Many travelers best know Frankenmuth, Michigan, as home to Bronner's Christmas store that celebrates the holiday year round, but the city of Frankenmuth also celebrates the German ancestry of its residents year round.
A little over half of Frankenmuth's 4,600 citizens claim German ancestry as they host over 3 million tourists visiting their Bavarian-themed restaurants, hotels, and stores each year.
Tourism drives the economy of this town two hours north of Detroit. Festivals like Oktoberfest, Bavarian Fest, and the World Expo of Beer help draw tourists into town, and the Bavarian-themed architecture of many Frankenmuth businesses and homes help visitors feel as if they traveled back into time to visit an Old World-German village.
The town started as a Lutheran mission to convert the native peoples in the Saginaw Valley (primarily from the Chippewa tribes) to Christianity.
German missionary Frederick Wyneken was working in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan in 1840 when he appealed to Lutherans in Germany to help his efforts in the area with pastors, churches, and schools. Wilhelm Loehe, a popular and influential Lutheran pastor from Bavaria, answered Wyneken's plea for help by organizing to train pastors and teachers to work in the United States.
Loehe's first group of missionaries left Germany in April of 1845, arriving in Frankenmuth in August that year after an arduous journey that included boat and train accidents, high winds and storms during the ocean crossing, and at least one child's death due to the small pox suffered by most of the group.
The group came primarily from the Province of Franconia in the Kingdom of Bavaria and named their new town Frankenmuth. The name comes from German words meaning "courage of the Franks", and today many know the town as "Little Bavaria".
The missionaries purchased 680 acres of land from the federal government for $1,700 and built a large log cabin to serve as a church, school, and parsonage.
Meanwhile, plans to convert the area's native peoples hit a snag as the Chippewa tribes moved west when the European settlers cleared the land the tribes formerly hunted. By 1847, most of the tribes lived 30-80 miles west of Frankenmuth, so very few attended school or became baptized at the mission.
Settlers also abandoned the original plan to build their houses surrounding the church in favor of establishing their own 120-acre farms nearby. The farmers prospered, and more German immigrants arrived to join their friends and family in the Frankenmuth area.
Frankenmuth residents were still largely German and Lutheran by the 1860s and most of the 200 residents spoke only German. At that time, the town had two Lutheran churches, several stores and mills, at least one hotel, and a brewery. Frankenmuth had flour, saw, and woolen mills, and later began producing beer, cheese, and sausage.
The Frankenmuth Brewery, opened in 1862, recently reopened after major setbacks in recent decades. It now operates as a restaurant and brewery in a new building using some of the original machinery in its brewing operation.
Early travelers in the area between Flint, Bay City, and Saginaw often stopped at Frankenmuth and the tradition of chicken dinners likely had their start then.
By the 1940s, the Frankenmuth chicken dinner was a tradition for many families, and as many as several thousand people traveled there each weekend for family-style, all-you-can-eat dinners.
The sources I've seen disagree on who suggested that the Fischer Hotel remake itself into a Bavarian-theme business in the late 1950s, but they do seem to agree that this transformation into the Bavarian Inn was extremely successful. Other businesses to followed suit and this marked the rise of Frankenmuth as a major tourist destination.
Read more about our Frankenmuth experiences in my earlier stories, Frankenmuth's Bavarian Inn serves up chicken, German beer and nostalgia in Michigan, Enjoy a quick respite at Bavarian Inn Lodge, and Bronner's keeps the lights on for Santa in Frankenmuth, Michigan.
Want to learn more about Frankenmuth's history? Check out Frankenmuth (Images of America) by the Frankenmuth Historical Association.
I also found a review of the book Frankenmuth: A pictorial history of Frankenmuth business by Jeremy W. Kilar in a Bay City, Michigan, newspaper. Kilar, a Delta College history professor, examines business development in Frankenmuth, the role of German cultural values in the growth of the town, and Frankenmuth's transformation from small town in its "pre-Bavarianization" days to today's major tourist draw.
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
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