Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
Easter Sunday seemed like an appropriate time to dig out a sunset photo of one of my favorite churches: Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg. It was taken October 25, 2014.
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Seelitz, in eastern Perry County, was a short-lived town near Altenburg. It was one of the seven colonies established in 1839 in the Saxon Migration.
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Gerard Fiehler from the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum walked me back to where a memorial stone contains the names of some of the earlier settlers. You’ll notice that many of the dates are from the first two years of the settlement.
Seelitz, I was told, was located in a low area that it made it disease-prone. The other problem was that the the early inhabitants were mostly students and professional men poorly prepared for carving out farms and houses from wilderness.
The Rev. Martin Stephan was the leader of the movement. He and his followers, with a communal treasury of $88,000 (you can see the chest it was kept in at the museum), landed in Wittenberg with the goal of farming about 4,500 acres of land that resembled what they had left in Saxony, Germany.
Rev. Stephan, however, was accused of “voluptuous living and dictatorial conduct” and put in a boat for exile to Illinois. It is rumored that he had been tapping the till and some of the wives.
Despite all the difficulties, the Saxon immigration was the start of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, which was established in 1847.
The beautiful and still active Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg was built in 1867.
One of the first people I met at the Altenburg Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum was volunteer Bob Fielher. At the time, I just thought he was a nice guy who knew a lot about area history.
I wish I had recorded some of this stories. Unfortunately, Bob died of cancer in 2009, and I missed the opportunity. Over the years, I have gotten to know his son Gerard, and Gerard has done a great job of keeping his memories alive.
Gerard tells about a boy who had never been further than St. Louis, who was drafted at 18; drove a tank in the Battle of the Bulge at 19; won a Purple Heart; stayed in Germany as a translator during the Occupation, and then returned to Altenburg to work in the family garage.
“He had lived a whole lifetime by the time he was 20 years old,” Gerard observed.
This is a video worth watching on Veterans Day.
We had to take Wife Lila and her buddy Jane Rudert McMahan to the airport in St. Louis way too early in the morning. Mother and I had lunch at Pappy’s Smokehouse, then paid $2.55 a gallon for gas at Peveley before hopping on Hwy 61 to take the scenic route home.
Just south of St. Mary and just north of Perryville, I saw a sign pointing down M to Lithium. Since our goal is to find a road we had never been on before, we set our sights on Lithium.
Before long, we spotted the city limits sign of a hamlet so small they didn’t even bother to show the population. (The 2010 census reported 89 people, 28 households and 22 families living there, but those figures may have included folks living in rural Perry county outside Lithium proper, an AP account said.) Lithium had a ZIP Code of 63775, but it has since been declared by the United States Postal Service to be “Not Acceptable – Use Perryville.”
This well-kept church didn’t have a name on it, but it is the St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, organized in 1896.
The village has a sizable park which contains this artifact labeled “The Old Houck.” It looks more like a cart you’d find in a mine than a railroad, but I don’t know exactly what it was for.
These brown somethings were dotting the park here and there, particularly where there was a tree stump or other organic matter. I’m assuming it was some kind of fungus.
The most interesting thing for me was this white, shake shingled gazebo with a sign “Lithium Spring.” Inside the structure was a pit that contained a pipe with clear water running into a basin from one side and going out a grate on the other. The flow wasn’t as strong as the artesian well outside Marble Hill, but it was steady.
Mother wanted to taste the spring, so I emptied a plastic bottle and handed it over to her. “Tastes like water,” was her verdict.
A contributor to findaspring.com said it is “It is a highly mineralized spring, more like water for healing…Not your everyday drinking water but will definitely start to heal you. I drink it every once in a while, additionally to my regular Spring water from Mountain Valley Spring.”
The State Historical Society of Missouri’s website of Perry County Place Names, 1928 – 1945, has this information about the town and springs: