On a quiet afternoon in Cullman you can walk east from the sunken railroad tracks and find a neighborhood that still hints at a very different origin story from most Southern towns. A state marker calls it “Die Deutsche Kolonie Von Nord Alabama.” Modest frame houses and larger Victorian homes line a grid of streets that were once the heart of a planned German colony. What began as an experiment in immigration, railroad development, and New South agriculture left its mark so strongly that in 1984 the federal government listed twenty seven city blocks here as the Cullman Historic District of “Die Deutsche Kolonie Von Nord Alabama.”
This is the story of how a Bavarian promoter, a railroad corridor, and thousands of German speaking settlers made a corner of north Alabama into one of the region’s most distinctive ethnic landscapes.
Rails, Land Companies, And A Bavarian Founder
The colony that became Cullman began with a man and a railroad line. In the decades after the Civil War, German political refugee John G. Cullmann drifted through several Southern states looking for an opportunity that would pay his debts and give him a role on the American frontier. By the early 1870s he was in Alabama, studying maps of a new line that the South and North Alabama Railroad was pushing from Montgomery toward Decatur. That line soon came under the control of the larger Louisville and Nashville system, which hoped to profit not only from freight but from the sale of adjacent land.
Railroad owned tracts stretched across the pine uplands of what would become Cullman County. In 1871 Cullmann negotiated to purchase a large block of those lands and town lots along the right of way. Later accounts in county histories and the Encyclopedia of Alabama describe him controlling hundreds of thousands of acres and roughly a thousand town lots through his land companies.
To manage this venture he incorporated first the North Alabama Land Company and then the North Alabama Land and Immigration Company, which by the late 1880s had a reported capitalization in the millions of dollars. These companies bought railroad land at wholesale prices and resold it in smaller parcels to immigrant farmers.
The site he chose for a town was a rise of land along the tracks in what was then Blount County. The new settlement took his name, with English speaking officials spelling it “Cullman” while German speakers often retained “Cullmann.” In 1877 the Alabama legislature created a new county from portions of Blount, Morgan, and Winston counties and made the young town its seat.
From the start the town was meant to be more than just a depot. Cullmann imagined a German farming colony that would prove, in the language of New South boosters, that disciplined European peasants could make cutover Southern land prosper through diversified agriculture, grapes, and small industry. Agricultural historian Robert S. Davis has argued that Cullman County became one of the most ambitious attempts to graft an Old World farming culture onto a postwar Southern landscape.
Selling A German Colony In Print
The German colony in north Alabama was built with ink as much as with axes and plows. In the mid 1870s Cullmann and his associates launched a German language newspaper titled Der Nord Alabama Colonist, printed in Cullman by “John G. Cullmann & Sohn.” The WorldCat record preserves the title and publisher, and surviving issues show a mixture of local news, land advertisements, letters from settlers, and promotional essays that painted north Alabama as a healthy highland refuge from crowded cities and harsher northern winters.
Because many prospective colonists were already living in American cities such as Cincinnati, St. Louis, or Louisville, where German language papers flourished, Der Nord Alabama Colonist could speak directly to people who had some experience with American life but were still reading in their mother tongue. Notices also appeared in other German papers, inviting readers to send inquiries or visit the colony by rail.
Alongside this, Cullmann and his partners sponsored an English language promotional weekly called The Southern Immigrant, begun in 1876. That paper aimed squarely at state officials, railroad investors, and English speaking farmers who might be persuaded that German settlement would raise land values and bring new markets. Later genealogical and newspaper histories note that The Southern Immigrant merged into the Alabama Tribune in 1880 but for a few years it was another mouthpiece for the colony’s ambitions.
Advertisements and pamphlets rounded out the promotional campaign. A pamphlet addressed “To German Immigrants” circulated in the 1870s and 1880s, promising cheap land, good water, and a mild climate to farmers willing to move south. Davis quotes from a version dated 1877 that emphasized the elevation of the plateau, the proximity of markets by rail, and the claim that German settlers could maintain their language and customs while enjoying American citizenship.
Other small pieces, such as a pamphlet titled “German and American Families in Cullman County” noted in the Alabama Department of Archives and History’s pamphlet catalog, suggest that local observers were already comparing the fertility rates, farm layouts, and household economies of German and non German families within a few decades of the colony’s founding.
