The Night Will Soon Be Ending

Story behind an Advent hymn

Early winter sunset in Christian County, KY

When we lived in Germany, I experienced the shortest winter days and longest winter nights I've ever seen! In Berlin, the sun set before 4:00 p.m. in December and January and didn't rise until 8:00 a.m. Winter was a very dark time there. (Berlin lies about 7° farther north than Montreal, Canada, believe it or not.)

"The Night Will Soon be Ending,"  a German Advent hymn, was penned in 1938 by novelist and poet Jochen Klepper (1903-1942). Klepper's knowledge of long winter nights and his personal experience with the Nazi regime were surely on his mind as he wrote this poem about darkness, light, hope, and promise.  Here is the first verse (as translated by Herman G. Stuempfle, Jr.)

The night will soon be ending; the dawn cannot be far.
Let songs of praise ascending now greet the morning Star!
All you whom darkness frightens with guilt or grief or pain
God's radiant Star now brightens and bids you sing again.

In the new LCMS hymnal, "The Night Will Soon Be Ending" is set to the Welsh tune "Llangloffan." But in Germany, the hymn has been sung since 1939 to a melody composed for it by Johannes Petzold.

The story of  Klepper's life is tragic. Jochen Klepper was married to a Jewish lady named Hannah ("Hanni".) Hanni had two daughters, Brigitte and Reni, by a previous marriage. The Kleppers sent the older daughter Brigitte to England in 1938, the same year that Klepper wrote "The Night Will Soon Be Ending." They could not bear to send little Reni too, so she stayed with them in Germany. Later, they tried to get an exit visa for Reni, but they were denied repeatedly. They also faced a mandatory divorce because it was illegal for a Jew to be married to a German.

German stamp honoring Jochen Klepper

In December 1942, Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of Jewish deportation, personally rejected their request to leave Germany. Certain that death awaited them in concentration camps  Klepper, Hani, and Reni committed suicide. Klepper wrote a final entry in his diary minutes before they died: "Tonight we die together. Over us stands in the last moments the image of the blessed Christ who surrounds us. With this view we end our lives.”

Klepper's diary was used as evidence in the trial of Adolph Eichmann.* A collection of excerpts from the Klepper diary, In the Shadow of His Wings, was published in 1956. I could not find a copy at any of my usual internet booksellers.

Several short histories of Klepper's life are available online. One article explores the role of German Mennonites in World War II as related to some events in Jochen Klepper's life. Another article on a Lutheran website discusses Klepper's theology and spiritual life in addition to the story of his life.
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*I clearly remember news reports and adult talk about the Eichmann trial during my childhood, though I did not grasp the full significance of it at the time.

Exploring the 1940 Census

Browse free of charge

US Census Bureau [Public domain]

I have been looking at several Nebraska counties in the 1940 census tonight, and it's been quite a trip down Memory Lane. The parents of my childhood friends were teenagers in 1940. My father and mother were 16.

You can browse the 1940 census for free at http://1940census.archives.gov/. Start by selecting the state, the county, and the Enumeration District (ED).  The 1940 street address will help you find the ED, or there may be a map or description of the EDs that will help. Once you've found the correct district, you can look through images of the actual census pages.

In northern Nebraska where I'm from, the populations were small. In most of the EDs, it's easy to find a name by going from one page to the next.  Rock County, Nebraska, for example, had just 16 EDs. A county map on the census site shows the ED locations. Of the county's 16 EDs, 14 of them have 10 pages of names or less.

In comparison, Christian County, Kentucky, had 34 Enumeration Districts.  A map of Hopkinsville shows the locations of EDs 1-10, but there's no county map for the remaining 24 districts. However, there are written descriptions of those districts' locations. Then, when the ED is pinpointed, there are up to 52 pages of names to look through!

And can you imagine trying to locate a family or an individual in hundreds (or thousands) of pages when you only know a vague location, such as "eastern Kentucky?" Most of us don't have enough time or patience for that sort of search.

Fortunately, the 1940 census is being converted from its original handwritten form to a digital database that can be searched by computers. Ancestry.com has several states completely indexed and available for search-by-name. Volunteers are indexing at the 1940 U.S. Census Community Project. According to Family Search, a participant in the Community Project, 68% of the 1940 census has been indexed in just 2-1/2 months.

I enjoyed browsing a few sparsely populated Nebraska counties tonight, but I'm waiting for the indexing to be complete before I attempt any serious searching. In a few months, the 1940 census will be much easier to navigate.

