Note: Jacques du Plessis (from the De Villiers family line) is updating information beyond the 1925 publication date. You are welcome to reach out.
The author of this history was born to an American of German-English forebears and a South African of French-Dutch (and a little Italian) background. These beloved parents and their predecessors are our heritage.
Because of our good fortune to have had several family members interested in genealogy, books and records have passed down to me that inform us of many of our ancestors.
I hope that this history will cause the reader to be enticed into reading many of these and other available source materials. The preparation and writing of these chapters has been a fascinating voyage of discovery for me. Many of the characters mentioned have come alive through the facts of their lives, through their own words and through placing them in the historical context of their times.
My father, Henry Baldwin Schwab, described his early life in a letter to his new fiancée dated January 12, 1912:
"I was born June 16, 1887, at Morris Heights which is about 12 miles from Grand Central Station, on the east side of the Harlem River [now part of the Bronx]. My grandfather [Gustav Frederick Schwab (1822-1888)] had a big place there [Fort Number Eight] and father [Hermann Caspar Schwab (1853-1898)] had built there too. We lived there until I was seven, going to the city for a month or two in the winter and to the seaside or Catskills in summer, or else to Europe - which we did in '92, '94, and '96. The winters of '96 and '97 we spent at Morristown, New Jersey, as Mother [Mary Baldwin Schwab (1865-1917)] was not well. In '97 and '98 we took a house in New York, 34 East 37th Street, permanently.
On March 6th, '98, my father died of pleura pneumonia. That summer we spent near Atlantic City together with my aunt and her family [Madge Baldwin Reeve, her husband, Augustus H. Reeve, and two children], Grandma Baldwin [nee Katherine Irving Dayton (1842-1919)] and her brother, Uncle Ogden Dayton [1851-1902], who was Director of the Coast Branch of the Pennsylvania railroad.
The next two winters I went to Brownings school in New York. Saturdays and Sundays I used to spend almost invariably at Morris Heights where my aunts and grandmother [Eliza von Post Schwab (1829-1904)] were wonderful to me, and I could pick apples, build bonfires, and coast to my heart's content.
Beginning with the summer of '99 we had a large place of some forty acres at Sharon, Connecticut, where we had a tennis court, built ourselves a 100 yard running track, and later had a swimming pool (40'x 80') made, besides which we had our vegetable garden, rabbit cage, chickens, dogs, etc., in fact everything that pertains to the healthy pleasures of youth. Mother was simply wonderful about it all; we had everything, yet in perfect simplicity. At Sharon, my Schwab aunts and uncles all came for the summer also, as well as several other relations."
In September 1900 I went to boarding school at St. Mark's, Southboro, Massachusetts. The summers of '01 and '03 we spent in Europe, I having a Bremen cousin with me - first a Noltenius, and then Christoph Kulenkampf for several years. I graduated from St. Mark's in '05.
We sold our place in Sharon after 1905 and went to Europe for the summers of '06 and '07. I graduated from Harvard in '08. [Henry received his degree in '08 after three years at Cambridge but appears in the Class Album for '09, which would have been his normal graduating year.] At the end of August, we all sailed for Europe, I going to the Alps, Hermann [Henry's four-year-younger brother (1891-1934)] accompanying Mother to the baths at Aix-les-Bains, France.
On October 5th I began work at Gustav Ebell & Co., Berlin, as a no-pay "volontair". I enjoyed my stay in Berlin and learned much; remained there until Easter '10, when I went as a "volontair" to the Washery and Combing Mill at Dohren-bei-Hanover, returning to New York the beginning of November after a good climbing season in the Alps."
At this point, Henry went to work for Oelrichs & Co., the venerable firm in New York City founded by his great-great grandfather Caspar Meier in 1798. His grandfather, Gustav Frederick Schwab, had developed this firm to profitable importance in the second half of the 1800s in the importing of wool and hides and in acting as agent for the North German Lloyd steamship line business between New York and Bremen.
Henry was assigned to the wool importing division of the business. After less than a year, he was glad to be sent in 1911 to visit some of the overseas sources. He later wrote to his fiancée:
"After a rather unsatisfactory spell there [in the New York Office], as far as work is concerned, though I enjoyed myself immensely with dances, dinner parties, opera, etc., and a delightful summer at Merrick, my present lucky voyage commenced, from which I return engaged to the sweetest girl on earth."
Henry was accompanied on this trip by brother Hermann. The story has come to me that his widowed mother, Mary Baldwin Schwab, urgently pressed to have Hermann leave the country to detach him from a romance with a lady of the theatre. Older brother Henry later wrote to his fiancée:
"I believe I told you that Hermann has assured me that he will act in the desired sensible manner over his affair, and this of course will be a great relief to Mother."
After voyaging to England, the brothers embarked on the "Edinburgh Castle" of the Union Castle Line, on October 7, 1911, bound for Cape Town, South Africa.
Aboard this ship there happened to be a wedding party returning to South Africa. Abraham Lochner "Braam" de Villiers (1869-1930), fashion designer and milliner from the town of Paarl in the Cape Province of South Africa, was returning with his bride, Clara "Clare" Hussey (1865-1955), of Sewickley, Pennsylvania. With them was my mother, Catharina Hendrina "Kitty" de Villiers (1880-1950), Braam's eleven-years-younger sister who had accompanied him to the wedding in Pittsburgh. In returning home via London, Braam, Clare and Kitty had been presented at the court of King George and Queen Mary, which at that time was a very formal affair.
Henry Schwab and Kitty de Villiers met aboard ship on October 8, 1911. On October 10, Henry, ever the diarist, reported: "Evening walk with Miss deV."
They had ample time to become acquainted before the ship reached Cape Town on October 24.
Henry was no stranger to young ladies. He was a part of New York society and had partied for some years with his St. Mark's School and Harvard friends. In fact, his diary for the year 1907 begins with a numbered listing of 137 young ladies' names. In his 1909 diary, when he was in Germany at the Berlin offices of Gustav Ebell & Co., typical entries might include:
"Had a letter from Julie in the morning. Usual day at the office. Wrote to Dorothy in the evening. or:"In the afternoon I wrote to M & H and in the evening to Laura and Julie".
Catharina Hendrina de Villiers could have born no resemblance to the girls of Henry's experience. She had had sobering, maturing and broadening experiences in her young life. Although she professed to be shy, she really was very outgoing. She had poise and dignity, beauty and charm, elegance of dress and a warm heart. She had lost her parents at an early age. She had lost her brother Lambertus in the Boer War. She had assisted her unmarried brother in his business. For most of the year 1910 Kitty had nursed another brother, John, dying of tuberculosis contracted as a result of his imprisonment in India in the Boer War.
A 1902 album of photographs, menus and programs attests that she had seen something of the outside world. It traces the grand tour taken by Braam, Kitty and sister Gerty to Madeira, London and Scotland, New York, Niagara Falls and Chicago, The Netherlands, Geneva, Germany and Austria, Venice, Milan and Rome, Monte Carlo, Nice and Paris.
Upon landing in Cape Town, Henry had time only to put Kitty on the train to her home town of Paarl before embarking on an old wool ship bound for Mossel Bay on the south coast of Africa. The brothers were back in Cape Town on October 28 and were warmly entertained by the de Villiers at Paarl. On November 1, Henry wrote to Kitty from aboard the "Kenilworth Castle" as he continued on to other South African ports on business: "Dear Kitty, We are even more to each other than the best of friends, and I hope it may never grow less."
By December 2, after Henry had returned to Cape Town and had again visited Kitty at her home at Paarl, they had become engaged. He wrote his mother a long letter saying:
"While I was away traveling these weeks, I found myself thinking of her continually and wondering at the beauty of her nature … in the end I was compelled to admit that I was dead in love with her and that I must have her at any cost."
On December 3, Henry left Cape Town again to continue on to Australia, New Zealand and other ports, leaving Kitty to her thoughts and her letter writing:
"Dearest, Dearest, we want all the love in the world and have no time for trifling, have we? Goodnight, my beloved, most dearly do I love you." My sister Cornelia has assembled and typed out the extensive correspondence that ensued between New York and Cape Town during the next six months. It is in two three-ring binders entitled "H.B.S.-K.deV.S. Letters 1911-1912".
Love had its hurdles. Mother Mary Baldwin Schwab assumed her two boys would marry into New York society. What could she know or even find out about a parentless young lady from half way around the world. And somehow it had not registered with Henry, and thus had not been passed on to his mother, that Kitty was almost seven years older than he. When this came to light, mother Schwab wrote a carefully phrased letter to Kitty which balanced her concern about the disparity in age with the warm wish that she will come to love Kitty as a daughter. Kitty had been forthright on this issue; in a letter written some two months earlier, she had written to Henry:
"Love, don't forget to tell me your birthday in your next. I would hate to miss it. Mine I think I have already told you, September 27th, and I was born in 1880, centuries ago, dearie, as Braam has told you."
Then, long before Henry had returned home, news of the engagement leaked out prematurely in Pittsburgh via some relatives of Clare and from there to the New York papers, to the acute discomfiture of Henry's mother who had planned to make the announcement herself at a later date. The unauthorized news also stated, without any foundation, that the marriage would take place in August, making mother Schwab more upset, and leaving Henry, now in Europe, to try to explain to the senior partners at Oelrichs & Co., on his return, how he could set a date without consulting them.
Eventually, everything was smoothed over and the wedding was set for August 12, 1912, in Pittsburgh, the home town of Kitty's sister-in-law Clare. Braam and Clare sailed to England with Kitty in May of 1912. After a week in London, they spent ten days in Paris to help the bride collect her trousseau and then on to America to act in loco parentis at the wedding. Mary Baldwin Schwab had put to rest her reservations and embraced her son's choice of bride.
The honeymoon was not the typical two week vacation from business. After crossing the Atlantic on the "Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm" and after two days in Paris, the newlyweds arrived in Grindelwald, Switzerland, on September 3. Henry was now in his beloved and familiar mountain climbing area. From his hand written, leather-bound book entitled in gold letters "Our Alpine Honeymoon" we know much about the Swiss portion of their trip. In his Preface he says:
"This simple account is written from a climber's point of view as a sequel to my several other greater climbing diaries and is therefore free from trivialities and sentimentalities, the latter need no recording."
It is clear that while Henry meant to introduce his wife to the beauties of the mountains, he also expected to get in some serious climbing with his favorite guides: "The expected rap came at 1:30 AM and leaving Kitty to continue her sleep, Fritz, Bernet and I set out at exactly 3 AM under a beautiful canopy of stars for our second try at the seldom ascended Berglistock."
On lesser climbs he did take Kitty. On their last day they undertook a three hour climb up the Baregg: "which we reached at 1:30 PM after considerable pushing and persuasion."
Deciding to return via the glacier, avoiding all the open crevasses and sometimes cutting steps in the ice, Henry writes: "wended our way leisurely back to the Schweitzerhof Hotel after a delightful outing."
We do not have an account from Kitty of her rude introduction to ice and snow and the exhausting rigours of mountain climbing.
From Switzerland, the couple journeyed to South Africa for a family visit, then on to South America to become acquainted with Oelrichs & Co. resources in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and finally back home in March of 1913 just three months before my brother Henry was born.
They took up residence in an apartment in New York City at 57th Street and Park Avenue. In the summers, they rented at Greenwwich, Connecticut, or at Merrick, Long Island, before the completion of their large summer home in Merrick in 1915.
My brother Henry was born at the rented Sturgis house in Merrick in June 1913. Sister Cornelia was born at the family apartment, then at 59 East 65th Street, in February 1915. When mother Mary Baldwin Schwab died in 1917, the family moved into her home at 118 East 39th Street where I was born in January 1918.
The years from 1912 to 1923 were a time of relative affluence for the family. There were cooks and maids and governesses. Cornelia attended the Brearly School and Henry and I attended the Bovee School. In June, one or two moving vans would shift our possessions to the Merrick house which included two servants' rooms with bath and a back stairs, and in the garage, a room and bath for the chauffeur.
In 1921, the whole family, with governesses, traveled by steamship to South Africa to mother's homeland to visit her married sister Gerty Bosman and her family, her married brother Rocco de Villiers and his family, and her brother Braam and his wife Clare.
With Clare's considerable resources, she and Braam had purchased in 1914 a lovely old Dutch colonial home and vineyards near Cape Town called "Klein Constantia", where they entertained our family lavishly. Cousin Cornelia Duckitt has shown me pictures of my brother and sister and myself (then three years old) on the front terrace of Klein Constantia in 1921. Needless to say, I have no recall of that scene, but I have been reminded over the years that I broke my collar bone while there and, while thus handicapped, fell into a bathtub full of water. My good luck to be rescued by Aunt Clare has been a family legend.
By 1921, Braam and Clare had enlarged the original building in an unobtrusive way and had completed thorough renovations and other improvements in keeping with the old Dutch colonial style. They built an elaborate outdoor pool called the Bath, and filled the house with fine pieces of old furniture, Delft and Nanking china, old brass and fine art works. They entertained frequently in their large dining room and the ball room with balcony for musicians.
The South African Woman's Magazine for May 1927 had an article about Klein Constantia with excellent pictures of the exterior and interior. The magazine text stated in part:
"The residence, with its white walls and thatched roof nestling in the shade of stately oaks, was built in 1685 by Van der Stel [first Dutch governor of the Cape Colony] for his daughter Cornelia upon her marriage to Van Ryan, one of his officials. …Klein Constantia is an incomparable domain richly stored with memories of the past, and it is in that spirit that it is occupied and maintained."
The article notes that the installation of electricity is contemplated but that candlelight is the only present illumination. I see no explanation for this other than that it suited the aesthetic temperaments of Braam and Clare to recreate and enjoy living in a monument to a cherished past. The slightly larger, but very similar, home of Governor Van der Stel, called Groot Constantia, is today one of South Africa's major museums.
In 1922 and again in 1923, father's passion for mountain climbing took him on expeditions of six weeks or longer to the Canadian Rocky Mountains to attempt a first ascent of Mount Clemenceau. The second effort was successful after long portages with carefully planned supplies, equipment and personnel. At the beginning of one of his diaries he lists the five members of his climbing party, then the names of the chief packer, two cooks, two wranglers, and then: "thirty horses, four colts and one dog".
Father kept meticulous diaries of all his climbs, going back to his summers abroad while in college. In his den at the Merrick house, the top of one cabinet was covered with a pile of small rocks, each from the top of a Swiss or Canadian Rocky mountain peak and carefully labeled. I remember on the wall of the den, a large framed topographical map of an area in the Canadian Rockies. This was created from his own party's sightings and barometric readings. All this material eventually went to the archives of the American Alpine Society in New York.
When the United States entered into war with Germany in 1917, any enterprises involving partnerships between the two countries ended, and for Oelrichs & Co. it meant the end of its most profitable division, the North German Lloyd agency. Father joined the army that year, but served only in this country.
After the war he rejoined Oelrichs & Co. only to find that the company's wool sources in Russia had been cut off by the Russian revolution and that the woolen mills in this country had commenced to send their own buyers to the overseas markets, thus bypassing wholesale suppliers such as Oelrichs. The violent post-war inflation ending with the collapse of inventory values in 1923 spelled the end of the family business and father had to seek a new career.
By 1926, my parents must have realized the impossibility of maintaining two homes and the need to recoup some funds, so they sold the 39th Street brown stone and settled into the Merrick house. Sister and I were sent to private day schools in Garden City, while brother Henry was enrolled at St. Mark's School at Southboro, Massachusetts.
After finishing the fourth grade at St. Mary's at Garden City, I went to Merrick's public school for three or four years and was then enrolled at St. Mark's in the first form (7th grade). At the end of two years, however, mother sat me down and tearfully asked if I would be terribly upset not to return to St. Mark's. I learned later that I had been on a 50% scholarship and that the school had informed my parents that they could do no better. To their ever lasting credit, father and mother scouted around, took me up to Kent School (no luck) and finally discovered a brand new, well-endowed boarding school in Delaware, St. Andrew's, that would take me for hardly the cost of the food I would consume.
Brother and sister, having come into the world prior to grandmother's death in 1917, received a small inheritance from her which enabled Henry to enter Yale University and for Cornelia to continue her education.
During these lean years, father never let his financial concerns show in front of his children. He was ever one to enjoy outings to Jones Beach with his family and to socialize with his many Merrick friends. Although unable to afford mountaineering excursions, he kept in touch with his fellow climbers and was president of the American Alpine Club in 1933. He had a succession of jobs, commuting to New York by train, but none were very satisfactory - which is not surprising in view of the onset of the economic depression of the early 1930s, the likes of which the country has not seen since.
Early in 1934 mother and Cornelia voyaged by direct ship to South Africa to visit relatives. During that summer, father was saddened by the sudden heart attack and death of his 41 year old brother Hermann, with whom he had always been close. At the beginning of November, shortly before mother and Cornelia returned from overseas, father wrote to me at St. Andrew's School. He must have felt that his fortunes were improving, for he had recently reinstated his membership in the Union Club and wrote me from there:
"You had better persuade Eddie [my St. Andrew's roommate whose father was a tentmate of my father at Plattsburg in army training in 1918] to go to Yale, rather than having him trying to persuade you to go to Princeton. In the first place, Harvard and Yale are the premier colleges of the U.S.A, and are known thruout the world as such, however fine Princeton may be. Then you have had many relatives who went to Yale, right back to the Baldwins in the 18th century [Abraham, class of 1772 and Henry, class of 1797], and I am a strong believer in family traditions. We have no connection with Princeton whatever. More about this when I see you, but remain firm for Yale.
Did I tell you that Rose Fiske [a nurse friend of father] and I mosed up to New Haven last Saturday for the Yale-Army game? Saw Bo [my brother Henry, starting his sophomore year at Yale] after wards, having cocktails in his room and supper in his Berkeley College dining hall.
Last night went to a little dinner party at Aunty Ruth's [his brother Hermann's widow] and stayed here overnight.
How are your studies getting along and when does your report come out? I am expecting a great improvement you know. Much love Budge old boy, Dad" So it is evident that father had not lost his zest for life nor his interest in his children!
Upon her return in mid November, mother found father to be in uncertain health. During the late winter, after a Christmas vacation during which (as a typical teenager) I was not aware of anything amiss, father's condition, which was diagnosed as nephritis, worsened and he died on March 15, 1935, at home with his family in his 48th year.
Among his mountaineering writings, father, at the age of 23, recorded thoughts that tell much about him. I will quote only a few lines of his three typed pages explaining his love of the sport:
"I climb because it is part of my nature not to be able to behold a noble peak without wanting to gain its summit or see a mountain barrier without desiring to penetrate the region of rock and ice in order to see what is around and behind. …Per chance we have won our way to the top thru biting cold and a shrieking gale, or have fought our way downwards to safety in a whirling snowstorm that obliterates the tracks or glazes the rocks with a treacherous coating. To cope with the elements you are forced to extend yourself to the utmost, and you are put to the test not only to look out for yourself but to consider and help your comrades in the common cause. The recollection of such a day can never fade, and having experienced a storm among the mountains you can all the more appreciate the sublimity of a summit view when all the peaks about are shimmering in the sunlight of a perfect cloudless day, a sight that must set the heart of any man throbbing with the joy of life and appreciation of the wonders of nature."
Father loved his sports and the company of his friends and family but I do not think he was engrossed in the family business. He was unable, with his cousin Gustav Schwab, IV (1879-1945), the sole other remaining family partner, to salvage the business of Oelrichs & Co. His preparations for life and his expectations of life had assumed a financial security in the family firm. His business luck was not good. I honor his memory for his courage in adversity and for his gentlemanly standard of personal conduct.
When he was engaged to Kitty, and aboard ship on a long dull voyage to Tasmania in December of 1911, Henry wrote of his aspirations:
"My ideal in life is to make a success as a member of our dear old firm, which is the embodiment of the finest and most honorable commercial traditions. Second, to be absolutely everything to my wife, to give her always the best that is in me, mind, body, soul and spirit, a true husband and a lover to the end, and finally to bring up my children to be an honor to the family. Finally, later in life, granted I have the means and the time - to do something towards bettering the social, moral and political conditions of my native city."
After father's death, mother moved to a modest apartment at 59 East 96th Street in New York City and rented the Merrick house. Brother Henry finished college and began work with the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. Sister Cornelia lived with mother when not at an out-of-town religious college.
I also lived at the apartment when not away at college or summer job or military service. A small legacy from Louis Schwab, an unmarried great uncle who died in 1935, and the distribution of a family trust fund established by great-great uncle Hermann von Post enabled me to finance my education at Yale University.
Father's aunt Emily Schwab, with whom mother had a warm relationship, gave financial support to mother in the years immediately after father's death. Around 1942 she distributed to mother a lump sum of about $40,000 that would otherwise have come to mother, as father's survivor, upon Aunt Emily's death. This suited Aunt Emily's estate planning and gave mother a greater sense of independence.
During the years of World War II, mother lived in New York working part-time at a dress shop, doing volunteer work and writing to her absent sons and to her far-away family in South Africa. Henry continued working with the General Electric Company and married Augusta Achilles, daughter of the long-time chaplain of Union College in Schenectady.
After finishing Yale, and having a short work experience at Macy's, I graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in June of 1942. I entered the Naval Reserve and sailed the Pacific Ocean on a heavy cruiser to the end of 1945. Mother's letters to me during wartime have been preserved and present an insight into civilian life in New York at that time. Excerpts from my letters written during my ser vice in the Pacific in those years form Part II of this book.
In 1948, mother again took the long voyage to South Africa by ship. Her visit with her beloved family there was especially delightful because her nephews and nieces, including her god-daughter, Kitty Bosman Smuts, were now grown up and starting their own families.
On her return in the fall of 1948, mother took great joy in our baby, Winthrop, Jr., born while she was in South Africa. In the spring of 1950, mother grew increasingly ill from cancer, although we hardly were aware of this. She spent the Fourth of July weekend with Pat and myself, delighting in our month-old daughter and her namesake, Katrina. On July 15 she died of a cerebral hemorrhage, undoubtedly related to her weakened condition.
Like father, mother never had any complaints. She was always cheerful and thinking of doing for others. She left her homeland, family and friends for love. Twenty two years later she found herself with out husband or estate and bound to her adopted country by her devotion to her American children. She had brought no dowry of her own, and on her husband's death, no capital or insurance or pension was available from his estate. In good times or bad, mother was always one to cheer others and to take most loving care of her children.
While I was away at business school in the spring of 1942, she wrote me this letter:
"The most pleasant surprise came to me yesterday when I was feeling very low and thought my zero hour had come - but the lovely box of pink roses which came first of all completely knocked me out and after that made me realize how fortunate I was in having such a wonderful "Budge".
—If this sounds very sentimental, don't mind - I often wish my parents had been more informal and outspoken with us. I might have had some sentimental foolishnesses to look back upon, but they were both very formal and strict. To me they were always on a pedestal and I was only twelve [to be factual, she was almost 16] when they both died within six weeks of each other.
As I was thinking - if the only reason for my existence has been to produce three lovely children to carry on through their being and efforts to make the world a better place to live in, I will have fulfilled my mission on earth. You and I see eye to eye in so many things and you are a great joy to me. I think you know it, but I am saying it again. —Courage, perseverance and faith, and I know I shall never be disappointed in you.
If this all sounds very sentimental, please forgive, but you'll understand.
As always, devotedly, Mother"
NOTE: Before we leave the near past for older times, I insert on the next pages a few photographs to identify the author's own family and home.
From notes handwritten by my mother around 1920, I have hints of her ancestral connections back in the days of France's Charles VI, who nominally ruled from 1380 to 1422. When Charles, at age 10, inherited the throne after the death of his father, his uncles fell to fighting for the regency of the boy and ousted the wise counselors of the deceased Charles V. When the young king came of age in 1391, he ousted the uncles but went mad the next year and the uncles returned to power.
A struggle then ensued between uncle Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and uncle Louis, Duke of Orleans. Louis had the misfortune to be looked upon with favor by the wife of the mad king and was promptly assassinated by John the Fearless, successor to Philip as Duke of Burgundy. The feud then continued for many years, leading King Henry V of England to take advantage of the civil strife by invading the torn country. He defeated the French at Agincourt in 1415 and occupied Normandy.
In 1419, it was John the Fearless's turn to be assassinated by the Orleans faction - which heated passions again. Three years later, the English king, Henry V, and the mad French King, Charles VI, died and Henry VI was proclaimed, in Paris, king of France and England. This left Charles VII, the 19 year old son of Charles VI, as merely hopeful king of France until, miraculously, national patriotism was fanned by Joan of Arc. Her heroic deeds restored to Charles an actual French kingdom in 1429 and gained her a death by burning at the stake in 1431.
Omitted from this account are many alliances, betrayals, dynastic marriages, wars, etc. of this period. Through it all, Burgundian supporter Marshall Jean de l'Isle Adam threaded a prominent path by good instinct or good luck and prospered in those topsy-turvy times.
The Marshall's grandson, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, must have inherited his grandfather's political acumen because he was chosen in 1521 to be the 43rd Grandmaster of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, a religious and military organization dating back to the Crusades. His duty was the governance and protection of the island of Rhodes, then a possession of the Order.
He was unlucky. Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566) had become sultan of the expanding Ottoman empire in 1520 and immediately turned his attention to the conquests in the west. He marched into Hungary, captured Belgrade and then besieged Rhodes. Mother's notes say that all the Christian princes who should have sent aid tot the Rhodes garrison abandoned them. After five months of fighting during the which time 40,000 of the Muslim besiegers are reported to have perished by the sword, the knights of the Order were mostly dead or disabled and the Grandmaster surrendered.
Suleiman respected the courage of the defenders and deported them to Italy, where they languished at Viterbo for eight years under the hospitality of the Pope. In 1530, Roman emperor Charles V, who was also, as Charles I, king of Spain (grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella), granted to Villiers de i'Isle Adam and his band of survivors the island of Malta on condition of their paying homage to him.
Our next hint of the Villiers name is a report that a de Villiers was a member of the State Council of Queen Jeanne de Navarre at La Rochelle in 1607 and that Charled de Villiers, Lord of Audincourt, was appointed in 1636 a councillor at the Parliament of Metz.
In the late 1600s, we know that descendants of the de Villiers were vintsers at La Rochelle, on the Bay of Biscay in west central France. The family is no no longer Catholic, but along with many in their area and elsewhere, adherents of John Calvin's new vision of the Christian church. This fact will lead to an explanation of the migration of the de Villiers name to South Africa. But first I will inject some more historical background.
In the early 1500s in France, the Catholic church had become extremely corrupt. The Papacy had granted to the French monarchy the right to appoint all of the bishops, abbots and clergy, and no office was filled for reason of spiritual worthiness. In this climate, a reform movement began which took some of its impetus from a the then recent Lutheran reformation in Germany. A Frenchman, John Calvin (1509-1564), published his "Institution of the Christian Religion", a manual of Protestant theology. He was quickly run out of France and founded at Geneva the Protestant's "New Jerusalem, which became a training ground for protestant theo1ogy and an ecc1esiastical state.
Calvin saw the Bible as the fundamental law of both the State and the Church, from which it followed that the ministers would dominate State as well as Church. He developed a disciplined oligarchic structure which maintained unity of belief and a high code of personal conduct. He was a genius at organization and his many converts in France, called Hugenots, soon became a political threat. The fierce fighting between Protestants and Catholics which then broke out became as much political and factional as religious in nature.
In 1567, the Hugenots failed in an attempt to kidnap the king and capture Paris. Ins 1572, thousands of Hugenots were massacred on St. Bartholomew's eve by order of Catherine de Medici, powerful mother of the weak king Charles II. In 1598, Henry of Navarre, a protestant, inherited the crown, but had to renounce his faith in order to be installed in Catholic Paris. Over-vehement protests, he then published the Edict of Nantes, which granted religious, civil and legal rights to Protestants. This remained in force for almost a century, but under Louis XIV, whose reign began in 1663, the Hugenots were again increasingly harrassed and in 1685 the king revoked the Edict of Nantes, believing that Protestants had ceased to be a factor. Instead, a vast exodus of population took place.
As the kings' renewed persecution of Hugenots approached La Rochelle, three de Villiers brothers were urged by their parents to leave France. The brothers went to Holland where the Delft Chamber of Commerce recommended them to the governor of the Cape colony, Simon van der Stel:
"With this ship we have again permitted the following French refugees to sail to the Cape and earn their living as freemen. Pierre de Villiers, Abraham de Villiers, and Jacob de Villiers, all three brothers born near La Rochelle. We were informed that these three persons have a good knowledge of laying out vineyards and managing the same, and thus we hope that the Company will acquire their good service. You are recommended to give them a helping hand."
They arrived in 1689 and settled on lands allotted to them and prospered. Within a year of their arrival, Abraham and Jacob married sisters Susanna and Margaretha Gardiol who had emigrated from De La Coste, Provence, France. Pierre married Elizabeth Taillefer in 1698.
The powerful Dutch East India Company, then known as "The Lords Seventeen", had found it necessary to establish a station a Cape of Good Hope for the resupply of their ships. The lack of fresh food on long voyages to the far east was causing scurvy among the sailors. A surgeon, Jan van Riebeeck, was appointed Commander of the Cape and arrived there in 1652. He and his party were to produce vegetables and fruit and to grade for meat from the nomadic Hottentot tribes. This was the beginning of white South Africa.
Almost immediately, Van Riebeeck concluded that grapes would thrive in the local climate and petitioned the Company send him vine cuttings. Cuttings were sent in 1655 and the first wine, all of 15 litres, was produced in 1659.
In 1679, Simon van der Stel was appointed Governor of the Cape of Good Hope. He laid out the historic farm Constantia and planted it with 100,000 vines. The Constantia wines from this estate became famous in Europe. "Klein Constantia", mentioned in the previous chapter was part of this original farm.
By al 1700, over 3000 men were settled on land still called French Valley about 36 miles east and northeast of Cape Town, where villages grew up now called Klein Drakenstein, Franschoek, and Paarl.
In 1715, Abraham de Villiers took title to a farm in this area called "Boschendal" from Jean deLang, another French Huguenot to whom the property had been granted in 1685. Abraham's great nephew, Paul de Villiers, built a fine manor house in 1812 and the de Villiers family continued ownership to 1849. The estate was then acquired by the Rhodes Fruit Farms in 1897, and in 1969 by the Anglo-American Corporation which has restored the manor house and has presented it to the nation as a furnished museum.
The settlers tended to have large families:
Abraham had 6 children, Jacob had 11 children, and pierre, from whom we are descended, had 25 children bu his tow wives and lived to see his hundrenth grandchild. Pierre de Villiers' son Jan had 7 children, his grandson Jacob had 12 children and his great grandson Jan Stephanus also had 12 children.
The sixth of Jan Stephanus' children, Abraham Matthys de Villiers, born in 1814, married Gertruda Catoggio (1818-1902) and they had 10 children. The second of these children was my grandfather, Jan Stephanus de Villiers. Gertruda's father, Rocco Catoggio (sometimes referred to as Catorzia), after many years in South Africa, wrote this fascinating letter to his family in Italy, dated July 3rd, 1833:
"After I left Armento for Naples, I went to Spain. I was taken prisoner and transported to England and forced to become a soldier in their service. After three months stay in England, my Regiment was sent to the Cape of Good Hope, and having served six years and three months, and seeing that peace had been declared, I took my discharge.
During athe time I was in the service here in the Cape, I took up the trade of shoemaker, which was an advantage to me, and when I took my discharge, I established myself in a town about 40 miles from the Cape, and took up not only the trade of shoemaker, but also that of a tanner, thus by the grace of God with these two activities I made a handsome profit. I bought a property near to where I was and another not far away. One producing wine and the other grain. In addition I have now started a butchery and a grain mill, and with all these enterprises you can imagine that they resulted in quite a little fortune for me.
Soon after my discharge I married a Miss Catarina Carlotta Theron who came from Mispa in Germany and God gave me a capable and good wife and in 1818 God gave me a daughter whom I named after her grandmother Gertruda Catarina Cattogia, and I spare nothing to accomplish every thing that she should do to bring her up well."
Gertruda is known to have had great musical talent. Her son Pieter was an organist. Her grandson M. L. de Villiers wrote "Die Stem", the South African national anthem, and his son is also a musician and conductor.
"Die Stem became a co-national anthem of South Africa, along with the British "God Save the King(Queen) from 1936—1957. Then "Die Stem" was the national anthem till 1994. Then a portion of the song was merged with "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" as the new national anthem of South Africa.
Gertruda's daughter Margaretha, known as Ellen, married Septimus Peter Henry de Villiers (1867-1968). Uncle Seppie and Aunt Ellen were favorite relations of my mother when she was young. The Cape Times of March 7, 1967, carried a headline "Oom Seppie is Spry and Witty at 100". The news article noted that he is the last surviving. member of the old Cape Colony Parliament, that he was mayor of Paarl for 17 years and that he still possesses the biggest moustache in South Africa. A photo with the caption "Veels Geluk Oom Seppie" proves the claim.
The de Villiers clan had so greatly proliferated since 1700 that it was common for couples to have the same family name. In fact, four of the ten children of Abraham Matthys de Villiers and his wife Gertruda Cattogia married other de Villiers. It is no wonder that my mother, in trying to explain her family to her fiancé, gets no farther than grandparents and aunts and uncles and then says:
"The cousins are too numerous to mention. All of my aunts and uncles being blessed with tremendous families."
A distant cousin by marriage, John Henry de Villiers (1842-1914), is worthy of mention. For 37 years he was Chief Justice of the Cape Colony and President of the Legislative Council. In the latter role, he presided over the legislative branch of his government and took part in debates. It is certainly unusual for a governmental structure to combine these two offices in one person, and perhaps more remarkable that over this long period he retained a high reputation for impartiality, keen intellect and wonderful understanding of his fellowmen.
In the year before the outbreak of the Boer War, Sir Alfred Milner, Britain's governor of the Cape Colony and proponent of British expansion into the Boer republics, corresponded with de Villiers. The judge, who had long since acquired the title of Lord de Villiers for his services to the crown, wrote to Milner at one point:
"Our family has for several generations been British, and therefore all my sympathies are with the Empire within the folds of which we enjoy liberty, peace and free government. If, in my communications with your Excellency, I may have appeared to have sympathized with the Transvaal [i.e., the Boers] it is because I wished to impress upon you what could be said upon that side. Unfortunately, perhaps, with my judicial training, I cannot help seeing both sides of every question."
Late in his life he had a central role to play in the formation of the new South African national government in 1910, and served as the first Chief Justice of the Union of South Africa until his death in 1914. General Smuts said of him:
"He was President of the National Convention from which emerged the Union which not only opened new prospects and a new life before South Africa, but gave an element of stability to our development. In this he made his greatest contribution to the future welfare of South Africa."
My mother, Catharina Hendrina (Kitty) de Villiers, was the fifth of six children of Jan Stephanus de Villiers (1841-1896) and his wife Cornelia J. Louw (1851-1896). The family lived in Paarl, a long-established town about 30 miles to the northeast of Cape Town. Jan Stephanus was the second of ten children of a Paarl family, and Cornelia came from nearby Malmesbury, one of eight children.
Four sons were born to Jan and Cornelia between 1869 and 1876 and then "Kitty" was born in 1882.
Father Jan became manager of the Paarl bank and later a director of the African Banking Corporation, Ltd. He was an active churchman and behind-the-scenes politician. He died in 1896 at the age of 54. When his wife died later in the same year, Kitty and Gerty were only 15 and 13 years old.
Reference has already been made to the oldest son, Abraham, in connection vith his marriage to Clara Hussey. Just a few doors from his parents' home on the main street of Paarl, Braam developed a fashion business in a shop which he called La Mode. On a side street, but connected to the back of La Mode, was his home called Bisby Lodge. Upon the death of their parents, Kitty and Gerty lived for a year at Paarl with aunt Gertruide Catherina du Toit and her husband Martinus. Then, after some years at boarding school, they moved in with bachelor brother Braam and were useful to him as hostesses when he entertained his clients in his home. Gerty left to be married in 1909, Braam married in 1911 at age 42 and Kitty married in 1912. When Braam and his wife Clare moved to Klein Constantia in 1914, brother Rocco and his wife Annie and family purchased Bisby Lodge and lived there until 1960.
