Hard working.

I have really deep roots in the church and in this city, in this country, and I come from people that work hard and are good people.

By the time I started school at St Paul's Lutheran in the early thirties, German was no longer taught.

There was no longer a German service except for the German that I learned from my grandmother, who was the only surviving grandparent I had.

I knew no German because nobody spoke German.

By that time you had the German heritage of a family that believed in hard work, that started with very little and just kept persevering.

They were very determined people and they were very committed to trying things that were risky and keeping at it until they made it right.

They were German people and they always had this attitude that we would make the best of it, whatever we have.

But whatever we can do, we will not feel like we are defeated, reliable.

I think that a German is, first of all, very determined about what they're going to do.

They're sincere.

My family, I look back.

It's always been a very hard working family.

We were at war with Germans, so we kids, far as the neighbors, some of the kids in the neighborhood concerned.

We were going to a German school.

That's what they called it.

They go to that German school.

So he threw rocks at us.

When I first came over, I pretended I wasn't German.

And of course, I've learned since then that that happens to a lot of Germans or to a lot of immigrants.

There's one way of there.

There are several ways of handling the situation like this.

When you leave your roots, you you come to another country and you find people with the same roots or you you kind of integrate into the new society.

And so that's what I wanted to do.

I wanted to be an American creative, never shy of work or do anything, because it sometimes that he was doing it, he was learning.

By 1890, when the knitting mills was established, it was relatively easy to get people to come here from Germany, taking a big chance, of course, on employment, on their futures, bringing their families with them.

Many cases or single young ladies coming over to work in the mills as is in the knitting.

Our people, our ancestors, the German people, they sacrificed a lot and they gave a lot.

Stubborn.

One time I took a telephone call at home and somebody made some remarks about being German, you know?

But we were.

We never considered ourselves German.

We considered ourself Americans.

There's a very fundamental question, you know, where did I come from?

You know, what?

You know what's in my genes?

You know, what was my family like?

What can I pass on to my children?

I think I'm probably a little more proud to be German than I used to.

I was never like that before.

Really.

I couldn't care less if it was German or Dutch or whatever.

But I think now I'm proud of my country, proud about what we have there.

In my case, liberal, you know, the liberal Germans of 1848, the 48ers in Germany who became the 49ers here, the Turners who came over with their strong liberal attitudes of equality and liberty and justice.

Those are traits that I think the Germans uphold, you know, strong feelings of community and of self-sacrifice and beer.

Fort Wayne, A Most German Town is made possible by a 40th anniversary grant from the Foellinger Foundation, honoring its past by investing in the future through grants that benefit children, youth and families.

And Home Loan Bank.

Typically, when a German immigrated to the United States back in the 1840s, 50s, or 60s, they found themselves to one of the German ports, Hamburg, for example.

There was a great, great deal of traffic between Hamburg and New York or Baltimore or these coast cities and or up the Rhine into the Dutch provinces.

And then they would come across from there to the East Coast cities as well.

So for the average German, for my relatives back then, it was putting everything you owned in something that you could carry, moving it up a river like the Elba toward toward Hamburg, finding passage on a steamship across the ocean, being sick for some 30 or 40 days while you were on the ocean, living in conditions that often caused death of people trying to cross the ocean at that time and then arriving in New York with literally no money in your pocket and just a great deal of hope in your heart.

And so they came.

It took them weeks and weeks and weeks to get here.

Many roads, swamps, maybe a little bit of trouble with Native Americans every now and then.

But more just just the elements.

And they get here and they find out their land of milk and honey is a few broken down cabins and a bunch of mud surrounded by swamp on three sides.

And so, yeah, there there probably was a little gulping when they got here, but they built it into what it is.

The first real German push in Fort Wayne was the branch manager for the two land speculators who had bought the initial tract of land that became Fort Wayne.

Henry Rudisill, a very well known name.

Rudisill, while not a first generation German, was of German background and knew lots of first generation Germans, and what he did was to advertise back both in Baltimore and in Werdenberg and in Hanover, for Germans to come to Fort Wayne and work for him to clear the land, because he argued at the time that they were harder workers and would do more per dollar of labor expense than what other people.

