Freistatt's First Teacher, Henry Nehrling

In March of 1881, at Freistatt’s spring congregational meeting, a discussion was held to hire their first full time teacher. The parochial school population had grown to sixty-five students, enough that a full-time teacher was warranted, as the workload on Freistatt's Pastor Roschke was unsustainable. They resolved to call a German speaking, Lutheran teacher, but with the stipulation that the teacher also teach at the public school, to help defray costs. He should teach primarily in German, but “should also teach a few hours in the English language.”[i]

They also agreed to pay the teacher $300 per year, slightly less than the pastor’s salary of $350 per year. By the fall of 1881, they had not yet found someone to assist Pastor Roschke in his teaching duties, so they voted to hire Mr. Baumgart, the teacher at the public school to teach English in the school for at least a few hours each week. After only one year at the Freistatt Lutheran school, Mr. Baumgart told the Freistatters he did not intend to stay any longer. In April of 1882, Pastor Roschke contacted the Lutheran Teaching (Normal) School in Addison, Illinois looking for Freistatt’s first teacher. Unfortunately, there were no teachers graduating from Addison at that time that were not already committed. But the school suggested an older candidate who already had teaching experience that wanted to relocate out of Texas. Three months later, Freistatt voted to select twenty-nine-year-old Henry Nehrling, who was then teaching at a small Lutheran School in Fedor, Texas.

Heinrich Nehrling had attended the Addison Lutheran Normal [Teachers] School from 1869-1873, which was an all-boy, boarding institution. Henry started at age sixteen after his confirmation and eighth grade graduation from a Lutheran parochial school in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. Henry went to school with about a hundred other boys at the time, most of them sixteen to twenty-two years of age per the 1870 census. Henry wrote about his experience there in a letter to a friend much later: “The stay in Addison was the finest part of our life, full of ideals and hopes, expression to which would be given during our walks through field and prairie after lessons. I was even then a passionate lover of nature, but my enthusiasm was little appreciated by the majority of the boys, who looked upon me as a queer sort of fellow and such a one I have remained to the present day.”[ii]

Upon graduation in 1873 at age twenty, Henry Nehrling took his first teaching job at a one room school house at Immanuel Lutheran in Harlem, Illinois (now Forest Park) only eleven miles from Addison. In the town of Harlem, he met Sophie Schoff and married her the following summer. He taught there for six years. During that time, he found many opportunities to wander the woods and prairies near his home taking precise and voluminous notes on all the birds in the area, when they arrived and departed, how they nested, and their mating behavior. “At this time, he commenced to write bird articles and sketches for several of the largest German newspapers in the country, which attracted attention to him and made him acquainted with their editors.”[iii]

