Elberfeld: A German Hometown Transplanted to Indiana

Elberfeld, a small town in the northwest corner of Warrick County near Evansville, was founded by German immigrants who named their new community after Elberfeld, Germany, the industrial city in the Rhineland that many of them had left behind. A post office opened as early as eighteen sixty-eight, and the town was formally mapped out in eighteen eighty-five. The naming practice was common among nineteenth-century immigrant communities across the Midwest: you carried your home's name with you as a kind of anchor in unfamiliar territory.

The German Elberfeld eventually merged with neighboring Barmen in nineteen twenty-nine, and the new city was renamed Wuppertal in nineteen thirty. The Indiana version never grew large, sitting today at just over six hundred people, but it still carries the name of a German city that no longer exists under that name.