Immigration

Dallas, TX

Founded in 1884 by the Temple Emanu-El congregation, this was Dallas's second Jewish cemetery, its first burials belonging to two Russian immigrants who died the same day. Older graves were carried here in 1956 from the city's first Jewish burial ground on Akard Street, established in 1872. Among its thousands of monuments rest early Dallas business and civic leaders, veterans of both world wars, and survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.

Paducah, KY

An organized Jewish community has lived in Paducah since 1864, when a burial society was chartered; the first house of worship followed in 1871. In 1873 the congregation became a charter member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and in 1893 it built and incorporated as Temple Israel. The congregation later dedicated a new temple in 1963, carrying a continuous religious life across a full century.

Terrell, TX

When the Terrell State Hospital opened in July 1885, the institution set aside part of its grounds to bury patients who died in its care, with the first interment that October. Most of the graves are unmarked, a separate section serves the hospital's Jewish dead, and some burials date to a 1907 smallpox epidemic. Burials ran thirty to thirty-five a year through the 1950s and 1960s before gradually declining.

Marion, TX

This limestone and stucco house, built in the 1870s, was the home of Carl August Edward Tewes, a German immigrant who arrived in 1854, served in the Civil War, and became a Guadalupe County merchant and longtime New Berlin postmaster. Its central-hall plan marks it as a characteristic early Texas pioneer dwelling, and it stayed in the Tewes family for a full century until 1976. The house embodies the German immigrant experience that shaped south-central Texas.

New Braunfels, TX

When Texas voted on secession in 1861, ten heavily German counties opposed leaving the Union, an unusual dissent in a Confederate state—though Comal County broke the other way. Many German Texans had only recently taken naturalization oaths and found the doctrine of states' rights hard to parse; some avoided service out of concern for their families while others slipped away to join U.S. units. Still, the majority backed the Confederacy, and three companies from Comal County earned praise for their discipline and morale.

Austin, TX

Johann Jacob Groos left Germany for Texas in 1845, part of the great wave of German immigration that reshaped the Hill Country, and put his surveyor's training to work opening the New Braunfels area to settlement. He held Comal County office for over a decade, served in the Confederate militia during the Civil War, and in 1874 was elected Commissioner of the General Land Office — the state agency at the very center of Texas's land-grant story.

Seguin, TX

Texas Lutheran College traces its roots to an 1890 decision by the first German Evangelical Lutheran Synod in Texas to open a school in Brenham, which welcomed students in 1891 with a European-style curriculum taught in German and English. Over the following decades it shifted toward ministerial training, moved to Seguin in 1912 after townspeople offered land, and grew through mergers with Swedish, then Norwegian, Lutheran colleges. It took its present name in 1932 and became a four-year senior college in 1948.

San Antonio, TX

On October 28, 1928, a San Antonio station billed as "Radio Sam" launched a two-hour nightly broadcast entirely in Spanish — the first program of its kind in Texas. Owner Sam Liberto and businessman Edward Buckley recruited Julián F. Lozano to produce and announce "The International Goodwill Program," which he hosted in a spirit of cross-cultural understanding until his death in 1951. The tradition he began seeded the many hours of Spanish-language radio that San Antonio stations still air today.

Farmers Branch, TX

This site marks the first agency, opened in January 1845, of the colonization venture better known as Peters' Colony. Under a contract secured from the Republic of Texas in 1841, William S. Peters and his associates introduced more than ten thousand settlers across seventeen counties of North Texas, seeding communities like Farmers Branch.

Rocksprings, TX

Built about 1895 by J.P. Taylor, an Englishman, this ranch house stood along the old Fort McKavett–Fort Clark Road when the country was still open range. In 1907 early settlers E.E. and Mary Sproul Morriss bought Taylor's acreage, patented more land, and turned the place into a social center for the region. Its name, "Chaparral," nods to the roadrunners and dwarf oaks that thrived across the surrounding brush country.

Haines Township, PA · est. 1997

This central Pennsylvania village was founded in 1786 by a Jewish immigrant who, in a striking act of generosity, gave land and even a communion set to the Christian congregations of his new community. More than a century and a half later, his example inspired a remarkable gathering: in 1949, tens of thousands of people came here for a day devoted to religious and racial understanding, complete with a vast outdoor pageant staged on a natural hillside. The founder's tolerance had become a symbol for a nation grappling with prejudice after World War II.

