Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland—Missing Persons in Garrett County (Part III)

I've long been interested in railroads, and learning about the B&O's climb up the Appalachians to Oakland and thence to the banks of the Ohio was no exception. But a whole new chapter of understanding the history of railroading in the U.S. opened up when I discovered Theodore Kornweibel's Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey. (Johns Hopkins: 2010) That this is history in photographs makes it all the more powerful—to me, at least. I mean, I've read about A. Philip Randolph and the organizing of the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, but Kornweibel has found pictures that put faces to these stories and more.

The book is encyclopedic: from the slaves—both men and women—who built the railroads, to the porters and Pullman maids, who babysat for and read bedtime stories to little white children on the luxury trains, to the recurrent use of railroad themes and imagery in popular song and folk art, to the role that the trains played in the Great Migration so thoughtfully described by Isabel Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House: 2010): the railroads are an essential piece of this history.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland—Missing Persons in Garrett County (Part II)

Last July, Jane and I went to the Garrett County (MD) Fairgrounds overlooking Deep Creek Lake for the Tristate Relief Sale, an auction sponsored by local Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren churches to benefit the work of the Mennonite Central Committee. They sell all kinds of things, including—inevitably—shoofly pie. Jane was interested in the quilts. I had intended to do some fishing, but it was raining off and on, and, since I was feeling less waterproof than usual, I had given up on fishing for the day.

Deep Creek Lake (Garrett County, MD).
The Garrett County Fairgrounds are near the head of
the lake, which is at the top left corner of the photo.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland—Missing Persons in Garrett County (Part I)

Smith Island Cake
from Wikipedia

It was surely the oddest of coincidences that on the one day of my life I visited my state government representatives in Annapolis, they—or at least a committee of them—were hearing testimony on the merits of making Smith Island Cake the official State Dessert of Maryland. Being a pie man myself, I have never tasted Smith Island Cake, although the pictures do make it look wicked good. Since we have Amish in both eastern and western Maryland, I would have thought shoofly pie or apple dumplings would also have been in the running, but they weren't. The Smith Island folk did themselves proud and carried the day, which is something the Amish would not have undertaken on the grounds that it is prideful.

Shoofly pie: Dad—Postscript

It’s interesting to note that in his taped memoir, Dad makes no mention of the heart disease that eventually took him. Here is what I remember.

I had gone to Europe in 1972 with the first Euroterm from Eastern Mennonite College (now University) under the leadership of Dr. Al Keim. When the rest of the Eastern Mennonite group returned to the U.S. in April, 1973, I elected to stay on in Paris.

Shoofly pie: My Dad—Jake's Granddad; Transcript of Tape 2

I had to change tapes so, we’ll start in again now there...Silvis, Illinois¹...Bill Anderson got on the train. I started to get on and the police caught me. And they held a gun on me till the caboose came along. And then they swung on the caboose and left me standing there. Here it was night-time, alone and Bill had all our money. I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know whether to go home, or go on out to Illinois,² or go out to Kansas.

Shoofly Pie: My Dad—Jake's Granddad;Transcript of Tape 1

How does one go about talking about your life?¹ What can a person put in and leave out to make it interesting to somebody else?

I think I’ll go back to 1932. At that time, I was 19 years old.² There was a Depression on in the United States. There was no work for married men, let alone single. I had worked previously three years at Western Union, and they were just in the process of expanding, and I was to go to Buffalo, New York, to learn to operate the teletype.³ Instead of that, I got laid off. I had no income at 19 years of age. My father had other children at home–a brother and two sisters⁴–and he couldn’t find any work at all. Finally he got a job cleaning rabbit pens at a dollar and a half a week. I felt perhaps that at my age, I could go out and earn some money someplace in the world.

Shoofly Pie: My Dad—Jake's grandfather

My father, Alvin E. Miller, was born in Fair Oaks, Indiana on January 22, 1913. His parents were Old Order Amish and he was raised in that tradition. Being raised Amish, however, is not the same as being a member of the Amish church. Part of what is called the "Believers' Church" tradition is that only adults can comprehend the gravity of the decision to join church, so only adults are permitted to join. Although the modern TV presentations are almost invariably wildly over-hyped, Amish youngsters so sometimes spend time "running around," before they join the church and settle down to the kind of sober life that is expected of Amish adults.

Dad was no exception; however, it just happened that the Great Depression coincided with his time of "running around," so most of his time was spent "running around looking for work." He left two tapes of memoirs, and the first one covers the time he spent running around looking for work. I transcribed those tapes and later annotated them and inserted headings to help with the text flow. What follows in the next post is the annotated transcription of the first tape he left.

Dad passed away in March, 1978, so neither Jane nor Jake ever met him.

A technical note: if you put your mouse on the footnotes, you should get a little pop-up with the footnote text in it. You must, however, open the jump to the full post for them to work. Grateful thanks to Ruth Kitchin Tillman, whose HTML fu is very strong, for making these work.

