German City Names in the USA: Explore the Immigration Legacy

2023-08-25 07:00:00

Infographic Is your city also in the USA? Find out

The city of “New Braunfels” was founded in Texas in 1845 by German immigrants

© Moab Republic / Adobe Stock

Some people in the USA may have already stumbled across names that are well known to us Germans. Mecklenburg County, for example, in the state of North Carolina. Our infographic shows how immigration from Germany is still reflected in the naming of American cities today

You like to keep what you know. At least that’s what many Germans will think Emigrants thought when they founded settlements in the USA in past centuries. Because Detmold, Braunfels, Fulda and Paderborn are not only in Germany, but also in the USA.

Graphic: German city names in the USA

If you are looking for the namesake of your hometown in the USA, write “, USA” following the place name in the search field (example: Flensburg, USA).

After the First and Second World Wars, the spellings of many German city names were anglicized. There are 21 Frankforts in the United States – but they do not appear on our map. Only exact matches of the official place names are shown.

Until the 20th century, Germans were the largest immigrant group to the United States. Today, most of the American population has German ancestry. The US census from 2000 shows: More than 49.2 million of the 282 million Americans at the turn of the millennium (today there are around 323 million) said they were descended from Germans. More recent surveys, such as the 2015 American Community Survey, reach a similar conclusion.

Graphic: Proportion of the population of German origin per federal state

The first German settlement in the USA was founded in 1683 by 13 families from the Krefeld area, the so-called “Original 13”. Her name: Germantown. Today, the once independent community is a district of Philadelphia. African Americans now make up the majority of the population.

Inspired, among other things, by a popular travel report by Gottfried Duden, a particularly large number of Germans settled in the Midwest. Even today, the number of people of German descent is highest in percentage terms in the states of Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Wisconsin.

There is another special feature in Pennsylvania, where almost a quarter of the population has German roots. Because the so-called Pennsylvania German has been preserved there to this day, even with your own newspaper.

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