Fredericksburg, TX

August and Johanne Hennersdorf left Prussia for Fredericksburg in 1855 and, in the early 1900s, built this frame-and-limestone home for their family. Local tradition holds that the floor joists beneath the frame section are the octagonal wooden columns salvaged from the town's original Vereins Kirche, dismantled in 1896. If so, the house quietly carries a piece of the community's founding meeting-house within its bones.

Tredyffrin Township, PA · est. 1951

In 1711, Welsh families who had crossed the Atlantic seeking room to worship freely gathered in the fertile Chester County countryside known as the Great Valley and organized a Baptist congregation. It became the second oldest Baptist church in Pennsylvania and, over time, the "mother" from which eight neighboring congregations grew. The present stone meetinghouse, the second on the site, was raised in 1805.

Washoe County, NV

This monument near Reno honors the Basque sheepherders who tended flocks across the Great Basin, carrying a poem, "Solitude," by the Basque artist Nestor Basterretxea. Drawn from the Pyrenees to the American West beginning in the nineteenth century, Basque immigrants became the backbone of open-range sheepherding, enduring months of isolation in the high desert. The work evokes the loneliness and endurance at the heart of their frontier labor.

Cranfills Gap, TX

The stone portion of this house was raised in the 1880s for Norwegian settler Andres Johnson, likely by builder Andrew Mickelson, who worked on other structures in the community. In 1894 Bertel and Christena Bertelsen bought the property, enlarged the stone house, and around 1910 added a frame wing to hold their family of eighteen children. The home stayed with the Bertelsen family until 1977.

San Antonio, TX

On the south side of San Antonio's Main Plaza — the old "Plaza de las Islas" laid out by Canary Islander settlers in 1731 — this Romanesque courthouse rose between 1891 and 1896, financed by $621,000 in citizen-approved bonds. Architect James Riely Gordon gave it massive walls of native Texas granite and red sandstone, green- and red-tiled towers, and richly carved arches. It was the fourth seat of Bexar County government since Texas statehood and remains the judicial heart of the county.

New Braunfels, TX

The Reverend Henry Braschler, born in Switzerland in 1818, came to Texas in 1848 and served as pastor of nearby St. Martin Lutheran Church before building this house in 1854 of caliche and cedar fachwerk — the half-timbered technique German and Swiss settlers brought with them. Enlarged over time, it is said to have become a stage stop on the Bastrop Road. Its family plot holds the grave of Danish-born Maren Hander.

Brenham, TX

Brenham's Maifest grew out of the German Volksfest, a spring celebration carried to central Texas by immigrants who settled the countryside around town. When the fire department took over in 1880, the once German-only festival opened to everyone and took its lasting name, pausing only for the two World Wars before its 1948 revival. Today the crowning of Maifest royalty and the parades in Fireman's Park still echo old-country custom.

Fredericksburg, TX

Gottlieb Burrer was one of the German immigrants who poured into the Texas Hill Country in the 1850s, part of the wave that made Fredericksburg a distinctly German-Texan town. Arriving in 1854, he married into an established pioneer family and, in the 1860s, built this sturdy two-story stone house in the local vernacular—an open sleeping loft upstairs, wood stoves for heat. Generations of the Burrer family lived here, with mid-20th-century additions marking its long occupancy.

San Antonio, TX

English immigrant Robert Caile built this caliche-block house soon after buying the property in 1857, on land that had been part of an 1812 Spanish grant to Delores Alderete. He enlarged it after the Civil War, and the home stayed in his family until 1894 before passing to a farmer who rented it out. It stands as a tangible link across San Antonio's Spanish-colonial and American frontier eras.

San Antonio, TX

In 1731, fifty-six colonists sent by King Philip V arrived at the San Antonio presidio after more than a year's journey from the Canary Islands, becoming the town's first civilian settlers. They laid out the villa of San Fernando de Bexar around a central plaza, siting a church and government house, and formed the first organized civil government in Texas. By royal decree they and their descendants were declared hijos dalgo, persons of nobility.

