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It is raining again this morning, June 18th.  The ground is saturated and some of my garden produce is suffering from the continually wet soil.  This unusually wet cool spring reminds me of my father talking about the wettest year in his memory—1915.  Yes, exactly 100 years ago.

All newspaper quotes in this story are from the Adams County Democrat, a weekly newspaper published in Hastings and subscribed to by most rural families.  The paper was primarily local “gossip columns” written by correspondents from each neighborhood.  The Matt Trausch family lived in the “East Assumption” neighborhood.   At that time there was no county roads department.  Farmers were expected to maintain the roads in their neighborhoods.  For road work they received a few dollars off their property taxes.  Matt Trausch served as road superintendent in his district for several years.

The winter of 1914-15 still holds the record for the most inches of snow at Hastings–86.7 inches.  The spring of 1915 continued cold and snowy.  On March 12^th the “East Assumption” correspondent wrote “Everyone is talking about the condition of the roads which are worse than any of our old timers of 25 years have ever seen.  No rural route delivery [of mail] for five days.  A number started out Monday to open up the half section road from the County Farm to Juniata [now Juniata Avenue] and along the way they picked up five teams and 14 men who shoveled snow diligently for four hours on that five mile stretch.  The rural schools are hampered now by the inability of the scholars to travel either on foot or by team, so many of the schools closed for several days.”  Back then drifted roads were cleared with horse drawn equipment and men with shovels. The roads hadn’t been graded yet, so there were no road ditches.  In low areas where snow was too deep, farmers just drove across the frozen fields.  On April 2nd, she wrote “The old saying, a white Christmas, a green Easter, certainly does not hold good for this year.  March 30^th and more snow falling, and our straw stacks look like huge snow piles yet, though the snow has been melting considerable the last few days.”

By April 9^th farmers were worrying about the late start to spring field work.  The roads were drying up and schools had restarted.  The Democrat reported that Matt Trausch made a trip to Hastings.  “Matt Trausch, from near Juniata, dug out of the muddy roads and came in Monday to see us and fix for more Democrats.  He said he would sow oats Saturday if this good weather continued.”

But the good weather didn’t continue.  On May 7^th East Assumption reported “Home grown peaches will be a scarce article in this country for there are not only no blossoms, but the trees are almost winter killed.”  May 14^th the Kenesaw correspondent wrote “This locality was touched lightly by frost on Thursday morning of last week, when the thermometer registered a few degrees below freezing.”    May 21^st,  East Assumption lamented  “A killing frost fell in these parts Sunday night, freezing potatoes, beans and other tender vegetation.  The frost of May 6^th did considerable damage to cherry and apple blossoms which are dropping now with stems on.”  1915 still holds the record for the coolest daytime high on Memorial Day – 54 degrees.

The rains continued and the June 11^th Democrat had many weather reports, beginning on page 1:  “If there were any rats in Hastings cellars which were not drowned out in the recent floods, they are some swimmers.”    The “Elm Creek” neighborhood is the area around Saint Paul’s Lutheran church on Adams Central Road. That correspondent reported “For the first time this season Elm and Pawnee Creeks were for several days raging streams, overflowing much land and doing extensive damage to crops and bridges.  Bridges are out in places throughout this part of the county.  Some corn is being replanted in this locality this week.  A hail storm passed from southwest to northeast in this neighborhood Saturday afternoon damaging all crops in its path.”   The Kenesaw reporter wrote: “A steady rain on Sunday night left the streets and roads in bad condition again.  They had almost recovered from the effects of Friday’s shower. Farmers are struggling with the difficulties put in the way of corn planting and the harvesting of the first crop of alfalfa by the frequent rains.  Working the roads between rains is another occupation of the farmers and road commissioners at present.”  The Mount Hope reporter, located southwest of Roseland, wrote:  “Our mail carrier could not cross the river [Little Blue] Friday. Some of the listed corn hereabouts will be planted over if it quits raining soon enough; so much of it was washed out and the rest buried too deep to come through.  The bridge at Grabills [east of Roseland] was washed out.  Six inches of rain fell during two days and nights. J.A. Frazier went to Bladen on Thursday and could not get home until Sunday on account of the water.”

All the cold wet weather caused even more problems.  All farm wives raised poultry for their family table and to sell for extra cash income.  Some women “set” hens to hatch and raise their own chicks.  Others gathered the eggs and hatched them in incubators.  Young checks need to be kept warm and dry, or they die.  On June 11^th  it was reported “The continuous rains have killed off thousands of little chicks and it will be necessary to keep the hens and the incubator going a while yet.”  June 18^th the Silver Lake [the township south of Roseland]  reporter observed: “The past wet cloudy weather was not even good for ducks; Mrs. L. Shaw lost half of her large flock of young Indian Runners.”

If the farmers didn’t have enough trouble, the floods, cold and mud caused illness and deaths of livestock.  Horses got “rain rot” a bacterial skin infection. Standing in mud all day also caused hoof diseases, and a lame horse can’t pull machinery.  On June 18^th the Democrat told of one mishap due to high water. “Much excitement reigned in the Bethel vicinity [Wallace School area]  Sunday over the discovery by Meyer’s boys of a horse and buggy occupied by a man, being found in the lagoon near the Henry Meyer’s farm, where they had been since mid-night.  The excessive rains have converted the lagoon into a veritable lake and the horse had wandered from the road into a ditch at the side of the road, where the water was very deep and was drowned when rescuers reached there.  The man was compelled to stay in the vehicle and was in a serious condition.  He was taken to the Nebraska Sanitarium for medical treatment.”   Mrs. Holbrook was driving through the water and mud near the long bridge south of Roseland, and one of her horses mired in the mud, almost upsetting the buggy.  Julius Pearson had a cow drowned in a creek, and in July lightning killed a $200 horse near Juniata and also a calf.  The loss of a good horse was about the equivalent of losing a car, pickup or tractor today.

The roads then were just dirt, no gravel.  Most people didn’t even attempt to drive autos on the muddy roads.  However, a man from Campbell purchased a new car in Hastings on Monday, July 5^th and attempted to drive it home.  He had his family with him.  He pulled in at John Dewitt’s south of Roseland at 4:00 a.m. Tuesday with a harrowing tale to relate. There was no report on when he got to Campbell.

June 25^th the Democrat reported: “All Water Streams High.  High water in June has done a heap of damage.  Along all the streams, except the Platte, over-flow has destroyed much property and farms have been ruined.  For the third time in two weeks the Little Blue River was within a few feet of high water mark again.  June 18^th rains were almost cloud bursts, the river rising to high point in six hours. Forty feet of dyke at Deweese was swept away by high waters.  The Little Blue has been a Big Blue several times this spring, but Saturday it was the largest ever, being entirely over bridge banisters at several crossing places.  A great deal of damage has been done to crops again; wheat in low places is down and in some lagoons is already dead; fences washed away and grades and bridges out.”

And of course in Nebraska stormy weather brings hail.  June 18^th  the Kenesaw reporter wrote “The most destructive storm in the history of Kenesaw and vicinity hit the eastern edge of town and the country to the east and south about 7 O’clock Monday evening.  Wind and hail snatched the leaves from the trees and pounded the crops, gardens, shrubbery, and every growing thing into the ground.  Wheat is totally destroyed in the path of the storm, which is variously estimated as extending from six to ten miles east and twenty miles north and south across the country.  The storm is said to have started near Prosser.  The hail stones were numerous and larger than ordinary.  The ground was covered with them at the close of the storm, and with the bare trees presented a winter scene.  Window glass and screens suffered largely on the north side of houses.  One man was said to be negotiating for twenty-six new panes of glass on Tuesday.  A good many shingles on the north side of houses and barns were splintered into kindling wood.  Most of the wheat was insured.”  And on June 25^th East Assumption reported “Farmers are busy wondering what to do first, if it ever quits raining long enough so they can cultivate corn and make hay.  We suppose everyone has read of the destructive hail storm of the 13^th which took such a large territory in this community again, traveling in the same path of that a week previous, only in opposite directions.  Many farmers have lost heavily and unless the oats will recuperate, there will be little grain left that is worth cutting.

The cold wet weather continued into July.  Sunday, July 4^th the thermometer fell to 38 degrees and it looked for a time as if it might snow.  That day still holds the record for the coolest Independence Day at Hastings.  In mid-July someone advertised that they had lost a coat on the road to Juniata.  On July 16^th the Mount Hope reporter wrote: “There is no place like home. These days and nights of all kinds of weather, it takes a blanket or comfort to make one sleep comfy this summer.”

By the second week of July wheat harvest had begun, the latest in many years.  With rain nearly every night, the harvest progressed slowly, causing much uneasiness.  The ground was very wet and soft, making the work difficult.  Horses were unable to pull binders through the muddy fields.  Some farmers attached engines to their binders to run the mechanism.  Bert Trausch recalled “In 1915, that real wet year, Dad mounted a motor on the binder to run it and all the horses did was pull the machine. The Cushman engine ran the binder which was powered by that big bull wheel underneath. [A large wheel with steel treads was located under the binder.  It powered the cutting sickles, the conveyor belt, and the binding machinery.] When it was muddy the wheel slipped and the machinery stopped.”  Exhaustion from overwork can kill a horse.  Some farmers killed horses trying to force them to pull binders through muddy fields. John Hoffman and Aug Heuertz were reported as losing horses while cutting wheat.

