winery in 1900. The wines of the area won international commendations. The Volstead Act of 1919 (Prohibition) led to the destruction of the vineyards and brought the Depression of the 1930s to Hermann a decade early. The decline of the steamboat industry, once the town’s second-largest source of jobs and wealth, preceded the demise of viniculture.
In 2005 Hermann had lost most of the culture that once made it distinctive. The German language is virtually extinct there, and tourist attractions such as a Maifest (May Festival, a seasonal festival with pagan roots celebrating fecundity) are poor indices to a community’s culture. Yet the town’s 2,674 inhabitants in 2000 could take great satisfaction in the scores of solid historic houses and buildings that make Hermann an architectural treasure trove.
Walter Struve
See also Duden, Gottfried; Egg Harbor City, New Jersey; Ephrata; Forty-Eighters; Fredericksburg, Texas; Harmony Society; New Braunfels, Texas; Pennsylvania; Transcendentalism
References and Further Reading
Bek, William G. The German Settlement Society of Philadelphia and Its Colony, Hermann, Missouri. Boston: American, 1984.
Hesse, Anna Kemper. Centarians of Brick, Wood, and Stone: Hermann, Missouri. n.p., 1969.
Schroeder, Adolf E. “Hermann: A Brief History.” In Edward J. Kemper. Little Germany on the Missouri: The Phtographs of Edward J. Kempner, 1895—1920. Ed. Anna Kemper Hess. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968.
Van Ravenswaay, Charles. The Arts and Architecture of German Settlements in Missouri: A Survey of a Vanishing Culture. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977.
Wittke, Carl E We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant. New York: Prentice Hall, 1939.