Rudisill was a Lutheran, and that led to the coming in of several Lutheran pastors from Germany and their particular theological leanings and their strong ties to Germany and their desire to keep German as the language of the of the incoming new German population would make the churches of central importance in Fort Wayne because they served as as a rallying point, as a socializing point for new immigrants coming in.

Virtually all immigrants had immense language problems, and most first generation immigrants never really learned English in any appreciable degree.

And so the church supplied a place where you could talk to people, where your desires were, your prospects for finding a spouse.

For instance, since the early immigration was heavily male, initially, as I understand it, the Germans who came here were criticized for being dirty, loud, obnoxious, and they suffered the slings and arrows that most new immigrant groups do.

They're not welcomed in.

By the middle of the 1860s, the predominant ethnic group in the area were the Germans, so it was no longer a question of being welcomed in.

It was a question of setting up institutions to reflect German culture.

It was a question of setting up churches that were that conducted services in German.

It was a question of setting up German language schools, and it essentially became a German community and it became increasingly German up until the First World War.

At the turn of the century, approximately 80% of the people that lived in Fort Wayne were Germans either descendants or native born who had immigrated here.

So there were there are still reports that one reads about people downtown angry Anglos or early French settlers here were angry because you couldn't get a job in downtown Fort Wayne unless you were bilingual.

German and English.

So the culture of this community, the schools, the governmental process, the taxing system, the conservative nature of the community, the way that we organize our homes, our lives, our schools, our churches and our government were established on German models.

From the 1860s up to the very recent past.

You had a two thirds majority of people of German background on the city council.

The workforce in the city.

The various departments were heavily staffed by Germans.

The fire department was almost exclusively German, had some German fire chiefs who held that position for 25-35 years.

You had lifelong tenure in those positions.

The police department had quite a few Germans, not quite as high a percentage is in the fire department.

The Parks Department was massively German in its leadership and in the workers who put together the very fine park system in Fort Wayne, there was a decided German cast to the education not only in the parochial schools, the public schools, the parochial schools got much of their support, not only because of the fear that the English language just somehow could not handle theology, a belief that was held very deeply by by many German theologians in the United States.

You just couldn't express things correctly in English, that English was not a language vehicle suitable for correct theology.

And of course, the Anglo Republicans, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Baptists all looked on the other side of the fence, on the German side of the fence, and saw these people as being incredibly dogmatic.

And because of their willingness to imbibe a little beer here and there, or to dance on Sundays or to play ball on Sunday, these were big political issues in Fort Wayne.

Could you allow bands to play in the public parks and to allow people to dance on Sunday afternoons?

Could you allow softball baseball games to be played on Sundays?

Well, from the Republican evangelical Protestant point of view, you were trying to keep the Sabbath holy and consequently you would not allow those practices.

For a German Catholic, this seemed to make no sense at all that Sunday was a day to go to mass for sure, but also to enjoy yourself and your family.

And that could mean all kinds of leisure activities.

In the formation of the Democratic Party in Allen County, the German Lutherans and the German Catholics got together, which was a major feat.

Of course, this was this was a real this was a miracle only in America could this happen.

They got together because they had to for self-defense sense against the Anglos who were developing the Republican Party.

And the Republican Party would be very, very heavy Anglo.

That desire to control personal behavior and morality.

And that just flew in the face of many kinds of German practices.

Easy examples would be alcohol.

That's one of the most common.

Parochial schools.

Both Lutherans and Catholics had parochial schools, and the Anglo Republicans stressed public schools.

And that battle for money and for control of continues to the to the present, though it's perhaps not quite as viciously fought as it was in earlier periods.

In the period preceding World War One, on a national level, there was created something called a German-American alliance, in which German clubs in particular breweries supported this to stress German family life, German communal activities.

Berghoffs for instance, here in Fort Wayne, bought a park on the north edge of Fort Wayne, called it Germania Park.

It's roughly where Shoaf Park is today, and it set up park grounds, for example, and you could get beer and you know, from what brewery you could get beer there any time and it was a family place.

We'd go out and play ball and the women would visit and the men would visit and smoke their pipes and play whist and so on.

And so there was this resurgence, this, this strengthened German community in the pre-war period, which makes what was about to happen all the worse psychologically for people.

