Friedrich Arends

Friedrich Arends , also Fridrich Arends, with full name Johann Friedrich Heinrich Arends, (born November 12, 1782 in Emden , East Friesland , † February 14, 1861 in Polk County , Missouri ) was a German geographer , economist , farmer and cultural historian .

Emden Town Hall 1845

Live and act

Childhood and youth

Friedrich Arends came from a wealthy Emden family. He was a multi-talented boy who had good academic records and, from an early age, developed a pronounced tendency towards careful observation and planned exploration. During his expeditions through his hometown with the large port area, he eagerly observed everything on the spot and even made his own city map. At the age of eleven, he had to give up to go to school because of a measles serious damage had taken his hearing and his speech organs. Despite medical efforts, he finally lost his hearing completely and, because of his unclear pronunciation, usually used a writing tablet to communicate. Self-taught , he expanded his knowledge of the natural sciences , in German, Latin and the Dutch language, by studying books and extending it to English and French. He tried his hand at turning and learned bookbinding .

Emder New Church 1826

Professional life and publications

At the age of 19, Arends started his professional life at the request of his father and was employed as an office worker in two Emden trading houses from 1801 to 1808. Then he turned to agriculture , because his father had bought him the Tütelburg estate near Marienwehr in 1808 , which made his childhood dream of a life in the country come true. Arends, with little practical experience, who had meanwhile married, had a factory built on the estate to produce sugar from beetroot , but this failed. He went bankrupt and had to give up the estate in 1814.

From 1815 to 1820 he worked again as an office worker and in his free time wrote the three-volume work: Ostfriesland und Jever . In 1820 he bought the 40-hectare Geest- Moorhof Marienfeld on Treckfahrtstief (today partly Ems-Jade Canal ) in Rahe (Aurich) and tried again as a farmer. Again he had to sell this property at a loss due to economic difficulties, but had already settled on Oldersumer Strasse in Haxtum near Aurich in 1823 , where in 1824 he completed the description of the earth of the Principality of Ostfriesland and Harlingerland . In 1825 he found a job as an office assistant in the royal Landdrostei in nearby Aurich and, despite the long working days, published the two larger works Painting of the Storm Surges from February 3rd to 5th, 1825 and the Treatise on Lawn Burning and Moor Burning in the following year . Then he completed the two-volume Physical History of the North Sea Coast in Haxtum after an extensive study of sources and literature in 1833 , a work that is still recognized and much-cited in scientific circles today, which also appeared in a three-volume Dutch translation.

The heavy strain on his eyes, especially due to insufficient lighting, caused Arends to suffer from an eye condition that worsened over time. Concerned that he might go blind as an almost deaf and mute man, he gave up his job in the Landdrostei after a long hesitation and with a heavy heart decided, like many of his compatriots at the time, to emigrate to North America .

Emigration ship 1850

Alone - his wife had already died in 1829 - at the age of 50, he and his three young children said goodbye to what he himself described as "friendly Aurich" and his East Frisian homeland. He wrote a detailed diary and said that the journey from Emden to Oldenburg led to Bremen , which would take several days, as there was no boat connection and the route had to be covered by carriage, horse or single horse. When they were shortly before Bremen, they were warned of thieves and other dangers in and around the port of Bremen, which is why, as a precaution, they traveled by ship from Brake , but had to wait a week for the departure to New Orleans due to the lack of wind . On the seven-week sailing ship voyage, his eldest daughter died after a short, violent fever. His youngest daughter was only 12 years old and his son was just 15 years old.

Finley map from 1827

In what is now the Midwest of the then young USA , in the newly founded 24th state of Missouri , which a few years earlier still belonged to France and which enjoyed a good reputation in Europe, Arends bought a 32-hectare farm with a water-powered sawmill in the Charaton river basin (Chariton) , a tributary of the Missouri . After a short time he had to sell the sawmill, because his strength was no longer sufficient to process larger blocks of wood, as he suffered from weakness at times, because the reclamation of the partly still wooded farmlands was associated with very difficult work. Disappointed he sold after four hard years of privation the farm and returned in 1837 without his children to East Friesland, where he already 1838 description of the Mississippi Thales published in which he the states of Missouri, Illinois , Indiana , Ohio , Michigan , Wisconsin and Arkansas described and gave concrete advice for those willing to emigrate and cleared up some misconceptions.

Arends had hoped to be able to acquire cheap property in Pomerania . When this failed, he moved to Missouri for the second time, where he lived in poor conditions on a small farm for over 20 years. The management of his farm suffered from the fact that, as usual, he often pursued his intellectual interests. He persistently refused the proposals of his now married children to give up farming and move in with them. It wasn't until the last year of his life that he sold the property and moved into a small house next to his daughter's farm in Polk County , Missouri . He died there on February 14, 1861 after an eight-day sick bed at the age of 78.