In February of 1879, he resigned his teaching position in Illinois, and Henry, Sophie, and their two children moved to Texas staying initially with one of his teaching college classmates, Gerhard Kilian, who was living and teaching at his father’s church in Serbin, Texas. The father,  Pastor John Kilian, like the earlier Old Lutheran leaders, Grabau and Krause, had also led a unique group of Lutheran exiles, referred to as Wends, from Prussia and Saxony to Texas in 1854.  After a short visit in Serbin, Nehrling found a job teaching in Houston for one year. He explored the wetlands and bays of the Gulf and roamed as far as Spring Creek when he was not teaching. While in Houston, seated on a veranda with a friend, he made up his mind to write a book on the birds of North America. Henry stated in the preface of the eventually published book that it “is intended to fill the gap between the very expensive and the merely technical ornithological books” and “to combine accuracy and reliability of biography with a minimum of technical description.” As a boy, Nehrling craved such a book that would tell him about all the birds he was seeing in his Wisconsin woods, and “could be purchased with the limited means at his disposal.” Nehrling continues in the preface:  “Thousands of our young people, true friends of nature and enthusiastic lovers of our feathered woodland minstrels, are in the same situation in which I found myself in my boyhood. The love for nature ought to be promoted and directed in the right way in our rising generation, and there should be ways and means to accomplish this.”[iv] Nehrling now was on a mission to write his magnum opus on the wonderful birdlife he had been observing and recording. Nehrling next took a teaching job in Fedor, Lee County, Texas. This was 120 miles northwest of Houston, where the Lutheran school was within a half mile of Yegua Creek. Henry wrote later from his notes: “During my four year stay in Texas, rarely a day in April and May passed by on which I did not ramble through field and forest….My small cabin near the West Yegua Creek was surrounded by forest trees, many of which were draped in lichens.” Here is an example of his prolific writing on just one species, the White Eyed Vireo, from his time spent wandering before and after teaching school in Texas: "In a distance of less than a mile I found more than forty nests, and I have no doubt that more could have been found for the seeking…A typical nest from Texas found by me May 12, 1882, I will describe more particularly. It was fastened to the uttermost end of a horizontal forked twig of a whitethorn about three feet from the ground. It was composed of Usnea lichens, fine ground moss, soft leaves, and fine grasses. The lining consisted of very soft and thin blades of grass. The exterior was heavily decorated with Usnea lichens, moss, broken leaves, and particles of bark, all firmly held together by spider webs and caterpillar nests. Most of the Texan nests were fastened by the same material and in the same manner to the supporting twigs, the large quantity of spider nests and caterpillar webs used in connection with Usnea lichens enable them to withstand months of wind and rain."[v]

And another example, when Henry watched the antics of a small bird along the Yegua:  "I can hardly imagine a more lively and charming bird than the Parula Warbler in its habitat of lichens and mosses. Incessantly it hops from branch to branch. Now it rests a moment, and, holding its bill erect, chirps its short lay; the next moment it creeps through the pendulous lichens, or is in pursuit of an escaping insect; then it returns to the tree, and again sings its brief notes, which are very savory to the ear. By its lively ways, its song and beauty it contributes much to the charms of these woods." [vi]

Nehrling was making comparative notes in Texas seeing the same birds he saw in Illinois but at different times due to their migration patterns. Using all this collected information he started submitting his writings, initially to primarily German language publications in both the US and in Germany. Then in 1881, he submitted English language observations on Texas birdlife, about which comparatively little was known at the time, and was published in the prestigious birding journal, the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club out of Cambridge, Mass in three different issues in 1882. This caught the attention of many prominent nature scientists from Harvard, the Smithsonian, and other institutions.

After four years in Texas, Henry had added a plethora of bird observations to his files, and his wife Sophie had added two new children to the Nehrling family. In the summer of 1882, he received the request to move to Freistatt. He said yes and they were on their way out of Texas. “It has been said, probably with much truth, that he looked upon his teaching mainly as an instrument by means of which he could carry on his studies of ornithology and the changes from one locality to another added constantly to the breadth of knowledge of bird life.”[vii]

The Nehrling family arrived in Freistatt at the end of September of 1882, and the congregation provided him a house for free and paid him $300.00 per year salary plus firewood furnished by the congregation. The house in turn cost the congregation $84.00 in yearly rent. Henry Brockschmidt had recently bought eighty acres from the Bridges family on the southeast corner of Section 29, just south of the church. Brockschmidt offered the former Bridges’ farmhouse to the church, but it clearly was not a donation.[viii] Mr. Nehrling was also given the option to teach in the English-speaking public school #4, during the winter on a part time basis, if it didn’t interfere with his work at the church school.[ix]  

In the Freistatt congregational meeting minutes, he was referred to as “Herr Lehrer Nehrling”, or literally translated as Mr. Teacher Nehrling.  The Old Lutheran Freistatters gave great respect to those educated and those in charge of developing their children. Some even referred to him as Herr Professor Nehrling.  He continued his early morning and afternoon walks observing nature in and around the Freistatt prairie. Even his Freistatt students received a mention in his writings as shown in this section: "[The Brown Thrasher] builds its nest in the interior of some white-thorn bush, in a sweet-scented crab-tree, or in a thicket overgrown with wild grapevines….One nest was found only a few steps back of the school at Freistatt, near a footpath along which more than fifty children passed and repassed daily. This nest, contrary to the usual habit of the bird, was built in a hollow of the ground, among some brush. The sitting female was so tame that it remained on the nest when one watched it or passed by."[x]

