They called it das Deutsch-Athen Amerikas. The German Athens of America. By 1860, German immigrants were a majority in the city, and by 1900, more than a third of Milwaukeeans had been born in Germany themselves. Add the children of those immigrants and over half the city was German by blood. You could buy a newspaper in German, take confession in German, learn algebra in German, and order another beer in German without ever needing a word of English.
And then, almost overnight, that world went quiet.
Milwaukee, the Place
Milwaukee sits on the west shore of Lake Michigan, about ninety miles north of Chicago, at the mouth of three rivers that meet inside the city itself. The original settlement was three rival towns: Solomon Juneau’s east-bank Juneautown for the Yankees, Byron Kilbourn’s west-bank Kilbourntown for the new arrivals, and George Walker’s south-side Walker’s Point.
The hills rise gently away from the lake. The old housing stock is brick and cream-coloured brick in particular, the soft yellow local clay that gives the city its nickname. Industrial neighbourhoods cluster along the river valleys, where the breweries and tanneries went up. The grid is interrupted only by the rivers and by Wisconsin Avenue, the broad east-west spine that runs from the lakefront up to the old west-side mansions.
How Milwaukee Became German
Before the Germans
The three founders staked their claims in the 1830s, on land taken from the Potawatomi and Ho-Chunk after the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. The first arrivals were New Englanders and New Yorkers, speculators and merchants drawn by the lake harbour and the timber inland. Milwaukee was incorporated as a city in 1846, the same year the German-speaking women of the St. Ann’s Frauenverein laid the cornerstone for what would become Old St. Mary’s Church.
By then the demographic shift was already under way. Byron Kilbourn had quietly made it his project to recruit Germans to the west bank of the Milwaukee River, both to populate his addition and to outvote his Yankee rivals. It worked. As one observer noted in 1891, the northwestern section of the city was “all Germany.”
The Germans Arrive
The first wave came in the 1840s and early 1850s. A group of twenty Old Lutheran families from eastern Pomerania had already founded the village of Freistadt just north of Milwaukee in 1839, fleeing the Prussian Union of Churches that forced Lutheran and Reformed congregations to merge. They were the leading edge of a much larger movement.
Then came the Forty-Eighters. After the failed revolutions of 1848 across the German states, thousands of educated, liberal political refugees left for America. Many landed in Milwaukee. They were lawyers, journalists, doctors, musicians, teachers. They were also exactly the people no autocratic monarchy wanted, and exactly the people a young American city needed.
Carl Schurz, who had escaped from the besieged fortress of Rastatt before Prussian forces took it, set up a law practice in Milwaukee in the 1850s. Mathilde Franziska Anneke, who had edited a feminist newspaper in Germany and ridden alongside her artilleryman husband during the revolution, ran a progressive girls’ school in the city. They organised Turnverein societies, musical clubs, theatre companies, and the German-language newspapers that would soon outnumber the English ones.
Milwaukee at Its Peak
The 1860s through the 1890s were the high years. Pomeranians, Bavarians, Saxons, Hessians, Westphalians, Rhinelanders, and Württembergers kept arriving by ship to New York, then by train to the lake, then on foot up the cream-brick streets to relatives who had a spare room and a job lead. Chain migration was relentless. Whole villages moved across.
And the beer made the city famous. Jacob Best had set up the Empire Brewery on Chestnut Street in 1844. His son Phillip ran it. His son-in-law, a young Lake Michigan steamship captain named Frederick Pabst who had come from Thuringia in 1848 as a twelve-year-old, joined the firm in 1864 and renamed it after himself in 1889. By the mid-1870s it was the largest brewery in the United States.
Frederick Miller, from Württemberg, bought the Plank Road Brewery in 1855 and built it into Miller Brewing Company. August Krug had opened a small brewery in 1849; when he died in 1856, his bookkeeper Joseph Schlitz married the widow Krug and gave the business his name. Valentin Blatz, from Bavaria, married a brewer’s widow of his own in 1851 and built Blatz into the city’s third-largest producer. By 1900, three of the ten biggest breweries in America were Milwaukee German operations.
The wealth and the workforce both lived nearby. Brewers’ Hill rose just north of downtown, a dense quarter of frame and brick houses where the cooper lived next door to the foreman. Beer gardens ran along the river. The Schlitz Palm Garden on Third Street was the grandest indoor public space in the city. On Sundays families crossed town to picnic on dark lager and bratwurst.
