Non Lutherans Had to Leave

               Alma Hansen's mother, another Alma emigrated from Meerane, Saxony, Germany, in 1871 at the age of seven. Meerane was a hub of cloth production and associated industries like dye works and tanneries, which employed the family of Christina Brautigan, little Alma Hildegard’s mutter. When still in the Old Country, her father Zacharias Pohle described himself as a “printer”. It’s unclear whether he printed designs on fabric or words on paper.

The location of Meerane in Germany

              

              This was the period of German unification, when the hyper-aggressive kingdom of Prussia forcibly melded all the other Teutonic principalities and kingdoms into a big and powerful empire. The goal was to forge a unified people with one philosophy and one religion. That religion was Lutheran, which the Pohle family was not. Their situation became unpleasant.

               So Zacharias led his wife, daughter, and infant son Johannes onto the immigrant ship Herschel. Sometimes this vessel carried the wretched refuse of Germany’s shores to the ends of the earth (well, to Australia) but fortunately on this voyage it docked at Buffalo, New York on September 13, 1871.

               Once there, Zacharias classified himself as a “laborer." He and Christina produced two more children in Buffalo, a son Theodore and a daughter Lydia. At one point Christina bore a fifth child who died young.

The Great War was Over!

The Great War was over! The Pasadena Star-News reported on November 7, 1918 that the Armistice had been signed, and the city reacted to the grand occasion as it always did: with a big parade. Everyone poured into the streets, banging on pots and pans in jubilation.  World War I veterans marched in rank and file with those from the Spanish-American War and even a fife and drum corps of grizzled Civil War vets.    

Pasadena hadn’t seen a crowd in months. Spanish flu was rampant, so the town had adopted prohibitions against gatherings indoors or out, even in churches.  The Star-News chirpily documented everybody’s scofflaw behavior: “Influenza regulations were forgotten and the ‘flu’ germs probably died in the noise and sunshine”.

               It was a glorious celebration. Unfortunately, the Star-News had made an error and the Armistice was actually signed on November 11. Unfazed, Pasadena threw another parade and giant block party a few days later.

               It was on one of these occasions that Harry met Alma. Or rather, 15-year-old Alma Hansen spied the head and shoulders of a tall, slim young man looming above his fellow soldiers. She turned to a bevy of her girl friends and announced “I’m going to get that guy”, and then promptly walked over and introduced herself.

               Harry Frederick Herman Heather was 28 years old and one of the most forlorn men on the planet. Years before, everyone he cared about had been torn from him by death, rejection, and disgrace. He must have been bewildered but touched that someone wanted to meet him.

               The girl smiling up at him was anything but alienated and bereaved. The youngest child of successful immigrants, she knew nothing but life swaddled in the protective cocoon of a loving family circle.

Frances and Earl

Let us return to 17-year-old Frances Woodley, who had vague dreams of becoming a doctor. But then her client’s son took one look at her, plunged his hands down her bodice to fondle her breasts, and she didn’t know what to do. I’m sure she turned pink and got flustered, as she did all her life whenever she fancied some male was interested in her. She had no way of knowing this man was morally unbalanced and took liberties with every female he ran into. She was young and naïve; he was the first man to drool over her.

Earl Beers’ psychic sister Lena had envisioned Frances at a clothesline hanging out diapers, and sure enough by the time her mother Edith died, there were two baby sons. By this time Frances realized she had married in haste; another man smelled her discontent and started sweet-talking her. Offended by her husband’s roving eye, she commenced a sporadic affair with her brother-in-law Verne (which was confirmed decades later by Verne’s wife Ruby). Then, to her horror, she became pregnant with a daughter her husband named Anna May.

Earl and Frances' family lived in various homes in Pasadena. Source: http://www.buncee.com/

In later years, Frances admitted she hadn’t wanted this female child of uncertain paternity, so she deliberately tried to starve the baby. Finally a doctor, upon examining the emaciated, rickets-ridden little waif, threatened to file a complaint with the police. It wasn’t the last time my grandmother was threatened with the law.

Three years later she had another daughter, Virginia Pearl. She liked this pretty girl better, but resentment and bitterness made her an abusive mother. She beat her first four children hard and often; children do try one’s patience and Frances had no patience at all.  Her life’s possibilities had somehow been stolen from her, and it was everyone’s fault but her own.

Earl was worse. The Depression made it hard for a gardener with little education to support his family, so he depended on charity baskets for help.  When his sons Bill and Roy defied him, he reacted savagely. Occasionally the boys had week-long vacations from school while the welts and bruises around their necks faded away. By the time Anna and Virginia were toddlers, their father often plopped them down on his lap and taught them to pleasure him sexually. His demands on them grew as their bodies developed, and he was impervious to their pleas and tears.

