A vintage black-and-white collage titled Beilage New Orleanser Deutsche Zeitung, 31 Aug. 1902, featuring portraits of numerous men arranged in rows with their names below each image. Edges of the paper are worn and slightly discolored.

Research Pathfinder

Germans in Louisiana, Part II

19th-Century Immigration, Benevolent Organizations, and Churches

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Germans in Louisiana Research Pathfinder
19th-Century Immigration, Benevolent Organizations, and Churches

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Germans in Louisiana

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An old map titled Grundriss von Neu-Orleans shows the street layout of New Orleans near the Mississippi River. The map includes numbered and labeled buildings, a legend in German, and distinct blocks with a grid pattern.

Introduction

Becoming American at the beginning of the 19th century meant great increases in immigration and commerce for Louisiana. While always present to an extent, German immigration to the state boomed in the 1840s. By 1870, 20 percent of Louisiana’s population was German-speaking (Merrill, The Germans of Louisiana, from the introduction by Don Heinrich Tolzman). While most of the estimated 750,000 Germans who used New Orleans as a port of entry to the United States in the 19th century continued up the Mississippi to the Mid-West, or took the Red River to Texas, many did stay in the city and its surrounding areas.

The German presence in the New Orleans population brought commerce. Antebellum New Orleans profited significantly from trade with Germanic royal duchies such as Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg, Hannover, Prussia, and Nassau, many of which had consulates in the city. Numerous records and correspondence of some of these consulates are preserved in the Deutsches Haus ArchivesOpens in new tab and the German Study FileOpens in new tab at HNOC. These documents offer insight into the breadth of trade activity and ship traffic between New Orleans and German lands, as well as into the activities of German citizens of New Orleans who were counted amongst the city’s most prominent figures. An interesting example from the German Study File is found in 10 items that document the occasion in 1848 when the City of Lafayette (later annexed by New Orleans) made a gift of a German flag to the Duchy of Bremen, in honor of their lucrative economic partnership. The impressive pomp and circumstance surrounding this gift, performed by both the givers and the receivers, clearly illustrates the importance of German trade to New Orleans in the first half of the 19th century, while also pointedly showing that it was German New Orleanians themselves who were responsible for its development.

These Germans played an influential and positive role in the growing economy of the entire city. Above all else, though, they saw themselves as members of their own community, the general well-being of which was their most important priority. This is evidenced, in part, by the creation of numerous German benevolent organizations to serve the purpose of supporting the German community itself. While such groups became more plentiful later in the 19th century, some had their beginnings well before the Civil War. Die Deutsche Gesellschaft (The German Society) was founded at the end of 1847 to help protect newly arrived German immigrants from the less than noble advice or offers they may otherwise have entertained upon arrival in the Port of New Orleans.

The society furnished the indigent with assistance (provided they were willing to work), and all other German newcomers with whatever assistance they needed to settle in New Orleans, or to move on to other points. Other early German benevolent organizations were the Deutscher Verein im 2. Distrikt (2nd District German Club), dating back to 1856, and the Germania Lodge 46 Opens in new tabof the Free Masons, the records for which HNOC has from as early as 1844. Interestingly, the first records of the Germania Lodge were trilingual, copied in German, French, and English. This is the case, however, for only one year’s worth of material. Thereafter, the club functioned exclusively in German through the first quarter of the 20th century.

Later in the 19th century, as large numbers of German immigrants were flocking to the United States, New Orleans saw the establishment of many more German benevolent organizations. The Deutsche Männer Unterstützungsverein (The German Men’s Benevolent Organization), Das Deutsche Protestantische Waisenhaus (The German Protestant Orphanage), Das Deutsche Protestantische Heim für Alte und Gebrechliche (The German Protestant Home for the Aged and Infirm), Das Bethanie Heim (The Bethany Home), and many churches as well as national German-American organizations contributed to an improved quality of life for Germans in New Orleans. Indeed, the heavy flow of immigrant traffic through the port guaranteed that, at any given time, there were quite a few Germans who could stand to benefit from the charity of their fellow community members. An excerpt from the Deutsche Gesellschaft’s 1885–1886 yearly report shows, rather humorously, that they were not all necessarily desirables:

Unfortunately, there were again, as usual, an un-ignorable number of bums and deadbeats among the foreigners we’ve mentioned above. They wandered around the city and the region, purportedly looking for work, and pestered our citizens—often in a most fresh and refined manner—especially the clergy, and various consuls, doctors, businesspeople, the German Newspaper, etc. One must never give one single donation to such wandering tramps, who avoid all work like the plague. One encourages the vice by doing so. Together with this admonition, we should also mention that there exists an organization in Munich, Bavaria, with multiple branches, whose purpose, among other things, is to collect funds with which to send to America a portion of their penitentiary inhabitants and good-for-nothing subjects in order that they can be rid of them. Two such cases have recently come to our personal attention.

Of course, part of the reason why this excerpt is humorous in our eyes is that such cases were most certainly the exception to the rule. Most of the Germans who arrived in New Orleans requiring assistance were eager to work and went on to become self-supporting. In HNOC’s materials, the rising numbers of members in the charitable organizations versus the dwindling number of aid recipients evidences this, as do the exploding numbers of German-owned businesses, most of which belonged to the same people found in the membership logs. While the German organizations of New Orleans never abandoned their benevolent work, it became, over time, more and more a function of their social activities. In 1927, perhaps due in part to this development, two of the city’s larger German clubs, the Turn-Verein (Turner’s Society, an athletic organization) and the Harugari Männerchor (a singing society, see section 4 of this pathfinder), merged together into one organization and purchased a property to become their clubhouse on the corner of Galvez and Cleveland Streets. The Deutsches Haus, as both the building and the new organization were called, became the meetinghouse for most of the city’s German organizations, including the Deutsche Gesellschaft and other benevolent organizations. Originally, some clubs continued to hold their own separate meetings in the new clubhouse, but inevitably, the communal setting led to the merging of all the groups involved into one, amalgamated Deutsches Haus. Today, the Deutsches HausOpens in new tab is still active. The organization constructed a new clubhouse on Bayou St. John in Mid-City in 2018. Correspondence, legal documents, deeds, and records concerning the formation of the Deutsches Haus are found in the papers of attorney Leon S. Cahn (84-12-L), who orchestrated the merger.

German immigrants quickly established themselves as independent citizens in New Orleans, and as immigration numbers declined after 1870, the city’s Germans looked less like a group of newly arrived immigrants and more like an established community of locals. The minute books and treasurer’s receipt books of organizations such as The Germania 46 LodgeOpens in new tab, The Deutsche Gesellschaft, the Deutsche Männer UnterstützungsvereinOpens in new tab, and the Deutsches HausOpens in new tab and its composite organizations all contain loose receipts and correspondence written on the art-nouveau letterhead of multiple German-owned printer shops, breweries, music stores, restaurants, and metalworks, to name a few. These materials quite thoroughly document the years from two decades before the Civil War until the years leading up to the Second World War. There are also sporadic books from a couple of institutions that range in date from the 1950s to the present. These minutes, receipts, advertisements, flyers, announcements, and invitations clearly convey the size of the support system New Orleans’s German community set up for itself. They also lend insight into the business and social activities of individual members of the German community—both the well-known and the otherwise anonymous.