Farmland Friday

Arkebauer Co-Founders of Mt. Olive?

Instead of watching the Cardinals lose the last game of the World Series, I spent Wednesday night reading the latest batch of Mt. Olive Herald newspapers sent by my mother-in-law. I noticed an ad for a contest to design the logo for Mt. Olive's 150th celebration in 2015.  That got me to thinking- as Mt Olive celebrates its history, they're going to celebrate John C Niemann as the town's founding father.  It may be time for the descendents of Meint Arkebauer (including those Gehners descended through his son-in-law Henry Gehner, Jr) to get him his proper recognition in creating Mt. Olive along with John Niemann.

Whose land is it anyway?

The original town of Mt. Olive as shown on the 1875 Atlas of Macoupin County (page 39 for Staunton Township) was two blocks either side of Main Street and by 1875 3 blocks either side of Poplar Street.  Most histories will credit John C. Niemann as the founder of Mt. Olive.

True, John Niemann was probably the first German here (his 1879 bio puts it as the only German between Edwardsville and Carlinville). It is also probably true that he had a big role in creating the town with the Niemann store.

But when you look at the township plat for the area around Mt. Olive in 1875, something strange pops out:

Mount Olive's Main Street is on the section line; the north of the street was from one owner and south of Main Street is another in another section of land.  Meint Arkebauer and a cousin of his (Gerd Gerdes Arkebauer) own the northwest part of section 11. The map in this case may distort the relative size of the town lots, but it would appear that at least the southwest part of the original town of Mt. Olive is Arkebauer land.  Above the town, there is a 20 acre plot of land labeled G.G.A.- is this another piece of Gerd's farm in 1875?

Side note: the Cross and "Cem" in section 2 on the H. Prange land?  That's what will become the Mount Olive City Cemetery with Immanuel Cemetery to the north of it and the Union Miner's Cemetery next to it.  The second burial in what will become the city cemetery is Meint's uncle Gerd G Arkebauer in July 1854.

When you take Meint's land and plot it's rough location on Google Earth (white outline), you'll see how Mt Olive has grown into part of it, and how G. G Arkebauer's 80 acres (in blue) next to Meint's land has pretty much been taken over by the city.

While John Niemann is honored for his work (and rightly should be, since much of northeast Mt Olive is on his original land and he is the first German settler in this region, bringing others to the area including another man from his hometown of Borgholzhausen-- Johann Heinrich Gehner), the Arkebauers are right there too in the founding of Mt Olive- both on the ground as farmers and land owners and IN the ground at the cemetery.

John Niemann's 1879 biography
John Niemann's baptism in Borgholzhausen in 1817