A German Christmas in Bowling Green, 1889

A German Christmas in Bowling Green, 1889                              by Alan Borer

            Like most cities and towns across the Midwest, Bowling Green, Ohio, had a sizable German-speaking minority in the.  “In 1900, 204,160 native-born Germans resided in Ohio,” according to the Ohio Historical Society, and many more citizens had whole or partial German ancestry.  And because Christmas, at least American Christmas is of German immigrant origin, I thought it would be worth sharing some German Christmas memories from my boyhood hometown of Bowling Green.

            That I can share these memories at all is possible because Bowling Green, in the 1880s, had enough German-speaking citizens to establish a German newspaper.  Die Post, easily translated as The Post, was published for the German speaking and reading population of central Wood County.  Like many newspapers in small towns, it had an off-again, on-again publishing career.  Microfilm copies exist for 1889, but another incarnation of Die Post was being published by “Dammon and Holterman” in 1899.  “Dammon” might refer to the G. J. Dammon, listed in the 1900 Census as a resident of Portage just south of Bowling Green.  The 1899 Post appeared to cease around 1903, but the trail is just too faint to say with certainty.

            But if your goal is to see what Christmas like in the German community, the December 19, 1889 issue of Die Post survives for perusal.  Not surprisingly for a new immigrant community, the news offered in Die Post was tilted heavily toward news from Germany and Austria.  Even on page three, where local news was offered, the news was about other German-Americans and advertisements for German-owned and operated businesses.

            For example a very large advertisement for the clothier Brunning and Witte in Pemberville was headed “Weihnachtssachen,” literally “Christmas things.”  Among the “things” offered were “mantel, scharpe, schuen und stiefeln (coats, sashes, shoes, and boots).”  Adhering to the German stereotype of practicality and frugality, the Pemberville merchants offered useful gifts.

            Other “news” listed the doings of German neighbors and neighborhoods.  Philip Berger, of the Bowling Green Glass Works, was back to work after four weeks of serious illness.  Herr Hoffman, Perrysburg’s “genial” grocer, was taking a trip.  Friedrich Roessinger died in Pemberville at age 52.  And Charles Kistner and Alice Strohl were married.

            There were even a few humorous references, although sometimes the humorous items were actually advertisements in disguise.  A short article labeled “Der beste Beweis (The Best Evidence”) is roughly translated thusly:

“What should I do, young lady, to prove my love for you?”

“Take my hand”

The conversation ends not with an engagement, but with, “Buy your Christmas things at Holden’s 5 & 10 Cent Store.”  I’m not sure the lady would have been won with a 10 cent ring, but who am I to judge?

            Another fragment labeled “Die Bauern Sagen (The Farmers Say)” also turns out to be an advertisement for “Tanners Schuladen,” which has the “einem Laden in Wood County (the best selection in Wood County.”  The Bowling Green merchant knew his customer base – Germans – and where they looked for information – Die Post.

            Another appeal to a rural audience was the following:

Farmer: Der beste Plaz, eine gute Wahlzeit zu bekommen, ist im “People’s Eatinghouse.”  Die erste Lokal nordlich von der Postoffic.  E. G. Ward

(The best place for having a good time is at the “People’s Eatinghouse.”  Located the first block north of the postoffice.)

            Retail selling, whether shoes or restaurants, was a cutthroat operation.  Especially in the nineteenth century, when merchants had few advertising options beyond signs and newspapers, businessmen placed much hope in the holiday push for sales.  Knowing your customer base was as essential as it is now.  So it was no surprise that the advertisers in Die Presse marked their local news column with a bold “Froliche Weihnacht! (Merry Christmas!)  We can only hope it was!

Posies and Pirates

Posies and Pirates                                                                                                                            by Alan Borer

                The book was in a pile of scruffy-looking donations to the library.  Typical book stock at the end of their usefulness, made all the more sad because of the looming de-emphasis on the printed word.  But there were a couple of older items, and I took a closer look.  A math book from the 1890s; a battered McGuffey’s Third Reader (an old edition but the date was unreadable), and the front cover of a book, the rest of which was at the bottom of the pile.  A scan of the title page is below.