During our 1986 visit, Mr. David Zetler, the present owner of the shop and home kindly showed us through both. He operates an art gallery in the shop and has maintained and improved the home in attractive fashion.
In 1900, war broke out between the Boer Republic and Great Britain. Starting in 1833, South Africans of French and Dutch background had emigrated northeastward from the Cape area almost 1000 miles to the Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natal in order to rid themselves of British colonial dominance and to be free to have their own country. The discovery of gold and diamonds in their independent Boer republics created a great influx of British fortune seekers. Soon they were demanding voting rights and complaining of mistreatment by the Boers. With the colonial expansionist fervor of the British, spurred on by Cecil Rhodes, a pretext for war soon existed. For reasons they are not here to explain, but probably related to the fact that they were of Dutch and French extraction rather than British, Kitty's brothers John and Lambertus de Villiers traveled north and east to Natal, leaving the Cape Colony to join the Boer resistance.
Lambertus was killed in the battle of Spion Kop, a hill near Ladysmith in Natal, where a fierce engage of the war took place early in 1900. A fine book called "Commando", written shortly after the war by Deneys Reitz, mentions the author finding his friend L. de Villiers dead on the slope of the hill. Brother John was taken prisoner later in the war and shipped to India. He escaped from a prison camp at Trichinopoly, reached France via Egypt, and in 1903 wrote in the Afrikaans language of his adventures. This account was published as a book called "Hoe ek Ontsnap het" in 1934, but unfortunately has never been translated into English.
I will digress here for a word about Afrikaans. The Dutch and French settlers, who began arriving in South Africa in the second half of the 1600s, were isolated from their former cultures. In 1739, the Dutch colonial government forbade public worship in the French language and the mother tongue of the many French refugees gradually disappeared and gave place to the Dutch language. This, in turn, evolved among the Boers into Afrikaans.
Shortly after the emergence in 1910 of the Union of South Africa as an independent nation in the British Commonwealth of Nations, Afrikaans was recognized as a medium of instruction in schools next to English. In 1916 it replaced Dutch in the churches and in 1925 it became, with English, an official language of South Africa. The emphasis on Afrikaans in higher education is recent - my first cousins recall their schooling to have been in pure Dutch.
Kitty's brother John became an architect and engineer upon his return to South Africa, but his health had been weakened by his imprisonment in India and he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1910. In his last illness, Kitty devoted herself to his care. She recalled this period in her life touchingly in a letter to her fiancé written in early 1912 on the train from Cape Town to Johannesburg to visit her sister Gerty, then living with her husband in the gold fields:
"I could not help thinking of the last time I travelled up the line - every 'kopje' and every landmark seemed to remind me of that last anxious trip when I was suddenly called up to Laingsburg and found my poor Johnnie at death's door, with no one to care for him but just left to the mercies of the old landlady at the hotel. I can still see him trying to put out his thin, weak arms but they fell back limply and his throat was dry, he could not speak, only his eyes opened for one second and then I saw the joy which his lips failed to express at having me with him again. Then the anxious time I had - and oh! the suffering of the dear boy, why, it just breaks my heart to think of it now. And yet, dearie, I would not have missed that period in my life for anything. Those nine months of close companionship with a beautiful character like Johnnie, going with him through all his suffering and doing everything for him up to when he breathed his last has just been the making of me. His sweet, unselfish and patient nature has taught me much and certainly made me think - my life was aimless and empty up to then, when suddenly I realized that I too was in the world for some purpose and not merely to amuse myself. Johnnie wanted me, and that was going to be my mission in life to care for him. Nothing else attracted me, and he was just everything to me and I to him."
Braam had a handsome monument erected in the Paarl cemetery to the memory of his two soldier brothers.
Kitty's brother Rocco Catorzia de Villiers (1873—1960) married Anna (Annie) Dorothea de Vos (1876-1952) about 1903 and they had two sons and a daughter. The second son, Stephanus (1906-1981), became a civil engineer in charge of the waterworks of the town of Ceres. He and his German-born wife Leone, who still lives at Ceres, had no children. Daughter Marguerite became a professor of drama and speech at the University of Stellenbosch and now lives in retirement in that town.
Because Braam and Clare had no children, but wished Klein Constantia to remain in the family, they underwrote two years of agricultural studies at the University of California at Berkeley for Rocco and Annie's older son, Jan de Villiers (1904-1984), and made him heir to the estate.
He worked with them at the farm for some years, but after the death of Braam in 1930, he and Clare disagreed on the farm management and Jan left to work in the Transvaal. Upon the death of Clare in 1955, however, Jan did inherit the property and occupied it with his English wife Gertrude (Gay) Mary Wyness. They did not have children and sold Klein Constantia in 1963 and moved to Hermanus where Gay still lives.
On my visit to South Africa in 1986, cousin Kitty Smuts drove Pat and myself to Klein Constantia. The new owners were not in residence, but a lovely "cape colored" lady was on hand to welcome us and to escort us throughout the house. This lady, Mary Pieters, was employed by my Aunt Clare in the 1930s. She and her husband worked for Jan and Gay de Villiers in the 1950s and 1960s and now work for the new owners.
The building is still in reasonably good shape, but it is almost devoid of furniture. We are told that there are plans for renovation. The new owner is a large scale vintner and has built a large winery building at the rear of the property and surprisingly well hidden from view. Inside the winery, 15 foot diameter stainless steel tanks were being installed. Inside the entrance is a hall with windows overlooking the processing floor. It would appear that the expectation is for the public to be invited to view the making of a new Constantia wine - and perhaps to visit an historic mansion.
The immediate area around Klein Constantia seems to be much as it might have been two centuries or more ago. The house in the Constantia valley is surrounded by gently rising slopes all meticulously laid out in vineyards. Up the hill behind the home are the properties that Clare gave to her sisters-in-law, my mother Kitty and Gerty Bosman. The Bosmans retired on their land, after building a house, and lived there until their deaths. Mother's property she used to call "Viels zu fer", the Afrikaans (which may not be spelled correctly) for "Much too far". Indeed it was, and when family finances were low, she sold it, perhaps back to Clare.
There being no descendants of any of my mother's four brothers, her parents' direct line is represented only by Kitty's American children and by sister Gerty's South African children. Gerty (1882-1956) married Johannus Bosman (1878-1964) in 1909 and moved to the Johannesburg area where "Bossie" later became surface manager of the New Modderfontein gold mine.
Bossie and Gerty had three children. The youngest, Johannus Jr. (Boetie) (1918-1981) married Yvonne von den Berg and farmed in the Constantia area until severe arthritis limited his activity and brought on his death. Yvonne now lives at Pennington in Natal province. They had no children.
The older daughter of Bossie and Gerty, Cornelia, lived for a number of years at Klein Constantia with her Aunt Clare after Braam's death in 1930 and married Clare's farm manager, Alston Duckitt (1906-1977), in 1936. Three daughters were born to this marriage and each has married and produced at least three children so far. More about these family members living today will be recorded in Chapter I in Part III of this book. Cornelia now lives near Johannesburg in a house on the property of her daughter Clare and her family.
Bossy and Gerty's younger daughter, Catharina (Kitty), was named after my mother, who took a special interest in her god-daughter. Kitty grew up on the grounds of the New Modderfontein mine at Benoni in the Transvaal, where her father was a senior official.
In 1932, a young Cambridge graduate came to work at the mine as a junior mining engineer. The presence of Jacob Daniel (Japie) Smuts was noted by everyone, because he was the older son of the then prime minister and world statesman, Jan Christian Smuts. In a series of articles written some twenty five years later about Smuts, his home and his family, Kitty is quoted as remembering:
"We were peering from behind a window curtain, my sister Cornelia and I, when I first saw Japie Smuts. I recall thinking that, although he looked rather nice, with his blue eyes and intellectual face, he also seemed a little stuck up. But even the fact that he had been a distinguished student and had climbed Kilimanjaro on the way home did not, in the opinion of two teenagers, give him the right to put on airs. I made up my mind that if I should ever meet in the mine offices where I was going to work for a few months until I was old enough to become a student nurse, I would not allow him to high-hat me!
We did meet there - and I found out he was not conceited at all. On the contrary, he was extremely modest and unaffected."
In 1933, Kitty and Japie were married and Kitty became acquainted with Japie's brother, sisters and parents. The parents lived on property they called Doornkloof, at Irene about eleven miles from the capital city of Pretoria. The house was a wood and iron and tin-roofed former British army mess and club that General Smuts had purchased for £300 in 1909 and had moved in sections to his site.
The "Oubaas", as the General was called, loved his home, and when King George and Queen Elizabeth and their two daughters paid a state visit to South Africa in 1947, they were not entertained at the official prime minister's residence in Pretoria, but at Doornkloof, where the General's wife Sibella Margaretha Krige, had once said, in Afrikaans:
"If people want to see us as we really are, they must come to our old tin house."
Japie and Kitty were on hand to introduce the royalty to the six Smuts children and several grandchildren, including Kitty and Japie's four daughters and infant son.
In 1949, Japie contracted cerebral meningitis which was not promptly diagnosed and resulted in his sudden and most untimely death. For a year thereafter, Kitty and her children lived in the spacious ten-bedroom Doornkloof.
Down a long dark corridor in the house was a small, plank-walled room with spartan furnishings, 15 by 11 feet, with a single window looking out on the back stoep. This was the bedroom of the prime minister; Oubaas believed in going through life with as little baggage as possible.
Fine biographies by Sarah Gertrude Millin, by J.C. Smuts (younger son of the general) and by others trace the eminent career of this unusual man:
farmer's son, lawyer, Boer War general, intellectual and political father of the Union of South Africa, prime minister, philosopher, member of the British cabinet during World War I, a founder (with Woodrow Wilson) of the League of Nations and a generation later writer of the preamble to the United Nations Charter, Chancellor of the Universities of Cambridge and of Cape Town and Chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
In spite of its many visitors, Doornkloof was isolated, and Kitty concluded that she should move with her family to Pretoria where they would have more companionship. Oubaas and Ouma (Mrs. Smuts), who had hoped that Kitty would stay with them permanently, acquiesced in Kitty's wishes, for they made a practice of little interference in the decisions of their children.
Smuts died the next year, 1950, at age 80. He was active in politics to the end - unsuccessfully attempting to stem the tide of Boer nationalism that had driven his United Party out of office in 1948. He felt that Dr. Malan and his Nationalist Party were leading the country to a clear separation of the races and to the laws of apartheid. He would not sit still and keep quiet when he saw his country:
"being run on the rocks… If I had a voice of thunder, I would speak out in these last years of my life when so much of what we have built up in these last fifty years is being thrown away."
Kitty said that the general often read Emily Bronte's poem which includes the words:
"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's
Storm-troubled sphere…"
Ouma died three years later. Back in 1901, shortly after she had lost her first three babies (undoubtedly at least in part due to the privations suffered by Boer families in the Boer War) she had posted inside the cover of her French Bible a poem which ends:
"And when death's shadows confront me,
As I seek the Throne of Grace,
The light to guide and direct me
Will be from the Baby's face."
Kitty's children are now married with children of their own, with the exception of one daughter who has been a nurse administrator at a Cape Town hospital There will be more about Kitty's family in Part III. Kitty now lives in a small house in Rondebosch, a suburb of Cape Town.
There are several ancestral paths on my father's side to which I would like to refer. I am greatly aided in this by the fine genealogical work done by my father, by great uncle John Christopher Schwab (1865-1916) and others.
It seems logical to start with the Schwabs. "The Record of my Ancestry", the genealogical chart book prepared by my father somewhere between the years 1913 and 1920, first refers to a Hans Schwab, born around 1528 in Braunsbach in Germany. Four generations of his descendants continued to live there, a fifth generation moved to Vaihingen, and a sixth to Remingsheim. A seventh, in the person of Johann Christoph Schwab (1743-1821), settled in Stuttgart where he had an illustrious career as a professor, privy court council lor, councillor of education, and member of the academies of science of Berlin, St. Petersburg and Haarlem.
The sixth of the children of Johann Christoph and his wife Johanna P. F. Rapp (1758-1831) was our ancestor, Gustav Benjamin Schwab (1792-1850), who deserves special attention. He attended the Hohen Karlschule where his father taught, and then received his theological education at the seminary in Tubingen from 1809 to 1814.
A fellow theological student and friend through out his life, Karl Ullmann, described Gustav at this age:
"I got to know Schwab as a student at Tubingen. Still today he appears before me, the vigorous, slender figure in the black, soberly elegant divinity student dress - through his youthful wholesomeness, sparkling countenance and lively manner announcing more the exuberant poet than the emerging divine."
Upon leaving university life in 1814, Schwab served as vicar for a half year at a small church at Bernhausen, located on a plateau in southern Germany with a view of the whole range of the Schwabisch Alps. Here he was inspired to the writing of his first poems.
With a friend, he then had the opportunity to make an extended tour of northern Germany where he must have had excellent introductions through the broad acquaintances of his father, mother and professors. In Weimar he visited Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the widow of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. In Dresden he stayed two weeks with relatives and became acquainted with all the art treasures there.
He stayed several months in Berlin where he met many prominent literary figures and, as the biography by his son-in-law, Dr. Karl Klupfel, states:
"With the benefit of his attractive personality, he found himself in the social circles of Berlin with greater freedom and opportunity to move than many of his countrymen, and made a more favorable impression than the average, healthy, cheerful Swabian."
Baron Friedrich Heinrich Karl La Motte-Fouque (descendant of a Norman-French family that fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes), author of the novel Undine and of the libretto for Hoffmann's opera of the same name, invited Schwab to stay a week at his estate. From Berlin, the young traveler went to Hamburg, Bremen, Gottingen and Kassel (where he got to know the Grimm brothers).
He returned to Tubingen as a private tutor at the seminary where he had studied. His friend Ullmann described his life there:
"Nearly every evening we sat together with frugal eats and drinks in Schwab's small whitewashed tutor's room, whose principal furniture consisted of a heavy, considerably-used grandfather's chair, and read old master Goethe, or wandered in fantasy with Tieck, or laughed at Zerbino or Puss-in-Boots - or when Schwab spoke to us about his next-day lecture on aesthetics, or when the dignified Uhland once was in Tubingen and read to us his just completed "Duke Ernst".
Thus we enjoyed those most beautiful and abundant hours, and I wish I could revisit our youthful fellowship and could experience again the unsophisticated, hearty, intellectual and restless happiness that we had."
In 1817, he received the hoped-for appointment as professor at the college in Stuttgart and soon married his long-time-beloved Sophie Caroline Gmelin (1795-1865). Sophie was the ninth of eleven children of a distinguished doctor of jurisprudence and professor of law and criminology at Tubingen University, Christian Gottlieb Gmelin (1749-1818), whose father had also been a professor at the same university.
The Schwab and Gmelin families had both lived in Schwabenland for generations. Swabia is roughly defined as an area in southern Germany bounded by the Rhine on the west, by the Lech river (west of Munich) on the east, by Switzerland on the south and the Palatinate on the north. Its chief cities are Stuttgart, Tubingen and the smaller Schwabisch-Hall and Schwabisch-Gmund. I think this is the most beautiful landscape in Germany.
This small region is unique in many ways. It abounds in names known world-wide: philosophers Hegel and Schelling, scientists Kepler and Einstein, writers Schiller and Hesse, and Gustav Schwab's good friends the poets Uhland, Morike and Lenau. Because Swabia was so often overrun by French troops, a "Schwob" calls a sidewalk a "Troddwar" from the French "trottoir" instead of a "Burgersteig". Swabian philosophy and dialect are illustrated in its proverbs:
"A hausigs Weib is d'best Sparbuchs!" (A thrifty wife is the best piggy bank.)
"Dr Schwob, dr wird mit 40 gscheit, d'andre net en Ewigkeit!" (The Swabian gets smart at age 40, but others never.)
"Besser a Glatze als gar koine Hoor!" (Better bald than no hair at all.)
My father's page on the genealogy of the Gmelins goes back to Urbanus:
"Son of a Roman knight of patrician family who fled to Germany about 1350 and settled on the River Teck as a cattle farmer."
Between that time and firmer dates, beginning with descendant Michael Gmelin (1510-1576) of Weilheim unter Teck, father names three generations, but notes in the margin:
"Either the time of Urbanus' emigration must be later, or, more probably, there are one or two more generations of which there is no record."
Gustav Schwab held his professorship at Stuttgart for twenty years. He was reputed to be an inspiring teacher, even able to make Cicero's philosophical writings interesting to his students. Since his tea ching duties did not take all his time and energies, he resumed the writing of poems and novels. His romance "Robert the Devil", published in 1820, received wide acclaim and brought a very friendly poetic letter from Goethe.
In his boyhood days he had had lengthy stays in French-speaking Switzerland. He now used his know ledge of the French language and literature to do translations of Lamartine and other French poets, placing the original French next to his poetic translations.
Prose and poetry were mixed in his writing about nature. "The Neckar Side of the Swabian Alps" included history and legend along with poetic depiction of that beautiful mountain region.
From 1827 to 1837, he was editor of the literary section of the morning newspaper, which at that time was more devoted to cultural interests than other periodicals. Many emerging poets were first published here under Schwab's editorship.
When his old Berlin acquaintance, Chamisso, was asked in 1832 to edit the "Almanac of the Muses", he agreed on the condition that Schwab be co-editor. Through this periodical, fine presentations of poetry from north and south Germany resulted.
This editorial work involved extensive personal correspondence with poets and authors, not just to deal with their literary offerings, but also to answer their requests for judgment of their work or of their calling as a poet, for introductions, for employment in bookstores, for recommendations, etc., all of which he did with the greatest kind-heartedness.
Because of his lively intellectual conversation and personal charm, his home increasingly became a meeting place for people of cultural interests. He and his wife welcomed visitors from all over Germany and beyond. His few vacations were usually to his beloved Alps, where he received inspiration for a handbook on the Alps and for his poems about the Lake of Constance (Der Bodensee).
In 1834, a customs union of most of the German states had come into being, making of Germany an economic entity. At the same time that this was evolving, some intellectual leaders began thinking about forming the German states into a political entity, with a democratic constitution under the leadership of Prussia. Schwab was enthusiastic about this prospect and saw to it that the writings of his liberal friends Uhland and Paul Pfizer were published in the media with which he was associated. This was not a popular view and evoked hostile reaction.
Depressed by this criticism and by having to do battle for his religious convictions in opposition some new literary-aesthetic trends, he decided break entirely away from his professorship, literary work and public affairs and take a rural ministry.
He obtained the position of pastor at the village of Gomaringen, which lies at the foot of the Alps not far from Tubingen, with charming views of the foot hills and, farther away, the range of imposing high Alps. The rectory was to be a little old castle, first seat of the Master of Gomaringen, of a knightly lineage which had died out in the 1500s. The structure was dilapidated but was somehow restored after several months work. Gustav found his clerical duties pleasant; he enjoyed preaching and was happy to have quiet hours for his family and for literary work.
Almost immediately, however, he was appointed to a commission to prepare a new Lutheran hymn book. He was then asked to deliver a speech at the unveiling of a memorial monument to Schiller. His involvement in the latter led him to devote his spare time in the winter of 1839-40 to writing a biography of Schiller.
In this book, he explained in particular detail how Schiller's poems had frequently been influenced by Christian ideas and how these ideas had been brilliantly expressed. This was in part to refute the protests of the pietistical clergy of Stuttgart over the ringing of the town's church bells at the time of the dedication of the Schiller memorial. These clergy contended that it was idol worship of a man who had been ill-disposed toward Christianity! As a sequel to this religious argument, Schwab found time in 1840 to write an essay entitled "The Controversy between Pietism and Speculative Theology in Wurttemberg".
Back in 1836, Schwab had published a "Volksbucher", a collection of heroic legendary tales such as "Robert the Devil", "The Beautiful Magelone", "The Horned Siegfried", etc. The successful reception of this book encouraged him to begin a larger work based on his intimate knowledge of the stories of the Greek poets and historians. This was completed after his return to Stuttgart and became so popular that by 1880 these "Tales of Classical Antiquity" had appeared in a twelfth edition. In 1981, Random House reprinted a translation in a paperback edition of 764 pages entitled "Gods and Heroes - Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece". The introduction by Harvard professor Werner Jaeger says:
"He wrote for the average reader and wanted to convey the legends in the form they have come down to us from the classical period of antiquity. His book has delighted many generations, and no similar work has surpassed it. It owes its freshness and color to the wise restraint the author imposed on himself. He was neither the philosopher who expounds the meaning of myths, nor the scholar who investigates their source and ultimate significance and tries to restore them to their original form. He, so to speak, was the last of the mythographers of ancient times who retold the myths they found in the works of poets in their own language and style, and thus made them accessible to a wide circle of readers."
In 1840, Gustav and Sophie's ten year old son suddenly died of typhus. This loss was deeply felt and caused Gustav to wish to leave the relative isolation of Gomaringen. The next year he was called to Stuttgart as rector of St. Leonhardt's church and as dean of the consistory of neighbouring parishes.
After some very busy years, he relinquished his rectorship to become president of the school board and of the consistory in 1845 and, in these positions, effected important reforms in church affairs and in the curriculum of the college in Stuttgart.
There was political turmoil in Europe at this time. Leaders of the democratic groups in the various German states met at Offenberg in 1847 and drew up a program calling for liberty of thought and association, universal suffrage, a progressive income tax, abolition of class privileges, education for all and a closer union of the German states. The appearance of revolutionary movements in Italy and Switzerland, and the success of the February Revolution in Paris in 1848 triggered rioting in the states of southwestern Germany. The surprised state governments yielded to the demands put forward by the democratic peoples' assemblies and the old ministries were overthrown in the whole region. When the revolution succeeded also in Berlin, seat of Prussian King Frederick William IV, a political reorganization of Germany was anticipated and a German parliament met in Frankfurt in the summer of 1848 for this purpose.
Schwab now looked to his friends Uhland and Pfizer, for the support of whom he had been criticized in years past, to move to the forefront of political action and, with others, to lead Germany to democratization and unity as an empire under a constitution.
He traveled up to Frankfurt to see and hear the parliament, only to find it in stormy and hopeless argument. At the same time, King William, having regained courage and fearing war with England and Denmark, had concluded the Treaty of Malmo (which adversely affected German citizens of Schleswig and Holstein) without consulting the Frankford parliament. This exposed the weakness of the reform parliament and led to the collapse of the hopes of the liberal elements in the several German states. Schwab was so disheartened that he foresaw the collapse of European civilization and seriously considered becoming an exile in America, where his son Gustav had recently established himself.
His last public and political act was to participate in a benefit for Schleswig-Holstein in the fall of 1850. He delivered a poem in which he fantasized a distraught Germania appearing before the throne of Olympic Zeus to implore protection for Schleswig-Holstein! A few days later he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 58.
A Stuttgart newspaper, speaking in 1987 about one of its illustrious citizens said:
"Death from incessant work claimed him on November 3, 1850. The tomb in the Hoppenlau church yard remains standing. The Schwab-strasse and the like named tunnel, and a bust in the house at Hasenberg-steige 22, remind us of this versatile creative poet."
Sophie Adelheid Schwab (1819- ), oldest child of Gustav and Sophie, married Karl Klupfel (1810- ), who became a doctor of philosophy and the librarian at the University of Tubingen. Dr. Klupfel*s brief biography of his father-in-law, first published in 1858, has been the source of most of my information about great-great-grandfather Schwab (using my translation of the 50 page 1881 edition).
The second child, Christoph Theodor Schwab (1821-1883), became a doctor of philosophy and professor at the Catharinenstift at Stuttgart. He also found time to write a biography of his father "Gustav Schwab's Leben" (180 pages). I wish I had the time to translate it. Christoph married Henriette Margarethe von Post (1831-1906), an American-born lady who had been brought up by relatives in Bremen after the early death of her parents. We will hear more about the von Posts in Chapter XIII.
The third child of Gustav and Sophie was my great grandfather Gustav Friedrich Schwab (1822-1888), who will appear in the next chapter.
I start a new chapter here because our Schwab history now shifts to the new world. Gustav Friedrich Schwab (1822-1888), my great grandfather, did not follow in the academic tradition of so many of his family. Instead, through his mother's friendship with Mrs. H. H. Meier, widow of a prominent merchant in Bremen, it was arranged that he would enter the counting house of H. H. Meier in that city to serve the customary six year apprenticeship. He was sixteen years old when he left home to undertake the drudgery of running errands and copying letters as youngest clerk. He lived comfortably with the family of Mrs. Meier's daughter, but the rigorous schedule of work prevented him from revisiting his family in southern Germany for four years!
The chief business of H. H. Meier & Co. was its trading relationship with the firm founded in 1798 in New York by H. H. Meier's brother, Caspar Meier (1774- 1839), who will be introduced in Chapter X. The successors to Caspar Meier, Oelrichs & Kruger, invited Gustav Schwab to join the New York business and in 1844, at the age of 22, he emigrated to America.
On July 19, 1845, a fire started in a store two doors away from the Oelrichs & Kruger office at 42 Broad St., NY. While Edwin Oelrichs and others were starting to remove the firm's books as a precautionary measure, an explosion in the burning building threw the adjoining building onto 42 Broad St. Edwin Oelrichs happened to be outside at the moment and survived, but a clerk, porter and laborer were killed.
The fire then spread rapidly and engulfed 345 buildings in what was then the center of New York and today is the heart of the financial district - from Wall St. south to Stone St. and from Broad St. west to Broadway. The fire so nearly reached the home of Hermann and Edwin Oelrichs at 3 Morris St. on the west side of Broadway that they removed their furniture to a Bremen ship in port.
Oelrichs & Kruger's books were destroyed or mutilated. It fell largely to Gustav Schwab, one of only two remaining clerks, to reconstruct and rewrite the firm's books. This entailed months of work late into the night. Three years later, he was again faced with weeks of night work when the firm's three partners left him in charge of the business for six weeks.
In 1849, Schwab left Oelrichs & Kruger - perhaps he was tired of the heavy workload without clear prospects of advancement. He entered into partnership with a friend, C. L. Recknagel, in a drug importing business. In this same year, he met Eliza Catherine von Post (1829-1904), daughter of Lawrence Henry von Post and his wife Henrietta, daughter of Caspar Meier. Eliza had completed her education in Bremen and had come to live with her blind grandmother Eliza Kunze Meier, Caspar Meier's widow, at her home on the Bloomingdale Road in Manhattan on the east bank of the Hudson. Gustav and Elize were married in 1850. More about Eliza Catherine von Post's family will appear in a later chapter.
The newlyweds then sailed to Europe where they visited father Gustav Benjamin Schwab at Stuttgart in what turned out to be the last months of his life. On their return in January of 1851, they, as the bride's parents had years earlier, spent several months living at the Bloomingdale home.
The business of Recknagel & Schwab prospered for several years. In 1857, Gustav and Eliza purchased eight acres of land on the heights above the Harlem River. With builder-supplied plans and day labor they completed a large house on the property in 1858.
They called the home "Fort Number Eight" because it was built on the site of one of a number of earthworks established by the British for the conquest of New York after the defeat of the Revolutionary army by General Howe at the Battle of White Plains in the fall of 1776. It was occupied by British garrisons until 1783. John Christopher Schwab published in 1897 a 50 page account of "The Revolutionary History of Fort Number Eight".
The property, at what is now 181st St. in the Bronx, looks westward over the Harlem River to what was Fort Washington (now Fort Tryon Park) in the northern most corner of Manhattan between the Harlem and Hudson rivers. Fort Washington was the last American garrison protecting New York City in the early days of the Revolutionary War. Its fall to the British late in 1776 led to the general retreat of Washington's army southward to positions calculated to stop the advance of General Howe's army which had landed near Wilmington, Delaware, and was approaching Philadelphia from the south. After the defeat of the Americans at Brandywine, in which ancestors yet to be mentioned took part, General Washington retreated with his army to Valley Forge and the British occupied Philadelphia.
In 1857 and 1858, a business depression severely affected Gustav's business partnership. This fact, and an invitation from his brother-in-law, Hermann Caspar von Post, a partner in Oelrichs & Kruger since 1852, caused Gustav to rejoin the firm in 1859.
In 1861, the outbreak of the Civil War brought about the failure of a New York bank that was correspondent for a German bank with which H. II. Meier & Co. dealt. This New York bank had served as agency for a new steamship line, the North German Lloyd, Bremen, founded in 1856 by the second H. H. Meier as an out growth of his firm's experience in ocean shipping. Meier now turned to his cousin and business associate Hermann von Post at Oelrichs & Kruger to take over the agency, which at this time had only two ocean-going steamships.
Gustav Schwab was put in charge of the new North German Lloyd steamship agency division. His talent for the business brought considerable financial success. By the end of the century, the owners had an ocean fleet of 55 steamships of which more than half were in regular or periodic trade with the port of New York.
The happy marriage of Gustav and Eliza produced ten children, all of whom appear together in an 1897 photograph in the book "Fort Number Eight" written by their daughter Lucy and privately printed in 1925. This intimate picture of her large family is most heart-warming, speaking as it does of a vanished way of life when entertainment consisted of bicycling, sledding, summers in the country, home parties with dancing, family meals with rounds of singing, and relatives visiting from Germany.
The most succinct way to characterize these' many children is to refer the reader to the few lines on each written by my father, Henry Baldwin Schwab, in 1911 as he attempted to describe his American family to his fiancée far away in South Africa: [I have added some notes in brackets.]
"Uncle Gustav Heinrich Schwab- [1851-1912] My father Hermann's elder brother, senior active partner of Oelrichs & Co. One of the most prominent business men in New York, member of Chamber of Commerce and various bank directorates. Two years ago he suffered a nervous breakdown and had to retire temporarily; now is again taking up his work. His wife, Caroline Wheeler, died in March 1911. Personally he is very dignified and kind-hearted, but often appears stern, has good judgment and ability as his success attests."
[Gustav's health did not improve and he died the next year.]
[Hermann Caspar Schwab (1853-1898), my grandfather, had died many years before father wrote these notes.]
"Aunt Henrietta- [1854-1920] Eldest sister. Lives with great Uncle Hermann C. von Post. Passable looking and dignified, yet jolly, clever and humorous. Very kindly and generally useful, a good sort."
[She lived with her Uncle Hermann until his death in 1913.]
[Lawrence Henry Schwab [1857-1911], had died earlier in 1911. He had married Margaret Paris and had been Canon of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.]
[I used to live during some college vacations with this lady, then in her late seventies. Father must not have known her well, for she was intelligent and up with the times as well as being most warm and kindly.]
"Aunt Lucy- [1863-1927] Married in 1903 to Henry C. White. A pleasing personality, very affectionate and full of fun. Has odd ideas on personal economy. Has no children; very popular with the Yale College fellows."
[Henry White was a New Haven lawyer. He died in 1914.]
"Uncle J. Christopher- [1865-1916] Yale graduate. Formerly Professor of Economics at Yale, now the Librarian. Extremely clever and witty, splendid grasp of detail and great for organizing parades, celebrations, etc., and his Library. Paints and sketches finely. Married Edith Fisher and has two children. "
[His wife died in 1922. Their daughter Katharine is now 90 and lives with her niece, Edith Schwab, at Danbury, Conn. Son Norman died in 1965.]
[Benjamin Wiliam Schwab (1867-1899) had just been made a partner in Oelrichs & Co. and was engaged to marry Maria Trumbull Dana of New Haven when he was killed in a fall from a horse at age 32. I knew Maria as my "Aunt Amy Dana" who was most hospitable to me and my friends at Yale in the late 1930s.]
"Uncle Louis and Uncle Albert- Twins. Harmless and uninteresting. Do church work."
[They inherited sufficient funds to preclude their need to earn a living.]
Several years before his death in 1888, Gustav Friedrich had turned over the steamship division of Oelrichs & Co. to his son Gustav Henry Schwab. In 1900, four of the steamships burned in a fire on one of the piers at Hoboken, New Jersey. The blaze claimed hundreds of lives. After his death twelve years later, Gustav Henry's obituary said in part:
"The general public will, perhaps, best recall him for his capable work after the great Hoboken waterfront fire of June 30, 1900. For days there after, Mr. Schwab piloted single-handed the big task of restoring order out of the wreckage, looking after the injured men among the company's employees, collecting the names of the dead, and rehabilitating the crippled service. His task was not entirely completed for several years."
The death of Gustav Henry Schwab in 1912, a year after that of his wife, Caroline Wheeler, prompted extensive newspaper accounts of his prominent part in civic, cultural and political affairs in New York. Had he lived another five years, he would have had the sorrow of knowing that the steamship business that had been his life's work was suddenly terminated by the declaration of war between the United States and Germany in 1917.
In 1898, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of Caspar Meier's business, now called Oelrichs & Co., the partners published a company history entitled "Caspar Meier and his successors, 1798-1898". It includes brief biographies of Caspar Meier, Lawrence Henry von Post and Gustav Friedrich Schwab, and reminiscences of Hermann Caspar von Post.
My grandfather Hermann Caspar Schwab (1853-1898), was was sent at the age of 11 from Fort Number Eight to Stuttgart to study under the direction of his uncle, Christoph Theodor Schwab, PhD., a professor at Stuttgart's Catharinenstift.
At 16 years of age, he entered the tobacco house of Warneken u. Sohn in Bremen and worked there for four years before returning to America in 1873 to live at his parents' large home and to work at Oelrichs & Co., becoming a partner in 1878. In 1886, upon the death of a non-family partner, Hermann assumed the chief management of the importing and wholesaling division of Oelrichs & Co.
In June of 1885, at age 32, he married 20 year old Mary Baldwin, daughter of Henry Baldwin, III, and his wife Katherine Irving Dayton. I shall refer to Mary Baldwin's families and ancestry in Chapters XIV, XV, and XVIII.
Hermann and Mary built a home on the grounds of Fort Number Eight. Their two sons, my father Henry Baldwin Schwab and his younger brother Hermann Caspar Schwab, were born there. A sudden attack of pneumonia caused father Hermann's death in 1898, leaving 32 year old Mary to cope with her two boys, then 11 and 7 years of age.
In Chapters V and VI, the Schwab line of our German background was sketched. Now we pick up the story of several other German families: the Weisers, the Muhlenbergs, the Kunzes, the Meiers and the von Posts. As with the Schwabs, the best way to introduce the first of these ancestral lines is to pick it up as it emerges from the mists of time.
We are fortunate that a Lutheran minister, Frederick S. Weiser, of New Oxford, Pennsylvania, formed the "Weiser Family Association" in the late 1950s to honor the memory of John Conrad Weiser and his son Conrad Weiser, who were among the early German emigrants to America. The Association has not only traced the careers of these two men, but also, with the help of Wolfgang Weisser of Stuttgart, West Germany, has tracked the Weiser family in the Wurttemberg district of Germany in records going back to the earliest recorded reference in 1475. These documents are admirably presented in a book published in 1985 by the Association entitled "Weiser Family Documents 1475-1710", edited by Wolfgang Weisser, who says:
"it contains a selection of genealogically and sociologically important Weisser documents most of which were slumbering unknown in archives until a few years ago."
The record ends in 1710 because this was the year that John Conrad Weiser and several of his children left Germany. Times were desperately bad then in the Wurttemberg area and in the Weiser home town of Gross Aspach (30 miles northeast of Stuttgart). The ruling Duke Eberhard Ludwig was disinterested in his subjects. The troops of King Louis XIV, the Catholic "Roi de Soleil" of France (credited with the statement "L'Etat, c'est moi."), had plundered the area. Disease and starvation conditions followed, and in 1708-1709 an unprecedented frost from October to April ruined orchards and vineyards. John Conrad's wife, Anna Maria Ubelin, succumbed to fever that year while pregnant with her 15th child (several of whom had died in infancy).
In the face of these misfortunes, the invitation of Queen Anne of England to the impoverished people of Germany was attractive. Anne was strongly religious and anti-Catholic and sympathized with the plight of the German Lutheran Protestants. England passed a Naturalization Act to encourage immigration of the "Palatines" with a view to their further movement to the American colonies.
