Germantown, Nashville's oldest surviving residential neighborhood, spreads out in front of you as one of the most intact Victorian streetscapes in the American South. German immigrants began settling this area north of the public square in the 1840s and 1850s, drawn to Nashville by the economic opportunities of a growing commercial and manufacturing city. They built brick rowhouses, corner groceries, Catholic churches, and a neighborhood life organized around old-country institutions translated into an American setting.
The neighborhood was named formally for its German character and flourished through the late nineteenth century. After World War One, anti-German sentiment that swept the country accelerated the dispersal of German-American identity throughout the United States, and Germantown's ethnic distinctiveness faded. The neighborhood declined through much of the twentieth century.
Its survival, paradoxically, owes something to that decline: because investment dried up, the original building stock was not demolished for parking lots and new development. In the late 1990s and 2000s, urban pioneers began restoring the Victorian houses, and the neighborhood has since become one of Nashville's most desirable addresses. The brick rowhouses and the stone churches on these streets are the physical record of Nashville's first substantial immigrant community.