They called it Das Alte Südende, the Old South End. You will not find that name on any modern street sign in Columbus. But walk the narrow brick streets below downtown today, past the one-and-a-half-story cottages with their limestone foundations and gabled roofs, and you are standing inside the most complete German neighbourhood the city ever built. By 1865, roughly one in three people in Columbus was German, and this is where they made their home.
German Village: The Place
German Village sits just south of downtown Columbus, hemmed in on its northern edge by the Interstate 70 and 71 freeway and bordered to the west by the old Brewery District along the Scioto River. It covers about 233 acres of densely built blocks, much of it paved with original brick.
The housing is the giveaway. Small brick cottages and rowhouses, built tight to the sidewalk, with wrought-iron fences and tidy back gardens. This was a working-class district from the start, and the modest scale of its buildings still tells you so.
How German Village Became German
Before the Germans
The land south of the young state capital was first claimed in the early 1800s, when Columbus itself was barely a town carved out of forest along the Scioto. The area was platted for development in 1814, but it stayed thinly settled farmland and scattered lots for a generation.
What it had going for it was room and cheap ground close to the river. When German families began arriving, they found an empty edge of the city waiting to be filled.
The Germans Arrive
The first German immigrants moved into the South End in the 1830s, and the numbers swelled through the 1840s and 1850s. They were fleeing crop failures, crowded land, military conscription, and the political upheaval that followed the failed revolutions of 1848.
One arrival shaped the whole district. Louis Hoster, a German immigrant who first passed through Columbus on the Fourth of July in 1833, came back and opened a brewery on Front Street in 1836. Beer needed bricklayers, coopers, maltsters, and draymen, and the work pulled more Germans south of the city year after year.
This is chain migration at its most concrete. One family wrote home, another followed, and a brewery worker brought his brother across to swing a hammer. By 1850, half of all new construction in Columbus was happening in this one neighbourhood.
German Village at Its Peak
By the 1860s the South End was a fully German world. You could hear German spoken in the shops, the schools, and the churches. The men worked as brewers, carpenters, tanners, bricklayers, stonecutters, and bakers, and after their shifts they relaxed in beer gardens scattered through the district.
Singing societies and gymnastic clubs, the Gesangverein and the Turnverein, gave the community its social spine. Faith anchored it too. Construction of St. Mary Catholic Church began in 1866, and the parish became the spiritual centre of German Columbus.
The brewing trade boomed alongside the homes. Hoster grew into one of the largest breweries between New York and the Mississippi, producing hundreds of thousands of barrels a year by the turn of the century. Beer money built much of the brick you still see today.
This pattern of a German enclave forming around a brewery and a parish repeated across the American Midwest. You can trace the same story in the Germans in Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati, just down the road in southern Ohio, and on a grander scale in the German community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The Change
The unravelling came fast, and it came from outside. When the United States entered the First World War, anti-German feeling swept Columbus like much of the country. In 1918, German books were burned at the foot of the Schiller statue, and the city council renamed the German street names and even the park itself.
Then came Prohibition. The breweries that had built the neighbourhood went dark from 1920, killing the jobs and the gathering places in one stroke. German was dropped from the schools, and families who could afford to move began drifting away.
The hardest blow was the bulldozer. By the 1950s, city planners had branded the South End a slum, and roughly a third of the old German neighbourhood was demolished. A new highway sliced it off from downtown, leaving the cottages cut adrift and cheap.
And then, against every expectation, it was saved. In 1960 a city accountant named Frank Fetch bought a crumbling house on South Wall Street and set about restoring it himself. That same year the city renamed the area German Village, and Fetch gathered nearly 200 neighbours to found the German Village Society in 1960.
The Society pushed the city to rezone the district away from industry and toward homes, and in 1963 Columbus created the German Village Historic District in its zoning code. The first Haus und Garten Tour, also in 1960, brought hundreds of curious visitors to see restored homes and gardens. The rescue had begun.
The Landmarks of German Village
Schmidt’s Sausage Haus, 240 E. Kossuth Street. The Schmidt family business goes back to 1886, when German immigrant J. Fred Schmidt, born just north of Frankfurt, opened a meatpacking house in the heart of the village. His grandson George opened the full-service restaurant in 1967, and the Bahama Mama sausage and the cream puffs still draw queues today.
St. Mary Catholic Church, 684 S. Third Street. Begun in 1866 and later crowned with a steeple that rises 197 feet, St. Mary was the religious heart of German Columbus and remains an active parish. Its spire is still the tallest thing in the village.
