The story
Nashville Oktoberfest in Nashville
Nashville Oktoberfest has run continuously in the city's Germantown neighborhood since 1980, when a church restoration fundraiser grew into what organizers now call the longest-running consecutive Oktoberfest party in the Southeast, filling four early-October days with imported German draft beer, live music, and a Dachshund Derby.
Nashville's Germantown neighborhood, just north of downtown, was once a thriving community shaped heavily by German immigrants who arrived starting in the 1840s, blending their heritage with Irish, Italian, Swiss, and Jewish neighbors in a district anchored by institutions like the Church of the Assumption, founded in 1859 to serve the area's German Catholic population, many of whose services were conducted in German well into the twentieth century.