LST Ship Memorial at Evansville, IN

The ship that won WWII for the Allies

Isaac and I visited the LST Ship Memorial at Evansville (IN) about two years ago. We've been planning to take Dennis to it ever since, and this past Sunday, we finally made that trip. I enjoyed going through the ship again and hearing the spiel of a different tour guide. Dennis enjoyed the tour from his own unique perspective. He is a Navy veteran as well as a history-lover, and also, his father was a machinist in the Navy during World War II.

The LST (Landing Ship, Tank) was a World War II invention.  It was a flat-bottomed, high-riding ship that could be driven right onto most beaches. The big doors at the end of the LST opened and a gangplank flopped out, so tanks and other vehicles could drive off, ready to do battle. If  the ship couldn't plow up onto the beach, the tanks and other vehicles drove off via pontoon bridges. According to our tour guide, the LST was first imagined by Winston Churchhill, who knew that tanks would greatly the chance of every invasion's success.

Evansville, Indiana, was one of several places where the LST was manufactured in the U.S. Although Evansville had not previously had a shipyards, 167 LSTs and 35 other vessels were built there by the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Company. At the peak of production, Evansville was building 2 LSTs per week, and over 19,000 people were employed at the shipyards. After manufacture and christening, the LSTs were outfitted, sailed to New Orleans, and from there, put into military service. 

Scanning Family Pictures

My concerns about scrapbooks

In 1995, as my parents' golden wedding anniversary approached, they decided that they should organize their photos. So Mama and Daddy spent many hours, looking through their photos and newspaper clippings and arranging many of them in chronological order. They taped (yes, taped!) them into scrapbooks, and for a few of the photos, they wrote captions. They enjoyed making the scrapbooks, and they enjoyed showing them to the friends and family who gathered to celebrate their 50th anniversary.

My parents have both been gone for over a dozen years, but my brother, my sister, and I haven't divided the family pictures yet. I hope that day will come eventually, but for now, I'm scanning photos from a couple of scrapbooks that I brought home from my brother's house last fall.

The scrapbooks and the taped-down photos are a bit of a problem. I can't remove the photos from the pages for scanning, so I opened the hinges of one of the scrapbooks and took out the pages. I have to make two scans for each side of each page. Then it takes a fair amount of time with image processing software to crop the individual photos, straighten them, and save them. I have an older Canon scanner. It works well, but it doesn't do many things automatically.

The worst problem is that we can't divide the photos in the scrapbooks without destroying the scrapbooks. For example, it would be nice if I could have some of the photos in which I appear -- the original photos, not just scans of them. Pictures of me as a child won't mean much to my five nephews and their descendants, whereas my own children and grandchildren might value them. Is that more important than keeping the photos in the scrapbooks that my mother and father created?

The photographs probably should be cut loose from the pages, whether or not we ever get them divided among the three of us. I am very sure the scrapbook pages are not made of acid-free paper.

Scanning these photos has made me wonder about the scrapbooks that many hobbyists enjoy creating today. How will their children share the family photos and memorabilia that are embedded in fancy scrapbook pages? No one will want to ruin the pages, so one person will inherit each book and its contents. I hope that the scrapbook crafters are saving duplicates of the photos or creating similar scrapbooks for each child.

People like to decorate their scrapbook pages with embellishments that they purchase at scrapbooking shops. Little doodads of any thickness would be a problem on my scanner. If a page doesn't lie flat, I don't get a well-focused scan. I'm glad my parents' scrapbook pages are not lumpy!

I think I'll try to write some information on the backs of my own photographs, instead of putting them in scrapbooks. If the kids want them organized chronologically, they can do it themselves.

The Winter of 1948-1949

A long season of deep snow and cold temperatures

I wasn't born until 1951, so I didn't experience the winter of 1948-49, but I've heard stories about it all my life.

My parents, along with my brother Dwight who was a toddler, were living on a ranch some ten miles south of Johnstown, Nebraska. The first major snowstorm hit in November of 1948. More snow followed, but around Christmas, it warmed up a little. My parents were able to get to town in the Jeep for supplies. They didn't get back to town again until sometime in late February.

Earl Monahan's Sandhill Horizons (pp.280-284, published in 1987 by Earl H. Monahan) also notes the break in the weather that allowed them to open the roads and get to town around Christmas. At the holidays, the snow was about a foot deep at the Monahan ranch, out in the Sandhills northeast of Hyannis, NE.

On Sunday, January 2, 1949, the Blizzard of  '49 moved in. By the next morning, the temperature was -4°F. and it was snowing hard with a howling wind that created white-out conditions. The blizzard continued through Monday and Tuesday.

