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Rev. Friedrich Wilhelm Fiegenbaum
and
Louisa Otto
Golden Wedding Anniversary, 1902
Oregon, Holt County, Missouri
Source: "For Fifty Years.", The Holt County Sentinel (Oregon, Missouri); Friday, 18 April 1902; page 1, columns 1-3.
Digital copies accessed through Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (The Library of Congress) in November 2011.
The original article covered three columns on the front page of the paper. The digital image presented here is an accurate reproduction of the digital copy found online.
Notes
The Article
The reproduction of this newspaper article available on the Library of Congress web site does not do justice to the photograph of Rev. Friedrich Wilhelm and Louisa (Otto) Fiegenbaum. Susan "Suzi" Marie (Dewsnap) Terrell has very generously shared a copy of the original with me for use on this web site.
Susan M. Terrell is related to Friedrich and Louisa. Their eldest child, Wilhelmine Christine Elizabeth Fiegenbaum (1853-1943) married Matthew Sexauer (1847-1928). Matthew and Wilhelmine's eldest child, Rosana Magdeline Sexauer, who is mentioned more than once in this article, was married to George Lafayette McDougal. May McDougal, fourth child of Rosana and George, married James Leonard Terrell, Sr. James L. Terrell, Jr. married Lillian Clare Kittle. Their son, Garrick David Terrell married Susan "Suzi" Marie Dewsnap.
The bare bones of this family line are outlined in the genealogical database at this web site. Suzi Terrell has more information and photos at her Keeper of the Family web site.
This newspaper article would have benefitted from more careful proofreading and typesetting. There are some errors which need to be questioned or corrected. There are nevertheless some important facts presented in this source which help to create a more complete picture of the Fiegenbaum-Otto family.
Migration to U.S.A.
According to his citizenship hearing in the St. Charles (Missouri) Circuit Court on 2 April 1838, Friedrich's father, Adolph Heinrich Fiegenbaum, declared that he and his family had emigrated from Ladbergen, Kingdom of Prussia and had landed in the United States at New Orleans, Louisiana in June 1834. Friedrich would have been a few months past his 4th birthday when his family set foot on dry land again.
In the autobiographical sketch written for his children, Rev. Friedrich Wilhelm Fiegenbaum recorded that his family arrived in New Orleans at the end of June and reached St. Louis on 3 or 4 July 1834. His brother, Heinrich Hermann Fiegenbaum, told essentially the same story (with a different date), and it was repeated to a reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch in June 1898. Maria Wilhelmine (Fiegenbaum) Winter, Friedrich's sister, mentions the ocean voyage briefly in her autobiography, but she was a babe-in-arms at the time and did not dwell on the facts.
In spite of all these versions of the story, there is some question about exactly where the family first settled after reaching Missouri. A federal land patent awarded to Friedrich's father in 1840 would suggest that the family started out in Femme Osage Township, in St. Charles County. Four years later the family had moved to land in neighboring Warren County.
By 1850, the older children in the family had struck out on their own. Many of them had experiences in St. Louis which led to their joining the German Methodist Episcopal Church. And Friedrich was once again on the move. According to the 1850 U.S. census, he (age 21, a day laborer) was living with his parents, Adolph (age 57, a farmer) and Christine (age 54) and his younger brother, Rudolph (age 14), on a farm near Wapella in Louisa County, Iowa.
Brother Heinrich Rudolph
Heinrich Rudolph Fiegenbaum, the sixth and last child of Adolph and Christine (Peterjohann) Fiegenbaum, was born in St. Charles County, Missouri. The birth and his baptism on 5 February 1837 were recorded in the baptismal register of the German evangelical church at Femme Osage, Missouri (founded in 1833 as the deutsche evangelische Kirchegemeinde and known since 1957 as Femme Osage United Church of Christ). As an adult, he was often known as H. R. or Rudolph; and occasionally as Henry (as was one of his brothers). I mention H. Rudolph specifically because he is conspicuous by his absence in the newspaper account of the celebration of Friedrich and Louisa's wedding anniversary. In 1901, he had relocated to Connell, Franklin County, Washington where he mixed his pastoral work for the Methodist Church with real estate sales. Perhaps he could not make the long trek to Oregon, Missouri. Rudolph died in 1908 at Gooding, Gooding County, Idaho and was buried next to his first wife in Concord Cemetery at Garner, Hancock County, Iowa.
