Category Archives: Coming to Amerika

Christmas on the Prairie, 1900

In the midst of all the overload Christmas has become, I admit to some nostalgia these days for a simpler time. Sometimes nostalgia for a simpler time is mere wishful thinking—the simpler time did not really exist. But in researching and writing Coming to America about my ancestors who came to settle the plains of Kansas, I did find a simpler, hardly commercial celebration to enjoy and share.

Although some families did have their own Christmas trees, that was not the general rule in Barrett, Kansas where my relatives lived. The tradition there was for a communal Christmas tree set up in the local school house, which in those days was much the heart of the community. There, mostly the school children would present some type of Christmas Entertainment. “There was a Christmas tree over at Barrett in the School house Saturday night. They had a good program and there were many there. They could not near all find seats.”

Christmas presents were exchanged among relatives. In my own family’s case, money was sent to my great-uncle John who was struggling to make a go of a farm he had bought in Missouri. He had two small children and actual presents (useful), sometimes handmade, were given to them:

“Wished to send you a little Christmas present, Two Dollars and a little package by mail but we had sent off for a few things and did not get them in time. Had sent for two pair of stockings for the Babies, but one pair was entirely to[o] large. Mama knit the little mittens some to[o] large too I think. Will send the package with this letter so you will get it during the Holidays.”

At the homestead in Kansas, the family “Had a nice time — a little surprise for everyone besides the nuts, candy and bratzel [a type of sausage they made themselves]. also roasted a pan of peanuts. We did not plant any [this year] but have plenty left over [from the previous year]. It was a nice day, a little snow fell the night before, not near enough to cover the ground, which was soon gone.”

John and his wife Lulu in turn sent products using express services such as Wells Fargo from their farm—molasses, nuts, apples and persimmons, the latter something that would have been particularly special as they could not thrive in the colder climes of Kansas.

About the molasses, my great-aunt Mary wrote “Opened it up. As it ran out looked like honey. Is fine and tastes nice. Is so different from the molasses we have here. . . .

“Mother sais to Thank You very much for the molasses but does not feel like accepting it as a Present as we think you need the money. You did not say how much molasses is there. It sold here for 35¢ and 40¢ per gal. At 40¢ per gallon and freight, would be about Five Dollars, which you will find enclosed and many thanks from us all. . . .”

Full-fledged Christmas cards were not used in those days. What were exchanged were Christmas postcards. At the beginning of the blog are a few from my family archive. Happy holidays to all!

 

Turkey Time

I have now finished the manuscript for Coming to Amerika and will be submitting it to the University of Kansas Press, which has expressed interest.  Keep your fingers crossed!

In reading over the letters I was able to vicariously participate in the major family celebrations centering around Thanksgiving, Christmas and July 4th.  As it is turkey time I want to share with you Thanksgiving on the Kansas Prairie in the 1890’s.  Wild turkeys were plentiful at the time and as my great-uncle Will wrote to his brother in Missouri, farmers would herd, pen up and fatten the turkeys for feasting.

“I wish you would [have] heard [herded] those wild turkeys and git them good and fat til I can come down but then I don’t know how long that would be. Maby [maybe] you would git tired of feeding them before that time.”

But even wild as they were, they could be tamed. My great-aunt Mary wrote about some wild turkeys that became pets and then nuisances:

“We had some queer pets this summer, three little Turkeys and they were so tame, could do any thing with them. Lena [another great-aunt] petted them so much they stayed right around the door, would sit in her lap and if we had any thing for them in our hands would all three eat right out of our hand at the same time. We still have them, three big cuss gobblers, they are cross to the chickens, but the worst is they don’t like to see strangers, especially children along the road, will run right up to them within three feet or so and strut and gobble and fly up around them, make a terrible fuss, and some time have followed people a long ways. They treat me the same way. I stay in the house so close they do not know me. Will have to sell them.”

The pictures below show my grandfather Louis (in a stylish bowler hat on the farm!) feeding two wild turkeys out of his hand and then two of the ornery gobblers.  Somebody got to eat them.  I suspect the family, having had them as pets, was reluctant to slaughter them themselves.  Besides they also had duck as an option for their Thanksgiving dinner.