German Americans from Fort Wayne participate militarily, the same as people of other ethnic backgrounds.

I've counted out the numbers on this.

There are as many people of German-American background in the United States Army from Allen County as would be represented by their total overall numbers.

The first American from Allen County to be killed in combat was a man by the name of, I believe, Carl Winkelmeyer, a clear German American lad from Fort Wayne.

So German-Americans certainly carry their share of load and some more in world War One.

The war doesn't really last all that long in terms of the United States.

And it's probably a good thing because there was more tension as American casualties, especially in 1918, began to take on very serious dimensions.

Something like 129 people from Allen County died in the war and a heavy share of them, not all, but a heavy share of them were of German background.

So Germans were paying their price for World War One.

All of a sudden, being a German was not something that you tried to disguise or hide, and it was impossible to hide or disguise your German accent and your religious affiliation and the like, the spelling of your name.

And it created real identity crises and it created much internal pain and hurt for Germans to now see their families, their relatives in Europe being represented as Huns with no civilization, no culture, and some kind of brutal barbarians.

So it was a terribly traumatic event.

But you didn't wear your German ethnicity on your sleeve any longer, and in fact, you tried, if at all possible, to minimize that.

Some people played with the spelling of their last name.

I haven't been able to find anyone who completely changed their name, but some would drop a second n on the final consonant of their name, for example, to give it a slightly more English look to it than people were, were more careful to name the first names of their children, names that were clearly of either Anglo or acceptable in Anglo eyes.

So the German a sense of being German is much diminished after World War One.

It's not gone, but it's much diminished.

Well, the war ends and we're not quite a German town anymore.

Some of the churches, the old downtown churches still have some German spoken in their classrooms and in their halls for their ceremonies.

Some churches still have one or two German ceremonies or so a week.

But at the same time, even the most German churches you see English being spoken in the schools.

You see English coming in to the religious ceremony and you see Germans slowly being weeded out by the twenties.

The German newspaper goes out of business because no one's reading it anymore.

The same German newspaper that used to carry ads from Wolf and Dessauer and all of the downtown eateries and the, you know, the and everything else.

It's out of business because there aren't enough people reading it.

They've switched to the Sentinel or the Journal, the old German signage and downtown starts to disappear.

What still survive through the war.

So while we don't have this forced Americanization that we had in the years of 1916 and 17 and 18, we have maybe a voluntary Americanization so it doesn't happen again.

The German clubs are much more low key at this period.

The turnverein, the sängervereins, the singing societies practically drop out of existence.

They're at a low ebb at this point and people are beginning to join in the American sports craze by the 1930s and this is tied to high schools in particular in Indiana and here you're there's no team in Fort Wayne that's the Fort Wayne Germans or anything of that kind.

I mean, the kinds of totems that are selected are far more traditional than that.

Meanwhile you have your Catholic in your Lutheran high schools, it's they are virtually assimilated into the broader American society by that point.

At the same time, the big push is on for prohibition, which is somewhat related to the women's right to vote.

The two kind of were tied together for a while, but prohibition happens and here we have breweries throughout town, German breweries, every brewer here is a German brewery.

Try to figure out what to do.

Well, some of them start producing what we call today near beer.

Basically no alcohol content, but it kind of tastes like beer, light beer, if you will.

Some of them start going into the medical industry and making nice pure medical alcohol.

How much of that ended up getting into the general populace instead of going to the hospitals is debatable at this point.

But they try to survive.

And a couple of them do survive.

But at the same time, before the war, you had the parks where they were owned by the brewery that had these great German beer festivals and such.

And that can't happen anymore.

And the parks become either part of the park system of Fort Wayne or they're built on.

During World War Two, German Americans here in Fort Wayne were major war leaders, war workers and so on.

And it does not have the sting that World War One had.

And most Americans did not have the kind of overblown idealism with which they'd gone into World War One.

There was not the same degree of bitterness.

The Liberty Gardens now become victory gardens.

You're not you're not going after Liberty any longer.

If you can just win, that's sufficient.

And as a consequence, the ideological component of the war is not as strong.

People do not get as carried away in World War Two as they did in World War One.

In 1944, the United States began moving German prisoners of war into the U.S.

