A Most German Town

By the eighteen nineties, the Chicago Tribune had a standard phrase it used whenever it wrote about Fort Wayne. It called the city, quote, a most German town. That description was barely an exaggeration.

German immigrants had been arriving since the eighteen thirties, drawn first by the canal construction and then by the farms and factories that followed. By the eighteen nineties, between sixty and seventy percent of Allen County's residents were of German descent. The mayor was a German immigrant. So were most city council members. Three daily newspapers published in the German language competed for readers on Fort Wayne's streets.

The Germans built churches, and their churches became the anchors of neighborhoods. Henry Rudisill, who arrived in Fort Wayne on Christmas Eve of eighteen thirty, established the city's first Lutheran congregation in eighteen thirty seven, organized by twenty three German families in a courthouse meeting room. German Catholic parishes followed. For decades, sermons were preached in German, school lessons were conducted in German, and German was the most commonly heard language on the streets of downtown Fort Wayne.

Then came the First World War. By nineteen fourteen, anti-German sentiment swept the United States. German-language newspapers shuttered. German-named businesses changed their names. The German-American Bank, founded in nineteen oh five, reorganized under the name Lincoln National Bank in nineteen eighteen, amid what its own historians describe as growing suspicion of German Americans.

The cultural transformation was rapid and largely permanent. Within a generation, the German language had largely disappeared from Fort Wayne's public life, replaced by a thoroughly American civic identity. What remained were the churches, the neighborhoods, the architectural traditions, and the deep roots that had shaped this city's character since before the Civil War.