Fred H. Binder Was Prominent Jefferson City Leader

By Walter A. Schroeder, for Historic City of Jefferson

Fred Henry Binder, prominent Jefferson City builder and civic leader, was born Oct. 14, 1845, in the Kingdom of Hanover to lumberman and architect Friedrich Binder and Johanna (Meier) Binder. He was apprenticed to carpentry at an early age and emigrated at age 21, arriving in Jefferson City in 1867.

How do you say it? "Binder" is a German name that is pronounced BINN-der, rhyming with the word “cinder,” or the first two syllables of the word “kindergarten,” which is a German word. So Jefferson City's Binder Lake, too, is pronounced “BINN-der” (not “BINE-der”).

In 1868 he married widow Katherine (Blochberger) Hugershoff with infant daughter Clara. Her sister was Margaret Knaup, wife of hotelier Fred Knaup, who helped Binder get established in business, according to memoirs of Binder’s son-in-law F. J. Zeisberg.

By 1873 Binder had his own carpentry business. his work as architect, builder, and contractor continued for three decades. St. Peter Catholic Church (1883), for which he was architect and builder, is in the North German Gothic style—tall, slender steeple and pointed-arch windows—the style of Binder’s native Hanover. He also had a role in designing St. Francis Xavier Church (1883) in Taos and was architect and builder of Central German Evangelical Church (1891), both in the same North German Gothic style.

Above, left to right: St. Francis Xavier Church, Taos; St. Peter Catholic Church; Central German Evangelical Church.

He was the leading proponent for the Water Works (1888), including the river pumping plant and settling basins, and was the company’s president and manager.

Above: The first Missouri River Bridge at Jefferson city opened in 1896 and operated as a toll bridge until 1932. It connected to the south side of the river at Bolivar Street, where Rotary Park is now. This bridge was replaced in 1954 (by the current span that carries southbound traffic). Image from the 1900 Illustrated Sketch Book and Directory of Jefferson City and Cole County, p. 40.

Binder was president of the Bridge & Transit Company. He oversaw construction and operation of the Missouri River Bridge (1895–96) and was the longtime company president. He was its largest subscriber and executed the $200,000 contract for the bridge.

Above: The U.S. Government Building, High St., between Jefferson and Washington streets, held the U.S. Circuit and District Courts for the Central Division of the Western District of Missouri as well as the U.S. Post Office for Jefferson City. Image from the 1900 Illustrated Sketch Book, p. 17. This building was on the north side of High Street, across from what is today's Arris' Pizza restaurant.

He had the state contract to design the U.S. Court House–Post Office in the 100 block of West High Street (demolished in the 1970s). He designed and built the Music Hall (1885), 238 E. High St., and the Binder Building, 214 E. High St. He reconstructed Bragg (City) Hall (1890), 240 E. High St., after a major fire and put a slate roof on the Supreme Court (1895). He was contractor for the enlargement of the state Capitol in 1887–88.

Above: The Binder Building on High St., as shown in the 1900 Illustrated Sketch Book, p. 431. The caption described the then-retired Binder, noting he was “the owner of a large amount of valuable property in the Capital City, included in which is the Music Hall, in which is his private office and that of the Water Works Company. Mr. Binder also owns a handsome park in the western suburbs of the city. Before retiring, he built, under contract, a number of the most modern and imposing buildings in the State outside of St. Louis. . . . He superintended the erection of the U.S. Government building of this city, which is conceded to be the most perfect piece of architecture in the State.”

Above: Bragg Hall, on the southwest corner of High and Monroe (on the left, in this photo), was used as a gathering place for public entertainment before it became the city hall. It remained the city hall until 1983. Now, it’s the Cole County Abstract and Title Co. The building looks very different than it did in 1900, as in this image from the Illustrated Sketch Book (the view is looking west on High Street).

Above: The old Capitol Building, as shown in the 1900 Illustrated Sketch Book and Directory of Jefferson City and Cole County, p. 21.

Among the many residences he built were those of Fred Knaup (1877), 400 E. Capitol Ave., and Henry Ruwart (1886), 731 E. High St.

Binder’s reputation enabled him to secure state contracts for building the Engineering Building on the MU campus quadrangle (1893–95; contract for $200,000); state asylum (now hospital) at Fulton; reformatory school for girls at Chillicothe (1895) and for boys at Boonville (1888–89).

Binder served his city in many ways. He served on the City Council (1881–84) and was mayor (1884–85).

Zeisberg wrote: “Mr. Binder’s administration was an efficient one from a business standpoint, although he was accused of being too autocratic and dictatorial. . . . He was conceded to have always worked for the best interests of the city.”

He was on the school board (1878–83; 1903–11) and the Carnegie Library Board. Binder was president of Central German Evangelical Church for 29 years (1882–1911), during which he led it to become a mainstream English-speaking church. He brought from Germany the progressive idea of a nonprofit building and loan association, which enabled residents with modest incomes to own their own homes.

