How did Frederick Trump, Donald Trump's grandfather, immigrate to the United States?
Executive summary
Frederick (Friedrich) Trump left Kallstadt, Bavaria, for the United States in October 1885 as a 16-year-old, boarding the steamship Eider from Bremen and arriving at the Castle Garden immigrant depot in New York on October 19, 1885 [1]. His departure was motivated in part by limited economic prospects at home and the prospect of compulsory military service in Bavaria; under Bavarian law his 1885 emigration was technically illegal because he had not completed mandatory military duty [1] [2] [3].
1. Early life and the decision to leave Bavaria
Born and raised in the village of Kallstadt in the Kingdom of Bavaria, Friedrich apprenticed as a barber but found the local village economy too small to support him and faced looming conscription into the Imperial German Army, a key factor in his choice to emigrate [1] [2]. Contemporary and retrospective accounts record that he and his mother agreed he should “go to America,” framing his move as an economic and personal escape rather than a formal, legal migration process sanctioned by Bavarian authorities [1] [2].
2. The voyage: Bremen to Castle Garden
Documents and secondary reporting identify October 7, 1885, as the day Friedrich boarded the steamship Eider in Bremen with a one-way ticket, and Castle Garden in New York as his point of arrival on October 19, 1885, where U.S. immigration records list him as “Friedr. Trumpf” [1]. Castle Garden was then the primary federal immigrant landing site for arrivals to New York, and German migration at that time contributed to a larger wave of nearly a million Germans arriving in the United States during the early 1880s [1] [2].
3. Legal status and the label “illegal”
Multiple sources note that Friedrich’s emigration without having completed his mandatory Bavarian military service rendered his departure unlawful under Bavarian law and later became the basis for official actions against him when he briefly returned to Germany; he was ordered to leave Bavaria in 1905 for failing to register his earlier emigration and avoiding conscription [1] [3] [4]. Some recent popular retellings emphasize the “illegal” tag and frame him as a draft-dodger or even as having been expelled from Germany, but primary documentary evidence cited in journalism and scholarship centers on the bureaucratic requirement he violated rather than a criminal prosecution recorded in court files [3] [4].
4. Establishing himself in America and the chain of mobility
After arrival he lived with relatives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and worked in the city’s German immigrant neighborhoods before moving west to Seattle and later to the Klondike gold fields, where he built wealth through restaurants, hotels, and services to miners; this mobility and entrepreneurship allowed him to return to Europe, marry Elizabeth Christ in 1902, and then be compelled to go back to the United States when Bavarian authorities challenged his status [1] [2] [5]. Census records and later accounts show his surname recorded variably (e.g., “Trumpf”) and his pattern of return migration reflects common practices of late-19th-century transatlantic migrants [1].
5. Competing narratives and limits of the record
Narratives diverge: some authors and commentators highlight Friedrich as an archetypal immigrant success story among mass German migration, while others stress the technical illegality of his initial departure and the 1905 Bavarian order to leave, using the family history to critique or defend contemporary immigration politics [6] [5] [4]. Reporting relies on ship manifests, census entries, Friedrich’s own writings and contemporary notices; where sources disagree or fill different rhetorical needs, this account presents the documented facts (departure and arrival dates, reasons cited in contemporaneous accounts, later Bavarian actions) and acknowledges that motives and informal arrangements beyond what those sources record cannot be asserted here [1] [2] [3].