Colonel Cullmann's German Colony

This town was the dream of a single German exile. Johann Gottfried Cullmann left Bavaria in the eighteen sixties, convinced his liberal politics could never survive under a rising Prussia. Working in a Cincinnati bookstore, he began imagining a colony built for working immigrants like himself.

He came to Alabama and, in eighteen seventy-three, struck a deal to act as land agent for an enormous tract owned by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, more than three hundred forty thousand acres. That spring, five German families followed him here. The town was incorporated the next year and named for him, the spelling Americanized to Cullman with a single n. Within a year there were more than a hundred families. Over his life, Colonel Cullmann is credited with drawing more than ten thousand German immigrants to America, selling them land and using the proceeds to bring still more across the ocean.