Moving to Iowa
U.S. military veterans of the Mexican–American War (1846-1848) were eligible to receive a federal bounty land warrant redeemable for 160 acres of land for serving one year or more. Many veterans chose to sell their warrants rather than accept the land. It appears that residents of the St. Charles and Warren Counties, Missouri took advantage of this real estate market to take up land in Iowa. This is what Friedrich's parents seem to have done. And perhaps Louisa Otto's parents did the same. Thus were Friedrich and Louisa able to renew the acquaintance that had begun in Missouri "which in due time resulted in a wedding," as this article phrased it.
Brother Heinrich Hermann
The Rev. Henry Fiegenbaum who officiated at the wedding of Friedrich and Louisa in Iowa in 1852 and helped them renew their vows at Oregon, Missouri in 1902 was no doubt Heinrich Hermann Fiegenbaum, Friedrich's eldest brother. In 1845-1846, while working as a carter in St. Louis, Heinrich Hermann Fiegenbaum struggled fitfully with his faith. He came under the influence of prominent Methodist preachers Ludwig Sigismund Jacoby and Casper Jost and was eventually converted to the German Methodist Episcopal Church. Clara Catharina Kastenbudt, his future wife, was converted at the same revival meeting. They were married at St. Louis, Missouri on 11 April 1847. After a long career in the German Methodist Episcopal Church, Heinrich and Clara had settled into retirement at St. Joseph, Buchanan County, Missouri, not far from Oregon, Holt County, Missouri. As this article notes, they had celebrated their own golden wedding anniversary in 1897, just a few months before Clara's death. Heinrich would die in 1905.
The Holt County Sentinel, which published this account the the golden wedding anniversary celebration, was co-owned by Tom Curry, the husband of one of Heinrich Hermann Fiegenbaum's daughters. The newspaper often contained notices of the comings and goings of the various members of the Fiegenbaum-Kastenbudt and Fiegenbaum-Otto families.
Family & the Church
At one point in his article, the author began a paragraph:
The Fiegenbaum family is a remarkable one in one particular; the family consisted of four brothers and two sisters, all of whom are still living, the sisters being widows, and the four brothers were ministers of the German M. E. church.
But the author failed to finish his thought. What was remarkable was not that there were four ministers and two widows in the family. The two sisters had also married ministers of the German Methodist Episcopal Church. All six of Adolph Heinrich and Christine Elisabeth (Peterjohann) Fiegenbaum's children, as well as the parents themselves, all of whom had begun their lives as faithful members of the United Evangelical Church of their homeland and steeled themselves against the doctrine of the Methodists, had been converted and ended up in long and faithful service to their new church.
In 1898 an article appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch discussing the family's emigration from Germany and their spiritual transition.
Friedrich's Service in the Church
According to Friedrich's own telling, he struggled with the call he felt to serve as a minister. He frankly admitted that he wished to avoid the responsibilities and the meager pay. He told his children that he hoped that his marriage to Louisa would make him a less desirable candidate in the eyes of the church, but in the end he could not escape the duty that he saw before him.
According to the policy at the time in the German Methodist Episcopal Church, Friedrich did not stay long in any one charge. The list of his appointments in the newspaper article certainly underscores this feature of his family's life. Because he and his brothers moved so frequently, it has been difficult for me to trace their wanderings with great accuracy. Often a single charge might involve being a pastor to more than one community at a time – some of them rather established and others barely getting started, all in a circuit which might take days of rough travel to complete. Friedrich, in his letter to this children, spoke of these difficulties and acknowledged the tremendous hardship which Louisa endured as his wife. Maybe those experiences partly explain the dour expression on their faces in the photograph.
