Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Altenburg, MO

Altenburg is a city in Perry County in southeast Missouri that was laid out and platted in 1839 by a colony of German Lutherans; its name means 'Old Castle' in German.

Altenburg was named after the Duchy of Saxe-Altenburg, the German homeland of many of its settlers — even though, curiously, not a single colonist appears to have come from the city of Altenburg itself.

Altenburg was one of seven Saxon Lutheran settlements founded in the area in 1839 — alongside Dresden, Frohna, Johannisberg, Paitzdorf, Seelitz, and Wittenberg — by some 700 immigrants, 665 of whom had sailed from Bremen in 1838 aboard five chartered ships.

The Saxon colonists pooled an $88,000 communal fund and used $9,234 of it to buy 4,475 acres of Perry County land for their settlements.

After the colony's first leader, Pastor Martin Stephan, was exiled for misconduct, the settlers were led by C. F. W. Walther, and the Saxon communities became the backbone of what grew into the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.

In 1839 the immigrants built a one-room 'Log Cabin College' near Altenburg — the first Evangelical Lutheran seminary west of the Mississippi River and the seed of Concordia Seminary — notable in its day for being co-educational.

Trinity Lutheran Church, the town's congregation, was founded in 1839 in a log cabin and later rebuilt in limestone and then in frame.

Altenburg was incorporated in 1870, with Dr. E. E. Buenger as its first mayor.

The 2020 census counted 341 people in Altenburg; the 2010 census recorded 352 people in 138 households.

German remained the everyday language of Altenburg and its sister Saxon towns until 1953, when they officially switched to English — more than a century after the immigration.