STUTTGART -- Journalists are generally advised to keep themselves out of their stories. But I'll assert a point of personal privilege for this visit to Stuttgart's Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie.
That's because its varied exhibits include a photograph more than a century old portraying a half-dozen of my ancestors. Those Kirchoffs were among the German-American Lutherans who migrated by train and covered wagon from Ohio to the Arkansas Grand Prairie in 1878 and 1879.
My maternal grandmother, Mary Kirchoff (later Spilker) is believed to have been the first child born in the new settlement. Its founder, the Rev. George Adam Buerkle, named the community after a city in his native Germany. He bought 7,000 acres of fertile prairie at $3 per acre and sold it to members of his flock at the same price.
There's precious little German spoken these days in the Arkansas Stuttgart, which touts itself grandly as "Rice and Duck Capital of the World." But the museum celebrates its Mid-European roots with a yearly German Heritage Festival, set for April 11.
In my ancestral photograph, preserved behind glass on a display board along with images of other Grand Prairie pioneers, the men are decked out in ties and three-piece suits. The women are wearing floor-length dresses. Having your photo taken then was a Big Deal -- not just another selfie.
(As a footnote, my great-grandmother, Katherine, was still living in the summer of 1944 when I was posed as a 1-year-old for a four-generation photograph in Stuttgart. That picture, also showing my grandmother, Mary, and my mother, Martha, is a treasured possession.)
The museum's archivist, Gena Seidenschwarz (a dandy Teutonic surname) notes that one service monthly was conducted in German at the local Emanuel Lutheran Church until 1935. And a weekly German newspaper was published here until 1925.
Seidenschwarz also points out that the largest number of immigrants to the United States over the centuries have been of German descent -- an estimated 50 million, more than English, Irish, Hispanic or any other background.
Given Stuttgart's German roots, museumgoers may be surprised to learn that the city's first mayor after its incorporation in 1889 was of British descent. What's more, Robert Crockett was the eldest grandson of legendary frontiersman Davy Crockett. Robert, later an Arkansas state senator, had moved here from Tennessee.
One of the museum's most popular areas has nothing to do with ancestry. The Water Fowl Wing features ducks and their avian relatives. The birds' seasonal presence is the inspiration for Stuttgart's World Championship Duck Calling Contest and Wings Across the Prairie Festival, staged each Thanksgiving weekend.
Other galleries in the 20,000-square-foot facility display such allures as vintage farm machinery, a mockup of Stuttgart's Main Street from the turn of the 20th century, and photos of the huge World War II Air Force base outside town.
Arranged outdoors are a half-dozen buildings that evoke the past. The structures include a two-thirds scale replica of the settlement's first Lutheran church, where my dressed-up ancestors could well have been headed for worship services after their formal portrait. I can only imagine.
The Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie, 921 E. Fourth St., Stuttgart, is open 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free; donations are welcomed. For more information, call (870) 673-7001 or visit grandprairiemuseum.org.
Weekend on 02/05/2015