Weiser turned over his farm to his married daughter and her husband and, with his eight other children, made his way to Rotterdam. On July 27, 1709, they sailed from there to London. By the time of this voyage, the English government had already, on July 23, requested that the Dutch government prevent any further embarkation of the Palatines. In April, May and June, thousands of them had reached England where they were housed in tents in London parks or on ships in the Thames. On June 14, the English Resident at The Hague had written to London to say:
"upon the continuation of Her Majesty's Bounty or any other encouragement, you may have half Germany if you please."
The English politicians now had to decide how to dispose of these thousands. An appealing solution was to employ them to extract tar and pitch from the pine forests of the American colonies. The reasoning was that, under the direction of Colonel Hunter, Governor of New York, they:
"will be a good barrier between Her Majesty's Subjects and the French and their Indians in those parts, and in the process of time by intermarrying with the neighbouring Indians (as the French do) they may be capable of rendering great service to Her Majesty's Subjects there; and not only very much promote the Fur Trade, but likewise the increase of Naval Stores."
At Christmas time 1709, 600 Palatines boarded the ship Lyon. The Lyon and several other ships maneuvered between London and Plymouth for several months awaiting final orders. Then, after seven or eight weeks at sea, the ship arrived at New York on June 13, 1710, with just 402 passengers alive. The Weiser family all survived. Three of the children (two of them 12 and 13) were bound out to service in the New York area to lessen the cost of providing for them. The rest, and the other Palatine families were settled on lands of Robert Livingston near a pine forest about 100 miles north of New York on the east side of the Hudson River. New York Governor Hunter was responsible for their subsistence until they could become self-supporting, but because he left it to Livingston to be his paid agent, they were short-changed and starved by this unscrupulous scoundrel.
The Germans had agreed to remain on the lands to which they were assigned until they should have paid by the products of their labor for the expenses of the Crown for settling and subsisting them.
Livingston's land of pine forests, however, was not congenial to farming, the production of pitch from the pines was a failure, and living conditions were intolerable. To earn money, many of the men volunteered for service with the English in the military campaign of 1711 which was to strike at the French in Canada. This effort was abandoned in the spring of 1712 and the men returned home to find their families almost starving. Protests to the Governor were to no avail and, as later recorded by John Conrad Weiser's son:
"Then the people scattered over the whole province of New York. Many remained where they were. About 150 families determined to remove to schocharih [a place about 40 English miles to the west of Albany], They therefore sent deputies to the land of the Maquas to consult with the Indians about it who allowed them to occupy schochary… my Father was the first of the German deputies."
The Palatines set up seven villages in the Schoharie valley, one of them called Weisersdorf. Before long, the title to the land they thought they had purchased from the Indians was disputed by Albany Dutchmen with the support of the New York Governor. In 1718, Weiser and two other deputies secretly made their way to New York and took passage to London to lay their case before the Crown. They were captured by pirates on the way, stripped, flogged and robbed. Finally reaching England destitute, they contracted debts and were imprisoned in the Tower of London until funds reached them. Five years in London attempting to obtain support were futile and Weiser alone survived to return to his people in 1723.
History should take note of him. He deserves remembering for his courage in bringing his family to America and for his leadership of his poor compatriots through the days of their difficulties in getting established in their new country.
When he returned from London, he purchased lands from the Indians on the Delaware at Minisink only to find that James Logan, representing the Pennsylvania Proprietors, considered the land to be theirs. Weiser then settled at Shecomico, east of the Hudson River, not far from the old Livingston plantation.
In 1746, the old pioneer was brought down to son Conrad's home on the Tulpehocken. The old man was 86 and dying. On the way, a stop was made in the home of his new grandson-in-law, Pastor Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, who wrote:
"He was carried into the house almost dead. After lying in bed for 24 hours he came to himself again and began repeating to himself in broken words the hymn 'Schwing dich auf zu deinem Gott…' His eyes were dark and his hearing gone, so that I could not converse with him. But I could not withhold my tears when I heard him repeat over and over the texts relating to the blessed atonement in Christ, such as: Himself took our infirmities …' to which he added companion texts, such as: 'Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden…'."
Forty three American descendants of John Conrad Weiser, all members of the Weiser Family Association, gathered from all corners of the United States (including Hawaii, Massachusetts, Texas, North Dakota, Washington, Ohio, Florida, and other states) in the summer of 1988 to visit Klein Aspach and neighbouring Gross Aspach in Germany and found that the memory of John Conrad is preserved in town documents, and a named street. A marble slab outside the old Lutheran church perpetuates the memory of his poor wife.
The group also visited the village of Affstadt in the Black Forest where son Conrad was born when father was doing military service there. Here we saw another Konrad Weiser Strasse and a monument, set up in 1987 in connection with the little town's celebration of its 7OOth year, honoring its most illustrious citizen who helped to establish the new world.
Weisersdorf, now Middleburgh, New York, erected a tablet in the town's schoolhouse in 1933:
Palatine Pioneer, Leader, Diplomat
Soldier and Magistrate
and
Founder of Middleburgh (Weiser's Dorf)
1713
Born in Germany 1660
Arrived in New York 1710
Captain in Canadian Expedition 1711
Palatine delegate to London and
Imprisoned in Tower 1719
Returned to Schoharie 1723
Died and buried in Tulpehocken, Pa. 1746
The Weiser family, including John Conrad's new wife Anna Margaret Miller (who had been a fellow passenger on the Lyon) and fifteen year old son Conrad, left the Livingston plantation in the late fall of 1712. They managed to find winter lodging in Schenectady to await the opportunity, with the advent of spring, to move to the Schoharie valley. In mid November, Quaynant, a chief of the Mohawk Nation, visited John Conrad and they agreed that son Conrad should go to the Maqua country to learn the language.
We now pick up the story of young Conrad after this sometimes frightening experience, always cold and hungry, during the long winter months with the Hodenosaunee (People of the Long House) - strangers who wore bearskins or mantles of blanket cloth and who greased their bodies with bear fat.
He returned in the summer of 1713 to Weisersdorf, the village his father was then establishing. Many villages of the Mohawks, Mohicans, Tuscaroras, Oneidas and Delawares were in the vicinity. Conrad later wrote:
"I had learned the greater part of the Mohawk language. An English mile from my father's house there lived several Mohawk families. With the Mohawks always around going out hunting and coming back, difficulties often cropped up, so that I had much interpreting to do, but without pay. There was no one else to be found among our people who understood the language, so that I became completely master of the language."
At first the new villagers were in extreme poverty and only survived through the kindness of the Indians and with loans of food and equipment from the people of Schenectady and Albany. Conrad remembered this first year when:
"We suffered much hunger… When we wanted flour, we had to go some 35 or 40 miles for it and beg it on credit, one got a bushel of wheat here, another a bushel or two there and we were often 3 or 4 days away from home before we got back to our folks who were waiting in pain and tears for bread."
No sooner had the Palatines surmounted their greatest physical difficulties than they found them selves facing a claim to their lands by Adam Vroman, a Dutchman from Albany. The Weisers' opposition to this claim led to young Conrad being clapped into jail in Albany until the Weisers agreed to take a lease and pay rent. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this land title problem precipitated father John Conrad's unsuccessful voyage to London in 1718 to seek redress.
By the time the elder Weiser returned from England in 1723, the villages were breaking up. Some settlers bought their land from the Dutchman and some had moved to free government land elsewhere. A third group had just set out for Pennsylvania, having heard of rich lands to which Governor Keith had invited them. Son Conrad wrote of this fifteen family expedition:
"The people got news of the land on suatara and tulpehockin in pensilvania; many of them united and cut a way from schochary to the Susquehana River brought their goods over and made canoes and descended the stream to the mouth of the Suartaro Creek and drove their cattle overland… From there they came to tulpehockin and this is the beginning of the tulpehockin settlements…"
Conrad did not at that time join the hegira. In 1720 he had married Anna Eve Feck, daughter of another of the 1710 Palatine immigrants, and had started a family. By 1729, however, he recognized the secure grip that the Dutchmen, Adam Vroman and Rip van Dam, had on the best land at Schoharie and he decided to move to Pennsylvania where his father-in-law, John Peter Feck, was already established. Conrad's journal simply says:
"Then in the year 1729 I went to pensilvania and settled at tulpehockin…" How this was accomplished with his wife and four children, ages 7, 4, 2, and less than 1, is not described.
Almost immediately, Conrad's knowledge of the Indian languages resulted in his being asked by the Iroquois to be their interpreter at a conference in Philadelphia to which they had been invited by James Logan and the Pennsylvania Province Council. After this first trip to Philadelphia, Weiser was appointed "Province Interpreter" and was compensated by the Province. That this was completely acceptable to the Indians attests to the high regard all parties had in Conrad's fairness.
This conference was the first act in the strategy of James Logan and the Province to make firm friends of the Iroquois (which is synonymous with the Confederation of the Six Nations - Mohawks, Onondagas, Senecas, Oneidas, Cayugas and Tuscaroras) rather than just with the local subservient Delaware Indians. This strategy, successfully pursued over the next quarter century with the critical assistance of Weiser and his friend, the Iroquois ambassador Shikellamy, provided a bulwark for the English colony of Pennsylvania against the ambitions of the French and their Indian allies.
Background about Chief ShikellamyConrad Weiser's extraordinary life has been well chronicled in fine biographies which make copious use of his own writings and the sizeable correspondence he had with the Proprietors in reporting on Indian affairs over the long period he was their interpreter and diplomatic agent. I have borrowed freely in this sketch from Paul A. W. Wallace's book, "Conrad Weiser, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945) and from Joseph S. Walton's book, "Conrad Weiser and the Indian Policy of Colonial Pennsylvania" (George W. Jacobs Co., Phila., 1900). Another excellent account is "The Life of (John) Conrad Weiser the German Pioneer Patriot, and Patron of Two Races" by C. Z. Weiser, D.D. (Daniel Miller, Reading Pa., 1876).
There is no better way to whet the reader's appetite for reading the whole story of Weiser's life than to quote from Paul Wallace's Foreword:
"Conrad Weiser, Pennsylvania's Indian ambassador, was one of the world's great originals, a hot headed, true-hearted, whimsical Jack-of-all-trades, a farmer and the owner of a tannery, one of the founders of Reading, Pennsylvania, a colonel on active service during the French and Indian War, the first President Judge of Berks County, a faithful husband and the father of fourteen children, a monk at Ephrata, a pillar of the Lutheran Church, a promotor of the Moravian missions… a hymn writer, traveler, statesman, linguist, diplomat and woodsman.
He taught Benjamin Franklin what he knew about the Six Nations. He was at home in Philadelphia as well as at John Harris' Ferry on the fringe of civilization [now Harrisburg], In his day, everybody knew him. Governors, churchmen, and Indian chiefs relied on his advice.
The Indians named him Tarachiawagon, He Who Holds the Heavens. During the French and Indian War, settlers beyond the Blue Mountains appealed to him for protection. The Governor of Pennsylvania commissioned him to do whatever was necessary for the defense of the safety of the Province, and with a volunteer army he held the Delaware-Susquehanna line. "
Even the foregoing does not adequately express why Conrad appeals so much to me. One has to read his words and about hifc actions in his dealings with the Proprietors and with the Indians to appreciate his loyalty and devotion to his adopted country on the one hand, and on the other hand his deep respect and affection for the native American Indians whom he treated honorably and with great patience.
There was a little time and place in our history before the press of white expansion westward caused most Indians to be considered just savage interference when Conrad Weiser could include the following in a report to the Governor of Pennsylvania on a mission in 1751 to the Six Nations:
"Abram, a chief of the Mohawk… stood up and Said: Brother Tarachiawagon the message you delivered to us just now… we take it as a fresh token of the Brotherly love of the Governor and people of pensilvania towards us… The Speaker gave me a String of Wampum.
After a short pause. I told them …I have brought one of my sons with me to put him into the Mohock country among my relations and in the same family in which I was adopted as a Son 37 years ago to learn the mohock language and enable him to serve as an interpreter. Gave them a String of Wampum.
Abram spoke and Said: We look upon him as our own Child, and We will use our best Endeavor to learn him to speak well and to make a man of him."
Five years later in 1756, Weiser recognized that his hopes that the Province could live in peace and harmony with the Indians were dwindling. He wrote an eloquent and impassioned letter to London to Thomas Penn who, like his revered father, founder of the Province, spent little time in America:
"Honoured Sir: …I cannot forbear of writing a few lines to let you know that the suffering people of this your province Cries Loud for your presence. …If I was to have two or three hours conversation with you, or with your honored brother Mr. Richard Penn, I flatter meself several things in this province would soon alder for the better, especially Indian affairs. I fear that the rudness, lawlessness and ignorance of the back inhabitants not only of this, but also of the neighbouring provinces will bring a general Indian war over us. They curse and damn the Indian and call them murdering dogs into their faces without distinction, when on the other hand these poor Indians that are still our friends do not know where to go for safety. In the woods they are in danger of being killed, or their young men join the enemy. Among us they are in danger of being killed by the mob, and what is pityfull, we have little or no government within our doors."
In 1758, a great peace conference was held in Easton, Pennsylvania. It was hoped that peace could be brought about between the western Indian tribes in Ohio, the Iroquois nation, the Delaware Indians, and the English colonies of Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. That the conference did not founder on misunderstandings and bruised egos was largely due to Weiser's diplomatic skill.
Peace turned out to be only temporary, but it lasted for the two years remaining of Weiser's life, during which time he was able to return to his home and his judicial duties. He died on July 13, 1760, after a sudden illness.
Son-in-law Muhlenberg wrote of his last days: "Two weeks before his death, his son-in-law and daughter paid him a visit on his estate at Heidleberg where he had most of his children around him. He spoke of his past life, recalled the countless blessings the forgiving Father in Christ the good shepherd of the sheep had shown him, spoke with tears of the immeasureable Love, Goodness, Grace, Pity, Patience, Forbearance and Tolerance which the Lord through Christ's intercession and forgiveness had promised and bestowed upon him! and sang some hymns with his family from the depths of his heart, so that one could see how the foundation laid in youth, of which Christ is the cornerstone, had remained intact, though the superstructure of wood, hay, and stubble had been burned away."
Author C. Z. Weiser concludes his summary of Conrad with these comments:
"As there are men dead, though they live, so are there men living, though they are dead.
Some lessons from Conrad Weiser's busy life:
1. We cannot all be like him. Know thyself first, and mature thyself subsequently.
2. Goethe says: 'On due reflection I am of the conviction that energy constitutes the great difference between men'.
3. Religion is no hindrance to an earnest, active and successful life.
Act, act in the living present!
Heart within and God o'erhead!"
The journal of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg has a melancholy postscript to the history of Conrad and Anna Maria Weiser. Twenty years after the death of Conrad, Muhlenberg paid a visit to widow Anna Maria.
August 1,1780. Set out at seven in the morning and covered eighteen miles in four hours, arriving safely in Readingtown in the midst of a rain. We turned in at Grandmother Weiser's, where I found my wife and daughter. My late father-in-law left his widow a spacious lot and house in Reading and an annual interest as income for life, so that she would not suffer want. Her two eldest sons, who had a proper concern for her and treated her well, died, and the two younger sons, who had been named guardians in the will, lived elsewhere, allowed the house to run down, and also failed to make the proper payment of the interest provided for her in the will. So now, especially in these hard times, she is practically deserted in her extreme old age, in sickness and feebleness, and must live in destitution without any care and attendance except for what some of her grandchildren give her for refreshment. The house is so dilapidated that there is not a corner in it that remains dry when it rains, and it will finally rot away entirely and collapse if repairs are not made at once. Mother lamented that she still had outstanding taxes to pay and had been threatened with the levy of distress upon her remaining household goods."
Anna Eve died the next year at age 81.
Conrad Weiser wrote to Governor Thomas Lee of Virginia in 1744 responding to the latter's request for information on the customs and religion of the Indians. At the end of the letter he said:
"I beseech God to incline the hearts of all that come into these parts, to outlive the Nations, by a fast obedience to their greater knowledge of the will of God; for it would be miserable, indeed, for us to fall under the just censure of the poor Indians, while we make profession of things so far transcending."
One white man, who exemplified in his life a heart and mind that "outlived" - in the sense of living on a higher plane than - most red or white men, was Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787).
This man graduated from the University of Gottingen in 1738 and was ordained in the Lutheran ministry in Leipzig the same year. After teaching a few years at the Orphan House at Halle, he felt a call to missionary work and was dispatched by the church fathers at Halle to London where Dr. Friedrich Michael Ziegenhagen, German Lutheran Chaplain of the Royal Chapel of St. James, gave him the official call to minister to the Evangelical Lutheran congregations in Philadelphia, New Providence and New Hanover in the English Province of Pennsylvania.
Muhlenberg was instructed to sail first to Georgia to visit a colony of Lutherans who had emigrated from Salzburg in Germany to Ebenezer, near Savannah. He boarded the "Georgia Packet" on June 13, 1742, but the ship drifted between London and Plymouth for weeks awaiting suitable weather before finally clearing Lands End on July 9. This small vessel was to convey supplies to Savannah for Governor Oglethorpe's Georgia colony. There were seven sailors, a boy steward, a cook, ten steerage passengers (including a family of emigrants from Salzburg) and eight passengers who shared the captain's table and the single cabin.
Ocean travel had not improved since the first Germans had come to America a generation earlier.
Muhlenberg's journal notes are graphic:
"July 7. We had a strong west wind with rain. I was very sick, so I could not rise the whole day. My mind was not less distressed because all of the passengers were in the cabin on account of the rain and frittered away the time with idle talk, cursing, swearing, and all sorts of sins. On the other side of my lodging place, which I shared with another man, I could hear everything said by the rest of the passengers and sailors in the steerage who were passing the time in the same way.
July 25. The sixth Sunday after Trinity. …I asked the captain whether I might speak a word for devotions. So about six o'clock the church prayers were read by the jurist [one of the cabin passengers]. Afterwards I read to them Ezekiel 18 and took as the basis for meditation the 27th verse, 'When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness…,' etc. The people were very attentive. After listening they were all very quiet. But gradually they became louder and louder and slipped into their old ways again, so that it was just as if they had heard nothing. The longer one associates with people in the world and seeks the true improvement of souls, the more one learns to recognize in oneself and others the abominable and unfathomable Fall of Man. In our cabin they were quite restrained as long as I was with them. But as soon as I left them to go to bed, they started in and carried on high with pranks and sinful talk and wanted to marry the woman to a sailor for sport. Such conduct grieved me terribly and caused me to sigh to God that He might not punish us in His anger, but rather have patience and, for the sake of His Son, dig around such trees and dung them before He cut them down. I got up and earnestly rebuked them before they came to more sinful things. I told them not to be deceived, God would not permit Himself to be mocked. They had just heard His Word and now they were committing such sins as they should be ashamed of before God and all honorable men! I would rather preach to the heathen and live among cattle than among them."
An experienced teacher, but still only 31 years old, he considered it his responsibility to awaken his shipmates to the peril of their souls. It is obvious that he did this fearlessly, aggressively and with some success during the enforced intimacy of the long voyage.
The abrupt transition from life in the intellectual and social circles of his university-day and teaching-day patrons, to months of close familiarity with a slice of humanity largely uneducated, uninhibited and profane, could not have been more extreme. Two months after leaving Lands End, fresh water, which had been rationed for weeks, was gone.
Sept. 10, Friday. …Since the rats could find no water and could not drink sea water, they came in great numbers into our sleeping room at night seeking the sweat on our faces.
Sept. 16, Thursday. Today our drinking water was completely exhausted. They gathered a little from all the vessels, but it was more mud than water."
Providentially, the Georgia Packet was able to attract the attention of two English ships by acting like a Spanish vessel (Spain then being at war with England) and from them obtaining sufficient water to make the nearest port, Charleston, South Carolina, on September 22, 1742.
The captain of the "Georgia Packet", being under contract to deliver Muhlenberg and the Salzburger family to Savannah, arranged with the captain of a small sloop to take them to Georgia. The sloop left on September 24 to traverse the inland channels. No provisions were supplied by the captain, but fortunately the passengers were well received at a plantation on the way and were again able to get food at Beaufort, South Carolina. Unseasonable cold on the night of September 29 formed ice on the ship, which had no cabin to shelter the travelers. When it was not cold enough to suppress the mosquitoes, a fire had to be maintained to produce thick clouds of smoke as protection. They reached Savannah on October 2.
The following day was a Sunday. Pastor Gronau of Ebenezer was in Savannah to preach to the German people there. The next day Muhlenberg and Gronau boarded a small boat for the thirty mile journey to Ebenezer, where Muhlenberg presented Pastor Boltzius with letters and a silver chalice from Augsburg bequeathed to the congregation. Muhlenberg then returned to Charleston with Ebenezer's Pastor Boltzius, who had been directed by the Lutheran Fathers at Halle to accompany him to Philadelphia to introduce him.
The season was now late for ocean travel, how ever, and no ships were available or expected. The overland routes were difficult with baggage. Pastor Boltzius, who had been reluctant to leave his family and parish responsibilities, purchased a horse and returned home. Muhlenberg was determined not to be delayed and took passage for Philadelphia as the ninth person on a small sloop. Of the sixth day at sea, Muhlenberg wrote:
"Nov. 17, Wednesday. Rain and stormy wind continues. Our sailors have been out the whole night in the rain and sea water and are half-frozen and half-dead. …Our little cabin is about large enough for three men. The crew had nothing else to do, however, but to creep in with us, and they lay on top of each other, treading and pushing and jostling one another. I have been lying in my nest with all my clothes since Saturday, vomiting continually day and night. I dare not take off my clothes because of the cold, nor can I change my clothing because of the horrible movement of the ship."
The physical difficulties he had on this ghastly twelve day trip turned out to be a harbinger of the stormy mental and spiritual challenges that he was to find upon his arrival in Philadelphia.
The confusion he found in the religious affairs of his intended congregations is well documented in the book, "Life and Times of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg" by William J. Mann (G. W. Frederick, Philadelphia, 1887). On arrival as a total stranger, he looked up John Zweifler, a druggist who had moved from Ebenezer to Philadelphia. To his astonishment, he found that Zweifler had invited Count von Zinzendorf to Philadelphia and had joined his Moravian congregation. To make matters worse, the Count now claimed ecclesiastical authority over all the Lutherans in the Province.
When Muhlenberg inquired after the two other locations to which he had been called, he found that New Providence was now called Trappe, and that New Hanover had now become Falkner Swamp - and that at the latter, the local Lutherans had "hired" as preacher a quack doctor and dentist. He was also told that an old parson, Valentin Kraft, had claimed to be authorized by the consistory of the church of Hesse-Darmstadt to minister to the Trappe and Falkner Swamp congregations.
Muhlenberg's journal gives insight to the feisty way he stood up to the imperious Count Zinzendorf at their first meeting in Philadelphia:
"December 30. …The Count sent word to me, politely requesting I should visit him. I went, expecting to speak to the Count alone. When I arrived, however, there was in the room a large gathering of his generals and corporals, the Count presiding at a small table. The Count asked me first about a number of circumstances [in Europe].
Then the following ensued:
Count: On what conditions are you here?
Reply: I have been called and sent through the Rev. Court Preacher Ziegenhagen, who had a commission from the congregation. The deacons and elders of the three congregations [to which M. had been assigned] have signed an acceptance.
Count: Here in Philadelphia no deacons of the Lutheran congregation gave their signatures, for they are sitting here, and there is no other Lutheran congregation and church here other than the one we have.
Reply: I know nothing about it, because I am convinced that I preached to Lutheran people and was accepted by them.
Count: They are not Lutherans, but rebels, brawlers; and you have become the head of such people and preached to them in the house from which they expelled my adjunct, Mr. Pirlaeus. The rebels must first come to us and apologize.
Reply: My dear Count, your people must come first and apologize to our Lutherans because they broke the lock off our church and staged a tumult.
Count: I have heard that you have read all my writings; did you not read that I have established a Lutheran consistory here in Philadelphia?
Reply: I read in Charlestown the printed reports of seven conferences, and through them learned that a certain Mr. von Thurnstein had caused disturbances in various places, but I did not know that the Count had established a Lutheran consistory."
How young Muhlenberg established his authority and gradually broadened his sphere of influence is a long story.
Before he had been in America three years, he had built a stone church at Trappe "fifty four shoes long and thirty nine shoes wide" and had acquired thirty three acres of land nearby. He had become acquainted in this same time with Conrad Weiser and soon saw in his daughter, Anna Maria:
"the imperishable richness of a meek and quiet spirit."
Despite the involvement of the Weiser family with his evangelistic rival, Count von Zinzendorf and his Moravians, Muhlenberg pursued his suit and won over father Weiser. As he wrote to a friend some 23 years later:
"I earned my board, made friends and convinced old Weiser's sensibilities, so that he gave me his daughter as a wife, or helpmate, because at my first visit, I played and sang the edifying Halle songs on his house-organ. Sometimes a hard heart can be thus softened and an entrance gradually won for the word of God."
The marriage took place in April 1745 at Christ Church, which still stands in a grove near Stouchberg. That summer, with father-in-law Weiser's assistance, a five room house was built on the Trappe property. Here were born between 1746 and 1755 their first six children: Peter (John Peter Gabriel), Frederick (Friedrich August Conrad), Henry (Gotthilf Henry Ernest), Betsy (Eve Elisabeth), Peggy (Margaretta Henrietta) and Polly (Maria Catharine). Four subsequent children died in infancy before Sally (Maria Salome) was born in Philadelphia in 1766.
A few years after Henry Melchior Muhlenberg's marriage to Anna Maria Weiser, he paid a weekend visit to father-in-law, Conrad Weiser, at Tulpehocken. The account of that weekend in Muhlenberg's journal gives a fascinating glimpse into the characters of the two men:
"April 16, 1748. Saturday. A heavy stone was lying on my heart because my parents-in-law had not been to the Lord's Supper in years, partly, at the beginning, because of the lack of a regular preacher, later through the seduction of all sorts of specious sects, etc., etc.
Father said that the principal doctrines of our Evangelical Church, as she teaches them from the Word of God according to the interpretation of the symbolical books, were dear and precious to him; that he considered them essential to salvation; that he had at no time and nowhere found anything better, though in his lifetime he had had ample opportunity to test them all. As to the Lord's Supper, he would rather wait a little longer until the Tulpehocken congregation had a regular ordained pastor and was brought into better order. April 17, Sunday. We all went to church together, and each one of us had our part to do. One served at the altar, the other baptized, a third conducted a brief preparatory service, Brother Handshuh preached and, with Pastor Brunnholtz, administered the Holy Communion to more than two hundred communicants, among whom was my mother-in-law with her children. In the evening we again returned to our quarters and had edifying conversation. We sat until after twelve o'clock at night.
We had hardly gone to bed when Mr. Weiser became so deathly sick that it seemed he might die any minute. It began with terrible vomiting, and before an hour had elapsed he had become almost totally cold and numb and there followed a cold sweat on the upper part of his body. He gave us to understand that he had the most excruciating pain in the region of the navel and thought he could not live an hour longer. I was not so much concerned about his salvation, for I hope that he stands in true repentence and a living faith which worketh by love, though, like all the saints, he has plenty of infirmities and faults which he seeks to lay aside by daily repentence. We had none of our blessed medicine with us and there was no doctor at hand. I asked my dear colleagues to unite in prayer to God for his life and true welfare, which they did heartily; and in the meantime I prepared a few poultices, since there was nothing else at hand, not even a clyster pipe.
April 18. Monday. At daytime, Mr. Kurtz came over also, and in our chamber we humbled ourselves before God and prayed for grace and compassion. After the prayer, we went to the patient and among other things I asked him in the presence of my brethren, as witnesses, on what foundation he was willing to live and die. Then he began to speak of his own accord, saying that he had been occupied the whole day thinking of the passage in Psalm 32, 'Be not as the horse, or as the mule' [which continues "which have no understanding; whose mouths must be held with bit and bridle, else they will not obey thee"], since dear Brother Brunnholtz had so kindly invited him to the Lord's Supper and he had refused. Thus he gave us to understand that first the invitation and then the example of the mother and children and many others had had their effect upon him, and that then he began to feel the bit and bridle because he had refused. He asked us to give him the Holy Communion and also to partake of it with him. We could not refuse, so we made preparation for it, confessing together to God and acknowledging our sins. Afterwards he added his own special penitent and believing confession of faith with tears, and together we partook of the Holy Communion in true humility of heart. That was a sweet evening for us all!"
In his book about Conrad Weiser, C. Z. Weiser says:
Of the daughters [of Weiser] we present some spare notes. The eldest, Anna Maria, became the wife of the honored and venerable Lutheran Patriarch, Rev. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Perhaps these notes may serve as an incentive in the minds of those who are more directly interested, to train up a Family Tree from the roots here inserted."
John Christopher Schwab (1865-1916), while Librarian at Yale, did "train up a Family Tree" of the Muhlenbergs. This he did in two ways. He privately printed "The Muhlenberg Album" in 1910, which contains a brief history of Rev. Muhlenberg, his wife, their children and their grandchildren, and photographs of old family portraits, of family documents and artifacts and of places with which they were associated.
Then he drew up, with Rev. Muhlenberg and Anna Maria at the hub, a genealogical wheel with concentric circles, each representing a generation, which includes all of their descendants through John Christopher Schwab's generation and the subsequent one which included my father, Henry Baldwin Schwab.
In 1985, the Weiser Family Association held a celebration at the Conrad Weiser Park at Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, of the 275th anniversary of the arrival of the Weisers in America and the 225th anniversary of the death of Conrad Weiser. I met on that occasion John D. S. Muhlenberg and his sister Caroline Muhlenberg Hufford (who happens to be a Wellesley College classmate of Pat). Through a close examination of John Christopher Schwab's genealogical wheel, I was able to determine that we were cousins five generations removed! Their descent was from Rev. Muhlenberg's son Gotthilf Heinrich Ernest Muhlenberg, and my descent being through daughter Margaretta Henrietta Muhlenberg Kunze.
Caroline is an accomplished sculptor. Some years ago, she created a bust of Rev. Muhlenberg's son, Peter, which which stands in a mini-park at a street intersection in Washington, D. C. Clustered around the head are three plaques defining his careers as preacher, soldier and politician.
In the summer of 1988, a bronze bust of Peter, also sculpted by Caroline, was unveiled at Woodstock, Virginia, in front of the 1795 Shenandoah County Courthouse, a few hundred feet north of the site of Peter s church, around which the main street of the town now splits. This tribute to Peter was organized by the Narrow Passage Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the ceremony was attended by the DAR's national President General. Retired Lutheran minister, Dr. William Eisenberg, gave a learned account of Peter's accomplishments, which extended far beyond the 3 1/2 years he spent serving the descendants of the 16 German families who came to the area in the 1730s and his other German and English parishioners in four counties of Virginia and one in West Virginia. More about Peter will appear in the next chapter.
Only by the reading of the "Life and Times of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg", or the perusal of his voluminous Journals (three volumes of over 700 pages each, translated by T. G. Tappert and J. W. Dober- stein and published between 1942 and 1958 by the Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium [which was founded by Muhlenberg back in the 1740s] and The Muhlenberg Press of Philadelphia) can one get a full appreciation of the mind-set of this extraordinary individual.
I am in awe of his complete commitment to his Saviour and his willingness to respond to every demand on his physical, mental and emotional resources. He was called on by day and by night to saddle up or trudge on foot in any weather to give solace to the dying. Since infant and adult mortality was high in those days, he was continually called on to lead funeral processions from the home to the church and to deliver comforting remarks. His journals have frequent reference to the difficulties he experienced on is travels to the numerous congregations he attempted to serve.
"In the evening I rode on towards New Hanover on a new horse. The roads were very deep and I hardly got as far as the rough, stony hills when dark night overtook me. My horse lost the way and got stuck between the marsh and the rocks. I dismounted and tried to find the road myself, but several times I fell into a deep bog and swamp up to my waist. With all this exertion I became so heated that the sweat came through my triple-thick winter clothes. I could not remain sitting there because of the cold, raw weather, nor could I light a fire, or I would have remained in the woods for the night."
When it rained on such journeys he remained soaking wet until he arrived at his destination.
Several congregations fell into factional disputes, causing Muhlenberg much distress. As an example of his humility and self-sacrificing nature, when the Philadelphia congregation of St. Michael's Church split into contentious groups either for Pastor Handschuh or against his conduct as Rector, Muhlenberg was willing to, and did, sell his home in Trappe in 1761 and move to Philadelphia to join Handschuh's ministry so that the congregations would then live in harmony.
In this new land, he was on his own resources. There were too few pastors for the many small communities of German Lutherans and he exhausted himself trying to give even occasional assistance to the parishes that he feared would otherwise fall into the clutches of the Moravians or succumb to the ministrations of unqualified quack preachers. He confided to his journal as early as 1748 that he was worn out, but as he became widely known and respected (or reviled by some), the calls on his time and energy only increased and he never had the luxury of a vacation. He was often beset:
"Pennsylvania will sorely miss me when I die, for I am almost like a privy to which all those with loose bowels come running from all directions to relieve themselves, or like a target at which every loafer takes a shot to pass the time away and win a prize. I am in the same fix as a bird that the children have caught. They squeeze and roll it around until it is dead and then expect it to sing when it no longer has any breath."
In the reading of his Journals, I am more drawn to his observations on his life and times than to his ecclesiastical activities. One day in 1747, when riding with his father-in-law, Conrad Weiser, from Tulpehocken to Trappe, Muhlenberg muses:
"We met on the road a 'regulus' or Indian king or chief of a savage nation. He had with him a grown son and son-in-law on horseback and was desirous of conferring with Mr. Weiser concerning certain land and war affairs. When one looks at these poor people, one deplores their blindness and darkness; and when they look at us, they think we are to be deplored, which is true, in so far as we have the light and for the most part do not walk in the light, but love darkness more than the light."
In reporting on a trip in 1751, Muhlenberg illuminates one of the many facets of Conrad Weiser's services to the Penn family:
"Pastors Brunnholtz and Hartwich came to Trappe. We set out together and traveled 30 miles to the newly founded city of Reading where we had a conversation with Magister Wagner and conducted divine service with the residents. My father-in-law had laid out a convenient lot in this city for an Evangelical Lutheran church, since he had been in trusted with the direction over the laying out of the city by the Proprieteur."
"A magnificent Lutheran church stands today on this property and in its chapel under the nave is a mural picturing early Reading with the courthouse and Weiser's trading post in the center."
In 1753, the death of a member of his congregation at New Hanover caused Muhlenberg to reflect:
"The Lord preserveth the simple. There are people here who imagine that they speak with the tongues of men and of angels, that they have the gift of prophecy, that they understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and that they have the faith to perform miracles. But if one inquires more deeply after the fruits, one gets a poor and uncertain response, as if the faith which works through love were altogether wanting. On the other hand, there are also people here who hold simply to the Word of God and the Holy Sacraments, who live decently and in their callings, who express their love at the right time and speak but few words. The above- mentioned deceased brother was a man of the latter type."
In the same year he wrote:
"When I first arrived in this land, still had warm European clothes, and was younger than I am now, I preached in barns or transparent wooden churches during the cold winters. The poor people assembled from miles around. They were cold and wet and wore poor thin clothes. When I preached rather long, keeping warm as a result of my earnest preaching, I noticed that the people who sat still became increasingly restless. I was depressed and supposed that they had no real hunger for the Word of God, until I had the opportunity to put myself in the position of an auditor and listen to the preaching of one or another of my colleagues."
In 1760, a conference of preachers took place at his house:
"The evening was devoted, with blessing, partly to the singing and playing of spiritual hymns and psalms, partly to conversation concerning the inner life of our congregations. But the time was so short and insufficient that, to our astonishment, it was three or four hours after midnight before we fell asleep and our bodies secured the rest that was their due. 0 how unspeakable must be the satisfaction and pleasure which the spirits of perfected saints derive from their conversation and occupations, if the poor souls on this side of eternity, who have been barely awakened from the sleep of death, who have tasted scarcely a drop of the justifying and sanctifying grace obtained by the great Mediator's blood, who are still like pilgrims wandering through a vale of tears burdened by mortal bodies in earthly tabernacles… If such persons can find so much pleasure in relatively harmonious conversation on earth, what must it be in heaven!"