Laying Out “Die Deutsche Kolonie Von Nord Alabama”
The words on today’s historic marker point back to the way the colony took shape on the ground. As the railroad carved a sunken path through town, residential blocks rose on either side. The area east of the line became the core of the German residential district. The National Register of Historic Places nomination describes a district of roughly twenty seven blocks, laid out in a rectilinear grid and filled primarily with single family dwellings rather than the denser boardinghouse rows of some industrial towns.
Within that grid, early houses ranged from simple one story frame cottages to larger two story homes with German influenced details such as steeply pitched roofs, decorative bargeboards, and grape arbors in the yards. Many settlers were not factory workers but farmers who kept town lots as a base while cultivating nearby fields and vineyards.
Local newspapers such as the Cullman Progress, the Review and Guide, and later the Alabama Tribune followed the building out of this landscape. Their surviving issues contain notices of new stores, reports of grape harvests, German society meetings, and the small disputes and court cases that marked the maturing of any frontier town. The Library of Congress listing for the Review and Guide, founded in 1884 and proudly billing itself as “the only independent paper published in this county,” hints at a lively public sphere in which German immigrants and English speaking neighbors argued over politics, rail rates, and land titles in both languages.
The combination of town grid and surrounding farms mattered for later preservation. When the Alabama Historical Commission nominated the area in the 1980s, it defined the Cullman Historic District of “Die Deutsche Kolonie Von Nord Alabama” as a residential enclave east of the tracks, with a period of significance from 1874 to 1934 that captured both the initial German building wave and later infill as second and third generation families adapted their surroundings.
Farms, Grapes, And A New South Experiment
Cullmann and his backers did not present the colony as a simple railroad town. They advertised it as a model of what diversified agriculture could look like in the New South. Der Nord Alabama Colonist and the land company’s circulars promoted vineyards, orchards, and mixed farms rather than the one crop cotton culture that had exhausted so much Southern soil.
In his article “The Old World in the New South,” Davis uses company records, R. G. Dun credit reports, and newspapers to show that Cullman County’s German farmers experimented with grapes, wine, and small fruits while also raising corn, small grains, and livestock. Cullmann even chartered a Wine Company of Cullman to market local wine.
The German settlers did not always find easy success. The soils of the Sand Mountain plateau and the challenges of Southern pests and humidity meant that some vineyards failed or required adjustment. Yet observers from outside the county repeatedly pointed to Cullman as an example of relatively self sufficient farmsteads. In a 1939 comparative article on British and German farming traditions, historian R. H. Shryock cited Cullman County as a place where German farmers’ “superior” methods were said to show in better barns, fences, and crop rotations than those of some American born neighbors.
During the 1940s geographers J. Allen Tower and Walter Wolf undertook one of the earliest academic studies of the region’s ethnic landscape. Their article “Ethnic Groups in Cullman County, Alabama” counted several thousand German Americans and detailed the ways their farms, churches, and family networks still differed from those of surrounding counties. An abstract later reprinted in a Southern Appalachians bibliography notes that there were nearly 2,500 German Americans in the county at that time, evidence that the colony had not simply vanished into a generic Southern population.
Over time, agricultural patterns shifted. Poultry, dairying, and truck crops joined or replaced vineyards. A recent historic context study of Alabama agriculture traces Cullman County’s evolution from a German wine and small farm experiment into a twentieth century hub for poultry and vegetable production, still shaped by the emphasis on diversified farming that Cullmann promoted but now operating within broader regional markets.
Language, Churches, And Everyday Life
For the first generations of settlers, Cullman was as much a linguistic refuge as an economic project. Letters, newspapers, and church records indicate that German was widely spoken in homes, stores, and congregations well into the early twentieth century. Der Nord Alabama Colonist provided a German language public forum, while bilingual notices in local English papers and advertisements from the land company helped bridge the gap with non German neighbors.
Religious institutions anchored this world. Catholic settlers drew the attention of Benedictine monks from German foundations in Pennsylvania. These monks first came to north Alabama in the 1870s to serve scattered German speaking Catholics, then in 1891 established a permanent monastery at St. Bernard Abbey just outside Cullman. The abbey’s own histories and regional reference works note that it became the only Benedictine monastery in Alabama and soon opened a school that evolved into St. Bernard College and later St. Bernard Preparatory School.
