Category Archives: 19th century history

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

German Singing Festivals

Posted on November 17, 2011 | 2 comments

This cover of the 27th Sängerfest German Singing Festival, held in 1893 in Cleveland, Ohio, is courtesy of The Western Reserve Historical Society Library. (Double-click on it to enlarge) The program alone is 101 pages. Seventy different songs were presented in afternoon and evening concerts, ranging from Schubert’s “The Wanderer” to Mendelssohn’s “Walpurgis-Night.”

Included in the program is a history of the North American Sängerbund, which began in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1849. At the first singing festival, five societies came together from nearby towns, for a total of 118 singers. By 1860, there were 25 societies and 450 singers. In 1868, after a hiatus during the Civil War, there were 58 societies and 1200 singers. For a complete history of the society, still in existence today, visit their web site at Nord-Amerikanischer Sängerbund.

About a month ago, a friend told me about a German music program put on by the Sacramento German Genealogical Society (SGGS): Liedermatinée: an Afternoon of Favorite German Songs with Michael Mayer-Kielmann. Their program offered songs by Brahms and Haydn and the 20th century Heino, as well as classic folk songs like Silcher’s Lorelei. I have since learned the SGGS is a very active organization, with over 900 members and an award-winning journal, Der Blumenbaum.

How I would have loved to hear the SGGS program, and the 1893 Cleveland concerts, too. In the German song tradition, musicians such as Schubert and Silcher and countless others set poetry (of Goethe, Heine, Schiller and so on) to music. Popular music is always a favorite, as evidenced in this quote from the 1893 Sängerfest program: “Of all numbers on the programme the “Volkslieder” (Folks’ Songs) invariably please the most. In the first place, the singers prefer them, (because they require less study), secondly, because the sound effects of a grand chorus in sustained, not polyphonic works, are brought out better, and thirdly, the audience recognizes dear old friends in them, and as it requires no exertion to follow the music, the enjoyment is the greater.”

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

The art of lace-making

Posted on November 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

The power was out a couple of weeks ago for an entire afternoon. I came home to make myself lunch, but since it was daylight outside, I did not notice until I put something in the microwave and pressed start. No beep. No hum.

Then I felt it — an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. No lights, no heat, no refrigerator, no computer, no TV. No ability to charge my cellphone. My God, I wondered, what did people used to do?

Actually, due to my extensive research on the 19th century, I have a vague idea of what people did do. Handwork. That’s right. Arts and crafts.

My grandmother, born in 1891, used to love to show me her lace collection. It made only a slight impression at the time. I mean, when I was growing up in the 1970s, lace was machine made, cheap and plentiful. But in the old days, lace was made by hand, with bobbins and eensy weensy crochet hooks. In my family, Lucy Harm Hoppensack, my grandmother’s mother born in 1865, was legendary for her lace-making. In this picture, she is wearing some of her handwork.

My grandmother kept a box of lace in her closet, laces worn on her dresses, and those of her mother and grandmother. At Lace Fairy, I’ve tried to identify types, which range from Burano to Point d’Angleterre to Valenciennes. The stitch work is so tiny, it was not until I examined the photos that I realized the netting is hand twisted, and braided, and crocheted.



When my cousin from Germany came to visit, and to work on translating the letters, she brought me a gift made by her grandmother, who had recently passed away. A handmade lace tablecloth. A more perfect gift could not have been found.

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Posted in 19th century history, General

Bird migrations

Posted on October 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

When I visited the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, one of the exhibits was called “Pioneer Ohio.”

It showed the varied habitats (wetlands, tall-grass prairies, hardwood forests) of early 19th century Ohio and how the arrival of European settlers changed the animal population. For example, the loss of the Passenger pigeon.

… once the most abundant bird in the world. In 1813 John James Audubon observed a continuous migration flight of these birds which darkened the sky for three days. Believed by many to be inexhaustible in numbers, Passenger pigeons were netted, clubbed, and even killed by cutting down roost and nest trees at night. Live captive birds, or ‘stool pigeons,’ were tied to stools or perches to decoy wild pigeons into shooting range. Passenger pigeons went from unbelievable abundance to extinction in less than 100 years.