Muhlenberg sent his three boys to Germany in April of 1763 to be educated. Peter, the oldest, was 17; Frederick 15; Henry Ernest only 10. Some message from abroad must have given father the understanding that Peter was not taking well to study, so he wrote the following postscript to his friend Ziegenhagen some six months later:
Unfortunately my boy Peter enjoyed very little care and supervision from me, owing to the distractions of my pastoral duties, but on the other hand, his parents did not set him a bad example; rather he had many an admonition. His chief fault and evil bent was toward hunting and fishing. If the Reverend Fathers observe the slightest evidence of that kind of thing, I humbly beg you to put him in some place where there are disciplined soldiers, under the name of Peter Weiser, before he causes any more trouble and scandal. There he can obey the sound of the drum if he will not follow the Spirit of God. My prayers will follow him! If only his soul is saved, no matter what estate he is in, I shall be content. I know full well what Satan is planning against me and mine."
Fourteen years later, the Continental Congress elevated Peter to the rank of Brigadier General!
There are several more quotes that I would love to include here, but this chapter is already too long. The Preface of William J. Mann's book sums up the impact of Muhlenberg's lifetime labors:
"Henry Melchior Muhlenberg needs no biographer to keep him in most revered and loving remembrance in the Lutheran Church of this country. His name is so closely connected with the very genesis of the Lutheran Church here, with the first attempts at its organization, and with the first and successful missionary labors among the many dispersed German Lutherans from Maryland to the shores of the Upper Hudson, and, in fact, far beyond these limits that it cannot fall into oblivion."
After 46 years of leadership of the American Lutheran church, he died peacefully in 1787 at his home at Trappe after reciting the last verses of Paul Gerhard's hymn:
"Befiel du deine Wege":
"Haste, Lord to end our sorrow,
Our feeble hands support;
Each day and each tomorrow
Be Thou our soul's resort.
May we to Thy great mercy
Till death commended be,
Then shall our earthly footsteps
Us safely lead to thee."
Anna Maria Weiser Muhlenberg lived through times of dramatic change and turmoil. As a child she lived on the frontier at Tulpehocken where friendly Indian delegates would camp on her father's property on their way to conferences in Philadelphia. As a young matron she lived at Trappe with her growing brood of children and a husband forever on the road or through the forest ministering to his far-flung congregations. In 1761 she moved to Philadelphia and reared her family there until 1776 when non-political neutrals were no longer safe. Patriotic feelings ran high in the wake of Patrick Henry's inflammatory speeches and the Declaration of Independence by the Constitutional Congress.
Anna Maria and her husband and their ten year old daughter Sally then moved back to Trappe. Here they were still close to family. Son-in-law Rev. Charles Schultze was now ministering to congregations in the Tulpehocken area (near Stouchberg); son Frederick and family, newly returned from the Swamp Church in New York ahead of the British occupation, settled in out lying New Hanover; Rev. Henry Ernest Muhlenberg and his brother-in-law Rev. John Christopher Kunze were assistant ministers at the Philadelphia churches.
Son Peter had fled from Germany after three years of apprenticeship to an unscrupulous, supposedly honorable and Christian druggist. Back home, he was tutored by Provost Wrangel of the Swedish Lutherans in the foundations of theoretical and practical religion and soon was helping his father to serve the many local congregations that had no regular rector. He was very well received and in 1771 he was called to minister to a congregation, largely German Lutheran, at Woodstock, Virginia. Under the rules of the Province of Virginia, this required ordination in the Anglican Church by a bishop of the Church of England, so Peter was able to take up his post only after a trip to England in the spring of 1772. He became highly regarded by the German and English residents of the Shenandoah valley area and beyond and soon found himself involved in politics. In 1774, after the dumping of tea into Boston harbor had dramatized the issue of "taxation without representation", the free holders of Woodstock met, and with Muhlenberg as moderator of a committee, drew up resolutions that led to the formation of a Committee of Correspondence with Peter as chairman. He was then elected a representative of Dunmore County to the Virginia Convention in Williamsburg, held in August of 1774. In March of 1775, as chairman of the Dunmore County Committee of Correspondence and Safety, he attended the Convention at Richmond at which Patrick Henry delivered his "Give me liberty or death" oration.
In January of 1776, he accepted appointment as a colonel by the Virginia Convention at Williamsburg and left his pulpit in dramatic fashion, saying (as recorded later by his great-nephew):
"…in the language of Holy Writ, there is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away; there is a time to fight, and that time has now come!"
There are arguments among historians whether Peter flung off his clerical robe at the end of his sermon and appeared resplendent in his military uniform, or whether he changed garments in the sacristy. We will never know his exact words from the pulpit, but I think it of interest to quote the actual language of Holy Writ - Ecclesiastes 3, 1-8:
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace."
Peter recruited and trained a regiment from his congregation and from other Germans in the valley. In February of 1777, in recognition of the effective force he had brought together and trained, the thirty year old Peter was advanced to the rank of brigadier general and joined General Washington in the attempt to stop the British from their advance on Philadelphia. The thunder of the Battle of Brandywine which ensued, and in which he took a prominent part, was close enough to be heard by his father at Trappe. The troops of his 8th Virginia Regiment and his military counsel continued to be valuable help to Washingon in many later battles and at the final siege of Yorktown.
After Cornwallis' surrender, Peter was asked to return to his church in Woodstock, where his family had continued to live during the war. He declined, saying:
"It would never do, to mount the parson after the soldier."
For a couple of years he continued in military service, recruiting, training and equipping troops that might be needed if the British were to resume hostilities. He retired as a Major General in November of 1783 and moved back to Pennsylvania where he became much in demand as a politician, first as vice president of Pennsylvania (the aged Ben Franklin being president), then as a representative to the first national House of Representatives.
As early as 1778, in a letter to Peter from Patrick Henry (that Rev. Muhlenberg copied into his journal) there is reference to the idea of:
"a tract of land about the Falls of Ohio that might be made to answer the purpose I wish for the Officers and Soldiers [after the war]"
The award of such land to Peter and others was in fact made in 1783. Among the Virginia Bounty Land Warrants for that year is one for the survey of 11,662 acres of land:
"due unto the said Peter Muhlenberg, in consideration for his services for seven years as a Brigadier General in the Virginia Continental line".
Peter was anxious to see this land and set off in February of 1784 for the Falls of the Ohio (today's Louisville) via Harris's Ferry (today's Harrisburg) and the Juniata to Fort Pitt (today's Pittsburgh) and thence by boat to Louisville, which at that time consisted of a fort, a courthouse, a jail and seven huts. Peter wrote back to Baron von Steuben, Patrick Henry and others that:
"From the prospects of the lands in the vicinity of this town, and its situation, it promises fair to become a place of great importance."
The only trouble was that the lands could not be surveyed. Virginia did not own the land. It belonged to the Shawnee Indians, who asked how it could be that the Americans had made peace with the "Man beyond the Great Water" (the British) but had made no treaty with the Indians - and if the Virginians want land, there would be broken heads if they choose to seize it, or a high price if they choose to buy it. Chief Cornstalk of the Shawnees, however, had a conciliatory and ingenious alternative to propose:
"Send your young warriors to our nations, and let them fetch our young squaws, and then our young warriors will come and fetch your young squaws; and soon everything will be Big Knife."
Peter returned in June and made a report to Congress. Virginia was directed by the Committee of the States not to permit settlement of lands westward of the Ohio pending a general treaty with the Indians. No more was ever heard of Peter's dream of an estate in the west!
Brothers Frederick and Henry, who had returned from Halle in 1770 with good academic and religious training, were immediately ordained and began pastoral work. In 1773, Frederick was called to the Swamp Church (Christ Church) in New York City and served there for three years. Back in Philadelphia, as a prominent member of the populous German Lutheran community, Frederick came to the attention of the Pennsylvania Assembly. His election as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress brought an end to his ministerial career, to the great distress of his father. Frederick continued successfully in politics and joined his brother in the new nation's House of Representatives, in which he was elected Speaker in the first and third Congresses.
Frederick's departure from the ministry caused mother Anna Maria Weiser Muhlenburg to pen the following note to her daughter Betsy:
"Last week Frederick went into the city. God knows what it will come to or how it will turn out. I had rather have seen him in the Swamp or at New Hanover than this way [i.e., in politics] in Philadelphia. The example of David occurs to me: as long as he looked after the asses of his brothers he had no trouble and was abel to rend lions but when he came before the great lords of this world he had to play music and often came into mortal danger and had to hide himself."
Brother Henry Ernest remained in the ministry at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as rector of Holy Trinity Church from 1780 to his death in 1815. He developed an intense interest in botany and gained an international reputation in this field - being called by some "the Linnaeus of our country". In 1787 he was appointed Principal at the founding of "The German High School or Franklin College in Lancaster", the forerunner of today's Franklin & Marshall College. His gray stone home in downtown Lancaster still stands just a few doors away from the large Lutheran church, successor to the one dedicated by father Muhlenberg on the site in the 1780s.
Henry Melchior Muhlenburg, as mentioned earlier, died in 1787. His wife, Anna Maria, who was indicated to be sickly as early as 1774, lived on to 1802.
For the family descent from Henry Melchior Muhlenberg see Weiser Descent at end of Ch. VIII
When Peter and Frederick Muhlenberg returned home in 1770 from their six years of studies in Germany, they were accompanied by a young Lutheran minister. John Christopher Kunze (1744-1807) was born in Artern, Germany, but soon moved to Rosleben where his father kept an inn and country store. After his early education, he studied theology for three years at Leipzig and then taught at the classical school at Klosterbergen. The Lutheran Fathers at Halle (where the Muhlenberg boys had been studying) ordained him and gave him a call to America as third assistant at Rev. Muhlenberg's Philadelphia congregations.
For his first few months in Philadelphia, he lived with the Muhlenbergs and, less than a year after his arrival, married their 19 year old daughter Margaretta Henrietta (Peggy), (1751-1831).
Despite all the space devoted to the Muhlenberg brothers in the previous chapter, they are only my several great-uncles, while sister Peggy and her husband are my several great-grandparents.
Kunze was an extraordinary scholar. He had extensive knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and Italian literature, and was a student also of medicine, astronomy and numismatics. He recognized the need in America to provide for the education of Lutheran ministers who could speak both German and English. To this end, he established a theological seminary in Philadelphia which succeeded briefly until cut short by the Revolution. In 1780, he held the post of professor at the University of Pennsylvania, giving instruction in German and the oriental languages and literature. The University conferred on him the degree of MA in 1780 and of DD in 1783.
In January 1780, his father-in-law inserted into his journal an announcement from the previous day's newspaper:
"Philadelphia: At a meeting of the American Philosophical Society the 21 Inst: the following Gentlemen were chosen Members viz: 1) His Excellency George Washington, Esq. 4) His Excellency Thomas Jefferson, Esq. 5) His Excellency John Jay, Esq. 7) Honorable John Adams, Esq. 14) Baron de Steuben. 17) the Rev. John C. Kuntze, Rector of the German Lutheran Congregation, Philadelphia. 18) the Rev. Mr. James Madison."
I have omitted several lesser known names from this impressive list of membership. Kunze, the only parson on the list, was undoubtedly included because of his reputation for scholarship and his prominent presence in the city through those perilous times.
John Christopher and Peggy continued to live and work in Philadelphia through the years of the Revolution. When father Muhlenberg moved back to Trappe from Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, St. Michael's and Zion were then in the care of son Henry Ernest Muhlenberg as second rector and of Kunze as third rector. In 1777, Henry Ernest also moved with his family to Trappe, leaving Kunze in sole charge.
When the British left Philadelphia after their occupation of the city, the church vestry in 1779 passed a resolution declaring the rectorship to be vacant and directing the election of a rector. Rev. Kunze was then unanimously elected.
Great agitation followed. Henry Ernest, who had retained his title of assistant rector although not active in Philadelphia at this time, returned to town, delivered a blistering farewell sermon and resigned his position. He and his brothers and a part of the congregation felt that the vestry had no right to declare the rectorship vacant, because father Muhlenburg had retained the title of rector, a seat on the vestry and a small stipend when he left Philadelphia in 1776.
Kunze had said that he would accept the rector ship only if his father-in-law approved, but when the resolution was passed, there was no such contingency mentioned. Kunze apologized. The vestry then invited father Muhlenberg to preach - which he did without any reference to the controversy. At the subsequent vestry meeting, however, he made it clear that his public reputation would be injured if it were to stand that he had been deposed from office and another elected in his stead. The vestry thereupon withdrew the resolution, accepted Muhlenberg's proffered resignation, passed further resolutions expressing their esteem for him, and reelected Kunze rector.
Father Muhlenberg, typically, bore no grudge as a result of these proceedings, but the brothers-in-law remained cool. About this same time, Kunze had written a letter to father-in-law urging him never to give Frederick permission to leave the ministry – that if he could not live by the church, it only meant that he could not get rich in it! A couple of years later Kunze went as far as to bring charges before the praeses of the synod against Frederick for use of abusive language.
Perhaps in part because of the family dissension, when Kunze received a call in 1784 to the same Christ Church in New York of which Frederick Muhlenberg had been rector before the Revolution, the Kunzes moved to New York. By 1789, filial warmth must have returned, because we find both Frederick and Peter taking up residence in the Kunze's home in New York while they attended the United States Congress in New York's Old City Hall, still undergoing renovation and renamed Federal Hall.
A daughter, Eliza Catherine, was born to the Kunzes in 1776 and a son, Charles Henry in 1781. Eliza's story will be in the next chapter. Three more children were born between 1785 and 1791 in New York.
Although the difficulty of this brilliant man with English pronunciation caused him to abandon his efforts to preach in English, Kunze foresaw that Lutheranism had to be represented by English speaking pastors and congregations in this country or it would die out. He helped to organize the New York Lutheran Ministerium and was its first presiding officer. This was the second in the United States after the Philadelphia synod, which had been founded and led for many years, by Rev. Muhlenberg.
In 1795 Kunze compiled "A Hymn and Prayer Book for the use of such Lutheran churches as use the English language" - basically a translation of German texts and hymns - the first English Lutheran hymn book to be published in the United States. Other published works included a "Concise History of the Lutheran Church", "Catechism and Liturgy", a small volume of poetry entitled "Something for the Understanding and the Heart", and "A table of a new construction for calculating the great eclipse, expected to happen on the 16th of June, 1806."
He was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages at Columbia College, but neither students nor stipend were forthcoming. He remained a trustee of the college until his death.
John Christopher Kunze died in 1807 at age 63 while still active rector of Christ Church. Margaretta Henrietta continued to live in New York where daughters Eliza, Anna and Catharine had married and settled. She died in 1831.
For the family descent from John Christopher Kunze see Weiser Descent at end of Ch. VIII
In Germany in the 1700s and later, a young man entering business in a mercantile office usually agreed to a six year apprenticeship as a clerk. One such was Caspar Meier (1774-1839) who, beginning at age 16, clerked at the office of Daniel Tideman in Bremen from 1790 to 1796. Almost immediately after completion of this service, he sailed for New York, arriving on September 7, 1796.
We have no record of his motives for leaving his ancestral home to seek his fortune in an unfamiliar land. He belonged on both his father's and his mother's sides to well-placed families of Senators and Burgomasters. The record of his ancestry (and of his descendants to 1900) going back seven generations on his father's side and four generations on his mother's side (the Smidts) is detailed in printed genealogies entitled "Geschichte (history) der Sanders-Meier'schen Familienstiftung (family foundation) und Stammtafeln (genealogical table) der Meier'schen Familie" and "Urkunden (record) der Sanders-Meier'schen Familienstiftung". These were printed in Bremen. The most recent one, dated 1911, includes my father.
We do have Meier's impressions on arriving in America:
"Here I was as if dropped from the skies, not knowing a single person, and a strange country did not seem to me as pleasant as I had imagined; but I was here and had to make the best of it. At last I succeeded in obtaining a situation with Peppin & Satterthwaite, whose office I entered on October 10, 1796. Now, as I was no longer idle, I liked it better here."
The next year he received from friends in Bremen some consignment goods. He left his employment to market these goods and then returned to Bremen with the proceeds. In 1798, in a 135-day voyage reminiscent of the long and perilous crossings of the Atlan tic experienced in earlier generations by the Weisers and by Muhlenberg, Meier returned to New York with more goods to establish his own business. Fortunately, the extended time at sea had caused him to miss a disastrous yellow fever epidemic in the city.
He hired a store in Gouverneur Lane and started a private account book listing inventory consisting of German linens, bags, candles, hats, caps, etc. and 493 boxes of claret, valued at a total of $7252.20. Funds to purchase this merchandise came from the proceeds of his previous trip and from $4500 borrowed from Bremen relatives.
In 1799, his younger brother, Hermann Henrich, joined him in New York and worked there until 1805, when he left to open his own firm in Bremen. Before they parted, the brothers executed an agreement between them that is a testament to their mutual affection and trust. In part it said that any business done by either party for his own account between Europe and America shall be considered as for joint account and that:
"such business for joint account must be governed by circumstances and no particular rules can be laid down for it; it is therefore agreed that, as unlimited confidence is to take place, each of the parties shall consent to any shipments made by the other party for joint account unless they are of a hazardous nature, it being expected and understood that neither of them would enter into any business which would, reasonably expected, not meet the approbation of the other party."
This amicable mutual understanding continued under successive agreements between the partnerships without interruption for sixty years - long after the deaths of the founders.
In 1821, Hermann Henrich Meier died in Bremen and his brother Caspar spent part of that year abroad.
H. H. Meier & Co. in Bremen had prospered under its founder's leadership and Caspar Meier wanted to continue his strong relationship with the firm and to assure the eventual succession in their father's firm of his brother's sons, Diedrich August and Hermann Henrich, then only 16 and 13 years old.
Foreign trade was difficult in the early years of the 1800s. The Napoleonic wars brought on embargoes and blockades which interrupted commerce, and even neutral property was not safe from arbitrary seizure on the high seas. Then the War of 1812 again endangered shipping. Not until the 1820s was Caspar Meier able to expand his business significantly. He then established correspondents in Holland, England, France, Spain, Sweden, the West Indies and various parts of the United States.
An importing and exporting merchant in those times could handle any article coming to or going from a port. From Germany, the firm imported steel for scythemakers, Swedish steel for blacksmiths, glass plates for makers of looking-glasses and daguerreotypes, dry goods, claret wine, etc. From other countries, wool, hides, brandy, etc. were imported. Ex ports from the United States and elsewhere, which were largely directed to H. H. Meier & Co. in Bremen, included cotton, hemp, tea, ivory, tobacco, and sugar.
In 1822, the first of several sailing ships began operating between Bremen and New York for the joint account of the two firms. An agreement provided that the ships would be owned by the Bremen partnership and sail under the Bremen flag, but they were to be treated as joint property, with profits and losses to be equally divided. By the 1830s, several large ships had been built and regular monthly sailings were maintained across the Atlantic carrying European emigrants and other passengers as well as company cargo.
It is possible that Meier had some acquaintance with the English language when he returned to America in 1798, but it was natural for him to seek out the German speaking community in New York (then a city of slightly over 30,000 population). He met the Kunze family shortly after his arrival. As pastor of the Lutheran's Christ Church, Reverend Kunze was a prominent citizen.
Living with John Christopher Kunze and his wife Margaretta Henrietta, was their daughter Eliza Catherine. She had been born in Philadelphia on October 4, 1776, a time when that city was in a ferment following upon the Declaration of Independence, when the British were about to occupy the town and when Kunze was soon to be the only pastor serving the Lutherans in the city. In May of 1801, Eliza Catharine and Caspar Meier were married in a ceremony conducted by her father and attended by uncle Henry Ernest Muhlenberg of Lancaster, Pa., and other family.
In 1807, the Meiers purchased five acres of land on the east bank of the Hudson River about eight miles from the company office in lower Manhattan and built a home there the following year. John Christopher Schwab, in his monograph "The Revolutionary History of Fort Number Eight" tells us that this property on the Bloomingdale Road (in the vicinity of Grant's Tomb and Riverside Drive) had been the site of one of the last skirmishes between General Washington and the British in 1776 before the Revolutionary army soon had to abandon New York when Fort Washington (now now the site of the Fort Tryon Park museum) was lost.
After a few years as only a summer residence, the Bloomingdale house became in 1812 their year-round home. As was not unusual in those days, three of their first five children had died in infancy. John Diedrich and Henriette Margaretta (from whom we are descended) survived. Then, in 1814 and 1816, Eliza gave birth to daughters Eliza and Mary. As his family increased and his business fortunes flourished, Meier doubled the size of his home and laid out terraces, gardens, orchards and walks through the woods to the river. He was greatly attached to his home and was seldom away from it except for his daily rides to his office.
Son John Diedrich left his studies at Columbia College at age 19 to begin his business career at H. H. Meier & Co. in Bremen. After four years, he returned to New York to work with his father, who took him into partnership in 1832. Two years later this only son, of whom his parents were justly proud, died of smallpox at the age of 26. As if they had not already sufficiently suffered losses, Caspar and Eliza endured the death in 1831 of 17 year old Eliza, and, in 1836, the death of their married daughter, Henriette Margaretta, who left her husband, Lawrence Henry von Post (then Caspar Meier's partner), with five small children.
Caspar Meier's health was weakened by typhus in 1838 and he died in February 1839. Eliza Catherine had become blind shortly before the death of her husband but continued to live at Bloomingdale. Here she was close to her surviving daughter Emily, who had married a New York physician, Dr. Albert Smith, and to her daughter Mary, who had married James Punnett, President of the Bank of America. She was also frequently visited by her grandson Hermann von Post when he returned to New York in 1849.
By the time Eliza died in 1863, Hermann recalls that the Bloomingdale Road neighbourhood had greatly changed. The old residents had moved away and many of the old houses had become taverns serving the drivers of fast trotters who used the road as a race-course.
For the family descent from Caspar Meier see Weiser Descent at end of Ch. VIII
In the office of H. H. Meier in Bremen there was a young clerk, Lawrence Henry von Post (1800-1839). This young man was a descendant of an eminent merchant of Bremen, Simon Post (1663-1730), to whom in 1719 the German Emperor, Carl VI, issued a patent of nobility entitling the family to the use of the prefix "von". Simon's only child, Hermann, became a lawyer and, after traveling widely, worked so diligently in studying and accumulating documents about the city of Bremen that the state appointed him "Archivarius". Hermann's only child, Simon Hermann, also became a lawyer, assisted his father in his work and succeeded him in the state office for forty years.
The single child born to Simon Hermann and his wife Margarethe Schumacher was also named Simon Hermann and also became a lawyer. This second Simon Hermann von Post (1764-1813) and his wife Metta von dem Busch (1770-1820) produced sons Lawrence, Simon and Hermann, and daughters Amalie and Betty. As will appear later, our ancestor Lawrence was fortunate to have this large family.
During his visit to Bremen in 1822, Caspar Meier met Lawrence von Post and invited him to come to New York. He was then twenty-two years of age and had worked in the Bremen office since the age of 14. He sailed for America on the brig "Constitution", the first of the packets owned by the Meiers and designed to carry goods between Bremen and New York.
By 1826, after four years in New York, von Post had sufficiently impressed Meier to be made a partner and to be sent abroad on a trip to represent the company's interests.
The following year, 1827, he married Caspar Meier's daughter, Henriette Margaretta. Young von Post did not have capital of his own and in the first years of his marriage his share of the partnership was small due to poor business. As a result, the couple spent the first summer at the Bloomingdale Road home of the bride's parents and then in rented quarters for several years, except for a year at Bloomingdale when the Meiers were abroad in 1832-1833. By the time the von Posts bought a house of their own in 1835, their five children had already been born. Hermann Caspar, the oldest, was eight years old; he was followed by sisters Eliza Catherine, Henriette Margarethe, Amalie Elisabeth Clementine and Emily Maria.
In the summmer of the next year, Henriette Margaretta 's health began to fail and she died in November of 1836. Lawrence then asked his two unmarried sisters Amalie and Betty, then living in Bremen, to come to America to help him care for his children. Three years later, when not well, he left his children in the care of the sisters and sailed on business to Bremen, and to the baths of Ems for his health. Upon his return, he was advised to winter in the West In dies. Weakened by a stormy voyage south, he died a few days after reaching Havana, Cuba, in December of 1839.
Having a premonition of the fatal nature of his illness, von Post had left a letter of instruction for his sisters. He directed that all of the children, then ranging from 11 down to 4, be taken to Bremen, where his sisters would be home, where his brothers Simon and Gustav lived and where better educational facilities were available for the orphans.
In his reminiscences in the Oelrichs & Co. centennial book some sixty years later, Hermann Caspar von Post (1828-1913), refers to the voyage abroad with his sisters, to his attendance at the Handelsschule in Bremen and to his confirmation in the Lutheran Church. About his work as junior clerk, beginning at age 16, at H. H. Meier & Co. in Bremen, he writes:
"I had to be in the office the first in the morning to arrange the papers on the desks and mend the pens of the principals, who, like most of us, wrote with quills. In the evening I was the last to leave and had to enjoy my own company for some time after everyone else had gone, for it was a rule that the youngest clerk should remain on guard until 9 P.M. This rule and that of requiring him also to spend the Sunday forenoons in the office originated, according to office tradition, at a remote period when it was said to have happened that an American captain, arriving at an unusual hour with the intention of consigning his vessel to the firm, had found the office closed and consequently addressed himself to a rival concern.
Adherence to precedent was the rule of the office and everything was done in a certain invariable way; the strictness of discipline was not al ways appreciated by the clerks, but the system was of value to them, and I am indebted to the thoroughess of the education I received and to the kindly interest which my principals took in me, for an excellent foundation to my acquirements as a merchant.
Much of the letter writing in German and English was given to me. There were no copying presses in those days; not only had every letter to be copied by hand into the letter book, but trans-Atlantic correspondence was frequently triplicated, sometimes even quadruplicated, in order that advantage might be taken of opportunities by fast sailing vessels from various ports, chief among which were the New York packets from Liverpool and Havre."
In 1849, Hermann von Post was invited to join Caspar Meier's firm in New York, which, after the deaths of Caspar Meier and of Lawrence Henry von Post, took the name of the then principals, Oelrichs & Kruger.
Shortly thereafter, G. W. Kruger left the partnership and Edwin A. Oelrichs, the surviving partner, invited Hermann into partnership. From this time in 1852, Hermann von Post was to be a central figure in the firm. The importation of wool and its distribution became an important and profitable part of the business in the 1860s. By the 1870s, agents were purchasing in Brazil, Australia, South Africa and Russia.
Another fortuitous development for the firm arose out of the acquisition of the agency for the North German Lloyd steamship company of Bremen. To von Post belongs the credit for accepting this opportunity and for placing Gustav Schwab in charge of it.
Hermann Caspar von Post lived through the years of greatest growth and success of Oelrichs & Co. He had relinquished active participation in the business by 1880 but continued to be a key figure as senior partner, assuring continuity of leadership in the firm after the deaths of Gustav Schwab in 1888 and of the younger partners Hermann Caspar Schwab and Benjamin Schwab in 1898 and 1900. He died at the age of 85 in 1913.
He and his wife, Jane Whitlock (1830-1895), had no children of their own but took great pleasure in frequent visits with the large Gustav Schwab family at Fort Number Eight. After Jane Whitlock's death, Gustav Schwab's oldest daughter, Henrietta Margaretta (1854-1920), lived with Hermann at his house at 32 West 57th St. This house was sold by his executors in 1914 for $190,000 - part of an estate amounting to the large amount for that time of $1,981,466.
On December 31, 1870, Hermann von Post had entered in the private books of Oelrichs & Co. a transfer of $100,000 from his capital account to a new trust account for the benefit of the children of his sister Eliza and her husband Gustav. In 1914, as Hermann's affairs were being settled after his death, this account, not part of his estate, had a balance of $323,166.21. The fund remained in the care of the company until it ceased business operations in the mid 1920s. Gustav Schwab, IV, (1879-1945), third generation of this name to be a partner of the firm, and an Executor of von Post's will, was prudent custodian of the Children's Fund and made the final distribution a number of years later.
I wish I knew more about that fund, which was entitled "Children of Cathe Elizab. Schwab". There were ten children, seven grandchildren and 21 great grandchildren. It is a mystery to me how the fine sum of $10,000 came to me from this fund in the mid 1930s just in time to enable me to think of attending a first class university. I am eternally grateful to old Herman Caspar von Post and wish he could know what a difference his 1870 action made to my life three generations later.
As mentioned in Chapter VI, Hermann von Post's sister Eliza Catherine married Gustav Friedrich Schwab in 1850. The young couple immediately left for Germany to meet the bride's three younger American-born sisters, Henriette (19), Clementine (17) and Emily (15), who were still in the care of aunts and uncles in Bremen, and to meet the groom's family in Stuttgart.
Forty seven years later, Henriette wrote "Mein Leben, fur ihre lieben Enkelkinder aufgeschrieben", an account of her life for her beloved grandchildren. The following quotations are from my translation from the German:
"My sister Eliza was married in May 1850 to Gustav Schwab who was a merchant in New York, and who first came from Stuttgart. At that time, his father, your great grandfather, the poet Gustav Schwab, was living, and my brother and sister, who after their wedding took a trip to Europe, took me with them from Bremen to Stuttgart where they visited his parents for the first time. This was for me not only a beautiful, extremely interesting time, but also important for my whole future life, because here I met your beloved grandfather, Christoph Schwab, with whom I should later become so happy. He was at that time private tutor for Count Prokesh von Osten in Berlin and had earlier, in his house in Vienna and Athens, educated his two sons. [The Count had been ambassador in those cities.] He came with these two to Stuttgart to greet his sister and brother from New York, and it was a great joy to their father to have both of his sons with him at the same time "from the new and from the old World", as he was accustomed to say, and to let them both tell of their lives in America and Greece. It was a beautiful conclusion to his life that the ending should come soon after this, for shortly after this time he died very suddenly on the 4th of November, 1850, at 58 years of age."
The reader will recall references to father Gustav Benjamin Schwab, the poet and professor, in Chapter V. Henriette's story continues with this brief reference to an important event in her life:
"My wedding was on October 8, 1852, and soon after we settled in Stuttgart where your beloved grand father had been teacher at the Katherine Institute (Katherinenstift). His wife [Sophie Gmelin Schwab (1795-1865)] became a true and beloved mother to me and in Stuttgart I quickly felt happy and at home."
What is not explicit is that this marriage joined Gustav Friedrich Schwab's brother, Christoph Theodor Schwab, with Eliza von Post's sister, Henriette von Post. One couple, Gustav and Eliza, lived in the "new world" while Christoph and Henriette continued to live in the "old world". Henriette adds:
"We had frequent visitors from America and my brother and sister [Gustav and Eliza] a couple of times made Stuttgart their home for one or two years. In this way, and while we had with us three of his sons for a long time, an intimate and never loosened bond was tied."
These three Schwab sons were Gustav Heinrich, Hermann Caspar (my grandfather), and Henry Lawrence, whose parents considered a German education to be desirable for their sons who might enter the family business.
Living in Stuttgart in southern Germany, Christoph Theodor and his family were not involved in the Prussian war with Austria in 1866. The troops of the South German States supported Prussia in the war with France in 1870, but the fighting took place on French soil and ended quickly with Prussian victory.
In 1871, Prince Otto von Bismarck led the North German Confederation and the Southern German States into the establishment of a national state under Prussian King William I as German Emperor. Upon William's death in 1888, he was succeeded by his son William II (best known to us as Kaiser Wilhelm) who ruled until he was deposed in 1918 at the end of World War I.
The four children of Christoph and Henriette Schwab, Gustav H., Emilie, Sophie and Clementine) grew up and lived most of their lives in the turbulent but peaceful years before the World Wars, when Germany was enjoying prosperity and rapid industrial development. When the wars came in 1914 and again in 1940, the toll in human lives in Germany, as elsewhere, is sobering. Gustav H.'s sons Ludwig and Richard were killed in 1915 and 1916; son Gustav F. rejoined the army in the second war at age 60 and was killed in 1944; son Hermann, then in his 50s, was imprisoned in Russia for several years in the second war. Clementine's son Albert was killed in 1915. Emilie's grandsons Hans and Gottfried Esenwein were killed in 1941 and 1944.
Eberhard Weitbrecht, husband of Gustav H.'s daughter Emilie Henriette (affectionately known as "Mutz"), was gassed and blinded in the first War, and died in 1919.
Mutz and Eberhard had three children. One of these was killed in the second War. Their daughter Susanne (1919- married Heinz Wagner (1912-1984), a lawyer and then army officer, who served on several fronts and was wounded twice. To avoid the bombing of Stuttgart, Susanne spent three years in a small village while caring for an infant daughter. When they returned to the family home, they found it heavily damaged and their family records and furnishings thrown out.
Mutz (1890-1981) remarried in 1924 to a Swiss citizen, Walter Classen (1883-1955), who is remembered fondly by their two children, Gretel Classen (1926- and Anna Lore Classen von Holst (1928-, and by his stepdaughter, Susanne Wagner. Walter was able in the late 1930s, by reason of his Swiss citizenship, to move between Switzerland and Germany and secretly to assist in the escape of Jewish families from the Nazi persecution.
I had the opportunity in the summer of 1988 to visit Germany and meet several of my third cousins, all of whom are descended from Christoph and Henrietta Schwab. Susanne Weitbrecht Wagner (now a widow) entertained us at Stuttgart and at the Bodensee (Lake Constance on the Swiss border) as if we were favorite first cousins. Also in Stuttgart, we were received warmly by Anna Lore Classen von Holst and her husband Dieter (1926-, and by Irmgard Esenwein (1922- ). In Solingen, near Koln (Cologne), we visited with Susanne's daughter Doris (1940- ), her husband Horst Quintar (1934- ) and their daughters Ute (1966- )and Ulrike (1970- ).
At Bremen, we were received most cordially into the home of Albert Willich (1918- ) and his wife Holdherta (1924- and met three of their daughters, Heide (1961- ), Friederike (1964- ) and Johanna (1966- ). Albert is descended from Clementine Schwab, youngest of the four children of Christoph and Henriette, and has a lively interest in the large families of his Kulenkampf, von Wasielewski and Willich relatives. I found it of particular interest to learn that Albert and his brother Walter (1926- ), whom we also met with his wife Hanna (1929- ), are partners in a prosperous trading company founded in the 1880s by the Kulenkampf family. That this firm, Kulenkampf & Konitzky, an import and export trading company not unlike Oelrichs & Co., has been able to weather a century of business changes and two worlds wars is a tribute to company management's acumen and ability to adapt.
After publishing some 970 pages in two volumes of a "Baldwin Genealogy" in 1881, C. C. Baldwin, President of the Western Reserve Historical Society of Cleveland, Ohio, expected to say no more. He resumed work a few years later, however, and ended the "Bald win Genealogical Supplement" at page 1339 in the year 1889, observing that he "may well say this is my last contribution". I have Volume II and the Supplement. Volume I is on microfilm at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. At the end of Volume II there is an index with about 120 names per page starting at page 849 and ending at page 970 - some 14,500 names. The index in the Supplement adds about 3,900 more names. There have been a lot of Baldwins!
On a page in his genealogy entitled "Line of Descent from the Kings of the Franks", my father, Henry Baldwin Schwab, purports to trace his Baldwin heritage back 42 generations to "Pepin the Bold" who died in 639 A.D. A separate typed document of 15 pages entitled "Pedigree of Henry Baldwin Schwab (Baldwin Line)", starts off with the same Pepin. It contains brief paragraphs on Charlemagne (742-814); Louis "Le Debonaire" (778-840); Charles "The Bald" (823-877); Baldwin II ( -918) who married Elfrieda, daughter of King Alfred of England; Mathilda, who married in 1053 the Earl of Normandy, King of England; Maud de Beauchamp; and Robert de Mountfort - to name just a few. The sketches end with the first of this formidable line to come to America.