After the binder cut the wheat and bound it into bundles called sheaves, it had to be shocked. Depending on the moisture content of the wheat straw, a bundle could weigh from 20 to 25 pounds. The job of shocking often fell to women and children.  Grandma, Catherine Trausch, and the older kids usually did the shocking.  The first two sheaves were set up leaning against each other, one to the north, and one to the south. Two more sheaves were set up the same way, on the west side of the first two, leaning against each other, and leaning slightly against the first pair of sheaves. Another pair was set up on the east side of the others, also leaning slightly toward the center pair. Finally, the last bundle was carefully fanned out to spread over the top of all the standing bundles, with the grain heads pointing down over the shock. This served several purposes. It helped to bind all the sheaves together and solidify the shock, and it served as a canopy over the entire shock, causing the rain to run off, rather than into, the shock. Attention was paid to directions, because most of the strong winds came out of the west or northwest.  Usually it took three or four good “shockers” to shock 10 acres in one day. An accomplished shocker could set up shocks that would withstand rather strong winds. Occasionally, storms blew down shocks, whereupon they had to be set up again.  Shocking wheat is an arduous task, especially in hot weather.

On July 30^th it was reported that “John Schifferns [an uncle of Matt Trausch] from the Roseland neighborhood was in Saturday to help the Democrat.  He had just finished threshing his wheat and was the first to deliver 1915 wheat to the Farmers elevator at Roseland.  His wheat made about twenty bushels per acre.”  That same day the East Assumption column said: ”With the exception of a few fields of late oats, harvest is about finished. Stacking, however, is progressing very slowly and we suppose shock threshing will be quit altogether since the recent rains, fogs and heavy dews make it impossible.  The second crop of alfalfa will be very poor quality on account of the damp weather.  The storm of Friday night did considerable damage to grain stacks and shocks; much reshocking will have to be done.  An inch of rain Friday night and about the same Saturday night and raining as a starter Monday morning.  Wonder if we all will turn to rubber?”  The reporter lamented, “How long, oh Lord, how long?”  The Hansen correspondent reported: Seven inches of rain in two days up in the Hansen neighborhood put the usually orderly West Blue to raging and it took a bridge or two and wheat shocks, fences and whatever else got in the way.”

The last remarks about excess rain were on August 6^th when the Kenesaw reporter wrote: “Last week was the rainiest on record around Kenesaw.  Seven inches and more are reported by local observers.  The low places were all full the first of this week, and lakes and ponds in the fields and dooryards were frequent.  However, a lively wind on Monday and Tuesday began the drying-up process and it was hoped that the sprouting of the wheat which had begun in the shocks would soon be checked.”

When people weren’t talking about the weather that year, the John O’Connor estate case was mentioned.  O’Connor had died in 1913, leaving a large estate, no will, and no known heirs. When word got out, people came from all over claiming to be heirs.  The case wasn’t settled until 1929 when the state claimed the estate.  In July the Liberty Bell traveled across the country on a Burlington railroad flatcar.   It stopped in Hastings, but our relatives were busy with harvest and didn’t see it.  War was raging in Europe in 1915.  Many people in Adams County were immigrants who had relatives still in Europe.  The European war must have been a great worry for them.  Little did they know that in 1917 their sons would be drafted into World War I.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the average monthly rainfall at Hastings for May is 4.6 inches and for June 3.6 inches.   On June 4th, this year the Hastings Municipal Airport reported 4.74 inches, breaking the old June 4^th record of 3.45 inches set in 1915.   That year the month of June’s total was 11.71 inches, more than the total amount of rainfall in some years.  For all of 1915, total moisture was 23.91 inches, more than twice the normal amount.  1915, the year that wouldn’t quit raining, was remembered throughout the lifetimes of those who experienced it.

Prior to modern drywall, the walls and ceilings in houses were covered with plaster and lath.  Laths are narrow strips of wood nailed horizontally across the wall studs and ceiling joists.  The lath was typically about one inch wide by four feet long by ¹⁄₄ inch thick. Each horizontal course of lath was spaced about ³⁄₈ inch apart.

To make lime plaster, limestone is heated to produce quick lime.  In the 1800s this was done in a kiln.  Heat causes the limestone to disintegrate.  It is then ground into a powder.  Water is then added to produce slacked lime, which is sold as a wet putty or a white powder.  Sand is mixed into the lime to make plaster.  If the plaster has too much sand mixed in it is coarse and crumbly.  One of the binding agents used to hold the plaster together was horse hair from the manes and tails.  If you’ve ever removed old plaster, you’ve seen the hairs.

Because plaster walls were often uneven and rough they were usually covered with wallpaper in the 1800s.   Wallpaper was used by the wealthy as far back as the 1500s.  By the 1700s improvements in wallpaper manufacturing technology reduced the price and allowed the upper middle class to use wallpaper in their homes.

The development of steam-powered printing presses in Britain in 1813 allowed manufacturers to mass-produce wallpaper, making it affordable to working-class people. Wallpaper enjoyed a huge boom in popularity in the nineteenth century, and became the norm in most middle-class homes until the widespread use of drywall began with the post-World War II housing boom.

Having lived all my life in old houses and also having remodeled several rental houses through the years, I have removed a lot of wallpaper.  Peeling off the layers and seeing the various patterns emerge always interests me.  Just as styles in furniture, clothing, etc. changed with the decades, so did wallpaper patterns.

I asked Agnes to write about our parents hanging wallpaper.  These are her memories.

Wallpapering is never easy, but when I was a child it was even more of a difficult and laborious task than with today’s vinyl and pre-glued paper. The wallpaper then was true paper that when wet with glue was heavy, easily torn, and hard to align on the walls. If the paper wasn’t put on exactly right the first time it had to be pulled back from the bottom and adjusted. This meant there was always a chance of rips or wrinkles in the finished product.   Long tables were required to lay the cut strips of wallpaper face down to apply the glue on the back with a brush.   The long wet strips were difficult to manage and usually required at least two people to put up.

Two people – two adults. In our house when I was young that meant Bert and Edna. I understand my mother’s point of view because I’m much like her when it comes to wanting things to be done right. She was always willing to work hard and do more than her share of the work, but she was demanding of herself and of anyone else working with her. It. Needed. To. Be. Done. Right.  Enter Bert who 1) didn’t understand why anyone would bother themselves by putting up new wallpaper and 2) didn’t really care how it looked when it was done. Oh, the arguments! It was a good time to stay out of the way and out of earshot.  I think I assumed all couples argued like that when wallpapering (and maybe they did).   Usually, Mom and Daddy worked and argued until Daddy got tired of the whole thing and left Mom to do the finish work. At least it got more calm then.  I remember once Mom teased Daddy for at least a week prior to the job by asking him if he had his “fighting clothes” on.  Things went more smoothly with much less fighting that time. Reverse psychology works even when wallpapering!

My uncle, Charles John Trausch was born February 9, 1909, the third son and fourth child of Matt and Catherine (Kaiser) Trausch.

In March 1934, siblings Charles, Martha and my Dad, Bert, moved onto the old McCue farm where I now reside.  Charles farmed the McCue farm and Bert farmed the quarter section a half mile east of my southeast corner.  Charles lived with Bert and Martha, then Bert and Edna after their 1937 marriage,  until October 1942 when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

Charles wrote this story in 1978.  He died at Riverside, California in 2001 at the age of 92.

 I am the fourth child in the family, born February 9, 1909.  I had a good childhood.  We had a nice area to play in the grove to the north of the house.  We were not blessed with a lot of toys, so we made our own and used a lot of imagination; like an old bull wheel from a binder was a 40/80 Avery tractor.  I remember us making a bicycle with a couple steel wheels and a makeshift frame.  One would ride and the other would push.

 As we grew up we had our chores to do at a young age, such as gathering cobs in the hog feed lot for fuel in the cook stove.  In the fall of the year we would gather fresh corn husks for refilling the mattresses, every fall the old husks were dumped out and the ticks refilled with fresh husks.

Every week Mother had a big wash to do.  Those were the days when the clothes were put in a boiler and boiled before putting them in the washing machine.  The machine was turned by hand.  I remember one incident when Mother was encouraging me to turn the machine and she said “It is fun to turn it.”  I remember telling her “If it is so much fun why don’t you do it yourself?”  For some reason that stuck in my mind throughout the years.  As I remember, it is about the only time that I sassed my Mother.

When I reached school age–seven years–we walked to Assumption parochial school, two miles west of our home.  As our folks living in a German community always spoke German, consequently when we started school we had to learn the English language.  Most of the children were in the same boat, so it wasn’t too bad, only it made it doubly hard on the Sisters having to teach the language besides starting the kids off.  There was no kindergarten, we started off in the first grade.

All but two years of my eight grades of education I got in the Assumption school.  There were two years, I think, it was my third and fourth grades, that we didn’t get any Sisters, we attended District 28 east of our home.  Our teacher was Mae Larson, a very good teacher.  She taught there for many years.  In the later years of school about the time I was in the fifth grade we drove to school with a horse and buggy.  The horse’s name was Maude, a faithful old horse.