The above write-up comes from the museum’s interpretive display. Here’s a link for more information on these amazing birds. In its collection, the museum has this stuffed Passenger pigeon, killed in 1900 on a farm in Ohio, believed to be the last documented wild Passenger pigeon. In 1914, the last captive Passenger pigeon, named “Martha,” died at the Cincinnati Zoo.

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

What day was that?

Posted on October 6, 2011 | 2 comments

When writing about our ancestors, sometimes we want to find not only the date, but also the day of the week. My ancestor Michael Harm arrived in New York Harbor on the packet ship Helvetia on June 30, 1857. What day, exactly, was that? There are various sites to help us figure this out, such as Ancestor Search.

And here’s a find, specifically for the 19th century, through the University of Pittsburgh Library System. A digitized publication from 1886, called “The 19th Century Almanac: A complete calendar from 1800 to 1900.” There are options for viewing the almanac, depending on the format (and power of your computer). Below is a page snipped from the alamanac. (Double-click to enlarge.)

(double-click to enlarge)

Especially fun are lists of important events in a given year. Here are the events of 1853.

Since the Almanac was published in 1886, what about 1887 and following, the “time that is to come”? In those years, the Almanac lists upcoming presidential elections and congresses and so on, and centennial events from 1787 to 1800. There are also pithy quotes at the bottom of each page. For 1887, it’s:

“We take no note of time, but from its loss.”

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Posted in 19th century history, Genealogy tips

Sütterlin – Old German Script

Posted on September 22, 2011 | 4 comments

My relatives in Freinsheim discovered a packet of old letters, from early in the 1840s up into the 20th century, from relatives who emigrated from the Rhineland-Palatinate to Cleveland, Ohio. They’re written not only in German, but in Alte Deutsche Schrift (Old German Script), or Kurrentschrift, based on medieval cursive.

Here’s a sample of the handwriting, written by Johann Rapparlie. This snippet says:


Cleveland on the 14th November, 1847
Much loved brother-in-law and sister-in-law,
With great joy I pick up the pen to let you know about our matters how all of us are here amongst each other in Cleveland.

Sütterlin script is named after the graphic artist who standardized the Old German Script, but that did not happen until 1911. Before then, variants were the rule, not the exception. The cursive is a problem to anyone lucky enough to possess old letters, church records, land deeds, and so on, hand-written in German.

It’s also a problem for those of us researching German ancestry, because signatures of Germans on, say, marriage documents, may have been typed up by people who knew only the English alphabet. Here’s just one example. I have had great difficulty finding my ancestor George Scheuermann. It turns out the Old German Script is one source of the problem. The letter “e”, in Old German Script, looks like this: which strongly resembles the English cursive “n”.

This revelation occurred to me on a recent visit to the Ohio Historical Society archives in Columbus. In the typed-up book of Cuyahoga marriages in the 1840s and 1850s, I found him at last.

Fortunately, like most challenges of the 21st century, there is help on the web.
Here You Can Learn Suetterlin
Write Your Name in Suetterlin

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Posted in 19th century history, Genealogy tips

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Lyrical obscurity

Posted on September 13, 2011 | 3 comments

A song that is formative for one generation becomes lost in obscurity for the next. That is the way of things, Grasshopper. (If you’re wondering, “Grasshopper” references a 1970’s TV program called “Kung Fu.”)

I visited Freinsheim, Germany last year at this time, to see my relatives, to do research, and to experience the Weinwanderung, a 7-mile culinary and wine-tasting hike through the vineyards. It’s awesome! This fall’s Weinwanderung dates are September 23-25. If you can swing it, you should definitely go.

Another memorable event during my trip last year was a meeting with Roland Paul (google translate link: click on “Autor”), Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Institute for Palatine History and Folklore in Kaiserslautern. He has compiled the largest migration file index in Germany.

As we talked, I told him the working title of my thesis, which was “Something to Tell About” based on the quote by Matthias Claudius: “Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, so kann er was erzählen.” (When someone goes on a journey, then he has something to tell about.) Dr. Paul nodded perfunctorily. “Yes, yes,” he said. “This is a very popular quote in Germany.” Yet from my side of the Atlantic, I had come up with something pretty obscure.

