The Cathedral of St. Peter rises over a brick downtown that runs uphill from the Illinois bank of the Mississippi. Its limestone spire was modelled on Exeter Cathedral in Devon, and on a quiet Sunday morning in 1870 you would have walked past it through a town where roughly nine in ten people were German by birth or descent. They came not just from poverty but from politics. Some of them came carrying Virgil.
Belleville, Illinois, was once called the most German town in America. It earned the title twice. Once through sheer numbers, and once through an extraordinary concentration of educated political refugees who arrived after the failed German revolutions of the 1830s and 1848, settled on the prairie east of St. Louis, and proceeded to farm by day and read Cicero by lamplight. Their neighbours, watching all this, gave them a nickname that stuck. They called them the Latin Farmers.
The Place
Belleville sits in St. Clair County, about fifteen miles south-east of downtown St. Louis, across the Mississippi River and just inside Illinois. The county is the oldest in the state, established in 1790 when the territory was still on the western frontier of the new republic.
The town itself was laid out in 1814, on rolling land between the river bluffs and the coalfields of southern Illinois. Today the population is around 41,000. Old brick storefronts and 19th-century houses line the streets that climb up from the Public Square, and the spire of St. Peter’s is still visible from blocks away.
How It Became German
Before the Germans
Before the Germans, Belleville was a small American frontier town of mostly English-speaking settlers from Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. It was a county seat with a courthouse on the square, a Presbyterian streak, and not much else. That changed quickly.
The First Wave
The first significant German arrivals came in the 1830s. Many were intellectuals and professionals fleeing the political crackdown that followed the failed liberal uprisings in the German states. They were university-educated, often radicalised, and looking for somewhere to start again.
A great many landed in St. Louis. But St. Louis was in Missouri, a slave state, and a striking number of these new Germans were appalled by what they found. They crossed back over the Mississippi, into free Illinois, and settled in the country around Belleville.
One of them was Gustav Koerner. Born in Frankfurt in 1809, he had been jailed for his part in the 1833 Frankfurt putsch, escaped, and made his way to America. He settled in the Shiloh Valley just outside Belleville in 1834. Within a decade he was practising law in town, sitting in the Illinois House of Representatives, and on his way to the Illinois Supreme Court. He served as Lieutenant Governor of Illinois from 1853 to 1857. In 1862 his friend Abraham Lincoln appointed him United States Minister to Spain, where he worked to keep the Spanish crown from siding with the Confederacy.
The Latin Farmers
Koerner was not unusual. The Shiloh Valley settlement around Belleville became one of the best-known concentrations of what historians later called the Lateinische Bauern, or Latin Farmers. They were doctors, lawyers, theologians, journalists, and graduates of the great German universities, trying their hand at corn and wheat on the Illinois prairie.
Their neighbours found them peculiar. The newcomers, the story went, knew more about Virgil and Cicero than about ploughing. They founded reading societies and literary circles. In 1836, a group of them established what is generally regarded as the first public library in Illinois, located in Belleville. They started choral groups, drama groups, and one of the earliest kindergartens in the country.
The Forty-Eighters
The second wave came after 1848, when liberal revolutions across the German states collapsed under the weight of monarchist counter-attack. Friedrich Hecker, a Baden lawyer who had led an armed uprising against the Grand Duke, fled into Switzerland and then to America. He bought a farm near Belleville and lived there for the rest of his life, except for a brief return to Germany in 1849 to try to relight the revolution and another absence to fight for the Union in the American Civil War.
Hecker became a kind of patron saint of the German-American left. He stumped for Lincoln in 1860, raised a regiment, and was a celebrated public speaker. His farmhouse in St. Clair County drew visiting Germans for decades.
Belleville at Its Peak
By 1870, the German imprint on Belleville was overwhelming. Roughly nine in ten residents were German-born or of recent German descent. German was the language of business on the square, of the schools, of the churches, of the beer halls, and of the newspapers. The Belleville German abolitionist movement was organised and active. Veterans of the Civil War, many of them German immigrants, came home and threw themselves into civic life.
In 1866 a group of those returning veterans and other German citizens founded the Belleville Philharmonic Society. Its first concert took place on January 26, 1867, under the conductor Theodore Decker. It is still performing today, which makes it the second-oldest continuously operating community orchestra in the United States.
The Change
The shift came slowly. Anti-German feeling during the First World War silenced German-language newspapers and schools across the Midwest, and Belleville was not spared. German signs came down. Families anglicised names. The Second World War deepened the retreat.
By the second half of the 20th century the Germanness of Belleville had moved inward. It was still in the surnames on the mailboxes, in the architecture, in the parish records, and in the Oktoberfest on the Square. But it was no longer the public, daily, audible thing it had been in 1870.
The Landmarks
Cathedral of St. Peter, 200 West Harrison Street. The mother church of the Catholic Diocese of Belleville and the largest cathedral in Illinois. The first wooden chapel on the site was built in 1842, when the parish was called St. Barnabas. The current English Gothic Revival building, modelled on Exeter Cathedral, was dedicated in 1866 and reflects both the wealth and the confidence of the city’s 19th-century German Catholic community.
Belleville Philharmonic Society, founded 1866. Set up by a group of mostly German citizens, including Civil War veterans returning to St. Clair County. Its first concert in January 1867 began an unbroken run that has now lasted more than a century and a half. Today the Society includes a full orchestra, a chorale, and a youth orchestra, performing at the Lindenwood University Belleville Campus and other venues around the city.