The Life of Women
As difficult as it is to find reliable material on the inner lives of the men in this branch of the Fiegenbaum family, it is even more frustrating to learn about the women. You may have noticed that this account of the celebration of 50 years of marriage is subtitled Rev. Frederick Fiegenbaum and Wife… and is focused mainly on Friedrich's experiences. There is a very small paragraph which reports Louisa's date and place of birth and then passing mention of generally where she lived during the first nineteen years of her life until her marriage. Her parents are never named. Only two of her eight siblings are mentioned, and the author of the article cannot decide whether the sister's married name was Mary Wagner or Waggoner.
What was it like to be the mother of ten children in the middle of the 19th century, the first born when you are 20 years old and the last when you are 37 years old? What was it like to raise a family on the wages of an itinerant minister?
This time back to Freeport, Illinois. A place where the P. E. [Presiding Elder] said nobody wanted to go. Yes, it was a hard place. No house to live in could be found that suited. There were four appointments on this circuit. But even here we had our success. One time when I came home, Mama set the table and put on what she had -- dry bread and black coffee. I looked at it and said, "Is that all you got?" "Yes," she said, "all." Well, I told the members if they did not do better in our support, I'd go and work on the street; I could not, would not, see my family starve. Then they did better. O, what hardships we went through, God only knows.
What was it like to pack up a household and move every two years?
Well, from here we again crossed the state of Illinois in the fall of 1855 with a horse and buggy. The baby Adolph had the chills every day on his mother's lap. We started Monday morning and the next Friday we got to Galena, Illinois where my brother Henry lived. I left my wife and children and proceeded to Dubuque, Iowa where I found my appointment ten miles west Charles Mount Circuit. Preached Sunday, then on Monday I went back to Galena and got my family. We found a log church and a log parsonage with two rooms. Glad to find that.
Yes, dour faces indeed!
Friedrich and Louisa's Children
This article states that Friedrich and Louisa were the parents of nine children: "three girls and six boys, all of whom are magnificent types of the true, high-minded, honorable, clean citizenship." A little later the author wrote: "Their life has been peculiarly blessed. Not a death has broken the circle of their immediate family."
In fact, ten children were born to Friedrich and Louisa. Not included in the count of the anniversary celebration is their third child, Louis Fiegenbaum, born on 6 September 1856 in Dubuque County, Iowa. He died 6 days later.
Friedrich wrote about this time in his life:
Here again a son was born to us, but died when but a few days old. We buried him at Cincolo Mount, Iowa. He was layed, his little body, and had an iron fence around his grave to protect it, and the infant spirit gone above where we will find him again. At this time Mother suffered very much. We had a bad house to live in. While I was out collecting one morning for a new church, which I was building, a big shower came up. O, how it did rain. I was away from home about four miles, but hurried home as fast as my horse would take me. I found Mama crying in bed. I took my umbrella, held it over her to keep her dry, for it was raining on her. Then I kindled a big fire. The whole house was swimming with water. God only saved her life, but she never recovered her usual health. It was a hard time. God only knows. After our time, two years were up, we had to move again.
Friedrich identified the place as "Cincolo Mount, Iowa" and the newspaper article, in the list of stations which Friedrich served, called it "Chirls Mount, Ia." The correct name at the time was Sherrill's Mount. Now it is simply Sherrill, Iowa.
A transcription of the gravestones in the Sherrill Methodist Cemetery was compiled in October 2001 by Vicki and Tom Schlarman and is available on the Dubuque County Genealogy web site (updated 5 October 2004). Their work lists a Louis Fiegenbaum; son of Rev. F. and L. Fiegenbaum; died 12 September 1856, age 6 days. Louis was buried in the Sherrill, Dubuque County, Iowa Methodist Church cemetery - section A, row 5, stone 7. There is a photo and a transcription of the grave marker at the Iowa Gravestone Photo Project.
