The 1873 Lynching in “Augusta”
by Bob Brail
The town of Augusta, Missouri, is notable for several reasons. The Katy Trail skirts the southern edge of Augusta. Several vineyards in the area draw customers from across the region, along with antique shops and bed and breakfast inns. Another quality Augusta is noted for is its rich German heritage. Founded by Germans in the 1830's, Augusta boasts its Harmonie Verein, a German cultural/music hall, in which concerts are still held. Part of that heritage is the abundance of German surnames in evidence, not only in the town's cemeteries, but also on the mail delivered to Augusta's residents.
One historical aspect of Augusta's German heritage is its reputation for supporting black rights and the end of slavery in the Civil War era. For instance, Augusta citizen Georg Muench assembled a large group of men in 1863 to rescue and liberate a runaway slave who had previously been captured in Augusta. After the war's end, Augusta integrated its school until a black school was constructed. Another example of Augusta's support for black rights can be seen in the results of the 1868 Missouri referendum on giving blacks the right to vote. Held at the same time as that year's presidential election, which pitted U. S. Grant against Horatio Seymour, in the state of Missouri “less than half of all Grant supporters also favored black enfranchisement.” However, in Augusta, ninety-two percent of Grant supporters voted in favor of black suffrage. So, then, it is indeed shocking to learn that on June 21, 1873, only a few years later, a black man was lynched by a local mob of about twenty people in Augusta, Missouri.
Newspapers across America, literally from coast to coast, reported the events in the following days. Details were sparse but clear. The story from Franklin, Missouri, stated that on June 21, a “young German girl,” Lizzie Koch, had been sexually assaulted by George Fields, a black man, in Augusta, Missouri, locating the village about ten miles west of Franklin. The story stated that Fields was arrested near Labadie by the sheriff and “other officers,” and then was returned to Augusta where he was hanged “by a mob” just outside Augusta. The brief account ended with the statement, “[T]he negro is still hanging.” In the brief articles printed in dozens of newspapers across the United States, the only differences were variant spellings of Koch and Labadie. Some newspapers even shortened the article to one or two sentences, never varying from the basic facts. The Baltimore Sun, for example, in its June 23rd issue, left out “Franklin, MO” and “about ten miles west of here,” leaving Augusta, Missouri, as the only identification for the lynching location.
The problem with all these articles was the inclusion of one immensely significant error. The story's one undisputable factual error had to do with location. The events of June 21, 1873, had taken place near Augusta Station in Franklin County, not Augusta in St. Charles County.
How could such an error occur? Much of the answer has to do with confusing and changing place names. Prior to the arrival of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad to Augusta in 1892, Augusta-area residents' nearest railroad access was across the Missouri River in Franklin County. Since the 1850's the Missouri Pacific Railroad had crossed Franklin County, coming to within a few miles of Augusta at one point. Eventually the Missouri Pacific Railroad built a station there, about four miles southeast of Augusta. A ferry carried Augusta-area residents across the river; where they walked or rode to the train depot. Soon the station was called Augusta Station.
This potential confusion of place names should have ended when the residents around Augusta Station were granted a post office in 1862. Located in Boles Township of Franklin County, the people chose the name of Boles for their new post office. However, the name of the train stop remained Augusta Station, probably because of its still significant relationship with Augusta, St. Charles County, at least through 1878 when it was used on a plat map of the county. When the MKT reached Augusta, St. Charles County, in 1892, Augusta Station, Franklin County, becames Boles.
The other place name change involves Franklin, Missouri. Anyone looking at a map of Franklin County, Missouri, today would see that there is no muncipality named Franklin. That is because Franklin's name was changed to Pacific around 1860, but the town continued to be called Franklin, at least by some. In other words, for a period of several years, including 1873, both Franklin and Pacific were in use. The readers of the first newspaper accounts of the rape and lynching who were familiar with Franklin County would have known that Augusta/Boles was indeed “about ten miles west” of Franklin/Pacific. Unfortunately, readers in states like Maine and Oregon would lack this knowledge and be left with the impression that the events took place in Augusta, St. Charles County.
Still to be considered is how the erroneous location of Augusta, Missouri, was ever reported. The Anzeiger Des Westens blamed the error on the telegraph, implying the original message had been the culprit. Samuel Morse's invention had been a “major historical technological breakthrough” for newspapers, forever changing the way news was reported. In 1846 five New York City newspapers had formed the Associated Press, agreeing to share news reports by telegraph. Soon telegraph wire services “quickly linked all major cities and most minor ones.” Editors no longer had to rely on old news gleaned from outdated newspapers to fill their pages. Telegraphed news could be printed in newspapers within hours of the reported events, instead of days or weeks later.
