Tonic in the air and wine in the wind

"TO THE VISITOR IN THE TWIN CITIES 

THIS FOLDER HAS BEEN COMPILED FOR YOUR SPECIAL BENEFIT. IT WILL TELL YOU HOW TO SEE THE MANY BEAUTIFUL AND INTERESTING PLACES IN AND AROUND ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS MOST COMFORTABLY, QUICKLY, AND INEXPENSIVELY. WHERE TO GO? HOW TO GO? HOW MUCH WILL IT COST? YOU'LL FIND IT ALL TOLD HEREIN. PERHAPS WE WOULD BETTER SAY: "HERE'S A SERIES OF MAPS AND HINTS TELLING HOW TO ENJOY SIGHTS AND SCENES NOT RIVALED, IN MANY RESPECTS, IN ALL AMERICA. IT'S A FRESH-AIR GUIDE TO THE TWIN CITIES OF MINNESOTA, WHERE THERE IS ALWAYS TONIC IN THE AIR AND WINE IN THE WINDS—WHERE IT'S A JOY TO BE ALIVE." 

Copyright, 1911, by A. W. Warnock, General Passenger Agent, "Twin City Lines"

I think it's funny/cool that in 1911 the city of Minneapolis was pictured as a winged pseudo-Greek goddess and St Paul was a journeying tonsured monk.  Looks like their preferred means of transportation was a streetcar.

You can page thru this charming booklet at Minnesota Reflections.

Even the anchor was special

I spent a major chunk of my life completely oblivious to the fact there was a  ship called the Olympic. I knew about the Titanic (who didn't?) but here was her sister ship, which happened to carry great uncles Math & Theo to Europe on the trip of their lives in 1914.   Funny how once you're aware of something, any other mention of it catches your eye.  Yesterday, I was flipping thru the pages of the September, 1911 issue of Popular Science magazine, as you do, and, woohoo, I found this: 

The Fourth of July, 1904 was "...one continuous round of pleasure"

There's more time for posting than I thought today, since the kids are stuck in traffic leaving the cities.  Em called and said they were moving about 20 mph, along with thousands of others, going north on I-94...

That title quote comes from a letter published in the Little Falls Herald on June 24, 1904 (top left) encouraging area farmers to attend the festivities in town and even enter their teams in the parade.  That particular year, the festivities featured Chippewa dancers from the Mille Lacs Reservation.  People were urged to bring their kids to watch, as the tribe was about to be removed to White Earth.  

Seven years later, the Pierz Journal promised "a Program the Like of Which Has Never Before Been Attempted in This Village"...Woohoo!  The description of the festivities, beginning with a cannon blast at dawn, sounds fascinating.  Don't you wonder what the Goddess of Liberty on that first float looked like?

Her name was Louisa

 Every time Heschs got together when I was a kid, if the subject of family history came up, the "first child" was debated.  WAS there a baby before Mike born to AA and Lizzy?  Maybe it was after him...but no, Gramma mentioned her as being first...what was her name?  Was it Mary?  The debate was never settled, because nobody knew for sure, and there was no internet.  
Now, tho, we have the fabulous record by AA's brother Math reporting weekly for the Pierz Journal, online.  YEARS worth are posted in the newspaper section of Minnesota Reflections...and reading thru late 1911, we found these few lines about her birth and death.  

I couldn't find a marker for her in the Buckman cemetery on Find a Grave.  It might be under the sod in the childrens section, or not marked at all.  She was named after Lizzy's mom, Louisa Rausch Sand.  
The Pierz Journal was published on Thursdays.  The Thursday before the 21st was December 14, 1911.  She would have been baptized on Sunday the 24th, Christmas Eve day, and died of pneumonia 21 days after her birth  (January 4th, 1912).  
Dad was born January 29, 1913.

Thomas McGoey-a Story of Barnstorming, Danger, Love

...and running out of gas.

One wonders what the main attraction at the Morrison Co fair was in 1911.  Sure, cows and sheep, chickens, swine, produce and canning, not to mention a chance to get away from the farm for an afternoon.  Still, the fair board felt the need to up the ante and hire "attractions", as tho crop art wasn't enough. 

In 1911, barnstorming was something new, AND it had an added zip of danger.  Luckily, there were fairly local men willing to fly in and perform death-defying feats....like Grand Forks' Thomas McGoey and his partner Mr. Kenworthy.

         Larry found an account of little Charles Lindbergh playing upstairs in their house in Little Falls, and hearing a noise overhead, an engine that proved to be an airplane on it's way to appear at the Morrison Co Fair.  The timing of that account and the arrival of Kenworthy & McGoey seem to coincide.  We decided to believe it ☺.

