Germantown, Tennessee
Germantown is a suburb of Memphis, bordering it to the east-southeast. Germantown's economy is dominated by the retail and commercial service sectors; there is no heavy industry in Germantown. In the city center is the "Old Germantown" neighborhood, anchored by a railroad depot (a 1948 reproduction of the 1868 original) and railroad tracks that recall the community's earliest days of development as an outpost along the Memphis and Charleston Railroad.
Germantown (Quincy, Massachusetts)
Palmer Street, the main thoroughfare of the neighborhood, was named for General Joseph Palmer. In 1752, Palmer and Richard Cranch, brother-in-law of John Adams and father of American jurist William Cranch, were held by tenure of lease by a company interested in German immigration to create a planned manufacturing community. The land was to be settled in the 1750s by a group of glassmakers and weavers from Germany. The planned community had failed by 1760, but the name has remained. Many of the Germans who originally settled in Germantown eventually left. Some went to Waldoboro, Maine as indentured servants.