Fredericksburg, TX

Carl Henke was said to be the first boy born among the German immigrants who founded Fredericksburg, and he grew up to become a skilled stonemason. In 1874 he built the original two-room limestone portion of this house—with a loft reached by an outside stair—for John Schmitt, then bought it for himself in the 1880s. His family kept the home for nearly a century, a quiet record of the settlement's first native-born generation.

Del RIo, TX

Italian stonemason G.B. Cassinelli came to America to build in New York, but when that project collapsed he and his partner found work on the railroads and then on stone buildings at Fort Clark and the Val Verde County Courthouse. Cassinelli settled in Del Rio and prospered as a merchant and contractor, and in 1903 he built a cotton gin here beside San Felipe Creek. Its upper floor, used for dances and receptions, made the gin house a hub of early Del Rio social life.

Okanogan County, WA

Below this sign lie the remnants of the China Ditch, dug by Chinese miners sometime between 1860 and 1880 to carry water three miles from a diversion on the Methow River to sluice gold from the sandbars of the Columbia. Chinese laborers were central to gold recovery across the Far West, often reworking claims others had abandoned, yet their contributions were long overlooked and frequently met with hostility.

Fredericksburg, TX

Christian Kraus began this stone home in 1859 after he and his wife Anna Maria settled in the German community of Klein Frankreich, or 'Little France,' near Fredericksburg. Kraus farmed and taught school, and the family raised not only their own seven children but also the seven orphaned children of Peter Burg, who was killed by the Haengebrande, the vigilante band that terrorized Unionist Germans during the Civil War. A pillar of the community, Kraus helped build Fredericksburg's St. Mary's Catholic Church and expanded his vernacular stone home in 1879.

New Braunfels, TX

German Catholic colonists who reached New Braunfels in 1845 were promised a church and school, and in 1847 Bishop John M. Odin received four lots atop a hill locals called "Lustiger Strumpf" (Happy Stocking) for its shape. A log cabin gave way to a walnut-wood chapel, and since 1871 a Gothic church of native limestone has crowned the hill; its storm-toppled steeple was rebuilt with a clock added in 1889. Franciscan, Benedictine, and Sisters of Divine Providence teachers took turns running the school.

Mason, TX

German immigrant Anna Mebus came to Texas in 1858, married her merchant cousin, and after his death ran their Mason store and post office while quietly handling the cash of area ranchers. In 1901 she helped found The Commercial Bank and became its president, opening with just three thousand dollars in capital and, before a bank building was secured, carrying the money home each night for safekeeping. With her sons as officers, she led a family bank that endured until 1958.

Center Point, TX

German pioneers of the Cypress Creek community formed a school district in 1879, and in 1908 replaced their frame schoolhouse with this limestone building, quarried locally and raised by stonemasons Charles and Otto Bartel. Classes continued here until 1942, when the district consolidated with Comfort. The sturdy stone structure reflects the craftsmanship of the Hill Country's German settlers.

Anahuac, TX

Born in Bavaria in 1845 and brought to America as a child, Nicholas T. Schilling served as a young Union cavalryman before earning his medical degree in Chicago and settling at Cedar Bayou in 1874. He worked in a brick factory to fund his first practice—a lean-to behind a store—and by 1890 had built this carefully arranged office, where he practiced general medicine, dentistry, and eye care, often accepting produce and farm labor in place of fees. Preserved intact by his daughter and later moved here by barge, the little office is a vivid window into the life of a 19th-century country doctor.

Fredericksburg, TX

The bonfires that still blaze on the hills above Fredericksburg each Easter Eve grew out of a moment of fragile peace. In March 1847, as Comanche leaders and German settlers signed a major treaty, the Comanches lit signal fires on these heights; to soothe her frightened children, one German mother said the smoke came from the Easter Bunny boiling flowers to dye eggs. As the story spread, settlers kindled the fires each year that peace held, and a beloved local tradition was born.

