Stand in the centre of Berne, Indiana, and look up. A 160 foot clock tower rises over a town of barely four thousand people, its faces ticking toward the hours when carved figures glide out to re-enact the arrival of Swiss settlers. The tower is a deliberate copy of the Zytglogge in Bern, Switzerland, and it is the loudest statement of an old truth: the Swiss in Berne, Indiana have never let go of where they came from. For nearly two centuries, the canton of Bern has lived on in this corner of Adams County.
The Place
Berne sits in the flat, fertile farmland of northeastern Indiana, in Adams County, roughly thirty miles south of Fort Wayne. It is a small city, with 4,173 residents recorded in the 2020 census, and it earned the nickname Furniture Capital of Indiana from the manufacturers that once filled its factories.
Drive down Main Street and the architecture announces itself. Steep gabled roofs, decorative timber trim and chalet styling give the downtown the look of a village in the Alps. This is not theme park dressing applied late. It grew from people who built what they knew.
The town is also encircled by one of the largest Amish settlements in the United States, a community whose members speak Bernese German rather than Pennsylvania Dutch. The Swiss thread runs through nearly everything here, from the church on the hill to the cheese shop on the highway. For another community that turned a single canton’s emigration into an American town, see the Swiss in New Glarus, Wisconsin, founded by colonists sent directly from the canton of Glarus.
How It Became Swiss
The story begins not in Indiana but in Switzerland’s Jura Mountains and the Emmental valley of the canton of Bern. For these families, the homeland was a place of beauty and of persecution. They were Anabaptists, descendants of a movement that Swiss authorities had hunted since 1525, when the first arrests and imprisonments of Swiss Anabaptists began.
The penalties were severe. Believers faced forced military service, heavy fines, imprisonment, and in some periods the threat of drowning if they persisted in their faith. Generations lived under that pressure, and by the nineteenth century many decided that America offered the freedom Switzerland would not.
The Baumgartner Brothers, 1838
The first Swiss arrivals reached Adams County in the 1830s, many travelling on from Wayne County, Ohio, where earlier Swiss Mennonites had landed. Christian and Peter Baumgartner arrived in 1838. David Baumgartner joined them in 1839, and the small cluster of farms they established became the seed of everything that followed.
The Baumgartner Church was organised after David’s arrival in 1839, a humble congregation of Anabaptist farmers worshipping in a thinly settled wilderness. A few years later, a second group formed the Munsterberg Mennonite Church, named for the mountain region near Moutier in the Bernese Jura that they had left behind.
Naming Berne, 1852
In 1852 the town itself was platted, and the settlers chose its name with intent. They called it Berne, after the capital of their home canton. By then the community had grown enough to need a proper town, with stores, trades and a centre of gravity beyond the scattered farms.
The two early congregations, Baumgartner and Munsterberg, eventually merged. From that union came the First Mennonite Church of Berne, an institution that would become the spiritual anchor of the town and, in time, a building of national reputation.
The Church on the Hill, 1910 to 1912
As the congregation swelled, it kept outgrowing its walls. The church expanded in 1879, again in 1886, and again in 1899. Each enlargement bought only a few years before the pews filled once more.
So between 1910 and 1912 the congregation undertook something extraordinary for a rural Indiana town. They built a Gothic church of brick with a sanctuary capable of seating roughly 2,000 worshippers across the main floor and balconies. It was dedicated on Easter Sunday, 7 April 1912, and remarkably it was dedicated debt free. The First Mennonite Church became known as the largest Mennonite church of its kind in North America.
The building was more than a place to pray. The General Conference of the Mennonite Church convened in Berne four times, in 1884, 1902, 1926 and 1947, drawing delegates from across the continent to this small Swiss town in the Indiana cornfields.
Furniture and Printing
Faith built the church, but industry built the town. Swiss and Swiss-descended families turned Berne into a furniture centre that gave it a statewide nickname. The Dunbar Furniture Manufacturing Company operated from 1919 to 1993. The Berne Furniture Company ran from 1925 to 2008. Smith Brothers of Berne, founded in 1926, and Habegger Furniture, founded in 1938, are still in operation, carrying the trade into the present.
Berne also became a printing town with a Swiss accent. In 1896 the Swiss Mennonite Fred Rohrer founded the Berne Witness, publishing its first issue on 3 September after buying an old Washington hand press. Every issue carried two pages printed in German for the town’s Swiss and German immigrants, helping them hold their language while learning a new country. The Berne Witness Company, incorporated in 1906, came to be regarded as an official printing house for Mennonite work across the United States.
The Landmarks
Muensterberg Plaza and Clock Tower, downtown Berne. The town’s signature landmark stands 160 feet tall and weighs more than a thousand tons, a deliberate echo of the Zytglogge in Bern, Switzerland. Dedicated in 2010, its glockenspiel sends 5.5 foot animated figures gliding out to re-enact the settlement’s history, with shows at noon, 3, 6 and 9 in the warmer months.
First Mennonite Church, Berne. The Gothic brick church dedicated on Easter Sunday 1912 seats roughly 2,000 and is described as the largest Mennonite church in North America. It remains an active congregation and the spiritual heart of the community its Swiss founders built.