Thirty four generations down from Pepin we come to John Bruen (1560-1625) of Bruen-Stapleford, England, whose daughter Mary (1622-1670) sailed to the New World with her half-brother and married John Baldwin ( -1681), of whom the Baldwin Genealogy says:
"He was, no doubt, of the Bucks County Baldwins, and related to the others, but among so many Johns in Buckinghamshire, at that date, he has not been identified."
It is thought he came to America in 1638 with members of the New Haven Company that first settled Milford, Connecticut.
John and Mary's daughter Abigail (1658- ) married Samuel Baldwin ( -1696), of another line of Baldwins, whose father Nathaniel ( -1660) came from Buckinghamshire in 1639 to Milford and then moved to Fairfield. Samuel lived and prospered at Guilford, Connecticut. He and Abigail begat six children, the fifth of whom was Timothy, and Timothy married Bathsheba Stone. Michael, the second of the eight children born to Timothy and Bathsheba, is worthy of special note.
Michael Baldwin (1719-1787) became a farmer and blacksmith. A quote without attribution says of him that he was "of powerful but uncultured mind". In the Baldwin Genealogical Supplement, there is this lovely quotation:
"In him a strong sense of filial duty prevailed over an early ambition, and confined to a silent and retired life of husbandry, talents and integrity rarely surpassed in the more public walks of men."
I wonder what that ambition was, and what were the unexercised talents, and could he have had some in sight that by pursuing his filial duties and by being concerned about the education of his children he would prepare them for eminent careers?
By his first wife, Lucy Dudley, he had a son Abraham and a daughter Ruth. I will take note of them before referring to their half brother, Henry Baldwin, from whom we are descended.
Abraham Baldwin (1754-1807), graduated from Yale in 1772, became a lawyer and settled in Savannah, Georgia. He joined the legislature there and helped to found, and became President of, the University of Georgia. He was a member of the Continental Congress, a member of the Constitutional Convention and a signer of the Constitution. He then became a Representative from Georgia to the United States Congress from 1789 to 1799 and a Senator from that date to his death in 1807.
Ruth Baldwin (1756-1818), married in 1781 an extraordinary American, Joel Barlow (1754-1812). Barlow graduated from Yale in 1778, spent three years as a chaplain in the Revolutionary army, started a news paper in Hartford, Connecticut, and became a lawyer. In 1788 he went to France as agent for an American land company and remained in France through a period of 17 years of great upheaval in Europe.
In 1789, an unpopular Louis XVI and his queen and court were virtual prisoners in Paris. France fell into disorder and bankruptcy and a fanatical republicanism hostile to all thrones led to war with Austria in 1792. The year 1793 opened with the execution of Louis XVI and was followed by the French assembly declaring war on Great Britain and Holland.
By 1797, Napoleon had invaded Italy and forced Austria to make peace; in 1802, the French having been somewhat checked, the Treaty of Amiens was signed which left England supreme at sea but restored colonies (including the recently acquired Cape Colony in South Africa) to the Dutch and left France in control of its continental conquests; in 1804, Napoleon became Emperor of the French and embarked on his greatest military exploits.
During his lengthy sojourn, Barlow published radical essays favoring the French Revolution, including "Advice to the Privileged Orders" (which was proscribed by the British Government), and was made a citizen of France. He somehow amassed a personal financial fortune in those perilous times and assisted many men of genius, including Robert Fulton who lived in Paris for seven years. He also served his native country by securing the release of American prisoners held for ransom by the Bey of Algiers and by negotiating a treaty with Tripoli.
President Jefferson wrote to Barlow in 1802:
"Dear Sir: Mr. Madison and myself have cut out a piece of work for you, which is to write the his tory of the United States from the close of the war downward. We are rich ourselves in materials and can open all the public archives to you, but your residence here is essential, because a great deal of the knowledge of things is not on paper, but only within ourselves for verbal communication."
The President also suggested to Barlow that the Washington estate of Gustav Scott is:
"now for sale. A superb house, gardens, etc. with thirty or forty acres of ground. It will be sold under circumstances of distress…"
Barlow did finally return to Washington in 1805. The Scott estate had been sold, but Barlow bought it in 1807 for $14,000 when it again became available. Much remodeling of the house and grounds of "Kalorama" was undertaken with the help of the eminent architect Latrobe, suggestions from Barlow's friend Robert Fulton, and occasional advice from President Jefferson on fruit culture and gardening.
A funeral vault was built on the property and Mrs. Ruth Barlow's brother, Senator Abraham Baldwin was interred there after his death in 1807.
Barlow made good progress on his history of the United States until interrupted in 1812. In 1811, the international situation had become critical. American merchant ships were being held in French, Spanish and Dutch ports and Napoleonic decrees were stifling American commercial intercourse on the open seas. As the one man who might have success in negotiating with Napoleon, Barlow was prevailed upon to become Minister to France. He sailed to Europe with his family in August of 1812.
Napoleon had invaded Russia in June of 1812 and by the time that Barlow caught up with him, the Emperor, having realized that his campaign was a disaster, had left his army and was fleeing westward from Moscow. While traveling with that dejected company, Barlow died of exposure on Christmas Eve, 1812, near Crakovia in Poland in his fifty fourth year of age.
A newspaper article about Kalorama, written after the Civil War, said:
"His diplomatic services and tragic death amid the Polish wastes are so well known that I need not recount them here. His country thought so little of them that she did not trouble herself to give his remains decent burial, and has never voted the slightest tribute to his memory, although he gave up lettered ease, fortune, even life in her service."
Before returning to America from the ill-fated trip to Europe with her husband, the widowed Ruth Barlow prepared a will which directed that Kalorama, at her death, should pass to her son Thomas Barlow, one of the two orphaned nephews of Joel Barlow whom Joel and Ruth had adopted. She then provided for bequests to her half sisters, Clarissa and Sarah, to her half brother William and to the widow of her deceased half brother Michael. The seventh clause of the will says:
"I have not left to my loving half brother Henry Baldwin of Pittsburgh any remainder in the estates seeing that he is already well provided for, but as a token of my sincere affection, I hereby order my executors to pay him the sum of one hundred dollars to purchase a mourning ring, and to deliver to said Henry a marble clock in my house at Kalorama."
The twentieth clause directs that should she die before executing her intention to erect a monument over the far-away grave of her beloved husband, Thomas Barlow is to see to it that a pyramidal monument fifteen feet high, made of the marble or stone of Poland is erected thereon.
Ruth returned from Europe the year after her husband's death, accompanied by her then unmarried half-sister Clarissa. When Ruth died in 1818, Kalorama passed by her will to Thomas Barlow. Ruth's half-brother, Henry Baldwin I, then a Congressman and an executor of her will, bought the property from Thomas and immediately transferred it to his recently married sister Clarissa, who was probably already living there with her husband, Colonel Bomford, a widower with four children. The colonel had achieved prominence for his ordnance engineering work during the War of 1812-1815 and had become the first Chief of Ordnance of the U.S. Army. He developed a long-range cannon which he called the Columbiad" in honor of Joel Barlow's epic poem of that name.
The Bomfords occupied Kalorama for the next twenty eight years, during which time the legacy of Joel Barlow suffered in the way described in a post Civil War newspaper article:
"At this time the attic of Kalorama is said to have contained the finest collection of American papers ever brought together in one place. All Barlow's literary remains were there - "The Columbiad" and his other poems in the original manuscript, letters from half the eminent men of Europe and America, presentation copies from authors, unbound copies of "The Columbiad", and all the papers gathered for his "History of the United States". Colonel Bomford was in the habit of giving these papers in discriminately to his acquaintances who called, and in this way the collection was nearly dissipated before his death."
Apart from his Army work, Colonel Bomford found time for outside business interests including a large flour mill in Georgetown. When this was destroyed by fire in 1844, he constructed on the site an immense water wheel and a four story cotton mill with one hundred looms and three thousand spindles. The venture was a failure and the resulting financial losses required the sale of Kalorama, which had grown to ninety one acres of ground, in 1846, for $25,000.
Kalorama passed into the hands of the Fletcher and Lovett families. At the outbreak of the Civil War, troops poured into Washington and camped and drilled on the fields of Kalorama. Soon the government leased the mansion as a hospital for the isolation of contagious diseases. After the war, George Lovett rebuilt the damaged home and occupied it until his death in 1882. A few years later Kalorama disappeared into city lots and streets where now the most prestigious foreign embassies are located in the area northwest of DuPont Circle near Rock Creek. Only a name, Kalorama Road, survives.
The eminence of the careers of Abraham Baldwin and of his sister Ruth's husband, Joel Barlow, is my excuse for sketching the stories of a several-times-great uncle and aunt and her spouse.
Abraham and Ruth were half brother and half sister to our direct ancestor, Henry Baldwin (1780-1844), son of Michael Baldwin and his second wife, Theodora Wolcot. The "Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography", Volume XIII, published in 1889, includes a seven page sketch of this Henry Baldwin (whom we will refer to as Henry I).
Henry I graduated from Yale in 1797, studied law in Philadelphia and was admitted to practice there. He moved to Pittsburgh and was admitted to its bar in 1801. In 1802 he married Marana Norton of Philadelphia, whom he had met years earlier when she was a schoolgirl at Litchfield, Connecticut. Little more than a year after her marriage, and less than a month after the birth of their son Henry, II, she died at the age of nineteen. Henry I remarried in 1805 to Sally Ellicott, but had no additional children. Sally was the sister of Andrew Ellicott, who aided L'Enfant in the plotting of the city of Washington.
For several years, Henry rode the circuit of the western counties of Pennsylvania, which were just being organized for judicial purposes. His work largely involved litigation between frontier settlers (some of whom might not have had good title to their land) and those who had obtained warrants to the same land. I suspect he defended the settlers against the city slickers who knew how to work the political process to get title to lands they had not worked.
In 1816, he was elected to Congress where he became chairman of a committee of the whole House of Representatives during the debates on the Missouri Compromise. He resigned from Congress in 1822, perhaps as a result of his financially disastrous involvement in an ironmaking venture. In 1828, Henry actively supported the candidacy of General Andrew Jackson for President against John Quincy Adams. He was orator at a large 4th of July campaign meeting near the Alleghany River. His speech, according to the author of the Pennsylvania Magazine article, "was long and full of points, covering about forty pages of foolscap."
A year after the election, the new President Jackson in 1830 appointed Henry to a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. He served on the Court until his death in 1844.
Through some happenstance I have an old Bible "Printed for Matthew Carey, No. 118 Market St., Philadelphia, October 27, 1802" by Joseph Charless, Printer, on behalf of a list of subscribers covering ten pages with about 4,000 names. It is a lovely tome with the stately language of the King James version and a number of full page prints with such titles as:
"And Eve bare Cain …and his brother Abel"; "Whoso shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me"; "And he found a new jaw-bone of an ass and put forth his hand and took it, and slew a thou sand men therewith"; and "As soon then as he had said unto them, 'I am he', they went backward and fell to the ground".
The Bible includes the wonderful stories of the Apocrypha, a 113 page Concordance and the Psalms of David. At the end of the New Testament is a decorative printed frame within which to record who purchased the copy and when. The word "purchased" is crossed out and changed to "presented":
This book was presented
the 21st Jan.y Anno Domini 1803 to Mrs. Baldwin
By Doctor Hugh Scott"
Might we surmise that Dr. Scott was family physician to Henry I and his bride Marana, and made this thoughtful present to Marana on learning of her pregnancy?
Between the Apocrypha and the New Testament are the customary few pages for recording family marriages, births and deaths.
The first marriage notation is:
"Henry Baldwin to Marana Norton 25th May A.D. 1802"
The first birth notation is:
"Michael Baldwin 28th July, 1803 45 minutes past 12 o'clock in the morning"
The next entry is Baldwin's second marriage, to Sally Ellicott, on the 11th of June, 1805. I wish we knew why poor Marana had to die on August 21, 1803, less than a month after the birth of her son, and why her death is unrecorded?
The infant entered in the family record in 1803 as Michael Baldwin (his grandfather's name) grew up as Henry (whom we will call Henry II). His marriage is recorded as:
"Henry Baldwin Jr to Mary Florida Dickson November 2nd 1830"
Mary Dickson (1810-1887), whose middle name is else where always entered as Flora, grew up in Nashville on an estate, Hunter's Hill, near the Hermitage, the home of the family's good friend, General Andrew (and soon President) Jackson. Mary, beautiful, well-to-do and much courted, chose to marry Henry Baldwin II (1803-1868), who had recently come to Tennessee to join a law partnership. He had preferred not to locate in Washington and find himself practicing law before his Supreme Court Justice father.
On a visit to the Hermitage in 1988, I read a reproduction of a letter to President Jackson in Washington from his adopted son in Nashville the day in 1834 after a fire had largely destroyed the family residence. It included the information that family member "Sally stayed with the Baldwins".
What we know of Henry II and his wife comes largely from their son, William Dickson Baldwin (1834-1915), who, in his 80th year, at the request of his relatives, wrote in sixteen typed pages "The Auto biography of an Ordinary Boy". Of his father, he says:
"My father was not only a lawyer, but a banker, a merchant, a farmer, a distiller and manager of a cotton mill in Franklin [south of Nashville, Tennessee]. He lost heavily by endorsing for others, and by business failures so that for many years we were quite poor, retaining our negro slaves only of our possessions. My father was a devoted parent, kind and affectionate, but always kept us in order. Truthfulness was always insisted upon and we soon found lying to be useless as he always found us out, so we always made him our confidant. He made us his constant companions, thus spoiling us with children of our own age."
In 1850, probably because of his financial reverses, Henry II decided to accept an appointment in the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. The following year, the whole family, which now consisted of sons Henry III (18) and William Dickson (17), and of daughters Ann (19), Mary Flora (12), Clara (8) and Kate (2), and mother, moved to Washington. The trip from Franklin, Tennessee, to Washington took eight days! The first leg of the trip was a 36 hour trip by stage coach to cover the 180 miles northward to Louisville. A fine steamship took them up the Ohio River to Cincinnati where low water forced a change to a smaller vessel to continue up the Ohio for three days to Pittsburgh. A horse-drawn canal boat with sleeping berths then took the family about sixty miles eastward to Johnstown, Pa. From there the rest of the trip was by rail. In mountainous areas, the rail cars were occasionally hauled up inclines by stationary engines and, in urban areas such as Harris burg and Baltimore, the cars were hauled across town by horses.
We have no further word about Henry II until 1863. The National Intelligencer newspaper of Washington, D.C., dated April 6, 1863, has this brief notice at the bottom of column 2 on page 3:
"Henry Baldwin, Esq., for nearly twelve years an Examiner, has been removed by the Commissioner of Patents in consequence of the expenditures of the office exceeding its receipts." Son William recalled in his memoir (inaccurately as to date) that: "In 1861, my father left the Patent Office and joined me until his death in 1868."
Of his own career, William says that after three years of hard, but to him uninteresting, work in the dry goods business, he joined the office of a patent attorney in Washington and four years later, in 1860, he became a Patent Solicitor himself at the young age of 26. He is not reticent to say that he became very successful at this growing legal specialty.
In 1860, when secession and civil war were impending, William wrote:
"Up to this time I had been an ardent Southerner. So much so as to volunteer to help suppress John Brown's raid [on Harper's Ferry], but was not needed as the work was done by U.S. troops commanded by an Army Engineer, Robert E. Lee." [The reader will recall that William's father had been a slave-owning lawyer in Nashville.] This raid was the only thing needed to set the South wild, and drilling troops began all over.
I never believed in States Rights or Slavery, and resolved to remain a loyal citizen of the United States. Early in 1861, I joined a drilling squad to prepare for emergencies. Later on I joined the National Rifles, a crack company of Southerners, to help unionize it. When the split came, half the company, about 35 in number, went South, including the Captain and most of the officers.
Edwin M. Stanton became Secretary of War, P. H. Watson, Assistant Secretary, and my brother [Henry III] accompanied him as his business mana ger. Mr. Stanton was much pleased with my volunteering and was always very kind to me. He was an old family friend.
The National Rifles were called into service April 10, 1861. It took us until April 15 to recruit up to 70 men [to replace the secessionist members], and we were mustered in. 32 D.C. companies were organized into 8 battalions of infantry, and work was begun at once, many of us being in Government service worked during office hours and drilled and did duty at night. There were in Washington at that time less than 1000 Regulars including Artillery, Cavalry, Infantry and Marines, but we held the fort until aid came and saved Washington."
When Virginia seceded in May, William's company crossed the Long Bridge and began fortifying the Virginia heights. Having no record of his further military adventures, I will now turn to the story of his older brother Henry III, of whom William wrote:
"For fifty years my brother and I were inseparable companions."
Henry III first worked as a lawyer's clerk in New York City and then, as had his brother, moved to Washington to work for a patent attorney. In 1860, he married Kate Irving Dayton (1842-1919) of Washington and in 1863 moved to Philadelphia to open his own pa tent law office.
Henry came to be highly respected in his adopted city. After his untimely death from peritonitis in 1885 at the age of 52, the U.S. Circuit Court, before which he had frequently argued in suits for the protection of patents, adjourned for the day after eulogistic remarks about the character of the deceased. The Bar Association of Philadelphia held a special meeting in the U.S. Court Room to do honor to him. Resolutions were adopted including such tributes as the following:
"By the Bar, his death is especially deplored as removing from its membership one whose integrity, learning and industry have made him an example of what a lawyer ought to be. He did not seek and did not acquire, what is commonly called a popular reputation, and was haughtily indifferent to that fame which is said to live merely in the breath of others. The professional arena in which he appeared was a restricted one. His audience was limited. His addresses were to learned Judges. His victory could be won, not by persuasive advocacy, but by pure argument, springing out of pure thought."
Henry and his wife first had a daughter Katie, who died at the age of 6. Two more daughters, Mary and Margaret, were born in 1865 and 1871.
Mary at age 20 married Hermann Caspar Schwab, my grandfather, who was then 32 years old. On date line of June 4, 1885, a Washington newspaper carried an account of:
"A quiet and elegant wedding at the National Capital at the church of the Epiphany here this afternoon which was witnessed only by relatives and intimate personal friends of the contracting parties."
This tone for the wedding was appropriate because Mary's father had just died in January of the same year.
Before leaving this branch of the family, let me refer again to that old family Bible. There are many other entries in the Family Record, among the last of which are the births of my grandmother, Mary Baldwin, and her sister Margaret Willis (Madge) Baldwin.
If it were not for the fact that a rift came about between Mary Baldwin and her sister Madge (Mrs. Augustus Henry Reeve) who lived in the Philadelphia area, I might have become acquainted with the descendants of the Reeve family who are alive today. What a tragedy that two sisters should separate themselves from each other! They are pictured together in the formal photographs of the wedding of my parents in 1912, five years before Mary's death in 1917.
Eighteen years after Mary's death, my mother received this letter from Madge, prompted by her learning of my father's death:
"Dear Kitty, March 17, 1935
I have just heard of the great loss which has come to you, and Uncle Gus and I want to send you our love and our deepest sympathy.
Though the unhappy rift of years ago has long separated us, my affection for my only sister's sons has never changed, and their passing in the full strength of their manhood has been a blow to me. I always hoped that some day the clouds would pass and the old happy relations might be resumed. And now they are gone and we of an older generation are left with our regret and grief.
I have never forgotten all your sweet friendliness to me and I hope earnestly that all that has been sad and bitter may be buried and that some day I may again see you and the children Mary loved so dearly. My heart aches for you, Kitty dear, and I am ever very lovingly your - Aunt Madge"
There is a lesson here!
When my parents gave me the names Winthrop and Dayton, father had possibly been looking at a copy of the application of his mother, Mary Baldwin Schwab, for membership in The Colonial Dames of America. A copy of this form, dated February 22, 1904, traces her ancestry back through her mother, Katharine Irving Dayton, to John Winthrop, first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
John Winthrop was an English lawyer, son of a lawyer in the days of Queen Elizabeth and grandson of a lawyer eminent in the reign of Henry VIII. He was born at Groton in Suffolk, England, in 1587. At age 17 or 18 he married Mary Forth, by whom he had six children (two who died in infancy) before Mary's death in 1615.
Winthrop was obviously proud of his oldest son and namesake, John, to whom he frequently wrote at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, with fatherly advice:
"My well beloved son, I beseech our God and heavenly Father, through Christ, to bless thee; and I humbly praise His holy name for his great mercy towards thee hitherto, which is a great occasion of my rejoicing. For there is nothing in this world, that can be like cause of private comfort to me as to see the welfare of my children; especially when I may have hope, that they belong to Christ, and increase His kingdom, and that I shall meet them in glory, to enjoy them in life eternal, when this shade of life shall be vanished. Labor (my dear son) to have in highest esteem the favor of this God, whose blessing is better than life, and reachest to eternity.
I am glad also to hear, that thou declinest the evil company and manners of the place thou livest in, and followest thy study with good fruit. Go on, and God will still prosper thee. Commend me heartily to your reverend tutor; and think not of seeing England till you may bring a hood at your back. And so I commmend thee to the Lord."
Second son, Henry, was not as easy to love! He had adventured to Virginia late in 1626 at consider able cost to father. A year later Winthrop writes to Henry a different kind of letter:
"Son Henry, It is my daily care to commend you to the Lord, that he would please to put His true fear into your heart, and the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, that you may be saved, and that your ways may be pleasing in His sight. I wish also your outward prosperity, so far as may be for your good.
I have disbursed a great deal of money for you, more than my estate can bear. I paid for your debts since you went. Except you send commodity to raise money, I can supply you no further. I have many other children who are unprovided for, and I see my life is uncertain. I marvel at your great undertakings, having no means, and knowing how much I am in debt already. Solomon saith, He who hasteth to be rich, shall surely come to poverty. But this hath been always the fruit of your vain, overreaching mind, which will be your overthrow, if you attain not more discretion and moderation with your years."
Henry had sent some tobacco to England to be sold for his account, but father found it to be "ill-conditioned, foul, and full of stalks, and evil colored", hence unsaleable.
Some years after the death of his first wife, Winthrop married Margaret (whose last name is not in our records), with whom he exchanged endearing letters when away from her on business in the late 1620s. I quote from one of Margaret's:
"Most dear and beloved Husband, I cannot express my love to you, as I desire, in these poor, lifeless lines; but I do heartily wish you did see my heart, how true and faithful it is to you, and how much I do desire to be always with you, to enjoy the sweet comfort of your presence, and those helps from you in spiritual and temporal duties, which I am so unfit to perform without you."
In 1629, Winthrop wrote from London to Margaret at their home in Groton:
"My sweet Wife, through His mercy it is, that I continue in health, and that, to my great joy, I hear well of thee and our family. The Lord teach us the right use of all His blessings, and so temper our affections towards the good things of life, as our greatest joy might be, that our names are in the book of life, that we have the good will of our Father, that Christ Jesus is ours, and that by Him we have right to all things. Then, come what will, we may have joy and confidence.
For news I have but one to write of, but that will be more welcome to thee than a great deal of other. My office is gone, and my chamber, and I shall be a saver in them both. So, as I hope, we shall now enjoy each other again, as we desire… and so, with my blessings to our children and salutation to all our friends, I commend thee to the grace and blessing of the Lord."
Winthrop had been practicing law with consider able success in London as an attorney in the court of wards and liveries and as a drafter of parliamentary bills. Now, at age forty one, something happened to terminate this employment. From his comments above, he seems to have been glad to leave his commitment to London and to have more time at home.
It is fascinating to imagine what England's political scene was like in those far-gone days. James, son of Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley, had become King of Scotland in 1581 at the age of 14. In 1586, after earlier capture and escape from protestant nobles, he was forced by them to make a treaty with England and in 1603 he succeeded Queen Elizabeth as King James I of England. Today he is probably remembered only in that his name is associated with the new version of the Bible produced by scholars in 1611 and dedicated in his honor. I wonder if this was a reward for his support of the Church of England, his assertion of the divine right of kings and his chastisement of all nonconformists including the Catholics, Presbyterians and Puritans.
Upon his death in 1625, his inept twenty-five year old son, Charles I, became king. The then prime minister, the Duke of Buckingham, led the king into military adventures resulting in a shameful defeat in France in 1627. To solve a critical need by the crown for funds, arbitrary loans were forced and heavy taxes levied on seaports and inland counties. The non-compliance of parliament led the king to dissolve it and rule without it. In these circumstances, in 1629, it was probably welcome to Charles to have a group come forward with a plan for a new colony in America which might be of profit to the crown.
John Winthrop was widely acquainted with the leaders of the Puritan party, which sought purification of the Church of England and opposed the Stuart autocracy. Many of them were worried about their prospects in these unsettled times, and sought the freedom to establish a society in accord with their Puritan beliefs. Winthrop joined with friends to draw up, and to seek from the king, a charter as "The Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England". Upon approval in the fall of 1629, Winthrop was elected Governor and plans were set in motion for the new colony.
On April 8, 1630, a fleet with over 1,000 emigrants sailed for America and landed at Salem on June 12. Here they were met by John Endecott, governor of a territory granted two years earlier to the Dorchester Company for the establishment of a plantation. They were also met by Isaac Allerton, one of the May flower Pilgrims (1620) and assistant governor of the Plymouth Colony - until he was repudiated by that colony the next year for borrowing in the colony's name to purchase goods for trade.
By the authority of Winthrop's charter, Endecott 's patent was superseded and his plantation became part of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Apparently amicably, Endecott remained at Salem while Winthrop and his ships left on the 17th of June for Boston harbor to settle Charlestown and Boston.
From the time of his embarkation on the Arbella when leaving England, Winthrop, like our ancestor Muhlenberg, kept a journal continuously to the year of his death. A second edition of his journals, "The History of New England from 1630 to 1649", was edited, with voluminous notes, by James Savage, and published in 1853. These two volumes also have many of Winthrop's letters. (A new edition of the Winthrop journals is being completed by Richard S. Dunn, a professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania.) Editor Savage says that the journals illustrate:
"the civil and ecclesiastical concerns, the geography, settlement, and institutions of the country, and the lives and manners of the principal planters."
It is sort of a congressional, judicial and ecclesiastical record written day-by-day by a tough, serious lawyer-politician coping with the governance of a new, unfettered pioneer society.
One of the early 1630 journal entries says only this:
"Friday, July 2. The Talbot arrived there [at Charlestown harbour]. She had lost fourteen passengers. My son, Henry Winthrop, was drowned at Salem."
The Talbot was one of the company of ships that left England in April. She had been separated from the others in a storm a week after departure. By accident, Henry had been unable to take passage on the Arbella and had come over on the Talbot. The day after landing he was drowned in a small creek. By the first ship returning to England, Winthrop sent a letter to Margaret. It reads in part as follows:
"My dear wife, We had a long and troublesome pas sage, but the Lord made it safe and easy to us.
We have met many sad and discomfortable things as thou shalt hear after; and the Lord's hand hath been heavy upon myself in some very near to me. My son Henry! my son Henry! ah, poor child! Yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter. The Lord strengthen and comfort her heart, to bear this cross patiently."
Young Henry had been married shortly before departing from England, leaving his pregnant wife living with her step-mother-in-law Margaret Winthrop.
On November 4, 1631, Martha and her other children arrived at Boston on the ship Lyon after ten weeks at sea. Except for the death of two children, all sixty passengers arrived in good health. Unfortunately, one of the two children was the Winthrop's year and a half old daughter Ann.
The charter of the new colony provided executive powers to the directors of the Company. But questions of legislative and judicial authority soon arose. The pastor and elders of Watertown, in 1631, refused to pay a levy of £60 for the purpose of fortifying the new town. They were summoned before the governor and council and given the understanding that this government was rather in the nature of a parliament, and that:
"at every general court they had free liberty to consider and propound anything and to declare their grievances without being subject to question". Winthrop then notes: "They were fully satisfied; and so their submission was accepted and their offence pardoned."
The basis for the government's position was that at the first general court, held in October of 1630, a general vote of the people assented to the proposition that the freemen should have the power to choose assistants and that the assistants, from among themselves, should choose a governor and deputy governor, who, with the assistants, should have the power of making laws and choosing officers to execute the same. Under this broad authority, in 1632, the general court passed an order that no planter, returning to England, shall carry either money or beaver with him without leave from the governor!
As to judicial power, it is recorded in the Colony Records that:
"Thomas Knower was set in the billows for threatening the court, that if he should be punished, he would have it tried in England, whether he was law fully punished or not."
The governor and his assistants obviously were not worried about an appeal of their judgments!
In addition to coping with legislative and judicial challenges, there were the problems of dealing with friendly and unfriendly Indians in the area, and with the criminal behaviour of some of the settlers. Especially galling was the necessity to deal also with religious nonconformity. The Colony was conceived to be a society of like believers, not one for diversity of belief.
Entered in Winthrop's journal in 1636 is this sentence: "One Stephen Greensmith, for saying that all the ministers except A. B. C., did teach a covenant of works, was censured to acknowledge his fault in every church, and fined £'40."
Then Mr. Wheelwright, (thought to be one of the three A. B. C.'s, together with Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker) preached against all who walked in a covenant of works, and was promptly adjudged guilty of sedition and contempt. Governor Winthrop managed to defer the passing of sentence on Wheelwright, hoping that the religious dissension would die down before the next general court. But Mr. Wheelwright persisted in justifying his position and was disfranchised and banished. When he appealed to the king, the court told him that by the king's grant:
"we had the power to hear and determine without any reservation."
Mrs. Ann Hutchinson was sent for by the court and charged for not preaching a covenant of free grace. After speeches back and forth, Winthrop reports that she:
"had it revealed to her, that she should come into New England, and should be here persecuted, and that God should ruin us and our posterity and the whole state. So the court proceeded and banished her, but because it was winter, they committed her to a private house."
About the same time:
"The governor and assistants met at Boston to consider about Mr. [Roger] Williams, for that they were credibly informed that, notwithstanding the injunction laid upon him not to go about to draw others to his opinions, he did use to entertain company in his house, and to preach to them, even of such points as he had been censured for [by the general court a year or so earlier]; and it was agreed to send him to England by a ship then ready to depart. …Whereupon a warrant was sent to him to come to Boston [from Salem], to be shipped. He returned answer that he could not come without hazard of his life. Whereupon a pinnace was sent with commission to Captain Underhill to apprehend him, but when they came at his house, they found he had been gone three days before, but whither they could not learn."
Roger Williams had sensibly made a quick departure alone to escape what he considered to be the abuse of authority by the governor and his council and their lack of tolerance of any but their own religious beliefs. A few companions soon joined him in Rhode Island where they founded Providence, established friendly relations with the Indians of the vicinity and opened their settlement as "a shelter for persons distressed for conscience".
Winthrop and his assistants were severe in their dealings with criminal behaviour (execution was normal for murder or conviction of certain sexual misconducts) or with religious differences, but when it came to foreign affairs, such as dealing with the Indians or with neighbouring colonies, they were not doctrinaire. Thus we find Roger Williams writing to Winthrop to ask advice about the murder of an Indian by some servants who had fled their masters, and Winthrop writing a civil reply.
In 1644, Winthrop reports on the arrival of a ship from Virginia bringing news of a massacre of whites by the Indians:
"An Indian whom they had since taken confessed that they did it because they saw the English took up all their lands from them, and would drive them out of the country, and they took this season for that they understood that they were at war in England, and began to go to war among themselves, for they had seen a fight in the river between a London ship which was for the parliament and a Bristol ship which was for the king."
One hundred years later we are to hear this theme in the writings of Conrad Weiser; here is a native American already giving voice to what the European settlers are doing to his land! And is it not remarkable that this Indian seems to know more than the New England colonists about the growing struggle in England between the king and parliament that was to lead to thee beheading of Charles I in 1649 and to the rule of Oliver Cromwell.
Winthrop continues his journal by saying:
"It was very observable that this massacre came upon them soon after they [the English settlers] had driven out the godly ministers we had sent to them, and had made an order that all such as would not conform to the discipline of the Church of England should depart the country. …Upon these troubles, divers godly disposed persons came from thence to New England, and many of the rest were forced to give glory to God in acknowledging that this evil was sent upon them for their reviling the gospel and those faithful ministers."
In 1639, Winthrop redrafted a will which he had first made in England in 1620. He specified that his wife should have half his farm, Tenhills, and life tenancy; that his son John should have the other half and all of it upon the death of his wife; and that other children should have specified lands. His estate in England he left to his wife. He voiced some doubt what net value it would have, but stated:
"I give to my son Stephen my moiety of the Isle Prudence in Narragansett Bay, which with his part of the reversion of his mother's estate in England, will be a good portion, for it will be fit that she should dispose some part of it to her other sons, and I hope they will all rest satisfied at their mother's disposal thereof."
Just two years later, in 1741, he appended to his will this depressing alteration:
"My estate becoming since much decayed through the unfaithfulness of my servant Luxford [bailiff and manager of Winthrop's farm in England], so I have been forced to sell some of my land already, and must sell more for satisfaction of £2600 debts, whereof I did know of more than £300, when I intended this for my testament, I am now forced to revoke it, and must leave all to the most wise and gracious providence of the Lord, who hath promised not to fail or forsake me, but will be an husband to my wife and a father to our children, as hath hereto been in all our struggles. Blessed be his holy name."
The editor of Winthrop's journals here adds this footnote:
"So effectually had he expended this property, as well as time, for the public service, that his Inventory footed up only £l03.10.ll."
To cope with the sudden alteration in his personal affairs, Winthrop was glad to be relieved of the governorship in 1640, but he resumed this responsibility in the years 1642-1644 and from 1646 to his death in 1649.
See Winthrop's journal onlineIn the first two decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Dudley was often deputy governor and sometimes governor. The relationship between Dudley and Winthrop was not always congenial. A meeting was called at Charlestown in 1632 at which were present Governor Winthrop, Deputy Governor Dudley and five of their council. Winthrop reports on this meeting in his journal:
"The deputy [Dudley] then demanded he of him [Winthrop] the ground and limits of his authority, whether by patent or otherwise. The governor answered that he was willing to stand to that which he had propounded, and would challenge no greater authority than he might by the patent. The deputy replied, that then he had no more authority than every assistant, (except power to call courts, and proceedings, for honor and order). The governor answered, he had more; for the patent, making him a governor, gave him whatsoever power belonged to a governor by common law or the statutes, and desired him to show wherein he had exceeded, etc.; and speaking this somewhat apprehensively, the deputy began to be in passion, and told the governor, that if he were so round, he would be round too. The governor bad him be round, if he would. So the deputy rose up in great fury and passion, and the governor grew very hot also, so as they both fell into bitterness; but by mediation of the mediators, they were soon pacified. Then the deputy proceeded to particulars, as followeth: 1st. By what authority the governor removed the ordnance and erected a fort at Boston… 2nd. By what authority he lent twenty-eight pounds of powder to those of Plimouth… 3rd. By what authority he had licensed Edward Johnson to sit down [settle] at Merrimack… 4th. By what authority he had given them of Water town leave to erect a weir upon Charles River…"
I have omitted Winthrop's justifications for each of these actions - all of them very plausible, but evincing, perhaps, a habit of taking actions for the benefit of the community without sufficient consultation with others.
In entries dated a month later in the journal, we read:
"Notwithstanding the heat of contention, which had been between the governor and deputy, yet they peaceably met about their affairs, and that without any appearance of any breach or discontent; and ever after kept peace and good correspondence together, in love and friendship."
The editor of the journal adds a footnote:
"In a later hand the last clause appears; and it was, perhaps, introduced after the family union between the respective children."
Winthrop's journal for 1632 included the above-mentioned controversy and also an account of how Mr. Dudley's house miraculously escaped burning and exploding from a fire that smoldered all night on a principal beam and only broke out in flame and was subdued after the family had arisen in the morning - but no mention of the marriage that year of his daughter, Mary, to the Rev. Samuel Dudley, son of the deputy governor!
