In 1860, as the United States and its territories held less than 34 million people and the nation was being torn apart over free states and states that allowed slavery, this area of open fields, woods, creeks, and scattered farms was also a notably scholarly neighborhood. Just south of Cherokee and Jefferson, the faculty of Concordia Lutheran Seminary taught philosophy, theology, and the classics. The State of Missouri had chartered the fourteen-year-old seminary as Concordia College in 1853. In 1860, its staff included three professors of theology, two from Germany and one from Norway, and a professor of the German and English languages and of philosophy. The census listed over 70 young scholars attending Concordia College, coming from across the Midwest and from East Coast states, along with one student from Tennessee, one from Louisiana, and one born in Germany. After South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860 and ten other states followed, these students had to decide whether to continue their studies or join the armies of their native states in the Civil War.
