| And who said ministers were boring? August Friedrich Crämer |
| And who said ministers were boring? August Friedrich Crämer was born in 1812 in Kleinlangheim, Franconia and he began his studies at the University of Erlangen in 1830. Influenced by the Burschenschaft Germania movement he was imprisoned due to his political activism. After being taken prisoner in 1833, he was charged with treason and jailed while he awaited trial, waiting three years before his case was heard. His sentence was another three years of prison, which may have been longer had not one of his professors intervened in 1839. |
| He entered the Philology Seminary, studied ancient and modern Greek, old and middle High German and French and English before graduating in 1841. After suffering a devastating illness, he turned for comfort to the Lutheran religion. He obtained a position as tutor to the son of the Saxon Duke of Einsiedel where he was deeply admired, and upon the Duke's recommendation in 1843, he procured employment at the house of Lord Lovelace in Devonshire, England, who had been looking for a German–trained tutor for his children. |
| Lady Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born in 1815 in London. She was born Augusta Ada Byron, the first legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke. Anne Isabella left Byron in 1816, taking the infant Ada with her. Ada lived with her mother, but shared her father's acute interested in mathematics, and she was privately home-schooled in mathematics and science, and taught by a noted researcher and scientific author of the 19th century named Mary Somerville who introduced her to Charles Babbage and other great minds. An active socialite, she married William King, Eighth Baron King ( later First Earl of Lovelace ), in 1835 and they had three children. Her social life included Sir David Brewster ( the originator of the kaleidoscope ), Charles Wheatstone, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. |
| Ada translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's memoir on Babbage's proposed machine called the "Analytical Engine" in 1842–1843. She is recognized by historians as the world's first computer programmer. Unfortunately, in order to finance some of her visionary schemes, Ada took to disastrously gambling on horses. She was plagued with illnesses and gambling debts, and became addicted to morphine as a result of her medical treatment. Ada Lovelace died of in 1852 after being bled to death during a cancer treatment. She was buried next to the father she never knew. In 1953, her notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished and the engine has been acknowledged as an early model for a computer. The United States Department of Defense honored Ada Lovelace by naming a programming language 'Ada' after her in 1977. |
| Unfortunately, her personal beliefs denied of the doctrine of the Trinity and drifted toward an acceptance of Unitarianism. She convinced her husband to accept her position, and they pressured Crämer to adopt their philosophy but he refused, and his stay with the Lovelace’s ended. |
| With support of Sir Henry Drummond, a prominent member of the House of Commons, Crämer went to Oxford in 1843 as an instructor of German. He soon found himself in controversy when he was pressured to deny Lutheranism, oppose the Reformation and turn to the Church of England. Meanwhile, he had read Friedrich Wyneken’s account of the plight of the German Lutherans in North America. Hearing of Wilhelm Löhe, Crämer went to see Löhe at Neuendettelsau in 1844. It all went very well. In 1845, the first group of Löhe's emigrants decided upon Crämer as their pastor. Crämer needed to be ordained first and recieved permission and on April 4, 1845, he was ordained |
| On April 20, 1845, they sailed for America. It was on this voyage that Crämer met his future wife, 27 year old Dorothea Benthien from Achim near Bremen. She was in the company of a group of Lutherans enroute to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Crämer watched her lovingly tend the sick during an outbreak of fever on the ship and immediately asked her if she would be willing to join the colonists as a missionary helper to the Indians, and she replied in the affirmative. They were married upon their arrival in New York City on June 10, 1845. |
| By the spring of 1846, Crämer was visiting Indian villages twenty miles away from their homes in Frankenmuth. Soon, he was visiting three Indian villages a month, normally by foot as far as seventy miles one way as well as teaching the Indians in school and even in his home. Crämer baptized thirty-one Indian children. Sadly, he lost one of his own, a small daughter. |
| After the fall out between synods, in 1847 Crämer helped form die Deutsche Evangelische Lutherische Synode von Missouri, Ohio, und Andern Staaten, the Missouri Synod. Crämer served Frankenmuth until 1850, when the Missouri Synod called him to the Missouri Synod practical seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which had been started through the efforts of Loehe, despite pleas that Frankenmuth needed him desperately. In 1861, he moved with the seminary program to Saint Louis, Missouri because of the Civil War, and he helped organize a congregation out of Irish and German immigrants in the section of town called “Minerstown”. He took no salary. In 1875, the seminary was transferred to Springfield, Illinois. |
| In 1881, three of his grown children and two grandchildren died within two months of each other, devastating his wife whose health soon deteriorated. By 1884, she was dead, too. Another tragedy was a typhoid epidemic which broke out in 1888 temporarily shutting down the seminary. Many seminarians contracted the disease. Crämer faithfully served the seminary from 1850 until his death on May 3, 1891. Three of his eight children became pastors. |