Cuero, TX

Edward Mugge, a German immigrant who landed at the now-vanished port of Indianola in 1854, rose through hard work to a partnership in the pioneer banking firm of H. Runge and Company and helped make Cuero a commercial hub of late-19th-century South Texas. The home he began in the 1870s grew from seven rooms — three of them milled in St. Louis and assembled on site — into a fifteen-room showplace, expanded room by room as gifts to his wife and six children. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1971.

Orange, TX

Emmett Beuhler, a native of Alsace-Lorraine, arrived during the 1880s lumbering boom and, with German-born partner L. Miller, built a cypress shingle mill served by its own railroad and employing some 75 men. Around 1890 he built this Victorian cottage of cypress and yellow pine trimmed with rare curly pine. The Beuhlers left for Louisiana in 1904, and after later alterations the R. B. Johnson family bought and preserved the home in 1955.

Bergheim, TX

Andreas Engel left Austria for Texas in 1885 and, by 1900, had bought land in the Hill Country and raised a cotton gin that drew farmers into a small community. When the post office arrived in 1901 he became postmaster and named the place Bergheim—'home in the hills'—and in 1903 he and his wife Eva opened the store that still anchors the crossroads. Their son Alfred later added services like a cedar yard, keeping the family enterprise woven into local life.

Midfield, TX

Friedrich Caspar Cornelius left Germany for Texas in 1870, anglicized his name to F. Cornelius, and learned ranching from his employers before buying cattle and, in 1882, land of his own on the Matagorda coast. He built this house between 1886 and 1888 from lumber dragged by ox-sled all the way from the port of Indianola, and despite the storms and floods of the Gulf, he held his ground and steadily expanded, parceling land to his children as they grew. A charter member of the Old Trail Drivers' Association, he lived to age 96.

Baltimore, MD

In the maritime heart of Baltimore lies the small burial ground of the Fell family, the English settlers who gave their name to Fell's Point. Arriving in the eighteenth century, the Fells laid out a shipbuilding and shipping community along the deep water of the Patapsco River, and their surname still marks one of the city's oldest and most storied neighborhoods. This family plot is a quiet reminder that a bustling seafaring district began with a single household's land and ambitions.

Cuero, TX

When four well-educated German families settled along Five Mile Creek in 1849, neighbors dubbed the place "Latiner" for the settlers' command of Latin; San Jacinto veteran Capt. Robert Kleberg was among the early residents. In the 1880s the German settlement of Rabke grew up nearby, with Edward Rabke's store housing the post office and a Woodmen of the World lodge, while local children attended the Five Mile School. Today only Rabke Methodist Church survives of the community's early landmarks.

Floresville, TX

The Flores de Abrego family came from northern Spain before the American Revolution and, through the eighteenth century, drove their cattle north to establish ranches along the San Antonio River. Grandsons of the family fought on the Texian side in the revolution against Mexico, and in 1854 Josefa Agustina Flores de Abrego married Samuel William Barker, who became Wilson County's first sheriff. In 1867 Josefa donated 200 acres for the new county seat, asking that it be named Floresville in honor of her ancestor Francisco Antonio Flores de Abrego II.

Boston, MA

In 1630, English Puritans led by John Winthrop settled the Shawmut peninsula and founded Boston, the town that would become the political and intellectual hub of colonial New England. This memorial stands on Boston Common — the oldest public park in the country — and recalls the first colonists and the lone earlier English settler who greeted them. From these beginnings grew a colonial capital of meetinghouses, wharves, and printing presses.

Houston, TX

The "Creoles of Color" — a distinct people of French, Spanish, African, and Native American heritage — emerged in Louisiana before losing their free status under Jim Crow. Fleeing the devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood, many migrated west to Houston for work in oil, construction, and railroads, building the tight-knit enclave of Frenchtown. There they sustained their Catholic faith, French language, la-la gatherings, and the zydeco music that became their signature.

Fairfield, TX

When German immigrant Fred Fischer arrived in Freestone County in 1876, he brought a tinsmith's trained eye that later shaped his own home. In 1893, the same year he opened a hardware store, he had this Eastlake-style residence built, dressing it in the elaborate metal ornamentation his trade made possible. The house stayed in the family for generations, a small monument to a craftsman who put his skill into his own walls.

