A Brief History
The German adventurer Friedrich Gerstäcker explored the state in the antebellum period and wrote accounts of “Wild West Arkansas” that were published contemporaneously in German newspapers and reworked into his first novel, Die Regulatoren in Arkansas (The Regulators [posse members] in Arkansas). While the novel primarily focuses on the vigilantes who attempt to put an end to horse stealing in the region, it also explores interactions between Native Americans and white settlers. Ultimately, it portrays Native Americans, in opposition to the white thieves and murderers, as the moral example to be emulated. Thus, it demonstrates that Germans, too, were cognizant of the plight of the Native community within the state. After Gerstäcker, a handful of other German speakers arrived prior to the Civil War and fought on both sides of the conflict.
Most German speakers came to Arkansas in the nineteenth century. A group of Swiss monks saw the state as a missionary field and founded Subiaco Abbey in Paris, Arkansas. Further, they helped the Little Rock and Fort Smith railroad to recruit other Catholic German speakers to purchase land for farming along the Arkansas River Valley. But Catholics were not the only religious group to come to the state. German Protestants came to Arkansas to farm in the Delta, a few Austrians were attracted to coal mining in the west of the state, and German and Austrian Jewish immigrants settled primarily in the political and commercial capital, Little Rock, with others scattered around the state.
German speakers assimilated quickly, usually within one generation. However, much of their history remains unknown by their descendants and the public at large. Recent scholarship by Condray has shown that these first generation immigrants preferred to speak German and thought it a moral imperative to keep the language alive; they fought with native-born Arkansans over agricultural dependence on cotton and against prohibition laws to try to establish viniculture as an alternative; they felt shut out of local governance and strove to have a greater political influence; and they were bewildered by lynchings in the post-Reconstruction South and feared a general race war. In short, these new Arkansans struggled linguistically and culturally to understand their new surroundings and faced many issues that present immigrants encounter.
Explore German-Speaking Arkansas
St. Mary’s Church in Altus, Arkansas was built by German-speaking immigrants and features frescoes and stained glass in German. Go here to view videos and pictures of St. Mary’s.
Watch short videos on Friedrich Gerstäcker, a German explorer to Wild West Arkansas, Charles Penzel, a Civil War soldier turned grocer and then banker, and Lorenz Schneider, a would-be priest who became a farmer instead and went on to have eleven children and helped keep St. Bernard’s hospital running as a maintenance man.
Visit wineries run by the descendants of German-speaking immigrants on the Altus trail below with the map created by the Arkansas Association of Grape Growers (used with permission). Learn more about their Arkansas Quality Wine Program at their web-site or on Facebook.
Read more about immigrants’ attempts to establish Arkansas as a wine producing region in the 19th century and read from a wine manual published for German-speakers in 1892.