The German city: the foreign-born series

1890 — 1920

In 1910 one Fort Wayne resident in nine had been born abroad, and more than half of those had been born in Germany: The Thirteenth Census counted 63,933 people in Fort Wayne and divided them by the census's own nativity classes: 36,772 native whites of native parentage (57.5 percent), 19,414 native whites of foreign or mixed parentage (30.4 percent), and 7,204 foreign-born whites (11.3 percent). Of the foreign-born, 4,051 — 56 percent — were natives of Germany, ahead of Russia (391), Ireland (385), England (337), Turkey in Europe (331), Canada (295), Switzerland (207) and France (173). German-born residents alone were 6.3 percent of the whole city, and when the census's parentage figures are read together, the scholarship puts the German share of the place at its documented peak: about 60 percent of Fort Wayne's people in 1910 shared German heritage, and two-thirds is the figure given for German ancestry when the second generation is fully reckoned. Allen County as a whole was 10 percent foreign-born in 1910.

The peak was already passing when it was counted. In 1890 the German-born had been 8.41 percent of Allen County's population and 72.55 percent of all its foreign-born — the German stream was both larger relative to the county and more dominant within the immigrant population than it would be in 1910, when southern and eastern European arrivals (the 331 natives of Turkey in Europe in the city count are the census's trace of the Balkan and Levantine migration) had begun to dilute the share. After 1914 the stream stopped: war, then the immigration acts of the 1920s, ended mass German migration, and the foreign-born series declined for half a century as the counted generation aged. The community that the numbers describe — the parishes, the German-language press, the brewing and hosiery trades, and the wartime ordeal of a German city in 1917–18 — is told in the Communities, Religion and Newspapers sections. What the count adds is the shape of the arc: German Fort Wayne was not a neighborhood but a majority, and its majority was built in two generations, between the canal and the First World War.

The booster record belongs in the same entry, labeled as what it is. A German-language newspaper advertising in the city's 1913 handbook announced that "Fort Wayne's 78,000 population is sixty per cent German," and in 1915 the historian Bert Griswold credited one citizen, Henry Rudisill, with making "about eighty per cent" of the population German. After the war the Chamber of Commerce answered in kind, announcing that the city's population was 88.73 percent "American." The percentages were advertisements in a contest over the city's identity; the census figures printed above are the count underneath them, and the truth they support — a German-heritage majority around 60 percent — needs no exaggeration.

Sources:

1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census (1910) — Fort Wayne nativity and parentage figures, as reprinted in full in Griswold and Phelps, Handbook and Guide to Fort Wayne (1913), pp. 18–19, including the foreign-born by country of birth.
2. Peggy Seigel, "Industrial 'Girls' in an Early Twentieth-Century Boomtown," Indiana Magazine of History XCIX (September 2003) — 10 percent of Allen County foreign-born in 1910; about 60 percent of the city sharing German heritage; the Chamber of Commerce's 88.73 percent "American" claim of ten years later.
3. "Challenging Economic Borders: Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Chemnitz, Germany," Indiana Magazine of History 112 (March 2016) — German-born 8.41 percent of Allen County's population in 1890, and 72.55 percent of the county's foreign-born; the derived foreign-born total for 1890 (about 7,700, or 11.6 percent of the county) is arithmetic on those two published percentages, and is marked as derived.
4. Griswold and Phelps, Handbook and Guide (1913) — the Freie Presse-Staats-Zeitung advertisement ("sixty per cent German"); Bert J. Griswold, Quest Club paper (1915) — the "eighty per cent" Rudisill claim, both printed here as booster record, not as counts.