OSAGE COUNTY — Recently retired State Historical Society of Missouri Executive Director Dr. Gary Kremer told Osage County Historical Society (OCHS) members at last Monday’s gathering that the county’s history is rich, and encouraged someone to preserve it in a new book.

“I was not a founding member, but I was pretty darn early in this group,” he said following a meal at St. George put on by the St. Ann’s Sodality. “I got a phone call from Claudia Baker, and she asked me if I would be interested in doing a survey of the county that was going to be funded by the State Historic Preservation Office.”

That was in 1986, when Dr. Kremer was teaching history at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, and after some persuasion, he finally agreed to do it. Over the next several years, he surveyed more than 750 buildings in Osage County.

“This was one of the first main projects that the County Historical Society had,” said Dr. Kremer. “I used a lot of what I came to call cultural brokers, people in the community who really knew where the historic structures were.”

A historic structure potentially could be anything more than 50 years old, and Osage County has plenty.

“I spent a lot of time in the car with Claudia, just driving around the county, but also with Harvey Buhr and Joe Muenks,” said Dr. Kremer. “I also got to know George Kishmar from Chamois. I really had not been a historian for a long time, but it was really the first time I came to begin to understand and appreciate the uniqueness of Osage County.”

He told OCHS members they should be proud because it’s one of the best societies he’s seen in the state. “You should applaud yourselves,” said Dr. Kremer. “Two or three times a year, the State Historical Society is contacted by a local historical society and asked to take over their operation and collection because they’re going out of business. It’s very difficult in many of these communities.”

He added that OCHS has more funding than many societies, and membership is impressive. “You’re much more active,” said Dr. Kremer, who hails from Frankenstein, grew up in Osage County, and still has property here on which he pays taxes. “I drove all the way down to Malden one time to an annual meeting of the County Historical Society and spoke to 10 people. I’m proud of you.”

Dr. Kremer suggested that a serious interpretive history of Osage County is way overdue. “Now, having said that, I’m gonna say I’m not the guy to do it, but it really needs to be done,” he added. “When I think back to the survey I did in the 1980s, I was struck by how much the county had changed between 1841 and 1980, and how much the county had changed since World War Two. It’s changed a lot since this organization was founded in 1985.”

Dr. Kremer recently told a group that he couldn’t begin to count on both hands the number of people in his community who made their primary living on the farm, who didn’t work outside the home, and whose wives raised the kids. “I’m not suggesting we all go back to that, but I’m hard pressed to name just a few who still do it,” he said. “It’s one of the ways we changed.”

Yet, Osage County didn’t change much for a long period of time, for which he offered an interesting historical explanation. Dr. Kremer alluded to Charles van Ravenswaay’s “The Arts and Architecture of German Settlements in Missouri: A Survey of a Vanishing Culture,” in which he labeled Osage County — 50 years ago — as one of the most unchanged counties in the entire state.

Part of the explanation for a static environment refers to the communities established in the 1830s and 1840s. “When Fr. Helias was establishing Catholic parishes in central Missouri, operating out of Westphalia, he understood the historical differences between the Europeans and even the Germans,” said Dr. Kremer. “Germany was not unified, so he tried to isolate them from each other so they wouldn’t fight. So, he put the Rhinelanders in Loose Creek, and the Bavarians in Westphalia. The people who were in these little parishes, in these little communities, were people who had come together from the same places in Germany, spoke the same dialect, and were suspicious of outsiders.”

He recalled a time in his youth when people in northern Osage County couldn’t date people as far south as Freeburg because they were so different in a county of 12,000 people.

“Anthropologists argue that one of the reasons people are conservative and resistant to change, and I don’t mean that negatively, is because of the homogenization of likeness,” said Dr. Kremer. “If you’re all alike, you’re resistant to outside ideas and outside changes. While that can be good, it can also become a problem, but I think in many ways, it describes 19th-century Osage County.”

Every community had its own entity — almost its own world, he noted.

“I grew up not knowing anybody who wasn’t German and Catholic,” said Dr. Kremer. “There are people my age who didn’t speak English, even five generations removed from Germany. Most of these people came before the Civil War, and five generations later, they were still speaking the same dialect that their father and grandfather spoke.”

He noted that Hubert Bescheinen told him that neither he nor his wife spoke English, learning it in school. On the other side, Dr. Kremer said there was a protest in Westphalia by English-speaking Americans, because the classes were all taught in German, and they couldn’t understand it.

“There are a lot of really interesting, unique things about this county, and somebody needs to document that and write it,” said Dr. Kremer. “Now, it’s changing. When I grew up, I didn’t know anybody who was divorced. That certainly changed in the last generation.”

Dr. Kremer presented a slideshow featuring older buildings, many of which are no longer standing.

A theme emerged regarding where people built their homes. “There were some you could hardly reach without a pretty good truck,” said Dr. Kremer. “What did that tell us? A couple of generations later, the people built a house on the hill by what would become the road. These people built where their work was. Their successors, the people who came after them, built where their work was, and their work was in Jefferson City, or their work was somewhere else that had to be close to a road that could take them away from the farm.

