MEMORIES: Recollections of the Life, Times & Activities of Albert F. Meyer

By Albert F. Meyer (b.1907)

PART I. [Based on his mother’s (Emelia Stelzriede Meyer (b.1882)) report written in 1930.]

My ancestry loses itself amid the rural communities of Germany (now West Germany), a heritage of the soil. The records have not been well kept, so knowledge of our past is rather sketchy. Knowledge of my mother’s ancestry goes back farther than that of my father. The two branches on mother’s side are the Krueger and the Stelzriede families.

My great-grandfather Krueger was born in 1821 in the little country village of Hille, Germany. At the age of 20 or so, he came to the United States to seek his fortune, coming almost immediately to the Midwest and remaining in Southern Illinois most of the rest of his life. Great-grandmother Charlotte Krueger (his wife) likewise was born in Germany near her husband’s birthplace. She came to America to seek work at the early age of 16 or 18 years, finding work she desired in St. Louis, MO. Before long she was married to my great-grandfather Krueger, making their home for a time in, or near St. Louis.

Later the family settled on a farm a few miles northeast of Nashville, Illinois, after having moved about some because they were having a hard struggle for a livelihood According to a family story, the Kruegers were living for a short time at Cairo, Illinois, where their first child, Mary, was born. According to one report, the father had crossed the river to buy a supply of flour for the family. On the return with a barrel of flour in the boat, the boat capsized and the flour was lost. The young family had a shortage of flour for a time because they lacked money to buy more.

After moving later to the farm in North Prairie near Nashville, conditions improved and they made their home there for a considerable time. Two more daughters, Sophia and Louise, and a son, John, were born there and grew up to marriage age. Sophia married a Michael Schmidt, a native of Germany, and Mary married Casper Finke, another German, both of whom had settled in the Nashville region. Louise married Frederick Stelzriede, likewise a native of Germany. John married and established his home near Sandoval, Illinois, for a time, and the parents came there to live. Here father Krueger died at the age of 67 years and his wife, Charlotte, then returned to the farm home of her oldest daughter, Mary (Mrs. Casper Finke.) near Hoyleton, Illinois, and lived there the remaining 24 years of her life, dying in 1914 at the age of 87 years.

At the time this account was written in 1930, Sophie (Schmidt) resided at Nashville. (Illinois); Mary Finke in Hoyleton; and son, John Krueger, in Audrey, Texas.

However, Louise Krueger is the essential branch of our family tree. At age 17 she married a small energetic German, Frederick Stelzriede. Grandfather Stelzriede was born in 1848 in Kreis-Minden, Germany. He came to the United States at the age of 17 or 18 to escape compulsory military training in the German army, this being during the time of Prussia’s military expansion that resulted in uniting the other German states to form the German Empire.

Frederick Stelzriede came almost at once to Hoyleton, Illinois, area where many other Germans were settling and worked as a farm laborer. At age 27 he married Louise Krueger and bought a farm about five miles south of Hoyleton in the North Prairie neighborhood.

He made a livelihood from the farm through hard work and being thrifty. Two sons and two daughters--Henry, Arthur, Ida and Emelia--were born there. The third of the four children, Emelia (later spelled Amelia) is my mother. She was born on July 30, 1882. Tragedy struck when Emelia was but five years old. Grandmother Louise was fatally injured by the kick of a calf at her early age of 29 years, leaving the four children motherless. The oldest child was nine years old. For two years grandfather Frederick struggled alone with the four children on the farm with a three-room frame house. Mother says they lived there comfortably.

After two years the father married Miss Mary Krietemeier of Nashville, IL. She had come to America from Germany with her parents at the age of two years. The Krietemeier family came to Illinois, living for a time at Petersburg, and Centralia before settling at Nashville. Mary’s father died the year she married grandfather Stelzriede when she was 21 years old. Four more children were born to this union, a son and three daughters--May, Frederick, Ruth and Julia.

Mother reports the little farmhouse now was a scene of happiness. Another room was added to accommodate the larger family. The inevitable spells of childhood illnesses hardly ruffled the surface of the farm life. The father’s motto was hard work, a necessary practice on a small farm with a family of eight children.

Among the many escapades of the children on the farm, mother was especially fond of telling about their fun in teasing the ram of their father’s flock of sheep. The children caught the ram and blind-folded him to get him angry. They then ran around a tree stump in the pasture with the irate animal chasing them until he became dizzy after which the children got the ram down, placed a fence rail on him, and scampered to the safety of the pasture fence before the ram could get up and follow them.

My mother, Emelia, attended a small, one-room country school about a mile from their home through woods and fields. The public school was in session only about five months each year with an additional two months of spring school for small children too young to work on the farm. The school was not graded as today. Schooling consisted of five readers and a course in history as well as arithmetic, but children attended school until they became young men and women. Mother quit school for home work at age 15, having reached the fifth grade level.

Grandfather Stelzriede’s home was devoutly religious. The family attended Pleasant Grove, the country church a short distance from home through the woods. Sunday school, church services, and Epworth League were on the family’s program each Sunday, rain or shine. The “old time religion” preaching was part of many of the meetings. Families came to the church on foot, in buggies, surreys, or wagons. Mother joined the church at age 11.

Life for young folks at that time was different than in the modern fast-paced living. Mother said in those days a young lady’s dress swept the ground if she did not hold it out of the dust or mud with her hands. It was a time of “bustles”, “leg-o’-mutton” sleeves, toboggan hats and tam o’shanters. Mother recollected one of her school teachers, who always wore a “bustle” to school, and some mischievous boys took delight in using the bustle as a pin cushion as the teacher passed along the aisle between the desks.

