BY the time the war ended, the Germans of Carroll Protestant and Catholic had transformed themselves into Americans. My great-grandfather Ferdinand Becker had become Fred, though he never did master English. But consequences linger. Thirty years later, when I went to Grandmother Willenburg's on childhood visits, she spoke as if the war had been yesterday and the Germans were still being challenged by outsiders. Today, German surnames still predominate around Carroll, a county of 576 square miles and 21,000 people scattered in farms and 16 towns and villages.
Catholics are still in the majority.
The friction may be gone, but the divisions remain. The Irish and the Germans now live in the same neighborhoods, more or less. Carroll was well over 80 percent Catholic when he was growing up, Mr. Brincks said. Of course, it's still almost all white. An area so fraught with its own brand of ethnic tension was hardly inviting to people who were even more obviously different, like African-Americans and Hispanics.