Frances didn’t even attempt to protect her children. She would merely pout until he let his sobbing daughters escape, and then turn his amorous attentions on her.

Actually, my grandmother didn’t do much of anything. She was determined not to be a drudge like her own mother, so she became something much worse. Her house was always filthy, and her children were too mortified to invite in their friends. In truth they were ashamed of themselves: their smelly bodies, greasy hair, dirty clothes and reeking underwear. Frances also disliked cooking, and her husband seldom found a hot meal awaiting him when he got home from work. She saw no reason to put herself out for his sake.

They snarled and yipped at each other like a pair of rabid curs. My grandparents poisoned their own lives, and the lives of everyone around them, because they were trapped together. In the 21^st century when people realize they made a mistake, they are able to get divorced almost as quickly as they got married. Only the wealthy had that option in the first part of the 20^th.

Frances finally called the police when her daughters were teenagers. Earl was carted off, but she was horrified when a prosecutor threatened to order her arrest as an accessory.  So, with the help of her brother-in-law Verne, she took her daughters and went into hiding. Because no one appeared in court to testify against Earl, charges against him were dropped.

It amazes me that four of their five offspring survived their childhoods. 

Venice Beach

Sometime before 1920, Emory Straker had had quite enough of the Northeast in general and Vermont in particular. He boarded a train to California, took an amazed look around, and sent word for his family to follow him out to the Coast.

Stories of blue skies and golden sunshine with nary a snowdrift in sight, thrilled his parents Daniel and Maloney Maria, so they pulled up stakes and went west themselves. Daniel died in Venice, CA 0n 16 December 1923, and Maloney breathed her last on 18 December 1927.

Perhaps because she was now living in a land of fresh starts, Edith, Emory's wife, resolved to have her umbilical hernia repaired. The surgery was unsuccessful, and she died on 23 February 1922. She was 52 years old.

When her daughter Frances went to the funeral home, she backed out of the viewing room in consternation. She was certain she was in the wrong place; the attractive, beautifully groomed woman displayed in the coffin couldn’t be her mother. But in fact it was Edith, and the funeral director had given her the care her husband, and her own innate simplicity, had always denied her.  

Emory seemed to enjoy life in Venice, California as a single man. Frances sniffed that her father lived near the beach so he could ogle all the floozies in bathing costumes. Hubba hubba!

Security Pacific National Bank Collection - LA Public Library

Before 1930 Emory married a slender, savvy businesswoman named Iola. She was either widowed or divorced, because she had four grown daughters in tow. On the 1930 census form, they claimed their last names were Woodley and Emory as their father, but he could not have been. When they were conceived in Indiana, he was shoveling snow in Mooers, NY. 

Edith - Used Like a Plow

          Emory and Edith Straker started their married life on a farm in Mooers, NY. 

The farmhouse and barn, which may still stand, although shakily.

          There is a touching but troubling story connected to this house. Edith’s first child was a little boy named George (1893) whom she simply adored. Evidently Emory didn’t share her infatuation with parenthood, and regarded his firstborn as an unanticipated burden. (This is puzzling, because surely Maloney Maria and Daniel gave him the Birds and Bees talk.) Anyway, Edith seemed to fear that her husband might harm her son. One day when she was down on her knees painting the farmhouse’s floor, little George trailed after her, leaving his tiny footprints in the wet paint. In later years, when she repainted the floor, she carefully skirted around the footprints so she could preserve some aspect of her child, no matter what happened to him.
          Emory was a hard-working one, as all farmers are, but he was careful to enforce his marital privileges. Every Sunday he would order his children to stay downstairs and leave him alone while he locked himself in his bedroom with Edith. I suppose he was indignant each time another baby mysteriously appeared, which happened in 1894, 1899, 1902, 1903, and 1907.

          This last birth in 1907 constituted my Grandmother Frances’ earliest memory.  The sight of Edith standing at the stove with two-hour-old Ernest balanced on her hip, cooking dinner for a gaggle of farmhands, haunted her to her final breath. The unspoken message “A woman’s first duty is to care for the menfolk” is one she vehemently rejected.

           By 1910 the family had relocated to a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont. Edith toiled on dutifully throughout these years, albeit in increasing discomfort. She had developed an umbilical hernia, which is usually caused by obesity, heavy lifting, or multiple pregnancies. In her case, all three factors converged.

          One of Edith’s great-granddaughters describes her in a short poem as: “Used like a plow/ Browbeaten, worn out/ Disposed of unmourned.” This is a little melodramatic, but contains more than one kernel of truth.