The other nine children who survived to celebrate their parents' wedding anniversary in 1902 and mentioned in this article were:
- Wilhelmine "Minnie" Christine Elizabeth (Fiegenbaum) Sexauer; her husband, Matthew Sexauer; and youngest child, Roscoe Conklin Sexauer; of Ankeny, Iowa. Their eldest daughter, Rosana Magdeline (Sexauer) McDougal, and a daughter, of Gowrie, Iowa, were present. Matthew and Minnie Sexauer's third child, Emily Louise (Sexauer) Pieckenbrock and her husband, Clarence Pieckenbrock, of Ellston, Iowa also attended. At one point Emily Louise is identified as the eldest daughter of Rosana McDougal (this is not correct).
- Adolph Heinrich Fiegenbaum and wife, Margaret McKee; of Washington, D.C. Their only daughter, Grace Gertrude Fiegenbaum, was not mentioned.
- Lydia Maria Fiegenbaum and husband, Francis Irwin Howard; of Sac City, Iowa. Their only child, Genevieve Howard, was present.
- Louis Theodore Stephan Fiegenbaum and wife, Luella May Shumway; of Geneva, Nebraska. Their only child, Inez Maude Fiegenbaum, was present.
- Theodore Johann Fiegenbaum and wife, Nellie M. Erlenborn; of Lincoln, Nebraska. Their only child, Martha T. Fiegenbaum was not yet born.
- Emma Maria (Fiegenbaum) Miller and husband, Jacob Miller; of Wathena, Kansas. Five of their seven children were present: Louise Dorothea Miller; Fredricka Frances Miller; Wilma Pauline Miller; Kathryn Hortense Miller; and Kenneth Carter Miller. Two daughters had died in May 1900.
- Benjamin Friedrich Fiegenbaum and his wife, Myrtle Maud Darling; of Western, Nebraska. They had no children.
- Henry F. Fiegenbaum and his wife, Nellie Blanche Montgomery; of Lawton, Oklahoma Territory. They had married in October 1900 and had no children yet, although Nellie would have been pregnant with Frances Louis Fiegenbaum, born on 25 June 1902 at Lawton.
- Wilhelm Edward Fiegenbaum and his wife, Maude Mary Montgomery; of Geneva, Nebraska. They had married in October 1901 and had no children at the time of the ceremony.
Guests
Some of the other guests mentioned by name in the article were:
- John Otto and Mary Wagner or Waggoner. They were brother and sister to Louisa Otto.
- Rev. Heinrich Hermann Fiegenbaum, referred to in the article as either Henry or H. Fiegenbaum. He lived nearby in St. Joseph, Buchanan County, Missouri. The article mentioned that he and his wife, Clara Catherine Kastenbudt, had celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in April 1897 at St. Joseph. Clara (Kastenbudt) Fiegenbaum died in September of that year.
- Anna Julia Fiegenbaum, known as Anna, was a daughter of Rev. Heinrich Hermann and Clara (Kastenbudt) Fiegenbaum; also of St. Joseph. Anna never married and I believe that she and her sister, Anna Maria Fiegenbaum, known as Mary, lived with her father. Mary was blind from the age of about ten years and from newspaper accounts she does not seem to have been as socially active as Anna.
- Mr. and Mrs. Robert Montgomery, of Oregon, Missouri. They were an uncle and aunt to Maude Mary Montgomery and Nellie Blanche Montgomery, who both married sons of Friedrich and Louisa (Otto) Fiegenbaum, but appear to have acted as parents to the two girls. I know very little about the Montgomery family.
- Christina Wilhelmina "Mina" Fiegenbaum, and her husband, Thomas Curry. They lived in Oregon, Missouri. Thomas was a part owner of the Holt County Sentinel, the newspaper which published this account the the golden wedding anniversary celebration.
- Mrs. Sophia Good, of St. Paul, Minnesota, who gave a "bon bon spoon" is not known to me.
More Information
Detailed genealogical information about nearly all of these people may be found in the genealogical database. The More Resources section, below, lists additional documents and photos which will also help to elaborate on these stories.