These were prisoners who had been captured a year, year and a half earlier in North Africa and were now coming in from from the invasion in Italy.

The Germans had been mounting most of the fighting in Italy, and there were just no space to keep those prisoners either on the European continent.

Great Britain had German prisoners galore.

They could not handle any more, so they were set up somewhere in the vicinity of about 500 different German prisoner of war camps in the United States.

A relatively small one was established in Fort Wayne in 1944, housed anywhere from 600 to 1300 German prisoners.

You know, in a camp on the near southeast edge of Fort Wayne, near Wayne Trace and the railroads, the enlisted men, not officers, but the enlisted men were encouraged to work outside the camp, and at least 80% of them did.

They either worked on farms, planting potatoes, harvesting potatoes.

They worked at a big celery farm, sweets, celery farm in the south edge of Fort Wayne.

They worked for the city park system, even work for the for the city theater, doing cleaning up kinds of jobs, mostly unskilled labor, some Fort Wayne folks grew unhappy when they heard that German prisoners could have one bottle of beer a day and two packs of cigarettes a week.

It was the cigarettes that was particularly galling because in Fort Wayne at that time you could buy cigarettes, but it was difficult.

They were in very, very short supply and you were having to buy what amounted to generic brands before anyone had ever heard of generic brands.

And they were those were viewed as not very good cigarettes and they probably weren't.

And then you heard that the German prisoners could buy two packs per week with the money that they had earned.

There was some unhappiness.

But what the United States Army was trying to do, and most good folks in the home towns never quite understood this, was to protect the interests of American prisoners of war in German war camps.

And the United States held very, very scrupulously to the 1929 Geneva Convention that governed the treatment of prisoners of war.

So apparently this was not a prison.

That was that was what our usual images of prisoner of war camps were like.

And most of the prisoners pretty much like their experience of some prisoners after they had been repatriated to Germany, once they got a chance, came back to the United States.

I've talked to at least one who moved back to Fort Wayne in the 1950s, so their experience was reasonably good.

There were plenty of people in Fort Wayne who could still speak German, for example, most of the farms that they worked on were of German American farms.

They went over to a combine canteen, factory and brewery, and I believe it's in Defiance, Ohio, and every time came back smashed, including the guards who went with them.

So this was not any kind of brutal concentration camp by any means.

The prisoners ate very well.

The United States government ensured that they ate well, had plenty of recreation.

Fort Wayne people would go out on Saturday afternoons to watch the German prisoners play soccer.

There were soccer tournaments and so on.

So they had a pretty good reception from the Fort Wayne folk with the exception of the cigarettes.

That did not sit well.

By the advent of World War Two, Fort Wayne had been Americanized.

It was very rare to hear German spoken in the schools or the streets or the churches, although it still was much rarer to hear it spoken in the in the institutions of the community, in the homes than it was prior to the beginning of World War One.

There was still the ties of family with Germany and there's still the ties of family with Germany.

And it makes it very, very hard to want to bomb the hell out of your kinfolk.

It makes it very tough on a person living in Fort Wayne to feel joy at the fact that a third of Hamburg was destroyed in a bombing raid and 1500 people or 3000 were killed.

It could be your cousins.

So there were still the ties between Fort Wayne and Germany.

That meant that it was a it was a bittersweet war effort.

I mean, it was sad because a lot of the kids from Fort Wayne were going over there to the to the European theater and literally shooting at their cousins and relatives who were shooting back at them.

In Germany, there was a very popular movement in the 19th century called the Liedertafel movement, where people would meet in usually taverns.

And there was a special table set aside called the Singing Table or the Liedertafel.

And they would sit around and have a beer or two and then work on a song for a while and then have another beer and work on another song.

And even though that sounds like a very social and maybe almost frivolous kind of activity, very serious composers wrote music for it, including Schubert and Mendelssohn and Brahms.

So it was a serious movement within the whole 19th century romantic scene.

The Maennerchor started its life as the Fort Wayne Sangerbund in 1869, and it was organized by immigrants who came here in the 19th century who wanted to continue their singing and cultural traditions in their new home.

Over a period of years, there were several singing societies in Fort Wayne, including the Fort Wayne Sangerbund.

