Person:Oscar Monnig (1)

Sometime around 1840, he enlisted as a sailor for Dutch interests and became proficient in navigation. He traveled around the world, visiting China, Borneo and the Indies. In 1844, during a stop in New Orleans, he jumped ship and stayed. He sailed up the Mississippi to St. Louis and then followed the Missouri River to Hermann, a German town on the river. Why he left Germany is still a mystery, but the German economy was not at its strongest and a family story relates the idea that Bernhard gave each of his younger sons a sum of money in lieu of the property and inheritance going to Balduin, telling them to make their way in the world.

Oscar suffered a bought of malaria upon arrival, then found work on a local farm and learned English. His future sister-in-law Bertha Setzer Wilkins remembered him as “fine looking and a gentleman with good manners and a good education. He had been in the Dutch navy for years and had seen much of the world and at the time he came to see my sister, he was living on a farm, working hard.” Oscar met Amelia Setzer at a dance in Hermann not long after he arrived.

They married in 1845 and the family story (related by their granddaughter Amelia in an interview in 1979), was that they moved to the country because Amelia didn’t want to raise children in “a wicked city like Hermann.” By the birth of their second child, they were living 10 miles from Hermann, near the future Americus homestead. In 1863, they moved back to Hermann where Oscar build a house, possibly due to hostilities in the Civil War. The house may have been purchased with a cash inheritance from his father, who died in 1862. They sold the house in 1869 as Oscar acquired several parcels which would become the homestead in Americus. The homestead was of about 320 acres of hilly land off highway F about 2 1/2 miles north of the Starkenberg church.

Oscar studied medicine in the 1850s and served as a surgeon in the Civil War. His medical office was at the front of the house in Americus. His granddaughter remembers him as “a shrewd man, very out of place as a well educated doctor in rural Americus.” Amelia was also misplaced in Americus, as she was “dainty and very neat” always dressed in a black dress and a white apron. Her life centered around her sitting room at the back of the house, and they didn’t give the impression of getting along particularly well late in life.^S1

1. ↑ ^1.0 1.1 Morrow, James Peter. The Monnig Family: A Story of Germany and America. (Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States: Privately published, 1981).
2. ↑ ^2.0 2.1 Deutschland Geburten und Taufen, 1558-1898: Database online (Index). (FamilySearch.org, 15 May 2018).