Teutopolis: The German Colony on the National Road

The name means City of the Germans, and the name fits. In eighteen thirty-seven, a group of German Catholic immigrants in Cincinnati formed a land company with a very long formal name and a very specific mission: find a place in the West where they could build a Catholic German community from the ground up.

Clemens Uptmor and two partners scouted the northeast corner of Effingham County and liked what they saw: woodlands, well-drained upland, plentiful game. In July of eighteen thirty-nine they purchased ten thousand acres at a dollar and twenty-five cents per acre. The Bishop of Cincinnati suggested the name Teutopolis, after the ancient Teutonic tribes.

Uptmor returned to Cincinnati and led one hundred forty-one German Catholics to their new home on the National Road. The town they built has remained deeply Catholic ever since. Saint Francis of Assisi Church, consecrated in eighteen forty, still anchors the community. Today Teutopolis has about sixteen hundred residents, and the Franciscan parish school has been educating children here for over a hundred and eighty years.