But I don't know all of their names.

There was the Saxonia and the Concordia and Frohsinn and other organizations that all had singing groups with them.

And there were a lot of Germans in Fort Wayne at that time.

So these people just sort of gravitated to these to these clubs.

In 1923, the various clubs that were in Fort Wayne combined into the name Fort Wayne Männerchor.

And at that time they took occupancy of these two rooms where we're sitting now.

So in 1998 we will have been here 75 years.

So it's a long history in this place and this room is just full of all of those memories.

When you look at some of the old pictures that hang on the walls of these halls here, you can see some names that were important in the history of Fort Wayne, Berghoff or Berghoff, the famous brewery people.

Baals, from which the famous mayors family came from.

So there have been significant people of the city that have been a part of this of this club.

When I joined, and I believe it was in 1978, I think I was one of two members who were not German born.

And today it's about half and half, maybe closer to two thirds, one third, but it's significantly larger number of people born in this country are members of the organization than when I joined.

To me, the music that we sing here has a kind of special quality to it.

It's a lot of the folk music has a real kind of genuine joy about it, and it celebrates life and the good things in life, whether it's drinking or loving or dancing or praying or whatever it happens to be.

And it has a kind of profound tinge to it.

I mean, it's not really frivolous.

It has its own kind of deep meaning that comes through.

Even if you don't understand a single word of German, it just communicates the sort of geist or the spirit of the music.

If the past of this club was preservation, I think the future of the club is promotion and to really promote German culture, German song, German language.

And so our activities become more and more cultural and artistic and educational and with the, with the social activities of the club supporting those basic pillars, I would say that if anybody has an interest in German culture, either from their own family backgrounds or German culture in general, that there's no better time than now to become a part of an organization like this, because we still have a lot of members here who are German natives, and one can really absorb a lot of language and sounds and experiences that after this generation will never be here again and they'll just exist in our memories.

So this is a really neat place for people to come and explore things German because we have a lot of real German here.

Friedrich Jahn was a German very much interested in youth.

He was particularly interested in their wellbeing mentally, physically, and he was a schoolteacher, so he knew something about young people and he thought he ought to do something about it.

And he opened the school where he had these young people and they spent a lot of time in discipline type of activities.

He got involved very much so in the apparatus, much like the apparatus we're using now in gymnastics competition.

And also he had his marching activities, his drilling, and he thought this is the route we ought to go to develop our children, because they had several problems then, too, you know.

And so he thought this was a step as well.

And 18, nearly 1840, there was some political upheaval in Germany.

Many of the names were leaving and he thought perhaps he could hold us back a little bit.

But many of the Germans did leave and came to including the United States, where the disciples of Jahn picked up on his idea and continued a similar program in the United States.

The movement continued, and I think at one time we might have had 200 German Turnverein.

Now the word turn to are end in German means exercise, and the word verein in German means club.

So it is an exercise club, sports club, athletic club.

That's what the word train run means.

Even today, some of our clubs in the United States are using those old German names.

First of all, we promote physical education.

Secondly, we do cultural education.

Third, we do civic participation.

And fourth, we have a social program.

And those are the four principles under which we operate, under the cultural program where you have music, art, painting, drawing, the arts and other the civic participation.

We're very active because in the German fairs and other activities that are put on by the city, because we are a part of the city.

When I was a gym teacher, I had gone to the to the Turner Normal College, which is now a part of Indiana University.

And our training was very formal now and our old place on Superior Street, a typical class for men, women, boys and girls.

And we had senior activities in those early years also.

So new programs are not new.

We were doing the Turner Club of 60 years ago longer.

However, we would line them up almost in military fashion, marching around the gym, running them around the gym, doing the movements that marching bands now do, that crisscrossing all of us.

All we did this was all a part of the training.

In addition to that, when we got them warmed up, then we gave the calisthenics and then we go into a little volleyball and end up with basketball.

And in Indiana, you play basketball.

And we did.

We had a small gym on Superior Street, and some of the old timers will remember playing there and actually bouncing off the walls.

It was 60 by 30 gym.

And then eventually we left that location.

Many of the physical education programs around the country were started by the attorneys in that particular city.

