It became his passion and decades later, Erhard Schmocker’s passion has culminated in the Helvetica Map which lists over 4000 Swiss place names (and counting) in the US.
The map is by no means completed. There is, as they say, much ground to be covered. Plus, as Mr. Schmocker puts it “I only can put so many names on the map.
In the meantime, we caught up with Mr. Schmocker to tap into his exhaustive knowledge of Swiss Settlements in the US.
“I once saw a map of the United States published by a Swiss bank that had some fifty places in the United States with the name of a Swiss city on it, and since my hometown in Switzerland is the city of Bern, I had to find out how many "Berns" there were; thirteen at the time on that little map.
And I looked to see how many "Zurichs" , how many "Basels", how many "Lucernes" —I found that Bern had the most. And that's where it all started.
For the 800th anniversary of the City of Bern (Switzerland), I did an exhibition in the Castle Waldt on the places named Bern in the United States. And then for Switzerland’s 700th Anniversary, I did a U.S map with a selection of Swiss names, on it; about 700 out of a list (at that time) of 2000 names. Now I have 54 places named Bern in the United States, over 60 Genevas and on and on and on..."
Swiss Are Amish Too…"Mennonites, Amish, what we would call the various religious sects that came with the Reformation— there were an awful lot of splinter groups from the basic Reformation: Lutherans, Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva—and they were persecuted in many areas. Mennonites, for instance, in the Langnau in Switzerland, which is part of Canton Bern, were even put in prison for their beliefs. So many of them fled first to the Jura mountains and then later into the Alsace-Lorraine, and from there an awful lot of them came to the United States.
I went to Berne, Indiana, where a lot of Amish live. I talked to everybody I could find willing to talk to me. And I would ask, "where in Switzerland were you from?" And they'd say, "we came from the Muensterberg", and I scratched my head on both sides and said "Where in the heck is that? There is no such place!" And eventually it turned out the Amish were German-speaking. They went to the Jura, which is French-speaking, and Muensterberg in the Jura is the mountain behind the village Muenster, but no one uses the German name. It's generally known in by it's French name: Montagne de Moutier. So I finally got the hang of it that they're from Moutier.
So in the beginning, it was quite often a religious reason to come to the US, and then in the 1830s and the 1870s it was an economic reason to come to the US, a primarily agricultural migration.
Gold Rush
In the 1950's, 60s and even into the 70s, in Northern cities of the US there were land promotions: "Buy land in Florida! Buy land in Florida! It's the land of the future and you'll make lot's of money…" And people bought land in Florida. They went out there to see the piece of land they had purchased, only to discover it was under two feet of water... It’s not unique, it’s been happening way back into the 1700's.
In the 1870s there were go-to-America-and-get-rich-quick-schemes in Switzerland, and there were always people more than willing to part with their money. But when they got there, the promises that were made did not exist. For instance, Bernstadt, Kentucky was promoted in Switzerland to be an absolutely excellent wine-growing region. Well, Eastern Kentucky doesn't have the soil, or the weather, or the climate to cultivate vineyards. So there were the settlers there, and they nearly starved to death.
If you've been to Switzerland, you'll know that the farms are relatively small, and if you divvy it up between three or four sons—none of them can survive. So they went to America to stay farmers and that was very common at the time. What was interesting was, despite this mass immigration of over 50,000 Swiss to America in the 1800s, the population of Switzerland did not diminish. It’s a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution—the farmers were replaced by people in the factories in the cities.
Doesn’t Make it Swiss Though
In most of these towns with Swiss names, you find people of other nationalities, even from the beginning.
New Glarus is probably the only one where it was founded by a group that left Glarus in Switzerland. They had an advanced party that was looking for farmland—they found it in Wisconsin, and that whole group that came together, over a 150 people, settled there. So the original settlers were hundred percent Swiss. But that rarely happens.
Genealogy; everyone does it. I thought this would be a different direction, to show Swiss people when and how we developed and how we spread across and influenced the United States. Every once in a while you fall into a trap. Like Little Switzerland, North Carolina, which is an absolutely enjoyable ride on the Appalachian highway, up in the hills, beautiful location—has nothing to do with Switzerland, with the exception that people that built the resort thought it looked like Switzerland. And that is the extent of that. Lake Geneva here, in Illinois; same thing. Someone was in Switzerland—one of the early settlers -- and then more and more people came and it eventually became a village and someone said, 'what do we name this place?" and someone else said "Oh, I was in Switzerland and it looks just like Lake Geneva"—so to some extent, these names are totally arbitrary…