The same thing happened when I mentioned the many immigration songs and poems. Dr. Paul nodded, waved his hand with a flourish. “Yes, Konrad Krez and so forth.” It hit home again, how what is so well known in one place or time can be so quickly forgotten in another. For general posterity, therefore, I post a poem by Konrad Krez, a moving ode to the immigrant’s journey (this version comes from the reprint of Jacob Mueller’s Memories of a Forty-Eighter (1896), translated by Steven Rowan).

Renunciation and Consolation
by Konrad Krez

I dreamed in my youth
Of the roll of drums, the blare of trumpets,
Of the clatter of swords and the fire of muskets,
Of heroism and immortality,
And sick with fever I raised my hand
To pluck garlands from the tree of fame,
I burned for deeds to mark
My trail forever in the sand of time.

It drove me to foreign zones,
My hills were too flat at home,
The valleys too narrow, the Rhine a brook,
I wanted alps, seas and waves.
I wanted to defy storm and hurricane,
See the splendor of the tropics with my own eyes,
Head west, to the new Canaan,
And plant corn and wheat on the Ohio.

And everywhere, wherever I came and went,
I found an ache, no land was so lonely
That I did not find there the way of care,
Even where no tree would grow, there was still distress,
Whether you go South or North,
East or West, to all the winds,
You will always find the same password,
The care of labor and work.

The same struggle for daily bread,
Which does not deserve to be so hard earned,
Awaits you on the Hudson as on the Rhine,
Your rights include suffering everywhere.
And if you, through long years of effort,
Pile up riches, where will a whole heap
Of gold buy you a physician who knows a way
To buy back even a day of youth?

To be sure you might be tempted to travel
The raw path of fame, to raise
A monument against forgetfulness, spiting envy with
Eternal praise by means of a famous deed;
Yet soon your ambition, your drive for fame
Will sink its wings with satiety,
When you spy the gates which beckon
When you go to drink of immortality.

And if one kingdom was once too small for you,
Soon an acre of land will do,
A protecting roof, a log in the fireplace,
To be happier with wife and child
Than a tyrant whose whims pass through wires
To the limits of the earth,
But whom not even a subservient senate
Can resolve to heal him of death.

Even if your burden presses and bends you,
And even if your heart distresses you,
Be consoled that life is not long,
And the path you have to go is short.
Then comes death and knocks on your door
As he did for your father,
Arriving like an old friend of the family,
And later he will visit your children.

He speaks to you: My friend, you have dreamed,
Fought and worried, now it is time
To rest, your bed is ready,
I have arranged a private house for you.
You will obey and expel your breath into the wind.
Whether grass or marble covers your grave,
On it is written: Vain are
Things, and life is but a shadow.

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Posted in 19th century history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history, General

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Singing through time

Posted on September 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

I just finished reading Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club, a memorable visit to early 20th century North Dakota and the disparate ways immigrants to that region eked out a living in the 1930s. In the novel, the main character Fidelis, a German butcher in the small town of Argus, starts a singing club, something he brought over from Ludwigsruhe, the town of his birth.

German singing clubs are a topic I continue to run across in my research. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Germany, singing with other men was a favorite pastime of scientists. Scientists? Yes, scientists. Perhaps nowadays, science and the arts do not come together so often, but once upon a time, music was considered integral, and essential, to the development of science.

In the 21st century, Jonah Lehrer is drawing the two disciplines closer together again. Lehrer’s book Proust Was a Neuroscientist came about as a result of neuroscientist Lehrer studying how the brain remembers, only to discover that almost 100 years ago the author Marcel Proust had come to the same conclusions about memory in his novel Swann’s Way. Lehrer (and Proust) make the case that remembering is subjective based on feelings of any given moment. Lehrer also explores the senses and how they take in data. For example, the first time Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” was heard in 1913, its dissonance drove people mad. (If you want to explore in more detail Lehrer’s findings, listen to this radiolab interview Sound As Touch.) By contrast, harmonious music, 19th century scientists believed, brought people together, enhanced the chances for the sharing of knowledge, and elevated discourse.

