Old St. Vincent Church

Steamboats arriving at Cape Girardeau.

On 19 Jun 2017 aboard the Queen of the Mississippi, Mary Frances and I docked at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where one hundred seventy years earlier, in the fall of 1847, Mary Frances’s great great grandparents Nicholas Wehner and Clara Schneider ended their riverboat journey. Nicholas and Clara claimed to have been married there, but their 26 Dec 1847 marriage probably occurred in neighboring Scott County.

Marriage record for Lorenz and Flora.

It was, however, in Cape Girardeau that Nicholas’s brother Lorenz and his bride-to-be Flora, freshly arrived from Germany, were wed at St. Vincent de Paul Church 14 Sep 1848. A Latin record of the marriage of “Laurentius Wehner et Flora Grisner” is preserved in the parish archive.

Only known view of the original
St. Vincent de Paul Church
(courtesy of Ronald F. Kirby).

As part of our recent paddleboat trip, Mary Frances and I had hoped to see the church where her GG Granduncle was married, but such could not be. On 27 Nov 1850 a tornado had destroyed the original church. We did, however, get to tour the present 1853 structure. Ronald F. Kirby, an author of the 2009 book Old St. Vincent Church, was our guide.

Present day St. Vincent de Paul from
the Queen of the Mississippi (2017). 

Louisville and the "Falls of the Ohio"

Extensive locks and dams are found at Louisville today (2017).

As one heads downstream from Pittsburgh, the land on either bank becomes increasingly flat, from the mountains of West Virginia, to the hills of Ohio and Indiana, to the flatlands below Louisville, the great way station for early boating on the Ohio. At Louisville a series of rapids announce a drop of twenty-two feet over two miles, and it was precisely because of these rapids that Louisville was the major Ohio River city (excluding, of course, Pittsburgh), surpassing even Cincinnati. In the early days of steamboat travel, boats often stopped to wait, sometimes for weeks, for water to rise sufficiently to traverse the “Falls of the Ohio,” and even then pilots were required for larger boats. Passengers often portaged around the rapids, changing to a different vessel on the other side. Even after the Louisville and Portland Canal, bypassing the rapids, was dug in 1830, Louisville remained a major terminus and embarkation point for steamboat trips, a persisting role because the canal was too small for larger boats, because the locks were often closed to clean out mud and debris, and because many steamboat owners were unwilling to pay what they felt was an exorbitant fee for canal passage. Today, a complex system of locks and dams, through which Mary Frances and I traveled on our recent trip, allows boats to traverse the “Falls of the Ohio.”

Paddlewheelers still dock at Louisville today, but

these are used for day trips and dining (2017).

Louisville was a major stopping point for Nicholas and Clara on their trip to Cape Girardeau. Though this break could have been for a portage around the falls or to await a river rise, Louisville appears to have been an actual destination or, at least, a planned break. Nicholas may have been looking for work. And he may have had relatives there. For at the time, there were Wehners in Louisville.

Related or not to the local Wehners, Nicholas and Clara stayed in Louisville only a few months. In the fall of 1847 they continued on to Cape Girardeau.

Riverboat Journeys

Bier und Brot, The Wehners of Southeast Missouri has been published and future editions are not anticipated. But additional postings will appear here from time to time.

Our boat, Queen of the Mississippi, a diesel-powered

sternwheeler with no crates, barrels, or bales (2017).

Mary Frances and I just finished a paddlewheel boat trip from St. Louis, Missouri, down the Mississippi and up the Ohio to Pittsburgh, duplicating (except for St. Louis) in reverse, a journey made by Nicholas Wehner 170 years ago.

Today, Pittsburgh's Point State
Park marks the meeting of the
Allegheny and Monongahela (2017).

On 31 May 1847, 22-year-old “Nicolaus” Wehner, arrived in Baltimore on the Barque Virginia from Germany with a gun, two chests, and his bride to be, Clara Schneider. Nicholas and Clara traveled from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, where the Ohio River (“Gateway to the West”) begins at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. From there they traveled 981 miles westward by boat to the Mississippi, and then 52 miles upriver to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. They journeyed by a steam-driven sidewheeler (rather than a diesel-driven sternwheeler used today), probably accompanied by caged chickens, barrels of lard, bags of coffee, bales of cotton, crates of cabbages, hogsheads of tobacco.

The next few postings continue with Nicholas and Clara's journey and its contrast with ours.