German American demographics

[Adam Griffin]

The three most Catholic per ARDA counties that don't have a large Native population are Stearns, Morrison and Brown. Stearns is mostly St. Cloud and usually not considered rural, but the western rural part of the county is mostly German and definitely qualifies. Those other dark maroon counties in southern Minnesota all would be examples as well.

Came across this looking for info about a certain TN county, oddly enough:

[Adam Griffin]

I did Tennessee because I was expecting for it to be a tad more interesting than what it turned out to be. There were a number of German and Swiss-German colonies built along the Cumberland Plateau between 1840 and 1890, but several failed and the residents ultimately migrated to Knoxville (which already had a fairly large Swiss-German community at the time) or dispersed. I wasn't able to track down all of them, though, but there are still quite a few notable cities remaining (Hohenwald, Gruetli-Laager, Wartburg).

[Adam Griffin]

I did Tennessee because I was expecting for it to be a tad more interesting than what it turned out to be. There were a number of German and Swiss-German colonies built along the Cumberland Plateau between 1840 and 1890, but several failed and the residents ultimately migrated to Knoxville (which already had a fairly large Swiss-German community at the time) or dispersed. I wasn't able to track down all of them, though, but there are still quite a few notable cities remaining (Hohenwald, Gruetli-Laager, Wartburg).

Potentially interesting finds: OK, so after a bit more digging, I tried to see if any of these counties with larger German populations might actually have a significant Catholic population. The only example I could find that really stood out was Williamson County, which isn't a rural county anymore (pop. 200,000).

I still think this is quite interesting, as there is no other urban or metro county in Tennessee that has anywhere near the Catholic population (21%) that it does. It's also tied for a close third in German population percentage. What is odd to me about its Catholic population is that usually, you don't find large populations of Catholics in the South in a suburban county without there being a comparably-sized or larger Catholic population in an adjacent metro area. Nashville/Davidson has 9%; Memphis/Shelby has 14%; Knoxville/Knox and Chattanooga/Hamilton each have 6%. So I'm pondering whether this county - before the most recent metro explosion in growth occurred over the past 30 years - had a much larger rural German population that was indeed Catholic.

I did find some more interesting auxiliary connections in the area: Maury County (adjacent; to the South) also has a larger than normal Catholic population (11%) and is adjacent to two other counties (Lewis, Lawrence) that once had extensive German "colony" projects in them:

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Lewis, which is home to Hohenwald:

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Code:

County:        German %     Catholic %

Morgan:        24%              1%
Cumberland:  15%              8%
Loudon:        13%              2%
Williamson:   13%              21%

So this general area seems to have some potential for German Catholic rural consideration:



I haven't checked to see if there is a perfect correlation, but this also seems to be in the same general vicinity as the part of TN that has always been stubbornly Republican...