Emigrant Binder brought to Jefferson City the German closeness to nature, deeply rooted in the German psyche. For his own residence at 210 E. Dunklin St., built in 1873, he chose not a location among other achievers on prestigious Capitol Avenue, but an irenic, wooded quarter block with a small creek in Muenchberg on the Southside. According to the 1906 Missouri Volksfreund [German-language newspaper], Binder “has around his house the most luxuriant and most glorious yard of the city.”

Binder invested in real estate, like the lot he sold in the 1200 block of East McCarty Street to the Jewish congregation (1879) for its cemetery. He purchased a beautiful tract of mature oak and hickory woods (1895), called Binder’s Woods. After the Binder estate was settled in the 1940s it became the popular Memorial Park, “Memorial” referring to the Binder family. Today’s 644-acre Binder Park and Binder Lake (155 acres) are the chief legacies of the Binder name.

Binder, identified as a capitalist, died at his home on Sept. 27, 1911, of cancer and, Zeisberg said, from a broken heart from his son’s marital problems. [It was probably also a blow that the Missouri State Capitol building had been destroyed by fire in February of that year. –ed.] Binder died intestate, and difficulties with his only son’s marriage surfaced during litigation of his enormous estate, valued in today’s dollars at almost $3 million. His only son, Fred C., died soon afterward in 1918. Fred C.’s only child, Fred W., had died earlier, in 1916, from injuries sustained while playing football, sealing the fate of the Binder name.

Above, the Binder-Zeisberg plot at Riverview Cemetery, photographed in March 2024.

Zeisberg summarized his father-in-law: “He was a man of ambition and, if I may add, fastidious and a little vain. He had worked his way up from a very humble beginning, starting as a day carpenter and becoming a successful contractor and a man of influence and wealth. . . . While a strong church and lodge member, he could also entertain some broad and liberal views.”

Walter Schroeder grew up in Jefferson City’s historic German Southside now known as Old Munichburg. A retired professor of geography, he is devoted to preserving cultural history and is the author of five books on the history of the Old Munichburg neighborhood.

[This article first appeared in the Jefferson City News-Tribune’s “Cole County History” series on Saturday, July 24, 2021, p. B4. Slight editorial changes have been made, including adding several images and captions that didn't appear in the newpaper piece, and to update for 2024 the number of JC history books authored by Walter Schroeder. —ed.]

For more about Binder and other German progressives, see my previous post.

For more about Binder’s property on Dunklin Street—his home, the woods, and more—see my 9/4/2012 post about his son-in-law, Franz Josef Zeisberg.

For more information about Binder's Music Hall, see this post.

Copyright © Walter A. Schroeder, 2021

Remembering Francis Joseph Zeisberg, Eminent Jefferson City Musician

Has Jefferson City forgotten one of its most eminent musicians?

Franz Josef Zeisberg, organist, violinist, pianist, composer, and teacher, was born in 1862 in the Sudeten mountains of Prussian Silesia, now part of Poland. Raised on a farm by musical parents, the teenager emigrated to Jefferson City in 1881 (he was only eighteen!) and first worked as a manual laborer in a brickyard where he learned English.

He began his musical career in Jefferson City in 1884 by opening the City Conservatory in the Conrath House on Madison Street in partnership with immigrant Carl Preyer. Zeisberg was organist at the Central German Evangelical Church (now Central United Church of Christ).

In 1887 he married Clara Hugershoff, stepdaughter of Fred H. Binder (who had been elected mayor in 1884). That marriage allowed Zeisberg entrance into the highest levels of Jefferson City society, because of Binder’s prominence in civic affairs. Zeisberg’s career took off.

I wish I could find a photo of Zeisberg. Here, at least, is his physical description at age forty-four, according to his 1906 American passport:

Stature: 5 feet, 11½ inches. Forehead: High. Eyes: Blue. Nose: Prominent. Mouth: Average. Chin: Sharp. Hair: Dark blonde. Complexion: Fair. Face: Average. Thin, full beard.

Zeisberg went to Lexington, Missouri, to teach at the Elizabeth Aull Seminary for women, then to Chicago, where his musical talents became more widely known and appreciated. With a solid reputation in the musical world, in 1892 he began a thirty-year career as conservatory director at Martha Washington College in Abingdon, Virginia.

He retired at age sixty in 1922 for health reasons, and the Zeisbergs returned to Jefferson City, leaving their three grown children in good professions on the East Coast. He retained a home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, to which he returned annually in summers until the 1940s.

In Jefferson City, the professor and Clara moved into the substantial Fred Binder house at 210 East Dunklin, unoccupied after Papa Fred Binder’s death in 1911 and Mrs. Binder’s death in 1920. The Zeisbergs continued to live there in the Southside until their deaths.

The Binder property included the southeast corner of Dunklin and Madison, catercorner from Busch’s Florist. While the Zeisbergs lived there, it was a wooded tract with a small creek running through it before going out of sight into a long tunnel under the street intersection.

This is how the corner looked around 1951. Madison Street is in the foreground; Dunklin is in the distance. The view is almost true east.

