Background
Frederick William Augustus Notz was born on February 2, 1841 in the Weinsberg district of Württemberg (now Baden-Württemberg), Germany. He was the eldest child of the Lutheran pastor, Gottlieb Notz, and his wife, Wilhelmina Louisa Burger.
Frederick William Augustus Notz was born on February 2, 1841 in the Weinsberg district of Württemberg (now Baden-Württemberg), Germany. He was the eldest child of the Lutheran pastor, Gottlieb Notz, and his wife, Wilhelmina Louisa Burger.
Notz received his early schooling in the Lateinschule at Leonberg and the Konigliche Gymnasium at Stuttgart and was admitted in 1855 to the Klosterschule at Maulbronn, where he came under the decisive influence of Wilhelm Bäumlein, equally noted as classical scholar and pedagogue. He matriculated in the Evangelische Stift of the University of Tübingen in 1859, studied philosophy, theology, and classical philology under Ferdinand Christian Baur, Johann Tobias Beck, Gustav Kohler, Wilhelm Sigismund Teuffel, and Karl Ludwig Roth, won the Freiherr von Palm prize with an essay on Roman history in the regal period, and took his doctor's degree in 1863 with a dissertation on the same subject. Having passed the theological examinations, he remained at the University for another year.
Notz was appointed vicar to his father, became a tutor in a noble family, and in 1866 came to the United States as tutor in a family living at Darien, Georgia. He decided to remain in America and, having established relations with Lutheran officials in the East, became professor of German in Pennsylvania (Gettysburg) College in 1868. The next year he accepted a professorship in Muhlenberg College, where the theological atmosphere was better suited to his own rigorous orthodoxy, and took part in the founding of the American Philological Association. He was secretary of the German-American Press Association in 1870 and president of the German School Association of Pennsylvania in 1871, began his career as an industrious writer for Lutheran periodicals in America and Germany, and in the summer of 1871 was pulpit supply in Philadelphia for his Tübingen friend, Adolph Spaeth. Meanwhile he had become interested in the work of C. F. W. Walther in the West. At first Walther wanted him for a professorship at St. Louis but, with his usual eye for strategy, decided instead to send him to Wisconsin to build up the educational work of the Wisconsin Synod. Accordingly, Notz became professor of Greek and Hebrew in Northwestern University (now College) at Watertown, Wisconsin, and remained there for forty years, retiring because of impaired health in 1912.
His one separate publication was a German translation of Johann Conrad Dietrich's Institutiones Catecheticae.
For many years Notz was "inspector" of the school, which in its organization, curriculum, and methods of instruction was modeled on the plan of a German Gymnasium. His influence extended far beyond the sphere of the school itself. He was a member of the board of official visitors and later of the board of regents of the University of Wisconsin and gave valuable aid to various Lutheran educational institutions.
Notz was one of the chief opponents in 1889-90 of the notorious Bennett Law.
In person Notz was the very embodiment of the German schoolmaster, genuinely learned, and with an inordinate respect for every detail, but mitigating the rigors of instruction and discipline with a wholesome South German humor.
On June 20, 1875 Notz married Juliana Friederike Schulz of Watertown, by whom he had two sons and three daughters.