My chores in the morning were milk two cows, feed Maude, curry and harness her, and put hay and grain in the buggy to feed her at noon.  We had some very cold winters.  The Priest had a rule if it was below zero in the morning school was cancelled for the day.  So the first thing I did when mother got us up was check the thermometer hoping it was below zero.

After school in the evening my chores were to clean out the cow barn and put in fresh straw for bedding for that night, and feed the cows and milk two or three cows.  We always milked from six to ten cows.  Mother always helped milk, she would milk three or four while the boys milked the rest.  Mother was always the main spoke in the wheel.

I remember one winter, I think it was 1920, [it was 1919] we had a severe blizzard.  It came up so fast the cattle didn’t all get in out of the field.  It lasted three days.  The drifts were half as high as the barn.  After the storm Dad went out searching for the cattle that didn’t get in.  He found some that sheltered behind a haystack and were nearly frozen to death.  A few of them went south with the storm till they reached the fence corner.  They were frozen to death standing up leaning against the fence.  He brought a couple calves home that he found behind the haystack.  I remember rubbing them with snow in the barn to thaw them out.  They survived.

When I graduated from the eighth grade, in 1924, my parents gave me the choice of going to high school or stay home and work on the farm.  I chose to stay home and work on the farm, I would have had to ride a horse three miles to Roseland, and I hated to ride a horse.  That was not the main reason, the main reason being I didn’t like to go to school.

Dad had bought a threshing rig and he, Ed and Bert, were out with it from the middle of July into October.  First shock threshing and then stack threshing.  So it was my job to do the fall plowing, preparing the wheat ground and sowing the wheat around the 15^th of September.  Also chopping off corn fodder every day for the cows and picking new corn for the pigs.  We always had around a hundred pigs.  I also did odd jobs for the neighbors when I could, saving my money so that some day I could buy a car with it.  Every time I earned a dollar or two I put it in the bank.  In those days wages were 75cents to a dollar a day.

Things went along smoothly.  I had a hundred dollars in the bank and was getting ready to shop for a car.  That was 1929.  The great depression hit, the banks went broke and my hundred dollars went down the drain.  I kept plugging away.  My parents helped me get started farming in 1931.

It wasn’t until 1932 that I had enough money saved to buy a car, a 1928 Chevy coup for $90.  It was a good little car.  Alfred, Vern and I drove it to California in 1939.  We loafed around Los Angeles, did a lot of sight seeing and visited Joe and Martha Preissler, my sister and brother in law.  They were living in Puente at the time.  After a month I decided to head for Nebraska.  Alfred and Vern decided to stay and go to an aircraft school hoping to get a job in an aircraft factory.  I had to go back to Nebraska as I was farming at the time.  I was living with Bert and Edna on the hill.

Farming didn’t turn out too good for me.  We didn’t raise much of a crop due to lack of rainfall.  Some years we no more than got our seed back.   When we did raise a decent crop the grain prices were way down, 35 to 40 cents for corn and 50 to 60 cents a bushel for wheat.  I went to Iowa several falls to shuck corn to get enough money to keep going.  I was single and had only myself to look after.  It was still hard to keep going.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked and war was declared on December 7, 1941 I was still farming.  I didn’t think it was possible for me to stay out much longer, so on October 12, 1942, I enlisted into the Army Air Corps.  I always wanted a military career.  I was inducted at Fort Crook, [now Offutt Air Base at Omaha]  sworn in at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and got my basic training at Big Springs, Texas.

That is when the excitement in my life began.  I had my first train ride, first airplane ride and my first ship ride in less than a year.  After basic training I was sent to an aircraft school in Glendale, California for 15 weeks, then to March Field near Riverside for six weeks, then to San Bernardino Air base for one month where we were outfitted for overseas.  From there we went to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.  After a week or ten days we boarded ship for North Africa.

We were on the high seas for ten days in a very large convoy.  There were ships on all sides of us as far as the eye could see.  Our ship was a converted luxury liner, there were 12,000 men on board.  The voyage was not an uneventful one.  There was a submarine attack on the convoy the first night after we entered the Mediterranean Sea in the Straights of Gibralter.  The second night about sundown we had an air attack.  As far as I know there were no ships sunk.

Our ship left the convoy the next day and we landed in Bizerte, Tunisia, North Africa.  We got our first glimpse of the ravages of war.  The town was completely destroyed.  It was a town of 25 or 30,000.  Some walls of the buildings were still standing, but the roofs were blown off.  There wasn’t a living thing around.  Our ship was the first to enter the harbor after the enemy was driven out.  The harbor was filled with sunken ships.  I remember seeing two halves of a liberty ship floating around.  A bomb split it in two.  They were invading Sicily when we landed.  There were six rows of landing craft following each other as far as you could see over the horizon.

The original plans were for our organization, the 309^th Depot Repair Squadron, consisting of 390 men, to follow the invasion into Sicily and up through Italy.  But for some unknown reason, they said our orders got lost, the plans didn’t materialize.

We were bivouacked in the woods at Bizerte in our pup tents for a couple weeks.  In the mean time we had several air attacks.  We thought we were the only living souls around there till we had our first air attack.  The place was ringed by English anti aircraft guns.  They all opened fire at the same time.  It was quite a sight as every fifth shell was a tracer, like a Fourth of July celebration, but they were playing for keeps.  They had a German aircraft in the searchlight beam.  It was up so high it looked like a small plane, but it was a JU 88 bomber.  After a few minutes of firing it was hit and came spiraling down.  Upon crashing it started a fire in the countryside.  It burned itself out, but the next couple days and nights some of our crew went out with shovels.  When we saw any live embers we shoveled dirt on them to keep the fire from starting up again.

Some of us had the opportunity one day to go to Tunis on one of our trucks that was going in for supplies.  There we came in contact with the first natives, mostly women and children and a few old men.  The children were begging for chocolate and chewing gum.  They were singing the song “You are my Sunshine” in English.  The GIs that went through there taught them English.  They were smart kids, dressed in rags.  They picked up English real fast.

After two weeks we got orders to go to Algiers.  We went to Tunis and got on a freight train.  “Forty and Eight” they called it.  (Forty men or eight horses).  We were packed in pretty tight.  It was a three day journey—it wasn’t very far but a slow moving train.  The whole group got dysentery, so it wasn’t a very pleasant journey.  When we got to Algiers we set up tents, eight men to a tent; also a shower room and a mess hall.  That was living in luxury after the pup tent ordeal.

Our assignment was to do aircraft engine overhaul, which we did for a year.  The climate was good, almost like California.  It rained quite a bit in the winter months.  They raised a lot of tangerines in that area.  After one year we were ordered to go to Casablanca, Morocco where we did major aircraft overhaul.  Also they shipped the fighter planes P-38, P-51, and P-47 over on fuel tankers.  Each ship had aircraft tied down on top–30 to 40 planes partially disassembled.  We would tow them from the port to the hangar, assemble them and send them on to the front. We stayed in Casablanca till the war ended.

Our organization was assigned to maintain the planes that flew the Fifth Army personnel back to the States.  They flew them in from Italy on bombers; then flew out on C-54 planes.  We were the last to leave Casablanca.  After flying the infantry boys home, we went back on a ship.

The third day out we encountered a North Atlantic storm.  It lasted three days; the waves were 40 to 50 feet high.  We bounced around like a cork as the ship was a small one.  It was used by the Frederick Lykes Line to haul bananas overseas.  Needless to say I and many others got seasick.  We made very little headway those three days; they headed the ship into the wind and turned on just enough power to control the ship.

Ten days after we left Casablanca we landed in Hampton Roads, Virginia.  Everyone was glad to see land again.  We were assigned to barracks, the first time we were in buildings since we left the States almost three years back.  After getting settled and cleaned up, we had a delicious steak dinner in the mess hall.  All the workers were German prisoners of war.

After a few days they started shipping us out to the various discharge centers.  It was kind of a sad feeling to be separated from buddies you had spent almost three years with.  I had my Thanksgiving dinner 1945 on a troop train on the way to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  After discharge I boarded the train for Hastings.  It was after midnight when we got into Hastings so I slept in the depot.  The next day was Sunday so I went to church.  I spotted Edna and Bert there so I rode home with them.  Needless to say everyone was glad to see me, especially Mother.  They didn’t know I was coming home.

After loafing around for a week or ten days I got tired of it and went to Hastings Naval Ammunition Depot and applied for a job as an auto mechanic.  I was hired and went to work the next day.  I stayed on that job until May 1947 when I decided to go to California.  I headed for Riverside where my Uncle Vet Trausch was in the refrigeration business.  It looked like it would be a good trade to learn, so my brother Al, Vet and I decided to go into business.  We purchased a lot, built a building on it and opened a refrigeration sales and service store in West Riverside.

I took a 15 week course. Adult Education, on refrigeration in the evenings twice a week at the Valley College in San Bernardino, and with what I learned from Vet, I picked up the trade.  I stayed with it for 30 years until I retired.