And he wrote about the Bluebirds he observed: "While I resided in the prairie near Freistatt in southwestern Missouri, nearly all the Bluebird boxes in my garden and the neighboring grove were inhabited, so that frequently broods were not more than a hundred steps from one another." [xi]

These observations on the Brown Thrashers and the Bluebirds in Freistatt made it into his future bird book. In 1883, while living in Freistatt, Nehrling was honored to receive a letter inviting him to become a founding member of the American Ornithologists’ Union. This was driven primarily by the good reception he received from his English language notes on Texas birds in the Nuttall Journal. Henry gladly accepted and was listed as one of the forty-seven founding Union members making him a member of a very elite group of natural scientists. This allowed him to make friendships and written correspondence with some of the most renowned natural scientists and nature lovers of the time. These included Robert Ridgway, head of the Bird Division of the Smithsonian, President Theodor Roosevelt, Alfred Brehm, a German zoologist, and C. Hart Merriam, the biologist who created the term “life zones.” While in Freistatt, he recruited Ridgway, Professor A. Göring of Leipzig, and Gustav Mützel of Berlin to provide the color plates for his planned ornithology book.

Mr. Nehrling in his first year at Freistatt taught first through sixth graders in the church pews as the first two pastors, Grupe and Roschke had done. But there was strong growth in church membership at the time, so Freistatt decided to build a new church in 1883. The new church (See Figure 26) was built across the street from the old church and the original 1875 church was left in place. The original church building was recommissioned as Freistatt’s new one room school house with forty new “Patent Schulbänke” [new school desks with patented designs that had connected chairs and desktops - See Figure 29] funded by a vote at Freistatt’s August 19, 1883 congregational meeting. Also at that meeting, the congregation was informed that Herr Lehrer Nehrling had received another job offer from Ft. Smith, Arkansas. Nehrling turned down the offer, and a congregational vote authorized an increase in his salary to $400 per year, the same as the pastor.  In addition, the meeting continued with a vote to authorize a new “teacherage” be built for Nehrling and his family. 

At the start of 1884, Nehrling now had his own space to teach, had received a raise, had new desks for his students, his own brand new house with lots of birdboxes in the yard, and was corresponding with renowned ornithologists throughout the world. While in Freistatt, his wife Sophie delivered two more children, Hulda and Arno, who were born in 1884 and 1886, bringing their total number of children to six. Despite more children in the Nehrling house and taking on the role of secretary for all congregational meetings starting in October of 1884, Henry still had time to work on his Die Nordamerikanische Vogelwelt [The World of North American Birds] book. Per a German language newspaper article in January of 1885, Henry was planning a twelve-volume work, each volume sixty-four pages long with two color plates. He was waiting for an investor to fund the $10,000 of upfront costs to begin publishing.[xii] In a subsequent article dated April 5, 1886, in another German newspaper out of Chicago, Nehrling announced that he now had a primary investor, Konrad Krez, a former neighbor from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.[xiii] Krez had been a general in the Civil War and then the district attorney for the County of Sheboygan. Besides Krez, Nehrling leaned on his other noted friends for financial support. These included: Carl Schurz, another Civil War general from Wisconsin who was the US secretary of the Interior from 1877 to 1881, a newspaper publisher and poet; H. Ruhland, and George Brumder, a fellow Lutheran in Milwaukee who was the largest German language publisher in the US, and who became the publisher of Nehrling’s bird books.

Nehrling’s ornithology book was to be issued via a subscription model, with 1000 subscriptions needed to break even. Krez had committed to ensuring 300 subscriptions from the greater Milwaukee area. Nehrling advertised his book by sending letters to the many German language newspapers with whom he had been corresponding. The twelve-volume set, with each volume now to be limited to fifty pages with two color plates, was priced at $1.00 each or $12.00 for the complete set. The goal was a reasonably priced bird guide without sacrificing quality of the color illustrations. The various newspaper articles, which helped him advertise, recommended their readers contact Henry Nehrling directly via US mail at “Freistatt, Lawrence County, Missouri.”

