Visiting friends in Germantown, near Memphis, Tennessee, we wondered about the origin of the town's name. The obvious one - the town was settled by Germans - apparently was not correct, although German breweries were built in Germantown towards the middle of the 19th century and must also have involved Germans.
We found one other explanation on this historic time line (see picture above):
In 1834 "A surveyor, N.T. German, laid out town lots on the land of G.P. Shepherd." The area, originally called "Pea Ridge" was named "Germantown" in 1836, and incorporated in 1841.
(This reminded me of the fact that "Heidelberg", a little town along the Mississippi, was not founded by Germans from Heidelberg, Germany, but - as I described in this blog - in 1862 by Washington Irving Heidelberg.)
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