Philanthropist Gottfried Duden, a German attorney, settled on the north side of the Missouri River along Lake Creek in 1824.
There he published Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerika's ("Report of a Journey to the Western states of North America") in 1829.
The description of the free life in the US, by Duden, motivated the Protestant minister Friedrich Münch and Follenius to found the Gießener Auswanderungsgesellschaft in 1832.
Both had participated in the outlawed republican and democratic movements in Germany in the wake of the French July Revolution of 1832.
They settled in the German populated Dutzow in Warren County, Missouri not far from the former farm of Gottfried Duden.