Luling, TX

Born in Germany in 1840, Fritz Zedler came to Texas as a boy and, after moving to Luling in 1884, built up the thriving enterprise known as Zedler's Mill. In 1900 he raised this ten-room, four-porch house from his own plans, a monument to his prosperity. It stayed in the family until 1964 and was later bought and carefully restored, earning recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Dublin, TX

Built in 1895 for W. T. Leggett, manager of the Dublin Music Company, this Victorian residence gained its two-story Classical Revival porch in 1907 under owner J. H. Wilder. In 1914 it passed to Michael D. Gallagher, an Irish immigrant who ran a local mercantile store, and the Gallagher family made it home for the next 35 years. The house reflects the tastes and prosperity of a small Texas town at the turn of the century.

Galveston, TX

As pogroms and anti-Semitic laws drove Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, the crowded immigrant neighborhoods of the East Coast prompted a bold alternative: route newcomers through the Gulf instead. Financed almost entirely by banker Jacob Schiff, the Galveston Movement brought roughly 9,300 Jewish immigrants through the Texas port between 1907 and 1914, welcomed each time by Rabbi Henry Cohen and the Jewish Immigrants' Information Bureau, which handed out rail tickets and directed them to more than 150 towns needing skilled workers.

Comfort, TX

This limestone-block building rose in 1890 as a blacksmith shop—a 'schmiede'—for Jacob Gass in the German community of Comfort. Rock mason J. Gottlieb Lorbeer spent nearly a year on the lower level, walking in each week from Sisterdale, while the upper floor was fitted out quickly as a residence. Paul Ingenhuett bought the building in 1903, and in 1932 his family opened it for use as a museum and public library.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2008

Founded the day after Christmas in 1764, the German Society of Pennsylvania is the oldest German American organization in the country, created to give newly arrived German immigrants legal aid, welfare, and help with the English-speaking world around them. Over time it built a library that grew into one of the largest German-language collections in America, prized by scholars worldwide. The Society settled into its present Philadelphia home in 1888 and still teaches the language and celebrates the culture.

Navasota, TX

Beside the Houston & Texas Central Railroad depot, German immigrant R. H. Giesel and his German-born wife Fannie built this three-story stone building in 1860 to house a restaurant and hotel, fronted by a two-story frame porch. A Confederate veteran, Giesel served as temporary mayor in 1867 when yellow fever swept Navasota. Fannie renamed her restaurant "The Good Morning John" and ran the business until her death in 1881, after which later owners kept the hotel going under new names.

Braddock, PA · est. 1994

By 1919 the mills around Braddock were the beating heart of American steel, and that autumn more than 350,000 workers walked off the job in the largest strike the nation had yet seen. Immigrant laborers demanding union recognition and an end to the grueling twelve-hour day found an ally in Rev. Adalbert Kazincy of St. Michael's, who opened his church as a rallying place when public halls were closed to them. After fifteen bitter weeks the strike collapsed, and organized labor in steel would not recover for another generation.

New Braunfels, TX

When the catastrophic 1918 influenza pandemic swept the country, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the parish of Saints Peter and Paul in New Braunfels answered with faith. Led by Father J.M.J. Wack, parishioners built this stone grotto — modeled on the famous shrine at Lourdes, France — from rock gathered off area ranches, dedicating it in 1921 in thanksgiving that the deaths had ceased. A stonemason from Nebraska completed the work with the congregation's help.

Seguin, TX

The Spanish explorer Alonso de León named this 250-mile river for Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1689, and within a few years Governor Domingo Terán de los Ríos kept a colony along its banks. Later it bounded the Power-Hewetson Irish colony and drew dozens of Anglo-American families to its shores. Near its mouth rose Victoria, and 60 miles upstream stood Gonzales, where the opening shot of the Texas Revolution rang out in October 1835.

Galveston, TX

German immigrant Samson Heidenheimer built this Galveston commercial house in 1876, capping a rise that local tradition says began with him peddling goods on the street and, during the Civil War, dealing in cotton and running the Union blockade. With his brothers he ran a wholesale grocery here for decades before the building became home to steamship stevedores and earned the name Marine Building. Its Victorian-Italianate front, with hood molds, ogee arches, and corbelled detail, restored in the 1980s, still speaks to the port city's mercantile prime.

