All Preparations for a Colony: The Saxon Colonization Project

So, a Bavarian immigrant, a Prussian nobleman, and a Revolutionary-War-hero-turned-debtor walk into a bar…. At least that’s probably the way this would start if it were a joke rather than an interesting and convoluted historical tale involving several notable characters and a scheme to populate southwest Virginia. Given that this is the latter, we’ll begin at the beginning.

While processing the early portion of the Alleghany County chancery causes a few years ago, I indexed a noteworthy case styled Gray & Parkey vs. Henry Anderson & wife and Henry Anderson & wife vs. Gray & Parkey (Alleghany Co., 1844-007). The case caught my eye because the bill of complaint refers to a group of men “who constituted [a] Colonization Company.” At first glance, I assumed this concerned the removal of free and enslaved people to Liberia, however, several of the parties mentioned in the case have surnames like “d’Aubignoise,” “von Murald,” and “Ehrenreich, Count of Redern Bernsdorf,” which further piqued my interest. It turns out that this case was one of nine chancery causes from various localities concerning land that was part of a plan to relocate immigrants from the German states to southwestern Virginia and Kentucky in the early-to-mid-19th century.

Lewis Eisenmenger, an immigrant from the German Kingdom of Wurtemberg, came to Richmond in 1825. At some point prior to his migration, Eisenmenger partnered with Colonel James Swan (a member of the Sons of Liberty, participant in the Boston Tea Party, and veteran of Bunker Hill) in the immigrant relocation enterprise. Swan went to Paris in 1795 to negotiate war debt on behalf of the new U.S. government. While there, he engaged several titled Europeans and other wealthy speculators, such as the Prussian diplomat Jean Sigismond Ehrenreich the Comte de Redern Bernsdorf, to create an entity in 1820 called the Compagnie de Colonisation Americaine. This entity claimed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of acres in the southwestern Virginia counties of Wythe, Grayson, Tazewell, Monroe, and Montgomery.

What makes this emigration endeavor even more interesting is that, by 1808, Swan was an incarcerated debtor in the Sainte-Pélagie Prison. Due to this matter of honor (Swan disputed the debt), he spent the next 22 years in jail, albeit luxuriously so. It was Swan’s good fortune that French law at the time required that creditors maintain imprisoned debtors in the manner to which they’d become accustomed, and Colonel Swan was accustomed to the finer things.

By the late 1820s, the Compagnie was unraveling. In 1827 Eisenmenger filed suit against Swan and the other partners in the Richmond Superior Court of Chancery in an attempt to divide the various interests in the western property.

The Superior Court case was entered as an exhibit in the Alleghany County Gray & Parkey vs. Anderson & wife chancery suit and alludes to the dissolution of the partnership, as does Swan’s will. However, the idea of relocating Germans (especially those from the poor Kingdom of Saxony) to Virginia continued with new players. Enter Frederich Augustus Mayo, a Saxon expat in Richmond, and Charles Andrew Geyer of Meissen.

By the mid-1840s, Europe boiled with revolutionary fervor. Rapid economic and social transformation prompted cries for change to the status quo. Not yet unified into a single country, Germany was an amalgam of affiliated nation-states. In the German Kingdom of Saxony, the artisans, tradesmen, and other skilled workers grew restless without job opportunities. Across the Atlantic, Virginia’s thinly populated southwestern region needed (in the opinion of speculators) a laboring class (due to its dearth of enslaved people) to settle its wilderness and exploit its natural resources.

Numerous states in America seemed to be courting possible German immigrants in an effort to augment their own white laboring class. The nebulously acquired “Eisenmenger lands” continued to be of interest to the emigrating Germans and their agents. A November 20, 1848 letter from Geyer (then acting as a relocation agent in Meissen) to Mayo (who had set up his “Land-Agentur und Intelligenz-Bureau” in Richmond) was brought to the attention of the Virginia General Assembly. In the correspondence, Geyer extensively enquires regarding settlement in western Virginia. Delegate Hugh Sheffey of Augusta County requested the letter be printed for use by the General Assembly, presumably to help promote settlement by the Germans.

According to a 1972 article written by Klaus Wust for the Society for the History of Germans in Maryland, Saxon Germans never ultimately relocated in large numbers to western Virginia¹. Many did settle in Texas, Tennessee, and the Midwest. Richmond had a noteworthy population of Saxon Germans, several of whom went on to prominence, such as tobacco exporter Adolphus William Nolting. Richmond’s German population was large enough to support several German-language newspapers like the Virginia Staats-Gazette and the Richmonder Anzeiger.

One enduring result of this experiment in mass resettlement was the mysterious “Eisenmenger lands.” As mentioned at the outset of this post, we have identified at least nine chancery causes initiated, at least in part, to determine ownership of portions of the land. These cases can be found in the counties of Alleghany, Bath, Tazewell, and Wythe and range in years from 1833 (the year of Eisenmenger’s death) through 1903, nearly 80 years after Lewis Eisenmenger emigrated. Apparently though, the ownership mystery continued even longer. In 1936, there is a newspaper notice in the Recorder (Highland County) for a case in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia at Lynchburg that names Lewis Eisenmenger, dead for 103 years, as a defendant. “Eisenmenger lands” indeed.