In 1948 I met and married a lovely lady, Edna Taylor from San Bernardino.  She had two girls, Sheryl age 7 and Sharon age 5.  We lived in San Bernardino in her folk’s apartment for a year, then we bought a house in Riverside.

In 1952 Vet, Al and I decided to dissolve our business partnership.  Discount houses were coming in which made it hard for the small dealer to make any profit on sales.  We could do servicing out of our homes.

I went to work at Rohr Aircraft in Riverside and also did refrigeration service on the side.  I stayed at Rohr three years.  I didn’t see any future in that job, so I quit and started my own one man business, Domestic Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Service.  On June 6, 1963 my dear wife succumbed to cancer.  She had been battling it for eight and one half years.  The girls were both married so I was left alone.  It was a lonely life after being happily married for fifteen years.

After three years I married the sweetest most loving and thoughtful girl “this side of heaven,” Mary Nichols.  We had known each other through square dancing.  We belonged to the same square dance club several years before we lost our mates; her husband died in January 1964.

We were married May 1, 1966 and had a one month honeymoon in Hawaii.  She has three children, Bill and Penny living away from home and Greg, a little boy they adopted, was six years old.  We sold my house and moved into Mary’s which was a better house.

I now keep myself occupied with the maintaining of five rental houses, besides our home.  I must say God has been good to me.  I have had a full and exciting life.  I have no children of my own, but I have eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren.  By not having any children of my own I have one consolation, I did not contribute to an overpopulated world.  So now I am nearing the ripe old age of Seventy, and after a few more trips I will just set back and wait for the Reaper.

The first Catholic settlers in what would be called “the Assumption area” were the Schifferns and Bausch families, drawn here in 1873 by the chance to own farms under the Homestead Act.  Peter Schifferns and his wife Susanna Pauli, my great, great grandparents, brought their seven living children with them.  They were from Bettenfeld, Prussia (in an area that had been part of Luxembourg prior to 1815), by way of Aurora, Illinois.  Many people from Luxembourg had settled at Aurora, including a young man named Thomas Trausch.  Whether Thomas knew the Schifferns or Bausch families at Aurora is unknown.  However, he bought a farm on payments from the Burlington Railroad and settled down in the neighborhood.  In 1876 Thomas married Anna, the oldest Schifferns child, in the Busch School house.   In 1883 a small frame church was built at Assumption. By this time many people of Luxembourg descent were arriving in the area from Saint Donatus, Jackson County, Iowa.   The congregation soon outgrew the building, but feeling a Catholic school was necessary they constructed a large two-story frame school building which opened in 1900.

The congregation was blessed with a good crop in 1902 and they immediately made plans to build a large brick church. In June the Adams County Democrat, published in Hastings, reported that the “Catholic congregation bought an acre of land adjoining the west from Dim Wilmes for $1.10.”  In March 1903 Fred Butzirus and John Sauerman of Hastings were contracted to build the new church for a sum of $10,720. The parish was to furnish the glass, sand, and water and to do all the hauling of materials.  The building was to be completed by November 1, 1903.  There were no government regulations to slow down construction in those days.

During this time period, the Assumption settlement was called Walnut Hill.  Who gave it that name and why is unknown. It’s doubtful there were any walnut trees and the location certainly isn’t on a hill.  In fact, there is a lagoon just to the west.  In March 1903 a news article in the Adams County Democrat reported “Henry Schmitz has donated 100 loads of sand for the new church at Walnut Hill.”  In April 1903 it reported that “Twenty wagon loads of brick from Hastings crossed the Thirty-Two Mile Creek Saturday en route to Walnut Hill.”  That same month it reported that “Mrs. Klepper’s new house in Walnut Hill is going up.”  The little settlement was a bee-hive of activity that spring.

The church’s cornerstone was laid on June 11, 1903 by Right Reverend Thomas Bonacum, Bishop of Lincoln.  He also dedicated the building on October 28, 1903.  The building had an overall length of 117.5 feet, a width of 48 feet, and a bell tower 100 feet high.   The Hastings Daily Tribune printed an account of the dedication titled “New Church Dedicated, Big Day Among Catholic Residents in Vicinity of Roseland. The large handsome Catholic Church, located three miles directly north of Roseland, which has just been completed, was dedicated with impressive ceremonies Wednesday morning. …This building is, without exception, the finest and costliest country church in Nebraska and compares well with the best city churches of the middle west.  This large brick building was erected at a cost of $16,000 and was very nearly completely paid for on dedication day. … The tower, which is 100 feet in height, is surmounted by a large gilded cross which may be seen at a distance of ten miles….Father Engelbert Boll is the pastor.  The large parochial school, which was built near the church a year ago, employs a number of teachers and both German and English instructions are given.  The new church, which has a seating capacity of more than double the old one, was crowded full to the aisles and it is safe to say that 1,000 people were in attendance.  Five residences and a general store are in the vicinity of the church. … Father Boll assisted by the generosity of the 1500 [sic should be 500] members, resulted in the present handsome structure. This fine building will stand as a monument to those who gave their support toward building it long after the members are gone.”  Unfortunately, that prophecy did not come true.

In the midst of all this work and excitement, Matt Trausch and Katie Kaiser were planning their wedding.  We do not know when they became engaged.  Many years later Grandma Trausch said they met when she was helping her aunt, Anna Theisen, after the birth of her son Edmund in December 1902.  The Nick Theisen farmstead (where Chad Trausch lives now) was located just a quarter mile north of the Matt Trausch home.  It seems strange that Matt and Catherine didn’t know each other as their families attended the same church and their parents’ homes were only three miles apart.  However, there was a six-year age difference, the families attended separate school districts, and the church congregation was so large that two Masses were held every Sunday.

In those days everyone got married on Tuesday.  When Matt went to make arrangements for the wedding, Father Boll said “Everything is out of the old church. Why don’t you wait until we dedicate the new church and get married the next day?”   Both families were well known in the community and it would be a large wedding.  So they chose Thursday, October 29^th, the day after the dedication, which was also the 27^th anniversary of Matt’s parent’s marriage; although Grandma said she didn’t know that at the time.  Thus Matt and Catherine Kaiser Trausch were the first couple married in the new church.  Their six oldest children, Ed, Bert, Martha, Charles, Albert (born and died in 1910), Elmer, Alfred, Laurine, and Vern, were all baptized in the beautiful church which was the pride of the community.

Engelbert Thomas Trausch was baptized on March 25, 1906 at the age of three days.  His name is written Thomas Engelbert in the church baptismal register.  He was named for the priest, Father Engelbert Boll who was well-liked by his parishioners, and for his grandfather Thomas Trausch.  Bert’s baptismal sponsors were his grandfather Thomas Trausch and an unknown woman written as “Elizabeth Trausch” in the baptismal register.

Bert made his First Communion on June 7, 1914, at the age of eight.  Twenty-eight children were in his class that year.  It was the tradition for boys to wear knee-length pants until they made their First Communion; then they began to wear long pants.

The Sacrament of Confirmation was administered to Bert by Right Reverend Henry Fisher, Bishop of Lincoln on Thursday, October 19, 1916.  The weather was very bad that day.  The temperature was below 20 degrees, the wind was blowing strong from the north and sleet followed by snow had fallen.  The roads were badly drifted.  Nevertheless, 80 children were confirmed at Assumption.  The group included Bert, Martha, and their uncle Sylvester “Vet” Trausch.  Grandpa Nick Kaiser served as one of the sponsors.  At that time the confirmands did not have individual sponsors.

During the years prior to World War I, church sermons, readings of the epistles and gospels, and announcements were given in German.  The Mass, of course, was in Latin.  German and English were both taught in the school.  Then during the war, over-zealous WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant) “patriots” who controlled the government, decreed that German could no longer be spoken in schools, churches, on the telephone, or in public.  Those restrictions eased after the war, but German was no longer taught in the school and the knowledge and use of German was gradually lost.

On November 20, 1919 disaster struck when the beautiful church was destroyed by fire.  On Friday, November 21, the Hastings Daily Tribune carried an account titled “Church Was Afire While Couple Wed”

“At 10 o’clock in the morning Louis Hoffman and Miss Stella Beiriger were married by Father Merkl.  He then attended the wedding dinner at the M. G. Beiriger home two miles east.  The fire was discovered at 12:15 by Albert Hoffman, who lived just south of the church.  Mr. Hoffman at once gave the alarm.  A telephone message was sent to the home of the bride’s parents, where the wedding guests were at dinner.  Meanwhile others, seeing the blazing church, came in cars from the farms around.  In a short time 500 people were gathered about the church.  Buckets were brought from nearby farms.  Dominic Willmes threw the first bucket of water on the burning church, but little could be done.  The Hastings Fire Department was called, but because there was no water system they replied they could do nothing.

The fire had started in the floor above the furnace, and destroyed the altar first.  The altar had cost $4,000.  The chalice, ciborium (a covered cup for holding hosts) and monstrance, (a decorative vessel used to display the consecrated host) all made of gold, were destroyed.  Among the church decorations destroyed were five valuable statues.  The pipe organ, donated by Miss Anna David, was only two years old.  The church with contents was insured for only $10,000, a fraction of what it would cost to replace it.  Father Merkl was quoted “I can’t say what we will do about rebuilding.  Our farmers have been unfortunate.  For three years we have raised practically no crop in this community.  This is going to be very hard on the church.”

