About this tour
On Good Friday, 1845, roughly two hundred exhausted German colonists ended a six-month ocean-and-wagon journey and founded a town that has stayed more German than Germany-nostalgic ever since. This driving loop covers where that colony actually took shape in its first years — the founding marker, the courthouse site, the hill where the colony's government sat, the spot under the elms where its first class was held, and the homes of the schoolteacher and the botanist who chronicled it all. It's a short trip through a remarkably fast start: church, school, government, and a newspaper, nearly all up and running within the colony's first seven years.