Indiana

The majority of the settlement of the American old frontier in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, including southern Indiana, was by Scots- Irish and English upland southerners moving north from Kentucky across the Ohio River into Indiana and eventually west to Illinois and Missouri.

These migrants always included a significant number of other ethnic groups, the largest portion of which were German Lutherans moving west from Pennsylvania and the Carolinas where their parents and grandparents had settled in the colonial era. Prior to 1816 most migration to the region had occurred along the Ohio River and the two streams that flow along Indiana’s western border—the White and Wabash rivers—as far north as what are now Richmond and Terre Haute. After the defeat of the Shawnee, Miami, and their Indian and British allies in the War of 1812, settlers began to flood the interior from Kentucky to the south.

While most of the first settlers in southern Indiana were “Englishmen,” as the German Americans in Dubois and Spencer counties still refer to all people of non-German descent, in southern Dubois and northern Spencer counties they were nearly all supplanted by German Catholic farmers by the 1880s. This was largely due to a deliberate colonizing effort by Catholic missionary priests in the midnineteenth century that, combined with difficult economic and political conditions in German regions of Europe beginning in the 1830s, eventually brought a flood of German Catholic immigrants to the area, as well as to other midwestern states. Once settled, the Germans, always successful farmers, bought up neighboring farms to increase their acreage. In 1834 Dubois County received the first visit by a missionary priest searching for a suitable area to colonize with German Catholics. In 1836 the first sizable group of German immigrants arrived: twelve families from Baden.

By 1838 the Jasper, Dubois County, area’s German Catholic population had grown to fifty families and by

1839 to ninety. By 1850 residents of German descent constituted over 50 percent of the population of this area (Lang 1995, 27-37).

Part of the reason for this increasing influx was the deliberate colonizing effort of one Croatian priest, Father Joseph Kun- dek. As a priest in the village of Gore in Croatia, Kundek had read reports published by the Leopoldine Mission Society of the North American missions and became determined to join the missionary movement. In September 1838 he was installed as the pastor of St. Joseph’s Church in Jasper, Dubois County. Father Kundek began systematically purchasing land from non-German settlers, using funds from the Leopoldine Mission Society, which he then advertised for sale in German weeklies. In

1840 he bought 1,360 acres to lay out a new town, which he named Ferdinand in honor of Emperor Ferdinand of Austria, patron of the Leopoldine Mission Society. Three years later he founded the town of Celestine, ten miles east of Jasper (then Fulda) in Spencer County.

So many Germans came in response to the efforts of Father Kundek and the early settlers’ encouragement of friends and relatives that Matthaus Hassfurther, one of the German pioneer settlers, wrote in January 1842, “the Germans are coming like snowflakes” (Hassfurther 1842). By 1854 an abbey of Benedictine monks was founded at St. Meinrad in Spencer County, fifteen miles south of Jasper, helping contribute to the expansion of the German Catholic settlement area, which tapers off about ten miles south of the Dubois- Spencer county border. Fifteen years later a convent of Benedictine nuns, Sisters of St. Benedict, was established in Ferdinand, just over the Dubois County border.

As Jacques Martin—a Swiss immigrant doctor’s son and budding textile miller, later turned subsistence farmer and artist under the influence of Henry David Thoreau’s writings—wrote in his journal in the spring of 1854, “There are too many German Catholics.

The priests of Ein- siedeln... have almost 4,000 acres here and are going to build an immense convent and seminary. In time they’ll have complete control over elections in the area.... The Americans of English descent are abandoning the area, selling their farms and moving out west [to Missouri]. The German Protestants are doing the same, and in several years this area will be settled entirely by intolerant Catholics. So I’m thinking of leaving... following the current towards the west” (Martin 1982, 61). Martin, however, did stay in Harrison Township, Spencer County, and all eight of his grandchildren married German Catholics.

As late as the mid-twentieth century, most descendents of these German immigrants spoke German as a first language, both in their homes and communities and in the Catholic schools they attended. By the last quarter of the century, however, only the elderly retained the ability to speak German and spoke English with a regionally distinct accent far different from the upland southern drawl of their non-German neighbors. In the early twenty-first century the local priests and nuns no longer teach schoolchildren, and the effects of mass media and modern communication have diluted much of the noticeably German culture still retained for a century before. There still remains certain visible cultural markers of the German heritage in Dubois and southern Spencer counties, however. The exterior grounds of the homes and farms of German Americans are markedly tidier than those of the Scots-Irish and English descendents, and domestic Virgin Mary shrines proliferate outside the houses and elaborate stone churches in the region. The local foodways, as well, have retained distinctly German characteristics that have outlasted the majority cultural and regional influences and that of popular culture as well.

Elements of German folk tradition in 2005 are retained sporadically in the architecture, such as three- or four-room houses with central—rather than gable—chimneys, known to be a German house plan.

Often the framework of these structures is of hewn logs, a tradition borrowed from the earlier British American settlers. Many of these German-style homes have a cantilevered roof on the front porch (sometimes also on the rear porch), as do the distinctive German log barns, which are squarish with similarly cantilevered porch roofs that contrast with the British American tradition of pent roofs. The well- known large bank barns of German-settled Pennsylvania, often stone or brick, are absent in the southern Indiana region, though they are present in central and northern Indiana as part of the western migration through Ohio of descendents of Pennsylvania Germans in the early nineteenth century.