On Wednesday, January 5, the sun finally shone again. There were huge drifts, and the wind was stirring the loose snow into a ground blizzard. The effort to locate and feed the cattle in the deep snow began.

Monahan wrote that when the wind died down, they had a few days of moderate weather. Then the weather went bad again -- starting on January 8th,  frequent snowstorms and extremely cold temperatures prevailed until the wintry assault finally slackened in mid-February. The February 7, 1949, edition of Time magazine reported that Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota had 18 snowstorms in 27 days following the initial blizzard in early January.

The Monahan Ranch owned a TD-9 crawler, and it was a tremendous help in feeding the cattle during those long weeks of deep snow. They were able to plow their way to the herds, but the crawler had to be brought home and kept inside every night so it would start again. (The diesel gelled if it got too cold.)

Credit: Blizzard image from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

Operation Snowbound and Operation Haylift

Loup County is located in the Sandhills of north-central Nebraska, east of the Monahan Ranch and just south of Rock County where I grew up. My Loup County (NE) centennial book contains the following description of that terrible winter.

The Blizzard of 1949 hit Loup County like a rocket and all was at a standstill. Cars and trucks were immobilized by drifts ten to thirty feet high. In the surrounding countryside, cattle were frozen stiff in standing position. Farmers and ranchers were isolated. When the airports were finally cleared, the Army flew supplies and troops for "Operation Snowbound," a month long program to help suffering familes, ranchers, and farmers. Mom remembers planes dropped food and medical supplies to the Loup County residents that were snowbound in the Sandhills[, s]ome of whom never made it to town until spring.

Source: Story of the J.U. & Delpha Predmore family on page 123, Loup County - Taylor, Neb. Centennial 1993-1983. Published by the Loup County Centennial Committee, no publishing date cited.

When I was a college student in Missouri, I was introduced to a friend's father. Jim Gentry was a heavy equipment operator, who had helped construct the Alaska Highway during World War II. As soon as he heard that I was from Nebraska, he began talking about the Blizzard of 1949.

I don't know the story of how Jim got the job for Operation Snowbound, but in early 1949, he was sent to northeastern Nebraska to drive a snowplow and open the roads to snowbound farms. He worked from dawn to dark every day, and the farm families fed him and gave him a bed, wherever he was. Thirty years later, he still marveled at the experience.

Operation Haylift was carried out by the Army Air Corp. Airmen dropped bales of alfalfa hay out of airplanes to starving herds of sheep and cattle. Many had not been fed for weeks. A terrible number of livestock and wild animals perished from hunger, thirst, exposure, and injury. Some ranchers lost 50% of their herds or even more.

I found several aerial images of the snow-covered prairies in 1949 at the Life photo archive. An image search for "Blizzard of 1949" brings up many interesting snapshots and websites. There's also an excellent video on YouTube: "The Blizzard of 1949: A Nebraska Story".

The entire north-central area of the United States, as far west as Utah, Nevada, and Montana, had a bad winter that year. However, Nebraska was one of the hardest-hit states, and so it has more than its fair share of the snow photographs and stories from the Winter of 1948-1949.

Related articles on Prairie Bluestem:
Blizzard of 1949 Stories
Ready for Winter
Winter Memories
1952 South Dakota Blizzard Story

Blizzard of 1949 in the News

A bad winter remembered

The recent snows and severe cold temperatures have stirred memories of the legendary Blizzard of '49 and the siege of snowstorms that followed it.  Here are three articles that have recently appeared in the news:

The Nebraska blizzard of 1949
Think you've had enough? Area residents recall winter of 1948-49
Living History: Operation Haylift saved Utah cattle

WHOP Celebrates 70 Years

Anniversary of a Hopkinsville radio station

WHOP radio of Hopkinsville, KY, (Lite 98.7 and News Talk 1230 AM / 95.3 FM) is planning an on-air celebration of its 70th anniversary on Friday, January 8, 2010, from 5:30-11:00 AM. It should be quite interesting.

According to the Lite 98 website:

It was 1940...Frank Sinatra debuted with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Walt Disney released the animated feature Pinocchio. World War II raged in Europe...and WHOP signed on the air, January 8, 1940.

Now we celebrate 70 years on the air serving the area. Join us Friday, January 8, 2010 as we look back over the years and listen to many of the voices of WHOP. We will reminisce with those who were there and listen [to] the recorded voices of many who are no longer with us.

Join us 5:30-11:00 am, January 8th, on the WHOP family of stations... Lite 98.7, WHOP-FM, News/Talk 95.3 FM and the original WHOP-AM as we celebrate 70 years as Hopkinsville's voice.

