The Chippewa Mission and Bethany

The whole reason Frankenmuth exists was a mission to the Chippewa, also called the Ojibwe. Pastor August Craemer did not simply preach to his German congregation. He made trips by canoe to Chippewa villages along the rivers, and Chippewa children came to live in his home, where his wife instructed them in Christian teaching.

In eighteen forty seven an Ojibwe chief named Bemassikeh visited Frankenmuth and invited the missionaries to his village on the Pine River, in what is now Gratiot County. Craemer sent a colleague, the Reverend Edward Baierlein, who in the late eighteen forties founded a mission he called Bethany. The work did not last.

The federal government established a reservation in Isabella County and offered eighty acre tracts of land to draw Ojibwe families there, and by the late eighteen fifties most had relocated and the Bethany mission was abandoned. The mission that gave this town its founding purpose faded within a single generation, a reminder that Frankenmuth's origin story is tangled up with the displacement of the very people it was built to reach. The German farming community, however, took root and stayed.