The Milwaukee Turners had been founded in 1853 by Forty-Eighters who believed in a sound mind in a sound body and a free republic to house both. By 1882 they were building a four-storey Cream City brick clubhouse with a gymnasium, a theatre, and a beer hall under one roof. Victor Berger, the future Socialist congressman, was later among its leaders. The Turners were the bridge between German liberalism and the city’s distinctive twentieth-century left.
The Change
April 1917 broke the world that had been built. The United States declared war on Germany, and Milwaukee, the most German major city in America, was suddenly suspect. German-language instruction was barred from the public schools. Theatres that staged German plays closed. Books in German were burned in town squares across Wisconsin. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage” in the newspapers, briefly, until the joke died of embarrassment.
The most visible casualty in Milwaukee was the Germania Building on Wells Street, with its three-ton bronze statue of Germania, the personification of the German nation, perched on the roof. The building was quietly renamed the Brumder Building. The statue came down. The downtown German-language newspaper Germania-Herold did its best, but by the 1920s the language itself was in retreat. Parents stopped teaching it to their children. Parishes switched their sermons to English.
Prohibition arrived in 1920 and gutted the breweries that had not yet been gutted by anti-German feeling. Pabst made cheese and soft drinks. Schlitz made chocolate syrup. Miller hung on by producing cereal beverages and malt extract. They came back after 1933, but the world that drank with them was gone. The second war in 1941 finished what the first had begun. German Milwaukee survived as memory and heritage, no longer as everyday life.
The Landmarks of German Milwaukee
Pabst Mansion, 2000 W Wisconsin Avenue. Captain Frederick Pabst commissioned the Flemish Renaissance Revival house in 1890 and moved his family in two years later. Thirty-seven rooms, fourteen fireplaces, carved oak everywhere, and a private chapel imported from a Bavarian palace. Pabst lived in it for twelve years and died there in 1904. It is now a museum and the most complete surviving residence of any American beer baron.
Old St. Mary’s Church, 836 N Broadway. Founded in 1846 by German-speaking Catholic women, designed by the Westphalian immigrant Victor Schulte, built of cream city brick in a restrained Zopfstil that reads as German Federalist. King Ludwig I of Bavaria donated the Annunciation painting above the altar. The bells, cast in Munich, arrived in 1868. It is the oldest church still standing in Milwaukee and the mother church of the city’s German Catholics.
Turner Hall, 1034 N 4th Street. Built in 1882 to 1883 for the Milwaukee Turners, the gymnastic and political society founded by Forty-Eighters in 1853. Romanesque revival, Cream City brick, with a ballroom that has hosted everything from boxing matches to socialist conventions to indie rock shows. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1996. The Milwaukee Turners are still the oldest continuously operating civic organisation in the city.
Usinger’s Famous Sausage, 1030 N Old World Third Street. Fred Usinger arrived from Frankfurt in the late 1870s, took a job in Julia Gaertner’s butcher shop on this site, married her daughter, and took over the business in 1880. The present six-storey Neoclassical building went up in 1906. Five generations later, the smell of curing meat still hits you a block away. The retail counter is open on Saturdays.
Mader’s, 1041 N Old World Third Street. Charles Mader opened the original Comfort restaurant on West Water Street in 1902, after working as a waiter at the Schlitz Palm Garden. The family moved to the present site in the 1930s and built up the Neo-German Renaissance facade between 1952 and 1962. It is now the city’s oldest restaurant: wiener schnitzel, sauerbraten, potato dumplings, strudel. A coat of arms in the lobby. Old waiters in lederhosen.
Brewers’ Hill Historic District. The dense neighbourhood north of downtown where the workers, foremen, and many owners of the nearby Schlitz and Pabst breweries lived from the 1840s onwards. Mostly Italianate and Queen Anne houses on a tight grid of cream brick and clapboard streets. Disinvestment in the mid-twentieth century kept the housing stock intact; the district is now a protected historic neighbourhood and one of the city’s most visually concentrated reminders of nineteenth-century working-class German Milwaukee.
Henry Maier Festival Park, 200 N Harbor Drive. Mayor Maier challenged the city’s German-American community in 1980 to put on a festival of its own. The first German Fest opened on the lakefront in August 1981. Forty-five years later it is still held the last full weekend of July and is the largest German Fest in the United States. Polka, oompah, dachshund races, beer in glass steins, and the lake somewhere off to your right.