You see as these Turners moving in to their particular city, they formed the club and then, as I said, the volunteer gym instructor might end up teaching.

And locally, Henry Meyer, a real German from Germany, went to the college, ended up introducing physical education in the public schools in Fort Wayne, and many of the old timers, many maybe not many, but old timers, will remember Henry Meyer and how strict he was.

It was a very disciplined type of physical education.

We looked at some of the names and as Becker(sp) and Schlosser(sp) and the Wertenbergs(sp) were very much involved many, many years ago.

Now, kids were since the German army, they were German, they were very active.

And Henry Meyer, of course, Hermann Korte(sp), as I remember, they were all very active in Germany.

They were, of course, of German descent from these locations.

Then in the early 1900s, we bought the old medical school on 616 West Superior Street.

There was an antique furniture shop there.

That is the old McCulloch homestead.

We say the on Superior Street, as I said, formerly a medical school.

We stayed there until about 19, early 1960s, and they decided that we would like to move.

The building was getting old, so we sold it and bought the property on 3636 Parnell Avenue, right by the Johnny Appleseed Grove, where we are located now.

We had all kinds of sports competition.

We had national volleyball.

We still do.

National golf is just going good.

National bowling is going to be held here, I think, next year.

And we do go in for national competition where we bring all the clubs together.

We also have what we call our Turner Olympics every four years.

We have a competition in gymnastics, some of the sports track and field swimming, diving, fencing, and these are held in different cities around the country.

I think our contribution was the introduction of physical education in the public schools because it made people alert to the fact that a sound mind must be lodged in a sound body.

It was a rather interesting and interesting development because the e to the three important industries in Fort Wayne, the GE, the International Harvester, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, these were the big employers and these were the employers had pulled the German immigrants into its fold and for entertainment and for recreation, these boys all still wanted to play soccer.

So actually each one of the industries had a soccer team, but the boys all were they had in common the fact that they were all German.

So they decided, let's make a club of our own.

And this was what then happened.

Now they continued to play for the individual teams of their industrial teams for a short period of time.

But eventually then it became the Fort Wayne Sports Club.

That was that was the soccer program for the whole city.

Since the club was founded in 1927 by, uh, I say, 80% soccer ball players.

And I would say they possibly had maybe 25 or 30 people who who joined the club or that's were the founders of it.

And I'd say 80% of those if let's say 15 or so, were soccer enthusiasts and soccer players.

Uh, and because of this, the emphasis of their whole existence and getting together was soccer and everything else about everything else.

Like, uh, drinking beer at the bar, bringing the wives out here.

And a lot of them weren't married at the beginning, but they brought their girlfriends out here and they had social gatherings.

And these social gatherings were so important because remember, these most of them had only been in this country one or two years, maybe three, but they hadn't been here very long, so most of them couldn't even speak English too well.

But in this atmosphere out here of soccer and fellowship, they were able to continue the German culture.

Now there was nothing.

This German culture was nothing.

Uh uh, outstanding.

It was simply a way of life.

A way of life, the way they had before they immigrated to the United States.

And it made a wonderful family get together.

In fact, I don't suppose there was a family and there was any place in the city where a family orientation was more important than it was out here.

We developed quite a reputation, not only around here in Indiana, in South Bend and Indianapolis, but also in Chicago, but because it was only on a social home and home basis, there was not too much glamor involved without the without the Fort Wayne Sport Club, I would have been completely Americanized and I was Americanized.

But, uh, this way I also had my German heritage.

And I'm afraid and I've seen so many cases where, uh, a boy my age would have lost a lot of that German heritage.

There wouldn't have been any.

Not a don't get me wrong, I am not.

I don't I don't never call about the fact that I'm German.

This is just part of me and the American indoctrination that I had was important.

This is what makes the whole man.

You take your past and your present and that becomes your future.

St Peter's Church was originally founded in about 1871, and it came about because of a very unfortunate circumstance.

A child who was a member of St Mary's Parish at the time was crossing the Pennsylvania railroad tracks and was killed by the oncoming train.

And because of that and the fact that the that the city was beginning to grow a little bit more south and east, there were a group of Catholic laymen who decided to meet and ask permission ultimately to build a parish this side of the railroad tracks.