In southern Indiana, as in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, occasional instances of homes of half-timber construction with unwoven wattle (wood slats) and daub infilling (Fachwerk) may be found. However, in terms of numerical dominance, most of the buildings in this area conform to the folk or vernacular Anglo-American forms: hall and parlor (one or one and a half story, two-room house with a single side-entry door, usually not centered) or double-pen houses (one or one and a half story, two- room house with two front doors on side wall, paired or separated by windows), I-houses (full two-story, single-room, deep house with a central hall and single door in the side), and cross-gable houses (derived from popular architecture plan book, a two-story house with cross gables that extend to form wings). Barns frequently are of the English—New England, Connecticut, Yankee, three-bay variety. These are rectangular three-bay barns with the large opening in the side wall of the center threshing bay, open on both sides to allow a wagon with horses to be driven all the way through the barn and a natural draft to blow the chaff away when threshing. The barns are of heavy timber with post-and- beam construction (hewn or sawn) and covered with wide, vertical unpainted weatherboarding.

Decorative elements such as the German diamond cross and star-shaped owl holes are often cut into the gable ends of barns, a distinctively Germanic tradition also found on New York Dutch barns and in Wisconsin, Ontario, and elsewhere where Germans settled. In this one small region of southern Indiana, the German farmers modified the basic English barn plan by enlarging the barn with an additional one or more bays on the ends and sometimes another large wagon entrance, or attached sheds, while retaining the basic rectangular, side-entrance plan. The barns are almost always at least one and a half stories, and generally a full two stories, in height. While the typical tin roof (which would have been wood shingled in the nineteenth century) of the classic English barn in this region has the smooth slopes characteristic of most nineteenthcentury barns—English or otherwise— many of the English barns built by these southern German immigrants from the 1850s on have a broken roofline that presents a distinctive profile from the gable end. Although initially it might appear that familiar sheds, one and a half or two stories high, have been added onto each long side of the barn to create this broken-roof appearance, in fact, it is apparent that these are not sheds but integral walls and roof partitions of the barn structure itself. Such a broken gable allows more storage area in the hayloft, reflecting changes in agricultural production of the mid- to late nineteenth century from largely subsistence farming to cash-crop agriculture due to the coming of the railroad in the 1850s to 1870s that allowed the transport of grain to distant markets. These successful and productive German American farmers in southern Indiana had need of very large, multiuse barns and creatively expanded the traditional English three-bay barn through the incorporation of integral two-story side sheds. This regional variation appears to be found only within the German-settled areas of southern Dubois and northern Spencer counties of Indiana.

Even though this area has sandstone available, which was always used as piers or unmortared foundation blocks for barns and houses and by the 1870s was quarried from local quarries to build churches, the German farmers never incorporated stone into the structure of the barns they built. This contrasts with the German immigrant farmers in both Pennsylvania and Missouri, who sometimes built stone barns as is traditionally done in Germany. Brick or half-timber with brick or clay infilling also was not used in barn building as in Germany, though the latter was done occasionally in house construction. Other outbuildings on the farmsteads—smokehouses, washhouses, summer kitchens, granaries, corncribs, hog houses, etc.—tend to conform to earlier Anglo-American styles, though sometimes the smaller outbuildings are constructed of brick or stone in a continental manner. One rare elaborate example from Spencer County is a square, pyramidal hip-roofed combination smoke house/washhouse/summer kitchen. The placement of outbuildings with relation to the farmhouse and barn commonly reflects the traditional German courtyard plan of a farmstead rather than the linear American plan. The German American farmsteads also display an order and tidiness that visibly contrasts with the farms and homes of most of the non-German descendents.

Religious architecture of this region is distinctive and sharply contrasting with that of neighboring British American Protestants. The German Catholic sandstone churches are large and elaborate compared to the small-frame, white-painted wood structures of their Baptist and Methodist neighbors. This variation reflects as much theological distinctions as it does ethnic characteristics. Likewise, the placement of saints’ shrines, predominantly the Virgin Mary, outside churches and homes of the German Catholic residents in this region is a custom replicated by non-German Catholics throughout the world, though it

is manifestly a folk custom that is not sanctioned by the mainstream church. Each region’s and ethnic group’s domestic Mary shrines display distinctive characteristics in addition to common Catholic themes. The German American Mary shrines in this area are colorfully painted but lack the gaudy decoration often added to Italian American or Hispanic shrines. Often they are incorporated into garden landscaping, sometimes within grotto settings. A large and elaborate grotto constructed of geodes gathered from a neighboring county was constructed behind St. Joseph’s Church in Jasper, Dubois County, in the mid-twentieth century by the resident priest, consisting of two major shrines within the large grotto area: to the south the Mother of God Shrine, to the north the St. Joseph Shrine, along with many smaller Mary, Jesus, and Joseph shrines throughout, two fountains, numerous flower planters, lampposts, benches, birdbaths, and geode walls.

Alice Reed Morrison

Indiana

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