By Dorothy Jerse
Special to the Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — It is fitting for German ancestry to be highlighted in “The Immigrants: Celebrating the Ethnic Heritage of Vigo County” exhibit at the Vigo County Historical Society Museum. First arriving in Terre Haute in the 1840s, the German immigrants became the largest ethnic influence in the development of the area.
The 1860 census, the first to list the distribution of foreign-born persons, showed Germans to be the largest foreign-born nationality group in Indiana. Germans still led the list in 1920.
According to the 2000 census, 42.8 million Americans — about 15 percent of the population — consider German to be their primary ancestry. The German-American Heritage Foundation of the USA claims, “We are 43 million strong.”
Jan Chait said it well (Terre Haute Living, Jan.-Feb. 2008), “Where do you start with the Germans? For that matter, where do you stop?”
Prominent names include Debs, Hulman, Dreiser, Dresser, Ehrmann, Baur, Ermisch, Gerstmeyer, Heinl, Moggers and Prox, but the number of German names in this area is almost endless. If we look at the occupation of these German immigrants, the largest group were those in the skilled crafts; they also held a high profile as businessmen, shopkeepers and farmers.
From early on, the Terre Haute area Germans formed their own benevolent and social societies and organized Catholic, Lutheran and Methodist churches. They built Germania Hall at 18-20 N. Ninth St. (current site of Thompson Thrift Development offices), and they published newspapers in the German language until 1917 when anti-German hysteria of World War I swept through the nation.
Some of the items in the current display were loaned to the museum by Christa Phifer, Helga Phillips and Rita Goffinet, all natives of Germany and members of the German Oberlandler Club. Members of the club also funded the 19th century dressmaker’s shop, located on the second floor of the museum, in 1984 in commemoration of the contributions made by German immigrants in Vigo County history.
Those of us of German ancestry are proud to be included in this current exhibit at the Vigo County Historical Society Museum along with residents of 11 other ethnic groups who played a part in developing Vigo County. As the venerable thirteenth-century monk Thomas Aquinas reminded us, “Diversity is the perfection of the universe.”