From L-R: unknown, Allen Fisher, my dad, Sylvester Fisher, Elias Fisher
The picture was taken in 1940 in front of the Millwood Mill,
where Dad was working then. Sylvester Fisher and Dad traveled together sometimes.
Sylvester would marry my mother's sister,thereby becoming my Uncle Sylvester.

Cheesy Grits: Valeria's Final Resting Place

As I mentioned earlier, the death certificate for Jane's great-grandmother Valeria was a great find because it had so much information about her. One of the final pieces of information was the place where she was buried: Flushing Cemetery. So it seemed a reasonable thing to see if we couldn't find her grave—after all, to this point, we had so few actual tangible signs of this part of Jane and Jake's ancestry.

I contacted the main office at the Flushing Cemetery (old style, FLushing 9-0100; new style, (718)359-0100) and the young woman there was quite helpful, confirming that Valeria Wilcoxson was indeed buried there. As it turns out, many people go to cemeteries looking for graves and headstones.

Cheesy Grits: Valeria's life in Savannah

Before I pursue the Charleston clues that figured so largely in Jane's maternal great-grandmother Valeria's death certificate, I should spend a bit more time on what we know of Valeria and George's life in Savannah, even though it is not very much.

Cheesy Grits: What Became of George Ralston of Savannah?

After having located Valeria and the two children in New York City, we wondered for a long time what happened to her husband, George Ralston, who remained in Savannah when Valeria moved north. He was in the 1910 federal census, but not in the 1920 census. Savannah city directories showed him residing at 625 E. Broad until 1914, but not thereafter.

As it turned out, Jane took a trip to Savannah in 2009 with one of her friends whose son was a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. On a whim, I suggested that she take an excursion out to one of Savannah's largest cemeteries, Laurel Grove, to see if there was any record of his having been buried there.

Cheesy Grits: Why Did Valeria Leave Savannah?

Above is a graphic depiction of where we've been so far in our exploration of Jane and Jake's cheesy grits heritage. That's Jane's mother (Jake's beloved Nana) highlighted in blue, with her father, the track coach at Brooklyn's Midwood High School, above her and her paternal grandparents, George and Valeria next. Robert Howard and Rebecca Thorne are the names of Valeria's parents that we didn't know until we saw her death certificate. (Although her name doesn't appear on this chart, we have learned Jane's maternal grandmother's name—Audrey—but nothing more so far.)

Cheesy Grits: Valeria's Death Certificate leads us to Charleston

Every now and then, we family historians hit what feels like the "mother lode" of information. After finding only small hints or, worse, nothing at all, a document appears that clears the path for years of future work.

Humble Pies

An old friend reminded me of two other humble/peasant pies that I grew up eating in addition to the shoofly pie I mentioned earlier: vanilla pie, and milk or "poor man's pie," as my father used to call it. Vanilla pie is well-known amongst the Pennsylvania Amish, while the milk, or "poor man's pie" seems to be known much more broadly.

Cheesy Grits: Resuming the Ralston chase in New York City

So there we were, stuck in 1920 on W. 99th St. in Manhattan, with South Carolina-born George Ralston (Jane's grandfather) and his young wife, Audrey—Jane's missing grandmother—and Jane's mother herself at just a smidgen over a year old. We knew that George's father, also named George, was still in Savannah, GA, in 1910, but that the younger George, his mother Valeria, and his sister, Mirtle, had disappeared.

Shoofly Pie: Amish Homesteaders in Colorado, Part II

Grandma Miller in her kitchen in Nappanee,
Indiana in the late 1950s. Being Amish, 
she is not pleased that her son is taking her
picture. I don't know what to make of the
overhead light and the curtains on the window,
as they seem un-Amish to me.

My paternal grandparents, Phineas and Elizabeth ("Bettie") Anderson Miller and their two children were part of a group of Amish families that homesteaded in Cheyenne County, in eastern Colorado, not far from the town of Kit Carson. (I believe it might have been closest to the unincorporated town of Wild Horse.) My grandparents left Indiana for Colorado in the fall of 1909 but came back to Indiana permanently in 1911, as the possibilities for farming were not what they had been led to believe by the land developers.

I only remember my Grandma Miller visiting us once when we lived at Millwood (near Gap, PA), and that was in 1957. Grandpa Phineas had passed away in 1953, so of course he wasn't along. My dad managed to get Grandma to sit down with him and his tape recorder and he interviewed her about their experiences homesteading in Colorado. I transcribed that interview a few years back and here it is.

Shoofly Pie: Amish Homesteaders in Colorado, Part I

We left off the Shoofly Pie historical narrative with the Dane in the family, Augustus Walbus, having changed his name, joined the Old Order Amish church and married an Amish bishop's daughter, whose name was Lovina. John (Augustus Walbus) Anderson and Lovina (Hochstetler) Anderson settled in Mt. Ayr in Newton County, Indiana, where John farmed and Lovina gave birth. Ten times. My grandmother, Elizabeth Anderson, was born in 1884. She was number three and was always called "Bettie."