From the abbey grounds a German monk named Brother Joseph Zoettl would eventually create the miniature landscape now known as Ave Maria Grotto. Between the 1920s and 1950s he built more than a hundred small stone and cement models of churches, shrines, and cities from around the world, assembling them into a four acre park in an old quarry. The grotto, dedicated in the 1930s and completed just before his death in 1961, has since become one of Cullman’s best known tourist sites and a physical reminder of the town’s German Catholic roots.
Protestant Germans organized Lutheran and Reformed congregations whose baptism, marriage, and confirmation registers now serve as key demographic sources. Microfilmed copies listed on FamilySearch and in Alabama church record guides show German surnames persisting for generations, often alongside English given names that reflected a slow blending of cultures.
In everyday life, that blending could be complicated. Tower and Wolf noted that German families often maintained distinctive barn styles, fencing patterns, and a reputation for thrift and self sufficiency even as they participated in county politics and markets. Local oral histories and genealogical compilations suggest that town merchants sometimes assumed customers could conduct business in German through the early twentieth century, while countywide institutions such as courts and schools functioned primarily in English.
From German Colony To Alabama Town
By the early twentieth century Cullman was no longer a fragile experiment. It was a county seat, a rail town, and a minor manufacturing center that shipped produce, lumber, and manufactured goods across the region. Newspapers like the Cullman Tribune, which had absorbed The Southern Immigrant, documented disputes over temperance, school funding, and politics that looked much like those in other Alabama counties.
Yet the German colony’s distinctiveness did not simply evaporate. When World War I stirred anti German sentiment across the United States, churches and schools in Cullman faced pressure to switch entirely to English. Some did so quickly. Others retained German services or classes for years, even as younger residents shifted their daily speech. During World War II, national suspicion of German culture resurfaced, but local accounts suggest that Cullman’s long standing integration into Alabama politics and its identity as a white agricultural county muted the worst effects that German American communities faced in parts of the Midwest.
By mid century many residents who traced their ancestry to the colony no longer thought of themselves as immigrants or even as particularly ethnic. They were simply Cullman County farmers, merchants, teachers, and workers. Nonetheless, scholars like Davis have argued that the structures of landholding, the persistence of diversified agriculture, and the survival of institutions such as St. Bernard Abbey and German rooted congregations show how the old colony quietly shaped the county’s trajectory.
Memory, Heritage, And The Historic District
In the late twentieth century, as communities across Appalachia and the South looked for ways to preserve distinctive pasts, Cullman residents and preservationists turned renewed attention to the German colony. The Alabama Historical Commission’s survey work led to the preparation of a National Register nomination for the Cullman Historic District of “Die Deutsche Kolonie Von Nord Alabama.” That document mapped the residential blocks east of the railroad and argued that the neighborhood’s houses, street grid, and surviving outbuildings together formed a rare physical record of organized German colonization in the post Civil War South.
Today a state historical marker tells visitors that Col. Cullmann brought thousands of German settlers to north Alabama in the 1870s, and that the streets around them formed the core of his planned “German Colony of North Alabama.” Exhibits at the Cullman County Museum display photographs, tools, and household objects from early colonist families, while local heritage books such as Heritage of Cullman County, Alabama collect family sketches and reminiscences from their descendants.
Walking those streets today, it can be easy to miss what made them so unusual in the Reconstruction era. The houses stand among modern cars, satellite dishes, and chain stores. Yet the pattern of the town, the continuing presence of German Catholic and Protestant institutions, and the layered record preserved in newspapers, pamphlets, and maps all testify that this was not simply another courthouse town. It was a place where transatlantic migration, railroad capitalism, and immigrant hopes produced a German colony on Southern soil and where that experiment left marks on land and memory that still shape Cullman’s identity.