Besides the work on his ornithology book in those years, he had exchanged letters with residents of Gotha, a new German speaking settlement in Florida. In 1885, Henry Nehrling, at the age of thirty-two, bought forty acres of Florida land, while he was living in Freistatt. He paid $10.00 per acre or $400.00. Forty acres, at the price of his one year salary, seems like an inexpensive purchase compared to today’s land prices, even if there was no house included. He purchased the land from a famous German poet, who had recently immigrated to the United States, Franz Von Siller, who only had the land for two years and never built on it.

Gotha, which today is a suburb of Orlando, was a new community of Germans being built from scratch like Freistatt. A rich German immigrant, Henry Adolph Hempel, originally from Gotha Germany, was the founder of Gotha, Florida, purchasing 1000 acres of land near Orlando. He had worked in the printing business, throughout the midwest. He invented and patented a unique printing tool called the “Hempel Printing Quoin” which made him a rich man. He envisioned Gotha as a community of people with a “social disposition as well as a progressive nature” like himself. Nehrling, in a German newspaper article he wrote in 1902, stated “it was Hempel’s intent to create a colony of Freethinkers”.[xiv] The Freethinker movement in the nineteenth century, emphasized that beliefs should be formed by logic, reason and empirical observation and not on the basis of authority, dogma or tradition. Hempel joined up with the poet, Franz von Siller and Charles Koehne, a devoted member of the Turner movement with similar ideals to the Freethinkers and were the three key leaders behind the establishment of Gotha, Florida. They aggressively advertised their forty acre tracts in German Newspapers from 1883 to 1885. Nehrling must have seen these ads as he read his German newspapers at home in Freistatt. It is interesting that Nehrling, a Lutheran teacher trained by a conservative Synod based on significant dogma, authority and tradition, would be an early investor in the Gotha community. 

In April 1886, during the school year, he took a railroad and steamboat trip to Gotha to visit his new property, stopping in New Orleans, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. Nehrling took bird observations and  made plenty of notes along the way. “On the evening of April 8, your correspondent reached, by truck, the German colony of Gotha”[xv] wrote Nehrling in an article in the German newspaper Anzeiger des Westens.  Nerhling had traveled by train from Freistatt to Jacksonville, Florida, then took a steamboat 200 miles upriver heading south to Orlando, disembarking in Sanford, just north of Orlando. From Sanford he found various modes of transportation to end up in Gotha. Nehrling described the area: “Nowhere else are there more beautiful and healthy orange groves as in the high pine areas. Already the heavy grass, four varieties of blueberries, the wax myrtle, the ferns, and a lot of beautiful flowers show that the soil is very fertile.”[xvi] On April 10, he took an excursion to nearby Lake Apopka, and noted the moss covered oaks, maples, magnolias, cabbage palms, and gardenias. 

It is unclear if his wife or any of his children accompanied him on this trip, most likely not. It is also unclear why Teacher Nehrling had the opportunity to leave his Freistatt teaching duties in the spring of 1886 and take off for Florida. Perhaps spring planting required most of the children to be home doing chores and they scheduled a school break. The congregational meeting minutes of that period do not make any mention of a school break but interestingly highlight a conflict between Nehrling and a fellow Freistatt church member. While Nehrling was away visiting Florida in April of 1886, Henry Voskamp took over Nehrling’s secretarial duties recording congregational meeting minutes. At the April 1, 1886 meeting, while Nehrling was away, a complaint against Herr Lehrer Nehrling was raised by one of the members, Louis Koenemann, and was discussed by the congregation. Voskamp’s notes do not describe the complaint, but merely state: “Resolved: The pastor and church council should look into Louis Koenemann’s accusations against the teacher and report their findings.”[xvii] A special congregational meeting was then scheduled for June 14 to discuss the matter, which was after Nehrling had returned to Freistatt. Although Herr Lehrer Nehrling was present at that meeting, Voskamp did the note taking. Except for one vote on a new member, the entire June meeting was spent discussing Herr Koenemann’s complaint. 