Bert Trausch was thirteen years old when the church burned.  Sixty years later he reminisced “We saw the smoke in the sky, got in the car [Matt bought his first car in 1918, a 1914  Model Overland] drove over there, but all we could do was stand and watch it burn.

The old frame church, which had been moved west of the school and used as a hall, was again used for worship.  But, it was much too small to hold the 600 church members.  Despite the financial hardship, plans were immediately made to rebuild.

The Civil War, or The War Between the States, or The War of Northern Aggression as the Southerners called it,  ended 150 years ago on April 9, 1865.  This seems like a good time to tell you about one of your ancestors who fought in that conflict.

In the late 1960s, Pat and I visited his father’s cousin, George Renschler, at Superior, Nebraska.  I was gathering family history and Pat’s father, “Bud” Renschler knew very little about his father’s family.  His parents, Harley and Clarice Clark Renschler, were divorced when Bud was about two years old.  George Renschler told us about their grandfather’s service in the Civil War.  He recounted that he had fought at the Battle of Gettysburg and that he had been a POW.  George had in his possession many items which had originally belonged to his grandparents, George Frederick “Fritz” and Lottie Renschler. Among them was this photo of “Fritz” Renschler taken during the Civil War. The photo was in a Gutta-percha case common in the 1800s.  Unfortunately the image did not photograph well.

The story George told us piqued my interest and over the years I filled in some of the details.  How I wish someone had written down Fritz’s experiences before his death in June 1917.

This biography which I found in The History of Caldwell and Livingston Counties, Missouri 1886 gave me more information, including his father’s name.

George Frederick “Fritz” Renschler enlisted in Company I, known as the “Towanda Rifles,” 6^th Pennsylvania Reserves, 35^th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on October 17, 1861 at Towanda, Bradford County, Pennsylvania.  The enlistment was for a term of three years.  He participated in the battles of Dranesville, Second Bull Run, White Oak, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg.  Below is information on the battles, and in italics an account of the actions of the 6^th Pennsylvania.

The Battle of Dranesville was a small battle that took place between Confederate forces under General J.E.B. Stuart and Union forces under General E.O.C. Ord on December 20, 1861, in Fairfax County, Virginia.  The two forces on similar winter-time patrols encountered and engaged one another in the crossroads village of Dranesville.  The battle resulted in a Union victory. “The Sixth marched down the Leesburg road, near the town of Drainsville, where it halted just before the enemy’s battery opened fire.  The shot and shell of the rebels flew around in all directions. Had their guns been managed by experienced artillerists, the slaughter in our ranks would have been terrific, as the position held by this division of the Sixth was immediately in front of the rebel battery.”            The Indiana Democrat, January 1, 1862

The Battle of White Oak Swamp took place on June 30, 1862 in Henrico County, Virginia as part of the Peninsula Campaign.

The Second Battle of Bull Run or Second Manassas was fought August 28–30, 1862 in Prince William County, Virginia.   It was the culmination of an offensive campaign waged by General Lee’s army against  John Pope’s army, and a battle of much larger scale and numbers than the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) fought in 1861 on the same ground.

On the morning of the 30th, the sun rose cloudless, and everything was quiet and calm upon that field soon to be made the scene of carnage and death. Troops began to move early, preparatory to the day’s work. The Reserves marched to the left of the Warrenton pike, near Groveton, where the Sixth was ordered to the support of Cooper’s Rifled Battery, of the First Pennsylvania Artillery. A brisk artillery duel lasted for some time, when the enemy in well dressed lines started forward, evidently intent on securing the road which lay between the contending forces. Immediately the word “forward” was given, and the Reserves swept down the hill with headlong impetuosity, reaching the bank at the upper side of the road, as the enemy was approaching the fence on the lower, and sprang down the bank into the road before them. The rebels, dismayed at the rapidity and success of the movement, turned and fled in confusion, under a terrific fire from the charging column. Thus was the enemy repulsed, and an important position retained. In this charge, the flag of the Sixth was shot from the staff, while in the hands of Major Madill. It was instantly taken by the gallant Reynolds, who, holding it aloft, dashed along the line, the wind catching it as he turned and wrapping it about his noble form. The sight inspired the men to deeds of greater valor, and for an instant they paused in the midst of battle and gave a tremendous soul-stirring cheer for their commander. Returning again to the hill, after resting an hour, night coming on, the division marched towards Centreville, and bivouacked at Cub Run. The loss in this sanguinary battle, extending through three days, was six killed, thirty wounded and eight missing. On the 31st, it moved to Centreville, where, for the first time since the 24th, full and adequate rations were issued. The regiment was placed on picket near Cub Run, and remained through the following day. At five P. M. of September 1st, it was relieved and followed the division to Fairfax Court House.  

The Battle of Fredericksburg was fought December 11–15, 1862, in and around Fredericksburg, Virginia, between General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by Major General  Ambrose Burnside. The Union Army’s futile frontal attacks on December 13 against entrenched Confederate defenders on the heights behind the city was one of the most one-sided battles of the war, with Union casualties more than twice those of the Confederates. On December 15, Burnside withdrew his army, ending a failed Union campaign.  

The movements preliminary to the battle of Fredericksburg began December 8th, when the Sixth marched from Brook’s Station and reached the hills on the north side of the Rappahannock, overlooking Fredericksburg, on the 11th. On the morning of the 12th it crossed the river on a pontoon bridge about three miles below the city. A line of battle was formed at right angles with the river. This position was held until daybreak of the 13th  when the pickets became engaged, and the brigade, the Sixth in advance, crossing a small stream, under a dense fog, marched through a cornfield to the Bowling Green road, where the line was re-formed. The regiment advanced and drove the enemy from the crest of the hill and from his shelter behind fences and the railroad embankment. The battle now raged furiously. The enemy’s second line proved a formidable obstacle, but soon yielded to the impetuosity of the Reserves. Moving along up the hill, followed closely by the brigade, it reached a road running along the brow of the hill near which a third line was encountered and a terrific fight ensued, ending in the discomfiture of the rebels. The regiment had now lost more than one-third of its entire number, the brigade had suffered heavily, and Colonel Sinclair had been borne from the field wounded, when the enemy was detected moving through the woods to the right in large numbers. At the same time a terrific fire of musketry was opened on the left of the brigade. The line began to waver and no supporting troops being at hand it finally yielded, and the regiment, with the brigade, fell back over the same ground on which it had advanced. In this battle, of the three hundred men who went into action, ten were killed, ninety-two wounded and nineteen missing. Moving to the opposite side of the river on the 20th, the regiment went into camp near Belle Plain. After having participated in the celebrated “mud march,” it returned to its old camp, and remained there until the 7th of February, 1863, when it was ordered to Alexandria to join the Twenty-second Corps. It did guard and picket duty until the 27th of March, and then moved to Fairfax Station, where it remained until the 25th of June when it moved to join the Army of the Potomac and participate in the memorable Gettysburg campaign.

The Battle of Gettysburg  was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg , Pennsylvania.  The Battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is often described as the war’s turning point.  The Union Army defeated attacks by Confederate General Lee’s  Army of Northern Virginia, ending Lee’s attempt to invade the North.    The two armies suffered between 46,000 and 51,000 casualties. Union casualties were 23,055, while Confederate casualties are more difficult to estimate. Many authors have referred to as many as 28,000 Confederate casualties.

Marching via Dranesville, Edwards’ Ferry and Frederick, the regiment joined the army on the 28th, and was again assigned to the Fifth Corps, which was commanded by General Sykes. Continuing the march through Uniontown and Hanover it reached Gettysburg at two o’clock P. M. of July 2d, and made a charge from Little Round Top with but small loss. Remaining in front during the night, on the morning of the 3d skirmishing commenced which continued through the entire day. Towards evening another charge was made, capturing a number of prisoners, re-capturing one gun and five caissons and relieving a large number of Union prisoners. In this encounter the Sixth remained on the skirmish line until two P. M. to the 4th, when it was relieved and bivouacked on Little Round Top. It sustained a loss of two men killed, and Lieutenant Rockwell and twenty-one men wounded.

Pursuing the retreating rebels to Falling Waters, constantly skirmishing on the way, it encamped on the 14th, after having captured some prisoners near Sharpsburg, when it was ascertained that the rebel army had escaped across the river. Marching and an occasional skirmish and reconnaissance occupied the time until August 18th, when the regiment arrived at Rappahannock Station, and remained until the 15th of September. Leaving Rappahannock Station on the 15th, it reached Culpepper Court House on the 16th, and went into camp two miles beyond the town, where it remained until October 10th. Returning, it re-crossed the river on the 12th, and encountered the enemy at Bristoe Station on the 14th, having three men wounded by his shells. On the 19th, it crossed Bull Run and bivouacked on the old battle-ground. The march was continued on the next day through New Baltimore to Auburn, and from thence, on the 7th of November, to Rappahannock Station, crossing the river on the 8th, and on the 10th taking possession of rebel barracks, where it remained until the 24th.