Sources & Further Reading
“Ave Maria Grotto.” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Alabama Humanities Alliance and Auburn University. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/ave-maria-grotto/
“Cullman County.” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Alabama Humanities Alliance and Auburn University. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/cullman-county/
Alabama Historical Commission. “Cullman Historic District of ‘Die Deutsche Kolonie Von Nord Alabama’.” In National Register Properties in Alabama, updated December 19, 2025. PDF. https://ahc.alabama.gov/nationalregisterPDFs/2026/National_Register_Properties_in_Alabama%2012_19_25.pdf
“Cullman Historic District of ‘Die Deutsche Kolonie Von Nord Alabama’.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory–Nomination Form. National Park Service, 1984. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/d6f147cd-f776-406c-81f4-24743bb3bc08
Ave Maria Grotto. “About.” Ave Maria Grotto, Cullman, Alabama. https://www.avemariagrotto.com/about.html
Cullman County Museum. “Colonel Cullmann and the German Colony of North Alabama.” Cullman County Museum. https://cullmancountymuseum.com/exhibits/colonel-cullmann/
Cullman County Museum. “Cullman County Museum.” Cullman County Museum. https://cullmancountymuseum.com/
Davis, Robert S. “The Old World in the New South: Entrepreneurial Ventures and the Agricultural History of Cullman County, Alabama.” Agricultural History 79, no. 4 (2005): 439–461. https://read.dukeupress.edu/agricultural-history/article/79/4/439/295888/The-Old-World-in-the-New-South-Entrepreneurial
Davis, Robert S. “The Communities Created in Cullman County, Alabama.” Wallace State Community College Library, 2005. PDF. https://www.wallacestate.edu/library/genealogy/genealogy_files/Cullman_County_article_for_current_revised_draft.pdf
“Der Nord Alabama Colonist.” WorldCat catalog record. OCLC 12339013. https://search.worldcat.org/title/Der-Nord-Alabama-colonist/oclc/12339013
Heritage of Cullman County, Alabama. Clanton, AL: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 1999. Listed under “Additional Resources” in the Encyclopedia of Alabama Cullman County entry. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/cullman-county/
“History of Cullman County Alabama.” Genealogy Trails: Cullman County, Alabama. https://www.genealogytrails.com/ala/cullman/history2.html
“John Cullmann.” Bhamwiki: The Free Encyclopedia of the Birmingham District. http://www.bhamwiki.com/w/John_Cullmann
Jones, Margaret Jean. Combing Cullman County. Cullman, AL: Modernistic Printers, 1972. Cited in Alabama county newspaper and history bibliographies. https://home.hiwaay.net/~bobwonda/books/18771898Tribune.htm
Jones, Margaret Jean. Cullman County Across the Years. Cullman, AL: Modernistic Printers, 1975. Referenced in regional bibliographies on Cullman County history. https://home.hiwaay.net/~bobwonda/books/18771898Tribune.htm
Kollmorgen, Walter M. The German Settlement in Cullman County, Alabama: An Agricultural Island in the Cotton Belt. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1941. HathiTrust Digital Library. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015055373685
Leigeber, Kaye Marie Couch. German Colonization: Cullman County, Alabama. Cullman, AL: Gregath Company, 1982. Listed in Wallace State Community College genealogy resources. https://www.wallacestate.edu/programs/liberal-arts/History-and-Genealogy/cullmancountyresources/
“The Review and Guide (Cullman, Ala.).” Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85044707/
Saint Bernard Abbey. “Benedictine Monks | Saint Bernard Abbey | Cullman, AL.” Saint Bernard Abbey. https://www.stbernardabbey.com/
Tower, J. Allen, and Walter Wolf. “Ethnic Groups in Cullman County, Alabama.” Geographical Review 33, no. 2 (1943): 276–285. https://www.jstor.org/stable/209778
“Selected Resources: Cullman County.” Alabama Public Library Service, Selected Resources for Alabama Counties. https://home.hiwaay.net/~bobwonda/clmncnty.htm
“On This Day in Alabama History: Cullman County Was Created.” Alabama NewsCenter, January 24, 2019. https://alabamanewscenter.com/2019/01/24/day-alabama-history-cullman-county-created/
“Cullman County.” German Wikipedia. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cullman_County
“Ave Maria Grotto.” Official site of Ave Maria Grotto, Cullman, Alabama. https://www.avemariagrotto.com/
Author Note: As someone who writes about borderland towns and immigrant experiments in the Appalachian South, I am drawn to places where old-world languages and new-world railroads collided. I hope this piece helps you see Cullman not just as another Alabama county seat, but as a German colony on Southern soil whose farms, churches, and streets still carry that layered history.