They called it the Missouri Rhineland. In the 1840s, if you stepped off a steamboat at the Hermann landing and walked up First Street, you heard German first and English second. The shopkeepers spoke it, the schoolchildren learned in it, the newspaper printed in it.
By 1900 the cellars cut into the bluffs above the town were producing nearly three million gallons of wine a year, and a Hermann label called Norton had been judged the best red on earth at the Vienna World’s Fair. The name on the post office, on the schoolhouse, on the new German Evangelical church, all pointed back to the same man: Hermann der Cherusker, a Germanic chief who broke three Roman legions in a forest two thousand years ago.
Hermann, the Place
Hermann sits on the south bank of the Missouri River in Gasconade County, about eighty miles west of St. Louis. The land rises sharply from the river in limestone bluffs, then opens into rolling hills cut by Frene Creek. Riverboats and now Amtrak’s Missouri River Runner still stop at the foot of First Street, and the Katy Trail rail-to-trail runs along the opposite bank.
The population is small, about 2,150 today, and a five-block stretch from the river to Fifth Street is a National Register historic district. The houses are red-brick, two-storey, with steep roofs and arched cellar doors. They look, deliberately, like Koblenz on a quieter day.
How Hermann Became German
Before the Germans
Before 1837 there was almost nothing here. The Osage had been pushed out by treaty in 1825, and the land between the Gasconade and the Missouri stayed largely uncleared frontier, too steep for the row-crop farmers who had taken the river bottoms.
When a Philadelphia scout named George Bayer rode up over the bluffs in the summer of 1837, what he saw was 11,000 acres of nobody’s favourite ground. That was the point. It was cheap, it was empty, and it bore an unmistakable resemblance to the Rheingau.
The Germans Arrive
The plan had been hatched in Philadelphia the previous winter. In 1836, a group of German-American craftsmen and shopkeepers, troubled by how quickly their children were losing the language, organised themselves as the Deutsche Ansiedlungs-Gesellschaft zu Philadelphia. In English, the German Settlement Society of Philadelphia. Their idea was almost utopian: pool their savings, buy land in the West, and build a German-speaking colony where the customs of the old country could survive intact.
They sent George Bayer west to find the ground. Born in Weingarten near Karlsruhe in 1800, Bayer settled on a tract along the Missouri River and laid out a grid wider than Philadelphia’s own. The Society named the town for Hermann der Cherusker, the warrior-chief who annihilated three Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, and who by the 1830s had become the great folk-symbol of a unified German nation that did not yet exist.
The first seventeen settlers landed by steamboat in December 1837. They built dugouts into the bluff that first winter. When Bayer himself arrived in March 1838 with hundreds more colonists, he met angry men: the surveyed lots were rocky, the streets ran up impossible grades, and there was no harvest in the ground. Bayer died, broken, in 1839, and the Philadelphia society dissolved soon after.
The town did not. By 1840, a stone Catholic chapel was rising on Fourth Street and a German printing press had arrived overland from St. Louis. By 1845 there were 450 Germans in Hermann. By 1860, almost 1,800.
Hermann at Its Peak
What kept Hermann alive was the slope of the bluffs. The first colonists tried grain, lost their shirts, and then noticed the wild grapes climbing the limestone faces. Michael Poeschel pressed his first commercial barrels in 1847, and by the 1850s the hillsides above town were terraced in vineyard.
The wine the Germans made was not Rhine wine. They had brought Riesling cuttings, but the Vitis vinifera could not survive Missouri winters and the local phylloxera. So they planted native and hybrid grapes: Catawba, Concord, and above all the dark, leathery Norton, a Virginia variety that took to the bluffs as if it had been waiting for them.
By the 1870s, Stone Hill was shipping 1.25 million gallons a year. By 1900, it was the second-largest winery in the United States and, by some accounts, the second-largest in the world. Its Norton red took gold at Vienna in 1873 and at seven more world’s fairs after that. A bottle of Hermann Norton sat on the table at the White House.