                               

                Now denominated OCLC# 191310421 in Worldcat, the central computer database of the world’s book titles, The Bouquet by “A Lady” was a “gift book” of the early Victorian era.  Gift books were books sold for use as gifts.  Often richly decorated with steel engravings and florid prose and verse, they were sources of sentimental reflection for the person to whom they were gifted.  “…most such books made a general appeal to those who wished to bestow an “elegant” offering indicative of “refined” sentiment.”  [The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21), Volume XVI. Early National Literature, Part II; Later National Literature, Part I.,  XX. Magazines, Annuals, and Gift-books, 1783–1850, p. 21]

            Who “A Lady” was is unclear.  The printer was Benjamin B. Mussey, but the verso shows the name of Oliver L. Perkins, the one who “Entered According to an Act of Congress,” and thus secured copyright.  Perkins was a Boston bookseller, and one of the first book merchants to use the term “antiquarian” to describe his stock of merchandise.  Details of Perkins’s life are sketchy.  He was born in Maine in 1808, when Maine was yet a province of Massachusetts.  In the 1850 Census he was listed as a “bookseller” with a wife and four children, plus two live-in servants, both women and one born in Ireland. 

Oliver L. Perkins Bookstore, 1834 [http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/View/2/2.9.png]
 

Other books produced by Oliver Perkins can be tracked via bibliographies on or off line.  He brought out an edition of the 1678 classic The History of the Buccaneers of America  by Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin.  This classic book of piracy on the high seas is old enough to have no copyright restrictions on reprints.  English editions are still readily available, and despite the temptation to refer to them as “pirated editions,” they are all perfectly legal.

Another book, The Pearl Box was published by Oliver Perkins about 1851.  Written (compiled?) by “A Pastor,” it claimed to offer one hundred poems suitable for young people.  I have not examined a copy, but from the subject headings, “Love – Juvenile Fiction,” and “Nature – Juvenile Fiction,” we can gat and idea of the contents.  Sentiment, Gothic, and romantic

Thus, the primly Victorian feminine gift book, The Bouquet, keeps company with the bloody, violent, masculine, Buccaneers.  Oliver Perkins, like bookmen before and since, appears to have added to his bookstore by reprinting books that had little or no copyright restrictions.  Did Perkins make much money reprinting books?  Did he intentionally print gender-based potboilers?  That is up to a more skilled bibliographer than I.  But as a literary rag-picker, it was a satisfying look at an old book.

                       

Land: Who Has the "Right?"

To:  Westerville City Council

Westerville, OH  43081

December 10, 2013

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I wish to offer a few comments regarding the request for rezoning of the 6.7 acre parcel at 433 Cherrington Road.  I strongly urge you to reject this proposal. 

Thai parcel represents some of the last “green space” left in this part of Westerville.  I know that what makes green space desirable is subjective, but most of the homes in this area are on relatively large lots.  Building 25 homes on six acres will certainly change the neighborhood, and, I think, for the worse.  It brings to mind the 1962 song, “Little Boxes,’ where the building of subdivisions by developers for speculative gain is ridiculed in the lyrics:

And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

Of course, in a free country, people have the right to choose their dwelling places, and how they look and the lifestyle that the dwellings encourage.  But it seems to me unfair to build huge houses on tiny lots in this neighborhood.

We have chosen a different mode of living.  Exercising our right to choose, we like our bigger lots, with room to garden, watch birds, and plant flowers.  None of these things will be more than faintly possible in these tiny yards.  I am an adjacent homeowner; I want to make my personal stake clear.  I do not want my (and my neighbors) utilities overtaxed, our groundwater polluted, and our children made unsafe by traffic congestion.

That may sound selfish to some, but that is my point of view.   I live across the street from the property.  John C. Wicks, the developer’s agent, does not live in Westerville.  He does not live across the street from the property.  Please consider whose opinions matter more, and reject this project.

Turkeys, Cigars, Burgoon, and China

           

            I’m not sure what attracted me to this envelope when I first saw it.  I’ve always liked turkeys, the quintessentially Native American poultry, images of which have graced many a Thanksgiving card and second grade report on the Pilgrims.  But the image of a turkey in a truly comical setting, walking down an avenue of cigars and carrying a flag is so contrary to the sober, devout images seen in November that I smiled at an advertisement 100+ years old.

            There are three elements to my cigar-selling turkey:  the sender, the receiver, and the product advertised.  Let’s look at each item.

The Sender

            Church and McConnell was a wholesale grocery in Toledo.  Two men, William Church and John McConnell had established the company around 1900.  Church had been a traveling salesman for the older and larger Berdan & Company wholesalers in 1896, and he and McConnell may have gone into business for themselves based on that experience.

The Receiver

            A wholesale grocer supplies merchandise to smaller, retail grocers.  In the days before automobiles and long-haul truckers, every crossroads village and urban neighborhood had one or more retail grocers.  In Burgoon, Ohio, that was Henry F. Bischoff.

