This
year the small village of St. John, Wisconsin will celebrate the 150th Anniversary of its parish
church, established in 1862 and dedicated to St. John the Baptist. Since this
is a blog about the life and customs of villagers in Kreis Saarburg Germany and the
small villages of Irsch, Zerf/Oberzerf, it may seem strange that I am writing a
post about an American Catholic church. But this is not just any Wisconsin
Catholic community and church. It
became the new home for a very significant chain emigration from the village of Irsch to the village of St. John.
I
want to write about a generally unknown and uncelebrated early settler, perhaps
the earliest person of all to take his family and leave Irsch, Kreis Saarburg,
and settle in St. John, Town of Woodville, Calumet County,
Wisconsin. Unfortunately, he has somehow been missed when, over the years, the
storis of this settlement have been written
There
is another reason for writing this post beyond the identity of the man who is
probably the first settler of St John. It is also
a great example of the effect on emigration from Germany of the “America Letters,” as mail from the
United States came to be called. When such letters crossed the ocean to be read by the relatives and villagers of the old homeland, many people who had been doubtful about leaving now dared the trip across the
Atlantic to a strange country. At
least one of those letters, long lost, surely came from a resident of Irsch
who settled in a place he liked and told others in his German village about it.
I
was not paying any attention to the St. Gervasius and Protasius church records
of Philip Thomas and his family when I searched for my Irsch ancestors. I
was trying to figure out why Johann and Magdalena Meier had chosen to
live in tiny St. John,Wisconsin. They had selected this remote area of
Wisconsin to be their home for the rest of their lives. Other emigrants from Irsch did the same thing. It was good farming land, of course.
But why this farm land?
There
was one reason that seemed likely. Someone in the group of families from
Irsch who became the first link in the chain of emigrants from the village of Irsch, sailed in March of 1861 to settle in St. John. Someone must have
had a relative who would be waiting for them, I reasoned, someone who had given advice on how to
make the trip based on experience. In other words, a former Irsch
resident who was writing "America letters."
I
searched the centennial books created for the St. John Parish anniversatries in
1962 and in 1987 to find a name that was not on the list of residents, as recorded by the immigration officials in Saarburg, who had
traveled to Wisconsin in 1861 and 1862, These people were listed as the very first emigrants
from Irsch. But I doubted. Like Adrian Monk, the quirky but
amazing detective on one of my favorite TV mysteries, I tried to find motives
and clues others did not recognize; someone who had arrived before 1861, who
had not been listed in the records of the time (the careful filing of
documentation only started about 1860-61) and who was now hiding in plain
sight, waiting to be discovered.
I
started with the 1860 Federal Census of the United States for the Township of
Woodville in Calumet County. This was in the days before so many records
were digitized and available on the Internet. I stuck my head into a
dunce-cap microfilm reader at the library and scanned the Town of Woodville
census line by line. I believed I would recognize a family surname from
Irsch. I had spent so much time reading and rereading the microfilms of
St. Protasius and Gervasius Catholic Church at LDS branch libraries that I had most of them
memorized. It was as if I myself had been born in that town and could
say, “Yes, that’s an Irsch name all right.” I had to search the census
twice but on the second try, I found a name I thought might be the one I was
looking for: a farmer named Philip Thomas, born in Prussia. He had a wife
and children and, as I thought, all had been baptized in Irsch.
Philip
Thomas was born in 1808 in Beurig. He was a Landwirt (a farmer who owned land) in
the village of Irsch, married to Anna Britten of Irsch. Philip was 48 years old, hardly the
time a man might have been expected to leave the village he had resided in for
so many years and make a harrowing trip.
Why did he do it? His good
luck in raising several children beyond the time of most danger for early death,
worked against his staying in the Heimat. He had four sons and two daughters. His land holdings in Irsch, probably
not very large, would by law be divided into six parts after his death, both
sons and daughters inheriting. This was a law imposed on the area when they were a part of France and never changed
after Prussia took power. Like so
many emigrants, lack of land for the children to inherit and survive was most
likely the motivating factor for Philip Thomas' decision to leave Irsch.
The
Philip Thomas family arrived in the United States in June 1856 according to
Philip's first papers in which he swore his intent to become a citizen of the US, and renounced the emperor of Prussia.
The Calumet County courthouse is where he filed his petition for
citizenship on 1 April 1859. In
July 1860, the US Federal Census of Wisconsin lists him with $1,800 in real
estate and $250 in personal estate in the Town of Woodville, Calumet County
Wisconsin.
Philip’s
wife, Anna, was the sister of one Heinrich Britten who still lived in
Irsch. The two families probably maintained contact through
letters. Philip would have described the availability of good, low-priced
farming land with lots of trees that would leave the soil rich once the land
was cleared. It would also would provide logs for houses and barns.
Evidently Heinrich began planning to take his family to Calumet County to join
his sister and brother-in-law,
sharing the content of these America letters as well as his plans with his
neighbors. These families, including
the family of Johann and Magdalena Meier, my 2nd great grandparents, decided to emigrate as a group. In March 1861 they began their travel
together from Irsch to the Port of Le Havre in France on their way to join the Thomas family.
I
cannot produce any letters that Philip Thomas sent back to Irsch. My evidence, I know, is circumstantial, but
similar letters are recorded in a book called News from the Land of Freedom:
German Immigrants Write Home, edited by Walter D. Kamphoefer, Wolfgang
Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer.
I think I may, with my circumstantial evidence, get Philip Thomas and his family noted among the first settlers from Irsch to St John.
