Stand on the bluff at Hermann Heights and you are looking up at a copper warrior with a raised sword, a man who fought Rome and somehow ended up watching over a prairie town in Minnesota. Below him, brick storefronts run in a tidy grid to the river. A brewery has made beer on the edge of town since before the Civil War. On certain afternoons a clock tower in the heart of downtown opens up and a little polka band rotates into view while bells ring out over Minnesota Street. This is the world the Germans in New Ulm made.
The Germans in New Ulm did not just settle here. They built a German town from scratch on open ground, named it for a cathedral city back home, and then held onto that identity through war, drought, and a campaign during World War I to scrub German culture out of the state entirely. They are still here, and they are still German about it.
New Ulm: The Place
New Ulm sits about 90 miles southwest of Minneapolis, on a triangle of land where the Cottonwood River meets the Minnesota River in Brown County. U.S. Highway 14 and State Highways 15 and 68 carry traffic in and out across the surrounding farm country. The downtown is laid out on a deliberate grid that climbs from the river flats up to wooded bluffs, lined with brick commercial blocks and modest frame and brick houses built by the families who first farmed and brewed here.
How New Ulm Became the Most German Town in America
Before the Germans
This corner of the Minnesota River Valley was Dakota homeland long before any town existed here. Through a pair of treaties signed in 1851, the Dakota ceded most of their land in the region to the United States and were pressed onto a narrow reservation along the upper Minnesota River. The valley was opened to settlement, and the prairie that would become New Ulm was suddenly available to anyone with the capital and the nerve to claim it.
That arrangement set the stage for both the German colony and the catastrophe that would strike it a decade later. The land was fertile, the river gave access to Mankato and St. Paul downstream, and to a group of German idealists looking for a place to start over, it looked like a blank page.
The Germans Arrive
The town began with two waves of organized German settlement. In 1854 the German Land Company of Chicago, made up largely of young immigrants from Württemberg in southern Germany, scouted the site and laid claim to it. They named it New Ulm, after Ulm, the old cathedral city on the Danube that many of them had left behind.
The colony nearly failed for lack of money. In 1856 it was rescued by the Settlement Association of the Turner Society, a national network of German gymnastic clubs whose members were freethinkers: liberal, anti-slavery, opposed to prohibition, and devoted to free public education and the separation of church and state. After nativist mobs had attacked Germans in eastern cities, the Turners decided to build a colony of their own on the frontier. They merged with the Chicago group, supplied fresh capital, and sent hundreds of colonists west.
In 1858 the surveyor Christian Prignitz drew up the town plan that still shapes downtown today, with Turner Hall, the courthouse, and the public school placed at the center and the avenues named for Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine. It was a German town with an American civic creed stamped right into the street map.
A third group followed close behind. German-speaking Catholics from Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire, began arriving within two years of the town’s founding. Most came from small farm villages around Hostau, Muttersdorf, and Ronsperg, where people spoke a German dialect, and they settled the townships ringing New Ulm. They became known as the German-Bohemians, a distinct strand woven into the same community.
New Ulm at Its Peak
By 1870 the town was overwhelmingly German. Of its roughly 1,310 residents that year, about 94 percent were either German-born or of German descent. The newcomers brought the institutions of home with them and rebuilt them on the prairie: a Turnverein for gymnastics and debate, singing societies, the Sons of Hermann fraternal order, German-language newspapers, and breweries.
Daily life ran in German. Business was done in German, church was held in German, and children learned the language at home and at school. The chain ran straight back to specific villages in Württemberg and Bohemia, with letters home and arriving relatives keeping the pipeline of settlers flowing for decades. By the 1880s and 1890s the town felt secure enough in its identity to start building monuments to it.
The Change
The community’s confidence ran straight into the First World War. New Ulm’s Germans were deeply skeptical of a war against their homeland, and in an unofficial local vote in April 1917 residents came out against entering the war by a lopsided margin. On July 25, 1917, a rally organized by Mayor Louis Fritsche, city attorney Albert Pfaender, and county auditor Louis Vogel drew thousands of people to Turner Park to question the constitutionality of the draft.
The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, a powerful wartime body, treated the gathering as sedition. That December the governor removed Fritsche and Pfaender from office, branding the rally unpatriotic. Across the state, German place names were changed, German was dropped from schools, and German speakers were boycotted and harassed. In New Ulm the murals inside Turner Hall’s Rathskeller were even covered over to hide their German scenes.
The town did not break. By 1920 both Fritsche and Pfaender had been returned to their old offices, and the murals eventually came back into the light. But the lesson stuck, and the public face of German culture in New Ulm grew quieter for a generation before it came roaring back as celebration in the decades after.
The Landmarks of New Ulm
The Hermann Monument (Hermann Heights, off Center Street) is the town’s signature. Built with money raised by Sons of Hermann lodges across the country and championed by the New Ulm architect and organizer Julius Berndt, it honors Hermann, or Arminius, the chieftain who defeated three Roman legions in the year 9. The copper statue was completed around 1889, but it sat in storage until enough money came in for the base, and the finished monument, 102 feet from foundation to sword tip, was dedicated on September 25, 1897, during a national meeting of the order.
