Full Circle

We started HH not knowing who my great grandparents were for sure, and definitely not knowing their parents, my great greats.  We didn't know who had emigrated--was it my grandparents?  Their parents?  Did they come here alone?  Where from? I remembered a few details--one great grand had died falling from a wagon.  One had a big black beard.  Two families produced two nuns each here in the states. One batch came from Iowa.

Whew--just think how much we've discovered!  When Larry and I first determined that Bohemia was home to Paul Hesch, I doubted, because I'd never heard any stories about Oberschlagles or Neidermuhl, ever.  But there it was, in a front page obit for Paul's brother Anton (Pierz Journal, 1911). Eventually, we learned what's in the masthead up there.  Paul's parents emigrated too, settling in Waumandee, Wisconsin and later in Pierz, Minnesota.  They're buried in St Joseph's Cemetery there.

So, last week, Larry was wandering thru the 1906 issues of the Little Falls Herald and came across this announcement:

It confused me for a bit because of the misspelling and because it mentions a totally wrong town.  But if you're a reporter with a deadline, then any Wisconsin town would do.  

This was Marya Schlinz Hesch, born in Rothwurst, Jindrichuv Hradec, Bohemia, on May 3, 1821.  The daughter of Lawrenz and Elizabeth Schlinz, she married Johannes Hesch, son of Martin Hesch and Elizabeth Wolf in about 1840.  They had 5 children, all born in the old country.  Four sons survived to immigrate to the US.

Earlier, we'd found Johann's announcement:  Too bad they didn't do a better write-up for either of them, but Johann & Marya were already 'old folks' when they arrived in Pierz.  According to the censuses of 1900 and 1905, Marya stayed in Pierz on the farm with Anton, and by a blurb that Larry found,  she moved to Wisconsin less than a year before she died.  BTW, their cemetery marker in Pierz is just south of the main white statue.  It's marked "Hesh".

George and Lloyd Harting, and John Heach?

 As we mentioned in the last post,  Little Falls was home to George and Lloyd Harting, sons of a  furniture dealer there, Harting and Sons.  George was born in 1877, and Lloyd in 1901, so together they covered a lot of artistic canvas, you might say (DAMN, I'm funny).

But WHY are we fixated on them here on HH? 
Well, partly because they were written up in the Little Falls Herald and Transcript in those years and we can't RESIST any possible connections--to wit, another article from 1906 involving our old friend John Heach*. 

  But first, there was this article in the Herald--George (the elder bro) illustrated a couple pages for "Browning's Magazine", but all I could find was Browning's Industrial Magazine.  I flipped page by page thru October, 1906, and there were no poems or interpretive drawings, just schematics and diagrams of machines.  Sigh!   If the right magazine is ever digitized, we'll add the drawings here for sure.  Don't hold your breath.

*In the meantime, LOOK at the mystery we discovered:

"The old picture drawn by a few of our local artists, of John Heach, when he defeated a LaFond mob in Bares saloon on September 28, 1900, is again on exhibition in one of our lower town [Pierz] saloons. The picture was drawn right after the battle and beautifully framed and placed in Bares saloon at that time.  Later it was placed in the American House [hotel] in Little Falls for about two years, after which it was again taken back to Pierz.  Mr Heach thinks a great deal of the picture and will not allow the saloonkeeper to dispose of it for any money."

Yes, I can hear you thinking  "fer dumb"...but isn't it kind of mystically providential that we discovered unknown (to us) artists in LF and then a mention of John Heach and a drawing of him that could still be around? Ok, ok, that's a real long shot, but wouldn't it be COOL if it was rolled up or among other pictures at the Weyerhaeuser, or in someone's attic or (horrors!) at a Pierz garage sale?  It's possible, IF it's still around, that the owner has no idea what it depicts.  We already have the staff at the Morrison County Historical Society alerted, and they're looking....cross your fingers, ok?

We'll post their answer and anything else we hear about it ☺, promise.

Rice, 1906

            USED BABY SISTER FOR RIFLE TARGET
                   -----------------------------
           Boy of 10 Sets Tot Up and Fires Bullet
                         Thru Her Body.
                   -----------------------------
Special to the Journal.
St Cloud, Minn., Nov. 12--Theodore, the 10 year old son of Mr and Mrs T. Gottwalt, near Rice, Saturday, probably fatally shot his 4-year-old sister, Leon.  The mother of the children had gone to town and the father was out in the field.
The boy put his little sister in a chair and taking a 32-caliber rifle aimed it at her breast and fired.  The bullet passed clear thru the body of the little girl, piercing her lungs.  When the boy realized what he had done, he picked up the little girl and called his father.  The girl is still alive, but her chances for recovery are small.

--Minneapolis Journal, November 1906

There's something called "Presentism", whereby we judge something that happened years ago by today's standards or experiences.  "For example, Thomas Jefferson is often judged harshly as a sexist even though the notion of complete equality between the sexes was almost unthinkable in his era.' Gordon-Reed calls it the 'why wasn't Jefferson like Alan Alda' question."   Via

We look at that article and wonder about leaving a 10 year old to watch his little sister; about parents far from the house, and mostly, about leaving a loaded gun around unsupervised children.  But we also know this same scenario played out thousands of times in thousands of homes in those years with no tragedy, no little sister hurt, and mom and dad home for chores and supper, right on time, without incident.

We know about this because it was reported in the newspaper.

We also know that Leona recovered, and that both kids grew up, married, and had regular long lives.

While researching what happened later, Larry found that Theo and Leona's mom was Catherine Janson Gottwalt.  She was related to me thru mom. 

 The story of how that happened is HERE, ok?

Theo and Leona's AUNT would have been Rose Hesch Gottwalt, 

wife of Louis E.Gottwalt.

Isn't that cool?