After considerable discussion, Koenemann now apologized to Nehrling and the congregation for what he had said back in April. But still he was adamant that he would take his children out of school and no longer be a member of the Freistatt church. Koenemann admitted that he had insulted the teacher, but he would not directly explain why he was removing his children from the school. Finally, he stated it was because German and English were being taught at the same time. This was odd in that Nehrling was specifically recruited to ensure Freistatt’s children would learn both German and English. 

Nerhling continued to teach the following year, 1886 – 1887, without further incidents. He also resumed in his role taking the minutes of congregational meetings for the November 1886 and April 1887 meetings. But at the May 1887 congregational meeting, Herr Voskamp was voted in as the new temporary secretary as it was announced that Herr Nehrling had resigned his teaching position at Freistatt “and would now follow a secular profession.” [xviii]. His resignation in Freistatt may have been caused by his conflicts with Herr Koenemann, but more likely it was due to his desire to dedicate his career to his primary passion, that of observing and writing about the natural sciences. He resigned his Freistatt teaching position, though, without having sufficient funds to continue his nature studies, his publishing ventures, or raising a family of six children. 

Nehrling then contacted his family friend and current publishing investor, Konrad Krez, and asked for help in finding more lucrative employment. Krez had just been appointed to the role of US Collector of Customs, for the Port of Milwaukee, by President Grover Cleveland in 1885. In the fall of 1887, Krez offered Nehrling the job of Deputy Collector of Customs and the family moved from Freistatt to Milwaukee. He now had the opportunity to finish his book on birds, living in the same town as his publisher, and receiving more pay with fewer hours worked. Nehrling stayed at his customs inspection job for the next three years but was more known for his work on bird studies, which he continued to publish, primarily in German speaking newspapers. 

[i] Trinity Lutheran Church Council, Protocoll der Gemeinde Freistatt, Lawrence County, Missouri.

[ii] C. W. G. Eifrig, “In Memory of Henry Nehrling,” Lutheran School Journal (Concordia Publishing House) LXVI  (66), no. No. 5 (January 1931): 208–16.

[iii] Eifrig.

[iv] Henry Nehrling, Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty: Being a Complete History of All Songbirds, Flycatchers, Hummingbirds, Swifts, Goatsuckers, Woodpeckers, Kingfishers, Trogons, Cuckoos, and Parrots, of North America. (Milwaukee: G. Brumder Milwaukee, 1893).

[v] Nehrling.

[vi] Nehrling.

[vii] “In Memoriam - Henry Nehrling 1853-1929,” The Auk: A Quarterly Journal of Ornithology XLIX (69), no. No. 2 (April 1932): 153–58.

[viii] Congregational Meeting Minutes 2 July, 1882

[ix] Anniversary Committee of Trinity Lutheran, The First One Hundred Years, 1874-1974.

[x] Nehrling, Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty.

[xi] Nehrling.

[xii] “Ein deutsch-amerikanischer Freund der Wissenschaft,” Der Westbote, January 1, 1885.

[xiii] “Die Nordamerikanische Vögelwelt,” Illinois Staats Zeitung, April 5, 1886. Page 8.

[xiv] Kathleen Klare, The New Colony of Gotha 1876-1950. Place Making in Pioneer Central Florida (Leesburg, Florida: Sea Hill Press, 2023). Page 23

[xv] Klare, 315.

[xvi] Klare, The New Colony of Gotha 1876-1950. Place Making in Pioneer Central Florida. page 315.

[xvii] Trinity Lutheran Church Council, Protocoll der Gemeinde Freistatt, Lawrence County, Missouri. page 54.

[xviii] Trinity Lutheran Church Council. page 57.