By Staff
I still have not been able to get in touch with the owner of the Blacksher home in Alco.
I will continue to try and put more of the story together and when I get more, I will pass it along.
I have some, but not a lot, on one of the families that settled around Brewton.
They were part of a large group of people who came from Bavaria to live in what was called "Little Germany" near Fort Crawford in East Brewton.
If you are not aware, there were many early settlers who were of German origin who settled in this area.
Among them was the Bauer family. I have seen the name Anglicized in some places as to how it would have sounded, Bower.
One of the immigrants was Kaspar Bauer.
He and his family sailed from Bremen, Germany and arrived in New Orleans in 1853. Incidentally, arriving on the same ship was the family of Henry Harold.
Both families listed their destination as Florida, but both came to this area.
There could have been several reasons for this change of plans, one being that about the same time there was an outbreak of Yellow Fever along the coast, and they may have just wanted to get away from it.
One reason could have been the fact that George Harold was already there, as was the family of John Mantel and his wife, Sophie Bauer Mantel.
Whatever the reason, George Bauer (31); his wife, Dorothea (24); their son, Christian (3) and Kasper's sister, Anna (25) made the trip together.
Kasper Bauer was born in 1822 in Sulzbach, Bavaria, the son of Leonard Bauer and Barbara Reichert.
He married Dorothea Dietz from the nearby village of Birkach, daughter of Kunnigunde Welsch and Georg Dietz. They had one child, Christian (1849-1874), when they arrived in this area and had two more children, Elizabeth (1855-1881) and Rosina (1857-1951), after arriving.
They, unlike the Harold family, did not stay in what was then Conecuh County as they finally made it to Florida in 1858 when they moved to Pensacola. They later had Edward (1859-1923), Susie (1860-1955), George (1862-1884), Charles (1865-1886), John (1866-1883), William (1868-1902) and Louis (1872-1910).
His sister, Anna, apparently had a child, Barbara (1848-1892) who went by the name of Barbara Giles, taking the name of the man her mother married when Barbara was seven years old. This Barbara Bauer Giles later married John Peter Schad (1842-1886) who was from another German family.
George Fred Bauer was born abt. 1828 in Bavaria and is thought to have been the son of Sophie Bauer Mantel. It is interesting to note that there is a story told in the Harold family, the Bauer family and the Schad family about a child that washed overboard on the trip to America. Mrs. Waters stated in her book that one of Sophie Bauer's two sons was lost at sea.
There is yet another Bauer who came to the Brewton area about the same time as the others. George Bauer (1826-1902) was born in a village not far from where Kasper Bauer was born. The relationship has not been established between the two but there must have been one as both families later moved to Pensacola and continued to be connected to the other Bauer family.
He was married to Kunnigunde Mary Schad (1829-1902) who had been born in Dippach, Bavaria, a village near Ermershausen, where the other Scads had come from.
It is quite clear that some of these people had to have known each other in the old country and were connected there just as they continued to be after they immigrated to America.
This is not unusual. You can see the same thing happened in other families. An example is my own family. If you look in Orangeburg County, S.C. at the names that later show up in Dale County, it is almost the same list of names. These people did not move on a whim or leave their families behind just because they were restless and wanted to move. There were other reasons and sometimes that reason was that they were following in the path of someone else that they knew.