She said young folks had hilarious birthday and surprise parties where they played games while the older folks talked. She said the Stelzriede home was too religious to tolerate dancing. Fall “apple cuttings” were quite interesting times in their neighborhood. Young folks gathered at a neighbor’s house in an evening to peel and cut apples for the fall’s cooking of apple butter. Throwing apple peelings and cores was even more interesting than cutting the apples at these parties.

Sadness came to the Stelzriede family in 1901 when the father died of pneumonia at the age of 53 years. The family did not remain on the farm long after his death. The farm was sold and, the family moved to Centralia because three of the older children already had left home to marry or work. The following year my mother Emelia left home for work up north to Boody and Blue Mound, Illinois, for a year. The following year she went to St. Louis for work in homes for a time. A high point in her life there at this time was a visit. to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. On March 2, 1905, she was married to August H. Meyer, my father, a young German farmer near Irvington, Illinois.

The Meyer side of the family tree is well-rooted in Germany, but we have not collected much ancestry about the Meyer family because only two of them were living in America at this time of writing. Grandfather Meyer, probably Fred, lived at South Hemmern, Kreis-Minden, which was not far from the birthplace of my grandfather Stelzriede. In Germany the Meyer spelling was Meier. My father, August, was born on November 16, 1877. He had one brother and three sisters. His mother died while father was a child and he had no later remembrance of her. Grandfather Meier married a second time and the new wife cared for the family with love. Three more sons were born to the family.

Of the Meyer children, a sister, Louise, came to America to live, married Henry Wellpott, a German farmer, and at this writing (1930) are still living on a farm near Hoyleton. The Wellpott family consisted of eight daughters and a son--Minnie, Louise, Clara, Sophia, Martin, Frieda, Alice, Ida and Bernice.

Father’s only full brother, Fred, serving in the German army, was killed on the Western front during World War I. The husband of one of father’s sisters also was killed in the conflict. The other sister still lives in Germany at this writing. Of the three half-brothers, one, Christian, born in 1889, came to America at the age of 23 to satisfy his lust for wandering and to seek his fortune. He lived at our home for a time while attending the Breese country school for a time to learn some English language, and then left for work. He lived only two years longer, becoming ill with tuberculosis and died on the day in 1914 that World War I began.

The other two half-brothers of my father returned to their German homes after serving in the German army’s losing cause in World War I. Father’s step-mother had died some time before the outbreak of that war. Grandfather Meyer lived until 1928 dying at the age of 71 years. One of these stepbrothers was Ludwig, born in 1887, who owns and operates a soda and mineral water bottling business in Waune-Echel in Westfalen, West Germany. A sister of father’s is Caroline von Behren, born in 1882, who lived in Kreis Minden.

During father Meyer’s boyhood, South Hemmern was a farming village where people had small land holdings which were farmed intensively. Yields from the soil were large and varied. Grandfather Meyer’s home was a rather large building, a typical German farmhouse of the time and place which was a combination house and barn. The family lived in the front part and the farm animals were housed in the barn addition to the back of the house. This was partly due to the value of land and better protection for farm animals.

Father completed public school studies in Germany and also was confirmed into the Evangelical Lutheran Church. However, the lure of work in America was great to the crowded conditions in Germany, so at the early age of 16 years young August Meyer embarked for America as some of his acquaintances had done. He landed at New York and came immediately to Illinois. He worked for a time on the farm of a distant relative living near Irvington which is eight miles south of Centralia, Illinois. Several Germans had settled west of Irvington and in the Hoyleton area.

Father attended a public school for a short time to get a reading knowledge of English, but he found association with people who had no knowledge of German more valuable in learning to understand and speak English. He never tried to write in the English language much other than signing his name or other necessary paper, such as checks. He worked in the corn fields of northern Illinois as a harvest hand in the fall for a season or two (as many young men in Southern Illinois did at that time) and found the associations there quite helpful in learning to converse in English.

However, father’s health did not seem very good at that time, so at 23 years of age he went west to the lumber camps of Washington state with a friend. They worked in the pine woods and saw mills for three years at Addy, Washington, near Spokane. It was a good life, health restoring, and filled with valuable experience.

By chance, the friend, with whom father went west, had been courting Emelia Stelzriede earlier. When, after three years in the lumbering work, my father expressed a desire to return to Illinois, but his friend desired to stay on in Washington. He jokingly told father that he could have his girl friend when he returned. Father was interested in farming, so when he returned to Irvington he arranged with a Julius Wacker to rent a farm he owned southeast of town to start working for himself. He apparently had saved some money from the three years of work in Washington to arrange for a few essential farming tools and a team or two of work horses. Almost immediately he took his friend’s remarks seriously and got acquainted with Emelia Stelzriede.

After a three-weeks’ courtship the couple were happily married on March 1, 1905, and started life together on the newly-rented farm. Two years later the first child, a son, was born on December 7, 1907, and named Albert. Three other sons and one daughter were born into the family. The struggle for a living was hard, but the heritage of my father and mother was that of hard-working, thrifty Germans filled with the love of the soil and what it produced.

After nine or ten years on the rented Wacker farm, father was able to get enough money together to make a decent payment on the 160-acre Fisher farm as a place of his own. This farm, with house and barns, was only about three miles north of the Wacker farm, so the family quickly made the change of abode, using wagons with wide hay frames on them to move household belongings and other items while larger farm equipment was transported separately. Farming was reasonably good during the World War I years and the immediate years thereafter at the new farm. The soil was quite good although father spent many winter days of hard work clearing out overgrown fence rows on the farm to improve the land. The depression that came in the late aftermath of World War I hit the family hard for a time and made the struggle for a livelihood strenuous in the face of remaining debts on the farm purchase, but the future was not without considerable hope--as was borne out in the years to follow.