            Bischoff was born in 1848 in New York City, but moved to Sandusky County, Ohio, as a child.  He grew up in Fremont, and served in the 72^nd Ohio in the Civil War.  During the war, he was captured by Confederate forces in Mississippi and was a prisoner at the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia for almost a year.  After the war he moved to Burgoon in southern Sandusky County, where he opened a general store.

            Henry Bischoff was a grocer in Burgoon for the rest of his life.  He was a “solid citizen,” a member of the Odd Fellows, the GAR, and the school board.  He served as postmaster of Burgoon from 1885 to 1913. And, apparently, stocked a line of cigars in his store named after a fellow Union veteran named Charles Denby.

The Merchandise

            Charles Denby (1830-1906) was a native of Evansville, Indiana.  During the war he served in the 42^nd Indiana, was promoted to Colonel, and injured at the battle of Perryville, Kentucky.  After the war he practiced law and in 1885 was appointed United States Ambassador to China.  He served in China through three presidential administrations, retiring in 1897.  Denby also served in the Philippines and did diplomatic work in Japan.  The Emperors of China and of Japan gave him medals.  In retirement he was an active public speaker and member of the GAR.

            In 1898, the president of the Fendrich Cigar Company approached Denby about naming a line of cigars after him.  Denby and John Fendrich were friends, but the ambassador did not believe “Denby Cigars” would sell well or last very long.  He was wrong; “Charles Denby Invincibles” can still be purchased in well-stocked cigar stores.

          Three parts – do they add up to a whole?  Why a line of cigars, illustrated by a strutting turkey, was named for a former ambassador to China and sold by a Toledo wholesaler to a tiny village storekeeper in a town with the unlikely name of Burgoon?  That I can’t answer. But it is an odd, and oddly funny, situation, odd as the turkey which is still walking his cigar-lined street after one hundred years.

           

[Sources include James R. Miller, “Philatelic Genealogy: Ohio at Work,” Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly, Vol. 52, Summer 2012: 93-97, and http://www.broadleafcigars.com/charles.htm]

Hard Hickory: Indian Chief and Farmer

     

(Hard Hickory by George Caitlin, 1831)

       I was flipping through an old book on the history of Sandusky County when I came across a mention of my great-great-great grandfather.  Saxon S. Rathbun (1813-1894), lived on a farm near Green Springs, Ohio. He was a pioneer, coming to Ohio from New York state at 13, and as an adult buying his land directly from the government.  He had thirteen children, three of whom fought for the Union in the Civil War.

            But what caught my eye was this sentence about his childhood on the frontier:

He played with Indian boys at this time, finding them companionable, and at one time was employed to hoe corn for old Chief Hickory, a very friendly Indian.

            An Indian chief was my ancestor’s employer?  At least for an afternoon?  Who was Chief Hickory, and what more do we know about him?  Indians of the time did not write autobiographies, were not listed in the Census, and generally did not leave tracks unless they were leaders or otherwise came to the attention of frontier society.  But for a (nearly) anonymous Indian, we can learn a few facts about Chief Hickory.

            His full name was Hard Hickory (17??-1831).  He was a member of what was called the Senecas of Sandusky (now the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma). The Senecas of Sandusky were of Iroquois stock, the Seneca having been one of the tribes of the Iroquois Confederation.  The Senecas of Sandusky were probably a mix of Seneca, Cayuga, Wyandot, and Delaware tribesmen.  They had been living along Sandusky River in Ohio since at least 1768.

            Hard Hickory’s people were not warrior/hunters of the prairies, but rather a farming Indian of the Eastern Woodlands tradition.  In warm weather, they farmed the land, growing pumpkins, corn, and beans.  After centuries of living exposed to white culture, they often lived in log cabins, using iron tools, and most men had guns.  Of course, they were traditional Indians in cultural aspects like war dances, adoption of captives by running the gauntlet, and wintertime hunts.  Their council house was in fact at Green Springs, where Granddad Rathbun met them.

            But Indian life was not just a glorified camping trip.  The Seneca had a deep fear and respect of the supernatural, including a belief in witchcraft.  Hard Hickory was incidentally part of the story of Seneca John.  Seneca John was another chief of the tribe, and the younger half-brother of Steel and Coonstick.  The aforementioned brothers left Seneca John and another chief, Comstock, behind while the scouted new land for the tribe in the west.  On their return, they found Comstock dead and Seneca John occupying his position as chief.  Steel and Coonstick accused Seneca John of witchcraft that caused the death of Comstock, and sentenced him to death.