At the time the parish was established, it was pretty much a German French community.

Uh, many of the Germans had left what was St Augustine's, the first parish of the diocese, St Peter's being the fourth parish.

They'd left St Augustine's, which was now called the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

Uh, the they left there and they wanted to begin a parish that really catered to their German heritage.

And so that's how St Mary's was founded.

And there were only about 30 families that made up St Mary's at the time of its having been founded from St Mary's then since that was a German founded parish and the way St Peter's, you know, began as a, as kind of an offshoot of St Mary's because of the story that I mentioned of the child being killed on the tracks between the two parishes.

Much of this parish was German, in fact, when it was first built and when the school first began, all of the classes were taught by German speaking nuns and um, the kids studied in German.

The head of the committee was a man named Peter Mettler, and that's part of the reason why the parish was called St Peter's, not only for the first Apostle, but also because of the chairman of the committee who was asking that the parish be built.

And so, um, permission was given by the bishop and a priest by the name of Father Wemhoff was assigned here and began to build the church.

He was followed by another priest, Father Messmann, and he was here 16 years, and Father Messmann did a lot more of the developing.

He picked up other ground that later has become what is known as St Peter's Square.

And, uh, it was under his leadership that the, the present church began to be built, and that was around 1892.

Then came the idea that Father Messmann had of wanting to decorate the church in a proper manner.

So it was painted and stenciled in great detail in the stenciling and very heavy dark colors.

The walls were heavy, dark green at the time, as I understand, which made it very dark inside.

The stations of the Cross came then and the lighted altars that you see even today were fashioned and brought in then they were they were built by a man out of La Crosse, Wisconsin, or a company out of La Crosse.

Again, German founded and very much mimic what you would find over in Germany if you travel some of the churches in, uh, in the area of Germany itself or I imagine Switzerland or Austria, the Stations of the Cross were originally, uh, were in, were in German.

The captions that told what sheet station was, was in German and that only was changed at the end of the First World War because of the situation of the need to do so.

So it was seen at the time and so there were no captions that didn't exactly translate what was said in German, but adequately stated what the station was.

And those were placed over top of the original German and it in 1992, 93, somewhere around there when we were beginning due restoration work, that we were cleaning and dusting one day and the maintenance man happened to knock loose one of these boards that was on the 8th station toward the back of the church.

And when I saw what was behind it, I said, My heavens, all of these must be like this.

And so we proceeded to remove them all and do what needed to be done to, uh, to make the English caption fit at the top of the station.

Re exposing the German at the bottom.

They re lettered the German as it was, but just highlighting it with fresh gold paint and so forth, making it, uh, a very nice looking part of the station and again, completely restored.

But we felt it was very important to keep the German caption just as it was written.

It's interesting when somebody does come in and look at them today and they read the caption at the top in English and Jesus is taken down from the cross.

For example, if you read it in German, it says he was taken down from the cross and laid in the arms of his mother.

And there's a certain that's expressed just in the way the German caption would have put that it's it's a more tender, compassionate thought to be taken down his dead body being taken down from the cross, and then laid in the arms of his mother.

The English translation fell short of that.

The altars are the thing that so many people come and say, Oh, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

They're lighted.

Some have kidded about that and some of the more contemporary preset arts, the liturgical light show and so forth, you know, and uh, kind of made light of the whole situation.

However, all the Catholics in Fort Wayne walk into the church.

So this is one of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen.

This feels like a church.

This feels like a very prayerful space.

You know, the whole ambiance that was created.

Um, well, they should never cut short the people who put it together.

You know, they truly had a sense of what they were doing, a feel for what was in their heart and what they put together expressed it so well.

People comment and all the time saying it's the most beautiful church in the city, that they really feel very strongly that way.

I know there are people who belong in other churches here in town that are also beautiful churches.

They probably would take exception to that statement, but we hear that so often, and I think it is because of the German craftsmanship that is still present, still visible here.

And the great detail that was given.

And because it speaks so much of what was in their heart and why they crafted it to begin with.

It was in February of 1882.

There were the 18 that the decision was made to found Zion Lutheran Church as a daughter congregation of St Paul's downtown Fort Wayne, and the driving force behind founding Zion was the fact that St Paul's was burgeoning again.

