Growing Up with the River

 

Growing Up with the River: Nine Generations on the Missouri by Dan & Connie Burkhardt  120 pp.

This juvenile non-fiction book sparked my interest when I browse through it and saw one of the chapters features the town of New Haven, Missouri, the town where my grandmother was born. Each chapter covers part of the last 100 miles of the river St. Louis as it was in different time periods. As this is a special edition published for the 2018 St. Louis Climate Change Summit, there are brief articles about environmental problems in the area. The chapters begin in 1806 at La Charrette (near Marthasville) where Lewis & Clark stopped early in their journey west and again when they returned. The following chapters are Femme Osage/Dutzow (1832), Hermann (1862), New Haven (1883-five years before my grandmother's oldest brother was born), Marthasville/Peers/Treloar (1904), Washington (1932), St. Charles (1959), Augusta (1986), Chesterfield (2016), and The Missouri River Valley (looking forward to 2040). The German immigrants who settled along the river because of its similarity to the Rhine River valleys and the residents of the towns of Hermann and New Haven were German speaking is mentioned. (Although born in Missouri, my grandmother did not learn English until she began to attend school.) Included is the quote from the Hermann Wochenblatt newspaper, "We hold ourselves as free men who did not escape slavery in our old home lands to support it here in America." However, no mention is made of the Missouri German regiments that fought for the Union in the Civil War. I enjoyed the history and emphasis on the nature of the area which includes the prevalence of the now extinct Passenger Pigeon and Carolina Parakeet. Lots of information and illustrations are packed into this book.