New Braunfels, TX

German native Frederick Hofheinz arrived in the New Braunfels area with his family in 1852, later settling in Kendall County and leading the Texas Sons of Hermann as its Grand Lodge president. After a run for lieutenant governor, he returned to New Braunfels and in 1906 built this Queen Anne home, its central tower and spindled porch friezes still intact. Converted to apartments during World War II, the house passed through several owners while keeping its distinctive detailing.

Marshall, TX

Mose Weisman opened the Hub Shoe Store on Marshall's East Austin Street in 1897, part of a Bavarian-Jewish family that had made its way from Germany to Syracuse and on to East Texas. His nephew Louis Kariel, a World War I veteran, took over in 1924 and became Marshall's first Jewish mayor—a tradition of civic service his son carried on. The store served the town for more than a century before closing in 2001.

Palestine, TX

Named the Anderson County seat in 1846, Palestine first grew on Trinity River steamboat trade that stalled whenever low water forced residents back onto ox-drawn wagons. Local leaders courted the railroad, and when the line that became the International and Great Northern arrived in 1872 — soon relocating its headquarters, shops, and roundhouse here — it became the town's largest employer for decades. Recruited workers arrived from across the nation and abroad, and to spare the old courthouse square the noise of trains the line was routed west, spawning a separate 'New Town' that took years to blend with the old.

Galveston, TX

Drawn by the opportunities of a booming Gulf port, many Italian immigrants settled in 19th-century Galveston and in 1876 founded the Italian Mutual Benevolent Society to aid one another. In 1888 the society built this Gothic-influenced mausoleum — the Italian Vault — in Calvary Catholic Cemetery, with twelve crypts that gave more than 70 members a temporary or permanent resting place. Community founders like Captain Clemente Nicolini and Gioacchino Cassara are buried nearby.

Big Spring, TX

In 1881, as Big Spring took shape, Austrian-born Joseph Fisher opened a general store out of a tent, joined two years later by his brother William. From that beginning the Fishers built a trade territory as large as four New England states, ran a pushcart that doubled as the town hearse, and served as the community's first bank—sometimes staying open until 2 a.m. to cash paychecks. They carried debt-ridden farmers and ranchers for years and gave freely to lodges, schools, and churches until the store closed in 1941.

Austin, TX

Born into slavery in Tennessee around 1839, Jeremiah Hamilton rose to become one of nine Black members of the 12th Texas Legislature during Reconstruction, from 1869 to 1871. In 1871 he bought this lot on Waller Creek and began an oddly shaped stone building to house his grocery. A decade later it passed to the Italian-born entrepreneur Michael Paggi, whose ventures included the novel manufacture of ice.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

Organized in 1865, the Jewish Hospital was the first in Pennsylvania founded and funded by Jewish Philadelphians to care for their own community — though its doors were open to all. It rose as the city's Jewish population swelled with families fleeing upheaval in the German states, offering kosher food and religious observance that other hospitals could not. In 1952 it was renamed the Albert Einstein Medical Center, a name it carries into the present.

Austin, TX

Charles Johnson, a Swedish immigrant, raised this thick-walled stone house near a Colorado River ford in 1858, quarrying the native stone and burning the lime himself with the help of fellow Swedes. Its eighteen-inch walls and breezeway-joined wings mark the craftsmanship of Central Texas's early Swedish settlers. In 1924 it became the permanent home of an American Legion post, which added the columned porch.

Castroville, TX

Joseph and Katherine Meyer, immigrants from Alsace, bought this four-acre homestead in 1855, part of Henri Castro's colony surveyed by John James in 1844. Remarkably, it survives as the only undivided tract in Castroville, its house built in the distinctive Alsatian style with thick rock walls plastered in lime from Meyer's own kiln near the Medina River. The land passed down through Meyer's daughter and a succession of later families.

Houston, TX

Irish immigrant John Kennedy (1819–78) arrived in Houston in 1842 and, after running stores elsewhere in the city, commissioned this two-story brick building around 1860 for a steam bakery. Kennedy went on to become a leading Houston businessman, and the structure — one of the oldest in the city still on its original site — stayed in his family until 1970. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1980.