In later years Fritz told how the streams ran red with the blood of men and horses during the Battle of Gettysburg.

Fritz was reported at Kettle Run, Virginia in November and December 1863.  He was discharged from the 6^th Pa. Res. to reenlist on Christmas Day, December 25, 1863 at Nokesville, Virginia.  This time he was in Company E, 191 Pennsylvania Infantry, a regiment organized in the field from Veterans and Recruits of the Pennsylvania Reserve Corps.

The Battle of Globe Tavern, also known as the Second Battle of the Weldon Railroad, fought August 18–21, 1864, south of Petersburg, Virginia was the Union’s second attempt to sever the Weldon Railroad during the Siege of Petersburg.   The Union force destroyed miles of track and withstood strong attacks from Confederate troops.  It was the first Union victory in the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign and forced the Confederates to carry their supplies 30 miles by wagon to bypass the new Union lines that were extended farther to the south and west.

On the 18th of August, 1864 the 191^st  moved upon the Weldon Railroad, capturing and destroying a portion.  Colonel Hartshorne, who had just previously returned to duty, was in command of the brigade, which was early ordered upon the skirmish line. It continued to advance, over heavily timbered ground, driving back the enemy until it came in front of his breast-works, where a line was established and fortified. This advanced position was held, without supports, until four o’clock on the afternoon of the 19th, when it suddenly found itself completely surrounded, and was forced to surrender.

Frederick Renschler’s Civil War battles were over;  he along with 27 others, was taken prisoner by the Confederates.   They were sent first to Richmond and then to the Salisbury North Carolina prisoner of war camp on October 9^th.

Salisbury Prison was a Confederate military prison in Rowan County, North Carolina.  The prison was a field of about six acres surrounded by a seven-foot-high stockade fence.  A stream that ran through the area was the prisoners’ source of water.  By October 1864 the prison held 5000, and soon increased to 10,000 prisoners. With the increase in men came overcrowding, decreased sanitation, shortages of food, and then disease, starvation, and death. Overwhelmed by a population four times larger than intended, the prison quartered prisoners in every available space. Those without shelter dug burrows in an attempt to stay warm and dry.  Rations and potable water were scarce. A day’s ration per man was a half loaf of bread and two to four ounces of meat in a pint of soup.  Sometimes, for the bread a pint of flour or cornmeal was substituted.  Then the men added it to the soup to make a gruel.  The meat ration was often missing, sometimes for several days at a time.  Adding to the poor conditions was an unusually cold and wet winter.  Disease and starvation began to claim lives, and all buildings within the stockade were converted to hospitals to care for the sick. Each morning, the dead were gathered from the grounds and placed in the “dead house.”   During November, rations were so lacking that the men thought they were to be starved to death so they attempted an escape.  As many as 75 prisoners were shot during the breakout attempt.

In February 1865 a prisoner exchange program was approved, and prisoners were moved to other locations. Those who could do so marched to Greensboro to be taken by train to Wilmington, North Carolina.  1420 who were unable to march were transferred to Richmond, Virginia.  Of the 27 taken prisoner with Fritz Renschler at Weldon Railroad, seven died at Salisbury Prison. Of the buildings that constituted the prison, only one house still stands.

Over 5,000 unknown Union soldiers are buried in 18 trenches, each 240 feet long, dug in an abandoned cornfield outside the Confederate Prison stockades.   Salisbury National Cemetery encompasses this mass grave site, now a grassy expanse marked by a head and footstone for each trench.

After his release from Salisbury prisoner of war camp, Frederick was sent to Camp Parole at Annapolis, Maryland.

While at Camp Parole Frederick was given 30 days leave to travel to Towanda, Pennsylvania. 

Frederick later joined the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) an organization of Union veterans of the Civil War.  That membership must have been important to him because his tombstone in the Webber, Kansas Cemetery displays a small, round metal GAR insignia just above his name.

During the 1920s the KKK was active in Hastings and even little towns like Roseland and Giltner.  There wasn’t a black person nor a Jew in Roseland or Giltner, and very few in Hastings.  How could a hate organization attract hundreds of members in this area?  No one knows when the local chapters were organized nor by whom.   They sprang up following the militant patriotism and extreme anti-German, anti-immigrant sentiments aroused by World War I.  They called their gatherings “Patriot Meetings.”  They believed in Americanism–White, English-speaking, Protestant, Americanism.   And for a time in the 1920s, several hundred local men, many of them prominent business and professional leaders, were members.

Dentist C. A. Phillips was the kleagle of the Hastings Klan, and he proudly displayed a sign in his waiting room.  “If you’re not a loyal American, get the ____ out of here.”  He wanted everyone to know he was the exalted savior of local purity and patriotism, and seldom wore a hood during parades.  The other members weren’t so brave; they kept their hoods on during cross burnings and parades.

The first local account of Klan activities appeared in the Hastings Daily Tribune on August 17, 1923 announcing a “Big Meeting at Prospect Park.”  The speaker was a Rev. Bates from Salina, Kansas who wore the white robe, but not the hood while he spoke about protecting women, limiting immigration, full-fledged Americanism, and law and order.  The attendance was “large” according to the Tribune.  A year later in September 1924 there was an even larger Klan gathering at the park.  It was estimated that between 3,500 and 4,000 attended, many from surrounding towns.

Why would people join a hate group?  Some thought it was a patriotic organization, some enjoyed the secrecy and intrigue, some thought they were “saving their way of life from foreigners,” some were coerced.  Local businessmen feared they would be boycotted if they didn’t join—although the Stein Brothers, proprietors of the largest mercantile firm in Hastings, refused.  Some of the members were ministers, especially Baptist ministers.

Sunday, May 11, 1924, Rev. A. P. Renn was closing a series of evangelistic meetings at the First Baptist Church in Hastings when the door swung open and a couple dozen white-robed, hooded and masked characters marched in, single file, to the pulpit where they asked the Rev. to lead a prayer.  “All knelt reverently” the Hastings Democrat reported, although Baptists ordinarily don’t kneel during church services.  Before leaving they gave the church a nearly $180 offering.  The congregation cheered as the Klansmen marched out.  The Democrat, a weekly newspaper, came out on May 15^th.  That night the church burned to the ground.  The Klan offered a $500 reward for arrest and conviction of those responsible.  The state fire inspector never charged arson, the reward was never collected, and the Baptist minister left town.

Joseph Daugherty died from a hunting accident in March 1925.  His fellow Klansmen held a full-dress funeral at the Methodist Church in Hastings.  Robed Klansmen were pallbearers and about 250 robed Klansmen escorted the body to the cemetery.

Hastings Klan meetings were held in the Armory at First and Lexington, in the Odd Fellows Hall on Second Street, and in the Brandes Building at Second and Burlington.  The Imperial Wizard visited Hastings in July 1925.  Welcome flags were displayed along streets, and windows displayed cards welcoming the Wizard.  About 600 to 700 Klansmen paraded down Burlington Avenue to the fairgrounds (located where Hastings High School currently stands).  The parade was lead by a masked horse and hooded rider.  The Hastings Drum and Bugle Corps, and bands from York and Franklin marched in the parade.  A large cross was burned in front of the crowd of 5,000 in the grandstand.  The Wizard spoke against Catholics and the Pope, a foreigner.  He went on to say “The foreign born are not 100 per cent American as long as they retain their own societies and practice old world ways…Those who will not be American must be sent back to where they came from.”  He also spoke against parochial schools, Jews, Negroes, and unions.

The Klan appears to have reached its peak membership about 1926, controlling politics in many communities, even electing state officials.  However, in 1926 the Klan Grand Dragon in Indiana was sent to prison for murder; and Klan politicians were indicted for corruption.  Bad publicity caused national membership to decline from three million in 1926 to 30,000 by 1930.

In this area there were few blacks or Jews, and few labor unions.  That left only the Catholics for the Klansmen to hate.  The cross burnings that weren’t symbolic were against Catholics, to cause fear, to warn them not to get into politics, nor to marry into “Decent Protestant American Families.”

Following is a November 1986 interview of Bert and Edna Kline Trausch concerning their memories of KKK activities in their neighborhoods.

You mentioned memories of the Klan from your childhood.

Bert.  I grew up on the NE1/4 Section 10, Roseland Township.  I remember the Klan had a big meeting one and one half miles south of where we lived.  It was in the fall of the year, about October.  I don’t remember the year.  It was in the 1920s.  Dad and I drove down around the west side of the section; we were going to see what was going on.  They were all dressed up in their sheets and hoods.  We tried to crawl up where we could hear, but they had guards posted all around, so we couldn’t get close enough.  They talked and then they burned a big cross.  It was out in a pasture.

Did you know who any of the people were who were involved?

Bert.  No, how would you know, they all had hoods on.  They came out from Hastings.  It was on Schifflers farm.  Maybe Schifflers were members of the Klan.  I don’t know.

How many people were involved?

Bert.  Hundreds it seemed like.  Lots of them drove by our house on the way out.  They needed a big open space because there was so many of them.  I think they came out by Roseland because they wanted to scare the Catholics.

