THE FLOW
OF
INTERESTING THINGS
In My
Schultz Lineage And In My Own Life
In The
Upper Perkiomen Valley
By
Forrest Wayne Schultz
PART ONE -- MY SCHULTZ
LINEAGE
My Ancestors
Like those of many other Americans, my ancestors immigrated
to America to escape religious persecution in Europe. I shall now share
with you some things that were different and quite interesting about my
ancestors.
The
first interesting thing is ultra-important: without it I would not have
the knowledge needed to write this. My ancestors were Schwenkfelders, who
were and are very interested in history and genealogy. This concern
reached fruition in several projects, the first of which was the establishment
of the Schwenkfelder Historical Library and the second was the publication of The
Genealogical Record of the Schwenkfelder Families edited by Samuel
Kriebel Brecht and copyrighted by the Board of Publication of the
Schwenkfelder Church (Rand McNally, 1923).
This
Genealogical Record Book also contains much historical information concerning
the emigration from Germany and the immigration to Pennsylvania, for instance
that the main body of the Schwenkfelders, which included my emigrant ancestors
George Schultz and Christopher Schultz, arrived in Philadelphia on September
22, 1734 on the ship Saint Andrew captained by John Stedman of
Rotterdam, Holland, and that the following day, September 23, an oath of
allegiance was taken to the King of Great Britain, because at that time
Pennsylvania was an English colony.
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On the following day, September 24, the Schwenkfelders there did
a very unusual thing (which, as far as I know, no other immigrant religious
group has done), namely, quoting the words of an eminent 19th century
Schwenkfelder, “They spent the 24th in thanksgiving to Almighty God for delivering them out of
the hands of their persecutors, for raising up friends in time of their
greatest need, and for leading them into a land of freedom, where they might
worship Him unmolested by civil or ecclesiastical power. This day, the 24th of
September, was thenceforth set apart to be observed by them and their
descendants, through all time, as a day of Thanksgiving commemorative of the
Divine goodness manifested in their deliverance from the persecutions of the
Fatherland. To this day it is so observed.” [p. 13 of Genealogical
Record] Therefore they called September 24 “Gedachtnisz-Tag”, which
means “Thanksgiving Day”. Unlike the national holiday of Thanksgiving,
which thanks God for a good harvest, the Thanksgiving of the Schwenkfelders
thanks God for delivering them from persecution and bringing them safely to
Pennsylvania, the land of religious freedom. And most of the day is
devoted to historical lectures and sermons to remind themselves of the
past and its legacy and importance for today. When I attended several of
these celebrations as a teen and a young man I remember how much I learned and
how moved I was and how meaningful it was. Few churches teach their
members as much about church history as the Schwenkfelders do!
The
Schwenkfelder Thanksgiving Day meals are also quite different. These also
were very meaningful to me. When the Schwenkfelders landed in PA they
were so poor that all they had to eat at their first Gedachtnisz-Tag was bread
and apple butter. In order to remember this humble beginning in the New
World, at each annual celebration since then all there is to eat at the meal is
bread and apple butter – now THAT is really a powerful way to remember and a
great way to identify with our ancestors!! This bread-and-apple-butter
mean is also interesting for another reason – a humorous one. Somebody who
once heard a garbled account of this meal thought it was referring to the
Lord’s Supper (!!) and then began spreading the rumor that the Schwenkfelders
used bread and apple butter as their Eucharistic elements!! That is one
of the funniest things I have ever heard!
Another very interesting pertinent matter is that the new ruler, Frederick the
Great, who subsequently took over Silesia, the region of Germany from which the
Schwenkfelders had escaped, in 1742 issued an edict which not only ended religious
persecution in his region but also invited the Schwenkfelders to return and
have their estates restored. None of them did so because by then they
were settled in their new land, which they believed held better prospects for t
hem than the old. [Genealogical Record, p. 14 and Plate 18] Now
isn’t that interesting!! Just one of the many interesting things they
leave out of the history books!!
