This St. Louis family has been coming to Rockbridge for 70 years

The Hermann family of St. Louis was back in Ozark County last week, visiting Rockbridge Rainbow Trout and Game Ranch for the 70th time in the resort's 70-year history. Someone from the Hermann family – usually several people – have been guests at Rockbridge every summer since Lile and Edith Amyx opened the attraction in 1954. 

Those first-year guests were Sally and Fred Hermann Jr., who came from St. Louis with best friends Dick and Christy Hawes, and Jeff and Dotty Miller. 

"They were outdoorsy people, and they loved to fish," the Hermanns' son Rick said Saturday during breakfast in the restaurant at Rockbridge with this year's batch of Hermann-family resort guests. "They hit it off with Lile and Edith and kept coming back," he added.

Both Fred and Sally Hermann had grown up in the city, but they loved being close to nature. Fred, a World War II veteran and Princeton University grad, was president of Hermann Oak Leather Co. in St. Louis, a leather-tanning operation that his grandfather, Louis Hermann, had started in 1881. Fred's father, Fred Sr., had run the company from 1907 until Fred Jr. took over in 1948.

Now in its 143rd year, the company is second oldest continuously operating businesses west of the Mississippi River. It still turns out a variety of leathers used by other entities to create everything from saddles and holsters to purses and luggage. The company's current president, Shep Hermann (Fred and Sally's son and Rick's brother), was also at Rockbridge last week with his daughter Kati and her husband Brett plus their three young daughters.

Rick and Shep's sister Holly Gulick was also part of the Rockbridge gathering, along with her husband Dave and their son Drew, his wife Alix and their two children. Another sister, Lyn Grace, and her husband Warren were there, too, with three of their sons, Louis, William and Peter.

A third sister, Mary Lemkemeier, was sad that she couldn’t attend this year’s Rockbridge gathering due to a scheduling conflict, Rick said, but her son Charlie was there. This year, ages of the family members at the annual gathering ranged from Shep, the oldest at 72, to Fred and Sally’s great-granddaughter, age 3. 

In all, 19 of the current 32 members of the three generations of living Hermanns made it to Rockbridge this year. 

The number varies each year, but usually it’s several relatives who spend four nights together at the resort. The exception occurred during the covid pandemic. One summer during that time, when folks were afraid to travel and many businesses closed, Rick drove from St. Louis to Rockbridge with a friend and spent one night at the resort – just to keep the family’s longstanding record of annual Rockbridge stays going. 

Most of the family members still live in the St. Louis area, but this year, one came from Texas and another came from Colorado.

Memories and traditions

Lyn Hermann Grace’s husband, Warren, loves sharing the story his mother-in-law, Sally Hermann, used to tell about that first trip to Rockbridge back in 1954. 

“They were in their room, and late that night there was someone knocking on their door, yelling for help,” Warren said Saturday. “It was Lile. He said the fish were dying.”

Warren thinks tree leaves had covered the filters in the rearing ponds, blocking the water flow and causing the ponds to lose oxygen. Warren said, Sally always told the story by saying they all “spent the night out there in the water with dip nets, saving the fish.”

Despite their middle-of-the-night adventure that first year, Fred and Sally fell in love with Rockbridge and brought their growing family along on their summer visits every year afterward. None of the Hermann siblings can remember what the family’s earliest vehicles might have been, but Shep suspects that at some point the Hermanns and their five kids (born between 1952 and 1967) made the trip from St. Louis to Ozark County in something like a “Ford Country Squire” station wagon. However they made the 200-mile trip, it couldn’t have been easy, especially before cars had air conditioning and considering that the last part of the journey covered miles of curving, unpaved country roads. 

Still, every year, the Hermanns came back. Rick, now 70, remembers fishing near the waterfall at the mill when he was 4. Holly, now 68, remembers crossing the swinging bridge that spanned the creek below the dam and standing on the “big rock” alongside Spring Creek to fish when she was 10. 

The family continued to come to Rockbridge every year as the five Hermann kids grew up and moved away from home. Soon they were joined at the resort by spouses and then kids and grandkids. Holly loves the freedom the youngest Hermanns can enjoy in Rockbridge. They bring bikes and scooters and ride along the driveway and parking area in front of mill. “We always stay in the same block of rooms, and we can sit out in front there to talk and watch them,” Holly said, motioning toward the porch in front of the strip of motel-style rooms facing the creek. 

The family has developed some traditions during their seven decades of Rockbridge visits. They no longer gather watercress above the mill pond to take back to St. Louis, as Fred Hermann liked to do, but they do walk up the road west of the lodge and ease into the creek’s 58-degree water for a refreshing swim/float back to the mill. 

And another tradition, sort of a joke but not really, they say, is that “before you get married, you have to bring your intended with us to Rockbridge and see how it goes,” Holly said. They all remember that one girlfriend who came along, and before the visit was over, “everyone knew this wasn’t going to work out,” she said.

Family and faith

The older Hermanns have always brought the younger Hermanns to Rockbridge for the same reasons, Shep said: “We teach the children about the outdoors and show them what it is to be close to the land.” 

As a devoutly Catholic family, the Hermanns also appreciate the resort’s close distance to Assumption Abbey, a few miles north of Rockbridge in Douglas County. There, the family joins the small community of Cistercian monks to celebrate Mass on Sunday mornings. Rick also enjoys going to the monastery on his own to visit with Father Cyprian, a 94-year-old monk who has lived at the Abbey for more than 70 years. 

Holly is the organizer of the family’s yearly gatherings at Rockbridge, and Rick is the spiritual glue, says Shep. Rick has published several books (under his full name, Frederick Hermann), including “How to Forgive Anyone for Anything.” For him, faith is the key that brings the Hermanns together and keeps them close. In the quiet beauty at Rockbridge, he said, family members share faith, forgiveness and reconciliation for any issues that may have arisen among them. 

“It’s the whole connection between love of nature and love of family,” he said. “This has been the venue where we rekindle those bonds.”