Did the Klan make any threats to the Catholics in your area?

Bert.  I don’t think so, but we were always uneasy about them.  The Catholics didn’t like them burning crosses, the symbol of Christ.  The cross they burned was big, maybe ten feet high.  It was wrapped in burlap so it would burn.  They lit it at the bottom.

After this cross burning, did the Priest mention it in church?

Bert.  I don’t remember that he did.  The people were all talking about it.  The neighborhood was riled up about it.  It was mostly Catholics around here.  Some of the neighbors said “We should have had a big mean bull to turn loose down there in that pasture.”

Did anyone get the license numbers off the cars?

Bert.  Not that I remember.  They came out there and it was dark when they left.  It was just getting dusk when they came out.  The whole meeting lasted maybe an hour and a half.

Was there any chanting, yelling or cheering at the meeting?

Bert.  We couldn’t get close enough to hear.  The guards were all around.  They had the road blocked with their cars so no one could drive down past where they were meeting.  We drove up from the west around the section, parked at John Schmitz’s place and walked up towards the meeting.  We could see the guards, they didn’t see us. I suppose if they had caught us, they would have beat us up.

Edna, when you were growing up in the 1920s between Trumbull and Giltner were there Klan meetings there too?

Edna.  Yes, at Giltner and around there.  I don’t know of any right in Trumbull. Grand Island had big meetings too.  I remember Valentine Smith was our neighbor.  He went to some Klan meetings and then after that he wouldn’t talk to Dad anymore.  He was mad at the Catholics.  In a few years, he got over it and was friendly to Dad again.  That was after the Klan fell apart around there.

At Giltner the Catholic Church had the main building and on the back was the sacristy built on.  Well, the Klan members told around that the back room was full of guns and ammunition.  They said the Catholics were going to try to overthrow the government.  It was so absurd that only an idiot would believe it.  But the Klan members believed it.

Were there cross burnings near where you lived? 

Edna.  Yes, but I never saw any.  I don’t know the locations.  My folks would talk about it.  When I was little I listened to the adults talk about the Klan and I was scared.  We didn’t know why they had to wear hoods and burn crosses.  I think they were ashamed to admit who they were.

Why did they lose their membership?

Edna.  I don’t know.  Maybe the people got smart to what they were.  I do know that when they had those meetings, they wanted money from their members.  I know that one of my friends at school told me her father went to the meetings.  He didn’t really want to go, but he went.  They wanted money from him.  He didn’t want to give them money or to belong, but he was pressured into it.

Do you know the names of any Klan members around Trumbull?

Edna.  Ray Arnold, Velky, can’t think of his first name, and Valentine Smith.  Smith didn’t have any money; I don’t think they bothered with him too much.  They wanted money.

Sister Theodore Kline [Edna’s Aunt] taught our school [before she went to the convent], Happy Hollow School,  before I went when just Josephine went to school.  They had trouble that year.  The Ku Klux Klan moved in there, and they hated the Catholics.  They had a meeting right in the middle of the school year and voted her out.  We were the only Catholics in that school.

Bert.  I remember they said around Roseland that the Catholics had guns in their church basements.  The Catholics were supposed to be going to start a revolution.  Maybe they thought we were going to shoot the Klan.  (laughs)

Do you know the names of any Roseland area people who were members of the Klan?

Bert.  Well I don’t know if I should say.  I know Hoylman was in the Klan.  When Hoylman lay dying, Frank Tolksdorf, our neighbor, said “Hoylman is going to hell on a hay stacker.”  The only other one I heard was in the Klan was Dan Snyder.

Daniel Edward Kline and Leona Josephine Bassett were married November 14, 1911 at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in Hastings, Nebraska.  Their attendants were Leona’s cousin Arthur Bassett and Dan’s sister Mary Kline.  Dan was one month short of his 25^th birthday and Leona was 18 years old.

In 1911 Dan was still living with his parents and helping with the farm work.  Edna Kline Trausch remembered that “Dad drove the Watkins Wagon with horses.  Uncle George Kline drove it first and when he quit Dad took it over and ran it for a year or so.  I don’t know when it was, before the folks were married or when they were first married.  I just remember Uncle George and Dad talking about it.”

In a 1996 interview Edna Trausch and Rita Obermeier told what they knew about their parent’s courtship.

Edna:  “Mom was working out for somebody around Hastings when they met.  Mom used to do house work. [It was common for girls and young women to earn money by living with a family and doing the cooking and housework. They received their room and board and about a dollar a week.]  Dad was going with Cora Halsted from Giltner.  She wanted to marry Dad, but she wasn’t a Catholic.  She wouldn’t join the church.  She said “I’ll go to my church and you go to your church.  It doesn’t matter to me.”  Dad said “But it matters to me.”  Dad’s folks would have up and died if he had married her.  All the time Dad went with her, Grandma and Aunt Kate picked on her because she wasn’t a Catholic.  She never did marry.   Mom never did say who she went with, but she told me this story.  The neighbors always listened in on the phone if somebody called her for a date.  The neighbors said she would go with anybody, but not Sunday night, [then] she was going with Dad.  Dad came to the farm with a threshing crew; that’s how they met.”

Rita:  “The only thing I remember about it, Mom told me about one time they were going to Grand Island on a date and they were going on that long bridge; they called it the mile bridge. [over the Platte River]  They met somebody and they had to get on a little turn off on the bridge.  It was only a one-lane bridge.”

In a 1988 interview Sister Francis Kline remembered going to the wedding at St. Cecilia’s.  The Kline family went in a carriage.  After the ceremony, a wedding dinner was held for the immediate family at the home of Jule Bassett, Leona’s father.  Jule and his second wife, Maud, lived on the farm where Leona grew up on the SE1/4 section 33, West Blue township.   The location is 1.5 miles east of Hastings on 26^th Street on the north side of the road.  The buildings are gone.

Dan and Leona “went home” to Dan’s upstairs bedroom in his parent’s farmhouse.  They lived there until March 1912 when they moved onto the farm they would eventually purchase.  Those must have been very difficult months for Leona who was three months pregnant at her marriage.  Her mother-in-law, Bertha Kline, was a stern, unloving woman who blamed Leona for the family’s embarrassment. (Leona was just 18; Dan was 24 when the pregnancy began.)  Dan’s sister Kate, an old maid, age 30 living at home, was much like her mother with an added component of “humor” that belittled people.   (Kate Kline got married on January 1, 1946, at the age of 63, and her mother, Bertha, dropped dead the same day.  But that’s another story.)

In a 1982 interview, Grandma Kline told me the following:  “My wedding gift [from her father] was $35.  We went to town and bought a dresser, a chest of five drawers with a mirror on top, and a bedstead and springs.  Then we went home and we picked shucks out of the cornfield and filled the tick and that’s what we slept on.  We either had a straw tick or a shuck tick.  We emptied them every year in the fall and put in new ones.  Spring we’d shake ‘em, take out all the scraps, put some new ones in with ‘em and back on the bed they would go.  A Shuck mattress was four or five inches thick.  We had feather pillows.  We always raised ducks or geese and made feather pillows.

“Dan’s mother bought us a kitchen table to eat on and Dan’s father made us a kitchen cupboard and a washstand.  We always had a washstand.  We set the water bucket on that and washed our hands there.  In the living room for years we never had nothing but six wooden chairs.  Later we bought a library table.  Then later we bought a dish cupboard for the kitchen that cost $5.  It’s still in the basement at home.”  [On the farm]

“We had a Bible that Dan’s mother gave us.  In the evenings we’d sit around and read the Bible and pray. I did embroidery.  In the summer we sit on the porch.  We didn’t subscribe to a newspaper, couldn’t afford it.”

“We paid $65 for a cook stove, bought it on time.  And our house was so poor that we couldn’t live in the kitchen.  We lived in the living room and the bedrooms.   It was so cold that our reservoir would freeze solid on the stove at night.  The kitchen floorboards were worn through and the foundation was full of holes.  When I cooked I put on my overshoes to go out there.  My dress would blow up from the wind coming up through the holes in the floor.  We lived there for two years before we got a new kitchen floor.  The landlord just didn’t see how he could afford to put in a new floor and they were wealthy. His name was Belsley.  He was a mine digger and every time he’d get a little money he’d come out here and buy this cheap land.  Make a down payment on it.  They had lots of land they got for four and five dollars an acre.”

“The kitchen was a big room.  The people that lived there before we did had a washer with a motor on it in the west end of the kitchen.  But we took that out and put the floor in.  We were two years like that.  We threatened to move and then the landlord got busy.   For years I did the wash in the kitchen.  Heat the water on the cook stove right in the kitchen.”

“We had the living room and two bedrooms.  One bedroom was a little room that just held a bed and a low chest.  You had to squeeze to get between the bed and chest when you were making the bed.  The other bedroom must have been nine feet wide and twelve feet long.”