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Several of
the emigrants who were in this 1734 group were my ancestors. I shall
restrict my remarks here to the two I mentioned on page 1, which are the most
important ones to me -- George Schultz and Christopher Schultz, who were two of
the famous three Schultz brothers who emigrated as orphans! George was 22
and Christopher was 16; the other one Melchoir was 20, and he was interesting
because he disappeared and no one knows what happened to him! George was
important to me for it was he who established the farm in the Upper Hanover
Township in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, which was passed down from
father-to-son all the way down to my father, who sold it when he retired, and
thus, alas, it has now passed out of our family. The names in this line
are George, Abraham, Isaac, Abraham, Levi, and Wayne (my father). [See
the Genealogical Record book pages 940, 946, 949, 954.] This my father
told me when I was a boy. Thus, George is my great-great-great-great
grandfather. This means, of course, that Christopher is therefore my
great-great-great-great-great uncle, and that is all I thought he was until the
Library entered the genealogical info in the Record book into a
computer program which can be used to trace your entire family tree. When
this was done I then discovered that I am directly descended from Christopher
Schultz by two different paths, which means that he is not only my
great-great-great-great-great uncle, he is also my great-great-great-great
grandfather (TWICE!).
This discovery
is important to me for my self-concept because I think I may have inherited my
writing ability from Christopher. Christopher kept a diary recording what
happened in the escape from Germany plus the intervening events finally
culminating in the journey in the ship to PA and the disembarkation. He
then wrote up this information in an article which was published in a prominent
Pennsylvania magazine -- quite an accomplishment for a 16 year old boy!
It is especially remarkable in that it reads like it was written by a mature
man, not a boy. This article is printed in the Genealogical Record
book. Christopher later on became known for other written works when he
became a prominent Schwenkfelder pastor.
There also
was a good writer in the lineage from George Schultz, namely his grandson
Isaac, who served as Secretary of the Society of Schwenkfelders (as they then
called themselves) and who wrote the chapter on the Schwenkfelders in the book HE
PASA EKKLESIA -- An Original History of the Religious
Denominations at present existing in the United States, edited by I. Daniel
Rupp and published in Philadelphia in 1844 & 1859. (See page 946 of
the Genealogical Record book.)
Returning
now to George Schultz, he built a log cabin, which was superseded in 1810 by
the house built by his son Abraham, who also in that same year built the first
half of the barn, both of which still stand. (Later in the 19th century
an addition was built which resulted in a barn 99 feet long, a length purposely
chosen to avoid having to pay the newly enacted tax by Pennsylvania on all
barns 100 feet or longer.) The house was built with very thick strong
stone walls, which made for very wide window sills which my mother loved to
fill with plants.
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My Paternal Aunts & Uncles
My father and his brothers and sisters were strongly
influenced by the Schwenkfelder ethos. Like the Anabaptists (Amish,
Mennonites, Brethren), with whom they are sometimes confused, the
Schwenkfelders embodied in their lives the virtues of hard work, frugality,
honesty, humility, and community. But, unlike the Anabaptists, the
Schwenkfelders were strong believers in education. In 1892 the
Schwenkfelders established their own school, the Perkiomen School located on
the same street in Pennsburg as the Schwenkfelder Library. My father and
every one of his seven brothers and sisters graduated from this school.
This was a remarkable achievement because at that time very few children
attended, let alone graduated, from high school! Then half of them (four
out of eight) went on to attend and graduate from college (my Aunt Daisy and my
Uncles Eugene, Alfred, and Lloyd), and two of them (Eugene and Alfred) then
proceeded to earn their Ph.D. degrees in science. My Aunt Daisy married a
research chemist, Dr. Earle Martin, who became notable for a cure he developed
for a cow disease called mastitis. Their son Paul earned a doctorate in
science and became an ecologist and paleontologist.
There was
an interesting contrast between Alfred and Eugene concerning their attitudes
toward matters outside of science. Alfred devoted his entire life to his
scientific research; he took no interest in anything else. His most
notable achievement was the development of the vitamin enriching process
employed in the baking of white bread, whereby some of the vitamins destroyed
in the milling of the white flour are returned via the yeast used in the
baking. I never saw him when I was growing up because he lived in New
York State near the Fleischmann Yeast Labs where he worked. But when he
retired he moved back to PA into a convalescent home near Allentown,
where, coincidentally, my mother was then working as a nurse. One weekend
when I was home from Philly, I went to visit him. I could talk to him
about chemistry, but nothing else, because that was all he cared about.
My Uncle
Eugene was very different because he was interested in many things and was a
good conversationalist in all of them. (He was also friendly, had a good
sense of humor, and cared a lot about people. He was my favorite
uncle.) He became my example in this regard: I decided then that I
too would not restrict my concern to science but would continue to be
interested in many subjects. Another interesting things about Eugene was
how he solved the dilemma he faced by wanting to be a scientist and also
wishing to continue his involvement in farming. He resolved this by
becoming an agricultural scientist. He worked for the U. S. Department of
Agriculture, doing his field work with the Maine Potato Company with the
purpose of improving crop yields and developing varieties resistant to
disease. He spent his summers in Maine and his winters in Washington,
DC. On his journeys to and fro he would stop at the farm for several
weeks to help us with the Spring planting and the Fall harvest. I
always looked forward to these times because of the enjoyable conversations I
had with him.
