35 years ago, Erdmann Schmocker a Swiss-born architect living in the US did a bit of traveling through the States. Occasionally he’d come across towns named Bern or Lucerne. Being a native of Canton Bern in Switzerland, his curiosity got the better of him. He just had to know how many other Berns were out there.
It became his passion and three and half decades later, Erhard Schmocker’s passion has culminated in the Helvetica Map which lists over 4000 Swiss place names (and counting) in the US. The map is by no means completed. There is, as they say, much ground to be covered. Plus, as Mr. Schmocker puts it “I only can put so many names on the map …”. In the meantime, we caught up with Mr. Schmocker to tap into his exhaustive knowledge of Swiss Settlements in the US.
In his own words:
800 Years of Bern
Downtown Bern, Switzerland
Christoph von Graffenreid
The original founder of New Bern, North Carolina, Baron von Graffenreid of Worb near the City of Bern, was in London at the court of Queen Anne. London at the time was flooded with religious (Swiss) refugees, and he said to the Queen, “I'll take two ships of your refugees to America”. She said "You can go to North Carolina" which was an English colony—“and you can settle your 700 people near the River Neuse.” It was not a very pleasant trip for the immigrants. 150 of them died on the voyage from England. Also, it was not a successful settlement—mismanagement and bribery and cheating, who knows what else… Eventually they ran out of money, and von Graffenreid went and got a loan from someone in North Carolina and said “well, I'm going back to Switzerland to raise more money for this colony—” . He basically used the settlement as security against the loan. Now, there was one problem: he didn't own the settlement. It belonged to the Queen of England. He went back to Switzerland and never returned.
The baron's account of his Indian captivity
Three Berns in a Row
Later in the mid 1700s, New Bern was resettled by the British— it was always a British colony in a certain way, and it became the capital of North Carolina. In the 1730s, a group from there who were of British descent moved to Indiana, but kept the name so there was a New Bern, Indiana. The same people moved further west to Iowa and New Bern, Iowa was founded in 1871.
Swiss Are Amish Too…
Mennonites, Amish, what we would call the various religious sects that came with the Reformation— there were an awful lot of splinter groups from the basic Reformation: Lutherans, Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva—and they were persecuted in many areas. Mennonites, for instance, in the Langnau in Switzerland, which is part of Canton Bern, were even put in prison for their beliefs. So many of them fled first to the Jura mountains and then later into the Alsace-Lorraine, and from there an awful lot of them came to the United States.
Death by drowning: persecution of the Anabaptists in Bern
It's interesting some the adventures one gets into: I went to Berne, Indiana, where a lot of Amish live. I talked to everybody I could find willing to talk to me. And I would ask, "where in Switzerland were you from?" And they'd say, "we came from the Muensterberg", and I scratched my head on both sides and said "Where in the heck is that? There is no such place!" And eventually it turned out the Amish were German-speaking. They went to the Jura, which is French-speaking, and Muensterberg in the Jura is the mountain behind the village Muenster, but no one uses the German name. It's generally known in by it's French name: Montagne de Moutier. So I finally got the hang of it that they're from Moutier.
So in the beginning, it was quite often a religious reason to come to the US, and then in the 1830s and the 1870s it was an economic reason to come to the US, a primarily agricultural migration.
One such Carolina brochure circa 1734
In the 1950's, 60s and even into the 70s, in Northern cities of the US there were land promotions: "Buy land in Florida! Buy land in Florida! It's the land of the future and you'll make lot's of money…" And people bought land in Florida. They went out there to see the piece of land they had purchased, only to discover it was under two feet of water... It’s not unique, it’s been happening way back into the 1700's.
In the 1870s there were go-to-America-and-get-rich-quick-schemes in Switzerland, and there were always people more than willing to part with their money. But when they got there, the promises that were made did not exist. For instance, Bernstadt, Kentucky was promoted in Switzerland to be an absolutely excellent wine-growing region. Well, Eastern Kentucky doesn't have the soil, or the weather, or the climate to cultivate vineyards. So there were the settlers there, and they nearly starved to death.
If you've been to Switzerland, you'll know that the farms are relatively small, and if you divvy it up between three or four sons—none of them can survive. So they went to America to stay farmers and that was very common at the time. What was interesting was, despite this mass immigration of over 50,000 Swiss to America in the 1800s, the population of Switzerland did not diminish. It’s a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution—the farmers were replaced by people in the factories in the cities.
Doesn’t Make it Swiss Though,
In most of these towns with Swiss names, you find people of other nationalities, even from the beginning. New Glarus is probably the only one where it was founded by a group that left Glarus in Switzerland. They had an advanced party that was looking for farmland—they found it in Wisconsin, and that whole group that came together, over a 150 people, settled there. So the original settlers were hundred percent Swiss. But that rarely happens.
Genealogy; everyone does it. I thought this would be a different direction, to show Swiss people when and how we developed and how we spread across and influenced the United States. Every once in a while you fall into a trap. Like Little Switzerland, North Carolina, which is an absolutely enjoyable ride on the Appalachian highway, up in the hills, beautiful location—has nothing to do with Switzerland, with the exception that people that built the resort thought it looked like Switzerland. And that is the extent of that. Lake Geneva here, in Illinois; same thing. Someone was in Switzerland—one of the early settlers -- and then more and more people came and it eventually became a village and someone said, 'what do we name this place?" and someone else said "Oh, I was in Switzerland and it looks just like Lake Geneva"—so to some extent, these names are totally arbitrary…
The Helvetica Map
There are quite a few places in the US that were founded by Swiss people, but they gave the village the family name of the founders and it became the name of the village. An example of this is Steinauer, Nebraska, and for that town, a few years ago, a little documentary movie was made (not by me). How language influences this is obviously an addition to the problem. For instance, in that movie the people talk about themselves and their family name. They clearly say ,"We are the Steinauers". The village is spelled exactly the same way, but when they speak about the village they say, oh, we live in "Steener". But it's the same spelling, and so obviously language changes play into it as well. You can't be hard-nosed about it if it's not exactly spelled the in same way it is in Switzerland.
So are they Swiss? Only God knows, and he hasn't told me yet. The name is truly of Swiss origin in terms of a family tree. New Bern in Iowa is clearly Swiss, but the content is not Swiss— and certainly not in New Bern, Indiana or New Bern, North Carolina of today.
Small Town Helveticana
One has to look at these things tongue in cheek. It's a nice hobby, it's a lot of fun and I meet a tremendous amount of very interesting people. I'm an honorary citizen in Bern, Kansas, I'm a Kentucky Colonel in Bernstadt (Kentucky because of my connection with these villages, and when I say I'm a Kentucky colonel, that's simply an honorary title).
The Wilhelm Tell Festival, New Glarus, Wisconsin
"Oh! We don't have a copy machine in our village..."
"Well, next time when you go to the bigger towns would you make me a copy and send it to me?"
"Oh, that's too complicated—why don't you take the Bible with you, make all the copies you want and send it back."
And that is the kind of trust, and when you have that, they'll tell you everything you want to know about their history. I have boxes full of material that I could write histories of many of those towns. The map is basically a little sideline that came out of 35 years of work.
Would you like a Helvetica Map? We're giving 10 copies of the 2nd edition of Erdmann Schmocker's Helvetica Americana Map —to find out how to win one visit our contest page.
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