As an active member of the Turner movement, Wilhelm (William) Pfaender proposed creating a town in Minnesota Territory specifically for German Americans. Together with other immigrants, he helped to found the town of New Ulm in 1857.
Jacob Wilhelm Pfaender was born in Heilbronn, Germany, in 1826. Because his father, a craftsman who made barrels, was also named Jacob, his family called him by his middle name. He was influenced as a young man, first in Heilbronn and later in Ulm, by the Turner movement: an ideology (from turner, the German word for gymnast) that encouraged gymnastics and other forms of exercise while promoting nationalism, political and religious freedom, education, and equality.
Pfaender left Germany amid the turmoil of the 1848 revolution. Traveling first to England, where he met Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. There he again founded a Turner Society and served as its first president. In 1851, he married Catherine Pfau, who had grown up in a Turner family.
In 1855, Pfaender wrote a letter on “Practical Turnerism” for a national Turner newspaper. In it, he called for creating a German American colony. In such a town, Pfaender thought, Germans could live free from harassment by anti-German nativists. They could act on their Turner values and practice German customs. In response to his appeal, the Cincinnati Turner Society set up the Settlement Association of the Socialist Turner Society and named Pfaender as its leader.
In 1856, Pfaender traveled throughout the Midwest in search of a location for the new town. Along the banks of the Minnesota River, the Chicago Land Association had already started to build a new town for German Americans in 1854. Pfaender decided to join in this effort, and the Cincinnati group united with the Chicago Land Association to form the German Land Association of Minnesota. With support from the Cincinnati Turner Society, they purchased more land and sold lots to their members. In 1857, the town of New Ulm incorporated.
Together with fellow Turners, Pfaender founded the New Ulm Turner Society in 1856. They built a Turner Hall in the center of the town a year later. The German Land Association set up several businesses in New Ulm, including a mill and a store. Individuals soon took over ownership of these enterprises, and the German Land Association dissolved in 1859. Turner beliefs, however, in sound bodies and minds, freedom, fellowship, and the common good continued to influence the new town.
New Ulm’s Turner Hall housed the town’s first school as well as many social and athletic activities. Strongly secular, the New Ulm Turner Society encouraged religious tolerance towards immigrants who joined the Forty-Eighters (as the participants in the failed 1848 revolution were called) in moving to New Ulm. When the first Turner Hall burned down during the US–Dakota War of 1862, the Turners quickly rebuilt it. The Turner Hall returned to its central place in New Ulm cultural life.
Pfaender filled many important positions in New Ulm. He served as president of the new town’s city council and its postmaster. He performed the first marriage ceremony held in New Ulm, on March 17, 1857. As a member of the Electoral College, Pfaender cast a vote for Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election.
In 1861, Pfaender acted again on Turner values when he, along with other Turners, joined the fight for the Union. An officer in the First Battery of Minnesota Light Artillery, he fought at the battle of Shiloh, where he and his unit played a vital role. He returned to Minnesota during the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. As a lieutenant colonel in the Second Minnesota Cavalry, he was in charge of Fort Ridgely until 1865.
After the Civil War, Pfaender continued to take an active role in the civic life of New Ulm and Minnesota. By the time of his death on August 11, 1905, he had held a wide variety of offices, including mayor, state representative, and state senator. He also served two terms as Minnesota State Treasurer.