August Schell Brewing Company (1860 Schell Road) is the second-oldest family-owned brewery in the United States, behind only Yuengling. August Schell, born in Durbach in Baden and a member of the Turner Society, founded it in 1860 with partner Jacob Bernhardt on a wooded site along the Cottonwood River south of town. The brewery survived the Dakota War untouched, survived Prohibition by selling near-beer, soft drinks, and candy, and in 2002 bought the rights to Grain Belt, the old Minneapolis brand. The Marti family, descended from the Schells, still runs it.
New Ulm Turner Hall (102 South State Street) is the oldest Turner Hall in the country still serving its original purpose. The Turnverein was founded in November 1856, its first wooden hall burned in the 1862 battles, and the building was rebuilt and expanded into the brick structure that stands today. Its Rathskeller, decorated with German murals first painted by Guido Scheller in 1873, is reckoned among the oldest continuously operating bars in Minnesota.
The Glockenspiel (Fourth North and Minnesota Streets) is a 45-foot musical clock tower in the heart of downtown, one of the first free-standing carillon towers in North America. It was funded largely by a gift from Clara Schonlau and dedicated in 1980, and its 37 bronze bells were cast in Holland. When it performs, twelve figurines from the town’s history rotate into view, including a small polka band that is swapped for a nativity scene at Christmas.
Martin Luther College (1995 Luther Court) sits on a wooded bluff overlooking the river valley. It began in 1884 as Dr. Martin Luther College, founded to train pastors and teachers for the Minnesota Synod, a forerunner of today’s Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. In 1995 it merged with Northwestern College of Watertown, Wisconsin, to become the synod’s college of ministry, and it remains a defining institution of the town’s German Lutheran life.
The German-Bohemian Immigrant Monument (German Park, on Center Street) honors the Catholic settlers who came from villages in Bohemia. A bronze sculpture of an immigrant family carrying their belongings, it stands as a reminder that not every German in New Ulm came from Germany proper, and that the town’s story has more than one origin.
Where the New Ulm Germans Came From
The first settlers came from Württemberg in the German southwest, the region around the original Ulm, and they carried the name of that Danube city with them to Minnesota. Many were shaped by the failed revolutions of 1848 and the political turmoil that followed, which is why so many were freethinkers and Turners drawn to a colony built on free thought, free schools, and communal effort.
The other major strand came from German-speaking Bohemia, then under the Austrian Empire and now part of the Czech Republic. These families left small Catholic farm villages such as Hostau, Muttersdorf, and Ronsperg and chose New Ulm deliberately, following relatives and neighbors who had gone before. Together the Württemberg freethinkers and the Bohemian Catholics gave New Ulm a German identity with two distinct roots feeding the same trunk.
New Ulm Today
New Ulm has around 14,000 residents, and German ancestry still runs deeper here than almost anywhere else in the country. After the 2000 census the town was widely called the most German place in America, with roughly two-thirds of residents claiming German descent, and the label stuck even as other towns have since edged ahead in pure ethnic uniformity. You can still hear it in the polka on the local radio and see it on the brats and sauerkraut at the summer festivals.
The heritage is a working part of daily life, not a museum piece. Schell’s is thriving and still in family hands. The Bavarian Blast festival fills the fairgrounds every July, Oktoberfest takes over the first weekends of October, and the Glockenspiel still rings out over downtown. New Ulm long billed itself as a polka capital, and the music has never really left.
What makes the place unusual is the continuity. The families who farm the surrounding townships, pour the beer, and keep the lodges going often trace straight back to the Württemberg and Bohemian settlers who arrived in the 1850s. In New Ulm the German story did not fade into nostalgia. It simply kept going, one generation handing it to the next.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Germans settle in New Ulm, Minnesota?
The Germans in New Ulm settled here in two organized waves: the German Land Company of Chicago claimed the site in 1854, and the freethinking Turner Society rescued the struggling colony in 1856. They wanted a place to build a German community around free thought, free schools, and self-sufficiency, on fertile land in the Minnesota River Valley.
Is New Ulm still a German town today?
Yes. New Ulm remains one of the most German places in America, with roughly two-thirds of its residents claiming German ancestry in recent census figures. The Germans in New Ulm keep the heritage alive through Schell’s brewery, the Glockenspiel, polka music, and German festivals like Bavarian Blast and Oktoberfest.
What are the most famous landmarks in New Ulm?
The best-known landmark is the Hermann Monument, a 102-foot copper statue dedicated in 1897. Other signatures include the August Schell Brewing Company, founded in 1860, the historic Turner Hall and its Rathskeller, and the downtown Glockenspiel, a free-standing carillon clock tower dedicated in 1980.
Where did the Germans in New Ulm come from?
Most of the first settlers came from Württemberg in southern Germany, the region around the original city of Ulm. A second major group, the German-Bohemians, came from German-speaking Catholic villages in Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire and now in the Czech Republic.
When did Germans first arrive in New Ulm?
German settlers first arrived in 1854, when the German Land Company of Chicago founded the town. The Turner Society’s colonists followed in 1856, and German-Bohemian farmers began settling the surrounding townships within about two years of the founding.
If your family’s story passed through New Ulm or any of the German colonies that took root across the American Midwest, from the Franconian settlers of Frankenmuth, Michigan to the Rhinelanders of Hermann, Missouri, the threads are worth following. You can trace similar journeys among the German settlers of Fredericksburg, Texas and the German Catholics who shaped St. Cloud, Minnesota.