The Baptists were the first congregation to use the brick church, but they eventually folded. In 1895 the Methodists also used it for about five years. The membership of these two congregations was primarliy of German descent. The old brick church was razed about the turn of the century.
The Christian Union Church (now known as the Community Church) was established in Sunman in 1890 using the old brick church as a meeting place. They erected their own building in 1896.
For a while the children of some ethnically German families would attend Sunday School at the Community Church in Sunman, but their parents would send them to the Evangelical Protestant Church at Penntown for confirmation classes. Today the membrship of both S. Paul's Methodist Church and the Community Church is primarily of German descent.
There is no burial ground in Sunman. Consequently the cemetery at St.Paul's Methodist Church, Hubble's Lutheran cemetery, and the Penntown Evangelical Protestant (U.C.C.)churchyard remain the burykng places for most of the ethnically German as well as non German families in the Sunman area.
In the 1850s immigrants continued to come from many parts of Germany, including Westphalia and Prussia which previously had not seen much immigration to this area. However, immigration began to decline in the years just preceding the American Civil War.
Many of the German immigrants served their homeland in the Civil War, particularly with the 83rd Indiana Regiment which was with General Sherman at Vicksburg and followed him through Georgia and South Carolina to the sea. It seems quite appropiate that Johann Friedrich Brinkmann from Venne, Germany who built the Sherman House in Batesville at its present location should have named it in honor of the Union General under whom many of the immigrants served their new country.
Around this time the grandchildren of the early English immigrants began to intermarry with the children of the German Protestant immigrants. John Sunman Jr.'s daughters Fanny, Minerva, Gertrude, and Alice all married the sons of Germans.
Land in Indiana had been occupied and settled long before the war. Many of the English families had already left for Missouri and other western states before the war. After the war, some of the children of German immigrants left Indiana for new land in Kansas, Iowa and Missouri. A new kind of separation was occuring, not with the homeland in Germany, but with the communities in southeastern Indiana.
Never the less, the ties with this area were strong. Letters were written relating family matters and property and often expressing home sickness. An inheritance might be received in Indiana from a family which left years earlier. A young min in Kansas City named "Sunman Rowe" attests to the remembrance of the maidan name of his great, great grandmother from Ripley County.
This pattern of settlement before the war largely determined the population of this part of Indiana into the 1900s. German immigration onto this area continued in part because previous German immigrants had settled here. Post Civil War immigrants tended to come from a variety of places in northern Germany, now known simply as Prussia after the Prussian take over of northern Germany in 1866. Some left to escape Prussian rule.