Pierz Journal, October 3, 1911

Looks like Tom pursued his flight career from the summer of 1911 to the end of 1912--according to the postcard below, the pilot sat outside, in front of the engine (the plane is pictured going away from the camera), so I assume his performances took place only in warm weather.

According to this clickable 1913 article from the Little Falls Herald (left) he quit flying when his sweetheart asked him to.  I wonder if they married, lived in Grand Forks, had a family...and if Tom told tales of daring-do for the kids' bedtime stories. That'd be pretty cool!          

THANKS LARRY!

Some 1907- 1914 News

Today's post needs little explanation, being an odd collection of news like we've done before, but you know I'll chat you up anyway, right?  

  
I'd just found the P.H.Hartmann obit the night before Shari and I went to Oakland Cemetery in Little Falls (Mn), so I thought I'd look for his grave and get a photo.  Yes, I posted the obit on his Find a Grave page, just for equilibrium on the internet ☺. 



START DRIVING EARLY had a far different meaning once, but by 1911 it was already a play on words.  It worked on me ☺, reading the article 100 years later.  

What a neat view of the logging industry--the spring thaw was early that year, so the down-river mills fired up in early April.  The info would have been pertinent to just about 
everyone who lived in Morrison Co. because of all the tributary streams that fed the Mississippi.  Once the ice went out, logs followed. Between 20 and 25 MILLION feet of logs at the landing in Little Falls?!  Whew.

BTW, I mentioned this to a client who recalled pulling submerged pine logs out of the river in the 1970s, and using the wood.  Wait, didn't they have to be dried out first?  He said no, they came out of 60 years under water pretty much like they'd gone in--not at all water logged or rotted.  How cool to learn that!

                                                           

 John Naber, mom's uncle John, must have had problem when he drove the Studebaker home...




We explored Secret Societies in June 2010 (they were fashionable in Morrison Co too).  Below are a couple of articles about the Red Men in Little Falls, one that's just embarrassing  and one about how they became "Improved".  Yes, these were grown men (President Roosevelt among 'em).

The Reformatory in St Cloud has been "over-populated" for years, it seems.  Yeah, it was a different place in 1911.

Fishing poetry in the PJ

 For awhile in the 19-teens, the Pierz Journal published poems that, I think, were composed by staff writers at metropolitan papers.  They seemed to have parameters--maybe it was a challenge to "write something in the style of..."
Some were better than others, for sure ☺.

Va-room! Va-room!!

Looks like the new-fangled automobiles in central Minnesota were embraced AND made fun of in equal measure.  Almost all new purchasers were listed by name in the paper, sometimes including how much they paid for the car.  Below are some articles with a fair amount of 'schputt'.  I don't think any of it was written by Math Hesch, tho...these were "editorial" pieces.  

BTW, according to the Pierz Journal, most people used their cars during the summer and fall, putting them up on blocks for the winter and giving the team a break once the roads dried out in the spring.

"A fellow from Lastrup had heard that Ford, the auto manufacturer, used tin cans in the construction of his car.  He gathered up several hundred tomato, sauer kraut and oyster cans and sent them to the Ford factory along with a request that they be made into an auto.  A week later he received a Ford by freight and a check for $8.80 by mail.  He had sent too many cans".









" AUTOS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT.
A party consisting of Chas Gish, Arthur Boyce, Louis Gravel, Anna Gish and Gladys Eynon broke down last Friday near the cream station in Granite while autoing from Onamia to Little Falls.  Mich. Priglmeyer towed them to the village in the afternoon.  Chas Schroeder of Little Falls was sent for, who, after looking the machine over, decided that the damages could not be repaired outside of a garage.  At the approach of the evening twilight the party sadly resumed its slow and laborious towage toward the occident.
While in our village, Mr Schroeder answered another call of distress from a Little Falls Chauffeur whose auto had ceased to automobilize at the foot of a hill north of Buckman.  We were told that the ailment of the second auto was of such a nature that it, too, had to be taken to the repair hospital the same night". August 1911

"A BAD WRECK.
Last Tuesday night at about the steenth hour of the night, a bad wreck occurred on the Pierz Buckman short line.  It seems that the Buckman fast express, south bound, while running at a high rate of speed, collided with the north bound flyer, which also was not going slow by any means.  The night was an exceptionally dark one and the headlights on neither of the engines(if they had any) could be seen.  While we could not learn who was in charge of the express, the flyer was manned by engineer Bentfeld of Pierz and conductor A.K. Mathison of Duluth.  Outside of a severe shaking up and a few bruises sustained by the above named engineer and conductor, no other damage was done".