I have little information about Mary Winthrop and Samuel Dudley and about the following three generations other than their names and some dates - which appear on the chart of Winthrop Descent. I will therefore skip Col. Edward Hilton and his wife Ann Dudley, Thomas Bradbury and his wife Mary Hilton and Capt. William Chandler and his wife Jemima Bradbury and refer next to Thomas Chandler, son of Capt. William Chandler and his wife Jemima.
Thomas Bradbury Chandler (1726-1790), graduated from Yale in 1745 and was ordained a minister by the Bishop of London in 1751. He returned to America to serve a parish at Elizabeth, New Jersey. He married Jane Emott (1732-1801) the next year and continued at the same church to the year 1775, during which time the couple had three daughters.
The bitter feelings between the colonists in America and the parent country, due to the Stamp Act and other perceived provocations, caused Rev. Chandler to take passage to England in 1775 to attempt to effect a reconciliation between the factions and avoid a war. He made no headway in this mission - by hind sight we know how late and futile such an effort must have been.
He also hoped to arrange the establishment of an American Episcopate (which would obviate the necessity for American-born ministers to travel to England to be ordained by an Anglican bishop).
Rev. Chandler stayed in England for ten years, being warmly received by the English bishops, while his family continued living in the rectory at Elizabeth midst the hardships of the Revolutionary period. Probably he knew that, as an Anglophile, he would not be tolerated in New Jersey while the passions of the Revolution raged.
Upon his return to America in 1786, he was offered the Episcopate of Nova Scotia, but declined on the grounds of poor health.
At a great convention in Philadelphia in October of 1789, "the Bishops, the Clergy and the Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America" adopted The Book of Common Prayer and stated that:
"when in the course of Divine Providence, these American States became independent with respect to civil government, their ecclesiastical independence was necessarily included".
So, in the year before he died, Thomas Bradbury Chandler learned that an American Episcopate had been established without his help and not at all in the way he had envisioned.
My ancestral descent is from the Chandler's old est daughter, Elizabeth (1764-1806) through her marriage to Elias Bayley Dayton (1762-1846). The next chapter will introduce the Daytons.
The name of Dayton derives from the places in Yorkshire called Dicton and Kyrke Dicton. In 1258, in the reign of Henry III, there is mention that Henry de Dicton and Nigel, a son of Henry's brother Thomas de Dicton, were appointed to a royal commission to make an inquisition into the manor and castle of Spofford held by the Percy family. In 1378, in the reign of Richard II, a poll list shows Petrius de Dighton with a poll tax second only to that of Baron Ros.
Seven or eight generations later, John Dighton of Horkstow, Lincolnshire, married Margaret Bee of Carle ton County. Their third son, John, who somehow became known as Ralph, emigrated to America at age 50 in 1638 with his wife and three of their five children.
Ralph Dighton (1588-1658) and his family were part of a group of twenty Yorkshire families of good estate who were sent to America by Sir William Constable and Sir Matthew Boynton to found a new colony. Upon their arrival in Boston, they were persuaded to join the Reverends John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton in the founding of the New Haven Colony.
After ten years at New Haven, the Dightons, now calling themselves Daytons, removed to East Hampton on Long Island and settled there in 1648. Three generations later Ralph's great grandson, Jonathan Dayton (1700-1776) moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey. By his second wife, Patience Bayley (1709-1744), Jonathan had several children, the oldest of whom was Elias Dayton (1737-1807).
At the age of twenty, while studying for a medical degree, Elias learned that the English Parliament was calling up a colonial regiment of troops to join the British army units in efforts to end the attacks of the French and Indians on the English colonies. Elias left his studies, was commissioned an Ensign-Lieutenant and fought with the British at Ticonderoga, Niagara and at the capture of Quebec. Before leaving seven years of military service, he had been appointed a Captain and had been involved in the expedition to Detroit to put down the rebellion of Pontiac.
Discovering that Pontiac entered the historical stage at the exact time that Conrad Weiser departed the earthly scene, I wanted to learn more about him although he is hardly relevant to this family history. He was an Ottawa Indian from northwestern Ohio who became chief of the Ottowas and of a confederation of their neighbouring tribes, the Ojibwas and Potawatomis. As an ally of France he is thought to have commanded the Ottawas at the defeat of General Braddock in 1755.
In 1760, following the fall of Quebec in 1759, the English were moving west to occupy the surrendered French forts. Pontiac at first thought that the English would welcome the Indians at the forts, as had the French, but when he realized the vast difference between the French presence as traders and the English military presence as a precursor to English settlements and the loss of hunting grounds, he turned his energy and skills to plotting attacks on the forts and to the destruction of the then poorly defended settlements.
In 1762, with the support of most of the tribes from Lake Superior to the lower Mississippi, he arranged for each tribe to attack the fort nearest to it. Eight of twelve forts were captured and the surrounding country plundered. Pontiac failed in his attempt to capture by surprise the fort at Detroit and his siege of several months in 1763 also failed. In 1764, Colonel Bouquet led expeditions into Ohio and forced the Indians into suing for peace. In 1766, Pontiac signed a treaty of peace and amity with the English at Oswego, New York, marking another recognition that the native Americans would have no court of appeal to protect any rights to ownership of, or to common use of, unspoiled ancestral lands.
For the years after leaving the colonial forces and until the colonies became irreversibly estranged from the mother country a dozen years later, Elias Dayton lived in New Jersey and conducted an importing and exporting business with the West Indies.
By 1776, however, he had been stirred by the talk of independence of the colonies and he was among the first to organize a regiment, including many of his former soldiers, for the new Revolutionary army. He was appointed Colonel of the 3rd Regiment, New Jersey Regulars, and soon thereafter commanded the 3rd Battalion of New Jersey Continentals. His busy war record included fighting in the battles of Brandywine, Germantown, Ticonderoga, Crossways Bridge and Spring field, at three of which he had horses shot out from under him. By the time he participated in the surrender at Yorktown, he was a Brigadier General. It is intriguing to reflect that this ancestor of English origins must have had intimate contact with Brigadier General Peter Muhlenberg, of our ancestral family of German origin, at the military councils of General Washington.
In 1787-1788, Elias Dayton was a member of the Continental Congress. Although elected a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he declined and recommended his son, Jonathan, who had served with him in the army for several years. Elias returned to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he started a new mercantile business.
Son Jonathan Dayton (1760-1824) was duly elected as the youngest delegate to the Constitutional Convention and had the honor of being a signer of the Constitution on behalf of New Jersey. After serving a few years in the New Jersey legislature, he was elected to Congress in 1791. He served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1795 to 1799, immediately succeeding Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg who had been Speaker of the first and third Conresses. From 1799 to 1805 he was a senator from New Jersey.
Our ancestor, Elias Bayley Dayton (1762-1846), was the second of the eight children of Elias Dayton and his wife Hannah Rolph. He served as a volunteer in several actions of the Revolution while still a minor. After the war, he settled in Elizabeth as a merchant, probably with the business of "Elias Dayton & Son" founded by his father.
As mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, Elias Bayley Dayton married Elizabeth Chandler. They had eight children, of whom the fourth was our ancestor Aaron Ogden.
Aaron Ogden Dayton (1796-1858) graduated from Princeton with highest honors in 1813, studied law and was admitted to the New Jersey Bar in 1817. Having just felt the first onset of a nervous disease that was to plague him throughout his life, he journeyed by horseback to Ohio for his health and to investigate professional opportunities. He obtained a license to practice in Ohio but returned east to settle in Salem, New Jersey. He was soon drawn into politics. After serving a term in the state legislature, he became an enthusiastic supporter of General Andrew Jackson. At the Convention of Delegates of New Jersey at Trenton in 1824, he drafted an address that was widely circulated and was influential in shifting the state's electoral vote to Jackson.
John Quincy Adams won the presidency in 1824, but Jackson's 1828 campaign was successful. By 1828, Dayton had moved to New York to practice law and had worked anew for Jackson. He became a Democratic member of the New York legislature in the 1828 election but was defeated for a second term largely because of the opposition of banking interests to his advocacy of the Safety Fund System, which had been adopted over their violent opposition.
He was then appointed as a Master of Chancery in New York City, a well-paying position. In 1833, he felt his health was not up to the demands of the job and he left his law practice to accept a position in the diplomatic bureau of the Department of State. In 1836, he was appointed Chief Clerk of the Department, which today corresponds to Assistant Secretary of State. In 1838, he joined the Treasury Department as Fourth Auditor and remained in that position until his death twenty years later.
For a man of such obvious capacity, it would seem odd that he left the law and politics for a mundane civil service job. The reason is perhaps best summed up by his brother-in-law, Rev. William Berrian, D.D., Rector of Trinity Church, New York:
"With his intellectual endowments, his cultivated mind, and varied acquirements, …he would have probably risen to the first rank in his profession, and had he followed up his political advantages, to the highest honors in the State. But besides the depressing effect of his nervous disease, which had an influence on his decision, he was modest, retiring, and unambitious, and longed for quietness and peace."
For a full appreciation of this able and attractive individual, one can read the thirty page pamphlet entitled "Memorial of the Life and Character of Aaron Ogden Dayton, Esq.", written by Rev. Berrian with the following disclaimer:
"I will endeavor to divest myself of fond partiality and describe him in simplicity and truth."
Rev. Berrian thought his brother-in-law to be a confirmed bachelor and was surprised when he married at the age of forty one. The marriage to twenty six year old Mary Beesley Tuft of Salem, New Jersey, was a happy one and produced six children, the youngest of whom, named after his father, was only seven when the devoted father died.
The third child, my great grandmother Katherine Irving Dayton (1842-1919), we met in Chapter XV because of her marriage in 1860 to Henry Baldwin III.
From recollection and from the documents and albums in my library I could add a chapter on my own life, family and career for the information of my descendants, but this would not be to my taste, even though I have had the happiest journey in this world, with countless blessings.
To me, what has made family members of the past and present of particular interest has been an insight into their thoughts. So, instead of autobiography, I will take the liberty of appending here excerpts from letters I wrote from aboard ship during World War II to my mother and to the young lady who became my fiancée during this period and my wife immediately after.
Only in those days did I have the time and the reason to put personal speculation and comments into written form. I had intended to edit out of this section most of the other material that does not fit into these categories, but Pat has persuaded me to leave it all in.
June 20, 1942
Took my active duty physical exam last week. The pharmacist mate who tested my eyes would not let me tilt the cardboard with a hole for one eye (for me, lining up the edge of the hole with the chart would bring it into focus), so I had pretty poor readings. He said he would give me the minimum 12/20 anyway and pass me.
The other day I went to the Public Library [New York] to look up some Navy books on Traditions, Customs, Usage and etc. There were answers for every thing - in fascinating detail. I must quote one excerpt on Club Etiquette which the book admitted was not strictly accurate, but which gave the proper tone of exclusive clubs:
"In a very smart London club, you keep your hat on and glare about. In Paris, you take your hat off and behave with such courtesy and politeness as seems to you an affectation. In New York, you take your hat off and behave as though the rooms were empty; but as though you were being observed through loopholes in the wall."
If I am not called immediately, I expect I will go out to Merrick, Long Island [where mother was using a friend's rented apartment near our old family home]. Good old Merrick! Our house [built by my parents in 1915 and rented to others since father's death seven years ago] stands across the road from a small privately owned lake, noted mainly for its seaweed and bullrushes and one huge weeping willow. The lake empties through a small dam into one of the millions of creeks of the Great South Bay. We used to catch lots of eels, crabs and snappers in the creeks in the old days. Mussels lined the banks of the small tributary creeks, but we never thought of them as edible. Meadows and swamps extended along the shores in great patches and probably still do where they haven't been laid out in blocks and promoted by indefatigable real estate operators (or simply optimists).
Politics! Intelligence in voting is a good place to start. Is a "statesmanlike" attitude toward poli tics better than a "partisan" attitude? I don't know, but it is patent that the democratic system of government is based on partisanships. In other words, in a democracy things are intentionally so ordered that the partisan group which gets the majority vote is given the government controls.
It is desirable that people be persuaded to conceive of self interest on a broader plane - to get "enlightened" self interest, ideally on a world-wide basis. But this is idle hope. The poor man is so concerned about the roof over his head and the food for his children that he must bend every effort toward the single objective of getting everything he can from a hostile world. This man has a political voice and he is numerous. Intelligence in voting might suggest a middle course of enlightened self interest, but how often in this strange world is the middle course possible? Even from the Bible comes the statement, "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad".
Independence of political thought! I'm all for it up to a point and would be for it almost all the way if we lived in an economy where all families were self-sufficient, and independent thoughts did not include predatory designs on others. Unfortunately (?) we live very interdependent lives in the modern economy and chaos would result if we were not willing to yield independence to the extent of joining with others in political groups in the hope that at least a few of our independent thoughts might receive expression. There is all too much evidence about us showing that it is the best organized, the best disciplined, and the most single-minded groups that succeed, whether they be political, military, religious or economic.
In all of this talk I am prone to argue points of view, not my own beliefs. I may tend to hide beliefs and feelings behind a reserve, or behind flippant remarks.
Well, here's one belief: The foregoing gloomy picture could be improved by a way of life for individuals and groups that is based on and derives its strength from the teachings and example and spirit of Christ. — And add that well-known "Prayer for All Conditions of Men" on page 18 of the Book of Common Prayer [1928].
June 30,1942
Got my Navy orders to report on July 15 to Dart mouth College where they have an indoctrination school.
Just now I ran around the Central Park reservoir for my first exercise in some weeks. It used to be one of the few beautiful sights in New York - the view of the night lights of downtown Manhattan reflecting from the reservoir. But now the lights are dimmed or out.
On Sunday, sister Cornelia and I came out to Merrick to join mother. Her apartment is right across the street from the little tennis club to which our old "social community" belonged. The apartment is part of the house that the Swenson family rented in the old days. Mr. Swenson was a tentmate of my father during army training at Plattsburgh, N.Y., in 1918. His son Ed went to kindergarten with me here in Merrick and later was my St. Andrew's School and Yale roommate.
Mother and I went out to dinner with the Kents, old friends of the family. We dined at the South Shore Terrace, a new and swanky night club in Merrick complete with orchestra, floor show and tables for a hundred or more! And then to think back to when I used to go to the public school here, and to when I heard Mr. Kent tell of how his father came to Merrick in 1892 and how for a couple of years they had no gas or electricity and had to pump their own water! When Mr. Kent built his present house about 1900, Merrick was a village of not even 200 people. Those were the days when everyone in the village knew everyone else and the whole village would have parties down by the bay. Now he hardly knows a soul as he stands with the crowd taking the morning train for New York.
Merrick's new population uses the same library which was functioning when I was born - a tiny one- room affair which used to be supported privately at an annual cost of $300. It is now under the Board of Education and has a budget of $5,000. I don't know how this shanty can gobble up so much money in a year. The new populace has not brought prosperity to the Episcopal church; it continues to limp along on a total budget of $6,000 a year - and that includes upkeep, parish work and minister's salary! And so life goes on - a town has a life and perhaps a soul just like people. Some things are good, some not so good; everything complex, intriguing.
July 2, 1942
People have been asking me what I am doing here in Merrick - meaning by that, what is the attraction here for a guy my age? For so long I have been a big city dweller that I am a stranger to the small town. But I now feel quite localized. I could go on for pages with the gossip I have picked up in two days: one woman's son ran away from home for good; another's son was secretly married for two years before it was known even to the mother; another's daughter went to the big city as a private secretary and something happened and now mother has to take care of the child while the daughter has another job. …and so ad infinitum.
Played bridge at the Backes this evening. Mr. Backe is an example of the successful small business man - that legendary sort of person you hear about at the Business School. He didn't go to college, but he developed from scratch a pin ball and music box ma chine business from which he pocketed a tidy sum. At present, his business is almost nil since the city has confiscated all pin ball machines, and of course production of new ones is impossible because his workers have left for defense jobs and because of scarcity of materials.
July 7,1942
Returned to New York today. It is amazing that all these hordes of city people manage to live without the benefit of the country breezes, open spaces, etc. It certainly has its effect on t-he poor souls. In order to keep up so-called "appearances" as they fancy the city demands, so many men and women wear outlandish clothes, and so many women obviously must spend some time each day building on to themselves a presumably suave facial facade. Perhaps they merely take a cue from the buildings of the city which, though invariably built of brick, would never think of presenting to the street other than a front of real or simulated, and always thinly appliqued, material of expensive appearance. But I think I am too harsh in this respect on humans and their structures.
July 16,1942
Last Friday [when friend Ed Swenson was getting married in New York] the Swensons threw a bridal dinner attended by the five bridesmaids and six ushers plus others making a party of 22. The dinner was punctuated by endless toasts - so many, in fact, that it was only by diligent attention at the free moments that I could eat all of the delicious steak. After dinner we went to the Waldorf Roof and a few of us ended up at Cafe Society Uptown.
On Saturday, the whole party lunched at one of New York's plush clubs, the Metropolitan, and the wedding came off at 4 P.M. The reception had plenty of champagne and was most enjoyable. Afterward, the bridal party went on to dinner at Fefe's Monte Carlo and later to La Rue's. Such are just the bare facts. Thank heaven all this was paid for by the father of the groom and the mother of the bride, who themselves [both widowed] married each other just a year ago!
Took the train for Hanover. Met up with a couple of Business School classmates and reported in to the U.S. Naval Training School at Dartmouth College. About 1,000 men are here, divided into eight companies. Most all are Ensigns in training, having been commissioned into some specialty such as ordnance, intelligence, aviation, engineering or deck. I am an Ordnance Volunteer Specialist.
July 19,1942
Do I have something that holds me fast? I would venture that if the above question can be answered easily and once-and-for-all, the conclusion arrived at is not too sound or solid. (I doubt my feelings in this matter are acceptable doctrine for a church body.) The essence of the whole problem is that if faith is to be strong and effective it must in a sense be incapable of easy and permanent affirmation. This may sound like harsh doctrine or even contradictory, but I stick to it. There are parallels everywhere. Mankind values that which his hard efforts have gained him, and particularly that which he must continually struggle to maintain.
Faith is meant as a challenge to struggle and an opportunity for a fuller life; it is no sugar-coated all-day sucker. It is those who earnestly question concerning the after-life who perhaps find it particularly easy to question the point of faith, who find it hardest to hold to faith, and who may become strongest because of their doubts. If they hang on!
August 6, 1942
This is our curriculum: Navy Regulations, Military Law, Ordnance, Ground Tackle, Bluejackets Manual, U.S. Fleets, Naval Organization, Navy Customs, Communications and Correspondence, Naval Phraseology, Naval History, and Naval Leadership. A round dozen in all. The teachers are mostly Ensigns - not teachers of long standing, yet most are acceptable. One teacher, how ever, has an insufferable personality. Of all things, he teaches Naval Leadership. He ought to read his Leadership pamphlet again to learn that effective leadership can be exercised only by obtaining respect and cooperation of subordinates.
August 9, 1942
On Thursday I had a duty watch called "Office Orderly". Most of the time was spent helping write out a report on the sanitary condition of our residential hall. It turns out that the hall, to remain within the limits of a memorandum from the executive officer on the health code, should have 32 additional lavatories to house a maximum of ten fewer guys than are now in the hall!
On Friday, during late afternoon off-time, I stopped in at the Dartmouth College museum of natural science where I planned to meet a friend of my sister, a Mr. Camp, who is the museum's cabinet maker, etc. I assumed he was a fundamentalist since my sister spoke so highly of him. I had my ears open for any allusions that might give me more certainty in the matter and was amused to have us pass a case with a group of busts showing the development of the human head from before the neanderthal and cro-magnon skulls. He spent no time on the case, merely saying in passing that he guessed it to be all right for those who believed in that sort of thing. I knew better than to question his remark. If ever you want to start an all day argument, just corner a fundamentalist and argue the origin of man!
August 18, 1942
Yesterday afternoon we were given a lecture by a member of the Bomb Disposal branch of the Navy. The work rather appealed to me and I responded when he asked to interview' volunteers. I thought the work would be something new and more active than any other job I would be given with my non-technical and non-navigational situation. I wouldn't mind going to Eng land for a while, but I would not be interested in the Solomon Islands. Another thing which appeals to me is that the work is salvage rather than destruction. The school is in Washington, D.C., and lasts seven weeks. For obvious reasons the passing mark for the course is 4.0, the Navy equivalent of 100. I suppose the disadvantage of the work centers around one's proximity to mechanisms which may or may not be diagnosed correctly.
September 10, 1942
It turns out that I am accepted for Bomb Disposal School along with three others and must report to Washington on the 18th.
September 21, 1942.
Friday evening, after getting all fixed at the school, I had dinner with Business School classmate Gordon Ainsworth who has worked in Washington at the Ordnance Bureau for the past year. I gather from him that the city is a pretty impossible place as far as leisurely weekend amusement is concerned. It is just out of the question to try to go to a movie or dance because of the crowds, and on Sundays dancing and liquor are taboo.
Saturday evening I went to a private party given by a bunch of Washington's "smart young set", which consisted mostly of those of my Yale classmates who are here. At the party there were many marine and navy officers. I happened to be introduced to one and in the course of conversation he said he was at the Bomb Disposal School. I was a little taken aback to discover he is the senior instructor, but we got so warmed to the subject that for an hour we forgot about the girls who had been with us. He is from Princeton '40 and got his bomb disposal experience in England rather recently during the so-called German "Baedeker" raids.
October 30, 1942
I have been leading a strenuous life in two categories, work and play. Work has consisted of lectures all day and study and notebook writing in the evening, often until after midnight. We have been having weekly exams, usually on Saturday afternoons, which last about six hours. On some days or half-days we dress in our dungarees and have practice work in reconnaissance, digging and timbering holes, and in the more intimate details of handling bombs.' We have 13 members in our class and, except for a couple of guys who are somewhat quieter, all of our class has been reacting rather violently during any time off we have. We have done a good job of tearing up Washington on Saturday and Sunday nights so far, and we end up in very poor shape for Monday's classes.
Last weekend I went to New York and spent a quiet day at home, eating well, going to church and eating Sunday dinner at grand-aunt's. I returned to Washing ton much surprised at how restful New York had been- and determined not to let the Washington fever continue to possess me.
November 4, 1942
Should I be surprised, amused or amazed that my orders are to report immediately upon finish of our course here on November 15 to sea duty on the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco. Heaven knows I am not an accomplished deck officer nor an engineer and I went to an indoctrination school not half as long or rigorous or as helpful as the midshipman schools are for officers expecting sea duty. Since bombs that don't explode will not be falling on the ship every day, the powers aboard will probably give me all the odds and ends that no one else wants to do!
November 27, 1942
We just pulled out of Galconda, Nevada, on my way to the west coast. Now we are stopped at Winnemucca. It beats me why we stop at all these places. The only thing I can imagine in this case is that the guy who sells pop and cookies on the train wanted to get some change at the general store - I saw him scampering in and out. Without exaggeration, the train has been moving no more than 1/2 to 2/3 of the time since we left Chicago. Ah me, I'll learn not take coach again! One neighbor on the train is a Supply Corps Lieutenant on a tanker that fueled the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Wasp before they went into battle and were sunk. Another was a young guy with a broken-down radio as his only apparent earthly possession. He had been been working for cattle companies for a couple of years after running away from a county home. His father evidently is a no-good drunkard and his mother died eight years ago. He is on his way to Ogden to get someone's permission to join the navy. All this information was quite unsolicited - and a lot more besides, such as the intimate details of his last job washing cows at a dairy.
The train has again stopped, but as there is nothing to see on my side of the coach except sage brush, the place may not even have a name. On the other side I can only see a windmill. A trip like this explains to me how there can be only 130 million people in the country despite New York having 7 of them.
January 6, 1943
The good ship USS San Francisco is being put back in fighting shape at the Mare Island Navy Yard at Vallejo north of San Francisco. It has been a sobering experience assuming duty aboard a ship just returned from being severely damaged in battle, and whose personnel has been through considerable and varied battle action. We are docked at one of the Navy's largest yards where manufacturing and repair activities of all kinds are on view.
[The ship had taken fifteen major caliber gun hits from a Japanese battleship. The Admiral, Captain, Commander and 166 others were casualties in the Third Battle of Savo Island near Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.]
The Navy is a complex of many things. The admirals and civic leaders exhort the men and conceive of the greatness of the Navy in terms of the famous quotes of John Paul Jones, Admiral Farragut and so on. This is baloney to most of the men, but they love the Navy for the men in their division, for their pride in their work and their skill as a trained unit. For in stance, on this ship, the battery of three big 8" guns near the after end of the ship constitutes the third division. These men for the most part have worked together for 2 1/2 years; they are good at their jobs and they know it. Their leisure time together and their battle experiences together, under officers they respect, are the Navy to them - and something memorable.
The junior officers have to censor the mail of the enlisted men. This certainly shows another aspect of the Navy. The letters talk little of the Navy, but a great deal about what the men have done or expect to do on leave. The men live for their brief periods of "liberty" and "leave". The men who have seen action want to have no more of war; those who haven't talk a little more about "having a crack at the Japs". All of them want to get the business over with and get home.
As usual, I almost wonder where I fit in all this. I feel like a spectator, but I am on the ship's list, do a job and go where the ship goes. It's quite a world.
May 23, 1943
[To New Caledonia and back to Hawaii] I am realizing how much I value mail and how I must do my part to deserve it. My duty watches are all stood on the bridge as junior officer of the deck where we are seldom in an enclosed space, where at night we obviously cannot use light, and where it is equally obvious that we have to pay constant attention to controlling the ship. No time for letter writing.
No mail received for a month. All we see is the sea. But that's not all bad: the clouds and the seas have their moods like the weather and the different combinations that develop are always awe-inspiring.
We get radio press news on the ship which out lines for us most of the big issues, but as far as the war goes, we get no more news than anyone back home. The war is still like so many chess moves in spite of the fact that I hear occasionally of friends who have been killed and that we sail in "dangerous" waters. Perhaps I would change my view radically if shells began to fall on our ship. It is one thing to see a man trying to kill another man because of hatred born of a cultivated nationalism; it is another thing to have large, impersonal, obedient hunks of steel land all about you, killing people.
August 11, 1943
[North of the Aleutian Islands]A few nights ago we had a remarkable display of St. Elmo's Fire, which appeared on a radio aerial leading from the top of a mast to our station on the fighting bridge. The effect is that the aerial would repeatedly light up with a ghostly phosphorescence starting at the top of the mast, creep down the aerial to the bridge and discharge noiselesly at intervals in a blinding flash. This scary show quite made up for the fact that it was the midnight to 4 A.M. watch and that it was storming and raining.
August 28, 1943
The ship is pitching and rolling rather violently today. My room is near the bow and right under the steel fo'c'sle deck. As I sit trying to write, I can feel the bow poise in the air, drop down and sink into the next wave with an accompanying shock making the whole 537 foot ship shudder. I had the watch this morning, and it was a beautiful sight to see the water rushing over the bow and flowing aft. Then the bow would rise high out of the water again all covered with foam and spray.
The sea can be beautiful at times, depending on one's mood and the sea's mood. It is a thrill to have a perfectly clear day and to be able to pick out land as far away as 80 miles. It is a beautiful sight at night when there is a lot of phosphorus in the water and the bow cutting the water causes a bright glow under the dark decks as we look down from the pilot house.
September 6, 1943
I have delved at odd times into a book of German short stories. I am usually attracted by their charming simplicity. Here's a rough translation from a book by August Sperl, a chapter headed "Ubi sunt, qui ante nos?" or "Wo sind sie den?":
"What are the people of the earth since the very beginning but a mighty pendulum. By an unseen power they are driven back and forth in great swingings, they rise up, sink back, rise again and sink again; and we feel the powerful movement, we rejoice over the irresistible advancement when the pendulum rises, we complain and know not whence the backward movement comes when the pendulum falls, and yet we fancy in spite of all this that endless paths will be traversed - since we do not know that since the very beginning there have been only swingings.
High above, over the restless pendulum is, of course, a clock; or indeed why would there be a pendulum. It is the world clock, which no one knows. Down below, it goes back and forth in great swingings and yet does not move from the place; up above, however, the great hand writes slowly and announces the time and the real progress.
We shortsighted humans do not recognize the hand and the figures; they stand too high above us. But at distant intervals, too, up there the hammer strikes the bell and its bright sound can be heard in every land.
The hand writes, the hammer strikes, and in the graves sleep the dead - until sometime the pendulum stands still. Rigid immutable laws force us on our short paths, and the short paths all lead to a single graveyard. But we have a choice whether we wish to go our short way with bound spirit or with peace in the heart." This sounds somewhat gloomy, but certainly it is an interesting concept.
November 7, 1943
[Back at Pearl Harbor from the Aleutians]
Morning deck watch in port is busy: getting liberty parties off to the beach, getting the Catholic church party off to another ship and back, rigging our ship for Protestant service, getting working parties from the crew to handle ship provisioning, preparing to receive a garbage lighter alongside, making reports to the Executive Officer and Captain, keeping track of four boats assigned to us and needed to ferry yard workmen or take someone for an eye exam, etc.
At sea, the officer of the deck has less routine in which to be involved, but he has charge of the deck watch and the movements of the ship. This is simplest when there are fewest of the big shots on the bridge, because it gets very crowded for one thing and furthermore it is difficult to know when to take a back seat or how to carry out a fistful of orders coming all at once.
This is an extraordinary world from which I have received a great many more goods things than I ought to expect from what I have put into it. I will always love to contemplate all the things that have in the past and continue to come my way - but let's not for get to put out something in return.
November 21, 1943
Night vision is an important item aboard ship, particularly for the watch on the bridge. Before going on night watch we are supposed to wear dark red goggles and accustom our eyes to the dark. But as with so many things in life, it is not as simple as all that. When you go up on watch, the first thing you have to do is read the night orders in the chart house, which necessitates taking off the goggles!
With or without goggles, eyes are of little use in getting up to the fighting bridge for watch duty. You climb up a ladder from the wardroom to a black passageway, turn 360 degrees and climb another ladder to the communications deck. So far it's easy; this is captain's country and the "ladders" are more like stairs and there is no traffic. From this point on, you keep one arm in front of your face while the other feels around for the next familiar object. Make a 180 degree turn, feel for a beam, then find a railing opposite and shout "coming up", if you can get it all out before a "coming down" foot is in your face. Up this nearly perpendicular ladder you are on the signal bridge and must make your way to another ladder, this time by pacing off two steps ahead, three to the left, and one again to the left. This must be done with a loud placing of the heels and slowly, as several signalmen are standing around whom you hope will clear a path - they can see you, but you are still blind. Climb another ladder, then take one pace to the right before stepping ahead lest you fall down to the signal bridge again. Step ahead two paces and grope your way into a tunnel leading to the pilot house. The goal is the fighting bridge where you stumble over the wires of the men on watch who are manning phones to the engine room, to the signal bridge, etc.
December 19, 1943
[Hawaii - Christmas time]It is completely beyond my comprehension why I am treated so well by everyone. Letters from relatives and friends are scattered all about me in the desk. Each person reminds me of different occasions and different locations and different frames of mind. Sometimes I am astonished at myself as I recall all the varied scenes in which I turn up. It makes me wonder in which of these places I belong, or whether it is possible for one person to belong in so many places. Of some people it can be said "They belong to the Racquet Club set". They have picked the limits of their social interests and they then settle down, presumably comfortably, within these confines.
The other day I went on liberty with a friend who always likes swimming or athletics, so that is what we did. Another day, with a friend who is a very capable artist, we visited a museum and spent an hour or two reading of local traditions. I couldn't take athletics or art as a steady diet, so I could not be committed to either direction. Perhaps there is a classification of "Rover".
January 20, 1944
I had a low feeling recently when, on sea maneuvers with some other ships, I made a couple of errors in "sea-man's eye" that resulted in our ship performing in a rather ridiculous manner - snaking back and forth, backing away, etc., before resuming proper station. The captain was rather disgusted, I am sure, and I felt I had lost every shred of prestige as officer of the deck. When I got off duty, I wanted nothing but to be left alone to try to trace the source of my errors and to let the balm of time do its work.
There is nothing one can do to get rid of that low feeling once it seizes you. You try to talk your self into believing that it is absurd to want to ponder on the whole affair and silly to worry about it, but to no avail.
The very next day I again had the watch and damned if the same sort of maneuver didn't come up. I was feeling positively clammy by this time, but luck ily things went off quite well, and in fact the admiral in charge of our cruiser division, having made it more difficult for us by executing a turn just as we were joining up, sent over a message apologizing for catching us in the knuckle of the turn and complimenting the ship for its beautiful handling.
I don't think this message impressed our captain the least bit with my seamanship, but it was just what I needed to make me forget my previous difficulties.
February 7, 1944
Nighttime again on the bridge. The moon hangs overhead and packs of clouds go scudding by. The Big Dipper is with us again, peering through an opening in the clouds. One can tell time by it, I am told. You take the two end stars of the dipper (not the handle) and note what hour they point to (away from the North Star). Double this figure and add to it double the month of the year it is past January 1. Then subtract from this 16 1/4 and you have the time of day (or night). In case the total of the hour read from the Big Dipper and the months past January is more than 16 1/4, subtract the total from 40 1/4. My calculation at the moment comes to 12:45 AM, only three minutes different from the ship's chronometer.
So you see I have another "midwatch", and another three hours to go. Usually the first three hours are all right, but the fourth often develops into a titanic struggle of willpower to stay awake and alert - recognizing that thirteen hundred people, mostly sleeping, are counting on you to carry them safely through the night. Off watch at 3:45 AM, but then there's "General Quarters", involving everyone, from an hour and a quarter before sunrise to sunrise (i.e., from about 4:30 to 5:45 AM).
February 12, 1944
We are sitting serenely under the moonlit sky, "anchored as before, with 90 fathoms of chain to the port anchor at the water's edge, in 23 fathoms of water" - as I must write in the ship's log. A friend, who also has this midwatch, brought mail up to me on the bridge, and an apple. With mail, the morning press news, a quartermaster reteaching me the Morse code, and an argument on the negro question with the junior officer of the deck, the watch went quickly.
Had we been underway, such activities are out. I hardly risk taking my eye off the ships around long enough to pour a cup of coffee and throw in the cream and sugar. Coffee, otherwise known as "joe" or "mud", is a serious institution aboard ship. On some watch stations one's social or professional standing may be influenced by whether one admits to liking cream and sugar (scornfully referred to in some circles as "la- dee-da"). Knowing that the anti-aircraft gun director crews, who inhabit a freezing cold cramped box even higher than the fighting bridge, frown on "la-dee-da", I had to drink quantities of lousy black coffee to keep warm when given a temporary watch station there.
February 16, 1944
A fleet of warships all performing simultaneous maneuvers is a beautiful sight. It is a panorama on a vast scale - stately movements involving change of front, rotation of axis, closing in a circle, forming column or forming line of bearing.
The other day I read a poem consisting largely of simple phrases of things seen and loved. One can be taken by scenes aboard ship: a flock of flying fish darting away from the bow of the ship, the sun shining through the membranes of their fins; the crew lined up for "chow"; men chipping paint on the fo'c'sle; bed ding being aired on the lifelines; planes circling overhead in tight formation; letting go the anchor - the noise, the bugle note, the cloud of dust from the rusty chain, and unfurling the jack; a destroyer racing to a new position; an eagle perched on a cold and desolate rock; fog of all varieties; a broken-down pot of "joe"; men in dungarees squatting around.
March 7, 1944
I spent a good part of yesterday reading "The Screwtape Letters" and thoroughly enjoying it. Enjoyment may be a poor way to express it because the book brings an uncomfortable focus of light on some of the strategems that the Lower Powers are obviously using to win me for their kingdom. Here is the Under-secretary of the Devil speaking:
"Our course is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do the Enemy's will, looks round upon the universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."
For years I have wished to hear some preacher in his pulpit face the question of what was meant by Christ's last words (According to St. Matthew 27.46 and St. Mark 15.34), but I never expected to hear a satisfying answer from this source.!
