Stallostown - Minster

After the Treaty of Greenville was signed in 1795 and the Indians left, the land that became Minster became known as U.S. Congress land. With Ohio established in 1803 and interior land lacking transportation, land was available at reasonable prices, and Franz Joseph Stallo and a group of German immigrants in Cincinnati sought to buy land and establish a new settlement. After surveying several areas, they chose the present-day site, and on September 1, 1832, a stock company was formed in Cincinnati to purchase land in Mercer and Shelby Counties. Stallo was designated to furnish money, purchase the land, and lay out the town. On September 28, 1832, Stallo and a group of men went to the federal land office in Piqua, where 1,200 acres were purchased at $1.25 per acre, including 640 acres for the formation of a town. Stallo drew the town plat as a square with eleven north-south streets and seven east-west streets containing 144 lots, with land reserved for churches, a market place, court house, government, and school use. Each stockholder drew a plot number by lottery from Stallo's hat, and the land sold for $8.50 per plot of 10 lots, a price poor German immigrants could barely afford. In the fall of 1832, the Stallo group left Cincinnati in a procession marked “Colonie of Stallostown,” traveled by canal boat to Dayton and by wagon to Piqua, then continued on and arrived at Stallostown late in the afternoon. Because there were no houses, the men lived in wagons while two log cabins were built, and the women and children stayed in neighboring cabins. The first settlers to arrive in the fall of 1832 with Stallo and his two sons included the Gerhard Surmann family, Joseph Cordesmann, the Tauke family, Kemper, the Feldman family, the Rohenkohl family, Bernard Busse, H. Boeckmann, the Beckmann family, the Bramlage family, the Heinrich Quartmann family, the Friedrich Gerwers family, Friedrich Sommer, and J. Busse. They began cutting the town out of virgin forest and draining swamps to find fertile soil, and by the spring of 1833 Stallostown was inhabited. Of the original 144 shareholders, only 50 percent ever arrived. The settlers brought with them their faith, families, friends, customs, and low-German language from the Oldenburg and Hannover region, and those traditions remained evident for many generations.

Minster, Ohio · United States