History
The village has the name of Emma Demetrio, the daughter of a local minister. The following are Excerpted from Robert W. Frizzell's 1977 article "'Killed by Rebels': A Civil War Massacre And Its Aftermath": Missouri Germans in general had a well-earned reputation among slaveowners as being opposed to slavery. Many St.Louis Germans were exiles from European political oppression. They desired and expected in the United States "a political and social utopia where the rights of the individual were held sacred." In West Missouri, the first Germans arrived in southwestern Lafayette County in the late 1830s. In the 1840s and 50s more Germans came, most of them from Hanover in Northwest Germany. They came for neither religious nor political reasons but simply for improved economic opportunity in the form of available farmland. When the war came in 1861, some sixty Lafayette-Saline Germans joined Frederick Becker's independent company of pro-Union Home Guards in Lafayette County in July. The company stationed itself at Lexington. During this time, with the Home Guards away, the community later known as Concordia experienced its first visit by Southern partisans. The Lutheran minister F. J. Biltz was interrogated, and Brockhoff's store was raided, and many of the community's horses and mules were confiscated. The community felt safer when a few days later 1200 Illinois troops passed through on their way to Lexington, but later in September, the entire Federal garrison at Lexington surrendered, including the Lafayette-Saline Germans. The Germans were released to go home after they were made to swear an oath not to take up arms again. With the activation of the 71st EMM** in August 1862, fifty Germans from Lafayette-Saline joined, and the German community for a second time found many of its men away on militia duty. As had happened previously, Southern partisans visited the community. This time, however, the partisans were guerrillas who did not stop with confiscation of property. On October 5, 1862, several families along with Rev. Biltz and his wife gathered at the home o