March 11, 1944
I am now reading "Between Tears and Laughter" by Lin Yutang. His is not, like the recent books by Ely Culbertson, Wendell Willkie, Herbert Hoover and others, a program for effecting world peace and a just solution to the problems the war will cause. Yutang sees as a prior necessity the development among nations of a proper philosophy or morality of peace. He goes to great length to explain his view that power politics, which he sees as at the base of all post-war plans, inevitably leads to more warring. Power politics he relates to a naturalistic view of society and this in turn is influenced by modern scientific materialism and determinism.
"Scientific materialism" chains us to thinking of world peace in terms of strategic locations, industrial capacities, economic and national entities, etc. These are the tools of political thinking. Yutang proposes that a better set of standards than "swine and slop economics" be adopted - standards common to the hearts of man: the heart of mercy, the sense of shame, the sense of courtesy and respect, and the sense of right and wrong.
March 26, 1944
I am supposed to be learning something about celestial navigation. We take our star sights in the pre-dawn when it is still dark enough to see the stars and yet light enough to see a clearly defined horizon. A sextant used to look extremely complicated, but I now find that it does nothing more than measure the angle between the horizon and the star, planet, sun or moon - whichever you are shooting. The fun begins when you have gotten your angles and you try to look up the figures in a bunch of tables. The "day's work in navigation" also includes taking a noon sun sight and more stars again at dusk.
The last couple of days have had the most beautiful sunsets. The atmosphere during the day has been clearer than I have ever seen it, and the sea very calm - the first time I have ever felt the term "glassy sea" applicable. Light puffy clouds extending into the distance were still clearly outlined as they curved with the earth and were cut off by the horizon. These modern painters who delight in abstractions would have derived inspiration galore from the many - colored and curiously formed little clouds a great distance away - some of them looking like gigantic ships perched on the horizon, others looking like black smoke from huge oil fires, others like the white cloud sent up by an ammunition dump explosion, others like icebergs and others like nothing else in man's experience - bluish and greenish shapes moving sedately about. Everyone just looked and looked for the hour or more that the effects lasted.
What is mankind up to while nature is showing us some of her gems! In the case of the sunsets, we all stop and feel the beauty as an emotion and as some thing to remember, yet all the time we are on our way to bombard, shoot down or sink anything Japanese that can be found. In the case of an island, we stand off and blast it to bits for reasons we consider good. Why are so many of man's activities of a destructive nature?
April 9, 1944
We have been directed to conduct Division Instruction. For the first session I brought some war maps clipped from a Sunday NY Times and used them for a discussion of the Russian winter campaign, of the British-American air attacks on Germany and of the alternate ways in which the Pacific campaign might be trying to reach Japan. Holding the "instruction" during working hours might make it popular whatever the subject, but the gang [the ship's Repair Division] wanted to know when we would have another session.
I have an idea for next time: Poetry! Mother sent me a book of poetry some time ago and I have a few selections in mind. "The Charge Of The Light Brigade" for a starter, with its "Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do or die". Perhaps "The Man With The Hoe" could be added to enlarge upon what happens to the individual and to society if tyrants force others to be "brothers to the ox", or if people allow themselves to sink to this level!
May 5, 1944
I have received a letter from Mrs. French, wife of the Master of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale. She describes in detail a show that the faculty attached to JE put on for the college: the Secretary of the university dressed in frockcoat and singing mid-Victorian songs topped off with Dickens' " Ode to an Expiring Frog" set to music by Paul Hindemith; a professor of comparative religions and my economics professor in Prince Alberts and sideburns playing a Coronation March of Queen Victoria with polka movement.
The Frenchs always held open house for tea on Sunday afternoons. Many a time I enjoyed their tea and sandwiches and listened to the discussions that took place in various corners of the living room, usually centered around Mr. French, a Chaucer scholar, or the resident Fellows of the college.
Mrs. French writes:
"the daffys are out in our court but the dogwood is just barely showing the faintest bit of green and those lovely crab apple trees on Library St. in the Branford moat are going to bloom in another week. I think it is the most beautiful spot in the world for that week of bloom."
She is not describing a large panorama, but just the view from her front doorstep and in her tiny courtyard not much bigger than her living room.
Across a college walk from the French's front door, Harkness Tower rises from the Branford College moat. At dusk the sight of the tower from the west end of the block-long Library St., soaring above the trees that line the path, and with the upper parts of the tower tinted by the rays of the evening sun, is one of the most beautiful and peaceful sights that I know. How easy it is to bring such glories again vividly to mind when someone's words, or one's own thoughts trigger the remembrance!
May 15, 1944
I have a fondness for sculptured representations of the Last Judgment as found in medieval church tympanums - the more blood-thirsty the better. Which reminds me of "my" beloved church of Ste. Foye at Conques in France, where, over the entrance, the devils of hell are portrayed ramming forks down the throats of some sinners, preparing to boil others in a fiery cauldron, or feeding some old reprobate in clerical garb to a horrible, huge-mouthed dragon. Nothing as tame as Michelangelo's Last Judgment for me, even though he also had the idea of putting a contemporary priest on the hell-bound side!
As for church windows or paintings, I make a plea for works "con brio", which, according to Van Loon, is a musical term denoting "with fire and noise". If the scene is to represent Temptation, then let the evil devils spout flame, be covered with horns and have tremendous fangs. Let the person tempted have the most worried expression that can be painted on the brow of mortal man. Let the person who has resisted temptation bask under the effulgence of two or three halos. Let the Temptor have something really worth while to offer - a mint julep, a pair of nylons, etc.
May 27, 1944
Saturday in the peacetime Navy was synonymous with inspection and liberty for the weekend. Today, with no place to have liberty, there is just inspection by the Admiral of our cruiser division. Preparations for such an inspection are begun days in advance: uniforms, in this case "undress whites with neckerchief", are repaired; all hands are repeatedly instructed to get haircuts; and paint is thrown about the ship in staggering quantities. The crew was routed out at 5:15 AM to make sure everything would be cleaned up by 10 AM.
My big role comes when inspection of the messing spaces [crew's eating quarters] is made. I greet the Admiral with a "Good morning, Admiral, messing compartments ready for inspection, Sir" and I fall in on his port quarter as he moves along. Lined up in the compartment are 28 mess cooks in two rows facing each other. They salute on command and otherwise stand at attention.
The Admiral had been inspecting haircuts of the deck force, so I had drilled the men in "uncover" and "cover"' but I was totally unprepared for the Admiral's request to inspect fingernails! I had no idea what sort of command to give to get hands presented for inspection, but words of some sort came to me and were delivered in authoritative tone ending with "Place!". Possibly the command was overdone because the hands were extended out so far that the Admiral could hardly squeeze through the narrow alley that resulted.
May 29, 1944
Mail censoring is a nuisance, but it has one intriguing aspect: it gives one an insight into what the men are thinking about, what their aspirations are and what troubles they have. Much of what one reads is very different from the daily talk; usually the men appear more soft-hearted, more given to referring to certain values they would never be caught talking about aboard ship.
One fellow was telling his family how he had just become throttle man in the engine room and rated having coffee brought to him. He was proud of his new job and looked forward to graduating to feed pump man and to engine room petty officer of the watch. Up on the bridge one doesn't think much about who carries out the orders to the engine room to go to standard speed, or to decrease propeller speed by two revolutions per minute.
Then there's the man who wrote that a friend of his, after 14 months at sea, just heard from his wife that she had a baby boy. The husband, carrying out a navy tradition, passed out cigars!
May 30, 1944
I have been clearing up my desk, which consists mainly in arranging letters received since heading west in December of 1942. A lot of letters from Pat. I last saw her in Boston when I was at the U.S. Naval Training School at Dartmouth and she had returned for the fall term at Wellesley.
Leave-taking was not a happy event the day I left for Bomb Disposal School in Washington and for what ever duty would follow that. I said goodbye to her on the corner by the Back Bay station in Boston and rushed off for my train. We had taken an excursion boat to the beach that day and I remember that on the return trip we didn't have much to say to one another. We knew we wouldn't see each other for an indeterminate period, and a question seemed to stand there uncomfortably before us: "What does it add up to - our thoughts of each other, our good times together?" I didn't have much answer.
How tenuous our correspondence was for the next several months! But we then discovered gradually that we could meet in our letters in a way I had hardly thought possible.
May 31, 1944
There's plenty of time out here to reflect on scenes of long ago. In New York I used to punch the time clock at Macy's at about 6 PM and walk across to Fifth Avenue to take the bus home to mother's apartment at 59 E. 96th St. It would be just after sunset and the streets would be filled with people from the stores. Despite the crowds and the hurried movements, there was always somewhat of a hush over everything. I would climb to the top of one of the double-decker buses, preferably an open-top one. The shop windows offered novel and fantastic displays. One evening I would sit on the left side to look at Russeks, Finchley's medieval storefront, Lanz of Salzburg, The Tailored Woman, Bergdorf's handsome front, Venus in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel, the statue of Sherman and Central Park. The next evening, on the right side, I would study Altman's, I. Miller, Bonwit Teller, Arnold Constable, Tiffany, Cartier, Lentheric, and so on to the Hotel Pierre and the mile upon mile of Fifth Avenue mansions, some in good taste, some in bad, some occupied by people, some by pigeons.
June 2, 1944
I have just finished writing to "Brownie", more formally titled Miss Susan E. Brown, who used to be nurse to brother, sister and me, who helped mother take care of father in the months before he died and who has always come to help the family when needed. She was an Episcopalian until about fifteen years ago when she adopted Roman Catholicism. An intensely devout person, she very literally believes the ad monition "Lay not up for thyself treasures upon earth", and I am sure she has laid up ample treasures for herself in heaven during her lifetime of nursing. The world will be poorer when she leaves for her heavenly home.
She used to take care of our measles and mumps in days of old and would tell us endless ghost stories remembered from the days of her childhood in Salem, Massachusetts, where, years later in World War I, she had charge of a hospital. She would see that prayers were said properly in the evening and that we all had our milk of magnesia. When through with us, she would join mother and dad for conversation. She was widely traveled (accompanying wealthy private patients), well-read and up-to-date on everything from politics to dressmaking. How she has amused us during recent visits with stories of the petty jealousies and idiosyncracies of her parish priests and nuns! She is not the least offended at her church for having its small people. She digs right in to argue them out of their pettiness, and what battles ensue!
My venerable Aunt Emily is another of my favorite girl friends. She turned 80 recently, and, like Brownie, is not too sturdy now. Both refuse, however, to admit that they are not capable of keeping up with the youngest, and their energy is astonishing. Aunt Emily Schwab lives at 863 Park Ave. in a comfortable apartment with her two German maids, Wilhelmina and Mada, who have been with her ever since I can remember and who never seem to grow a day older.
It came to be the custom for me to live with Aunt Emily during my college vacations. I would have the luxurious room of her deceased bachelor brother, Louis, and would always be up at 8 AM (no matter when I had returned from a prior evening party) for a sumptuous breakfast with my aunt. Mada always had freshly baked bread and coffee cake which aunt and I would eat prodigiously with a glass or two of milk and then a cup of incredibly bad coffee. This was only a preface to fruit, hot cereal, eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade - all served up on a lace table cloth with fresh flower centerpiece and the sun shining in the tall windows.
We would talk about family: about the first Schwabs and von Posts and others who came to this country and what they did and how they are related. And she would want to know from me exactly what courses I was taking at college and what I thought of some of the things in the current headlines. What a chance to air my wildest theories!
June 15, 1944
We have been debating the condition of the ship's morale. We have been away from the U.S. about 15 months and there is no sign of our going back. For the officers, shipboard life is comfortable: we have our rooms and our wardroom, we have drawers for our clothing, comfortable bunks, good ventilation, desks, privacy, running water in our wash basins, showers at any time, comfortable eating arrangements and no waiting in line for everything.
For the enlisted man, it is another thing. He waits in line for his meals, he sleeps 4 high in compartments which have ventilation enough to keep the air fresh, but not enough to ease extreme heat. He has a locker less than two feet square as his only place to keep his shoes, stationery, toilet articles, caps, uniforms, etc. - everything except his heavy peacoat. At meals and movies he gets to sit on a bench, but the rest of the time he has only the deck, which dirties his clothes if he sits.
He wears dungarees and works at heavy or greasy or hot jobs. Much of the time fresh water is turned on only for short periods. The ship can distill a limited amount daily, and this must be divided between the galleys, sculleries, laundry and officers and crew - not to mention the boilers. The wonder is that the men put up with it all as well as they do and still can joke about it.
June 28, 1944
My witty Yale classmate, David Kaplan, writes from London:
"Have been here for the last two months. I have seen every play in town, very few of them any good, though Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband", brilliantly directed, staged and costumed by Robert Donat, once again proves how dull morality is and how delightful wickedness. Also Agatha Christie's thriller "Ten Little Niggers", which contains eight highly satisfactory murders.
I leave now to rejoin my unit in "the field", said field being a Marquess' castle, where in feudal solitude our three ring circus lives with the Marquess, his idiot' wife, two "pale lost lilies" of daughters, and squalling grandchildren."
Fitting duty for a man who has a passion for royalty!
August 10, 1944
We're heading home! Yard overhaul, leave. —Are we happy! We have just left for San Francisco after a brief stop at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Since we hadn't seen Pearl for seven months, many of us bent our creaking elbows at the officer's club. I had seven bourbon and ginger ales in about an hour and a half and then started back to the ship. We met some shipmates perched on some lumber and drawing on a quart of bourbon; naturally we joined them. Liquor is not allowed on board, so it was necessary to dispose of the bottle beforehand. We reached the ship just in time for the evening movie "Cover Girl" which everyone had been looking forward to see. I went to my room, found a letter from Pat and started to read it. The next thing I knew, it was midnight - too late for the movie and my eyes in no condition to read anything but the face of the clock.
Along with a lovely bunch of letters from Pat, which finally reached the ship at Pearl, was word from mother of the death of a very good friend of mine, Dill Burgess, who had piloted scores of bomber missions over Germany. I lived with him and his family during the summer of 1934 when mother and sister Cornelia went to South Africa. Dill was perhaps the only man in the world lazier than I; he even looked lazy when playing badminton, although he was Metropolitan New York doubles champion.
When mother heard the news, she hopped the train right out to Garden City, L.I., to be with his family. Mother's chief occupation in life seems to be to stand by her friends. Well, I guess it is secondary to ta king care of her beloved children! In any event, she never seems to have a minute to herself, and that is probably the way she likes it. In every letter there is mention of something which she "had" to do for someone. Things that most people would consider a great exertion and a very charitable deed mother regards as natural and the only thing to do, no matter what trouble is involved. A remarkable lady!
August 31,1944
[New York City. Letter to Mr. Harold McB. Thurston, North Muskegon, Michigan, after being on leave for a week and seeing much of his daughter Patricia, then working in NY.]
"While I was away at sea, I was reluctant to consider the question of asking Patricia to marry me, but to return on this leave and see your beautiful daughter, with whom I have shared so rich a correspondence, made it impossible for me to keep my fee lings unspoken. I love Pat deeply and would consider it forever my greatest blessing to have her love and her hand in marriage. May I have your permission and your blessing?
The war is far from over in the Pacific and I fully expect another lengthy cruise with the USS San Francisco. Let us hope the war will be over in another year. I would like to marry Pat at the earliest opportunity I have to set a free foot again on the U.S."
September 16, 1944
[Back in San Francisco, after leave. Letter to Pat. ]"Our love did most of its growing on writing about everything under the sun except love. Do you remember us wondering one recent evening how our letters would be now? Filled with a new understanding and relationship - but not very different after all, I think."
September 30,1944
In the lounge of the BOQ (bachelor officer quarters) I found Thomas Hardy's "Far From The Madding Crowd". How envious that man makes me. He can take hold of incidents and persons and, in a very few pages of narrative and description, construct an analysis of character and a humorous story that will stand by it self despite the fact it is but the first of 57 chapters of the book.
Practically every hour of the day each of us sees enough incident and humanity pass before our eyes to form the basis for such writing. Often we realize it at the time, yet our mental impressions soon grow dim. What a shame!
October 1, 1944
Bugle calls were a memory to me before I joined the Navy because we had a few of them at Camp La Jeunesse near Saranac Lake, N.Y., the summer of 1936 when I was a counselor there. The bugler would sound tattoo and taps as he stood on the end of the swimming dock facing the opposite side of the lake. The calls would echo back and be given a beautiful tone by the woods all around.
Aboard ship, our routine is governed by loud speakers that reach every compartment. The bo's'n mate's shrill pipe and his voice direct certain activities and make announcements: "Whee—eet. Now hear this, clean and sweep down fore and aft". The bugle also sounds over the system to call for action and I think is given a higher degree of respect. Reveille is a loud enough call to fulfill its task of awakening, and by the haste expressed in the torrent of notes, it shows its anxiety to get an unpleasant duty over with quickly. You might think that a piece of brass responsible for rudely awakening twelve hundred men would become an object of passionate hate. Not so, because it also announces liberty, the movies, and chow. It is more of a melodic companion to the daily routine than an exacting task-master.
Just like the men, the bugle watches the clock and doesn't do a bit more work than the plan of the day calls for. So human is it that after a night of insufficient sleep or too much alcohol it will falter from excess saliva in calling reveille and during alarms, it becomes as nervous as anyone, but is prompt with either the stutter of general quarters or the scream and gallop of air defense.
And how I love to hear tattoo and taps in the dusk of some moonlit lagoon, or in a godforsaken Aleutian harbor, or even in Mare Island Navy Yard above the whine of the gears of the cranes. There's a note of lonesomeness in these calls, and how right that is, for everyone aboard ship or in camps is away from loved ones and is thinking of them before falling asleep.
There goes taps now, 9 PM, coming through the porthole of my room and echoing from ship to ship. That call gives voice to our thoughts - another day is done. "Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh; shadows of the evening steal across the sky. Jesus give the weary calm and sweet repose; with thy tenderest blessing may our eyelids close".
October 6, 1944
[Mare Island Navy Yard, Vallejo, California]
I was invited to lunch a couple of days ago in the quonset hut where two of the enlisted men in the Repair Division live with their brides. Both of the men, Sharp and Card, while on leave married the home town gals they had been going with for years. In these huts there is only china and silverware for four places, so Sharp, Card, Loeffler (division Chief Ship fitter) and I sat in style while the gals waited on us. While the feast was in the final stages of preparation, we tackled a couple of bourbon and sodas.
When we sat down, the thought of a blessing crossed my mind for some reason, but was quickly dismissed. Sharp, however, turned to me and said, "Mr. Schwab, will you ask a blessing?". We received ample blessing that day, for the dinner was of immense proportions. We had huge slices of pork, with delicious carrots, peas, mashed potatoes and gravy and corn on the cob. In addition, there was a half pound of butter on the table and white and brown bread, and a bowl of fancily cut radishes, celery and stuffed olives - and a salad. Dessert was a huge slice of apple pie with coffee.
Card has nicknamed his wife "Tonto" in retaliation for her calling him the "Lone Ranger", and the two of them exchanged a continuous stream of good-natured insults which kept Loeffler and myself in laughter the whole time. How thoughtful of these two fine couples to entertain two lonely bachelors!
October 14, 1944
Then there's laundryman Hamilton who called to the Chief Carpenter's Mate on the sidewalk in town and, when the chief turned around, Hamilton pasted him right in the eye.
Then there is the neurotic type. Serafino, for instance, who writes the most passionate letters to his wife and yet has just returned from three days AWOL in Reno where the civil authorities want him for attempted bigamy, false claims of divorce, conspiracy, etc. Seems he got mixed up with some woman there.
Or there is Polacek, a shipfitter, who tells me that he is engaged, but he got to running around with his girl's married sister, who is serious about the matter and wants to divorce her husband. What about his fiancée? She doesn't know anything about it.
And now I am going to have Sunday dinner in Vallejo with another shipfitter and his wife. I will be interested in the domestic scene, because I clearly remember about six months ago reading (we officers have to censor mail) a couple of his letters to his wife. He then told her just where she could go because he had the dope on how she had been carrying on in his absence and she could start getting a divorce as soon as she wanted to!
October 15, 1944
This morning I left the ship in time for church at the little chapel at Mare Island and then hopped a cab for Vallejo to have lunch with the couple referred to above. Again an excellent meal and domestic bliss!
December 15, 1944
Yesterday the ship held funeral services for a man who died of internal injuries when a wave broke over the fo'c'sle and threw him against a gun mount. The ship's Boatswain and the First Lieutenant were also thrown about by this wave and almost swept overboard. Hundreds of men turned out for the ceremony, the band played "Abide with me", and eight of the man's division mates acted as pall-bearers, dressed in dress white uniform and leggings. It is a shame that his family could not be present to see the last rites that in many ways probably outdid anything he might have had at a distant future date in civilian life. It was an impressive setting - the ship steaming along majestically with colors flying at half-mast, with all the other ships in the formation also half-masting their colors.
Taking a look at all the men attending, I was struck by the diversity of nationalities represented. There were a couple of negro mess attendants, a mexican, a greek, a frenchman, Italians, irish, filipino - a fair cross-section of America. I can never think of our present occupation as being glorious, but it is deeply impressive that such a heterogeneous group can learn to work together and worship together. There is something to this brotherhood of man although it is sadly overshadowed at times by the strife of nations.
The presence of all the man's shipmates, only a few of whom could have known him personally, and the vastness of the ocean into which his body was dropped, lent to the funeral an aspect of universality - living men watching a man's spirit commended to Heaven and his body to the deep - the essence of man's departure from the earth.
December 23, 1944
"I mould my watch to fit the human concept of time."
What is one to think of this momentous statement of my friend Wadsworth? The quote is a good example of what happens to people's minds after being out here a long while. Wadsworth did not make the remark idly - he is actually engaged in constructing a clock based on some ingenious new principle. All I have seen of it so far is a brass tube closed at one end. When he came into my room with it, I happened to offer him a cigarette. He took it and thanked me, then sat down with his little tube in hand, dropped the cigarette in the tube, exclaimed "Fits just right", withdrew the cigarette, fingered it and suddenly looked up to say, "0h, no thanks, I don't want a cigarette". Poor guy!
He claims the laws of inertia are a hell of a basis upon which to measure time accurately, and any way there has been no advance in the design of time pieces in 150 years, so he is working out some sort of hydraulic approach inspired by the fact that the earliest timekeepers in prehistoric days were based on the flow of water.
January 14, 1945
About half way around the world and twenty seven years ago today, I popped into the world in the family's brownstone house at 118 E. 39th St. in New York City.
January 19,1945
The Executive Officer, as if preparing for Captaincy, has recently developed an interesting habit. Whenever one of the coding board officers brings the dispatches to him and presents a #3 pencil for him to initial the message, he breaks the pencil in two, heaves it against the bulkhead and lectures the unwitting officer on how he has told the radio room again and again to use a #2 pencil. High officers hardly seem worthy of their rank unless they have some idiosyncracies that have to be allowed for.
January 28, 1945
Got a Christmas card from old college friend, George Redington. It pictures Notre Dame cathedral in the background beyond one of the many bridges over the Seine. He has agreeable duty in Paris at present and deserves it after accompanying his troop carrier unit in landings in northern and southern France. George couldn't have realized all the memories that his card brought to mind.
In the summer of 1939, I lived in Paris for six weeks with classmate Bob Donhauser while we worked for a Yale professor in excavations at the Abbey Church of St. Denis. Many an evening, after dining in the Montparnasse, we would come back to our hotel on the lie St. Louis across a Seine bridge. At sunset, the view of Notre Dame is inspiring: the sun's rays still catching on the massive towers, giving them a strange glow. At night, the view is equally impressive: floodlights play all around the church making beautiful patterns of light and shadow on the flying buttresses and the stone ornamentation.
March 5, 1945
I wrote mother yesterday to say I would be thinking of her and of dad on the Ides of March. It was March 15, 1935, that dad died in our house in Merrick. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York, in the family plot next to his parents. Mother and I used to take the west side subway from Manhattan to the end of the line, which is right at the entrance to the cemetery, and walk to the plot. Later we would find Uncle Hermann's vault, sit down by it and have a cigarette, reasoning that he would like us to visit him in this way.
Dear dad! He loved his mountain climbing, his tennis and his Merrick house. He loved to entertain, to be jolly, to have his friends around; and he loved his family, loved to go on picnics to Jones Beach with all of us. All of these things must have given him a lot of happiness, yet he had his troubles. He must have had much heavy on his mind in the months of his last illness. I would like to think that he can see his family now. He would be especially proud of mother for the way she has taken care of us and kept a home for us.
March 11, 1945
Reading in some newspapers that have come to us of the raid on Dieppe on the European front of the war reminds me of the Pacific theatre landings on Makin, Saipan, Kwajalein and Guam. From our stations aboard ship sometimes as close as 2000 yards from the beaches we have seen the marines and the army making their way ashore. It all seems to go very smoothly, just like the reading of a correspondent's account. Close as we are to the scene, we cannot grasp what the war really means to the men on the beach. We cannot see the rifle, machine gun and mortar fire that they have to walk through; we cannot see some of them drop. We cannot realize that some of the men in the little LCVP landing boats that pass us on their way to the beaches will, in the space of a few more minutes, have given their lives for something. I wonder what that some thing is? They are the ones who pay the price for their courage.
March 24, 1945
In February we steamed with the Fifth Fleet up to Tokyo from Ulithi. The ship tuned in on Radio Tokyo and listened to a program of setting up exercises, complete with the equivalent of "one-two-three", until it was suddenly succeeded by excited jabbering and then silence - which told us that our carrier planes had reached their targets.
Along with the Tokyo strikes, we were also protecting the landings on Iwo Jima. As an aid to the marines who were advancing across the island, our ship lay offshore firing steadily at specific targets.
April 3, 1945
About the 21st of March, our ship, together with a fleet of cruisers, battleships and destroyers, set out for Okinawa, arriving on the 25th. Minesweepers, protected by planes of a carrier force, swept some channels for the heavy ships around Okinawa and Kerama Retto, just to the west of Okinawa. [Retto means group of islands; jima or shima means island.] This carrier force, the same one with which we operated on the Tokyo raid and the Two Jima bombardment, has just completed a sweep of all the Japanese bases from For mosa up to the main Jap island of Honshu where, in the inland sea, they jumped a major remnant of the Jap fleet.
Okinawa is midway between Formosa and Kyushu, the southernmost of the main Jap islands. The distance is about 350 miles each way. We are out of range of friendly land-based air support, but we are protected by carrier aircraft, enabling us to anchor and take on ammunition in a harbor constructed two days before and within 20 to 40 miles of five major Jap airfields.
The other morning I went up on deck for the 4 to 8 AM watch and learned that during the night our formation of ships (which was on night retirement into the East China Sea northward from Okinawa) had shot down between 10 and 17 planes. Our ship had not fired because the planes were coming from a direction where the other ships nailed them first.
The other evening in fog so thick we could hardly see a ship's length ahead, a destroyer scooted past our bow just a couple of hundred feet ahead, creating some heat under the captain's collar.
Iwo Jima was purely a Japanese military installation, lacking towns, houses or even fields. Okinawa and the Kerama Retto group were different. From a few miles off, Tokashiki island looked like a Corot landscape. The steep hillsides were terraced into long horizontal strips of farm fields. The undeveloped ridges and gullys were dark shadowy green and the fields were a hundred variations of lighter green, sometimes tinged with yellow - a beautiful sight. After looking at this harmony of color through my binoculars, I ran my eye along the highest crest of the island. Up there, outlined against the sky, was one of those magnificent low, wide-spreading trees that are so closely associated with Japanese art and scenery. That single tree seemed very significant; it meant that we were hitting at Japanese home territory, not at obscure and almost uninhabited Pacific islands on the waters of a vast ocean.
We are now involved not in the blasting of coral and coconut trees and the displacement to other is lands of native populations, but in the destruction of towns and the driving into the fields of civilian population. Small as Okinawa may seem on the map, it has about 450,000 population!
War sure is a disgraceful occupation for humans. I will think more of the truth of this as the Pacific war becomes like the European war has been for some time - a concerted effort to wipe out a nation's means and will to resist. What a mess Germany must be now! The same fate seems imminent for Japan. About a month ago, Naha town on Okinawa was visited by carrier air craft dropping incendiary bombs. This raid wiped out the town, completely obliterating the main city and port. From our ship we can clearly see the gutted ruins empty of life - a frightful sight, and cause for thought.
A few minutes ago I was in the wardroom eating my dessert of pie a-la-mode. Every minute or so our guns would let out a salvo; we are shooting at some kind of enemy concentration of troops or materiel on the edge of Machinate town. The Executive Officer and First Lieutenant are playing cribbage. Paulk and I are listening to the radio news from the Philippines. Every now and then in the background of the radio program we hear the observers on the island directing our shooting, "Up two hundred, right two hundred".
Cribbage and shooting and pie and Japs and radios and burning towns, the ship just drifting on a smooth sea, artillery shells flying overhead, a beautiful sunset and a Filipino news program talking about Russia's three votes at the San Francisco Security Conference (memories of Nob Hill, The Presidio, Market St., the Opera House), and talking about the Americans at Bremen (memories of Rhine wine and smoked eel when I visited my relatives, the Noltenius family, there in August of 1939). What a life!
April 7, 1945
As I went to watch duty, our anti-aircraft batteries started an awful din. The horizon in all directions was filled with the black smoke of burst shells. After a temporary lull, more Jap planes attacked and ahead of us a plane dove on a destroyer, clipped off part of her mast and fell into the water. Off to starboard, a plane went after another destroyer and smashed right into her. About five minutes later another plane spotted the cripple, flew through a hail of gunfire and nosed right into the damaged ship.
What a sickening sight. The last we heard as night settled down was that the destroyer was still afloat and thought she had the flooding under control (but what of the dead and injured?) It is hard to believe that planes will deliberately crash a ship, yet it is not a new Jap tactic and one has to believe one's eyes. Those Jap pilots are not taking a gamble, they have decided on death.
April 8, 1945
This morning, shortly after I went on watch at 4 AM, I spotted a plane coming in at us on the starboard bow. It was very dark and all I could see was the exhaust flame of his motor. He was so low I could hardly believe it was a plane at first. In the time it took me to alert the gunnery control station, the plane hit the water about three hundred feet away. A few seconds later the Navigator called out "Torpedo wake" and by the time I looked, the wake was under the bow and threading out to port. Our luck was almost unbelievable - that the torpedo missed and that the plane flew so low that he tripped into the water. The ship hadn't fired a shot. A few minutes later we felt an underwater explosion, probably the torpedo at the end of its run (some Jap torpedoes blow themselves up when they get tired out).
July 2, 1945
Old roommate Jim Mclnteer stopped in last night to read some poems out of "One Hundred and One Famous Poems". He is well practiced in the Scotch dialect and had us doubled up with laughter at Robert Burns' "Letter to a Young Friend":
"Ay free, aff han', your story tell,
When wi' a bosom cronie;
But still keep something to yoursel
Ye scarcely tell to onie:
Conceal yoursel as weel's ye can
Frae critical dissection:
But keek thro' every other man
Wi' sharpened, sly inspection."
- etc. -
August 10, 1945
Shipboard friend and roommate, Hugh Clay Paulk, a born promotional genius from Tennessee, left the ship when we were off Okinawa. If you wonder how he managed this, it was like this: he and the chief engineer did not see eye to eye, Paulk being competent but independent, and the other arbitrary. So Paulk requested transfer when he had trained a replacement. But the chief engineer was happy to transfer him with out relief!
At Pearl Harbour, he visited our former captain, now Commodore Overesch, Chief of staff of the Hawaiian Sea Frontier Command. How well I remember Captain Overesch: he had just come to sea duty in the Pacific from being Commandant of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy. Can one imagine a more incongruous pair on the bridge of a warship, Overesch and Schwab! How I used to suffer from that man's excitability and temper. Paulk wrote to me:
"I've just been in to see the Commodore Overesch. I told him how much we missed him and how I used to hear from my roommate about what went on up on the bridge. [Paulk being an engine room officer.] 'Schwab', he interrupted, 'now there's a fine officer. There's always something going on in that mind of his; he does a lot of things quietly, but I got on to him, -etc. -etc.'."
One thing Paulk and Overesch have in common: with the utmost apparent sincerity, they can both hand out a line.
August 26, 1945
[Subic Bay, The Philippines]
A couple of evenings ago I had dinner aboard a large British aircraft carrier. Three of their officers asked our officer of the deck for three officers to have dinner. Stan Henson, Buck Dyess and I went. Before dinner we had a couple of rounds of Australian whiskey (first one straight, the second with ginger ale), then two rounds of Scotch whiskey after a tour of some of the spaces on the ship.
Dinner started off with delicious tomato soup, then roast lamb with mint sauce, boiled potatoes and delicious cooked onions. With the main course came a glass of sherry followed by large glasses of white wine with bottles standing by to keep the glasses filled. A "savory" of salmon spread on biscuit (crackers to us) was followed by ice cream and a glass of port wine.
On our way back to the wardroom, we poured our selves a demitasse, as if to sober us up. But then we started off again with two rounds of creme-de-menthe, the second of which we bottomed-up and were in condition to think nothing of it. We were engaged in animated chatter about one thing or another all this time - which led eventually to a couple of rounds of Van-der-Hum. When these were finished, it was high time to call a halt to after-dinner liqueurs and start drinking again: Australian beer, whiskey and ginger ale until we were poured into a boat to return to the 100% dry USS San Francisco.
The best we could do for the Britishers the next day was a routine dinner in the wardroom, a songfest on the fo'c'sle, and a movie.
September 16, 1945
[Vicinity of Port Arthur, Manchuria (not Texas!)]
Just received a letter from Meg Miller, St. Andrew's School nurse, with sad news about many friends: a key faculty member, Granville Sherwood, dead most untimely of a coronary thrombosis; classmate Chuck Silliman nearly blinded at Aachen, Germany; classmate Bill Fox just home from two years in a German prison camp, but suffering a psychosis.
On the lighter side, Miss Welton, the chubby school secretary, got married in the school chapel to an army private 15 years her junior. At the request of the bride, Meg played "Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways" on the organ - which gave out with an awful squawk halfway through, leaving Meg to finish with the chimes.
October 18, 1945
I was awakened this morning at seven by Lieu tenant Gorman who told me we were going to get under way as soon as possible. Thirty two years in the Navy have given Gorman the habit of being up and about at 6:30 in the morning - a laudable practice which I have not seen duplicated except by other up-from-the-ranks mustangs". The anchor detail was called away and I went to my station on the fo'c'sle. I wondered what all the fuss was about; someone said that there was going to be a war starting today.
We were anchored at Chefoo, a Chinese port on the Yellow Sea, and as I looked toward the entrance to the harbour I beheld a most amazing sight. Coming toward us was a tin pan armada composed of a couple of diesel powered fishing boats, three tugboats towing one or two wooden fishing junks each, and a broken-down old coastal steamer. All of the boats carried the flag of the Kuomintang government, and some of them carried the U.S. flag in addition. One of the fishing boats, which apparently had the officer-in-charge aboard, had the U.S. flag on the starboard yardarm and the Chinese flag on the port yardarm.
Our ship and one destroyer were the only ones anchored in the harbor. The new entrants steamed in to where we were and hove to in our shadow. All the boats and junks had a full load of troops. They waved at us as the boats milled about in uncertain pattern with their whistles screeching. A couple of representatives came aboard from the fishing boat and went into conference with our Admiral. Then they left the ship, climbed aboard their boat and the whole group headed on farther into the harbor.
We up-anchored and left. It seemed that the Kuomintang forces would try to land and take Chefoo from the Chinese Communists. The whole affair seemed ridiculous. I can't imagine Chiang-Kai-Shek getting together with his military advisors and deciding to send this pathetic amphibious force to take the town. Perhaps they were counting on our taking part in their little plan!
So much for our part in international politics.
December 6, 1945
[On the way home]
We have been underway since November 27 and heading east. We are crossing the international date line this evening and confusion is rife as to what date it is. The official answer is that today is our second Thursday, the 6th. The trip so far has not been uneventful. Off Okinawa, we passed what I hope is the last floating mine that the ship encounters.
