Engaged in 1897 |
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Dick Busch, Henry & Katrine's fourth child,
was born January 11, 1864. He was thirteen when Garret left for the U.S.
so he was the man of the house for nearly three years before he, too, left
for the U. S. in September, 1881. He met his brother Hermann in Havana,
Illinois, where he probably set about working to save enough money to marry
and buy property.
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Engaged in 1897 |
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Emma was the daughter of Jacob Ritterbush and Martha Defreese. (Jacob was born October 9, 1844 or 1847 in Hannover, Germany, and died December 24, 1927 in Springfield, MO. Martha was born in 1847 in Springfield, IL and died April 24, 1880, in Nelson, NE) Emma had a brother, Edward H. (1872-1876) and a sister Leona Louella (Lulu) Ritterbush Geary (November 15, 1875). After Emma's mother died, her father remarried and had four more children. Jacob was quite enterprising and a fair amount of information is recorded about him in Nebraska history of Clay and Nuckolls counties. Apparently his nature was passed on to his daughter Emma who was a business woman much of her life.
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"This is the way we looked when Mamma was cleaning house. A man came along and told us to sit on the steps and he would take our picture. Don't we look fine. Love, Frances" |
Early German writers used the term Deutschheim (German Home) was a term to describe 1820s-1850s Missouri. The region extending from St Louis west to Boonville on the Missouri River, plus areas along the Mississippi, became the new homeland of thousands of German immigrants in the 19th Century. By 1860 over half of Missouri's foreign-born residents were German. Today at least 50% of Missourians claim at least one grandparent of German ancestry. Most of the Germans who came were not of the middle classes, and opted to leave their homeland because of collapsing rural economies. Nearly every one of them tried to reestablish in the new land that which had b een most valued in the old. In the early period of settling (1830-1850) Missouri was still primarily a frontier with vast tracts of heavily forested and unpopulated land.
Middle class Germans established schools, li braries, institutions of higher learning, newspapers, a wide variety of cultural opportunities, and a variety of successful businesses and industrial concerns. German peasants opened up the land and created propserous farms and villages where wilderness had existed, on land that many Anglo Americans had avoided because it was regarded as substandard. The advanced farming techniques of rural Germans proved them wrong. Many peasants wrote ome about their good fortune and were joined in Missouri by friends and relatives.
In the 1830s when several immigrant groups selected Missouri as their choice of a new home, one association bought land in Gaconade County. The resulting Hermann Colony (well north of Mountain Grove) was the most systematic and best organized of Missouri's seven German settlement societies. Founded by the Deutsche Ansiedlungs-esellschaft zu Philadelphia (German Settlement Society of Philadelphia), it was the only one organized in this country, the only one set up as a joint-stock company, and was widely advertised on both sides of the Atlantic. It drew colonists from throughout the eastern United States, Canada, and Central Europe. The Society planned to b e culturally integrated and self supporting, almost like a little coun try, with town lots of forty acre farms redeemable for shares of stock. Construction began in 1838 and the founders expected that a new Germany in the New World would quickly arise.
While the New Germany was never achieved in any part of the U. S., the German language has been the first one spoken by many Missourians right up into the 1950s. Before farming became industrialized, travelers always knew when they had come to a German American district by the barns and the distinctive haystacks.
Dick lived to see the end of W. W. II, but died
as the result of heart trouble the following spring on March 5, 1946, at
the age of 82. Dick had been confirmed in the Christian faith of the Lutheran
church.
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Main Page . Florence Busch (Hubbard) . Frances Busch . Mable Busch (Jarret) . Richard J. Busch .