Appreciation

Arend's work has remained significant to this day, whereby his particular merit consists in the fact that he gave new impetus to regional research in East Frisia, which was predominantly historically oriented up to the beginning of the 19th century, by placing greater emphasis on the natural and economic disciplines. Initially he placed greater emphasis on an economic view of geographical spatial units, but later he endeavored to capture and represent spatial interdisciplinary interdisciplinary relationships in a more holistic conception. In the absence of written and printed sources, as he wrote, "almost all geographic and topographical news ... had to be obtained through private communications and various journeys." He went on exploratory trips into old age. While it was closer and closer home in younger years, it was later North America.

For East Frisian regional studies, the high value of his research is based above all on his own, direct view on site or on the information of trustworthy people. We owe the knowledge of numerous landscape elements that have since disappeared to the detailed depictions of former landscape conditions and economic methods, which in the East Frisian Geest areas were largely still attributable to the rural settlement and economic system that emerged in the Middle Ages.

The fact that, in view of the complexity of the research areas and the breadth of his work, errors were made and the information given by his sources were certainly not always reliable, and some of his explanations are outdated today, does not significantly reduce the value of the enormous life's work, which the almost restlessly active man despite strong physical activity Disability and tragic blows of fate.

Works

• Fleeting remarks on a trip from Emden to Cassel in late summer 1806. In: Gemeinnützige Nachrichten. Volume 3, 1807, pp. 164-168, 169-172, 177-182, 187-192, 198-200, 212-216, 236-240
• News about the opening of the Spitlande at Larrelter Kolk. In: Charitable News. Volume 3, 1807, pp. 81-84
• The polders and Groden. In: Historical-geographical-statistical-literary yearbook for Westphalia and the Lower Rhine. Volume 2, 1818, pp. 119-140
• The Christmas flood of 1717. A historical sketch. Emden 1818
• Geographical and statistical overview of East Frisia. In: Historical-geographical-statistical-literary yearbook for Westphalia and the Lower Rhine. Volume 2, 1818, pp. 1-48
• East Frisia and Jever in geographical, statistical and especially in agricultural terms. Volume 1–3, Hannover and Emden 1818–1820 (2nd edition, Hannover 1822, reprint: Leer 1974)
• Something about the customs and habits of the Geest people. In: The Upstalsboom. Volume 1, 1819, pp. 259-267
• Earth description of the Principality of East Friesland and the Harlingerland. Hanover and Emden 1824 (Reprint: Leer 1972)
• Painting of the storm surges from February 3rd to 5th, 1825. Bremen 1826 ( Google eBook, full view )
• Treatise on the burning of the lawn and the burning of the moor. Hanover 1826
• The old ways in East Frisia. In: New fatherland. Archive. Volume 1, 1831, pp. 36-95
• Annual history of Ostfriesland 1830. In: Ostfriesisches Volksbuch. Volume 2, 1832, pp. 106-131
• Physical history of the North Sea coast and its changes due to storm surges from the Cymbrian Flood until now. Volume 1 and 2, Emden 1833 (reprint: Leer 1974, in Dutch translation with notes by R. Westerhoff under the title :) Natuurkundige geschiedenis van de kusten der Noordzee, en van de veranderingen, welke zij, sedert the Cymbrian Vloed tot op heden to lift the watervloeden ondergaan. 3 volumes, W. Van Boekeren, Groningen 1835–1837 ( Volume 1 , Volume 2 , Volume 3 )
• Depicting the Mississippi Valley or the western United States of America. Along with an outline of my journey there. Emden 1838 (reprint: Leer 1974)
• Petrus G. Bartels: Some news about Friedrich Arends and his writings. In: Yearbook of the Society for Fine Art and Patriotic Antiquities in Emden. Volume 4, Issue 2, 1881, pp. 45-57

Short biographies

• Gerhard Siebels: Johann Friedrich Heinrich Arends. In: Biographical Lexicon for East Frisia. Volume 1, Aurich 1993, pp. 32–35, online at: ostfriesenelandschaft.de, accessed September 16, 2015
• Jürgen Hoogstraat: From Ostfriesland to America from ... In: Ostfriesen Genealogical Society of America: American-Ostfriesen Zeitung. Volume 12, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 12-13, on ogsa.us, accessed September 17, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gerhard Siebels: Johann Friedrich Heinrich Arends. In: Biographical Lexicon for East Frisia. Volume 1, Aurich 1993, pp. 32–35, online at: ostfriesenelandschaft.de, accessed September 16, 2015
2. ^ ^{A b} Jürgen Hoogstraat: From Ostfriesland to America from ... In: Ostfriesen Genealogical Society of America: American-Ostfriesen Zeitung. ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Volume 12, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 12-13, on ogsa.us, accessed September 17, 2015 
3. ↑ DL Ashliman: Germany Discovers America. An Annotated Bibliography of German-American Travel Narratives 1800–1918. from: pitt.edu, accessed September 17, 2015