Frizzell book explores German settlement in Missouri

Author and Northwest Director of Libraries
Robert Frizzell and the dust jacket of his new
history, "Indepenent Immigrants: A Settlement
of Hanoverian Germans in Western Missouri."

The University of Missouri Press has announced the publication of "Independent Immigrants: A Settlement of Hanoverian Germans in Western Missouri," a new book by historian and Northwest Director of Libraries Robert Frizzell.

Covering the period between 1838 and the early 1890s, Frizzell's book describes the exodus of a large group of farm families from what is now the north German state of Lower Saxony to Lafayette County, Mo.

The immigrant community centered around the town of Concordia -- located near Frizzell's boyhood home -- and eventually grew to include settlements in the adjoining counties of Saline, Pettis and Johnson.

Frizzell traces the growth of Concordia and other settlements as he examines early economic and agricultural successes, and shows how the community evolved into a center of religious conservatism despite the freethinking philosophy of founder Friedrich Dierking.

"Independent Immigrants" has its genesis in a prize-winning article Frizzell wrote three decades ago for the "Missouri Historical Review" that explored the tribulations suffered by west Missouri's Germans during the Civil War. Anti-slavery in outlook and sympathetic to the North, the Hanoverians found themselves in a part of the state with a large concentration of slaves, slaveholders and Southern sympathizers.

In the chapter of his new work dealing with the war, Frizzell tells how the notorious guerilla leader "Bloody Bill" Anderson repeatedly attacked the German community and committed atrocities as gruesome as any recorded in the grim annals of border-state conflict.

In addition to viewing the German community in western Missouri as a whole, "Independent Immigrants" also renders portraits of families and individuals who paid a high price in blood and toil in order to meet the challenge of building homes in a new land.

Drawing on material gleaned from family records, Missouri sources and three trips to the Lower Saxony state archives, Frizzell also offers insights into how Concordia differed from other German immigrant settlements in America.

His exploration of conditions in Hanover -- a kingdom in 1840 -- and especially the village of Esperke, from which many of the settlers came, sheds new light on theological, political and economic circumstances in the Old World and the United States that will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike.

For more information, please contact:

Anthony Brown,
News Bureau Manager
E-Mail: abrown@nwmissouri.edu
Phone (660) 562-1704
Fax (660) 562-1900

Northwest Missouri State University
219 Administration Building,
800 University Drive
Maryville, MO 64468

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