Johann Georg Rapp – anglicized to George Rapp – led those who would follow from southwestern Germany to found the first of three communal villages – Harmony – in the New World in 1805. Five other villages would spin off from these in the course of time. Who was George Rapp and who were his followers?
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In Genesis, Bethel is the place where Abram stayed building an altar on his way to Egypt and on his return. Later, in the same record, fleeing from the wrath of his brother Esau, Jacob falls asleep on a stone dreaming of a ladder filled with angels stretching between Heaven and Earth. At the top of the ladder, God, who promises Jacob the land of Canaan. When Jacob wakes, he anoints the stone (baetylus) with oil and names the place where he his dream occurred, Bethel. So, as with Abram and Jacob, Wilhelm Keil led his communal German-American followers to a new Bethel. This one in the middle of Missouri.
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From a European birth, Wilhelm Keil made his way in fits and starts, all the way from one coast to the other, finishing his days in the communal town he founded, Aurora, Oregon. The story of his life was unusual to say the least.
Keil started out in what would soon be the Prussian province of Saxony. Born 6 March 1811 in the town of Bleicherode, just a year before the Royal Saxon army was marching off as part of Napoleon’s Grand Armee on its date in Russia.
NOTE: This is the first post of four moving backwards in time from the German-American communal town in Oregon of Aurora to other like settlements from which the Aurorans sprung out from.
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