Where the Milwaukee Germans Came From
Almost everywhere German was spoken in the nineteenth century. The Wisconsin Historical Society puts Prussia first, then Bavaria, then Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse-Darmstadt. In practice that meant three rolling waves. The 1845-to-1855 wave was mostly southwestern Germans: Hessians, Württembergers, Badeners, Rhinelanders. The 1865-to-1873 wave drew more from the northwest: Westphalians, Hanoverians, Oldenburgers. The 1880-to-1893 wave was largely from the northeast: Pomeranians, East Prussians, Mecklenburgers.
The Forty-Eighters were disproportionately from Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, and the Rhineland. Carl Schurz was from the Rhine Province. Frederick Pabst was from Saxe-Weimar in Thuringia. Frederick Miller was from Riedlingen in Württemberg. Valentin Blatz was from Miltenberg in Lower Franconia. Joseph Schlitz was from Mainz. The map of who built Milwaukee is a fair sample of who lived in mid-century Germany itself.
Milwaukee Today
German remains the single largest reported ancestry in Milwaukee County into the 2020s. That figure has been spread thin by a century of intermarriage and English-only schooling, and you will not hear the language on the bus. But the bones of the old German city are still there if you know where to look.
The Pabst Brewery complex on West Juneau Avenue, dormant for decades after the brewery closed in 1996, has been redeveloped into apartments, offices, a hotel, and a small in-house brewpub that uses the old gravity-fed system. The Schlitz Park complex is a corporate campus that kept the chimney. Lakefront Brewery and Sprecher Brewery, the two oldest of the post-Prohibition revival, both opened in the mid-1980s and both lean explicitly on the city’s German lager tradition.
Mader’s, Usinger’s, Old St. Mary’s, the Turners, German Fest, Brewers’ Hill. The list of things still functioning is longer than the list of things lost. Karl Ratzsch’s, the other great German restaurant downtown, closed in 2017 after ninety-three years, and that loss still aches. The compensation is that the others keep going.
Milwaukee is no longer the German Athens of America in the way it was in 1880. It is a quieter and more layered city than that. But the heritage is not a museum exhibit. It is the brand of mustard on the counter at a Brewers game, the polka set on a Friday night at Lakefront, the cream-brick row up the hill behind the freeway, and the great-grandchildren of a Pomeranian Lutheran weaver who still drive past the church their family helped build and nod.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Germans settle in Milwaukee?
Milwaukee’s founders, especially the west-bank developer Byron Kilbourn, actively recruited German immigrants in the 1840s, both for cheap labour and to outvote the Yankee east bank. The mix of available farmland, cheap industrial work in tanneries and mills, an existing German Catholic and Lutheran infrastructure, and chain migration from earlier arrivals made Milwaukee the natural landing point for Germans heading inland from the East Coast. By 1860 they were the majority population.
Is Milwaukee still German today?
Demographically, German remains the most commonly reported ancestry in Milwaukee County into the 2020s, but a century of intermarriage and English-only schooling has dispersed the community. Culturally, the heritage is visible rather than lived: German Fest every July, Old World Third Street, the breweries, the cream brick, the polka, and a handful of restaurants and butcheries that have outlasted everything around them. It is heritage rather than daily life.
What are the most famous German landmarks in Milwaukee?
The Pabst Mansion on Wisconsin Avenue, Old St. Mary’s Church on Broadway, Turner Hall on North 4th Street, Usinger’s Famous Sausage and Mader’s restaurant on Old World Third Street, the Brewers’ Hill historic district, and Henry Maier Festival Park during German Fest. The Pabst, Miller, and former Schlitz brewery sites also remain visible markers of the German beer-baron era.
Where in Germany did the Milwaukee Germans come from?
From across nineteenth-century Germany, but in three broad waves: southwesterners (Hessians, Württembergers, Badeners, Rhinelanders) in the 1840s and early 1850s, northwesterners (Westphalians, Hanoverians) in the 1860s and early 1870s, and northeasterners (Pomeranians, East Prussians, Mecklenburgers) in the 1880s and early 1890s. Bavarians arrived throughout. The Forty-Eighter political refugees came mostly from Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, and the Rhineland.
When did Germans first arrive in Milwaukee?
The first significant arrivals were Old Lutheran families from eastern Pomerania who founded Freistadt just north of Milwaukee in 1839. German settlement of the city itself accelerated sharply through the 1840s, especially on the west bank, and by 1860 Germans formed a majority of the population. The peak years of German Milwaukee ran from the 1860s through the 1890s, before the First World War broke the public German culture of the city.
If your family’s story passed through Milwaukee, or any of the cities the Germans made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Pomerania or Württemberg to a cream-brick house off Wisconsin Avenue, to wherever you are now.