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Where the Rhine meets the Missouri
About 80 miles west of St. Louis, the Missouri River bends through a valley of rolling hills, and a small town of roughly 2,185 people sits right in the middle of it. Red brick buildings line the streets.
Vineyards climb the hillsides. Hermann is the center of one of the first federally recognized wine regions in the country, designated in 1983, and AAA members have voted it a Best of the Midwest destination.
But the wine is only part of the story, and it starts almost 200 years ago.
Image Credit: Bruce Andersen – CC BY-SA 3.0/Wiki Commons
Founded to keep German culture alive
In 1837, the German Settlement Society of Philadelphia sent a schoolteacher named George Bayer west to find land for a new city that would be, as they put it, German in every way…