            Horace Knapp wrote the finale of Seneca John’s story and the role of Hard Hickory in his dates 1872 History of the Maumee Valley.  In writing about Sardis Birchard, a frontier storekeeper at Fremont (and the father-in-law of President Rutherford B. Hayes), Knapp mentions that

Hard-Hickory lived about a mile below Green Springs, in a cabin yet standing, and Seneca John, the night before his execution, slept under Hard-Hickory's porch. Steel and Coonstick, at sunrise, called and waked him. John told them to kill him quick. They tomahawked him. Mr. B. obtained this statement from Hard-Hickory, who came into town that day, or the next, with Tall Chief, and told him about it.

Apparently Hard Hickory had enough of a house or cabin to have a porch for someone to sleep under.  He also was an acquaintance of Sardis Birchard.

            The artist George Caitlin, who painted Hard Hickory, described him: 

Hard Hickory; a very ferocious-looking, but a mild and amiable man…Good Hunter and Hard Hickory, are fair specimens of the warriors of this tribe or rather hunters; or perhaps, still more correctly speaking, farmers; for the Senecas have had no battles to fight lately, and very little game to kill, except squirrels and pheasants; and their hands are turned to the plough, having become, most of them, tolerable farmers; raising the necessaries, and many of the luxuries of life, from the soil.

           

            Henry Howe, the early Ohio historian, also mentions Hard Hickory:

The Senecas of Sandusky – so called – owned and occupied forty thousand acres of choice land on the east side of Sandusky river….By the treaty concluded at Washington city, February 28, 1831…these Indians ceded their lands to the United States.  At this time their principal chiefs were Coonstick, Small Cloud Spicer, Seneca Steel, Hard Hickory, Tall Chief, and Good Hunter….(p. 574)

            Hard Hickory traveled with other leaders of the Seneca to Washington to the signing of the treaty, and also signed a statement stating that they were not interested in receiving missionaries, but:

We should be glad to have you send persons to us to learn us how to plough, and sow, and reap, and teach us all the arts of agriculture.  This would make us happy

            But Hard Hickory never made it to Oklahoma, where the tribe was relocating.  According to William Lang’s 1880 History of Seneca County, Hard Hickory embezzled some annuity money.  Lang described Hard Hickory in glowing terms:

Hard Hickory was the leading mind among them. He was a leader of no ordinary grade. He was possessed of polished manners, seldom seen in an Indian. He spoke the French language fluently, and the English intelligibly. Scrupulously adhering to the costume of his people, and retaining many of their habits, this chief was much endeared to them. His urbanity, his intelligence and ardent attachment to the whites, and, above all, his strict integrity in business transactions, obtained for him — and deservedly- — the respect and
confidence of all with whom he traded.

But Hickory fell from grace.  He took some annuity money due the tribe, and spent it during the aforementioned trip to Washington.  The tribesmen were outraged, and some of the same men who had conspired to kill Seneca John resolved to murder Hard Hickory, including Hickory’s nephew Shane:

On being assured that Shane was alone, Hickory directed his wife to unbar the door and let him in, which she did. Shane wore a blanket, and approached Hickory in the middle of the room, holding out his left hand, while his right was under the blanket, holding the handle of a long knife. Hickory held out his right hand to Shane, and as soon as their hands were grasped, Shane drew his knife and stabbed Hickory through the body, and then dragged him out of doors, where several Indians stabbed and tomahawked him. Thus perished the renowned chief Hard Hickory, with the seal of falsehood stamped upon his hitherto fair character.

            It would be interesting to talk to Hard Hickory, Seneca John, or other actors in this drama.  Was it witchcraft or jealousy?  Was this knowing embezzlement or misunderstanding of the use of government funds?  Most of the accounts of Hard Hickory that have comedown to us are second or third hand accounts from whites of varying degrees of hostility.

            I prefer to remember Hard Hickory as an Indian, a farmer, and a man kind enough to hand a hoe to my great grandfather, and point to a planted field near a green spring.  My own grandfather, four generations later, let me work in his garden near the same spring when I was young.  In a figurative way, then, I gardened with Hard Hickory. 

[Along with the sources listed in the essay, I also used:

hhttp://www.hartslog.org/seneca.htm

http://www.hartslog.org/seneca.htm

http://www.ohiogenealogyexpress.com/seneca/senecaco_bios_h.html

http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/catlinclassroom/catlin_browsec.cfm?ID=238]