Hermann: A German Dream on the Missouri

You are standing in Hermann, Missouri, a town that exists because a group of Germans in Philadelphia looked at a map of the American West and decided that German immigrants were disappearing too fast into the English-speaking mainstream. In the year eighteen thirty six, they formed an organization called the German Settlement Society of Philadelphia and began selling shares at twenty five dollars each. Their plan was to buy land somewhere in the West and establish a colony so thoroughly German in language, customs, and character that it would never be absorbed by the surrounding culture.

They sent a schoolteacher named George Bayer as their agent. Bayer traveled west and purchased eleven thousand three hundred acres along the Missouri River in what is now Gasconade County, paying about fifteen thousand six hundred dollars for land he believed resembled the Rhine Valley of Germany. The bluffs, the river, the grape-covered hillsides, he thought it was all there.

When the first seventeen settlers arrived in December of eighteen thirty seven, they found no city waiting for them, only steep hills and dense forest. The maps drawn back in Philadelphia, showing a flat, tidy city with wide streets and grand avenues, bore no resemblance to the rugged terrain. The Society went bankrupt and dissolved in eighteen thirty nine without ever completing its colony.

But the settlers stayed, and more Germans kept coming on their own. They built the town themselves on the hillsides and bluffs, in defiance of the original blueprint. The rocky land defeated most conventional farming.

The settlers planted grapes instead. They had noticed wild vines tangling across the hillsides, and within a decade the area had nearly sixty small wineries producing more than ten thousand gallons of wine each year. By the turn of the twentieth century, Stone Hill Winery in Hermann had grown to become the second largest winery in the entire United States and the third largest in the world.

The German Settlement Society of Philadelphia never got its Rhine Valley colony. What grew instead, on the rocky bluffs above the Missouri, was something the settlers built themselves. And it is still here.