Trish McKinley was kind enough to portray my great-great-grandmother, Isabelle Greer Redlingshafer, during Sunday's 18th annual Chariton Cemetery Heritage Tour. I was thinking, as I sat there listening, to the story-tellers in my family who shared these stories with me so many years ago.
I was too young to be especially interested in family lore when my paternal grandfather died (I was 12 at the time). So I heard these stories from his siblings, my great-aunt Minnie (Myers) Johnson, sitting in her living room across the street from First Baptist Church in Russell, and Raymond Myers, at his Ottumwa home. I've always been grateful that I asked, and listened. Here's the script:
+++
My name is Isabelle, ladies and gentlemen, and I am the bearer of one of Lucas County’s most distinctive surnames, Redlingshafer. If that sounds German to you, you are correct. But I started life a Greer, born into an old and honorable Pennsylvania Scots-Irish Presbyterian family.
How I, a highly educated and accomplished school teacher, came to marry and make a new life in the West with a young immigrant named John Redlingshafer --- who spoke no English when we met --- is the story that I will share with you today.
But a little about the Redlingshafers first. This family originated in Austria, but was driven out in the mid-17th century as followers of Martin Luther. They were welcomed in Bavaria, however, and resettled and prospered there in farming villages west of Nuremberg.
All Redlingshafers, no matter where you find them today, are related and can trace their origins to these German villages.
As I said, my heritage is Scots-Irish and I was born in 1830 in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, the youngest in a family of nine. Our father, William Greer, was a farmer and shoemaker by trade; our mother, Mary, was called “Polly.”
When I was a child, we moved a short distance south into Fayette County and then, across the Monongahela River west into Washington County, Pennsylvania.
Our parents made sure that all of their children received decent educations, but as the youngest in the family, special attention was paid to my brother, William Henry Harrison Greer, and myself. By 1848, we both were teaching school and Will was an aspiring poet, too.
+++
The political situation in the German states, including Bavaria, had become unstable by 1848. Prussia was asserting itself militarily. And progressives, like the Redlingshafers, were beginning to fear for their security and safety --- and for the futures of their children. Young men --- and there were five Redlingshafer sons --- faced the prospect of being drafted into the Prussian army.
George and Doratha Redlingshafer and their 11 children had a comfortable home in the village of Heinersdorf and many acres of farmland in the neighborhood, but eventually decided to uproot their family and emigrate to America in the fall of 1848.
George’s two children by his first marriage, James and Barbara, blazed the trail. Then, the family home and land were sold and the entire family boarded a ship at Hamburg for the journey to Baltimore, where James was waiting to escort them to southwest Pennsylvania. The youngest, Elizabeth, learned to walk aboard ship.
+++
After arriving in Pennsylvania, George and Dorotha purchased a farm in Washington County --- and that was where I first encountered the family. Learning English was a priority for the Redlingshafers and I helped both in the classroom and as a private tutor.
John G. Redlingshafer was two years older than I and we became acquainted and enjoyed each other’s company as he improved his command of the language, but I, at least, gave no thought to romance.
By the mid-1850s, the older Redlingshafer children were moving west to other German settlements in Illinois and at Guttenberg, along the Mississippi River in northeast Iowa. John joined his family at Guttenberg, then --- in search of a permanent home --- traveled on to Lucas County where some of his Risbeck cousins had settled earlier.
During those years, I had found myself in an extremely difficult situation. I had believed the promises of a young man who courted me and found myself pregnant. Faced with the prospect of marriage and fatherhood, he fled.
John and I had corresponded occasionally during his years of travel and so I took a deep breath, sat down with pen and ink and confided in him as a friend. Somewhat to my surprise, and in a way that earned my undying gratitude, he proposed marriage and I accepted.
John had decided that the hills and wooded creek valleys of Benton Township, Lucas County, would make a fine home. He purchased land and built a cabin in a sheltered spot on high ground near a spring, then returned to Pennsylvania.
My daughter, Cora Jane, was born during September of 1856 and John arrived later that fall. We were married on Nov. 30, spent the winter with my father and early the following spring, John, Cora and I set out for our new home in the West.
+++
Once settled in Iowa and after our new neighbors learned of my experience as a teacher they asked me to take on the Gartin School, near our home, where I taught until the arrival during 1859 of our daughter, Mary Belle.
The log school house was the only public building in the neighborhood, so Sunday school and preaching services were held there, too, and John and I became founding members of what was called at first the Gartin Class of the United Brethren in Christ. Later on, when we built a church building, it was renamed Otterbein.
And several members of John’s family joined us in Lucas County during the late 1850s and 1860s. His sister, Anna Margaret, and her husband, John Rosa, located in Chariton. Another sister, Margaret Anna, and her husband, Aaron Hupp, bought a farm near our own, as did John’s brother, George. George then opened his home to his widowed mother, Doratha, and the two youngest Redlingshafer children, John Lot and Elizabeth.
The birth of three additional children to myself and John during the 1860s completed our family. John William was born in 1861; Minnie, during 1864; and Greer, in 1867.
+++
John was a good provider and we prospered. Our first cabin home had been in the middle of nowhere. A new house and set of farm buildings were constructed on the same farm but along the Wolf Creek Road to the north and we moved.
Cora was the first of our children to marry and leave home, during 1873. In 1880, Mary Belle married a neighbor boy, Daniel Myers, they settled down on his father’s farms two miles southeast and they had a family of seven children, descendants of whom still live in Lucas County.
John attended Iowa State University and then accepted a position in the Iowa state auditor’s office and became acquainted with Miss Emma Bondurant, daughter of the founder of the city by that name. They were married in 1886. During 1887, Minnie married a young banker named Aquilla Jones Davis.
Finally, in 1891, Greer married Miss Fannie Augusta Arnold and it was they who took over the family farm when John and I retired.
We lived comfortably into the 1890s on the home farm, but I became critically ill during 1894 and medical science failed to find a diagnosis or effective treatment. As a result, death claimed me on Aug. 10, 1894, age 64, and I was the first to be buried here on the family lot where 12 of us now repose. (Research and script writing by Frank D. Myers.)
No comments:
Post a Comment