The German heritage is prevalent in Iowa’s early years and today

Part of a series celebrating the Des Moines Register’s 175th anniversary examining Iowa’s demographics past and future.

French explorers Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette, who followed the Mississippi River, are believed to have been the first people of European descent to set foot in Iowa when they came ashore in 1673 at the confluence of the Mississippi and Iowa rivers, in what is now Louisa County.

The first Euro-American settlement in Iowa began in 1788, when the Meskwaki tribe granted Canadian Julien Dubuque the rights to mine lead in the area where a town bearing his name now stands: Dubuque.

But it would be nearly 45 years before Iowa was actually opened to European descendants settling in the state, after the Black Hawk War in 1832 drove out Native American tribes.

According to U.S. Census figures, Iowa’s population grew dramatically in the first three decades, from 1840 to 1870. The influx in the 19th century was largely driven by German immigrants who left their homeland in the 1840s because of political unrest and revolutions.

Many of the early German settlers formed strong ethnic communities in Mississippi River towns such as Dubuque and Davenport. They also spread rapidly across the state to every county in Iowa by the 1840s, lured by government lands that cost as little as $1.25 an acre.

No other immigrant group was as widely dispersed throughout the state as the Germans. Their influence is evident in towns with names like Guttenberg, Schleswig, German City, and of course the Amana Colonies.

While many German immigrants worked Iowa’s rich, fertile soil, others went into business — such as the founders of the Davenport-based Von Maur department store chain — and practiced crafts, bringing newspapers, breweries and even a symphony orchestra to Iowa’s frontier, says Aaron Baker of the German American Heritage Center and Museum in Davenport.

“The German immigrants did a really good job of bringing culture to Iowa, and they were a mix of both rich and poor,” Baker said.

Baker said it was German immigrants who founded the first schools in Davenport and brought the concept of physical education to early Iowa.

They also brought a strong classical music tradition to Iowa that continues to this day, Baker said.

Founded in 1915 by German-born Ludwig Becker and inaugurated with a program that included a piece by German composer Richard Wagner, the Quad Cities Symphony Orchestra is one of the 20 longest-running orchestral societies in the United States, according to the symphony’s website.

Research has shown that the climate in the region of Germany where most immigrants come from is very similar to that of Iowa, which likely explains why so many Germans have stayed in the state instead of moving further west, Baker said.

The potato famines of the 1840s brought many Irish families to America, and they soon became the second largest contingent of European settlers to frontier Iowa. Britain, Canada, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries also provided early settlers to Iowa.

But people of German descent have maintained their dominance. Among states, Iowa now has the fourth-highest percentage of people of German descent, at 31.5 percent, after Wisconsin and the Dakotas, according to the World Population Review.

Kevin Baskins covers jobs and the economy for the Des Moines Register. You can reach him at [email protected].