Category Archives: 19th century history

Emigration geography

Posted on January 25, 2012 | 3 comments

When in Germany, I visited the Bremerhaven Auswandererhaus, where many genealogist types do research. A large number of Germans left for the Americas (New Zealand and Australia, too) via the northern ports at Hamburg and Bremerhaven. However, it’s not the route my ancestor Michael Harm took from Freinsheim in the Rhineland-Palatinate. He went through the French port at Le Havre, and he wasn’t the only one. According to Freinsheim emigration records, many of its citizens took a similar route in the 19th century.

The map here was made in 1596, so it’s a far cry from 1857 when it comes to locations of cities and borders, but nonetheless, I provide it here with Freinsheim inked in, showing also the usual route through Paris to Le Havre, in order to demonstrate how the French port of departure made sense geographically. It also made sense politically. Many young men who left snuck out of the country, since they were liable for military duty in the Bavarian-controlled Palatinate of the day. It seems the French were willing to look the other way when it came to the paperwork. Hence, consider Le Havre, France another place to look for your ancestors emigrating from southwestern Germany.

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Posted in 19th century history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history, Genealogy tips, The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel

A good tome on religion in America

Posted on January 19, 2012 | 4 comments

I admit I’m a history geek: Snowbound in Seattle, I can’t think of a better way to spend the day than curling up by the hearth fire with a just-discovered tome: Religion in American Life: A Short History, by Butler, Wacker and Balmer (2003).

Intended as an overview, the book begins with native religions and extends all the way into the Reagan and Bush eras of American conservativism.

Right now I’m buried in the chapter called “Reformers and Visionaries.” For example, William Miller’s numerology (mentioned in an earlier post: Is 2012 the end of the line?) led him to calculate the return of the Lord would occur in 1843. “[Miller’s] views reached a broad audience in Horace Greeley’s New York Herald, complete with illustrations. Comets and meteor showers at the time added to the excitement. Some said that Miller attracted thirty thousand to one hundred thousand followers.”

Another end-times religion began in the mid-18th century, due to the visionary zeal of Mother Ann Lee. Her sect came to be known as the Shakers. One of nineteen Shaker communities, the North Union Shaker Community was organized in 1822 on land just outside Cleveland, on property along Doan Brook.

Better known as Shakers, members of the sect called themselves “Believers,” a shortened version of “the United Society of Believers in the Second Appearing of Christ.” Suffering persecution in England, a small band led by their founder, “Mother” Ann Lee, came to America in 1774. Ann Lee symbolized the second coming of Christ in female form, establishing the Shaker concept of sexual equality and of the deity as a father-mother God. Shaker colonies were founded in New York and the New England states, and later, on the frontier. (from The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History)

Today, the North Union Shaker Community is the neighborhood of Cleveland called Shaker Heights.

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Posted in 19th century history, Cleveland and Ohio history, General

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A Kit Bakke groupie

Posted on January 12, 2012 | 2 comments

Seattle author Kit Bakke wrote Miss Alcott’s E-mail (2006), a series of imagined conversations between the author and Louisa May Alcott. (Louisa May Alcott was more than a novelist, she led a life of advocacy for social reforms, as an abolitionist, a women’s rights activist, and a hospital worker.)

In the novel, Kit Bakke writes to Alcott about life as a baby boomer, filling in the deceased Alcott (1832-1888) on the progress of the women’s rights movement into the 21st century. Alcott “replies” via material Bakke culled from Alcott’s journals and letters. The book is extensively researched and full of information about 19th-century life among the Transcendentalist crowd (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Peabody, Henry David Thoreau) in Concord, Massachusetts.

This past week, I had the privilege of hearing Kit Bakke speak at the Whidbey Island residency (Whidbey MFA) on interviewing people for oral histories, and the permutations of truth in fiction and nonfiction. Afterward, I went up to introduce myself.

“I’ve heard you speak about six times now,” I said. “You might say I’m a Kit Bakke groupie.”

“I wish,” she said, laughing.

