Today’s post is another contribution made by Fred Eggers. I now think that we should have Fred write a blog post every June 27th.

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Lynn Degenhardt, our resident genius who compiled and maintains the German Family Tree, asked me recently to document the available information for the Eggers and Hellwege families in 1842 so he could add it to their entries in that masterpiece.  When I went to my files to find the blog that I wrote on that emigration, I found that I have previously written two blogs for June 27.  The first was The Perilous Journey of Some Early Lamstedt Immigrants that was posted on June 27, 2017.  The second was The Three Pilots Revisited that was posted on June 27, 2024.

The common denominator in these two threads was the Mississippi River steamboat pilot, Samuel Donalds.  (Note: Warren Schmidt, the former math teacher, is likely cringing at my use of a math term in its social context.)  Donalds in the first blog was credited with being the pilot who steered a burning steamboat, the General Pratte, into an island which enabled all the passengers to escape with no loss of life.  The second blog names him as one of the three steamboat pilots that lived adjacent to each other near Tower Rock just south of Wittenberg.  It tells how he drowned with other family members on June 27, 1844, while trying to place a highwater mark on Tower Rock during the historic flood that year.

Since those blogs were published, I have continued to research these incidents.  I did find a painting that included the General Pratte that was published by J C (John Casper) Wild in 1840 as one of his eight Views of St. Louis.  His major work is the publication The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated in a Series of Views published between 1841 and 1842 that included his interpretation of Grand Tower and the Devil’s Bake Oven that is included in the 1968 booklet Tower Rock (la Roche de la Croix) which remains available from the Perry County Historical Society.

I also did further study on a statement in the newspaper accounts of the burning of the General Pratte and found that its Captain T J Casey was later aboard the steamboat Boston when it sank on its way to St. Louis.

I found a drawing of that boat and a newspaper article that tells of the Boston sinking at Devil’s Island about five miles north of Cape Girardeau.  We can also see an 1865 map showing the location of Devil’s Island.

Considering that Samuel Donalds and T J Casey were close associates, we can assume that the pilot would have traveled with this captain upriver from their steamboat burning aboard the Boston. I also speculate that since John Dietrich Hellwege’s obituary states that he arrived in Birmingham in Perry County in December 1842, it may be possible that Donalds, who lived south of Wittenberg, may have been responsible for the emigrants being able to travel along with him from Memphis to Devil’s Island and from there the 17 miles to Birmingham where a road could have taken them to Altenburg.

Based on this information and what was previously stated in the 2017 blog, this is what I will submit to Lynn to use in the German Family Tree:

Immigrated to the USA aboard one of three sailing ships, the Columbus, the Johannes, or the Diana, arriving in New Orleans LA in Nov 1842.  They then traveled aboard the steamboat General Pratte, departing from New Orleans on 19 Nov 1842, until that boat caught fire and burned 12 miles above Memphis on 24 Nov 1842.  They then may have traveled on the steamboat Boston from there to Devil’s Island, five miles north of Cape Girardeau, where that boat sank on 2 Dec 1842.  They then arrived in Birmingham in Perry County during Dec 1842.

There are additional connections between the Donalds family and the German Lutherans in East Perry County that are a part of this tangled web that I am studying.  Hopefully I will be able to write another blog on that in the future.