Around the wine grew a whole German town. The Hermanner Volksblatt, founded 1856, printed in German. The 1871 German School at Fourth and Schiller taught bilingually, half the day in German, half in English. Pastor Friedrich Münch, a Lutheran clergyman turned rationalist farmer and writer, contributed essays in German on agriculture and on abolition. Eduard Mühl, who printed the rationalist newspaper Licht-Freund (Friend of Light) out of a brick house on Second Street, attacked slavery in print at a time when most of his neighbours quietly owned slaves.
The Change
Then, in January 1920, Prohibition. For the Missouri Rhineland the Eighteenth Amendment was not an inconvenience, it was a guillotine. The town’s entire economy ran on wine, and overnight wine became illegal.
Local memory says the streets of Hermann ran red as barrels were broken open and emptied into the gutters. Vineyards were ripped up and replanted with corn, oats, wheat, barley. The vast vaulted cellars beneath Stone Hill, dug by hand from limestone, were leased to a St. Louis company and turned into mushroom farms. Hermannhof and the smaller wineries closed. The Held family, who would later resurrect the place, were still small farmers in nearby Pershing, raising hogs and selling cream.
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but the wine did not come back. The Depression hit, then the Second World War, and German names came under fresh suspicion. The bilingual school had already been forced to drop German in 1914, after the United States entered the First World War. By the late 1940s, German was a kitchen language in Hermann, spoken by grandmothers, not by their grandchildren.
The revival, when it came, started with one couple. In 1965, Jim and Betty Held, two small farmers in their thirties with four children and less than $1,200 in the bank, leased the ruined Stone Hill buildings and moved their family in. They cleared the mushroom beds. They replanted vines on the bluffs above the town. By the late 1970s, Stone Hill was making award-winning Norton again. Hermannhof followed in 1974 under the Dierberg family, and Adam Puchta, the seven-generation family farm, reopened in 1989.
The Landmarks of German Hermann
Stone Hill Winery (1110 Stone Hill Highway). Founded 1847 by Michael Poeschel. By 1900, the second-largest winery in America, its Norton wine the most decorated red in the country. Sat as a mushroom farm for forty-five years between Prohibition and 1965, when Jim and Betty Held leased it and began the slow restoration of the vaulted limestone cellars. Still working, still family-owned, still pouring Norton.
Hermannhof Winery (330 East First Street). Built into the bluff in stages from 1848, opened 1852. Ten stone cellars, the largest in continuous use in Missouri. Closed by Prohibition, restored from 1974 by the Dierberg family, who saved most of the original brick and timber. The smokehouse on the property still cures sausage on the premises.
Adam Puchta Winery (1947 Frene Creek Road). The Puchta family arrived from Bavaria in 1839. Adam Puchta drove cattle to the California gold rush in 1853, came back, and crushed his first vintage in 1855. Seven generations on, it is the oldest continuously family-owned winery west of the Mississippi.
Deutschheim State Historic Site (109 West Second Street). Two adjacent houses: the Pommer-Gentner House from 1840, built in the austere German Klassizismus style, and the Carl Strehly House from 1842, which housed Eduard Mühl’s printing press and produced the first German-language newspaper west of the Mississippi in 1843. The state runs guided tours and keeps a working German kitchen garden out back.
Historic Hermann Museum at the German School (Fourth Street and Schiller). The 1871 schoolhouse, built to teach Hermann’s children in both German and English. The bilingual programme thrived until anti-German sentiment shut it down in 1914. The building stayed open as an elementary school until 1955 and is now seven themed rooms of nineteenth-century Hermann, plus a still-working clock tower mechanism.
St. George Catholic Church (128 West Fourth Street). Of the first settlers in Hermann, thirty-three were Catholics. They began their stone church in 1845 and finished it in 1850. The present building was built by German parishioners in 1915, and ten of its stained glass windows, depicting the Seven Corporal and Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy, were shipped from Germany in 1924.
St. Paul United Church of Christ (109 West Fifth Street). The German Evangelical congregation, founded in 1844, was once the largest in town. Its parent denomination dropped the word “German” from its title only in 1927, and the church eventually became part of the United Church of Christ in 1957. The pulpit and the hymnals stayed in German until the 1930s.