I anticipate that one of the featured radio personalities from the past will be the late Drury "Col. Dink" Embry. Embry began his WHOP career in 1948. His "Early Bird Morning Show" was on the air six days a week for decades. Embry was also the WHOP farm director and a musician. I don't know much about his musical career, but he played with several country groups before and during his employment at WHOP. He's also remembered for his role in the local Rotary Radio Auctions that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for college scholarships and loans.

Streaming audio from WHOP is available if you are out of range for over-the-air broadcasts. I couldn't get the Lite 98.7 link on the WHOP website to do anything. However, the link for News/Talk 1230 (below) worked for me with Win-Amp (a free media player.)

Play News/Talk 1230 AM

UPDATE:
Tim Havrilek of The Underground Rooster provides an interesting history of the Lackey family who founded WHOP (and several other radio stations) and were active in local and state politics.

Marion Post Wolcott Photo

A mountain woman

Mountain woman by her home up Stinking Creek,
Pine Mountain, Kentucky, August 1940
FSA photo by Marion Post Wolcott.

I came across this photo tonight as I was wandering through the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photos on the Library of Congress website.

I think this woman is young, even though she's wrinkled. She looks strong and tough, but overworked and weary. She's curious and obliging, and yet her eyes are wary and a little anxious. All these contradictions make this an interesting photo.

Her three little children and the gate in front of her home can be seen in the adjacent images (here and here).

The photographer was Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990) and this photograph is just one of hundreds she took in Kentucky as an FSA photographer.

Wolcott visited Russellville, a town about 40 miles east of Hopkinsville, where she photographed farmers on Saturday afternoon and a blacksmith shoeing a horse. However, she doesn't seem to have visited Hopkinsville. I have found no photos whatsoever of Hopkinsville in the FSA collection.

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5000 FSA photos by Marion Post Wolcott

Image credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-055920-E DLC

"Puzzle Pages" Workbooks Remembered

Reading seatwork series illustrated by Ethel Hays

In our one-room school, our teachers taught several classes for every subject. The number of classes depended on the grade levels of the current students. Sometimes there were half a dozen grades or more for ten or twelve students.

Usually, the teacher called the classes in order from youngest to oldest. "First grade Reading," she might announce, and the first grader/s went to the bench beside the teacher's desk with appropriate books and papers. After a few minutes of oral reading, the teacher assigned some seatwork and called the next class.

In the primary grades, we always had a page or two to do in the reading workbook, a few pages of practice reading from the textbook, a page in the phonics workbook, and the next page of Puzzle Pages.

Read and write, cut and paste

Puzzle Pages was a reading seatwork series. Besides the part of every page that had to be read, the work usually required some writing and some cut-and-pasted words or pictures from the back of the book. This kept our hands busy with pencils, round-tipped scissors, and globs of white paste. We were also expected to color all the pictures on the pages.

The cover of this Puzzle Pages workbook is exactly like the ones I remember. Just look how busy those children are. And so were we! My husband remembers this workbook, also.

One day, the children in the Puzzle Pages story went to the circus, so we had pictures of circus animals to cut and paste. When the teacher checked my page, she marked the elephant wrong, even though I had pasted it in the right place. She said it was colored wrong. Not having gray in my box of 16 crayons, I had made the elephant purple. Maybe she would have preferred light black.

Ethel Hays, artist and illustrator

ThePuzzle Pages workbooks were published by McCormick-Mathers of Wichita, Kansas -- a publishing company which appears to have gone out of business. Internet searches for "McCormick-Mathers" yield used books from the 1930s through the 1980s, but no website for the company.

The illustrator of all the various Puzzle Pages editions and revised editions was Ethel Hays. Her other work included a comic strip, Flapper Fanny, during the 1920s and magazine illustrations and comic strips during the 1930s. During the 1940s, she illustrated a number of well-knownl children's books, including The Little Red Hen (1942),  Little Black Sambo (1942), The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1942), The Town and The Country Mouse (1942), and others. She also illustrated the popular Raggedy Ann books of the same era.

Horse Drawn Hay Sweep-Rake

Making hay with horses

In the hayfield, the hay sweep (or sweep-rake) moved hay. The driver lowered the sweep's teeth (the long wooden tines) to ground level and took the sweep down a windrow of raked hay. As the sweep moved forward, the hay piled onto the buck (the platform of wooden teeth.)

When the buck was full of hay, the load was taken to the haystack. A good man on the sweep planned his route so he was close to the haystack when the buck was full and heavy.

Mowing machines and dump rake were pulled from the front. However, horses could not walk in front of the sweep-rake -- they would have been wallowing through the hay windrows that the sweep was supposed to gather. This problem was solved by having the horses pull the sweep from the sides.