But it’s true, I am. These days, Bakke advocates for literacy and helps support writers as a founding member of the Seattle 7 Writers, a group actively supporting literacy in the Northwest. She’s also working on collecting oral histories, and recommended a couple of great sites:

Oral History Association
H-Oralhist
The Washington State Heritage Center Legacy Project
StoryCorps

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Posted in 19th century history, Genealogy tips, General

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Remembering 1857

Posted on January 8, 2012 | 2 comments

My ancestor Michael Harm emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1857. During my research of the time period, I’ve discovered a number of “big events” occurring that year.

– July 4th riots in the Five-Points slum of New York City, a Democrats v. Republicans squabble over who controlled the city, including control over liquor laws.
– On August 24th, railroad stocks tumbled, kicking off the financial Panic of 1857, further exacerbated by the sinking of the “Central America,” a ship loaded with federal gold to back up the U.S. treasury.
– Transatlantic telegraph cables were laid from North America to the United Kingdom for the first time. The first signal was feeble at best, then failed altogether a short time later. The first successful instantaneous communication across the Atlantic would not occur until after the Civil War.
– The Atlantic Monthly was founded. I learned this the other day in the grocery story, when I plucked off the magazine shelf a special issue of articles published in the Atlantic on stories of the Civil War. It is an issue in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War about the mid-19th century discussion of slavery, and includes essays by Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the first editor, James Russell Lowell. Here is an excerpt about the history of the magazine, given by Cullen Murphy at a 1994 presentation:

The year was 1857. Railroads did not yet cross the North American continent, but everyone knew that one day soon they would. The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species was two years away, but loud rumblings in the halls of science had already warned the keepers of religious faith that serious challenges lay ahead. The largest wave of immigration in the nation’s history was pouring through the cities of the eastern seaboard. Though he would become President in four years, Abraham Lincoln in 1857 was no more widely known nationally than any former one-term Congressman is today. But the clouds of secession had begun to gather, and few believed that North and South, still joined by weak bonds of vexing compromise, would not soon be torn asunder.

Among educated people throughout the United States the issue of slavery was obviously one of great moment. But so, too, was another matter, and in the baldest terms it might be said to have involved an attempt to define and create a distinctly American voice: to project an American stance, to promote something that might be called the American Idea.

It was this concern that brought a handful of men together, at about three in the afternoon on a bright April day, at Boston’s Parker House Hotel. At a moment in our history when New England was America’s literary Olympus, the men gathered that afternoon could be said to occupy the summit. They included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and several other gentlemen with three names and impeccable Brahmin breeding—men from the sort of families, as Holmes once noted wryly, that had not been perceptibly affected by the consequences of Adam’s fall. By the time these gentlemen had supped their fill, plans for a new magazine were well in hand. As one of the participants wrote to a friend the next day, “The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually that I have ever had.” Soon the new magazine acquired an editor, James Russell Lowell, and a name—The Atlantic Monthly.

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Is 2012 the end of the line?

Posted on January 2, 2012 | 1 comment

2012 is here, and with it a host of dire prognostications about the end times, most recently in this Los Angeles Times article: Will the year 2012 be a game-changer?

What startles me, in researching 19th century Cleveland, is the number of game-changing religions afoot in Ohio’s Western Reserve.

Everyone, then and now, loves to make fun of the Millerites. Here is a picture of a round (8-sided) church built by the good people who followed William Miller, a preacher who foretold the end of the world by March 21, 1843, no wait, April 22, 1844, no wait, October 18, 1844 …

In 1833, construction began on a Mormon Temple (still standing) in Kirtland, Ohio, a little northeast of Cleveland, where many new revelations occurred, and Joseph Smith was named President.

It was also an era when Mary Baker Eddy founded the first Church of Christ, Scientist (1866 in Boston). According to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, General Erastus N. Bates “secured 2 rooms in a downtown building and formed a ministry based on the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science church.” Eddy writes in the preface to Science and Health: “The time for thinkers has come.”

