calsfoundation@cals.org
August 27, 1821
The Arkansas Gazette published the obituary of thirty-eight-year-old Christian E. Zoeller from Emmendingen, Germany. Zoeller taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point before coming to Arkansas. Newspaper accounts and other documents identified Germans among the early settlers of the state. German immigrants played a significant role in the development of Arkansas’s economy and in the founding of many social, religious, and cultural institutions, even though the number of German immigrants never represented more than one percent of the state’s population. Long after German immigration to the state reached its peak in 1882, evidence of the immigrants’ presence remains.