“When I walked through the Maries River Valley 40 years ago, I was stunned by how many stone and brick structures in the valley had been just abandoned, because by that time, farms were not as productive as they had been,” he continued. “A lot of this happened during the 1920s; the Great Depression hit Osage County farmers a decade before it hit most of the country. It became really hard to make a living as a farmer by the 1920s and 1930s, so many people started moving. If they didn’t leave the county, they moved to a place on their farm where they could get to a road that would take them somewhere else. It was a couple more generations before we started black-topping and concreting the roads. “

In his childhood, before Rt. C and Hwy. 100 were black-topped, Dr. Kremer said it was a long trip to Jefferson City.

“We came to Jeff City twice a year, once to get school clothes, at least a few that my mom didn’t make, and once to get Christmas presents,” he said. “That was it. We didn’t leave Osage County. Of course, I grew up wondering why anybody would want to, because I thought this was the perfect place to live.”

Sadly, many of the structures that defined Osage County’s heritage are gone. Many of them featured German workmanship in the detail and the ornamentation of the house, though the structures had an American style in the era before the Civil War.

Most of the homes Dr. Kremer presented were unoccupied at the time of his survey. “When a house is unoccupied, it’s not going to survive long,” he said.

One building he showed was the Maceo School in Chamois, which included 126 African American students in 1880.

“I grew up thinking that there were no black people in Osage County,” said Dr. Kremer. “The only African American I knew was Toad Anthony, who lived in Chamois, and would come up to the tavern across the road from my house, Hoobie’s Tavern in Frankenstein. But years later, I discovered that there were hundreds of African Americans in Benton Township, because the township was settled by Virginians, Kentuckians, and Tennesseans in the 1820s and 1830s, who brought their enslaved people with them. Maceo School closed in the 1950s because there weren’t any black folks left.”

Another structure he presented was the original rectory in Frankenstein. In the 1940s, the parish built a new rectory — which is still standing — from the same stone as the big church. The old rectory was converted into a convent. “Throughout my childhood, there were always at least four nuns living in this building, but it was torn down not too many years ago,” said Dr. Kremer.

One of the oldest houses in Osage County is the Bruns House. “Bernard Burns was a doctor who came from Germany in 1835, and he was about 15 years older than his wife, Henrietta,” Dr. Kremer noted. “Her mother died when she was very young, and she raised her siblings, then married this doctor who was 15 years older. And I think she thought, ‘I’m gonna have a decent life. I’m gonna be taken care of.’ What she didn’t know was that he didn’t practice medicine. He wanted to go to America to be a farmer, and he didn’t know a thing about farming. And he came to Westphalia and built this house. And if you read her letters, she describes how they built this house, and they moved into it just before winter, when it had no doors or windows.

“They spent the winter there,” he continued. “He owned the land down in the Maries River Valley and planted crops there. And every year they would flood, and every year he’d planted in the same place. He never went back to practicing medicine, but they spent 20 years in that house. In the late 1850s, she’d had it and told Bernard, ‘We’re moving to the city,’ which was Jefferson City, a city of about 3,000 people in 1860. They built a huge house that stood where the post office is, right across the street from the Capitol. They moved in there, but he still wouldn’t practice medicine. He opened a general merchandise store in the Hope Building, across the street from Central Bank.”

Reading Henrietta’s letters to her brother in Germany was instructive, Dr. Kremer noted. “It’s one of the most insightful statements of what it was like to be a woman on the frontier in 1841,” he said. “I think she buried three of her children within about a 10 or 11-day period. They all died of dysentery. In one of the saddest letters you’d ever read, she’s writing to her brother in Germany, and she describes how she’s sewing her nine-month-old baby into his burial shroud. It’s just awful. And by the way, one of the people she disliked most in the community was a priest named Father Helias, who was Flemish and a teacher of languages at St. Louis University before he came to Westphalia. She said he speaks German with an accent; he’s not a natural.”

Fr. Helias was stubborn, and community members were the same, so they fought over where he had his garden plot, among other things. “Before he came to America, he had wanted to be a missionary to the Indians, but by the time he got here, the Indians were gone,” said Dr. Kremer. “When he finally leaves in the 1840s, like Martin Luther, he tacks a note on the door of the church in Latin. I don’t remember the exact wording, but the translation was something like, ‘Why would anyone who sought frustration go to work among the Indians? Let them come to Westphalia, and they’ll have frustration enough.’”

Dr. Kremer reiterated his suggestion that someone needs to write a good interpretive history, explaining how Osage County became what it was, how it changed over time, and how it has become what it is today.

“I don’t mean that in a negative way, but that’s what history is: understanding change, how things change, and why,” he said. “The highways had a lot to do with it. Television had a lot to do with it. Television changed us. It changed our sense of reality and a sense of possibility. It never occurred to me to want a lot of things before I saw them on television. I remember not having television, and then I’d see these ads, and I think, damn, maybe I am poor.”

Dr. Kremer shared one of his most vivid memories regarding television. “Before we got television, I would walk around the neighborhood, Metropolitan Frankenstein, and I’d look through the windows of neighbors watching their TVs, hoping they’d invite me in to look around,” he said.

