Monthly Archives: September 2021

Arnold’s Economy has Deep Roots in
Pioneer Days

Animal furs, grain, fruit, soybeans, beef, and hogs defined our local economy in the early 1800s until entrepreneurs began to grow new businesses.

In 1800, with no newspaper published within hundreds of miles, news of Thomas Jefferson’s election as President of the United States did not reach some people here until months after the election.  Yet more than any person, Thomas Jefferson opened doors of opportunity for new settlers who rooted their families here.

In return for $18 per square mile paid to Napoleon Bonaparte for the Louisiana Purchase that Jefferson brokered in 1803, the colonies acquired 828,000 square miles of unmapped land west of the Mississippi River. In his deal with France, Jefferson acquired rights to obtain all Native American Indian lands by treaty or by conquest. No other nation could legally claim it.

In 1804, Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery to explore west of the Mississippi to establish trade with Native Americans, explore the northwest territories, and chart a route to the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean.

As almost every schoolboy knows, the expedition launched on the Mississippi a few miles upriver from St. Louis. About 50 men in a 55-foot keelboat and dugout canoes rowed upstream until they entered the Missouri River at its confluence with the Mississippi and then headed northwest on the Missouri. The expedition occurred from May 14, 1804, to October 16, 1805. Only one crewman died.

Jefferson County is born

In 1818, a 657 square-mile area bordering the Mississippi River was surveyed and named Jefferson County. Settlements were served by navigable rivers including the Meramec, where a ferry crossed to what is today Flamm Park in Arnold. This area began to attract new settlers from the eastern colonies, plus many immigrants from Germany, France, England, Ireland, and Canada.

Later in the 19^th century, Missouri Supreme Court Judge John L. Thomas was asked by the Jefferson County Agricultural & Mechanical Association to write a detailed history of Jefferson County. He presented it as a speech on Independence Day, July 4, 1876.  “Indians were numerous,” Thomas asserted. “The Delawares, Shawnees and Cherokees were peaceable and friendly, but the Osages were very savage and warlike, and gave the settlers a great deal of trouble.” Indeed, they did.

In 1821, Missouri entered the Union as the nation’s 24^th state. Some historians contend that Lewis & Clark’s expedition and Missouri’s statehood led to the federal Indian Removal Act of 1830, which relocated native tribes from their ancient lands. There were eight known Native American tribes in Missouri and, until the Act took hold, local settlers were attacked by hostiles including the ferocious Osage. Unlucky families were killed or scalped. Every pioneer family owned at least one rifle, knives, perhaps a sword, and at least one big dog for protection.

The famous artist George Catlin painted the Indians of nearly 70 tribal groups in the 1830s. He described Missouri’s Osage as “the tallest race of men in North America, either of red or white skins.” Historian Ron Soodalter later wrote an article for Missouri Life Magazine that noted, “Aside from their physically prepossessing appearance, the Osage were fiercely warlike, ready to fight with any tribal group that threatened their domain. Proficient in the use of bows and arrows, lances, knives, clubs, and tomahawks…The Osage waged various types of war, from the nonlethal to outright slaughter.”

German settlers

Lewis & Clark described the land they explored as endless areas of lush farmland, fruit trees, plentiful water resources, abundant wild game, and many types of furbearing animals. Yet raids by hostile Osage kept Missouri settlers constantly worried about attacks. That situation began to change after the War of 1812. The war started when Colonialists violently rebelled as England tried to dictate rights of overseas trade. When the colonial army won the war in 1815, the military began to protect settlements. The military presence discouraged Indian attacks; more pioneers settled in Missouri.

In 1826, Jefferson Barracks was built not far away. Marquette University Professor Francis Paul Prucha wrote that the army was “an agent of American civilization on the frontier.” Soldiers at Jefferson Barracks were peacekeepers for the Mississippi River valley, defending against Native American Indian raids.

St. Louis National Public Radio (NPR) recently reported, “In 1833, two men from Giessen, Germany, decided to immigrate to the United States where they hoped to create their own utopia with freedoms and democracy that they did not have under German aristocracy. They recruited hundreds of others and formed the Giessen Emigration Society.

“In year 1834 500 Germans came to Missouri with the big idea of creating a German state as a new state within the United States of America…” NPR reported.

“The 500 immigrants ended up in Missouri in an area that looked like their homeland.” The ‘Missouri Rhineland’ extends west of St. Louis to just east of Jefferson City, mostly along the Missouri River valley and is named for its similarities to the Rhineland region of Germany and the Rhine River.”

For political reasons, they could not legally create a new state. So, most new German immigrants merged with colonial society while preserving traditional German ways of life.

Pioneer Industrialization

Most settlers in the Arnold area, including Germans, were farmers. Blacksmiths kept horses in shoes. Leather craftsmen kept them in bridles and saddles. Farmers grew the animal feed.

Mills were where farmers took corn to be ground into meal; stores to buy necessities were located near mills. According to Jefferson County Library archives, two early mills were Byrnes Mill and Byrnesville Mill, both situated beside the Big River miles apart. Each mill was owned by an Irish immigrant named Patrick Byrne. Each man came from Ireland in 1849, but neither knew the other. Store products were tanned hides, candles, soap, farm fruits or vegetables, and freshly killed game, pork, or beef. Customers usually paid in gold, silver, furs, or animal skins.