Unfortunately the telegraph could also quickly disperse errors to newspapers across America, which is exactly what happened in the days following the rape and lynching at Augusta Station. On June 22, just one day after the lynching, it was reported to have happened in Augusta, Missouri, in newspapers in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The next day the same error was printed in newspapers in more states: Maryland, Indiana, Ohio, Maine, New York, West Virginia, and Virginia. Within one week of the initial reporting of the incident, residents of Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Delaware read of the Augusta, Missouri, lynching. During the first week of July, Alabama was added to the list of states with newspapers that had incorrectly located the lynching at Augusta, Missouri.
In the days following the nationwide erroneous reporting on the rape and lynching, few newspapers bothered to correct the error; perhaps they were never even made aware of it. Two newspapers, Anzieger des Westens in St. Louis (on June 25) and Der Demokrat in St. Charles (on June 26) correctly reported the events as occurring in Augusta Station, Franklin County and provided several more details. According to these articles, Lizzie Koch was gathering blackberries on the farm where she was living with the family of a farmer named Hinkle. Some time later she was found by a creek, “unconscious, bleeding, and in a horrible condition.” The perpetrator had tried to cut her throat. Taken to Hinkle's house, eventually she was able to say she had been sexually assaulted by a black man with a distinctive “pointed beard” who had been in the area several days. The man's name was George Fields. A posse was quickly formed, possibly led by the sheriff or the girl's father.
A passing train was given a description of the man. At approximately 2:00 pm, a black man was seen two miles east of Augusta Station by the brakeman on an eastbound train. When the train stopped, the man fled. He was found near Labadie, hiding in a quarry. The man identified himself as George Fields, and denied committing the crime against Lizzie Koch. Fields was taken back to Augusta Station, where Lizzie Koch identified him as her assailant. Still denying his guilt, Fields was “seized from the officer” (possibly the sheriff) by a group of about twenty people, taken to a nearby tree, probably on the Hinkle farm, and hanged until dead. Only as the noose was placed around his neck did Fields confess to the crime. The Anzeiger des Westens reported that “[t]he participants in the lynching are among the best citizens of the vicinity.” Lizzie Koch, as of June 25, was reported to be “lying in feverish delirium most of the time, . . . hanging on between life and death.” The next day her condition had improved.
The Atlas Map of Franklin County, Missouri, 1878 contains a map of the eastern part of St. John's Township and the western part of Boles Township which is very helpful in understanding the events of June 21, 1873. Besides illustrating the proximity of Augusta, St. Charles County, to Augusta Station, Franklin County, the map is also provides insight into who was living in the neighborhood where the lynching took place. Lizzie Koch was staying with “a prosperous farmer named Hinkel along the Missouri Pacific Railroad two miles north of Augusta Station,” according to the Anzeiger des Westens. One glance at the map makes it clear that the direction given should have been west, not north. This was the farm of Isaac Hinkle, straddling the boundary between St. John's Township and Boles Township. Adjacent to Isaac Hinkle's land to the east was the farm of his brother Miles Parson Hinkle, whose land reached to within yards of Augusta Station. Both Isaas and Miles Hinkle, Virginians by birth, were former slave owners. In fact, of the approximately thirteen landowners living within a mile of Augusta Station in 1878, nine of them had owned slaves. If the assumption is made that these men had owned the same land in 1873, it becomes easier to see why the lynching might have occurred, although it must be stated that the names of the participants in the lynching were never reported.
BDHS member Dr. Walter Kamphoefner, in his research into the events of June 21, 1873, identifies the victim as Eliza Christina Koch. Kamphoefner writes the following:
Although one German account gives the age of the rape survivor, Lizzie Koch, as 17 and the other as 16, the only person fitting her description in the census was only 10 years old in 1873. Eliza Christina Koch was born on March 2, 1863, and baptized on April 9 in Ebenezer Evangelical Church, daughter of Ernst Koch and Eliza Jeude. She apparently lost her mother early, for her father remarried to Susanna Vogt on March 16, 1865. The marriage record lists him as living at “Harold’s Ferry,” probably named after Augusta founder Leonard Harold and lying opposite the town on the south side of the river. The family was listed as living on the Franklin County side in 1870, in Boles Township, with Labadie as the nearest post office. Although only seven years old at the time, Eliza was also listed as living in another household on the Augusta side, that of Adam Schweitzer, whose wife Elizabeth nee Jeude was her aunt and perhaps her godmother. This may be indicative of “stepmotherly” treatment that left her more vulnerable, and might explain why she was working as a hired girl at age 10, but this is mere speculation.
