St. Marys, Pennsylvania

St. Mary's City Hall

St. Marys (gray) within Elk County

St. Marys (formerly also Sankt Marien Stadt or Sainte Marie ) is the only city (City) and the largest place in Elk County in the US state of Pennsylvania . In the last census (2010) the city had 13,070 inhabitants.

German and Belgian colonies

The Straub Brewery was founded in 1831 in Pittsburg, came in 1855 to St. Mary's and is in German hands since 1872

St. Marys was founded in December 1842 by Catholic settlers from Bavaria who had left Europe via the Belgian port of Antwerp . Between 1843 and 1848 Matthias Benzinger (1800-1856?) Founded another colony in the immediate vicinity from Forchheim (Kaiserstuhl) in Baden , the suburb Benzinger Township . In 1852 the Bavarian Benedictine nun Benedicta Riepp emigrated to St. Marys with two sisters and set up a school for the children of the immigrants.

From 1849, on the initiative of Charles Rogiers in Pennsylvania , the Belgian government acquired 10,000 acres of land (over 4,000 hectares) and provided over 200,000 francs to encourage the emigration of impoverished farmers from overpopulated West Flanders. Lured by the promise of 25 acres of land (10 hectares) per family, a transport financed by the Belgian government from Antwerp via New York and Philadelphia to St. Marys, and a better future in the USA, the first sixty Flemish settlers , mainly from Dentergem , founded under Professor Victor De Ham (1805–1879) in July 1850 eight kilometers north of St. Marys, the city of Leopoldsburg . In the area henceforth called New Flanders , Abbé Jean-Louis Cartuyvels (1811–1874) founded another settlement four kilometers east of St. Marys, New Brussels , the American Association for the Colonization, with ten Flemings , mainly from Sint-Truiden of Sainte-Marie helped. The Irish settlement of Kersey was also built four kilometers south of St. Marys . Five years later, another 80,000 acres had been acquired and the population of the settlements had grown to 3,000. However, the Belgian colonies were now financially ruined by land speculation and their settlers had moved on.

In 1872 , Peter Straub (1850–1913) , who came from Felldorf in Württemberg, married one of the Benzinger daughters and acquired the brewery founded by Charles Volk in 1855, which is still known today as Straub Brewery .

Adolf Schmidthammer from Nuremberg emigrated to the USA in 1923. In 1925 he founded the Keystone Carbon Company in St. Marys with BR Reuscher. The company later grew to a size of over 1,200 employees. After three years Schmidthammer returned to Germany and built his own factory there in Schwabach .

In 1991 the residents of St. Marys and Benzinger decided to merge their towns.

The St. Joseph Monastery , founded in 1852, existed until 2014.

Personalities

• Edward C. Meyer (* 1928), General in the US Army and Chief of Staff of the Army

See also

• Belgian colonies
• Germans in the United States

literature

• Report on the settlement in St. Mary in the County of Elk in Pennsylvania , Münster: Aschendorff , 1849, 16 pages: 1 ct. (Plan of the settlement in St. Mary in Pennsylvania) digital copy of the ULB Münster
• JH Beers & Michael Leeson: History of the counties of McKean, Elk, and Forest, Pennsylvania, with biographical selections . Chicago 1890

Web links

• City of St. Marys (History)
• The emigration policy of the Belgian government from Belgium to the US through the port of Antwerp 1842-1914 (PDF; 818 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rasso Ronneburger: Mother Benedicta Riepp - An American dream of a lifetime . Unterdießen 2005. ISBN 3-00-015913-4 .
2. ^ History of Schmidthammer Elektrokohle GmbH

Coordinates: 41 ° 26 ′  N , 78 ° 33 ′  W