Researching Countess Leon

A native of Frankfurt, Germany, Countess Leon was the daughter of Johann and Anna Maria Heuser. She claimed to have married Bernhard Müller, a Christian mystic also of Germany, who was known as Count Leon, or Count de Leon. The couple had three children, Johanna Schardt, Joseph Maximilian, and Anna Stahl.

In 1831, the Countess and her husband came to the United States with a like-minded group of believers. The Leons first joined a Rappite colony in Monaca in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, but because of a schism, they left that group and instead headed down the Ohio River southeast to Louisiana. They soon established their proclaimed "New Jerusalem" at Grand Ecore north of Natchitoches. When the Count and several other relatives died of cholera, the Countess moved some eighty miles north from that location near the Red River to present-day Webster Parish near Minden in northwestern Louisiana.

For nearly four decades, the colony flourished under a communal arrangement until it began to decline after the American Civil War. It dispersed in 1871, when Webster Parish was created from Claiborne Parish to the immediate east. The Countess then relocated north to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she died in 1881.

One of three Utopian Society settlements in North Louisiana, the Germantown Colony, located off Louisiana Highway 531, was the most successful and lasted the longest, having peaked at fifty to sixty pioneers but usually with fewer than forty followers. The settlement had been planned by Bernhard Müller, but he died at Grand Ecore on August 29, 1834, of yellow fever.

The Countess is remembered for having maintained Old World grace and culture in rural Louisiana.