About 700 Saxon Lutherans settled in Perry County in 1839 and formed the parishes of Altenburg, Wittenberg, Dresden, Seelitz, Frohna, and Johannisburg in Cape Girardeau County, while the community of Paltzdorf (Uniontown) was organized in 1840. They came to Missouri mainly to free themselves from the Saxon State Church and, under their pastor Martin Stephan, organized an emigration society with an $88,000 communal fund. In 1838, 665 members sailed from Bremen in five chartered ships for St. Louis by way of New Orleans, though one ship was lost at sea; other members joined them in Missouri, and some remained in St. Louis and founded a parish there. The immigrants bought 4,475 acres of Perry County land with $9,234 from the communal fund. The colony survived both the physical hardships of settlement and the spiritual blow of discovering that Martin Stephan was a false leader. After his exile from the colony, leadership passed to the great pastor C. F.W. Walther. Of the original Saxon settlements in Perry County, Altenburg, Frohna, Wittenberg, and Uniontown survive. From these Saxon colonists, probably the most distinct of the German cultural groups to settle in the U.S., came the Missouri Synod, one of the nation’s largest Lutheran bodies, and Concordia Seminary. Concordia, the first Evangelical Lutheran seminary west of the Mississippi River, was founded near Altenburg in the Dresden community in 1839, moved to St. Louis in 1849, and its original school building, called the Log Cabin College, was moved to Altenburg in 1912 and preserved as a memorial museum, while a replica stands on the seminary campus in St. Louis. About two miles below Wittenberg, the early river landing of the colonists, Grand Tower Island rises 85 feet from the Mississippi River and was also known as Cap St. Cosme and Rock of the Cross because Catholic missionary priests De Montigny, Davion, and St. Cosme planted a cross there on Dec. 12, 1698.