The growth of of the city's population in the middle of the nineteenth century was truly spectacular, more than doubling between 1845 (29,773) and 1855 (74,214). In 1855, over 60% were foreign born (mostly Catholic):

• 31,00 were German,
• 18,000 Irish, both of which live in their own separate enclaves: the Germans on the East Side, the Irish in the First Ward

The Germans came to Buffalo already skilled and most of Buffalo's skilled workers were German -- shoemakers, masons, tailors, musicians, blacksmiths, boilermakers , butchers, upholsterers, painters, tinsmiths, stonecutters, clock makers, bakers, cigar-makers -- and many of them were quite well educated.

German language: The desire to perpetuate the German language was a critical element in the cultural cohesiveness of the German community. In both Catholic and Protestant German churches, sermons were delivered and scriptures were read in the native tongue. German was also the language used in the five German Catholic schools that existed in Buffalo in 1850. Indeed, many Germans insisted that their language achieve official status, demanding that Buffalo should become officially bilingual, with all laws and ordinances printed in both languages. Other groups, such as the German Young Men's Association, a cultural nationalist group founded in Buffalo in 1841, were dedicated to the perpetuation and preservation of the German language and culture.

The community's struggle for public recognition of the German language and German culture continued throughout the next decade as German leaders made persistent and periodic requests for the appointment of German teachers in, schools in German neighborhoods. It was not until 1866, perhaps as a kind of guilt-ridden recognition of the role that Buffalo's German population had played in the war effort, that the Common Council finally relented and did appoint several German teachers to teach German in four schools on Buffalo's East Side.

Business: What is most interesting about this first generation of German businessmen -- people like Solomon ScheuJacob Schoellkopf (photo above), a tanner; and Stephen Recker, a wholesale grocer -- was that they had stayed in their homeland until after they had acquired an education and a trade. (portrait above) and Albert Ziegler. both brewers;

• Scheu, for example, had been trained as a baker before he arrived in this country in 1840 at the age of sixteen.
• Schoellkopf, who by the end of the l850s owned one of the largest tanneries in Buffalo, had been trained as a tanner during his youth in Germany.
• Albert Ziegler, whose brewery made over forty thousand barrels of beer per year and was the biggest in Buffalo, had worked as a brewer as a teenager in Wurtenburg.

Thus, within ten or so years after their arrival in Buffalo (usually after a short stay in New York City), these men had become eminently successful businessmen, the object of envy and admiration not only within their own community but throughout the whole city.

By 1900, the Poles had replaced Germans as the dominant ethnic group on the East Side. No longer the despised race that [Millard] Fillmore and his cohorts had railed against, Buffalo's Germans, now making up more than half of the city's population, had left their East Side enclave and assumed a major role in the life of the city. The whole fiber of the city had become German.

There were five German owned banks, six German insurance companies, a German hospital, scores of German churches, several turnvereins, and the nationally known Saengerbund Singing Society. But unlike the other immigrant groups in the city -- the Poles, Irish and Italians -- the political and financial activities of the Germans were not limited to their own ethnic group. Germans owned the largest breweries and the largest department stores. German doctors and lawyers were among the most successful in the city. German politicians, like Mayor Conrad Diehl (portrait above), a former county medical examiner, determined the outcome of municipal elections, while certain German families, like the Urbans, were among the wealthiest and most powerful people in the whole community.

The Schoellkopfs: None were more influential than the Schoellkopf family. The founder of this prolific dynasty was Jacob Schoellkopf (photo above), who came to Buffalo in 1843 with the first wave of German migration to the city. Taking advantage of the city's location at the junction of the nation's most important commercial lines, Schoellkopf went into leather and grain, and by the end of the Civil War his tanning and flour mills were among the largest in the country. Schoellkopf was one of the first people to realize the potential of the waterpower generated by Niagara Falls, and during the 1870s he founded the first power company in the area.

His two sons, Jacob, Jr. and Hugo, further developed the power company while opening a chemical company that by the turn of the century was the largest manufacturer of aniline, a chemical used in the manufacture of explosives. By the end of the century, the Schoellkopfs had become one of the wealthiest and most prominent German families in the United States.

Jacob Schoellkopf, Jr. (photo above), the first member of the family born in the United States, won the respect and approbation that had hitherto been denied the city's German residents. He was admitted to the most exclusive clubs, and appointed director of two bastions of WASP control, the historical society and Buffalo General Hospital. However, Schoellkopf's success and his mobility did not isolate him from his German origins. Like his father, he sent his children to Germany for their college education, while he remained deeply concerned with the progress of the German community in Buffalo,