Several parishes had been founded off of St Paul's, which is one of the great mother churches of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.

And so it was resolved to let some 60 families go, families who found themselves south of the railroad tracks, and then to the east of Harrison St through all the foibles and failings and serious mistakes we make, we have a forgiving and loving God who comes to forgive people.

And there's a joyful freedom in that kind of living.

And in this sense you can think about a sort of German Lutheran piety, a piety that doesn't mind drinking some beer and enjoying life.

The purpose of the club was to preserve and promote our German heritage here in Fort Wayne.

All of us that were original members, Jim Sack, I'm sure you know by now, has been working tirelessly for the German American community here in Fort Wayne.

He wanted to he thought it was important that we have a club that would would do that, preserve and promote German heritage, mainly by means of the Germanfest.

At that time, Germanfest was was growing.

It wasn't as big as it is now, but they were having a difficult time raising money for the cultural things that we now have, like organ concert, the speeches, the lectures, the food things and everything that's outside of the beer tent.

And it was important to all of us that the Germanfest be more than just this four day or back then with only three days, three days of this beer tent with polka music and bratwurst.

So that was the main purpose.

And we have now branched out from that as a result of the monies we've earned at Germanfest prior to 1980, there was there were three German clubs in Fort Wayne and there was a shortsen(sp) fest, which was, I think, the principal German event in the community.

Sport Club put it on, came to an end in the early, I think about 1980, 1981, Germanfest was founded.

First one was in 1982.

It was done as an operation of the mayor's office.

And at the time I was told that you'll never get the Germans to cooperate with each other.

And yeah, there's a German culture in Fort Wayne, but nobody does anything German here any more.

The first year of Germanfest, it was a small tent, I think 90 feet long, in frame and square in the parking lot.

There.

And we had, you know, a few bands and enough people to help us break even.

It was neither a critical success nor a financial success.

But there were enough people who said that this could work and there were enough lies told about how much money we made, that people became very interested in being part of it.

The subsequent year that other groups gravitated to German fairs too, and made it grow and grow and grow to the point that it's very, very successful now, ever since the founding of the German Heritage Society, one of our goals to obtain a German sister city for Fort Wayne, Jim and I and the other founders could have had a difficult time understanding how Fort Wayne could have at that time a Japanese sister city.

But nobody seemed much interested in having a German sister city when we've got all this German heritage here in Fort Wayne.

So Jim had started trying to get a sister city relationship going for several years prior to the formation of the German Heritage Society.

But we continued that that quest during the early years of the German Heritage Society and surprisingly, right before the wall came down in 1989, we received a letter from Gera, Germany, saying that they were interested, and we were just ecstatic because at that time we believed that we were the first city to have a sister city in Germany, in eastern Germany.

Before we could finalize the paperwork.

However, another city, I think in Illinois or maybe even in Indiana, formalized a sister city relationship with an eastern German city.

So we were not the first ones, but I think we were the second ones.

The German Heritage Society pushed for a German sister city because it provides a way for Fort Wayne people to reconnect with their German roots.

For example, in during Germanfest of 97, we had 89 visitors from Gera and all of them stayed with host families.

So that was a lot of homes in which German and Germany were discussed.

The German language might have been resurrected where it wasn't heard for a long time.

I'm sure there were conversations where people talked about their ancestors from Germany or or other connections, and it it revives an interest in the roots that might lie dormant otherwise.

It's important, I think, from a historical perspective, for the people of Fort Wayne to understand the rich German heritage that we have here and in Fort Wayne and in Allen County and were willing to help in any way we can.

And those people that are trying to learn something about there, about their German heritage, I mean, that's part of what we are, part of our goal as a German, as a German heritage society is to is to promote those kind of things so that people can appreciate, like we all do our German heritage.

We have people that talk about their ancestry and do a great deal of research and are proud that their grandmother came from someplace.

In Germany, we have a German sister city.

We have a Germanfest that draws people from literally all over the Midwest and from around the country.

We're known as the German community again, or at least that we have the her Fort Wayne, a most German town, is made possible by a 40th anniversary grant from the Foellinger Foundation honoring its past by investing in the future through grants that benefit children, Youth and families and Home Loan Bank.