The Rev. George Adam Buerkle is considered the founder of Stuttgart. He was born in Plattenhardt, Germany where he married Barbara Roth. They had one child when they immigrated to America in 1852. The Rev. Buerkle was a Lutheran minister in Woodville, Ohio and in 1878 bought 7,000 acres of prairie land in this area. He brought his first colony to the prairie in the fall of 1878. The group traveled in six chartered railroad cars and included 48 men, women, and children. They got off the train at Carlisle and made the rest of the trip by wagons. There were 17 Lutheran ministers in this first group, but records show they  did not stay long.

 

The Buerkles had 15 children, including three consecutive sets of twins and 12 of their children grew to maturity. Nine of the children moved to the prairie with their parents and grew up in the Stuttgart area. Two never married and descendents of the others reside in this area today.

Buerkle brought his own family here in the second colony which came October 6,1879. He kept almost one-half of his original purchase of land for his family and sold the remainder to his colonist for the same price he had paid for it…$3 per acre.

 

On April 30, 1880, Buerkle was appointed post master of the post office in his home and he named the new office Stuttgart for the town in Germany near where he was born.  He probably felt that his native town of Plattenhardt was too hard to spell and, thus, chose the name Stuttgart.

 

Probably all the adults in the settlement were born in Gemany and for years church services in the Lutheran churches in Stuttgart were in German. Most stores had someone who could speak German. The Germans had their own private schools and a weekly all-German newspaper was published for over 20 years.