The church is currently located on the northern limits of the city on gently sloping ground on Perryville Road.

[3] Before 1846, there were several Lutheran families who had migrated from a 50-mile (80 km) that included the German cities of Hanover and Braunschweig to a new settlement in America, north of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

This title which the church chose acknowledged and reflected both their European place of origin of many of its members as well as the dispersed rural community northwest of the town of Cape Girardeau where the seeds of a "New Hannover" were being sown.

Land for the very first log-cabin church building was given to the congregation by the carpenter Daniel Bertling, located near the present intersection between Melrose and Delwin streets.

Classes were held during the day in the church building, and taught originally by Christian August Lehmann, the first pastor of the congregation.

By the mid-1870s, plans were under discussion for relocating the church in order to better serve the growing congregation, many of whom lived several miles north of the log building.

In 1875, the congregation approved a site two miles (3.2 km) north along Perryville Road, a narrow dirt lane leading to Cape Girardeau.

[4] In 1887, land for a new church directly across the road from the new parsonage and frame school was donated by congregation member Henry Krueger, a native of Braunschweig, Germany.

[7] Pierced with round-arched openings, Hanover's second church building is given further definition by off-set buttresses capped with sandstone from a local quarry.

Following German custom, a stone inscribed with the church's name and date of construction is located over the front doorway.

It offered elementary education through eighth grade, entitling graduates admission to any public high school in Missouri.

The 22-by-50-foot (6.7 m × 15.2 m) building was built by Will Savers, a local contractor, after members of the congregation had dug the basement with picks, shovels, and horse-powered slip scrapers.

The school's rectangular plan and symmetrical front with a single, centered door facing the road on the short side of the building are basic vernacular design elements found nationwide.

Segmentally-arched windows on the side elevations conserve a 19th-century form favored by German builders long after straight lintel-headed openings were commonplace in non-German structures.

The low-hipped roof with dormer and overhanging eave, however, indicate stylistic influence of the bungalow, as seen nationally in 1920s rural school architecture.

The imperceptible joining of the addition to the school is testimony to the skilled hands of local masons as is the well-proportioned arch which houses a cistern on the south side of the building.

Walter H. Schwaub, at that time the assistant pastor of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Concordia, Missouri; and Rev.