In these 21st century times, we the people continue to explore spiritual frontiers.

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Posted in 19th century history, Cleveland and Ohio history, General

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History lightbulb

Posted on December 15, 2011 | 2 comments

At a recent gathering of friends, I mentioned how much I was learning about the 19th century. Things I had never thought about before.

“Really, like what?” Whitney asked.

“Well, before Edison and the lightbulb, an inventor named Charles Brush invented the arc lamp. His lights were used to light Public Square in Cleveland back in 1874.”

“What about Thomas Edison? When did he invent the light bulb?”

I was in trouble then, because I wasn’t sure. Later, looking it up, I happened upon the Library of Congress Science Reference site, and the question: “Who invented electric Christmas lights?” (Tis the season) The answer: Thomas Edison, in 1880, when he strung electric lights around his Menlo Park research facility. Apparently, two years later his business partner Edward Johnson made a patriotic string of lights–red, white, and blue–to adorn his Christmas tree. Because such a novelty was exorbitantly expensive then, the tradition would not catch on for another four decades.

The Christmas tree, or Tannenbaum, is an especially German contribution to the American Christmas tradition. Also the decorations. The glass balls originated in the Thuringian region of modern day Germany. According to About.com German Christmas Ornaments, F.W. Woolworth made a fortune importing them in the 1880s. And the tinsel? Don’t even get me started on the tinsel. Once upon a time, though, it was made of actual silver, and brought a real sparkle to the candlelit trees.

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One thing leads to another

Posted on December 7, 2011 | 1 comment

In writing about the 19th century, I am always on the alert for antiquated books. About a year ago at the Friends of the Library book sale, I crouched down overlong under the table to leaf through a box of neglected, musty tomes, a wine-colored, 12-volume set of The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll. I purchased only the last in the set, a compendium of speeches Ingersoll gave on topics such as “The Religious Belief of Abraham Lincoln,” “Tribute to Walt Whitman,” an address on “The Circulation of Obscene Literature,” and so on. I did not expect much enlightenment, merely a glimpse into the mindset and flavor of the times.

What a treasure! I have returned to this volume many times. The contents defy most stereotypes I held about the post-Civil War era, are thought-provoking and, in many instances, still contemporary. Included in the volume are several of Ingersoll’s addresses to banquets and clubs; apparently, he was a renowned, eloquent speaker, who dared people to abandon what I had assumed to be the hallmarks of the Victorian era — superstition and dogma. Why had I never heard of the man before? Furthermore, in all of my research about the time, I did not encounter his name. Not until I was writing a recent post about Freethinkers, that is. (Aha! He’s one of those. I love the irony of this; the concept of “freethought” ought to defy all categories, no?)

Check out more at Council for Secular Humanism:

Robert Green Ingersoll is too little known today. Yet he was the foremost orator and political speechmaker of late 19th century America — perhaps the best-known American of the post-Civil War era.

I want to quote something here, but what to pick? There’s a gem on just about every subject. Given the climate of a campaign year and the “Occupy” movement, I have selected an 1892 “Fragment” about the upcoming World’s Fair (the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago, I presume):

The World’s Fair will do great good. A great many thousand people of the Old World will for the first time understand the new … [The European settlers of the New World] had to fight for the soil and … the people who had rescued the land made up their minds not only to own it, but to control it. They were also firmly convinced that the profits belonged to them. In this way manhood was recognized in the New World. In this way grew up the feeling of nationality here. What I wish to see celebrated in this great exposition are the triumphs that have been achieved in this New World. These I wish to see above all. At the same time I want the best that labor and thought have produced in all countries. It seems to me that in the presence of the wonderful machines, of those marvelous mechanical contrivances by which we take advantage of the forces of nature, by which we make servants of the elemental powers–in the presence, I say, of these, it seems to me respect for labor must be born. We shall begin to appreciate the men of use instead of those who have posed as decorations. All the beautiful things, all the useful things, come from labor, and it is labor that has made the world a fit habitation for the human race.
Take from the World’s Fair what labor has produced–the work of the great artists–and nothing will be left. What have the great conquerors to show in this great exhibition? What shall we get from the Caesars and the Napoleons? What shall we get from popes and cardinals? What shall we get from the nobility? From princes and lords and dukes? What excuse have they for having existence and for having lived on the bread earned by honest men? They stand in the show-windows of history, lay figures, on which fine goods are shown, but inside the raiment there is nothing, and never was. This exposition will be the apotheosis of labor. (pp. 346-347)

Hear hear for the blacksmiths and carriage-makers, and for all laborers then and now.

