Editors' Notebook

On Oct. 2, 1865, exactly 160 years ago this morning, Wilhelm Horstmeier and his family stepped off the German ship Alder and onto the docks of New York City. He, wife Maria and their five adult children had left the port of Bremen weeks before, trading the turmoil and strife of mid-19th century Germany for a country that was still healing its wounds and mourning its dead after four years of civil war.

It's suspected Wilhelm and Maria made the journey at such an uncertain time because their youngest, a 20-year-old son, was ripe to become cannon fodder himself on one of the many fronts Germany was fighting at the time. There are no documents from the Dutchy of Tecklenburg approving the family's emigration, which was required at the time. The common reason to risk slipping out undocumented, a German historian told me in 2016 when my wife and I visited Wilhelm's village of Lienen, was when a male was facing certain conscription.

That undocumented draft dodger was my great-great-grandfather Heinrich. Henry, as he would become known, would eventually settle in St. Charles, Missouri, where he met Sophia Gronefeld and began the bloodline that flows through me and on to my two grandchildren.

The Horstmeiers and Gronefelds were part of a wave of German immigrants coming to Missouri in search of freedom and democracy, to be out from under the foot of a tyrannical monarchy. Missouri, it is said, with her hills mixed with fields and woods, reminded them of home.

I've walked the wooded hillsides outside Lienen, Germany, on the land still known locally as "The Horstmeier Farm," though it's no longer in the family. And it's cliche as hell, but the hair stood on the back of my neck and my eyes welled up as I walked across hay fields and wheat fields and woods, and was suddenly a kid again exploring my grandfather's farm along the banks of the Missouri River for the first time. Home, indeed.

It's hard to imagine leaving such a beautiful place. To be fair, it's a hardscrabble part of Germany. The soils are heavy and rainfall less than ideal. The church where Heinrich was baptized, with a bell tower almost 1,000 years old, still stands. I attended Sunday morning services there. It survived two world wars and numerous conflicts not because of any reverence nor historical significance, but because that area of Nord Rhine-Westfalen lacked industry or other militarily valuable resources. It simply wasn't worth wasting bombs on.

If you know anything about the "buckshot clay" of the St. Charles County river hills, you'll empathize. It's a little closer to "home' than my ancestors bargained for.

Yet it is impossible for me to think about those times, about trading the hardships of a known country for the uncertainty of a new one, and not think about the news footage today of people being dragged off in zip-tie handcuffs by masked men and women in battle fatigues and body armor, and not wonder, "What if?"

Most of us who have a stake in these United States owe that stake, be it great or small, to someone who took a big step into an uncertain place. They didn't know the language, nor the customs. If they were lucky, they had a relative or a former neighbor who came first and eased their assimilation. Many had no such luck.

Had his family stayed in Lienen, young Heinrich would have likely caught the shrapnel of a well-placed cannon blast, and I wouldn't be writing these words. If he'd had been snagged by German authorities and returned, or turned away at that dock 160 years ago, my family wouldn't have worked those heavy Missouri clay soils into corn and soybeans and beef and pork, or built barns that still stand, or drove dump trucks that hauled the rock for factory foundations and an interstate highway system, or worked in gunpowder factories to support the Allies in World War II against their quickly-forgotten cousins.

Henry's descendants became musicians, mechanics and pilots, forest rangers, accountants and designers, home builders, bar owners and, of course, farmers. And at least one cynical, prone-to-not-suffering-fools, journalist.

Most of you in agriculture could tell a similar story, many with even more daring chapters.

Maybe we need to think about that from time to time, when we choose to ridicule, to fail to empathize with, or to even hate, those trying to make their stake today.

Just maybe.

Greg Horstmeier can be reached at greg.horstmeier@dtn.com

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