Seelitz, Missouri Explained

Official Name:Seelitz, Perry County, Missouri
Settlement Type:Abandoned village
Mapsize:250x200px
Subdivision Type:Country
Subdivision Name:United States
Subdivision Type1:State
Subdivision Name1:Missouri
Subdivision Type2:County
Subdivision Name2:Perry
Subdivision Type3:Township
Subdivision Name3:Brazeau
Timezone:Central (CST)
Utc Offset:-6
Timezone Dst:CDT
Utc Offset Dst:-5
Elevation M:241[1]
Elevation Ft:791

Seelitz is an abandoned village in Brazeau Township in Perry County, Missouri, United States.

Name

Seelitz was named after Seelitz in Saxony, Germany.[2]

History

Seelitz was a short-lived town near Altenburg, one of the seven colonies established in 1839 in the Saxon Migration. Pastor Ernst Moritz Bürger was the Lutheran pastor of the village.[3] [4] Seelitz was settled by people from Bürger's congregation in Germany and from that of his father. Although only one of the colonists is recorded as coming from the small parish of Seelitz, which is near Rochlitz in the Zwickauer Mulde valley, Bürger may have chosen it out of filial piety and the memory of his own first pastorate, rather than Lunzenau, from which he and most of his people had actually come. Seelitz must have been near to, and somewhere to the north of, Frohna, in the Brazeau Creek bottom, because the "special partition" between those two colonies had not yet been agreed upon in November, 1839. Seelitz' low-lying situation made it unhealthy and subject to various fevers. By 1841, Bürger's congregation had been reduced to five, and after much dissatisfaction he resigned, and the parish was made a branch of Altenburg. Thereafter the name disappears from the map. It has been impossible to ascertain whether its territory was united with that of Altenburg, or Frohna, or perchance changed its name to Brazeau, a small community which still survives a short distance away on Brazeau Creek, and which is said to have been originally settled by the Saxons in 1839.

Notes and References

  1. cartographic.info http:// cartographic.info/usa/map.php?id=739094
  2. State Historical Society of Missouri: Perry County Place Names http://shs.umsystem.edu/manuscripts/ramsay/ramsay_perry.html
  3. History of Southeast Missouri: A Narrative Account of Its ..., Volume 1 . Robert Sidney Douglass . 1912.
  4. Book: Paris, Tightwad, and Peculiar: Missouri Place Names . 9780826209726 . Margot Ford McMillen . 1994.