The degree to which Germans dispersed across the entire country and the speed with which their ethnic group was integrated into the English-speaking American middle class could, of course, not have been anticipated by their contemporaries. Like other immigrant groups, the Germans followed the natural instinct of forming neighborhoods with their countrymen where they felt at home far away from home. They preferred to head for a region where they could still acquire reasonably priced farm land in areas where German-language churches and perhaps German schools already existed. Thus, the path taken by an individual often turned out to be but a link in a growing chain that bound the Old Homeland to the new target region. Scholars address this as "chain migration" and cite, for example, the fact that many Hannoverians, Oldenburgers, and Braunschweigers traveled by way of Bremen and New Orleans to Ohio and Missouri. Most of the Mecklenburgers journeyed by way of Hamburg and New York and then by railroad and ship across the Great Lakes to Chicago and Milwaukee. This resulted in our thinking of Milwaukee as the "Mecklenburg capital" of the United States. Micro-studies show that emigrants from the same village tended to follow each other to neighboring townships and counties in the New World [Kamphoefner, The Westfalians, 77].

[National Origins of U.S. population by states with largest concentrations, 1983. (Source: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1980 census Population. Supplementary Report PC 80-SI10: ancestry of Population by State: 1980 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,1983).] The dream of establishing a German dominated belt, or perhaps an exclusively German state in the new Union, was never realized in spite of several attempts at large-group occupancy, such as the settlement of over 7,000 Germans by the Adelsverein of Mainz in Texas during the 1840s. As a rule, the choice of a destination by the newcomers was greatly influenced by the time frame of their arrival. That is, there were differing phases of colonization in the West, as well as stages of industrialization and urbanization in the East. In the course of the 19th century, the vast majority of Germans settled in a quadrangle encompassing the states from Ohio to Missouri on the south quadrant, and from Michigan to North Dakota and down to Nebraska on the north and west quadrants. These territories were accessible on waterways from New Orleans up the Mississippi and the Ohio, or the Missouri, or from New York across the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, and out to areas already connected by railroads. For craftsmen, the booming cities of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, St. Louis and Chicago offered job opportunities, which could be said also for East Coast cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Between 1850 and 1920, more than 30% of all German immigrants and their children were living in the Mid-Atlantic states. During the same period, the percentage for the Midwest hovered between 35 and 39%. Just as inland migration within Europe turned at times into overseas emigration, so too in America the stream of immigrants followed in part the pathways of westward migrations, moving perhaps from Pennsylvania to Ohio and Indiana, or maybe on a route up the Hudson, westward by way of Albany and Buffalo and thence across the Great Lakes to Cleveland and Detroit, Milwaukee and Chicago. These transportation patterns resulted in the principal German settlement region -- both rural and urban -- mentioned above. At least a third of Wisconsin's population in 1900 was either German-born or had at least one parent who was born in Germany; in both Minnesota and Illinois it was more than a fifth of the population.

The states of the South held little attraction for Germans or any other immigrants following the Civil War, even though after 1865 several southern state governments established agencies to promote immigration. In addition to other efforts, these bureaus made use of German-language brochures, placards and agents in Germany. They put advertisements for contract labor in German newspapers in order to direct part of the stream of immigrants to the South. But in the end, they were unable to compete with the favorable conditions for western land acquisition provided by the Homestead Act of 1862, nor could the South compete with the wages paid in the textile and steel industries on the East Coast. This lopsided distribution of European immigrants is obvious in the 1900 census data. Among the inhabitants of North and South Carolina, less than one half percent were born abroad. But more than 25% of the population had been born abroad in the states of New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Montana and Minnesota; North Dakota outdistanced all others with 35.4% born abroad. The unequal distribution of the Germans across the nine major regions of the United States from the New England states to the Pacific can easily be observed in the following table.

[Source: Cathleen Conzen, "Germans," (1980), 412.]