Charleston's Germans: An Enduring Legacy

By 1900, the German population in the United States was close to 2.7 million. In numerous cities in the Northeast and Midwest, those who had immigrated in the nineteenth century congregated in demarcated ethnic neighborhoods—"little Germanies." This was not the case of the German immigrant community in Charleston, South Carolina. The establishment and evolution of the nineteenth-century German immigrant community there was as unique as the southern Lowcountry city itself.

Early German-speaki...