Lewis county pioneers merged two villages to develop the friendly
town of Hohenwald, Tennessee.
Hohenwald had been a pioneer outpost for less than 20 years, and New Switzerland had celebrated its second birthday Nov. 17, 1897. It was a mere coincidence that both villages were settled and developed largely by people of German and Swiss descent.
This first upland terrain was originally heavily forested and several years after the War Between the States only a few families had come her to live. The name Hohenwald was given to the little village sometime before 1880 by the wife of a German settler. Meaning "high forest," it was well named. Rural progress was slow in those days and Hohenwald was no exception to the rule. The wide acres hereabout long remained the forest primeval.
NORTHERNER BUYS LAND
But during the war, a Northern officer had ridden horseback
across this country and years
later he sent agents in to buy and sell large tracts of this land,
widely advertising it in the nation's newspapers. By 1894 a
group of Swiss people in Milwaukee, tired of their rigorous climate,
had formed a pioneer Union and were prospecting for a new
home. They first went to Arkansas, but through the low
country too unhealthy and were pulling up stakes there when
Smith's Lewis county land advertisement fell into their
hands. They decided at once to come here.
Advance representatives of the Swiss colony had soon procured 5000 acres of local land at $5 an acre, which proved exorbitant, for similar plots later sold for 50 cents an acre.
On Nov. 17, 1895, the first group arrived and within a year the colony contained about 75 families numbering some 300 people. The nucleus of the band edged right up against little Hohenwald and took the name New Switzerland. Though outnumbered, the older village by now had a one room school and a post, so in the ensuing competition for supremacy, Hohenwald won out, the two groups merged, and the name New Switzerland was abandoned.