The steering plant has developed a couple of casualties, the running lights have developed short circuits, and one of the reduction gears started throwing oil, causing us to slow for half an hour. One of the gyro compasses burned out a motor and an inexperienced helmsman trying to get the ship to the proper heading relative to the dead compass, had the rudder hard over and the ship going around in circles.
These were minor troubles. The major concern was that some cracks developed in the ship's hull near the bow. It took all the shipfitters plus volunteer welders from our passengers two days of continuous and dangerous work to patch up the leaks. The poor old USS San Francisco is tired - and who can blame her!
Except for the half hour slowdown to repair the reduction gear, and the more extensive slow-down to reduce the water pressure on the cracked bow plates, the ship has never had to slow down for anything. So now it happens on our homeward bound voyage!
This part of the book attempts, by means of genealogical charts, to acquaint the reader with our relatives living today.
Because we are fortunate in having so many warmhearted relations who are personally known to me, it is hard to resist the temptation to say lovely things about them. Regretably, this is not the place to write such encomiums.
I have assigned a letter to each of the four family roots -
V- de Villiers
S- Schwab
P- von Post
D- Dayton-Baldwin
- and have used a numbering system to identify relationships within each family.
This part of the book will have narrower margins in order to better accommodate the indented material.
The explanations accompanying the charts should be understood to have been written early in 1989.
There will be many omissions, and probably some errors in this material. The omissions I regret; for any errors I apologize.
As background to the subsequent charts, this chart lists the ten children of Abraham Matthys de Villiers and his wife, Gertrude Catoggia (or Catorzia). The second of these children was my grandfather, Jan Stephanus de Villiers. Because there had come to be so many de Villiers in South Africa, it was not considered unusual for one de Villiers to marry another de Villiers.
Grandfather Jan Stephanus de Villiers (1840-1896) and his wife, Cornelia Johanna Louw (1848-1896), had six children. The fifth child was my mother, Catharina Hendrina de Villiers.
Mother's brother, Rocco de Villiers, and his wife, Annie de Vos, had three children.
Jan's widow, Gay, lives at Hermanus, on the ocean about 70 miles southeast of Cape Town. Steph's widow lives at Ceres, inland north and east of Cape Town, where Steph had been a civil engineer for the town. Marguerite lives at Stellenbosch, about 30 miles east of Cape Town, where she had been a professor of speech and drama at the University of Stellenbosch.
Mother's sister, Gertrude de Villiers, and her husband, Johannes Bosman, had three children.
Cornelia (Mrs. Alston Duckitt) lives at Ferndale, a suburb of Johannesburg, in a house on the property of her daughter and son-in-law, the Duncan Miller family. Kitty (Mrs. Japie Smuts) lives at Rondebosch, a suburb of Cape Town. Boetie's widow, Yvonne, lives at Pennington, Natal.
Mother's niece (my first cousin), Cornelia Bosman, and her husband, Alston Duckitt, had three children.
Jeannette and her husband, Hans van der Merwe, live at White River, about 200 miles east of Johannesburg and near the Kruger Game Reserve. Jeannette owns and operates a gift shop and Hans manufactures fine furniture reproductions.
Son Louis is an accountant, son Carl is a chef and son Peter is a college student.
Clare and her husband, Duncan Miller, live at Ferndale, a suburb of Johannesburg, with their four young children. Duncan is a financial executive.
Elizabeth and her husband, Tubby Smither, live at Bryanston, a suburb of Johannesburg, with their three young children. Tubby is an investment banker.
Mother's niece and goddaughter (my first cousin), Kitty Bosman and her husband, Japie Smuts, had five children. Katusha and her husband, Dr. Ewald de Kock, live at Wynberg Park, a suburb of Cape Town. Ewald is a radiologist. Son Adriaan is a lawyer living at Hermanus with his wife Tutu and a daughter. Daughter Marguerite lives in Wellington, about 30 miles northeast of Cape Town, with her husband, Dr. Laurens Steyn, and two daughters. Daughter Catherine lives at Bellville with her husband, Dr. Willem (Wim) de Villiers, and three children. Daughter Henrietta is working in Cape Town. Daughter Cornelia is at Stellenbosch University.
Larisa has been a nurse administrator. She has started a new career in nature conservation at the nature reserve at Jonkershoek, at Stellenbosch.
Estelle and her husband, David Durham, live at Harare in Zimbabwe. One of their two sons now works in Pretoria. David is a civil engineer.
Irene lives in the Johannesburg area, where her two sons are starting course at Witwatersrand University. J. C. Smuts and his wife, Ingrid, and two daughters have just moved from Windhoek, Southwest Africa (Namibia). Jan has just received his doctorate and now teaches English at Bloemfontein University.
Cornelia and Kitty's brother Yvonne, had no children.
Great uncle Abraham de Villiers, brother of my grandfather and his wife Charlotta had a son Abraham Matthys de Villiers. The latter and his wife, Floss de Vos, a favorite aunt of my mother, had seven children.
Margaret, widow of Edward Williams, lives in the Cape Town area.
Charlotte and Dorothea, retired schoolteachers, live at Rondebosch.
Chris, widow of Thomas Butland, lives in the Cape Town area. Her family is listed in CHART V-VIII. Sunny's family is listed in CHART V-IX. Boetie's family is listed in CHART V-X. Isobel's family is listed in CHART V-XI.
Chris Butland's son Peter and his wife, Margaret, live in England with their three teenage children. Peter is a senior executive with South African Marine and has spent some years in the United States. Chris' daughter, Wendy, and her husband, Drew Bayly, live at Zeekoevlei, south of Cape Town. Drew is a business executive.
I regret not having had the opportunity to meet the Sunny de Villiers family. Sisters Charlie and Dorothy de Villiers kindly supplied me with information on their family.
Boetie de Villiers and his wife, Cynthia, live at Bergvliet south of Cape Town. Their son Michael is an architect with Charles Moore in Los Angeles, California.
I regret that I have not met the Dawson family. This information comes from Charlie and Dorothy de Villiers.
The musical talent that legend has attributed to Gertruda Catoggio (or Catorzia) apparently passed down through her eighth child, son Dirk de Villiers, younger brother of my grandfather Jan Stephanus de Villiers. Dirk's son M. L. de Villiers, was author of the South African national anthem, "Die Stem". M. L.'s son Dirk is a musician known to the de Kocks.
As background, I list the eleven children of Gustav Friedrich Schwab and his wife Eliza Catherine von Post. The second of these children, Hermann Caspar Schwab, born at New York at "Fort Number Eight", was my grandfather.
This chart introduces the two children of Gustav Heinrich Schwab and his wife Caroline Eliza Wheeler.
Amo and Dr. Bill Herrick lived in New York where he was a prominent physician and professor of medicine, and, at the time of his death in 1945, President of The New York Academy of Medicine.
Gustav and Alice Schwab lived in New York. The descendants of this branch of the family appear in Charts S-III through S-IX.
This chart lists the two children of Emily Elisabeth (Amo) Schwab and her husband, Dr. William Worthington Herrick.
Bill Herrick, Jr. lived in Sharon, Connecticut, after service in World War II and operated a travel agency.
Eunice and Tom Trowbridge live in New Britain, Connecticut, and have a summer home in Sharon. Eunice has written a book in tribute to her eminent father, and has authored other biographies. Tom retired from a career in industry.
Bill Herrick, Jr. had two daughters by his first wife, Ruth Kenyon, who became a physician after their divorce.
Caroline and Suzanne Herrick own the log cabin part of the Herrick estate at Sharon. Caroline lives and works in to Newport, Rhode Island.
Eunice and Tom Trowbridge have four children.
The Noyes family lives at Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. James Noyes works for a computer business.
Tom Trowbridge, Jr. and his wife are lawyers. They live in a Manhattan apartment and spend summers at Sharon.
William built a house at Sharon and teaches at the Indian Mountain School.
David, an accountant and flute player, lives at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Gustav Schwab, IV and his wife Alice Requa Clark had three children.
Caroline and Gordon Williams live at Washington, D.C. Gordon is retired from a career with the International Monetary Fund.
Gustav Schwab, V has just remarried and will live at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, and at Stonington, Connecticut.
Alice Mix died recently. Her daughter carries on the music business founded by her husband.
Caroline and Gordon Williams have three children.
Laura Williams Ivey and her husband live at Washington, D.C. Ronald Ivey is an agricultural economist. Laura's daughter Caroline is a photographer in San Francisco. Her son David works for a San Diego computer company.
Roger Williams and his family are working at the Albert Schweitzer Memorial Hospital in Haiti. They expect to return to their home at Sharon in the spring of 1989.
Anne Williams Paley and her husband live at Sharon where William Paley is a cabinet maker and contractor.
Gus Schwab and his first wife Josephine had two children.
Alice Schwab Combes has recently moved to Danbury, Connecticut, to take a teaching job.
Alice and Ted Mix had two children.
Madeline Mix Hunter and her three children live at Sharon, Connecticut, where Madeline manages the music business founded by her parents.
Emily Mix Cullen and her husband live at Mount Kisco, New York.
My grandparents Hermann Caspar Schwab and Mary Baldwin had two children. My father Henry and his family lived in New York City in a brownstone house on 39th St., and in the summer in a house at Merrick, Long Island, built in 1915.
In the mid 1920s, the New York house was sold and the family lived year-round at Merrick.
Uncle Hermann and his family lived in an apartment on Park Avenue and built a country home at Cold Spring Harbour, Long Island.
Henry Schwab and his wife Kitty had three children.
Henry Schwab, Jr. and his family lived at Schenectady where Henry worked for many years with the General Electic Co. His widow Augusta continues to live in Schenectady except for winter months spent at Sanibel Island in Florida.
Cornelia and Miles live in an apartment on the out skirts of Colorado Springs. From his home office, Miles conducts an active evangelical ministry by correspondence and publications.
The Winthrop Schwab family lives at Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. Winthrop is retired from a career in the department store business.
Henry Schwab and his wife Augusta had three children, one of whom, Peter, died suddenly at age 27.
Emily Schwab owns property on Maui Island, Hawaii, but is often at different places in the continental United States.
After Peter Schwab's untimely death, his wife Nancy married David Borden and lives in Boston.
Henry Laurence (Larry) Schwab recently moved to Media, Pennsylvania, with his two children and is embarked on a career as a family therapist. He remarried in 1988 to Linda McMeniman. a professor of English at New Jersey's Glassboro State College.
Winthrop Schwab and his wife Patricia have six children.
Winthrop Schwab, Jr., and his family live in Falls Church, Virginia. Win and his wife Carroll, a graphic designer, own a furniture showroom in Falls Church, Virginia.
Katrina and her family live at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Her husband, David Anderson, deals in commercial and industrial real estate. Katrina has retired from work as medical technician to care for her two young children.
Anne lives in Seattle, Washington, where she is an architect in partnership with two others. She and her husband are in the process of divorce.
Eliza and her family live at Boulder, Colorado. Eliza is studying with a view to working with hearing impaired children. Her husband Jerry Klintz is an industrial engineer.
Lucy and her husband live at San Diego. Lucy is a museum associate. David Baze is a painter in oils and water colors.
John has just married and moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire for a job in radio station time sales. His bride, Elise Brown, has been sales promotion director for a nationally known small business.
Uncle Hermann, my father's younger brother, and his wife Ruth Bliss, had four children.
"Junie" Schwab (known also as "Gus") and his wife Meteer live at Oyster Bay, Long Island, and also have a small apartment in New York City. Junie is a partner in a Wall Street investment banking firm.
Ruth and her husband live at Southport, Connecticut, where they have been active in sailing. Stephen Galpin is retired from a writing career.
Mary Brett lives in New York City and Easthampton.
Walter Schwab and his wife Judy Rhode Island.
Junie Schwab and his first wife Leslie had three children. He and his second wife Meteer had three children.
After the death at age 43 of Hermann Caspar Schwab, Ruth Bliss Schwab married Rev. Lyman Bleecker. Their one child, Anne, lives at Berkeley, California, where her husband is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
My great uncle Lawrence Heinrich Schwab and his wife, Margaret Paris, had one son. Lawrence von Post Schwab and his wife, Rosetta Carson, had four children, none of whom are now living. Only Cynthia Schwab, daughter of William Schwab, survives from this branch of the family. Cynthia lives at Tucson, Arizona.
Great uncle John Christopher Schwab and his wife, Edith Fisher, had a daughter and a son.
Katharine Schwab lives at Danbury, Connecticut, with her niece Edith Schwab, a teacher of violin.
Norman Schwab's widow lives with her son Peter and his family at Tucson, Arizona.
Chris Schwab lives at White Plains, New York. He is a free-lance technical writer and his wife Judy is a voice teacher. Chris' son Norman lives at Southampton, Long Island.
Miggy Schwab Guldseth lives at Homer, Alaska. Her husband, Mark, an electrical contractor, has been disabled by an auto accident.
Kate Schwab McLaughry and her husband Bill live and work at New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
Irene Schwab Cowley and her family live at Inglewood, California.
Lawrence Henry (Laurenz Heinrich) von Post came to America in 1822 and married Caspar Meier's daughter Henrietta. Their five children were brought up by relatives in Germany after the early deaths of Henrietta and Lawrence. Only Hermannn and Eliza returned to America.
Hermann became a partner in the New York firm of Oelrichs & Co., founded by Caspar Meier. He and his wife, Jane Whitlock, had no children.
Eliza married Gustav Friedrich Schwab, who came to New York as a young man and became a partner in the New York firm. Their large family is traced in the charts of Schwab Descendants in Chapter II of this Part III.
Henrietta married Christoph Theodor Schwab, a Stuttgart professor and brother of Gustav Friedrich Schwab. Chart II below lists their four children, all of whom had families.
Amalie Elisabeth Clementine and her husband, Hermann Wilhelm Georg Schrader had a large family. I have traced only one of their children, Eliza Henrietta Emily Schrader, who emigrated to New York with her husband, Karl Klupfel. (See CHART XI).
Emily Maria and her husband, Ernst Bernhard Pauli, had one son and one daughter. The daughter, Eliza Amalie Pauli, married her first cousin, Otto Christoph Schrader, and emigrated with him to New York. I do not know the Schrader and Pauli descendants.
Henriette Margarethe von Post and her husband, Christoph Theodor Schwab were brother and sister of my great-grand parents. They had four children. Descendants of three of these children I had the opportunity to meet in 1988. See Charts III, IV, V and VII.
Of the six children of Gustav Hermann Schwab and his wife, Anna Sick, two of the boys were killed in World War I and another in World War II. Only Emilie Henriette, known as "Mutz", had children.
Mutz had three children by her first husband, Eberhard Weitbrecht. Eberhard died in 1919 of war injuries and his son and namesake was killed in the second War.
Daughter Susanna, known as "Susel", lives at Stuttgart with her granddaughter, Ute Quintar, who works as a foreign language secretary.
Susel's daughter, Doris, and her husband, Dr. Horst Quintar, live at Solingen with their second daughter, Ulrike.
By her marriage in 1924 to Walter Classen, Mutz had two daughters. Gretel lives in the Stuttgart area. Anna Lore and her art historian husband, Dieter von Holst, live in Stuttgart with their two sons.
The only son of Emilie Sophie Elisabeth Schwab and her husband, Alfred Pleininger, died in World War I.
Their daughter Elisabeth Marie and her husband, Max Esenwein, had four children. Their two sons were killed in World War II.
Daughter Waltraud Esenwein lives in Stuttgart with her husband, Rev. Ernst Hagar, a retired minister. Waltraud's daughter, Mechtild, and her husband and child live in Peru on a five year assignment.
Daughter Irmgard Esenwein, a retired nurse, lives at Stuttgart.
I do not know that there are any descendants of the children of Sophie Henriette Schwab and her husband, Johann Eberhard Noltenius.
The descendants of Clementine Sophie Caroline Schwab and her husband, Johann Heinrich Kulenkampf, by several of their six children are numerous. I have met members of the Willich family, who appear in Chart IX, but no others of the Kulenkampfs. Albert Willich, who lives at Bremen, has genealogical records of the Kulenkampf and von Wasielewski families.
Albert and Walter Willich are partners in a family importing and exporting business, Kulenkampf & Konitzky, founded in Bremen in the 1880s.
The Albert Willich family lives in a suburb of Bremen. Daughter Heide is completing advanced studies in Moscow. Daughter Friederike is entering the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Pennsylvania. Daughter Johanna is a veterinary assistant with a passion for horses. Son Klaus is a regional planner in the Dusseldorf area
The Walter Willich family live in the Bremen area.
The fourth child of Lawrence von Post and Henriette Meier, Amalie Elisabeth Clementine, married Hermann Wilhelm Georg Schrader. They had twelve children. I will follow only the family of the fourth of these children, Eliza Henriette Emily Schrader, who moved to New York with her husband, Karl Klupfel. The Klupfel's four children were born in America, and all remained in this country except Clementine Sophie. (See CHART XII).
Clementine Sophie Klupfel and her husband, Eberhard Noltenius, lived at Bremen where I visited them one evening in 1939 just weeks before the outbreak of World War II.
Their daughter Margaret married a Dutchman, Willem Hoogendoorn and they had three children. Margaret now lives at Voorberg in the Netherlands. Her second child, Clementine, lives in Padua, Italy, with her husband, Claudio Scimone, a noted orchestral conductor.
Margaret's son, Eberhard Ludwig Noltenius was interned in Australia during World War II, remained there after the war, married and became a successful rancher.
Roland Klupfel, a contemporary and good friend of my father worked in New York. The two daughters of his marriage "Christy" Klotz now live with their families in North Carolina.
The two sons of Margaret Klupfel and her husband, Egbert, Bogardus, live with their families in the Sharon, Connecticut, area.
The members of the Dayton family on whom I have information are descended from four of the six children of Aaron Ogden Dayton and his wife Mary Beesley Tuft.
William Berrian Dayton, Rector of Trinity Church in New York, wrote a eulogy of his brother, Aaron Ogden Dayton after the latter's death in 1858. Dayton Beguelin (see CHART D-V) is better acquainted than I am with the living Daytons.
Elsa Beguelin, daughter of Elizabeth Dayton and her husband, Carl Pfeiffer, lived in New York and was a good friend of my mother. Her daughter, Virginia Clarke, lives at Newport, Rhode Island. Her son Dayton Beguelin and his wife, Natalie Pickering, live at Locust, New Jersey.
The descendants of Helen Dayton and her husband, John Owsley Manier, are known to Dayton Beguelin.
Our family is descended from earlier Baldwins to Henry Baldwin, III and his wife, Katherine Irving Dayton. Our family records have not tracked the descendants of any of the eight brothers and sisters of Henry Baldwin, II.
My great-grandparents, Henry Baldwin, III and his wife Katherine Irving Dayton had three daughters, one of whom died at age 6. Grandmother Mary Baldwin had a falling out with her sister Margaret (Mrs. Augustus Reeve of Philadelphia) and we have lost track of the Reeve family.
Baldwin Genealogy, Vol. 2, 1881, 974 p., and Baldwin Genealogical Supplement, 1889, 1373 p. by C. C. Baldwin, Cleveland. References to:
· Abraham Baldwin (1754-1807)
· Henry Baldwin I (1780-1844)
· Henry Baldwin II (1803-1868)
· Henry Baldwin III (1833-1885)
· William Baldwin (1779-1819)
Baldwin Family Misc. genealogical inf., records and photos
Henry Baldwin I (1780-1844).
· Ref. to HB in "The Story of Kalorama" by Mrs. Corra Bacon-Foster, 1910, 20 p., a reprint from Records of Columbia Historical Society;
· Biographical sketch of HB by Hon. Daniel Agnew, LLD, in address to the Alleghany County Bar Association, printed in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1889
Henry Baldwin II (1803-1868)
· Ref. to HB in "The Autobiography of an Ordinary Boy" by his son William D. Baldwin, 1913, 16 p. typed
Marana Norton Baldwin (1784-1803)
· Holy Bible printed in Philadelphia in 1802, presented to Mrs. Baldwin on January 21, 1803
William Baldwin (1779-1819)
· "Reliquiae Baldwinianae", selected letters of WB edited by Wm. Darlington, MD, 1843. 346 p.
William Dixon Baldwin (1834-1915)
· "The Autobiography of an Ordinary Boy", 1913, 16 p. typed
Ruth Baldwin Barlow (1756-1818)
· Her will dated 1813, probated 1869
Mary Schwab Brett (1925- )
· Her Schwab family genealogy, 1979, handwritten
Dayton Family
· Misc. genealogical records
· Aaron Ogden Dayton (1796-1858)
· Memorial of the Life and Character of Aaron Ogden Dayton, Esq." by his brother-in-law Rev. William Berrian, DD, Rector of Trinity Church, New York, 1858, 30 p.
De Villiers Family
· Letter of Rocco Catoggia from South Africa to his parents in Italy, 1833;
· Family History in South Africa, 3 p. typed;
· Sketches of family members by Kitty de Villiers, 1912;
· Misc. genealogical information, papers and photographs
Abraham Lochner de Villiers (1869-1930)
· Article about "Klein Constantia", home of ALdeV and his wife Clara Hussey, in the South African Woman's Magazine, May 1927
John Henry (Lord) de Villiers (1842-1914)
· Notes on S A. Chief Justice Lord de Villiers
John L. de Villiers (1871-1910)
· "Hoe Ek Ontsnap Het", written in 1903 (his story of escape from British prison camp in India in 1901), 116 p., published in 1934 with foreword by his cousin Septimus P. H. de Villiers
Lambertus de Villiers (1876-1900)
· Ref. to his death in the Boer War in "Commando" (p.73) by Deneys Reitz, 1944, 331 p.
German Relatives
· Misc. genealogical records and photographs
John Christopher Kunze (1744-1807)
· Ref. in Dictionary of American Biography, 1933;
· Ref. in "The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg"
Caspar Meier (1774-1839)
· "Caspar Meier and His Successors 1798-1898", the Centennial history of Oelrichs & Co., 1898, 117 p.;
· Sketch of the life of Caspar Meier by his grandson Hermann Caspar von Post, 1894, 5 p. typed
Muhlenberg Family
· "The Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania", by Paul A. W. Wallace, 1950, 358 p.;
· "Muhlenberg Album", text and photographs by J. C. Schwab and H. M. Oakley, 1910, not paged
Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg (1750-1801)
Gotthilf Henry Ernest Muhlenberg (1753-1815)
Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787)
John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg (1746-1807)
· Ref. to the four names above in the Biographical Dictionary of America and in the Dictionary of American Biography;
· "The Facts about the Muhlenbergs" by Helen E. Pfatteicher, 1942, 29 p.
Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787)
· "The Life and Times of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg" by William J. Mann, DD, 1887, 547 p.;
· "The American Revolution in Henry Melchior Muhlenberg's Experience" by Helmut Lehmann, printed in The Lutheran Historical Conference Reports, 1976, 10 p.
Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787)
· "The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg", from 1743 to 1787, translated into English 1942-1958, 3 vol., 2297 p.
John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg (1746-1807)
· "Peter Muhlenberg", An Address by Rev. Dr. William Eisenberg delivered at Woodstock, Virginia, Oct. 1, 1988,on the occasion of the dedication of a bust of Peter Muhlenberg created by Caroline Muhlenberg Hufford-Anderson, 12 p.
Margaret Willis Reeve (1871- )
· Letter to Kitty de Villiers Schwab, March 17, 1935
Benjamin W. Schwab (1867-1900)
· Memorial in "Reports of the Century Association", New York, 1900, p.32
Gustav Benjamin Schwab (1792-1850)
· "Gustav Schwab's Leben" by his son Christoph Theodor Schwab, 1883, 180 p.;
· "Gustav Schwab als Dichter und Schriftsteller" by his son-in-law Dr. Karl Klupfel, 1881, 50 p.;
· Ref. in "Your Swabian Neighbours" by Bob Larson, 1985, paperback, 221 p.
Gustav Benjamin Schwab (1792-1850)
· "Gedichte" (Poems), 1851, 538 p.; "Die Deutschen Volksbucher, 1859, 755 p.;
· "Volks-und Heldensagen" fur die Jugend herausgegeben von Otto Kamp, 1892, 181 p.;
· "Gods and Heroes, Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece", Pantheon reprint, 1981, 764 p.
Gustav Frederick Schwab (1822-1888)
· Genealogical record of his descendants by John Christopher Schwab (1931- , 1985; "Fort Number Eight" the home of Gustav F. and Eliza Schwab by their daughter Lucy Schwab White;
· Ref. in "Caspar Meier and His Successors", the story of Oelrichs & Co.;
· Newspaper obituaries
Gustav Frederick Schwab (1822-1888)
· Letters to his daughter Emily, 1885-1887
Gustav Henry Schwab (1851-1912)
· Newspaper obituaries
Henriette Margaretta von Post Schwab (1831-1906)
· "Mein Leben. Fur ihre lieben enkelkinder aufgeschrieben", Stuttgart, 1897, 8 p. printed, also English translation by WS
Henry Baldwin Schwab (1887-1935)
· "The Record of My Ancestry",the extensive genealogical book hand-entered by HBS, c.1920;
· "Pedigree of Henry Baldwin Schwab (Baldwin Line)", by HBS, 15 p., typed
Henry Baldwin Schwab (1887-1935)
· "Our Alpine Honeymoon", 1913, 76 p., handwritten;
· Diary of wedding trip, 1913, 15 p., typed;
· Letters of HBS and KdeV, 1911-1912, typed by daughter Cornelia Stanford, 1980
Henry Baldwin Schwab (1887-1935)
· "Mt. Clemenceau - North Canadian Rockies", article by HBS, 20 p. reprint from the American Alpine Journal, 1924;
· "Second Mt. Clemenceau Expedition, 1923" by HBS, 76 p., typed
Henry Baldwin Schwab (1887-1935)
· Misc. papers and photographs;
· Ref. in Harvard Class Album, 1909
John Christopher Schwab (1865-1916)
· "Muhlenberg Album", text and photographs of Muhlenberg family, 1910, not paged
· "The Revolutionary History of Fort Number Eight", 1897, 50 p.;
· "The Descendants of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg", circular genealogical chart, handwritten, 1913
John Christopher Schwab (1865-1916)
· Obituary and article in Yale Alumni Weekly, January 21, 1916
Kitty de Villiers Schwab (1880-1950)
· Letters of KdeV and HBS, 1911-1912, typed by Cornelia Schwab Stanford, 1980;
· Kdev Court presentation and wedding photographs, in Madame Magazine, London, May 27, 1911;
· KdeVS Letters to WS, 1939 and 1942-1945; Will and raise. papers
Mary Baldwin Schwab (1865-1917)
· Her sketch of the first 8 years of the life of her sons Henry and Hermann;
· Application form for Colonial Dames of America (tracing descent from Governors Winthrop and Dudley)
Norman von Post Schwab (1904-1965)
· Memorial address by Rev. Garrett R. Stearly, 1965
Winthrop Dayton de Villiers Schwab (1918—2008)
· "From Letters of the 1940s" (source of "Thoughts at Sea");
· Misc. papers and photographs
Jan Christian Smuts (1871-1950)
· "General Smuts" by Sarah Gertrude Millin, 1936, 2 vol., 826 p.;
· "Jan Christian Smuts" by his son J. C. Smuts, 1952;
· "Salute to a Great South African", a photo review by the Cape Times, 1950, 64 p.
Jan Christian Smuts (1871-1950)
· "Freedom", address at St. Andrew's University, Scotland, 1934, 36 p.
Kitty Bosman Smuts (1912- )
· "Life at Doornkloof" (home of General Smuts), newspaper articles, 1959
Hermann Caspar von Post (1828-1913)
· "An Appreciation by the Rector of the Church of the Holy Communion", 1914;
· "Accounting of the estate of Hermann Caspar von Post", 1921
Weiser Family Association
· "The Weiser Family", genealogy edited by Frederick S. Weiser, 1960, 882 p.;
· Misc. publications relating to the Weiser family (noted WFA)
Conrad Weiser (1696-1760)
· "The Life of (John) Conrad Weiser, the German Pioneer, Patriot and Patron of Two Races" by C. Z. Weiser, 1876, 449 p.;
· "Conrad Weiser, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk" by Paul A. W. Wallace, 1945, 648 p.;
· "Conrad Weiser and the Indian Policy of Colonial Pennsylvania" by Joseph S. Walton, 1900, 420 p.;
· Ref. in "Johann Conrad Beissel, Mystic and Martinet 1690—1768" by Walter C. Klein, 1942, 218 p.;
· Ref. in "The Story of the Pennsylvania Germans" by William Beidelman, 1898, 254 p.
Conrad Weiser (1696-1760)
· "The Account Book of Conrad Weiser 1746-1760" edited by The Pennsylvania German Society, 1981, 184 p.;
· "The Autobiography of (John) Conrad Weiser" edited by Frederick S. Weiser, WFA, 1976, 61 p.;
· "Tulpehocken, Two Hundred Fifty Years 1723-1973" edited by Marie Knorr Graeff, 1973;
· "Tulpehocken Settlement Family festival 1723-1973", program pamphlet, WFA, 1973, 15 p.;
· "Conrad and Shikellamy" by John Christopher Schwab, WFA, 1975, 24 p.;
· "Conrad Weiser, Man of Affairs" by Arthur D. Graeff, WFA, 1964, 16 p.;
· "A Weiser Family Album" by Frederick S. Weiser, WFA, 1971, 30 p.;
· "The Weiser Family" by H. M. M. Richards, LLD, Pennsylvania German Society, 1924, 115 p.
John Conrad Weiser (1660-1746)
· "The German Origins of the Weisers" by Frederick S. Weiser, WFA, 1965, 24 p.;
· "Vignettes of the John Conrad Weiser Family", Lutheran Historical Conference Reports, 1978, 10 p.;
· Ref. in "100 Jahre Heimat- und Kunstverein Backnang", 1984, 176 p.;
· Ref. in "Geschichten und Bilder aus Aspach" by Renate Haussermann, 1981, 112 p.;
· "Weiser Heimat Tour", writeup by WS of 1988 tour to Weiser home land;
· "Weiser Family Documents 1475-1710" edited by Wolfgang Weisser, 1985, 66 p.
Lucy Schwab White (1863-1927)
· "Fort Number Eight, the Home of Gustav F. and Eliza Schwab", 1925, 45 p.;
· Memorial to LSW by Mrs. Irving Fisher in New Haven Journal Courier, March 27, 1927;
· Will dated January 8, 1927.
John Winthrop, Esq. (1588-1649)
· "The History of New England from 1630 to 1649" (John Winthrop's journal) edited by James Savage, 1853, 2 vol., 1018 p
1887-1935
It is hard to realize that Henry Schwab, my companion of three happy summers in the Canadian Rockies and good friend ever since, has gone. We first met in 1921, I having previously heard of him as a mountain climber from his brother, whom I had known during the war. The late Allen Carpe was also present on that occasion, and it was probably due to him that the three of us went out together in 1922 to attempt Mt. Clemenceau. A kick from a horse on the way in forced Schwab to return to Jasper; Carpe and I did not climb Clemenceau, but Schwab and I with Dana Durand and others returned and were successful in 1923. In 1924 we went by trail with a party including the late Sir James Outram from Lake Louise to the Canadian Alpine Club camp at Mt. Robson. On the way, with Thomas D. Cabot, we failed by a few hundred feet to climb Mt. Columbia because of treacherous snow conditions. That was his last summer in the mountains, for reasons beyond his control. Earlier he had climbed from the age of fourteen during ten different seasons in Europe. Beginning with minor ascents in the Tyrol in 1901, he turned to Switzerland in 1903 and every year from 1906 through 1912 climbed in the Alps in either the Oberland, Zermatt or Chamonix, and occasionally other districts; 1920, during which he made over twenty climbs, was his last and best year in the Alps.
He was a good all-around mountaineer. He particularly enjoyed the detailed consideration and the planning involved in undertaking a new climb. Our Clemenceau trips involved methods new to him. He enjoyed all this particularly but never lost sight of the benefits of his previous experience in the Alps. He was a sound climber who had absorbed much that his guides had to teach him during the Alpine seasons. He was always insistent that a thing be done properly as he understood it. He had little patience with slipshod methods, but much when it was a question of doing a thing right even when this involved considerable extra effort. He was a safe man in the mountains.
Although he rarely alluded to it, one is sure that his inability to go to the mountains in recent years was a great disappointment to him. He did, however, maintain a very live interest in the accomplishments of others in the mountains, and from 1926 until a short time before his death was always in some official capacity connected with the management of the American Alpine Club to which he was devoted—Secretary 1926-1929, Councillor 1929-1932, President 1932-1935. During his presidency the present suitable and conveniently located quarters were occupied by the Club.
Henry Schwab was born at New York on June 16, 1887, his parents being Hermann C. and Mary Baldwin Schwab. After preparing at St. Mark’s School he entered Harvard with the class of 1909 but graduated a year ahead of his class in June 1908. The next two years were spent in business in Germany from where he returned to enter the wool department of Oelrichs & Co. in New York. There he rose to partnership in 1917 in charge of the firm’s wool business. Before this he had visited New Zealand, Australia, South America and South Africa on business. In 1912 he married Kathrina H. de Villiers of Capetown at Pittsburgh. She and three children, two sons and a daughter, survive him.
In 1916 he attended the Plattsburg Training Camp, and later during the war entered the New York Guard as a private, being mustered out as Captain in the 9th C.D.C.
His premature death on March 15 following an actual illness of six weeks, from causes which had set in earlier, is a shock to his friends and a great loss to the Club, which he loved so well. He possessed an unusually even and cheerful temperament. Despite business worries during the last ten years of his life, he always maintained a smiling and happy exterior. In the mountains as at home his attractive personality caused him to stand out, and invited friendship among those with whom he came in contact. Mountain memories and a happy family life were a great source of satisfaction to him during his last years.
Signed H. S. H., Jr. (p.351-2) Alpine Journal
MERRICK, L. I., March 15.-
Henry B. de Villers Schwab, who was a member of Oelrichs & Co., in charge of the firm's wool business, from 1917 until his retirement in 1926, died here this morning at his home, De Paarl, at the age of 47. He is survived by his widow, who was Kate de Villiers of Cape Town, South Africa, at their marriage in 1912; two sons, Henry B. de V. Jr. and Winthrop de V. Schwab, and a daughter, Cornelia de V. Schwab.
Mr. Schwab was born in New York City, a son of Hermann Casper and Mary Baldwin Schwab. He prepared for college at St. Mark's School, Southboro, Mass., and was graduated from Harvard in 1909. The following year, after visiting Europe, Africa and Australia, he began work with Oelrichs & Co.
While actively engaged in business he was a member of the Boston and Philadelphia Wool Trade Associations, and occasionally wrote articles on the woolen situation.
A keen mountaineer, Mr. Schwab was a former president and secretary of the American Alpine Club and a member of the Alpine Club of London. He was the first man to climb several high peaks in Canada. He belonged to the Society of Colonial Wars and the Harvard Club.
New York Times: In Memoriam 1935Cornelia Stanford was called home by the Lord on May 28, 2011. Cornelia was born on February 13, 1915 in New York City to the late Henry and Kate deVilliers Schwab. She was a resident of Colorado Springs for many years and will be fondly remembered by her family and friends. Cornelia had a subtle spiritual influence in the lives that she touched. She was loved for her dry sense of humor and jokes, great memory, and lifelong commitment to her Lord, Jesus Christ. She had a sincere interest in absolutely every person that she met. Cornelia was the beloved wife of the late Miles J. Stanford, and together, devoted their lives to the ministry of God's word and encouragement of believers. Cornelia is survived by several nephews, Win, John and Larry Schwab; nieces, Eliza Petersen, Lucy Blythe, Katrina Anderson and Anne and Emily Schwab. Visitation will be held from 4:00-6:00 PM, Thursday, June 2, 2011 at Swan Law Funeral Directors, 501 N. Cascade Avenue, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80903. Funeral services will be held at 2:00 PM, Friday, June 3, 2011 at Mesa Hills Bible Church, 615 W. Uintah Street. Interment will follow at Memorial Gardens Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Mesa Hills Bible Church.
Her husband, Miles J. Stanford's biography is on Wikipedia.
1923-2014