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Uncle
Eugene's wife, Selina Gerhard Schultz, was a prominent Schwenkfelder. She
served for many years as the Editor of the Corpus Schwenkfeldianum Project,
an enormous task which involved collecting and publishing all of
Schwenkfeld's prolific writings. It eventually came to nineteen volumes
and was completed in 1961. All of these writings are in German and Latin,
and, unfortunately, only a very few of them have been translated into
English. Selina also wrote a book on Schwenkfeld's life and teachings,
which she later abridged into a Course of Study.
I never
knew my Aunt Carrie because she died of a goiter before I was born. My
father told me this when I was a boy and it made a very profound effect upon me
as well as upon my mother. When one day she noticed a swelling in the
neck of my sister Sharon, she immediately rushed her to the doctor, because she
remembered what had happened to Carrie. I told my wife about Aunt Carrie
and sternly warned her that if ever she noticed a neck swelling on any of our
children to take them to the doctor immediately. I guess you could say of
my Aunt Carrie, that she "being dead, yet speaketh"!!
OK, that's
enough serious stuff for a while. Let us turn now to my Aunt Geneva
for some humor. My Aunt Geneva was most impressive for her
loquacity. Well, now, back in those days the City of Geneva in Switzerland
was often the host city for international meetings. One day when one such
gathering was taking place, the newspaper reported it using the headline --
"Geneva Talks". We had a lot of fun with that. Someone
said, "Hey, look here: Aunt Geneva is in the news -- it says here
in the newspaper "Geneva Talks". Then someone else
retorted, "Humph! That's not news! Everyone knows that
Geneva talks!"
Perhaps
the most interesting of all my aunts and uncles was my Uncle Norman.
He married a very intelligent woman and carefully listened to her astute
remarks, so he could repeat them to others at our family gatherings.
My Uncle
Lloyd was the youngest one of the eight and the last one to die (in
1994). When I spoke with my sister Sharon about that, she said to
me, "You know what?? We are now the oldest generation; scary, isn't
it??!!" My Uncle Lloyd was a stockbroker, which came in handy.
He advised my father on which stocks to buy, and when my father retired
and sold the farm he put the proceeds into stocks, which made it easy
for his estate to be settled. Every year in the Fall my Uncle Lloyd
came to the farm to go "small game" hunting with my
father. In PA small game hunting is pheasants and rabbits. After I
was old enough I was permitted to accompany them but did not do much
shooting. Walking the fields and woods was what we most enjoyed about
it. Uncle Lloyd one year expressed his appreciation to my father for
these hunting experiences by giving him a fine taxidermal gift: a
beautiful stuffed pheasant mounted on a base with a plaque on which was
inscribed: “To Brother Wayne, A Good Sport”.
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What I have
written above is the final draft of what I wrote as a rough draft in the late
1990s. This month I discovered some very interesting things I had
hitherto been unaware of. I learned of these matters from reading a
fascinating newly published book, Darlene Della Schneck’s Letters From a
Montana Sheep Man, about my grandmother Elizabeth’s brother Isaac S.
Schultz. Isaac achieved his first goal in life of getting a lot of higher
education, but then he failed at his second goal – to get rich out West.
In his consequent embarrassment, after 1887 he ceased writing letters to his
relatives back East, which led them to wonder what had happened to him.
The mystery was not solved until 1931, after which communication was
restored. That in itself is plenty interesting, but in addition to that
what makes it especially interesting to me is that my favorite uncle, Eugene,
was instrumental in restoring the communication and that my favorite cousin,
Paul, was the one primarily responsible for preserving the letters, making
photocopies of them, and depositing the originals in a museum in
Montana!! What really “takes the cake” here is that Isaac had four
sisters of which Elizabeth was his favorite; and then Elizabeth returns the
compliment by producing a son and a grandson which help Isaac in the ways
noted!! It would take a super-brilliant novelist to come up with a plot
like that. And what makes the thing doubly mystifying is why I was not
told about this when I was a boy. After reading the abovementioned book I
tried to remember if I had been told and it jogged my memory a bit to where I
think, but am not sure, that I may have been told that we had a relative
missing for a while – but I know for sure I was not told these vivid details I
recounted above. My sister Sharon only remembers Daddy telling her that
his mother was worried about a missing brother. This is indeed
ultra-strange – when someone like his own brother, Eugene, was involved, and
his nephew Paul, both of whom he highly regarded!! Plus he revered his
mother and father.