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The Freidenker

Posted on December 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

I was ferreting around the Internet looking for, among other things, quotes by Benjamin Franklin about German immigrants, and I came across a write-up at Dialog International. The things Ben Franklin thought and said are at this post on the site. The post begins with the statement: “Immigrants to America have always been feared and hated.” It’s striking, isn’t it, how political turmoil regarding immigration spans the centuries? Newcomers are consistently the outsiders. Gotta get a handle on that (rather than, for instance, a wall).

Meanwhile, the Dialog International site where I found the above post intrigued me. The tone is rational, clearheaded, and humanitarian in scope. I clicked on about me and learned the blog theme is: “Free thinkers who are interested in cross-cultural dialogue.” The term “Free thinkers” triggered a memory. The word Freidenker, freethinker, is generally synonymous with “atheist.” Back in the 1830s and 1840s, this rationalist perspective was also prevalent in the rural village of Freinsheim, according to writings of the then-pastor Johann Georg Bickes. In a description of his parish, Bickes wrote of: “a pernicious spirit of unbelief… Here, as everywhere, there are those who are led astray by false enlightenment, following their own arrogance. They do not pay attention to the word of God, and are infected by the pernicious spirit of unbelief and frivolity, of carelessness, of arrogance and contempt of divine laws.”

Further investigation led me to this statement in the German-language Wikipedia: “Freidenker sind im heutigen Sinn Menschen, die sich an wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen orientieren und zu einem nichtreligiös geprägten Humanismus bekennen. … Freidenker bestehen zwar auf ihrer Unabhängigkeit von Glaubensregeln wie Tabus und Dogmen, beziehen sich aber ausdrücklich auf ethische Grundsätze von Freiheit, Gleichheit, Toleranz und Gewaltverzicht.” [Translation]: “In the modern sense, Freethinkers are people oriented to a non-religiously influenced humanism based on scientific findings. … Indeed, Freethinkers insist on their independence from religious rules, such as taboos and dogmas, relying instead on the ethical principles of liberty, equality, tolerance and nonviolence.”

Historically, in the 1840s in the Bavarian Rhineland and surrounding areas, Freethinkers were German intellectuals who wished to overthrow their religious and political autocracies in favor of a constitutional democracy. These men read Thomas Paine, author of “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason,” a man who also inspired humanitarian zeal in America’s founding fathers. When the 1848 revolution was suppressed, many German intellectuals emigrated (or were forced to flee). In Cleveland, Ohio, ex-patriated Germans formed a Society of Freemen and beginning in 1853, held an annual Thomas Paine celebration.

In a Wikipedia entry on Freethought, I found the following: “[German 1848er immigrant] Freethinkers tended to be liberal, espousing ideals such as racial, social, and sexual equality, and the abolition of slavery.” What followed was a short-lived but heartening “Golden Age of Free Thought.”

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Posted in 19th century history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history, General, The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel

Illnesses of old

Posted on November 29, 2011 | 1 comment

Medical science has come a long way. So long in fact, that over the past 100 years formerly common medical terms for illnesses are no longer familiar to us.

Infant deaths, in particular, plagued 19th century Clevelanders. In an 1875 letter, excerpted below, my cousin Angela and I discovered the following:

This passage is about the infant death of Herman Harm, the fourth child of Michael and Elisabeth Harm, in August of 1874: “He was so healthy and happy, so well behaved. We rarely felt that we had a child. He woke up with laughing mouth and that’s also how he went to sleep. Until he went to the eternal rest after three days of being sick. He died of the childhood sickness Summer Complaint. His baptized name was Herman.” In that same time period, the letter goes on, a 2 year old girl of Uncle Jakob also died.