“The big bedroom was the one that had the bedbugs in it. They were in the house when we moved in. Then after the spring opened up the first year I said to Dad, “We’ve got bed bugs.”  They crawled up the wall in the corner, the wall was just black.  We used kerosene on them; if we would see a place where there were several we would put a little kerosene on them. And then we would pick ‘em.  Take them off the wall with a needle.  Every day we would pick every one we could find.  We couldn’t get rid of them any other way.  Bed bugs are terrible! You can’t sleep with them.  They bite; raise a welt just like a mosquito. I can take everything but bites.   They get in every little crack, behind the windowsills, behind the mopboard, behind everything.  Then at night they crawl out.  It took us a couple years to get rid of them.   Mary Kline Wunderlich [Dan’s sister] moved east of us and their house was full of ‘em.  They bought formaldehyde and burnt that on some wood.  Didn’t faze ’em.”

“The south end of the house was all cracked away from the floor and we tinned that all up with tin to keep the mice and rats out. The plaster in the house was so poor that every night the mice would gnaw through, then the next day we would fix that hole, and the next night the same thing over.  We fixed the holes with tin.    We used everything we could find.  We didn’t make the tin very big and the next night they would chew through somewhere else.  It was a mess.  We lived that way for three years and then we hollered, “We’re going to move.”  The landlord came in July and Dad said to him, “We’re looking for another place. We can’t stand the mice.”  So the landlord said to plaster the house.  So then in the fall the landlord paid someone to plaster the house and we never had but one or two mice in it since.”

Despite “having to get married,” and the hardships they endured wresting a living from the Nebraska prairie, Dan and Leona were married for over sixty-five years until Dan’s death in February 1977.

Many Adams County people do not realize that the Mary Lanning Memorial Hospital was not Hastings’ first hospital.   The Nebraska headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventist church were in Hastings from 1907 to 1917.  The Sanitarium was one of seven large buildings located on three square blocks between California and Cedar Avenues on East Ninth Street (then known as High Street).  The headquarters complex included offices, a church, elementary and high schools, a nursing school, dormitories, a printing plant and the large Sanitarium.

The Seventh Day Adventists promoted healthy foods and vegetarian diets.  They operated several sanitariums that followed the health principles of Dr. J. H. Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan.  The Kellogg Brothers, who made a fortune selling corn flakes,  were a part of the Adventist movement.

The Nebraska Sanitarium, which cost $30,000 to construct, opened in December 1908.  The three story, 65 feet tall frame building included a basement and an open porch on three sides.  The building contained e-ray equipment, several homeopathic treatment rooms and an operating room.  There was room for 30 patients, many of whom stayed for several weeks receiving treatments.

For several years the Nebraska Sanitarium was the only hospital in Hastings and treated non-Adventists as well as church members.  When the Mary Lanning Hospital became fully operational in 1920,  the number of Sanitarium patients fell from an average of 700 a year to only 215.  The building was sold in 1928 to Carl Pratt who used it as a private business college, then during World War II it was converted to apartments.  It was jokingly called “The Hatchery” because of the many pregnant women who lived there.  The building was demolished in 1986 by Peace Lutheran Church for a parking lot.

The Sanitarium’s most famous patients were John O’Connor, whose body was kept at Livingston Brothers Mortuary for two years, and Carl Burton Whitcomb, a Pauline area farmer,  who was wounded in a gunfight with Adams County Sheriff W. A. Cole in 1916.

Two members of our family have a connection to the building.  Irene Kline and her husband Ken Engel lived in an apartment there shortly after their marriage.  They lived on the top floor and I remember climbing all the stairs to visit them.

Bert Trausch was hospitalized there about 1919.  He was just recovering from scarlet fever and Grandpa Matt made Bert go out and work, carrying manure for the rhubarb plants he was setting.  Grandma Catherine said she told Matt that Bert was still too sick, but Grandpa said, “That won’t hurt them.” He had Ed and Bert helping him, it was about April. Then Bert got sicker, with diarrhea and yellow jaundice.  Bert became so weak he could hardly walk.   Dr. Mace from Roseland treated him, and told them to take Bert to the Seventh Day Adventist sanitarium in Hastings.

In a 1984 interview, Bert told the story.  “I had scarlet fever and then I got yellow jaundice. I got the scarlet fever at school [District 28] from the Portz kids. Schifflers got it too.

Ed Trausch remembered ” I was the first one in our family that had it. We went corn shelling and I picked it up. The whole school, everybody had it. That one Portz kid went away to Lincoln to be a mechanic and he came back and he had it and that set the whole country afire around here. Nobody died that I know of.  Lots had after effects–kidney and liver trouble.”

Bert continued the story “All of us got it, we were quarantined all spring and summer.  One would get scarlet fever and be quarantined for three weeks, then another one would get it, another three weeks and that went on. It started in the winter and it was summer before we were out of quarantine.  I was getting better and then I got the yellow jaundice.   I sweat so much the bed sheets turned yellow. I was really tired and my eyes turned yellow. The folks took me to Hastings in Dad’s Overland.  It took an hour to get to Hastings.  Driving a horse and buggy it took about four hours.”  They left him, went home, and didn’t return until he was discharged.  “Them days they didn’t run to town like now.”

“They didn’t give me any medicine. They put me in a salt bath and rubbed salt all over me and then in steam baths to boil the poison out. I was in the sanitarium over a week. I don’t know if it did any good, but I got over it. I was plenty sick.”

It took about a year [for me to recover]. That’s when I quit school.  I was in the seventh grade.  When Schifflers were sick we went over and did their work and when we were sick he came over and helped us. Dad never got the scarlet fever. Schiffler took our cream along to town to sell it for us when we were quarantined and couldn’t sell it. Hell, the guys out working in the barn weren’t sick. We did that for them too.

Whether the diet, steam baths, and salt rubs helped Bert recover we don’t know.  Probably the days of quiet and rest helped as much as the treatments.

Blacksmiths started forging simple flat irons in the late Middle Ages. Plain metal irons were heated by a fire or on a stove. Some early irons were made of stone, earthenware or terracotta.

Flat irons were also called sad irons or smoothing irons. The sad in sad iron (or sadiron) is an old word for solid, and in some contexts, this name suggests something bigger and heavier than a flat iron.  The metal handles were as hot as the iron and had to be gripped with a pad or thick rag.  In 1871  U. S. Patent number 113,448 was filed by Mary Florence Potts of Ottumwa, Iowa. The invention was a detachable body and handle for sad irons. This permitted a person to heat a number of iron cores on a stove, attach the handle to one, and iron with it until it cooled, then attach it to another heated iron core.  This invention shortened the ironing time by eliminating the time waiting for the iron to reheat.  At least two irons were needed for an efficient system: one in use, and one re-heating.  Since the handles were no longer heated with the iron, wood handles that didn’t conduct heat could be used.  Cool handles stayed even cooler in asbestos sad irons.

Ironing traditional fabrics without the benefit of electricity was a hot, arduous job. Irons had to be kept immaculately clean, sand-papered, and polished. They were regularly but lightly greased to avoid rusting. Beeswax prevented irons from sticking to starched cloth.  Constant observation was needed over the iron’s temperature.  Experience helped decide when the iron was hot enough, but not so hot that it scorched the cloth. A well-known test was spitting on the hot metal.

In 1996 Aunt Dorothy Kline Myhrberg reminisced about ironing.  “We couldn’t even think about going anywhere until those two oil-cloth-lined bushel baskets filled with ironing were done.  Mom wet the clothes wetter than they were when they came out of the washing machine. [Then the items were rolled and packed in the baskets so they became damp through.  It is easier to remove the wrinkles from damp cloth.]  We had an ironing board that set on the table and a regular ironing board.  One of us ironed the flat things on the table board and the other one used the ironing board.  We had to get all those baskets of clothes dried with those irons off the stove.”

The first electric iron was patented in 1882, but was far from an instant success, as most households lacked electricity — and many that did had power only in the evening to run lights. In addition, the early electric models were difficult to regulate.  None had thermostats until the late 1920s.  Edna Trausch didn’t have an electric iron until after the farmhouse was wired for electricity in 1950.

The J W Williams Company was established at Chagrin Falls, Ohio in 1844.  I do not know when they began making sad irons,  but they were manufacturing them by the 1870s.  In 1895 the Montgomery Ward catalogue sold solid metal irons similar to this one by the pound–.02 ½  cents a pound.  This iron, which weighs six pounds, would have cost 15 cents.  By the 1908 Wards catalogue all irons had wood handles.

Dover Manufacturing Company, from Dover, Ohio,  produced this salesman’s sample sad iron numbered 602. Salesman’s samples are a scaled-down version of the item that is for sale, so that it can be easily transported. This sad iron could also be used on small jobs like ironing collars, cuffs, or lace.  The iron is in good condition with some age-related wear to the surfaces and light rust.  It measures 3 ½ inches long and 2 ¼ inches tall. This iron was given to me by Pat’s grandmother, Clarice Clark Renschler Bugg.  She said that as a girl she played with it.

This was the iron my mother used prior to 1950.  Unfortunately I do not know when she got it, however I suspect she purchased it used.  She told me that prior to her marriage in 1937 she went to auctions in Hastings to purchase household items she needed.  This iron was in production as early as 1906.

This iron has asbestos inside the cover that fits over the heated core.  The asbestos prevented the heat from rising up to the woman’s hand.  It also kept the iron hot longer.  The ad below is for the identical iron.