IMG_5623Turkeys

ONE DRAFT DOWN, ????? TO GO

 

It is good news (at least for me) that I have finished the first draft of my second book, Coming to Amerika. The first draft has been undergoing editorial review from the professor at Northern State University who translated many of the letters used in this immigrant story.

I have started on the second draft and am looking for people willing to read the chapters and give me feedback. I want this to be a compelling, nonfiction family saga and need readers’ reactions.

If you are willing to go on this second journey with me, please let me know and I will feed you chapters as I progress. To give you an idea of what it encompasses I am including here the introduction.

INTRODUCTION

We are, as John F. Kennedy once famously wrote, a nation of immigrants. Driven by famine, warfare, religious persecution, and political and economic oppression, we came to the United States attracted by the opportunity for a freer life and greater economic security. The story, of course, is more complex than this. There are those of us who were brutally brought here as slaves and found no freedom or opportunity. And, there were those already here who lost much in people, property and their ways of life as a result of contact with immigrants.

These are the sweeping generalizations of standard history books. Beneath them, however, lies what I call “history at the ground level”— the unique stories of the individuals who lived the events so briefly described in the books. Coming to Amerikais one such unique story. It follows the fortunes of members of the Lodholz family as they journey to and settle in the United States.

Having a B.A. and M.A. degree in the field, I have been passionate about history since a teenager in Beirut, Lebanon, where my father was a diplomat and we explored Sidon, Tyre, Baalbek and the great Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers. This passion has now been fueled by an extensive collection of family documents and photographs, spanning some 100 years from 1850 to 1950, which came into my and my brother’s possession upon the death of family members. This comprehensive archive is unique in its breadth and depth. A true story, it rivals fictionalized family sagas such as Buddenbrooks, The Thorn Birds, Roots and the novels of James Michener.

The family seemingly threw nothing out. Letters were saved to be savored on multiple readings. Even receipts for the sale of eggs and small drawings by children were placed safely away. In them I found a richness of detail about the lives of a wide variety of individuals I had never known, each with his or her own quirks and personalities. It made a century of American history come alive and I wanted to share this discovery of what it was like to live through those times.

In addition, as an historian, I am acutely aware that immigrants have often met with hostility, the Irish and Chinese being prime examples. We need to be reminded, with works such as Coming toAmerika, that it is the immigrants’ successes, failures, trials and tribulations which are the stuff of which this nation is made.

The book is divided into two parts, each focusing on one generation of the family. In Part One: The First Generation you will travel with fifty-two-year-old Anna Maria Lodholz and her two teenage children as they leave Ebhausen in what is today Germany, sail on the S.S. Fox through the storms of the Atlantic to walk right off the ship in New York City (no Ellis Island at the time) to join two older children, factory workers in Terryville, Connecticut. You will follow the family westward to be among the earliest settlers on the seemingly endless plains of Kansas. There with few comforts, they risk crop failures, prairie fires and grasshopper plagues for land of their own and independence. Their prairie life contrasts dramatically with the unsettled factory existence of the one family member who remains behind, working in the Colt pistol factory during the Civil War and facing possible conscription.

Later, in Part Two: The Second Generation, you are introduced to the family of daughter Anna Regina Lodholz, married to Henry Reb, blacksmith and farmer, and their many children who after Henry’s death help their mother keep and grow their farm into a prosperous enterprise. Along the way you will meet a security guard at the Chicago World’s Fair, a woman who mastered printing glass plate negatives in a horse trough; a husband who took his wife and young child to California in the vain hope of curing her of tuberculosis; and a farmer hit hard by the Great Depression, losing two farms and reduced to working as a handyman to try to make ends meet. All these and more are the real-life characters whose voices you will hear in this narrative.

In writing Coming to Amerika, I found myself submerged in their world.  I hope that you can take yourself back almost two centuries now and find pleasure in submerging yourself in their world too.

 

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION OF LETTERS AND DOUMENTS:

It is difficult to convey from our present perspective how important letters were to our ancestors. Often separated by many long miles of difficult to traverse terrain, relatives and friends found in letters an emotional attachment to loved ones as well as information about their health, joys and sorrows; hard times and bountiful harvests; the quick strike of death and the newborn child.

Translated for the first time for this book, the letters and documents in Part One: The First Generation were written in Old German. I have generally kept to the translators’ wording while formatting the material into more coherent paragraphs. Paper was valuable and postage cost money so the letters were often crammed with writing.

