Category Archives: The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel

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A brief history of the Palatinate

Posted on February 18, 2012 | 6 comments

To imagine one might write a “brief” history of the Palatinate seems grandiose, but I think Larry O. Jensen has done a pretty good job, in “Articles of Interest” in a 1990 issue of the German Genealogical Digest (Volume VI, No. 2). I summarize the contents of his article below.

The Palatinate? Known in Germany as the Pfalz (from the Latin term palatium meaning palace or castle). Also called the Niederpfalz, the Pfalz am Rhein, “Palatinatus inferior”, “Palatinatus Rheni”, Rheinpfalz, and Rheinbayern. Why so many names for one relatively small stretch of land along the Rhine River? Perhaps because this charming locality has seen a whole lot of history.

HISTORY OF THE PALATINATE
3rd century – Inhabited by Alemannic tribes
6th century – Conquered by the Franks, who established tribal districts, otherwise known as “Gauen”
9th century – Under Charlemagne, earls were established to rule the Gauen
12th century – King Friedrich I became the ruler.
1214 – Ludwig of Bavaria, of the House of Wittelsbach, became ruler of the Palatinate, by marriage
1410 – Four sons of King Ruprecht III divided the region into four parts. Ludwig III, the eldest, received the Rheinpfalz
1508-1544 – King Ludwig V introduced Protestantism, although he himself remained Catholic
1618-1648 – Thirty Years War. At the start, the Pfalz was ruled by King Friedrich IV, leading supporter of the Evangelical Union. In 1622 Heidelberg was conquered and plundered, and the Pfalz turned over to Bavaria’s Duke Maximilian. Spinola of Spain then invaded the Pfalz. The plague hit at around the same time, wiping out as much as two-thirds of the population. The Thirty Years War established the right of three religions to exist: Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist.
1673-79 – War between the German Empire and France, in which the Pfalz had to pay 250,000 florin in war tax. (1683, Pietists emigrate, establish Germantown, PA)
1688 – War of the League of Augsburg. King Louis XIV of France invaded and burned most of the region to the ground.
1697 – Treaty of Rijswik made the State Church Catholic, although Catholics were outnumbered 5 to 1.
1705 – Calvinist and Lutheran churches re-established.
1707 – Palatinate destroyed in the Spanish War of Succession. (1708 – another emigration led by Joshua von Kocherthal, many of whom settled in Neuberg on the Hudson River.)
1742 – The Palatinate grew and prospered in trade, agriculture, arts, and science.
1799 – France moved in to occupy the Palatinate, Napoleon officially took the region over in 1801.
1815 – Paris Peace Treaty gives the Palatinate to Bavaria. Thirteen districts were created: Bergzabern, Frankenthal, Germersheim, Homburg, Kaiserslautern, Kirchheimbolanden, Kusel, Landau, Ludwigshafen, Neustadt, Pirmasens, Speier, Zweibruecken
1832 – Hambacher Festival – enormous gathering of peasants and intellecuals from all over Europe at Hambach Castle to advocate for a democracy – the tricolor black, red and gold flag was first flown. The rulers quickly put down the movement, and forbid political assemblies.
1849 – Democratic Revolution of 1848 crushed by Prussia and Bavaria (prompting a wave of emigration from the region)
1871 – The Palatinate joins the united German Empire.

There are many twists and turns in between, but were I to include them, this history would not be brief. Not at all. When I visited the Palatinate a little over a year ago, a member of the Bad Dürkheim history club noted they had suffered more than 20 wars between 1610 and 1850. No wonder the Spätlese (late harvest wines) are so popular — no doubt they take off the edge. These days, the people of the Palatinate are a fun-loving people, in a fertile, enchanting land.

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

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Celebrities of the 1848 Revolution

Posted on January 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

The “1848 Revolution” in Europe was a formative political event of the mid-19th century century. Beginning in late February, 1848 with an uprising in Paris, the foment of peasants against rulers played out across the many countries, duchies, and principalities of the day. It took over a year for all of the different revolutions to be crushed, the rebels scattered in exile. Here are a few persons who went on to make a name for themselves, who were active in some part of the 1848 struggles:

Richard Wagner was active in the rebellion in Dresden
Robert Schumann and his wife Clara were witnesses to the Dresden violence, and Schumann fled the scene rather than be conscripted in the city’s civil guard
Karl Marx was especially active in France in 1848; the failure of the rebellion convinced him of the need for a more radical society
Frederick Engels wrote about his role in the Palatinate in 1849, in a document called “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution”
Otto von Bismarck was a young landowner who rose to power and influence on the monarchist side
Carl Schurz was a leader in the rebellious provisional governments army, who escaped from the Prussian troops through a sewer from a village under siege, sailed to America, and later became an active advocate of the newly formed Republican party and an attorney and friend of Abraham Lincoln
Jacob Müller was a provisional government civil commissioner of Kirchheimbolanden who immigrated to Cleveland, eventually becoming the tenth Lieutenant Governor of Ohio from 1872-1874.

Perhaps you know of others? If so, do tell.

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

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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

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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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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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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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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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

More birds – the European stork

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

Last year when I was visiting Freinsheim, Germany, my cousin said to me: “The people here are upset because the storks don’t come any more.”

Since the European White Stork was not familiar to me, I did not fully grasp what Angela was telling me. I stumbled upon the significance of these birds since my return. The enormous, twiggy nest of the storks is welcome and encouraged on German rooftops, as storks bring good luck, fertility and prosperity. It is believed storks protect a house from fire. Like cats in the barn, storks feed on rodents, so keep down the vermin population. It was once thought storks had human souls.

A write-up on the European White Stork can be found at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park web site. Apparently, the disappearance of the storks in Freinsheim is one instance of a much larger problem.

The overall population of White Storks has declined steadily over the last half century. The decline in Western Europe has been the most pronounced. Pollution, pesticides and wetlands drainage have severely reduced suitable foraging habitat across the breeding range. Storks no longer breed in southern Sweden, Switzerland, western France, Belgium or southern Greece. In The Netherlands the number of breeding pairs has declined from 500 in 1910 to 5 in 1985. Denmark was home to 4000 pairs in 1890, but only 12 in 1989. Captive propagation and reintroduction efforts have been hampered by their tendency to produce overly tame birds, which over-winter in Europe without migrating normally.

In the 19th century storks were so plentiful, their broad wingspans darkened the sky as they migrated north from African shores. Another “melioration of the climate” (à la James Fenimore Cooper) changing our lives in ways we don’t even realize.

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