New York’s Little Germany
While German immigrants were present in New Amsterdam since its earliest times, the mass transatlantic migration of the mid-nineteenth century brought a huge wave of new arrivals. The city’s German population reached a peak of three-quarters of a million in 1900. A vibrant German neighborhood full of tenements and beer halls—Kleindeutschland or Little Germanydeveloped in the 1840s east of the Bowery in what is now the East Village.
Here Matthew Rehm must have first settled after arriving in New York in 1865. Maybe that is where, a few years later, he met 20-year-old Elizabeth F. Richner, called Eliza, newly arrived from Switzerland. From their 1869 marriage record, we know her parents’ names but not their town of origin, so it is not possible to know if they came from a part of Switzerland near to Lottstetten.
As a recent immigrant, one of Matthew’s first connections was likely with the powerful political machine in New York City, the Tammany Hall organization, which serviced the city’s immigrant populations to lock up their votes. Precinct workers might help with housing or employment, giving impoverished immigrants a road to assimilation. We can infer Matthew’s connections to Tammany because his second son Joseph M. Rehm and his wife Evelyn were later active in the Democratic Party in Brooklyn and may have held patronage positions.
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