I highly
recommend reading this book. I have done a lot of book reviews, but this
is the first one in which people I knew were involved in the story. The
book is also helpful in that it contains (on pp. 126 – 127) an excellent
photograph taken a century ago of my grandfather Levi, my grandmother Elizabeth
and all their eight children – my father and his three sisters and four
brothers. This book is also what prompted me to finally go to my filing
cabinet and get out my rough draft of all the interesting things I was
collecting about my ancestors and family and life in the Upper Perkiomen Valley
and put it into final form. In the email correspondence which developed
between Darlene and me, she suggested I create a blog for this purpose, which I
have done. I call it “Schwenkfelder Schultzes”, http://schwenkfelderschultzes.blogspot.com/ which
is where I am depositing these memoirs in this Flow Of Interesting Things in My
Schultz Lineage And In My Own Life In The Upper Perkiomen Valley. Also
found on this site is the review I wrote of Darlene’s book plus other review of
it I have found. Any comments anyone has on what I am writing in this
“Flow” can be sent to me at schultz_forrest@yahoo.com
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My Father
My father
enjoyed farming. To him it wasn’t a job; it was a vocation. And he
endeavored to be the best farmer he could. He specialized in dairy
farming, and he had purebred Holstein cows. He was a charter member of
the Dairy Herd Improvement Association, based in Brattleboro, Vermont.
For a long time he owned one of the best bulls in the country, which he bought
as a calf, and eventually his entire herd was sired by that bull. His
name was Scholtop Moncade Cornflower; his nickname was “Monty”. Purebred
cattle have three names. The first is the name of the farm. The
second name is what corresponds in humans to our last name. And the third
name is what corresponds in humans to our first name. One of these cows
sired by Monty was my favorite: Scholtop Moncade Fern. In a cattle
show in which my father entered her she was the Grand Champion for the State of
Pennsylvania. She was not only beautiful and an excellent milk producer,
but she was also very friendly, and was one of the very few of our cows who
would allows us to ride on her back when we were children.
Later on,
when artificial insemination was introduced into dairying and bull barns with
the best bulls were established to be the sources of the semen, my father donated
(yes! donated!) Monty to the bull barn established by the Lehigh Valley
Co-operative Farmers, of which he was a member, serving on its Advisory
Board. He liked to tell us about a humorous remark he made at the meeting
of the farmers which was held to explain artificial insemination. When
the speaker asked if any of the farmers had an objections to it, my father got
up and proclaimed: “It’s not fair to the bull!!”.
My father
not only intimately knew and cared about his cattle, he also knew and cared
about his fields and pastures and woodlands. Most of the crops he grew –
wheat, barley, oats, corn, and hay – he fed to the cows. The rest he
sold. He kept up with the advances in farming and was usually the first
farmer around there to adopt them, e.g. an improved strain of wheat. One
year he entered his wheat into a contest and won first prize for the State of
Pennsylvania.
He also was the
first farmer in the area to buy one of the new style hay balers. The old
style balers were disgusting: they were ugly, bulky, and unwieldy, lumbering
around the field like the movie version of dinosaurs. The new greatly improved
model baler was compact, sleek, and graceful and did not block your view of the
wagon behind it. But it was so small in comparison with the old style
balers that it looked like a toy! The farmers who came over to watch us
use it for the first time kidded my father, saying, “That little thing can’t
bale hay!!” But we proved them wrong! I was driving the tractor and
my father was loading the bales onto the wagon and the other farmers and the
dealer were walking alongside watching the baler’s performance. At first
I drove very slowly to be sure everything was working properly. Then the
dealer wanted to impress them so he told me to speed up, which I did to the max
and then the farmers had to run alongside to keep up. The new
baler performed quite well and we were pleased with it. It was a New
Holland baler, which was made in the Pennsylvania city called New Holland. Wentz was the name of the dealer from
whom we bought it, about which I made up the following joke: whenever we have any trouble with our baler
from Wentz cometh our help!
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I enjoyed
helping my father with the farm work, and I especially liked getting outside in
the fresh air and getting a good suntan. I also respected and adopted for
myself my father’s values, which, in addition to the Schwenkfelder values noted
above, also included a love of nature. Later on, in the 1960s, when
I began reading about ecology, I was amazed at how many of its principles I had
already learned as a boy from my father. He never used technical terms
like “ecology” or “environment” but he cared about nature and knew how it
worked.