Swiss Heritage Village and Museum. Spread across 26 acres, this open-air museum is one of the largest of its kind in northern Indiana, with around eleven historic buildings. Among them stand a Sweitzer barn, a cheese house, a working cider press, a one-room schoolhouse, and the Baumgartner Church building dating to 1860, a direct link to the town’s first families.
The Canton Tree, Muensterberg Plaza. Beside the clock tower stands a metal tree displaying the crests of every Swiss canton, said to be the only one of its kind in the United States. It is a quiet civics lesson in iron, reminding visitors that Berne’s roots reach back to a whole confederation, not just one city.
Swissland Cheese Company, U.S. Route 27. On the highway south of town, this shop carries an extensive selection of cheeses, many of them locally made, in a region where Swiss dairy traditions never disappeared. It is the kind of place where heritage is something you can taste rather than only read about.
Berne Witness office, downtown. The newspaper Fred Rohrer founded in 1896 still bears the town’s name and continues to chronicle local life. Its century of bilingual printing helped a Swiss immigrant community keep its German language alive well into the American twentieth century.
Swiss Days festival, downtown Berne. Held on the last full weekend of July, the festival fills the streets with more than a hundred food and craft vendors, a parade, polka, and live entertainment. It is the moment each year when the whole town leans hardest into the heritage it carries the other fifty weeks.
Where They Came From
The Swiss of Berne trace overwhelmingly to one place: the canton of Bern. More specifically, the majority descend from the Jura Mountains and the Emmental valley, both within that canton, with the Munsterberg name pointing to the region near Moutier in the Bernese Jura.
They were Anabaptists, members of the faith tradition that Swiss authorities had persecuted for centuries. That persecution shaped the migration. Some came chasing opportunity and good farmland, but many came simply to worship without fear of fines, prison or worse.
Their route was rarely direct. Many families spent a generation or more in Ohio, particularly Wayne County, before pushing west into Adams County, Indiana. They carried with them the Swiss German dialect, the Anabaptist faith, and a tradition of craftsmanship that would later flower in Berne’s furniture factories.
Indiana drew many such immigrant communities into its small towns and growing suburbs. The same state that took in Berne’s Swiss also gathered the Polish in South Bend around its factories, and later the Indians in Westfield and the Indians in Fishers drawn to the prosperous suburbs north of Indianapolis. Each arrived in a different century, but each remade a Hoosier town in the image of somewhere far away.
Berne Today
Berne today is a town that has chosen to wear its origins openly. The 2020 census counted 4,173 residents, and the downtown remains compact and walkable, lined with locally owned shops, the chalet rooflines, and the clock tower presiding over it all.
The heritage is not frozen. Smith Brothers and Habegger still build furniture. The First Mennonite Church still gathers. Swissland Cheese still sells the dairy traditions that came over with the Emmental families. And every July, Swiss Days draws thousands into streets that briefly feel like a transplanted Alpine village.
The surrounding Amish settlement, one of the largest in the country and distinctly Bernese in its German speech, adds another layer of continuity. Berne is not pretending to be Swiss. It is the genuine, evolving descendant of a migration that began with three Baumgartner brothers and a wilderness congregation, and it has spent nearly two centuries refusing to forget the canton it was named for.
For families across Indiana whose surnames trace to the Bernese Jura, this small Adams County town is the closest thing in America to the homeland their ancestors left. The clock still strikes, and the figures still march out, telling the story to anyone who stops to look up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Berne, Indiana named after a city in Switzerland?
The town was platted in 1852 by Swiss Mennonite settlers who came from the canton of Bern. They named their new home after the capital of their home canton. The connection is honoured today by a 160 foot clock tower modelled on the Zytglogge in Bern, Switzerland.
When did the Swiss settle in Berne, Indiana?
The first Swiss arrived in Adams County in the 1830s, with Christian and Peter Baumgartner documented in 1838 and David Baumgartner in 1839. The town of Berne itself was platted in 1852, by which point the Swiss in Berne, Indiana had grown into an established farming and church community.
Where in Switzerland did Berne’s settlers come from?
The majority descended from the canton of Bern, specifically the Jura Mountains and the Emmental valley. Many were Anabaptists fleeing centuries of religious persecution, and a large share travelled by way of Wayne County, Ohio, before settling in Indiana.
What is the largest Mennonite church in Berne?
The First Mennonite Church of Berne, a Gothic brick building dedicated on Easter Sunday, 7 April 1912, seats roughly 2,000 people and is described as the largest Mennonite church in North America. It grew from the merger of the early Baumgartner and Munsterberg congregations founded by the town’s Swiss settlers.
What is the Berne clock tower?
The Muensterberg Plaza clock tower, dedicated in 2010, stands 160 feet tall and is a replica of the Zytglogge in Bern, Switzerland. Its glockenspiel sends out 5.5 foot animated figures that re-enact the history of the Swiss in Berne, Indiana several times a day in the warmer months.
When is Swiss Days in Berne, Indiana?
Swiss Days is held annually on the last full weekend of July. The festival features more than a hundred food and craft vendors, a parade, polka, competitions and live entertainment, and it is the town’s largest celebration of its Swiss Mennonite heritage.
If your family’s story passed through Berne, or any of the places the Swiss have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the Jura Mountains and the Emmental valley of the canton of Bern, to a clock tower rising over the Indiana cornfields, to wherever you are now.