Gießener Auswanderungsgesellschaft
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The Gießener Auswanderungsgesellschaft (Gießen emigration society) was founded 1833 in Gießen with the aim of establishing a German-populated federal state in the frame of the US.
Naturalist Gottfried Duden, a German attorney, settled on the North side of the Missouri River along Lake Creek in 1824. He was investigating the possibilities of settlement in the area by his countrymen. In 1827 he returned to Germany which he felt was overpopulated. There he published a glowing Eine Reise zu den westlichen Staaten von Nordamerika ("A journey to the western states of North America") in 1829.
The romantic description of the free life in the US motivated the protestant minister Friedrich Münch and the attorney Paul Follen to found 1833 in Gießen an emigration society. Both had participated in the outlawed republican and democratic movements in Germany in the wake of the French July Revolution of 1832. As there was no immediate hope for success, they intented to establish a "new and free Germany in the great North American Republic" to serve as model for a future German Republic.
In 1834 they led 500 German settlers into Missouri. They soon realised that the plan for a separate federal state would remain an Utopia. They settled in the German populated Dutzow not far from the former farm of Gottfried Duden.
Friedrich Münch realised that the slopes of the Missouri valley were suited for the cultivation of grapes and wine making. In 1859 he founded with his brother Georg at Augusta, Missouri the Mount Pleasant Winery. Their letters written home to friends and relatives brought more of their countrymen to the Missouri valley.
Together with later Italian immigrants they formed the Missouri Weinstraße.
The emigrants from Gießen are part of many liberal intellectuals who had to leave Germany in the 1830's to escape political repression. Many of these Dreißigers came to the US, especially to Texas, Illinois and Missouri. Others went to Switzerland, such Adolf Ludwig Follen (as the brother of Paul Follen) and the family of their sister Louise with the nephew Carl Vogt. Another brother, Karl Follen had emigrated to the US in 1824. They were followed by the Forty-Eighters, the most prominent being Carl Schurz.
