Biography
Ferdinand Ernst was born around 1784, in the Rhineland according to his biographer Paul E. Stroble. The son of a wealthy farmer who had built up several large estates for his children, he ran an estate of his own in the Kingdom of Hanover, where he lived with his wife, Mary Ann, and their three children, Hermann, Rudolf and Augusta.
The years after the Napoleonic Wars plunged the German countryside into crisis. Ernst devised a plan that was both charitable and calculated: to advance penniless countrymen the cost of the crossing to the United States, in exchange for a few years of indentured work, and to settle them together on new land.
In the spring of 1819 he set out to reconnoitre with a few companions, among them Frederick Hollman, a young farmer from near Hildesheim. Landing at Baltimore, he went by way of Washington, crossed the Alleghenies, travelled down the Ohio and entered Illinois, admitted to the Union a few months earlier. At the end of the summer he reached Vandalia, which the state had just chosen as its capital, and bought land there. Hollman stayed behind to prepare for the settlers; Ernst went on as far as New Orleans, then returned to Germany.
In 1820 he published his travel observations in Hildesheim, at once a journey diary and a guide for future emigrants. The book helped him gather about a hundred people, including his family and a Lutheran pastor. The group landed at Baltimore in October and reached Vandalia on 19 December 1820, after two and a half months on the road.
Ernst made his mark there: he sat on the town's board of trustees, became a director of the state bank, and set up a farm and a mill on the Kaskaskia River. But fever struck the newcomers, and some settlers broke their contracts. Ernst himself died of fever on 19 August 1822, at about thirty-eight. Without its founder the colony scattered; his son Hermann stayed in Vandalia, where Ernst lies in the town's old cemetery.
His book circulated little outside Germany. Only its Illinois chapters were translated into English, in 1903, by E. P. Baker, in the Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society. It remains one of the few European eyewitness views of Illinois in its very first years.
