As a student of the Missionary Society in Basel, Switzerland, he had intended to go to Southern Russia to preach. But Czar Nicholas abolished the church’s missions and decreed that the only churches to be allowed were Greek Catholic churches. So when the call went out from the American west for a young man to come to this country and minister to the large number of German emigrants who were flowing into Middle America, Georg Wendelin Wall answered. He and Joseph Reiger came to this country in 1836 on the basis of a request from church officials in Hartford, Connecticut. Wall’s first church, when he arrived in St. Louis, was the German Protestant Evangelical Church of the Holy Ghost, a small congregation meeting in a building loaned by the Methodist and Presbyterian churches.