In 1864, vast sources of lead, iron ore and zinc began to be mined in Missouri. Jefferson County became more developed when the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway began transporting iron ore and, also, shipping cord wood to St. Louis. In addition, big dairies shipped huge quantities of milk, cream, and butter daily to St. Louis. The St. Joseph Lead Company in Herculaneum became the largest lead smelter in the United States. In 1868, sand was discovered in Jefferson County for plate glass making by glassmakers in Chicago and Detroit. In 1902, the Frisco Railroad began transporting people and freight through Jefferson County to western and southern states, enhancing local growth.

Bernie Wilde of the Arnold Historical Society & Museum points out that few hard-working pioneers in the Arnold area, even those settled for some years, got rich. Unless they arrived from their place of origin with money to buy a farm or open a business, most settlers worked in positions that barely supported their survival. “After years of renting a place to live, maybe they saved enough money to build a cabin, a small house, or homestead,” Wilde says. Bankers, doctors, and lawyers for many years were almost exclusively located in St. Louis near the Mississippi riverfront, a 60-mile round-trip.  Wilde says Jefferson County pioneers who earned enough money to be comfortable were doctors, lawyers, business owners, undertakers land investors, or farmers cultivating hundreds of acres.

The website Passion for the Past provides a good look at farming in the mid-1800s: “(Pioneer) farmer sowed grain by hand; shouldering a bag of seed, the farmer walked up and down the tilled field, fingering the seeds from side to side…with the grain hung over the shoulders, and the steady swing of the right arm throwing the grain as the right foot advanced and dipping the hand into the bag for another cast of grain as the left foot advanced.”  An old proverb describes seed sowing like this: “One for the mouse, one for the crow, one to rot, and one to grow.”

A nineteenth century hay wagon piled high with a morning’s cut. Farmers headed for their hay fields to cut their hay starting in late June and finishing by summers end. The old saying “Make hay while the sun shines” is very true.

Photo property of http://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2011/08/early-farming-tools-from-days-gone-by.html

This corn planter from 1875 required two men to operate – one to handle the horse reins and one to manage the planting machine.

Photo property of http://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2011/08/early-farming-tools-from-days-gone-by.html

Better farming

Mechanical innovation began to help make Jefferson County farming more efficient in the 1850s with new inventions and better tools. Metal harrows pulled by horses spread out plowed land to enable more efficient seed planting.  A horse-drawn grain drill distributed seeds evenly and quickly, and then covered them with soil – much better than spreading seeds by hand. A spreader to distribute manure for fertilizer was introduced to spread manure farther and wider than shoveling it off a wagon. In 1860, two brothers in Wisconsin “patented a design for a combination drill and cultivator pulled by a team of horses. This was an immediate success. By the end of the Civil War the brothers’ company was producing 1,300 of the grain drills per year.”

http://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2011/08/early-farming-tools-from-days-gone-by.html

Allen Flamm was an Arnold Historical Society board member and, also, Vice-Chairman of the City’s Historic Preservation Commission.

“In 1836 my great grandfather Wilhelm Flamm arrived from the village of Merseberg, Germany to farm and began planting apple orchards. He married a French girl named Elizabeth Gamasch whose family was related to Jean Baptiste Gamache, this area’s first settler.  By 1920 my grandfather John H. Flamm owned 320 acres that spread to the Meramec River. He planted more orchards growing apples, peaches, pears, plums, grapes, and raspberries. My father Alvin Flamm was born in 1915. I remember my father and grandpa sold most of our products in south St. Louis.

“Our family was a group of hard-working farmers, but I would not consider us well to do,” says Flamm. “In 1937 a man named Leo Ziegler wanted to run a store near our property, but he didn’t know how people would find it. He called the area ‘Flamm City’ because most people knew where the Flamm orchards were.”

Sue Kroupa’s grandfather was Ferd Lang, Sr., a farmer-turned-businessman who built a general store, tavern, and gas station on property he bought from a landowner named Louis Arnold. Ferd Lang, Sr. named the location Arnold to honor Louis Arnold – and that name stuck for the community. Sue Kroupa’s father was Ferd Lang, Jr., an undertaker and woodworker who became the first mayor when the Arnold incorporated as a city in 1972.

The grandfather of Sue Kroupa’s husband was Clement Vogel. The Vogel family, along with the Kroupa, Lang and Ziegler families, were instrumental in establishing new businesses and municipal developments such as public highways and the Rock Community Fire Protection District.”

Allen Flamm observes, “Many locals call Arnold a ‘Small Big Town.’ We evolved from agricultural, mechanical, and industrial eras to today’s modern age. Settler families endured Indian attacks, droughts, floods, the Great Depression and more. We are stubborn and determined. Families that came here in the 1800s such as the Vogels, Kroupas, Zieglers, Langs, and many others intertwined or intermarried so that, today, everybody knows about everybody else. you have got to be careful what you say about someone because it will travel like wildfire!”

Indeed, what would Thomas Jefferson say?

Article by Jeff Dunlap for the City of Arnold.
In addition to interviews, some information was excerpted from specialty journals and websites as noted, and educational resources as noted, and from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.