Where the Hermann Germans Came From
Most of the families who landed in Hermann came from the south-western German states: the Rhineland and the Palatinate above all, then Hesse, Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria. By 1860, nearly half of the settlers in the wider Missouri Rhineland were Rhinelanders from the area around Koblenz.
Some came directly from Bremen or Le Havre on the immigrant ships. Many others came in two stages: first to Philadelphia, where they joined the German-American community there, then west by river and rail when the Settlement Society called them. George Bayer came from Weingarten in Baden. Friedrich Münch came from a Lutheran parsonage in Hesse. Eduard Mühl came as a young printer with a hand press and a quarrel with the established church. The Puchtas came from Bavaria in 1839. The Helds, two generations later, were Missouri Germans by then, the inheritors rather than the founders.
The push factors were the political repression that followed the failed liberal movements of the 1830s, the agricultural failures and land hunger of the south-west, and the slow tightening of religious orthodoxy in the Lutheran and Catholic state churches. The pull was the promise of a German-speaking America in which a man could keep his language, his beer, his rationalist newspaper, and his Sunday wine.
Hermann Today
Hermann is no longer a German-speaking town. The last cradle speakers of Hermann German died in the 1970s and 1980s, and the bilingual school is a museum. Most residents are German by ancestry but English by daily life.
What survives is everything wine, food, and festival. The Hermann Wine Trail now runs about thirty miles along the Missouri River and links seven family-owned wineries. Wurstfest in March packs the town with sausage-makers from across the Midwest. Maifest in May has been an unbroken Hermann tradition since 1952. Oktoberfest runs every weekend of October, and Kristkindlmarkt, the German Christmas market, fills the streets in December.
The brick houses on First Street are mostly bed-and-breakfasts now, the cellars beneath them are tasting rooms, and the Missouri River Runner train brings St. Louis day-trippers in by the carriage-load. The Norton vines on the bluffs are the great-grandchildren of the cuttings the first colonists planted. Hermann is, in the end, still doing what the Philadelphia Germans set out to do in 1836: making a German place on the American frontier, and keeping it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Germans settle in Hermann?
Hermann was founded in 1836 by the German Settlement Society of Philadelphia, a group of German-Americans who wanted to build a colony where the German language and customs could survive on the American frontier. Their scout, George Bayer, picked the Missouri River bluffs in Gasconade County because they looked like the Rheingau back home. The Germans in Hermann, Missouri, came as colonists, not as scattered immigrants, and that is why the town is so densely German.
Is Hermann still German today?
Hermann is no longer a German-speaking town, but its identity is unmistakably German. The historic district, the wineries, the churches, and the annual Maifest, Oktoberfest, Wurstfest, and Kristkindlmarkt all carry the heritage forward. Most residents are of German ancestry, and the wine industry that defined the town from 1847 through Prohibition is alive again.
What are the most famous German landmarks in Hermann?
Stone Hill Winery, founded in 1847 and once the second-largest winery in America, is the best-known. Hermannhof Winery (1852), Adam Puchta Winery (1855), the Deutschheim State Historic Site, the Historic Hermann Museum at the old German School, St. George Catholic Church, and St. Paul United Church of Christ are the other anchors of the German community.
Where in Germany did the Hermann Germans come from?
Most of Hermann’s founding families came from the south-western German states, especially the Rhineland and the Palatinate, with significant numbers from Hesse, Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria. By 1860, nearly half of the settlers in the wider Missouri Rhineland were Rhinelanders from around Koblenz.
When did Germans first arrive in Hermann?
The first seventeen Germans arrived by steamboat in December 1837, sent west by the German Settlement Society of Philadelphia, which had been formed in 1836. The town was platted in 1837, and by 1845 the German population had grown to roughly 450. By 1860 it was close to 1,800.
If your family’s story passed through Hermann, or any of the places the Germans made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the vineyards of the Rheingau to the bluffs above the Missouri River, to wherever you are now.