NEW HAMBURG CHURCH TURNS 145 YEARS OLD

NEW HAMBURG -- St. Lawrence Catholic Church, a survivor of early religious persecution and raids by bushwhackers during the Civil War, turns 145 this year.

The church in New Hamburg is considered the "mother church" of parishes that developed in Scott City, Oran, Benton and Kelso.

The first settlers of New Hamburg were the families of Louis Pfefferkorn, John Glaus, John Martin and Martin Bisher. They were from Schirrhein in the French province of Alsace, whose natives spoke a German dialect.

They left their homeland in 1838, and after 41 days at sea made their way to an Alsatian settlement in Massillon, Ohio.

Land there was selling for $50 an acre, so the four families set out west on the Ohio River. They settled in a place called Texas Bend, then an area six miles northeast of Charleston.

Four more Alsatian families joined them in 1841, but by the following year rampant malaria had driven them to seek higher ground. They found it 20 miles away in the hills around Benton.

Their first church was built in 1843 on an acre of ground at Benton, the county seat. The majority of the people living at Benton at the time were Protestants, and some didn't like having a Catholic church in their midst.

The priests who came from Cape Girardeau to say mass often found the doors and windows smashed, and vagrants living inside.

Sometimes rocks were thrown through the windows during the services.

The parishioners began having services in private homes to avoid trouble. The living room of one Christian Halter was frequently used, and a chickenhouse served as a confessional. Halter's house was midway between Benton and the present site of New Hamburg.

As more immigrants arrived and settled in the hills north, northwest, west and northeast of Benton, New Hamburg came to be the center of the Catholic settlement.

In 1848, the same year the original church was set afire and destroyed, the Catholic settlers built a log church in New Hamburg.

To accommodate the expanding population, the current church an exact replica of the stone Catholic church in Schirrhein was completed during the Civil War. The rock, quarried nearby, and the hauling were donated along with the masonry labor.

St. Lawrence Catholic Church was named for the patron saint of the son of Wendolin Bucher, who donated the land it sits on.

New Hamburg was on the dividing line between Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War, but the residents generally favored the North. They sometimes were taken prisoner by bushwhackers the name for the guerrilla Confederate troops operating in the area.

When Confederate soldiers were in the area, the church's bells would ring to warn the residents. The church housekeeper, a Mother Julia, devised a system of ropes and pulleys that allowed her to ring the bells from her kitchen.

The farmers gathered at the church, then stretched ropes from tree and waiting for the raiders. When they came, they were knocked off their horses by the ropes and then shot.

The rebels sometimes took revenge on the town Union sympathies. In August 1863, 15 bushwhackers under the command of Sam Hildebrand went to the village known to him as Hamburg after three or four men who'd caused some of them trouble.

From Hildebrand's autobiography: "About ten o'clock in the forenoon we rode up and surrounded the house of one of the men whom we were after. He recognized us as Union soldiers and came out without being called. He commenced addressing us in `Dutch' but I told him that we did not belong to that persuasion; he then began speaking in broken English and still advanced toward us. When in the act of extending his hand toward one of my men, who was nearest him, he suddenly discovered his unfortunate mistake, and called to his wife, who was yet in the house.

"The whole family came out, placed themselves in a group near us and implored us in broken English to spare their father. To the bottom of my heart I cursed the man who first invented war; but as war on one side and mercy on the other would only lead to death, we marched our `Dutchman' off about a mile and hung him to a leaning tree. About one hour afterwards we came to the house of another of those cunning informers; he broke out at the back door and ran so fast that we all had to fire before we brought him down."

In the town proper, they were met by a volley of musket shots, which killed one of the bushwhackers. It turns out the man they had shot earlier, one Ambrose Blies, was only wounded and made his way to the house of Sam Tanner, captain of the Home Guards.

The Home Guards then attacked the rebels, some of whom were taken prisoner while others escaped by swimming the Little River.

Confederate forces burned the church in 1864, gutting the inside.

The interior was rebuilt in 1867, and a complete renovation of the church was completed in 1948.

In the mid-'80s, a two-year restoration project was completed on the original log church, which started it all back in 1848.

Information for this article was obtained from the book "History of St. Lawrence Catholic Church," co-authored by the late Rev. Hubert J. Eggemann and Ramona Glastetter of Kelso.