Canadians and Americans

Samuel Woodley junior was born in Grand Isle, Vermont in 1801. He married an Irish-born colleen named Margaret Lamberton (1810). They raised nine children, and Samuel died in Sciota in 1884 of apoplexy at the age of 83. All his descendants I know of over the age of 40 pop high blood pressure pills like they were Tic-Tacs to avoid succumbing to the dreaded apoplexy. Margaret followed him to the grave ten days later.

Their son Daniel (1842) married Malony (her spelling; her descendants tend to spell it “Maloney”) Maria Stockwell, the child of Joseph and Anna Maria Stockwell. They started their life together in Mooers, NY, where their older son Emory Carol was born on 14 August 1869. By 1920 Daniel and Maloney were living in Clinton, NY, a nearby farming community.

Evidently Emory was a stern young man, and Edith Frances Straker, born just over the Canadian border in Hemmingford, was meek, hardworking, and eager to please; she was a good choice for him. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good choice for her, but I’m basing my hunches on conversations with her granddaughter Orella Colburn. Not to mention comments made by her daughter Frances, who considered Emory to be something of an ogre.

Edith’s grandfather Robert Straker was born about 1791 in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. East Riding sounds like an area reserved for nobility in brocade riding habits to chase foxes around. Actually, it comes from the old Viking administrative term Threthingr. Robert was a farmer with Episcopal leanings, and he lived near the North Sea coast. I’ve looked at fully a hundred photos of the area, and although the landscape’s quite striking, the sky’s always stormy. It reminds me of Victoria Beckham.

Fighting Napoleon left England in a post-war depression. Because she was the victor (and in no mood to let France forget that fact) in 1820 she proclaimed Lower Canada “open for settlement”. Farmers from Yorkshire began pouring into East Hemmingford and LaColle; Robert Straker was one of the first. According to a Web site called The English Settlers of Lacolle, Quebec, “the English settlers…and their families broke into the wilderness…[they] established settlements throughout Lacolle with churches, schools, and stores. Along with their lifestyles, customs and religious beliefs, they brought with them new and better methods of farming and husbandry.”

In other words, they taught their ignorant French neighbors a thing or two.

LaColle Mills Blockhouse. Source: Wikipedia.com

Robert married an American woman, Rachael Palmer (1817) and they raised their six offspring in LaColle, Quebec. Their son Robert (1844) married Charlotte, the daughter of Godfrey Andrew and Mary Lett; among their six children was our Edith Francis/Francis Edith (the arrangement of her given names varies from source to source. She seemed to call herself Edith.)

This Robert gave me quite a start, because records show he died in the Somme, Picardie, France, in 1914. I pictured a 70-year-old doughboy dying in the trenches with the rest of the blighters. Then I recalled the Somme offensive happened in 1916. So I guess that after a lifetime of hearing his French neighbors boast about La Belle France, he decided to see for himself. It was his last hurrah.

From Being Homeless to an Ashery

The Woodleys had been in the Chazy, N.Y. area for three generations. Chazy is west of Lake Champlain in the Adirondack Mountains, just south of the Canadian border. Samuel Woodley had been born in Devonshire, England around 1770. After he immigrated about 1790, he married Phebe Lent, who belonged to an old New Amsterdam family.  They learned of land in New York State that the government was offering to settlers, so they attempted to establish a homestead in the wilderness about two miles east of a place called Flat Rock, a remote spot where the nearest neighbor was five miles away. But a plethora of bears, wolves, and an especially ornery colony of rattlesnakes, drove the family out.

Flat Rock State Forest

Samuel Woodley took refuge in Grand Isle, Vermont, but evidently did not prosper. On 26 February 1806 his family was issued an order “to depart town and find a place to settle” because “they had become destitute and without worldly goods.” They had to decamp within 20 days of being served notice, and were to be escorted to the next settlement or out of the state. In other words, the Woodleys were homeless “riffraff” and run out of town.

Because he had no choice, Samuel trudged back to the little cabin in the wilderness he had built five years before. It was far from any road, but at least it offered shelter. He finally realized it also offered a means of supporting his family.

Wikipedia explains it succinctly: “In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, potash production provided settlers in North America a way to obtain badly needed cash and credit as they cleared wooded land for crops. To make full use of their land, settlers needed to dispose of excess wood. The easiest way to accomplish this was to burn any wood not needed for fuel and construction. Ashes from hardwood trees could then be used to make lye, which could either be used to make soap or boiled down to make valuable potash…The American potash industry followed the woodsman’s axe across the country. After about 1820, New York replaced New England as the most important source…” The Champlain canal connected the area with Montreal, the major potash exporting port. 

Samuel had established an ashery in nearby Sciota by 1828, and in 1843 had sufficient means to will his sons 10 acres each, while his daughters received two acres each.