"...20 to 40 miles an hour!"



It's stunning to remember that it was a almost exactly a hundred years ago that all this was taking place.  Wow, huh?

Promoting Center Valley, Mn

Back in June 2012, we did a post on Theo Billmeyer, the main promoter of a place called Center Valley.  Evidently, Theo had some big ideas about the marvelous-ness of this little valley 7 miles east of Pierz, Mn.
As we found more and more articles in the Pierz Journal reporting on Theo Billmeyer's efforts, we realized that they were poking fun at him.  Here they were in Pierz, a well established town, and there was Center Valley, where nothing was happening at all.  A store, a creamery and a Soo line spur, nothing more.  

But then, I think postmaster Theo was also the Center Valley reporter to the PJ, and he often poked fun at himself....good for him!

As COOL as it gets

Last night, Larry showed me this postcard from Pierz, Minnesota, sent in 1911:

Isn't it cool?  That's St Joseph's Church when it was new (22 years).  The bell tower says 1888, and the event pictured was before 1911.  We speculate that the banner probably says, in German, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord"...it's a bit too fuzzy  to see,  but maybe Horst or Heinz can figure it out and let me know ☺.
And, the reverse of the card (left)?  We recognize the writing style (Suetterlin) but not the words.  Still, they probably aren't related to the occasion pictured. 
It's obviously a religious occasion, but Larry and I searched our brains for one that would elicit a bannered archway and decked out horses.  Hmm, it's summer or fall, looks like the pic was taken from across the road because there isn't room today for all the pine trees planted between the arch and the church.  Was there such a thing as a blessing of farm animals, etc?  But no, this was WAY too fancy an occasion for animals...

SO, our Master Researcher checked the Pierz Journals for a church-related event, and WOW--he found this from October 13, 1910.  We think it had to be  the day pictured on the postcard! 

BTW, the statue from the St Cloud Hospital that was given to the village of Pierz?  It's now in a park on main street about at 3rd Ave SE.  Cool x 2!

The New Pierz Bar

 Well, here's more info about the bar mentioned in the last post, so now we have a little provenance, right?




 

Another Old News Contest--YAY ☺

My file of clippings from the Pierz Journal is bulging with hundred-year-old news that I'm sure you want to see.  Three of these were written by 21 year old Math Hesch.  Guess which ones, ok? Normal prizes to be bestowed, promise.

"Since the auto season is gradually drawing toward the close and the chicken season and election are approaching, the talk among the benchwarmers and whittlers is slowly shifting from the merits of the different types of machines to the merits and demerits of pointers, setters, and political candidates".

Charles Gravel (gra-VEL) was the mayor of Pierz in 1912, just so ya know.  It's valuable knowledge that you might need some day, when I'll say "Ha! I told you so!"

 "Joe Hortsch began to dig the basement for our new school in district 41.  It will be 48 X 49 and 3 feet deep".
(This would be the high school building on the west end of Buckman where the nuns taught freshman and sophmore subjects in alternate years.  Mom attended in 1932-34)  Horst wrote to say the school basement Joe Hortsch dug was St Michaels school, the one we remember across from the church.   (The HS was built much later, he said).  Thanks, Horst ☺

"J. Hoheisel says his well cost him $140 and that it would have been about as cheap to buy beer, as to get water at such expense".

A crop in fall, 1911: "John L. Dehler took a four horse
 load of flax to  Pierz Thursday".

"Jos. Janson Sr. who left for Los Angeles, Cal. last spring for his health returned Saturday and is feeling much better. (Joe Janson was mom's grandpa).

Lena Sand went to Pierz Thursday for a visit with friends, returning 

last Saturday. 

(Lena was Grandma's sister).

John Wintermeyer and family of St Cloud were the welcome guests of 

Mr and Mrs Mike Sand, the first part of the week.  They returned Wednesday.  (Mrs Wintermeyer was grandma's sister Vernie).

T.A. Hesch who left for North Dakota last spring came home for a short visit last Saturday.

(T.A.  was Math's brother, Theo).

Annie Hesch of Agram was in town Sunday visiting friends"

(Annie was the daughter of Mathias Hesch, our great grand uncle).

An ad for Hartmann's Store, Pierz, 

 from February, 1912.  

Definitely a typical Morrison guy with his typical dog, Shep.