����� ��� Ohio, perhaps more than any other state, served as a conduit in the nineteenth century for the westward movement of Americans seeking to escape the overcrowded eastern seaboard.1 After the War of 1812, with fertile lands opening west of the Appalachians, public officials were eager to attract immigrants to fill a population vacuum. No small portion of these newcomers was from Central and Eastern Europe, especially Germans, who streamed across the Allegheny Plateau into the Till Plains, descended the Ohio River, or entered the lake ports.2 As a result, a corridor of German settlements emerged from Cincinnati in the southwest to Toledo in the northwest parts of Ohio. These sites became the basis for a belt of Germans, largely from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, who occupied a two-hundred-mile swath that extended to the Mississippi River. They were reinforced by another wave of German immigrants after the 1848 revolutions in Europe and by a potpourri of nationalities who sought jobs along the newly urbanized Erie lakefront at the end of the century.3 The German community was distinguished by such place names as Berlin, Hanover, and Potsdam, but the largest concentration was in Cincinnati where Germans increased from 5 percent in