Dr. Kamphoefner goes on to state:
There is a slight silver lining to this gloomy chapter. From the best that can be determined, Lizzie Koch went on to live a fairly normal life for a woman of her generation . . . she actually lived in Augusta with her parents in 1880, married Philip Hilker, a man 13 years her senior, in 1883, and continued living in Augusta till between 1910 and 1920 when she moved to Lafayette County with her husband and is buried there, but was living back in Washington when she died.
It is also possible that the telegraph message did not contain an error, and that the lynching did indeed take place in Augusta, Missouri, . . . in Franklin County. As unlikely as it may seem, Augusta Station was sometimes called Augusta. Considering the confusion that these identical names for towns only a few miles apart must have caused, one wonders how this every came to be.
In its section on the history of Boles Township, the Atlas Map of Franklin County, Missouri,1878 refers to the town three times, once as Augusta and twice as Augusta Station. On March 21, 1889, sixteen years after the lynching, the Labadie correspondent for the Pacific City Herald reported that J. C. Powell was working on the engineering crew of the St. L. K. C. and C. R. R. at its headquarters in Augusta. The St. Louis, Kansas City, and Colorado Rail Road at this time was laying tracks from St. Louis to the town of Union, southwest of Augusta Station. It is extremely unlikely that the railroad would have its headquarters across the river from its work and in a village without rail access. So perhaps the telegraph operator on June 21, 1873, as a resident of Franklin County, simply used the name Augusta that many from Franklin County would have understood referred to Augusta Station.
The incorrect identification of Augusta in St. Charles County as the location of the lynching probably would have been lost and forgotten in the vast storehouse of online historical newspapers were it not for the publication of a book in 2009. Dr. Harriet C. Frazier, a professor and attorney, has written four books focusing on black history in Missouri. Her latest book is Lynchings in Missouri, 1803-1891 (McFarland and Company Publishing, 2009). In her book she devotes one paragraph to the lynching she states occurred in Augusta, St. Charles County. How did she make this error? Simply by using as her source one of the early incorrect newspaper accounts of the lynching. According to her book, it was the June 23, 1873, edition of the Sedalia Daily Democrat. She would have had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the newspaper article without a very thorough knowledge of the history of Franklin County placenames, which few people today would have.
It is ironic that Dr. Frazier, in another chapter in her book, does, in fact, mention the 1873 lynching incident and correctly locates it near Boles. However, she refers to it as a separate incident, and states “the documentation for [it] is slight, if not suspect.” Her source is an article entitled “Former Lynchings of Franklin County” that appeared in the July 16, 1897, issue of the Franklin County Tribune. That article states, “Just at the close of the war, a negro man was hanged by a mob, near Boles, for we believe assaulting a white woman. They finished their job so well that we believe it has never been known publicly what disposition was made of the remains.” Clearly this refers to the lynching of George Fields, yet Dr. Frazier has no reason to connect it with the lynching she reported as happening in St. Charles County since she was ignorant of the erroneous information in the 1873 newspaper account she used as a source.
Through no fault of her own, Dr. Frazier has removed an error from that vast storehouse of online historical newspaper articles and placed it on public display in an important book on Missouri history. Unless the error is corrected in future editions of Dr. Frazier's book, researchers relying on her book will no doubt make the same error. Of course, the correction of this error of location will not change the horror of what happened at Augusta Station in June of 1873: a girl was raped and brutalized, and a man was executed by a mob, without the benefit of a trial by a jury. In fact, the error pales in comparison to the human tragedy. However, for the purpose of historical accuracy, it is hoped that this error will be corrected and that Augusta, St. Charles County, Missouri, will retain its historical reputation for racial tolerance and equality.
The author would like to thank Dr. Walter Kamphoefner for providing his own research on the events of 1873 and translations of newspaper articles from the St. Charles Demokrat and the Anzeiger des Westens.
Sources: Anzeiger des Westens (newspapers.com); Atlas Map of Franklin County, Missouri, 1878 (cdm16795.contentdm.oclc.org/digital); “Augusta Falsely Accused” (Walter D. Kamphoefner); The Baltimore Sun (newspapers.com); Federal Population Censuses; Federal Slave Census of 1860; “Georg Muench” (muenchfamilyassociation.com); Germans in America (Walter D. Kamphoefner); “Harriet C. Frazier” (prabook.com); “History of American Newspapers” (en.wikipedia.org); “History of Newspapers,” Understanding Media and Culture (open.lib.umn.edu); “A Horrible Crime and its Punishment,” Anzeiger des Westens, June 25, 1873; Lynchings in Missouri, 1803-1981 (Harriett C. Frazier); “A Negro Outrages a White Girl and is Hung to a Tree,” Muscatine (IA) Weekly Journal (June 27, 1873); Pacific City Herald (newspapers.com); Untitled, St. Charles Demokrat, June 26, 1873.