Summer Complaint? In the German, Michael uses the term der ruhr Krankheit (Sommer Complain). The modern term for it is “dysentery.” The term “Summer Complaint” came from the increase in frequency of dysentery in the summer due to poorer water quality in the warm months of the year.

A friend Bill Sherertz recently pointed me to a helpful site for sleuthing out antiquated medical terminology, which might appear on death certificates, in letters, or any number of genealogy documents. Rudy’s List of Archaic Medical Terms. Best of all, in addition to the English, there is an index for German and French medical terms.

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Posted in 19th century history, Cleveland and Ohio history, Genealogy tips, The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel

Thanksgiving Home Festival

Posted on November 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

As I wrote scenes set in Cleveland in 1857, I imagined my characters on the last weekend of November gathering to celebrate the Thanksgiving Home Festival. A quick bit of research informed me this holiday has been a time-honored American tradition since October 3, 1789, when George Washington proclaimed: “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

Already, I felt led astray. Didn’t Thanksgiving begin in 1621, in the Plymouth Colony? Images flashed through my head — tall black Pilgrim hats, white collars, buckled shoes, Native Americans toting in a freshly killed deer for many days of community feasting.

My daydream came to a crashing halt as I pictured this Thanksgiving theme in the mid-19th century. In 1857, the Senecas and Wyandots had just been forcibly cleared out of the State of Ohio five years prior, in 1852. Among Ohioans of that day, would the Pilgrim Thanksgiving as we know it really be celebrated? Surely not.

On a search for the true story, I looked for 19th century newspaper articles about Thanksgiving. In the mid-nineteenth century, it seems, the Thanksgiving “Home Festival” was touted as a day of prayer and praise. Not one word about Pilgrims and Native Americans sitting at table. The States had still not agreed on the day.*

And so I asked myself: Is the First Pilgrim Thanksgiving a hoax? If so, it continues to be perpetuated. A quick glance at current classroom curriculum shows the First Pilgrim Thanksgiving still going strong in children’s classrooms.

What do the Native Americans say? At this web site, The Real Thanksgiving, Dr. Daniel N. Paul gives a First Nations account of the gathering. According to this version, the natives were seen by the Pilgrims as uninvited guests. Especially poignant is the apology by Clarence Standish IV that comes at the beginning of this history.

In addition to his status as a descendant of the original Myles Standish, Clarence Standish’s words (at The Real Thanksgiving) hold extra weight because, it would seem, the source of our fantasy Pilgrim Thanksgiving is found in the novel Standish of Standish (1889) by Jane G. Austin, a run-away bestseller in its day. The book Thanksgiving: the biography of an American holiday by James W. Baker states Standish of Standish went through twenty-eight reprintings between 1889 and 1912, thereby cementing this version in the American imagination. Baker notes:

In Standish of Standish, Austin presents a fictionalized, sentimental account of the “First Thanksgiving” centered on an “outdoor” feast … In the Nov. 1897 issue of Ladies Home Journal, Clifford Howard drew heavily on Austin’s fictional account.

Before the Civil War, Thanksgiving was not even considered a harvest festival, so much as a winter one. Again, I quote from James W. Baker’s Thanksgiving:

The old New England holiday … had also been the Puritan stand-in for Christmas (a holiday they rejected as noncanonical and pagan), an early winter time for feasting and pious hope before the long dreary months of cold and privation to follow.

Is there a bright side in any of this? I vote for education. At the National Museum of the American Indian web site, under education, curriculum is offered for, among other things “American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving.”

*See my earlier post on Thanksgiving here. In that post, I referred to Thanksgiving as an “innocuous” holiday. I was wrong.

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Posted in 19th century history, Cleveland and Ohio history, The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel