Igis to Missouri, 1856

In the late summer of 1856 Luzius Hegnauer of Igis in Graubünden, Switzerland, then 36 years old, left his village with his wife Anna Margreth Bernet and their five children. They crossed France to Le Havre, sailed to New York on the American ship Chace, and within a few years were farming among Swiss neighbours in Gasconade County, Missouri. This page brings together what the records say about that journey. Where a statement is the study's reasoning rather than something a document says, it is marked (inference).

The family on the passenger list

The family appears on the passenger list of the ship Chase from Havre, lines 155–161, indexed under the surname "Hegemann".¹ Their ages on the list agree with their baptisms in the Igis church register.

A sixth child, Barbara, was born in Gasconade County, Missouri, in 1859.

Leaving Igis

Igis was a farming village of vineyards, orchards and livestock on the Rhine near Landquart, with 637 inhabitants in 1850.² A family of seven was about one in a hundred of its people (inference). The Hegnauers were not the only ones to go. The Bürgergemeinde's notes on the old Igis families record the Pfeifer family sent to New Orleans in 1845, with the commune paying half the 1,232 francs; Joseph Barfuss leaving in 1854; and the whole Florin-Disch family in 1857. The same notes mention only a later Hegnauer emigrant, Peter (born 1811), who left in 1872. They say nothing of Luzius's family, and no record has been found of whether Igis helped to pay their passage.³

The year 1856 was in fact a quiet one for Swiss emigration. The United States recorded 7,953 Swiss arrivals in 1854 but only 1,780 in 1856.⁴

There was no railway into Graubünden yet: the first line, to Chur, opened only on 1 July 1858.⁵ The first stage from Igis therefore went by road and lake (inference). Their neighbours give a good picture of the route. In April 1855 emigrants from Untervaz and other villages nearby boarded omnibuses at the Tardis bridge at Landquart, on the Hegnauers' doorstep. They travelled by Walenstadt, Weesen, Rapperswil, Zürich, Baden and Brugg and over the Bözberg to Basel.⁶ From Basel the railway carried emigrants across France to Le Havre. A French decree of 15 January 1855 regulated the trade: it placed emigration commissioners at the frontier and at Le Havre, required each emigrant to show 200 francs or hold a through contract, and allowed emigrants to board the day before sailing.⁴ The family must have been at Le Havre by about 21 August, and had probably left Igis in the first half of August (inference).

The ship Chace

Sailing ships leaving Le Havre, photographed by Gustave Le Gray in 1856–57. The ships are not identified. Bibliothèque nationale de France (public domain).

The ship was the American full-rigged ship Chace, often printed "Chase". She was built of oak and chestnut at Warren, Rhode Island, in 1850 and measured 625 tons and about 133 × 32 feet. She sailed out of New York for G. Bulkley & Son under Captain W. White.⁷ Before 1856 she had been a New York–Charleston packet. In 1856 she was working the cotton trade: from Charleston to Havre with cotton, and back to New York with emigrants and goods (inference from her clearances). Several ships named Chase were afloat in those years. The identification rests on the arrival notices, which name her master as White, and on the registers, which give the Chace of master White and owner Bulkley as the only full-rigged ship of that name. No painting or photograph of her has been found.

The voyage

The New York Herald of 30 September 1856 reports the arrival: "Ship Chase, White, Havre 36 days, with mdse and 200 passengers", and the drowning of the seaman Henry Henrickson. Library of Congress (public domain).

The passage took 38 days, an ordinary length for a sailing ship of the time. The ship "has had light winds and calms the entire passage", the Herald reported.¹⁰ The one tragedy the newspapers recorded was the loss of the young seaman on 8 September. When the brig Clinton spoke the ship six days later, her crew reported that they had "lost a boy overboard, named Harry".¹¹ The newspapers report no deaths among the passengers, although the same columns do report them for other ships. The newspapers list cabin passengers for other ships that day but none for the Chace. The Hegnauers, like almost all her passengers, travelled in steerage, berthed between decks (inference).

On the same page as the Chace's arrival, the Herald carried news of "Trouble in Switzerland": the royalist rising at Neuchâtel in early September. It had broken out after the family sailed, so they would have heard of it only in America.¹⁰

Castle Garden

The family landed at the new state emigrant depot at Castle Garden, at the tip of Manhattan, which had opened in August 1855. That year 141,625 people were landed there from 579 vessels, 78 of which came from Havre. Only 1,064 of all those arrivals named Missouri as their destination. Arrivals of 1855–56 carried on average about $63 in cash. The Commissioners of Emigration made small advances on pledged baggage so that families could move inland at once.¹² A grand jury that inspected the depot three weeks before the Chace arrived watched railroad clerks lay "maps of the various routes of travel" before the newly landed emigrants and explain the times and prices.¹² That is very probably how Luzius chose the family's road west (inference).

The road west

How the family travelled from New York to Missouri is not recorded. In the week they landed, the Tribune advertised an Erie Railroad "EMIGRANT" train to Dunkirk and through tickets "for CHICAGO, ST. LOUIS, KANSAS".¹³ The likeliest route was the Erie emigrant train to Lake Erie and on to Chicago, then rail to Alton on the Mississippi and a river packet to St. Louis. From there the Pacific Railroad ran about 81 miles west to Hermann, and a wagon road led the last ten miles or so south into Boeuf Township.¹⁴ At emigrant speeds of about 12 miles an hour the journey took eight to twelve days, which would have brought the family to Hermann in mid-October 1856. The fares for the family would have come to perhaps $60–80 (inference, low confidence).

Why Gasconade County? People from home were already there. George Krättli of Untervaz, the next village to Igis, was born in the same year as Luzius and had come in 1844. By 1860 he was farming in Boeuf Township.¹⁵ The Danusers and other Swiss families were nearby, and the settlement that grew up there in the 1880s was named Swiss "because the inhabitants are mostly from Switzerland".¹⁶ Hermann was a German wine town, busy since the railroad came, and Igis too was a wine village (the wine link is the study's suggestion, not a documented motive). By 1860 the family was farming in Boeuf Township, and Leonhard's obituary of 1916 recalls that they came in 1856 and first settled in Gasconade County.¹⁷

After the war: the second move

Five years after they arrived, the Civil War took Luzius, John and Leonhard into Union service (see The Hegnauers in the Civil War). Afterwards the family moved again:

• Leonhard went to Madison County, Illinois, in 1865. On 4 July 1866 he married Susanna Katharina Hirschi of Canton Bern at Highland, the Swiss colony east of St. Louis. In 1869 he took up land in Bates County, Missouri. The family crossed the state from Illinois "in wagons pulled by ox-teams", a three-week trip, according to the county history of 1918.¹⁸
• John married Catharina Appel in Madison County on 24 August 1869 and was farming near Grantfork in 1870.¹⁹
• By 1880 Luzius and Margreth were in Bates County, near their sons. The Hegnauers of Bates County later spread to Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and California.

Open questions

• Read the manifest itself on the free Internet Archive copy of roll 167: the master's signature, a count of the passengers, any notes of deaths or births at sea, and the columns for the Hegnauer lines (origin, occupation, destination).
• Le Havre departure records kept under the 1855 decree may survive in the Le Havre municipal or Seine-Maritime departmental archives. Neither has been searched.
• Igis commune minutes of 1856 might show whether the commune paid for or advanced the passage, as it did for the Pfeifers in 1845.
• The inland journey: any family account, letter or record of the route and the date of arrival in Gasconade County.
• The ship's fate after 1865. She is not in the register of 1866, and no wreck, sale or renaming has been found.

If you can help with any of these, please leave a comment below.

Images

No picture of the Chace is known. These public-domain images document the voyage or show its setting:

• The ''Herald'''s arrival notice, 30 September 1856: "Ship Chase, White, Havre 36 days, with mdse and 200 passengers".
• The ''Tribune'''s Marine Journal, 30 September 1856, with the brig Clinton's report.
• Ships leaving the port of Le Havre, photograph by Gustave Le Gray, 1856–57.
• "New-York von der Seeseite aus gesehen — Des Auswanderers Sehnsucht", a lithograph of the 1850s showing New York from the sea, made for German-speaking emigrants.
• "Emigration vessel — Between decks", Illustrated London News, 1851. This is a British ship; the picture shows what steerage was like.

Sources

Notes

1. "Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, 1820–1897," NARA microfilm publication M237, roll 167 (19 September–18 October 1856), Records of the U.S. Customs Service, RG 36; ship Chase from Havre, list dated 30 September 1856, lines 155–161, "Hegemann" family. Image: Ancestry, New York Passenger Lists, 1820–1957; free copy of the whole roll: Internet Archive, reel 0167. ↩
2. "Igis", Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz. ↩
3. Bürgergemeinde Landquart, "Die Igiser Bürgergeschlechter" (viewed 26 September 2026). ↩
4. Nicole Fouché, Émigration alsacienne aux États-Unis, 1815–1870, chapter III (Publications de la Sorbonne, OpenEdition). ↩
5. "Chur–Rorschach railway line", Wikipedia. ↩
6. Untervazer Burgenverein, ''Jahresbericht 2022'' (the emigration of 1855). ↩
7. New-York Marine Register (1858), p. 22, entry 275; American Lloyd's Register (1859), p. 46, entry 347; both via Mystic Seaport Museum. ↩
8. New York Herald, 11 September 1856, p. 8 ("HAVRE, Aug 21 — In port ships Chace, White; … for NYork, ldg."), Library of Congress, Chronicling America. ↩
9. New York Herald, 12 September 1856, p. 8 ("Sld 22d, Chace, White, NYork"). ↩
10. New York Herald, 30 September 1856, p. 10, "Port of New York, September 29, 1856". ↩
11. New-York Daily Tribune, 30 September 1856, p. 8, Marine Journal. ↩
12. Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York, ''Annual Reports, 1847–1860'' (report for 1856). ↩
13. New-York Daily Tribune, 3 October 1856, p. 3. ↩
14. "Alton Railroad" and "Gasconade Bridge train disaster", Wikipedia. The Pacific Railroad reached Hermann in August 1855; its opening excursion fell through the unfinished Gasconade bridge on 1 November 1855. ↩
15. George Kraettly, WikiTree profile. ↩
16. Goodspeed Publishing Co., ''History of Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Crawford and Gasconade Counties, Missouri'' (Chicago, 1888). ↩
17. 1860 U.S. census, Boeuf Township, Gasconade County, Missouri, household of Luzius Hegnauer; "Passing of a Pioneer", obituary of Leonhard Hegnauer, Appleton City Journal, 9 November 1916. Both are cited in full on Luzius's profile. ↩
18. See the sources on Leonhard's profile: the Madison County marriage register (4 July 1866), his obituary (1916) and History of Bates County, Missouri (1918). ↩
19. See the sources on John's profile. ↩