Maifest and the Town That Preserved Itself
Near Hermann, Missouri
In the eighteen seventies, Hermann residents began celebrating Maifest, a traditional German spring festival. In the early years it was organized around the German school, the last-day-of-school picnic turned civic celebration, with a parade to the city park, food, games, and music. After the two World Wars, the celebration fell out of practice.
Hermann's German identity had been a source of suspicion during both conflicts, and the visible markers of that heritage were downplayed. In nineteen fifty two, a local arts organization called the Brush and Palette Club revived Maifest as a fundraiser to restore the Rotunda Building, an unusual eight-sided structure in the city park that had fallen into disrepair. The first public Maifest drew a crowd far larger than the town was prepared for.
Maifest has been celebrated for decades since. Today it draws tens of thousands of visitors to Hermann each May, filling the steep streets and the parks with music and food and wine. The limestone buildings from the railroad and winemaking era still line the downtown.
The old German school, the old stone commercial blocks, the wine cellars cut into the hillsides, all of it is still here. The German Settlement Society of Philadelphia never built the flat, ordered city it planned on paper in eighteen thirty six. What grew instead, on the rocky bluffs above the Missouri, was something the settlers built themselves, and it is still recognizably theirs.
