Immigration between 1842 and 1854 was particularly heavy. Many entered at the Port of Baltimore crossed the Alleghenies, and flatboated down the Ohio River. Others came up the Mississippi through New Orleans. Many families stopped for several years in Cincinnatii before moving to southeastern Indiana.
Then came the American Civil War, and much of the immigration to this area stopped. Hermann Bruns of Sunman, born at Wachendorff in Hannover, fought for the North. His first cousin, Henry Severs, born at sea off Charleston, South Carolina, fought for the South. They visited each other after the war and became friends.
In 1866, Prussia under Otto Von Bismarck, conquered Hannover in a major move to unify Germany which had been but a loose confederation of numerous separate kingdoms and principalities. Oldenburg and Hannover were both incorporated into the North German Confederation and in 1871 were made part of the German Reich.
My Great-grandfather, Hermann Dreyer of Engter, was one of the very last immigrants to travel under a Hannoverian passport. By the time he arrived in America, his country had been swallowed up as a part of Prussia, and those that remained, including his younger brother Wilhelm, were pressed into Prussian military service.
<Following the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71, Prussia annexed Alsace-Loraine as well as most of the south German states into the German Reich. Peace reigned in Europe until 1914. However, the balance of power established in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia and re-established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had been upset by a united Germany. Eventually war again engulfed Europe in 1914. After World War I came the Versaillies Peace Treaty, the Great Inflation in Germany, The Grear Depression, and the rise of Hitler and World War II.
Many of the immigrants' German cousins died in the two World Wars. The Ripley County names of Lampe, Henneke, Meyer, Cordes, Freuchtenicht, Neddermann, Segelke(Selke), Bose, Schroeder, Kahmeyer, Einhaus, and Kasendick all appear on the War Memorial to German dead in the churchyard at Haeiligenfelde from which many of these families originated.
Nevertheless, unification of Germany in 1871 initially brought pride to many Germans in both Germany and America. German was still spoken in Ripley County churches into the 1900's although it had begun to die out with the immigrants. Catherine Ratheiser Bruns of Sunman recalled that as a girl she would attend a German service at the EvangelicalProtestant Church at Penntown with her parents, but then she would run down the street to arrend the English service at the Penntown Baptist Church which she could understand.