× Expand Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum A hand-colored lithograph of the St. Louis Levee around 1840 by J.C. Wild A hand-colored lithograph of the St. Louis Levee around 1840 by J.C. Wild

If you’re a casual student of history, terms such as primary and secondary sources might cause your eyes to glaze over. But for historians, the difference between the two is critical to the study of the past. Primary sources are letters, newspapers, photographs or other documents created as the historical event was taking place; they open a window into the past. Secondary sources are works of history written by authors who were not present when the event in question took place, and thus they rely on primary sources to inform them. Historians make use of carefully vetted secondary sources combined with primary sources to generate a more well-rounded picture of history.

One of the best primary sources for German American life in the 19th century is Ernst Kargau’s St. Louis in Früheren Jahren: Ein Gedenkbuch Für Das Deutschthum, published in 1893. It’s more commonly known nowadays by its modern title, The German Element in St. Louis, because an English translation done by William G. Bek in 1943 was published in 2000 by Don Tolzmann. But the St. Louis Public Library has multiple copies in German (one for each branch in its system at one point) if you’re interested reading the book in its original language. I can vouch that English edition is an excellent and accurate translation of the German.

As a primary source, Kargau’s reminiscences about the bustling German business, political and cultural life in St. Louis, particularly before the Civil War, are invaluable to anyone studying the history of the Gateway City. Kargau was born in 1832 in Silesia, which at the time was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia, the northern German state that flexed its political and military power after the defeat of Napoleon. For many in Prussia and German states threatened with annexation into the militaristic kingdom, the United States looked like a promising place to start a new life. Kargau, along with millions of other Germans, chose the New World. He then, like hundreds of thousands of others, chose St. Louis as his new home. He found work as a reporter for several German language newspapers, including the Westliche Post. Kargau was a sort of Renaissance Man about town before dying in 1907; he is interred in what is now known as Hillcrest Abbey Crematory and Mausoleum at Sublette and Arsenal.

Kargau organizes his book about St. Louis in what might be described as a particularly German manner—that is to say, meticulous, orderly, and thorough. First, he starts with the streets of the original grid laid out by Laclede and Chouteau: Main, First, and Second streets. It seems almost impossible that so many businesses were packed into a such a small area, the site of what is now the Gateway Arch National Park grounds. But we learn, as Kargau proceeds building-by-building, address-by-address in the first section of his book, that every storefront was filled with a German immigrant plying a different trade. Interestingly, we also learn that certain streets were particularly Teutonic, and that was perfectly normal to find oneself surrounded by the sounds of the German language being spoken by passersby and in the businesses lining the sidewalks. Kargau mentions the rowdy saloon of Adam Lemp, which was on South Second Street, and a restaurant where “Old Man Anheuser” would hold court, no doubt working out deals to generate capital for the latest investments going on at the time.

After an exhaustive description of approximately two dozen other streets in St. Louis with a “German element,” Kargau turns to a thematic excursus on life in the city. Beer gardens, with which modern readers will be familiar, popped up as more and more German immigrants arrived. So did the concept of drinking on Sundays, which was a shock to the English-American occupants of St. Louis. Also, St. Louis had been a French Roman Catholic city, and now many of the new immigrants arriving were Lutheran, arriving from Prussia and other northern German states. Many of the churches Kargau describes still exist, though sadly a large number have closed in the last 30 years. He also describes the Turner societies, which were sort of a combination between gymnastic and social organizations. Unlike the English language, German has an intransitive verb, turnen, for the act of doing gymnastics. What I find interesting about this second section of the book is just how many of these institutions, particularly the Turner societies, have gone out of business in just the last three decades, along with their ecclesiastical counterparts. For young people, there is no firsthand knowledge of these organizations.

The third and final section of the book deals with the business and industrial accomplishments of German-American immigrants. It is a bit of a tired cliché around St. Louis that the Protestant German work ethic drove the founding of a long list of corporations, but it is fascinating to read the dozens of familiar names that still bedeck factories and office buildings around the region. What is also interesting is that Kargau reveals that not all industrialist began in the same field of business they are currently famous for; Eberhard Anheuser, for example, started in the soap industry before turning to brewing.

Kargau’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about St. Louis before the Civil War, which is a consistently overlooked period in the history of our region. But his work has its limitations. Kargau was writing decades after many of the events he describes in his book, and while he may have still had access to newspaper archives or his own journal notes, there are some errors. However, despite a few questions of reliability, Kargau gives us valuable leads to follow into a now vanished world, one that is buried under the legs of the Gateway Arch.