The Great Migration lesson plan

Before Columbus was a city, some of the area’s earliest migrants came to the Refugee Tract. This land was aside in 1801 by Congress to provide land compensation for residents of Nova Scotia who had supported the American Revolution.

Since the early 1800s, various groups of migrants and immigrants have made Columbus their home.

The first major wave of immigrants to the U.S. took place from the 1820s-1870s, with the arrival of about 7.5 million new residents. Most immigrants came from northern and western Europe.

The Irish and Germans were the largest groups to arrive in Columbus during this period. The Irish settled largely in the present day Short North neighborhoods, while the Germans lived mostly on the Southside and Bexley areas.

The rapid increase in immigration in the mid-1800s alarmed many Americans. Immigrants brought their own cultural practices and languages, and many were Roman Catholics. The American Party (Know-Nothings) emerged in the late 1840s as an anti-immigration and anti-Roman Catholic political party.

In the decades following the Civil War, a second wave of immigration occurred in the U.S., with the majority of arrivals coming from southern and eastern Europe. These “new immigrants” sought freedom and economic opportunity in the U.S. in the wake of political revolutions in Europe.

Chinese immigrants came to the U.S. beginning in the 1850s to work in gold mining and, later, railroad construction. With growing resentment over job competition, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This law prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. It also made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship.

By the early 20th century, Columbus had a booming industrial economy. This led to increased migration of white southerners and the arrival of the first wave of Latino immigrants to Columbus.