WHERE WE LIVE: FROHNA; BRAUNSCHWEIGER, LUMBER AND A LEGACY OF LUTHERANISM

Melissa Weber's cat Katie examines company, looking out the front door of her house off of Route A in Frohna.

Glenn Weber, Lenord Hoehen, Ellis Hecht and Don Wunderlich regularly play 7 point pitch at Harold's. You can find a group of guy's playing pitch at Harold just about any day of the week. "They call it pitch 'cause if you get mad you can pitch your cards and leave," Weber explained.

Laura Luckey comforted her son Blake, 12, who wasn't feeling well during church at Concordia Lutheran in Frohna.

Allie Swinney held Chad Smith in the foyer of Concordia Lutheran Church in Frohna. The rambunctious toddler kicked up during services and Allie brought him out so he would'nt disrupt the question and answer part of the confermation cerimony.

Robert C."Tex" Martin takes a break from loading fire wood out side of his home in Frohna. "When I was a kid I had this big belt buckle and people started calling me Tex and its just stuck" explaynes Martin.

FROHNA -- Braunschweiger and summer sausage are menu staples at Harold's Vinson's Package Store, where a group of retirees play a card game called seven-point pitch most afternoons. But the heart of Frohna is not Harold's, not the livelier West End Tavern and Grocery that stays open until 11 p.m. on weekends, and not even the sprawling East Perry Lumber Company, which was closed for Good Friday.

The heart is Concordia Lutheran Church. Frohna was one of the towns founded during the Saxon emigration from Germany in 1839. German Lutherans bought land in Perry County because it reminded them of their homeland in Saxony. They established the villages of Frohna, Altenburg, Wittenberg, Johannisberg, Dresden and Seelitz, all named for towns in Germany.

The Saxon Lutheran Memorial, which went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, pays tribute to the immigrants and to Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther, the minister who brought his flock from Germany to found Wittenberg.

Walther later became the first president of the Missouri Synod.

Sarah Swinney, the new curator of the memorial, lives in the lodge with her mother, Ruby Hafner. They moved here in March from Independence in a kind of homecoming. Hafner's deceased father-in-law, the Rev. Gustav Hafner, was a pastor here at Concordia Lutheran Church.

The undulating green hills of the 30-acre site are topped with log cabins built by some of the original settlers. "It's everything I was hoping for," Swinney says of her home. "I like it that everything revolves around the church."

While a boy growing up in Frohna, Edgar Dreyer spoke the German dialect that originated in Saxony. Many people his age did. German is taught in the schools now, but Dreyer says the ability to converse in German is disappearing among the townspeople.

"After my generation it will be lost."

Now retired, Dreyer spends much of his time translating German church records and researching genealogy. He has been asked to speak to a group of Catholics in Charleston about the Saxon immigration.

"I did well without an education," said Dreyer, who quit school after the 10th grade. "If you're willing to work and put your trust in God, you can." At the same time, he is proud that most of his five children sought college educations. All but one, his son Bryan, have moved away to pursue their careers. Bryan bought his father's electrical contracting business.

Of the original Perry County villages established by the Lutherans from Saxony, only Frohna and Altenburg remain. The city limits of Frohna, population 246, and Altenburg, population 256, abut. Some 20 years ago, an attempt to merge the two towns failed. They are competitive but inextricably joined.

Altenburg has a public school, Frohna a Lutheran school. Students from both towns go to high school in Perryville.

Not everyone in Frohna is Lutheran. The town's Catholics attend church in Apple Creek, and some residents go to the Brazeau Presbyterian Church.

The East Perry Lumber Company is the town's largest employer with 100 workers and the largest hardwood sawmill in the Midwest. Marvin F. "Tommy" Petzoldt founded the company in 1942. Today it is owned by his son, Stan.

"It's a small town with good people. Everybody has a good work ethic," Petzoldt says. Other major employers in town are Perry Crating, which makes pallets, and Beechwood Manufacturing, which produces beechwood chips for the Anheuser-Busch aging process.

Most members of Concordia Lutheran Church can trace their ancestry back to the original emigrants. "The religion for which they came has always been very important," says the Rev. Wayne Palmer, the church's minister. "That's why the community has stayed very compact."

"... They moved over for religious reasons, and religion has continued to be an important thing to the members ever since."

Some of the Frohna's early buildings have been preserved. Die Kleine Schule (The Little School), built in 1898, educated elementary students until the new Lutheran school was built in 1969. The old school has been preserved as a museum.

Concordia Lutheran Church itself was built in 1874 and remains in use. The congregation had 702 members in 1902. There are now 369.

In the summer, the ballpark is busy with men's fast pitch and ladies slow pitch softball leagues and a league for children. The town's young people hunt, fish and go four-wheeling.

Gary Scholl operates the West End Tavern and Grocery, a combination restaurant, bar and grocery store where high school basketball and volleyball players come to eat pizza and burgers after their ball games. Families often come in on weekends.

Scholl's brother, Marvin, is the mayor of Frohna just as their father, the late Arthur Scholl, was.

What it would be like to live in a town where the church wasn't the center of activity, Scholl can't imagine. "I've never lived anywhere else," he said.

"... Everybody knows everybody. That's good and bad, but more good than bad."

When the West End Tavern and Grocery burned down in 1991, Scholl wasn't sure whether to rebuild. As soon as word got out that he had decided to rebuild, people began volunteering labor and making monetary donations. The Jaycees pitched in.

"Forty or fifty people were here to help clean it up," Scholl said, wonder still in his voice. "It's almost overwhelming in a situation like that what people are willing to do."