2011 Annual Meeting

Willkommen

Indiana GERMAN

HERITAGE SOCIETY

IGHS

To contact us:

401 E. Michigan Street

Indianapolis, IN 46204

Phone: 317 464-9004

E-mail: mkgac@iupui.edu

Wyneken & Ft. Wayne

 

2011 IGHS Annual Meeting!

 

Mark the date and join us March 25-26 in Ft. Wayne for the IGHS Annual Meeting. Our hosts will be the Friends of Wyneken and they promise us a different kind of Annual Meeting as they are planning interesting and satisfying (both intellectually and culinary) events.

 

On Friday, after check-in at the downtown Courtyard Hotel, IGHS members will gather at St. Paul's church downtown Fort Wayne for the Annual Membership Meeting. A German-style dinner will be served for members and friends and will be followed by a program and a narrated tour of the St. Paul's Church. St. Paul's is about three-and-a-half blocks from the hotel.

 

On Saturday morning we will gather at the St. Paul's parking lot to board a bus for a guided and narrated tour. We will visit several of the Wyneken churches, learn about their history, and will be able to spend time at the Wyneken House. It will be a combination religious history tour and "progressive meal" at the different churches. The main breakfast is planned for Zion Friedheim. We will then re-board the bus for the short trip to the Wyneken House for a cup of coffee and a tour and discussion of the House. Late-comers can join the program at the Wyneken House.

 

For a sit-down served lunch we are invited to St. John's Bingen and will continue from there to Emmanuel Soest for desert. On the way to Soest, the bus will drive by two additional Wyneken Churches, St. Peter Fuelling, and St. John Flatrock. The entire time on the bus will be accompanied by an onboard "color commentary".

 

Reverend F.C.D. Wyneken is a figure of local, regional, national and even international significance. His work in Northeast Indiana includes the founding of the Fort Wayne Concordia Theological Seminary and his presidency of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. In Germany he trained pastors and induced some of them to come to America.

 

Friedrich Conrad Dietrich Wyneken was born May 13, 1810 into the large family of a Pastor, in Verden, Hannover. Educated in a seminary, he became a multi-lingual conservative Lutheran. While in his twenties, he followed a call from America for pastors to serve the German-Lutherans in America who were in desperate need of pastoral care.

 

German immigrants had been settling in Fort Wayne and the surrounding region since the l830s. By the 1890s, the Chicago Tribune characterized Fort Wayne as "a most German town" whenever it reported the news from there. During the 1920s and 1930s, Fort Wayne's German culture gradually faded.

 

When in 1838 Wyneken came to Fort Wayne, located at the confluence of three rivers, it was populated by only some 1500 people. He found a countryside full of marshes, bogs, swamps, rivers, and dense hardwood forests. He began preaching at the few established congregations, such as St. Paul's in Fort Wayne, sometimes called the "mother" church in the area and the equally old Zion Friedheim, the oldest congregation in Adams County.

 

With only a few roads, or traces, and Indian trails or military roads in existence, and because of the challenging topography, travel was difficult, so Pastor Wyneken would bring together settlers to start new congregations where possible. Some of these in the Fort Wayne area include St. John at Bingen, St. Peter at Fuelling, and Emmanuel Soest.

 

The circa 1850 pre-Civil War Wyneken House is significant not just because of its age and its Georgian Revival style, but primarily because of its connection to Wyneken. He was married to an Adams County girl, Sophie Buck, herself an immigrant from Windheim, Westfalen. It is the only residence of an Indiana religious pioneer, known to still survive in the State, and it is the only known structure of any kind directly connected to Rev. Wyneken, anywhere in the United States.

 

Over the decades, a succession of families had lived in the Wyneken House, often making modifications and additions. Eventually the house became unoccupied and fell into a period of neglect and plunder. In 2005 to prevent destruction, the Wyneken House was forced to be moved from its original site to its current and permanent location, a few miles away on the historic Winchester Road, where restoration work continues. IGHS is the actual owner of the House and the land it sits on today.

 

The mission of the Friends of Wyneken, working with the IGHS, is to preserve the Wyneken House and restore it to its original 1850's condition. Plans are to use it to teach about German Heritage, Rev. Wyneken’s life, and to show the public, especially the younger generations, what it was like to live in the Northwest Territory in the middle 1800s.

 

More information on the Annual Meeting, the program and registration forms will be in the next newsletter.