Arnsberg (Missouri)

Arnsberg was a settlement in Cape Girardeau County in Missouri between the cities of Cape Girardeau and St. Louis .

History and Development

The place was mainly inhabited by German emigrants and their descendants. The area around Arnsberg was nothing more than a large clearing when the place was built. About fifty years before the town was founded, the Shawnee and Lenni Lenape Indians who lived there had been driven out. Some smaller Indian groups stayed in the area even after German emigrants began to immigrate.

August Tacke was the founder of the settlement. He came from a village near Hemer and emigrated to the USA in 1857. There he initially ran a flour mill. In 1864 he bought an area of ​​around 44 hectares. Apparently the first settlement arose there in the following years, as documents in 1856 reported the sale of a piece of land to a parish.

During the American Civil War , Tacke was a soldier in the Army of the Northern States and made it up to captain. After his return, the "city" of Arnsberg began to emerge from around 1880. In 1881 the Arnsberger fire and lightning insurance was founded. Customers were mainly farmers in the area. A year later, Tacke built a grain and sawmill. The sawmill had a steam engine. Tacke also built a two-story department store with a post office. Since 1884 there was a two-story market hall in Arnsberg which also housed a dance hall. There was also a forge, other shops and later a doctor. In 1909 Arnsberg was connected to the telephone network.

The first church “St. John German Evangelical Lutherian Church of Arnsberg “was closed due to dilapidation around 1890 and later collapsed. There was also a school in the village.

The town began to decline in 1911 with a devastating tuberculosis epidemic, which killed a large part of the population. In the 1940s most of the houses were demolished, only the shop and the market hall still existed.

Since 2001, the “Arnsberg Cemetery Association” has been made up of residents of the surrounding areas to maintain the cemetery, which was used from 1856 to 1958.

literature

• Wolfgang Boucsein: Arnsberg in Missouri (USA). Hemeraner citizens founded Klein-Arnsberg in the USA. In: Heimatblätter. Journal of the Arnsberger Heimatbund. Vol. 2007. pp. 34-38

Coordinates: 37 ° 34 ′  N , 89 ° 47 ′  W