The Belleville Public Library, founded 1836. Established by Gustav Koerner and a small group of Latin Farmers, on the suggestion of Dr. Anton Schott. It is generally regarded as the first public library in Illinois, predating the Illinois State Library by three years. The institution is still operating, in a later building, as the city’s main library.
The Stag Brewery, North Belleville. Brewing in Belleville goes back to the 1830s, but the most famous local lager was Stag, born in 1907 at the Western Brewery. In 1912 Henry Louis Griesedieck bought the brewery and began making Stag from a German recipe. By the mid-1950s the Griesedieck Western Brewery, on the north side of Belleville, was one of the largest in the country. The plant closed in 1988. The brand survives under Pabst, and old Stag enamel signs still turn up in St. Clair County bars.
Gustave Koerner House, 200 Abend Street. The town home of Gustav Koerner and his wife Sophie, who lived there for decades. It is preserved by a non-profit restoration group and stands on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the most direct material links to the Latin Farmer generation.
Hofbräuhaus Belleville, near Carlyle Avenue. A more recent landmark, opened in 2018 as a 30,000-square-foot Bavarian beer hall licensed from the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. The franchise has had a turbulent run, including closures and reopenings, but its arrival in Belleville rather than in a wealthier suburb of St. Louis says something about where German identity still feels at home in the region.
Where They Came From
Belleville’s Germans were not from one place. They came from a constellation of states and statelets that did not yet form a single country. Württemberg, Baden, and the Palatinate in the south-west sent farmers and craftsmen, many of them squeezed by failed harvests, military conscription, and partible inheritance laws that shaved family holdings down to nothing. Hesse and the Rhineland sent more of the same.
The intellectual layer came from across the German university system. Koerner was from Frankfurt, Hecker from Baden, and others from Heidelberg, Tübingen, Göttingen, and Bonn. What pulled them all to St. Clair County was the same simple chain. One family, or one Forty-Eighter, settled near Belleville. A letter went home. A cousin followed. Then a brother. Then a village.
The Mississippi did the rest. Most arrived through New Orleans or New York, then took river steamers up to St. Louis, then crossed into Illinois to find people who already spoke their language.
Belleville Today
Belleville is no longer a German town in the way it was in 1870. The census today shows a mixed city, with a significant African American population and growing Latino and South Asian communities, alongside the descendants of the old German families whose surnames still fill the phone book.
What remains is mostly architectural and ceremonial. The Cathedral of St. Peter still towers over the downtown. The Philharmonic still plays its season. The Public Library still lends books. Each September, the Belleville Oktoberfest fills the Public Square with bratwurst, lederhosen, and a wiener dog race, raising money for the Belleville Sister Cities organisation that has linked the city with Paderborn, in North Rhine-Westphalia, since 1990.
For most Belleville families with German blood, the connection is now generations deep. A grandmother who still cooked rouladen. A great-grandfather buried at Green Mount Catholic Cemetery with a German inscription. A surname pronounced the American way. The Latin Farmers themselves have been gone for more than a century, but the library they founded, the cathedral they helped build, the orchestra they started, and the town they shaped are all still standing on the same Illinois hill.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Germans settle in Belleville, Illinois?
Germans settled in Belleville from the 1830s onward because Illinois was a free state, the land was cheap and good, and an early group of educated political refugees from the failed German revolutions, known as the Latin Farmers, established a community there that pulled in family and friends through chain migration. By 1870, roughly 90 percent of the city was German-born or of German descent.
Who were the Latin Farmers of Belleville?
The Latin Farmers were German university graduates, doctors, lawyers, and journalists, who settled around Belleville in the 1830s and 1840s and tried to combine farming with intellectual life. Their classical educations gave them their nickname. Gustav Koerner, later Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, was the most famous of them.
Is Belleville still a German town today?
Not in the way it was in 1870. The city of around 41,000 is now ethnically and culturally mixed, but German heritage remains visible in landmarks like the Cathedral of St. Peter, the Belleville Philharmonic Society, the annual Belleville Oktoberfest on the Public Square, and the city’s Sister Cities link with Paderborn, Germany.
What are the most famous German landmarks in Belleville?
The Cathedral of St. Peter on Harrison Street, the Belleville Philharmonic Society, the Belleville Public Library founded by the Latin Farmers in 1836, the Gustave Koerner House on Abend Street, and the former Stag Brewery on the north side are the principal landmarks tied to the city’s German history.
Where in Germany did the Belleville Germans come from?
They came mostly from the south-western German states of Württemberg, Baden, and the Palatinate, with significant numbers from Hesse and the Rhineland. The intellectual Forty-Eighters who shaped the town’s character came from across the German university system, including Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Tübingen.
When did Germans first arrive in Belleville?
The first significant wave of German immigrants reached Belleville in the 1830s, after the failed liberal uprisings in the German states. A larger wave followed the 1848 revolutions, bringing political refugees such as Friedrich Hecker. By 1870 the German presence in the city was overwhelming.
If your family’s story passed through Belleville, or through any of the German towns and provinces that sent people to the Illinois prairie, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From the villages of Baden and Württemberg, to the Public Square in Belleville, to wherever you are now.