The letters and documents in Part Two: The Second Generation were written in English. In transcribing these, I have kept the spelling of the writers and provided the modern correction only when it is not obvious what the word signified. Keeping the original spelling allows the reader to catch the accent of the letter writer. The letters contain run-on sentences and paragraphs, often skipping abruptly to new topics, one indication that the letters were often written in several sessions. In this case I have divided sentences, inserted punctuation and created paragraphs in order to make the text easier to follow.

In both parts I have added contextual information about events mentioned and unfamiliar terms and items. This information is hardly meant to be exhaustive and leaves the reader to explore further if he or she is curious about it.

The letters are of course arranged chronologically, but they are not consecutive, that is, there was obviously more correspondence than was actually saved. The sequence of letters, however, provide a consistent story of interwoven lives. Coming to Amerika reads I hope like a good epistolary novel.

 

 

The School Ma’am


My great-grandmother Francina Smith had a literary bent.  She wrote occasional poetry on traditional Victorian themes—death, religion, and the like.  She also, however, wrote some flowery, but witty letters in response to items she read in the Saturday Evening Post.  These letters were not published in  the Post, but in more local papers, including the Toledo Blade (still in existence) which was widely circulated in Kansas.  She had been a school teacher in a one-room schoolhouse and relates her experience:

Written for the Saturday Evening Post

You Dear, Darling Old Post:

I love you more than ever—if that is possible—since I find we are permitted to come to you with our troubles.  And as Uncle Aaron would say, “I accordingly avail myself of the opportunity.”

I know it must be dreadful to be a “Reminder” and be “mistooken” for all sorts of people; I infer from Observation that it is inconvenient to be ”too little;” I have no doubt that it is discouraging to be “too big”; and to be “too thick,” or “too thin”—like sorghum molasses—may not be blissful; but I am persuaded that not one of my dear sisters (“in distress”) who have written so pathetically of their several grievances ever taught “deestrict” school and “boarded round.”

I have.

I say it not with an air of boasting, but rather with an humble and contrite spirit. Teaching may be, as some learned person has remarked, “a high and mighty calling.”  But when it comes to “boarding round,” it’s calling rather frequently, and on all manner of people.”

Just think of being circulated through a whole neighborhood like an interesting pamphlet, or an itinerant brass kettle.  To have no abiding place.  To go Jones’s tonight, and get black looks and receive admonitory hints in reference to keeping “our Johnny” in at recess.”   And have to sleep alone in a lonesome room at the end of the porch.  Couldn’t complain last night, however, as my bed was in Brown’s family room, and I had two of the children for bedfellows. One night to be chilled in Smith’s barnlike chamber, and feel little icy imps scampering up and down your back, until you think it would.be pleasant to be roasted alive a la wild “Injun,” but change your mind next night when Mrs. Green undertakes it in her little bed-room with a big fire and a mountain of bed-clothes.

To be regaled on every known edible from pot-pie to “water-million preserves.”  Variety may be the spice of life, but one cannot be expected to subsist on spice.

And when you alight, as you frequently will, at a congenial fireside, you dare not spend more than the allotted time, or it will be reported that you are “struck” with the “hired hand,” or, the hopeful heir to the said fireside, so you can only “take up your staff and travel on.”

And when your own real loves comes over to see how you are prospering, and to bring the last “Post” and “Lady’s Friend,” and a letter from Sis, and —well, on consideration I presume the foregoing will be considered sufficient excuse for his coming, so I need not reveal anything further.  But, to have all of the old ladies catechizing you concerning him; and the little boys making remarks about his having eye-brows on his upper lip; all of which you must bear with smiling composure.  You know why.  There is nothing under the sun a poor “lone, lorn” woman in the country can do but teach school (or get married) and she must be very meek and conciliatory if she gets to do that—which includes the phrase in parenthesis.

I might write much more—but if you are not yet convinced, there is a school “out on the pike,” [for] which you can secure an application, and have the opportunity of “trying it on” ”boarding around” and all.

“Walking for your supper,

Miles of up-hill road;

Whaling little urchins

With an oaken rule,

Bless me! Ain’t it pleasant,

Teaching district school.”

Anicnarf

[Francina spelled backwards]