Yesterday, I happened to hear this NPR report about an elementary school principal keeping alive the tragedy of 9/11 in children’s memories who were not even born when it happened. In this story, the call and response was discordant. “We were attacked,” the teacher says to her class. “We were attacked,” the children repeat in unison. Hearing this segment, I remembered a passage near the end of Erdrich’s book, when Fidelis makes a trip to post-WWII Germany to sing with his old butcher friends. “Time was an army marching like the butchers onto the stage. Time was a singing club whose music was smoke and ash.”

On its tenth anniversary, the tragedy of 9/11 seems to be rising away from public awareness like smoke and ash. The dissonance of 9/11 was an explosive bar in the music of modern history. There are many such dissonant strains, occurring all over the world, in senseless acts of violence. Only now have scientists learned how to play the music of the spheres: Sounds of stars fall in a Bavarian forest. May we all learn from its harmony.

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Phaeton — a gentleman’s buggy, and ancient myth

Posted on August 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

Here is a photo of my great-great-grandfather’s Harm & Schuster Carriage Works on Champlain St. in Cleveland, Ohio. (Champlain Street was located downtown where the Terminal Tower now stands.) Lined up in front of the shop are signature carriages of the day, of the Phaeton class. Phaetons came in a variety of sizes and suspension systems, designed for pleasure riding and competitive racing. Had you lived in Cleveland in the 1870’s, you might have seen gentlemen the likes of John D. Rockefeller Sr. (of Standard Oil) or Jeptha Wade (of Western Union Telegraph) riding down Euclid Avenue in one of these contraptions.

Here is a fashion plate of the Diamond Phaeton, found in the Coach-Makers’ International Journal (circa 1867), courtesy of the Archives/Library of the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus.

Below is an interpretive sign photographed at the Northwest Carriage Museum in Raymond, Washington, where there is a Spider Phaeton on display.

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

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Old-time drinking and thinking

Posted on August 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

I am descended of “keepers,” people who held on to belongings long beyond their usefulness. Or so I used to think.

As I’ve spent the last couple of years researching my great-great grandfather, I’ve made discoveries of some of his belongings. In fact, these days I possess a small “Michael Harm museum”: mid-nineteenth letters and photographs, a gold heart necklace he purchased for my grandmother, and this beer stein, which I recently picked up from my brother’s house. (Thanks, Craig.) How do I know the latter once belonged to Michael Harm? Because of this bit of paper tucked inside.

For my German side of the family, Michael Harm was our “point of entry” to America. Perhaps this is why there appears to have been a cult of reverence around the man. When I was child, my grandmother and my father were still telling stories about Michael Harm’s Atlantic voyage and Cleveland carriageworks, more than one hundred years after he made the journey, and sixty years after the Harm & Schuster Wagons and Carriages had closed its doors for good. His daughter Lucy drew this painstakingly detailed portrait of him (left), poster-sized and framed, based on this photograph, an honor not bestowed on any other member of the family.

Michael Harm may have been attached to his beer stein, but he hailed from the Palatinate, the southern Rhineland region. Wine country, that is. When my relatives visited from that region of Germany last spring, they brought me this gift, a replica of an old “Freinsheimer Krug,” or wine-drinking jug.

An old object for the shelf, no longer of use? Think again. Before disposable plates and cups, how did we manage? Apparently, people used to carry around their own crockery. Some cultures still do this today. In the 1990s, I had the privilege of being a guest at a Makah Native American Potlatch at Neah Bay. In addition to the generous custom of gift-giving, the respect for tribal elders, and the moving dances and songs, what struck me about the gathering was how all the Makah families brought baskets containing their own tableware–plates, cups, silverware. When the potlatch was over, they packed up their dishes to bring home and wash. It seemed a laudable, sustainable way of living, a way to keep trashbarrels (and landfills) from brimming over with paper plates and cups and plastic eating utensils.

At the time, I wondered why my own culture did not do this. Now I realize, in the not-so-distant past, it was how things were done. It may be an old-time way of thinking but it’s good enough for me.

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