Schiller Park, City Park Avenue. The city bought this green in 1867, and in 1891 German residents dedicated a statue of the poet Friedrich Schiller here. Renamed Washington Park in the anti-German panic of 1918, it was returned to the name Schiller Park in 1930 and is now the second-oldest park in Columbus.
The Book Loft, 631 S. Third Street. Opened in 1977 inside pre-Civil War buildings that once held a saloon and a nickelodeon cinema, the Book Loft has grown through eight expansions into a maze of 32 rooms of books. It is one of the largest independent bookstores in the country.
The Brewery District, west of German Village. Louis Hoster’s 1836 brewery launched a whole cluster of German breweries along the river ravine. Prohibition shut them, but the Hoster name was revived in 2024 with a new taproom pouring its historic Gold Top lager again.
Frank Fetch Park, Beck and Jaeger Streets. A small pocket park named for the man who started the rescue. It sits where Fetch’s own restoration efforts began, a quiet monument to the citizen who refused to let the bulldozers win.
Where the German Village Germans Came From
Many of the families who settled the South End came from the small towns and villages of southwestern Germany, close to the Rhine. Louis Hoster himself came from the Rheinpfalz, the Rhineland Palatinate, and others arrived from Bavaria, Württemberg, and Hesse.
They left for ordinary, painful reasons: too little land split among too many heirs, failed harvests, heavy taxes, and the political wreckage of 1848. Word of cheap lots and brewery work travelled back across the Atlantic, and the same regions kept sending people to the same Columbus streets. The same homeland regions also fed other Midwestern enclaves, from the Bavarian settlers of Frankenmuth, Michigan to the wider German Midwest.
German Village Today
German Village today is one of the most celebrated historic preservation districts in the United States. More than 1,600 buildings have been restored since 1960, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 30 December 1974, and it is often described as the largest privately funded historic district on that register.
The people who live behind the brick facades now are mostly not German by descent. The neighbourhood is prosperous and sought-after, its cottages restored to a standard the original bricklayers could scarcely have imagined. The German identity survives less in bloodlines than in the streets, the names, and the institutions the community left behind.
But the heritage is far from dead. The German Village Society still runs the Haus und Garten Tour every June, drawing thousands; the 64th tour ran in late June 2025. Schmidt’s still serves sausage, St. Mary still rings its bells, and the brick streets the Germans laid still carry their grandchildren’s footsteps. The story of this enclave is layered like the cities that grew up around it, much as Toledo’s Birmingham neighbourhood holds the memory of its Hungarian community a couple of hours to the north.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Germans settle in German Village, Columbus?
Germans settled in the South End of Columbus from the 1830s because the land was cheap, close to the Scioto River, and near the breweries that hired German labour. Louis Hoster’s 1836 brewery in particular drew waves of German bricklayers, coopers, and carpenters. Chain migration did the rest, as each settled family brought relatives across from the same regions of Germany.
Is German Village still German today?
Not in population. Most current residents are not of German descent, and German Village is now a prosperous, restored historic district. The German heritage survives in the architecture, street layout, place names, and institutions like Schmidt’s, St. Mary Church, and the annual Haus und Garten Tour.
What are the most famous German landmarks in German Village?
The best-known landmarks are Schmidt’s Sausage Haus, dating to 1886, and St. Mary Catholic Church, begun in 1866 with a 197-foot steeple. Schiller Park, the Book Loft bookstore, and the nearby Brewery District founded by Louis Hoster in 1836 round out the essential stops for anyone tracing the Germans in German Village, Columbus.
Where in Germany did the German Village settlers come from?
Most came from southwestern Germany near the Rhine, including the Rhineland Palatinate, Bavaria, Württemberg, and Hesse. They left because of land shortages, failed harvests, heavy taxes, and the failed revolutions of 1848. Word of brewery jobs and cheap lots kept the same regions sending people to the same Columbus streets.
When did Germans first arrive in German Village?
The first German immigrants moved into the Columbus South End in the 1830s, with the heaviest settlement coming through the 1840s and 1850s. By 1865 roughly one in three Columbus residents was German, and the South End was the centre of that community.
If your family’s story passed through German Village, or any of the places the Germans made home across the American Midwest, Atlas of Home can help trace that journey. From a village in the Rhineland Palatinate to a brick cottage in the Old South End, the threads of Das Alte Südende brickwork run all the way to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
Sources: German Village on Wikipedia and the German Village Society history archive.