Another memory involves a woman who moved into an upstairs apartment across the street from his house. “One evening, my family and I were all in the living room glued to the television because Superman was on,” said Dr. Kremer. “I remember this so well. This woman came in the kitchen door at the back of the house. Nobody knocked or locked their door. She just walked in, and she happened to come into the room just as Superman was swooping down, and she ducked behind the couch, and said, ‘Watch it. That son of a bitch is going to get us.’ She was dead serious. She could not distinguish reality from TV, and historically, we’ve had a real problem with that.”

Dr. Kremer also encouraged OCHS members to record their memories for their kids and grandkids, who have no idea how they lived.

During a recent interview with Sen. Roy Blunt for a program at the State Historical Society, Dr. Kremer said his grandkids, ranging in age from 11 to 30, could not believe he grew up without indoor plumbing.

At the age of 13, Dr. Kremer went to the seminary. “It’s embarrassing to say, but I’d never had a shower, because there was no shower,” he said. “We all had jobs to do in the seminary, and they would post them on a list on a bulletin board every week. And so one day, I walk in, and there’s ‘Gary Kremer - clean the urinals.’ I had to ask what a urinal was. I had no idea. If they just said ‘trough,’ I would have known, because that’s what we had at the Frankenstein school. We had outdoor plumbing, and we had a trough, not a urinal. So, I’m encouraging you to write your memories down.”

Dr. Kremer’s family moved from Pettis County to Frankenstein, a memory shared by his mother on dozens of yellow legal pads. “They’re one of the great treasures I have today, because I have a lot of her memories,” he said.

Her father came from Germany in 1906, well after Dr. Kremer’s dad immigrated in the 1840s from Germany.

When the family moved from Pettis County, the trip began at 10 a.m. and ended at 8:30 p.m., with two tires blowing out halfway to Jefferson City.

The family settled in a log house with two bachelors, who lived in one room, while the Kremer parents and their seven children lived in two other rooms, a temporary measure while the new home was built.

“Then, we started going to school the following Monday, which was very different than anything we were used to,” said Dr. Kremer. “We had to go to Mass every morning, and school was taught by nuns, which we had never heard of. We survived. We walked four-and-a-half miles to school in Frankenstein, and were there when Mass started at 8 a.m. We’d get home about 4:30 and then have to milk the cows and carry in the wood.”

When his grandmother died, Dr. Kremer’s mother, then 12, and her sister, 14, took a crosscut saw and hauled 40 loads of cordwood they cut by team and wagon to the undertaker in Bonnots Mill to pay the balance of their mom’s funeral. The total cost of $65 was offset by $20 collected by neighbors.

“Anytime I have a bad day, I think about that, and I say to myself, ‘Buddy, you ain’t never had a bad day. You will never have a bad day.’ Can you imagine? The next year, she was sent to St. Louis to work as a domestic servant. She didn’t go past the eighth grade; neither did my dad. There wasn’t a school to go to, so she went to work as a domestic for a friend of the family at the age of about 13,” said Dr. Kremer. “She did all the laundry, cleaning, and cooking, worked 60 hours a week, and made $15 a month, and thought she was making pretty good money.”

Another memory his mother chronicled involved the day she began dating Dr. Kremer’s father, Ben. “A picnic day at Frankenstein, August 1946, the day Ben came into my life,” Dr. Kremer said of his mother’s recollections. “This was always a big day in our lives. The picnic. Everyone had to have a new dress. Then we had to prepare food at home and carry it up to the old church basement and work all day serving dinner. We finally got there, and somewhere along the day or evening, Ben came up and started talking to me. Anyway, by the time the dance was over that night, we had made a date for the next week. He had just returned from the army after four-and-a-half years, and he was very handsome and likable. Actually, I’d admired him from a distance for a long time, but he was engaged to be married to a girl from Kansas, but they broke up, so I was happy to know that.”

Dr. Kremer relayed how his mother and father were married because she lost her first husband during WWII. “My mom married her childhood sweetheart, a man named Ted Broker, whose name is on the Memorial outside the courthouse here in Linn,” Dr. Kremer explained. “Ted was in the Army Air Corps. He got a weekend pass to come home and get married, and they spent the weekend together. He left, and she never saw him again.”

Broker was killed one day short of their one-year wedding anniversary, but over their short wedding weekend, she got pregnant with Dr. Kremer’s sister, who was born on Sept. 8, 1944.

“Ted knew he had a child, but he never saw the child,” said Dr. Kremer. “Ted’s parents were part of my extended family. I grew up calling them grandma and grandpa, and his siblings, aunt and uncle, because my sister did. My middle name was his middle name, and he and my dad had been good friends. They were writing to each other during the war.”

Everyone has a great story, Dr. Kremer added. “That’s my point,” he said. “You all have stories. A great writer, Gertrude Stein, once said, ‘By the time you’re eight years old, you have at least one good book.’ And I think she’s right. There are a lot of books in this room.”

In West Africa, when an elderly person dies, they say a library has burned. “As I look around, I know there are libraries in this room, and you need to record those while you still can,” said Dr. Kremer.

Visit https://osagecounty.org/ for more about OCHS.