My father’s
farm at that time required the labor of two people in the summer, and one
person during the rest of the year. The extra person for the summer was
first, my cousin Paul (son of my Aunt Daisy), then agricultural students from
Penn State, and then finally myself, when I was old enough. At the end of
each of those summers of farm work, I would have a good suntan and would be in
such good physical condition that I could outperform the football players,
which was not easy to do because at that time our high school had an excellent
athletic coach, much better than is usually the case with a little high school
in the boondocks.
One of my
most memorable experiences of those days was the sale of our cows. Since
I decided to go to college instead of taking over the farm, my father decided
to sell the herd at the end of the summer in between my graduation from high
school and my matriculation near the end of September at Drexel in
Philadelphia. Thenceforth he would only do crop farming, which he could
do by himself. Prior to the auction we had to train the cows to be led so
they could be led into and posed in a roped-off area that looked like a boxing
ring.
The
experience of training these cows to be led was one of the most interesting
experiences I have ever had. It really brought out the various
“personalities” of our cows. They reacted to the experience in a manner
quite similar to that of a group of children being taught something new.
Some of the cows were excited and learned quickly and seemed to be proud of
having mastered this new thing – being led around! Others were afraid at
first and required a lot of coaxing until they overcame their fears.
Still others purposely gave us a hard time and seemed to enjoy our frustration
with them! I had always known that cows were a lot like people and had
different “personalities” but this experience of training them to be led really
demonstrated these differences in a dramatic way!
I have forgotten the name of our County Agent, for whom my father had
great respect. He helped him in the
planning of the cattle auction. For
instance, he had nice looking signs posted on the roads saying in large easily
readable letters “ HOLSTEIN AUCTION” to direct people to our farm. My Uncle Lloyd helped by directing traffic to
a special parking place we created in a nearby field. And my sisters Sharon and Janet and some
other members of the local 4H Club ran a refreshment stand. I pasted a number on each cow in the
chronological order in which they were to be auctioned off, and led them one by
one from the barn down to the location where the auction was being held. It went very well. We also had the milking machine and
associated equipment auctioned off. It
was a very emotional time for my father – he could hardly keep from crying!
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The last interesting thing
about my father I shall note here is that he had a premonition of his
decease. To put this into context I need to remind the reader of his
great respect for science. He also utterly repudiated the Pennsylvania Dutch
superstitions, and he was a very practical down-to-Earth man who did not go in
for any kind of weird or nonsensical stuff. There are two pieces of
evidence indicating my father knew he was about to die, which he could NOT have
deduced from his health because he was in very good shape – and he died by
being hit while crossing the road, not from a disease.
The first
of these I learned from my sister Sharon. She told me that in his last
visit to her, a few days before he died, he spoke to her as though he was never
going to see her again. And, indeed he never did see her again!
Sharon told me how eerie this was. He did not explicitly tell her he
would never see her again. He spoke to her as though this would be the
last time he would speak to her. And indeed it was!
The second
piece of evidence is what his sister, my Aunt Daisy, told me. She said
that every Christmas he sent her a Christmas card and on every single one,
except for the very last one, the only thing he wrote on it was “Brother
Wayne”. But on the very last card he sent her, which, by the way, he
dropped into a mailbox right before crossing the street where he was hit, he
added to the card a lengthy letter full of reminiscences, just as though this
was his swan song to her, as, indeed, it was!!
I
shall now conclude with some mundane data, which does have an interesting
feature in that it shows how old my father was when he got married, 45 years of
age, and how old he was when I was born, 46. He was born on August 18,
1893, was, married in June 1938, and I, his first child, was born on August 19,
1939. I have two sisters: Sharon born in 1942 and Janet born in
1944. My father died at 80 years of age in December 1973. As you
can see from these data, my father is old enough to be my grandfather.
Another interesting thing is that since George was an orphan (only 22) normally
his father would have been living and middle aged so that he would have been
counted as the first generation, and George as the second generation.
As matters stand I am the seventh generation to be here in America,
but in normal circumstances I actually would be the ninth generation. I
do not know if that means much or not, but there it is.
Well,
anyway, this concludes my account of my Schultz ancestors, my paternal aunts
and uncles, and my father. The remainder of this FLOW is of the
interesting things which I did and which happened to me while living in the
Upper Perkiomen Valley plus a little bit of information about the Upper
Perkiomen Valley itself – the farms near ours, the towns, and the schools.
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