Here is the same view, as of September 2, 2012:

Professor Zeisberg gave organ concerts at the Southside’s Central Evangelical Church, where the Zeisbergs were members, and other local churches, always to full and appreciative attendances. He was the first in Jefferson City to broadcast organ music over the new WOS radio station, directly from Central Church’s organ.

He taught students in piano, organ, and violin. His best-known student, by far, was Carl E. Burkel, who received his first organ lessons as a preteen on Central Church’s large Möller pipe organ. Burkel is well remembered in Jefferson City for his forty-one years of teaching music at Jefferson City High School and directing the Jefferson City Symphony and Capitol Caroling at Christmas. Carl later told me about sitting as a boy on the church organ bench with “that old German” teaching him the intricacies of a multiregister organ.

I was one of Professor Zeisberg’s piano students from age nine to eleven. The nineteenth-century Binder house was spacious and had a big, airy sunroom with windows on three sides overlooking the corner woods and little creek.

Mrs. Zeisberg filled the sunroom to overflowing with pots of ferns and other large plants, making it a tropical paradise just as luxurious as Busch’s greenhouses across the corner.

Professor Zeisberg gave his lessons at an upright piano in an adjacent room, and as I sat on the piano bench I could see the great abundance of Mrs. Zeisberg’s ferns and the woods beyond. I imagined I was playing a piano in a park!

You can see the sunroom in this sketch that my wife, Pat, made of the Binder house in 1950 while an art student in high school.

Professor Zeisberg emphasized German music, especially Beethoven sonatas. When I got reasonably proficient in one, the professor uncased his violin and played the melody with embellishments along with me on the piano.

At times he would lean over me to get close to the music to read it, and the backs of his hands showed the huge, bulging veins of an active eighty-two-year old man. When I made a mistake, he rapped my hands gently with his violin bow and slipped into German to say “Es ist nicht so, Walter!” (That isn’t right, Walter!) In 1944 he gave me a manuscript copy of one of his compositions for children, titled “Kris Kringle,” composed in 1922.

Professor Zeisberg promenaded daily throughout the Southside. He was tall, bearded, and very much the proud German professor. He wore an old-fashioned black suit and top hat, which made him look like Abraham Lincoln. Though in his eighties, he walked very erect in long strides, tapping his black cane as he went briskly along.

Professor Francis Joseph Zeisberg died in 1951 at age eighty-nine. Clara, his wife for fifty-nine years, had died five years earlier. They were buried in the large Binder plot in Riverview Cemetery.

The Zeisbergs’ unmarried daughter Elsa had returned to Jefferson City to care for them when they were aging. She continued to live in the house in the woods at 210 East Dunklin until 1958 (she died 1985), when the property was sold to the Milo H. Walz family, which saw an opportunity to develop the corner commercially.

Here is another view of that corner. This time the view is almost true north, toward the intersection of Madison and Dunklin. The brick building at the left is the Madison side of the Wel-Com-In. The horizontal white structure to its right are the greenhouses for Busch’s Florist. The upright storefront for Busch’s is to the right of that.

Here is the same view as of September 2, 2012:

The beautiful, sturdy Binder/Zeisberg house is now encased within a modern commercial building at 210 E. Dunklin, with its nineteenth-century brick chimneys projecting bizarrely above a flat, modern roofline. Here are some views of the building.

. . . And the shady woods has been totally cut down. The pretty little creek now runs underground as a drainage sewer.

That corner of Madison and Dunklin became the Bolten Southside Conoco and most recently is Doug’s Blvd. Motors. Fred Binder’s well-preserved 1800s black surrey (with a fringe on top!), which was still housed in a carriage house on the property when it was sold in 1958, was given to the Missouri State Museum in the Capitol, where it was on exhibit for many years. Most recently it has been displayed at the museum at Lohhman’s Landing, but as of Labor Day weekend 2012, that museum is closed for renovations and the surrey will be placed into storage indefinitely.

Professor Zeisberg’s legacy endures not only in the huge number of students he taught in Jefferson City and Virginia, but also in his enormous volume of compositions. He began publishing in the 1890s with the Theodore Presser Company of Philadelphia. He composed numerous children’s songs for both piano and violin, transcriptions of well-known American melodies like Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe,” and other, longer works.

He composed secular and church music for male and mixed choruses. Central United Church of Christ still uses some of the anthems and choral responses he composed or arranged for it more than eighty years ago. Most impressively, he composed two full-length masses and at least eighty-five—yes, eighty-five!—fugues for the organ.

His immense trove of compositions, some published and others in manuscript, was given to his star student, Carl Burkel. A few of the organ fugues are in the music library of Central Church.


Special thanks to Albert Case for sharing his personal memories of Professor Zeisberg. Mr. Case drove the “Dutchy” professor to his summer home in Virginia in the Zeisberg touring auto. Thanks also to Shirley Klein, organist at Central United Church of Christ, for sharing the manuscript copies of Zeisberg’s fugues. Thanks also to the late Don Walz for his photographs of the Binder woods. The photo of Carl Burkel is from Carl’s collection and was made by Bob Elliott; it is used with permission. And thanks to my wife for sharing her schoolgirl artistic talents. I cannot find a photo of the Binder house!

Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.