Elberfeld: A German Name in Indiana

The town of Elberfeld in Warrick County near Evansville was settled largely by German immigrants who named their new home for Elberfeld, an industrial city in the Rhineland. A post office opened here in eighteen sixty-eight, and the town was formally platted in eighteen eighty-five. Elberfeld, Germany, was known for its textile factories and as an early center of industry in Germany.

The Indiana settlers carried that name across the Atlantic the way so many immigrant communities did, making the landscape of southwestern Indiana a patchwork of German place names reflecting the homelands of the people who built it. The town remains small today, one of dozens of German-named communities stretching across the Indiana countryside.