The district lies at the center of a broader rural farming community culturally bound through German Catholic traditions.

Outside of Westphalia, the district holds 35 historic farmsteads containing late 19th- and early 20th-century residential and agricultural buildings still retaining a high degree of integrity in their environment, design, materials, and workmanship.

[5] Westphalia, never formally platted or incorporated, historically is situated along three principal streets, and is composed of four distinct sections.

[5] Outside of town, agrarian lands within the district were originally structured in a rectangular grid pattern with roughly 270-acre (110 ha) tracts broken only by wooded areas along streams and later by the diagonal path of SH 320.

Although some large tracts have been further subdivided beginning in the 1910s, the modern county road network along with fence lines and their associated vegetation respect this historically rectangular framework.