In the image below, the load of hay has been deposited on the haystacker buck (another platform of wooden tines.) The sweep driver has backed the horses away from the load. Now he is approaching the hay again to push it farther onto the stacker buck. The driver is physically lifting the sweep teeth. Men and horses worked hard in the hayfield.

Out of the camera's range, the stacker team waits. The horses are harnessed to the pulleys that take the stacker buck to the top of the triangular frame and throw the hay onto the haystack. The man who is standing by the stacker buck is probably the driver of the stacker team. This was a fairly easy job, perhaps one that a grandfather might be assigned to do.

By the time I was a child, the hay sweep was a tractor, with its transmission reversed and its seat turned around. Its big wheels were in front and its small wheels were in back. The sweep buck was mounted in front of the big wheels, and it was raised and lowered with hydraulic power. It could carry much larger loads of hay than a horse-powered sweep, and it went much faster.

A tractor pulled the load of hay to the top of the haystack. However, the tractor driver was still said to be "driving the stacker team." Maybe "stacker team" was easier to say than "stacker tractor."

Photographs in this post were taken between 1935 and 1945 by John Vachon (top-left image) and Russell Lee (the other three images) for the Farm Security Agency.

Related posts:
The Hayfield
Horse-drawn Hay Rake
Winter Memories

More images
Solomon Butcher's Nebraska images of hay equipment (stacking)

A Good Wife in 1948

Faithful service rewarded with a watch

Quoted from a Hamilton Watch advertisement that appeared in the December 1948 National Geographic magazine:

To Peggy --

for marrying me in the first place...

for bringing up our children -- while I mostly sat back and gave advice.

for the 2008 pairs of socks you've darned.

for finding my umbrella and my rubbers Heaven knows how often!

for tying innumerable dress ties.

for being the family chauffeur, years on end.

for never getting sore at my always getting sore at your bridge playing.

for planning a thousand meals a year -- and having them taken for granted.

for a constant tenderness I rarely notice but am sure I couldn't live without.

for wanting a good watch ever so long ... and letting your slow-moving husband think he'd hit on it all by himself.

for just being you...

Darling, here's your Hamilton with all my love!

Jim

In fairness to Jim, I must say that a Hamilton watch was a nice gift. Watches pictured in the ad include a platinum watch, set with 32 diamonds, that sold for $725. (It was similar in design to this Hamilton watch, set with 48 diamonds.)

However, this one was what Peggy really deserved for darning all those socks and putting up with years of insults about her bridge playing!

Related webpages:

Vintage Watch Ads
Brief History of the Hamilton Watch Company
Watchmaking at the Hamilton Factory in Lancaster, PA, 1947
1913 Hamilton Railroad Watch Manual

Broadbent Seedhouse Near Cadiz, KY

Built by Austrian POWs during World War II

This structure, known in my family as the "Broadbent Building" stands along Highway 68/80, just east of the I-24 junction, near Cadiz, KY. I wrote about it several weeks ago, saying that I'd heard from several people that it was built by German POWs during World War II.

A local Prairie Bluestem reader, John, asked his dad about the building's history. John's dad grew up in that area and he personally remembered POW laborers on their farm and the Broadbent farm during World War II. John's dad also volunteered to ask the Broadbent family about the building's history.

Thanks to John and his dad, I can report with confidence that the Broadbent seedhouse was built by Austrian POWs (not by Germans.) The building's architects were Americans, however. I've updated the original post with all the details. Here's a link:

The Broadbent Building Near Cadiz, KY

Electricity in the Home, 1942

Electricity applauded, 65 years ago

Did your parents or grandparents have electricity in their house by 1942? If they lived in a rural area, it's very likely that they did not. In 1939, just 25% of rural homes were electrified.

In this part of Kentucky, the Pennyrile Rural Electric Cooperative brought electricity to rural homes. Pennyrile Electric was organized in 1937, but out here, some of the old-timers reminisce that they didn't get electricity until the early 1950s. I don't know if that was because electricity wasn't available earlier, or because of reluctance in some families to install electricity.

In Decorating the Home, a 1942 interior-decorating textbook, Ethel Lewis writes about some of the latest electrical gadgets.

Electricity and light are so nearly synonymous today that some of the newest electrical devices can be listed here.

In addition to all the labor-saving equipment, there is the electric clock, the fan, and most of us depend upon electricity to run the radio and the automatic-change phonograph.

For the nursery there is the "seeing eye" which protects the crib and so warns of the approach of thieves or kidnappers.

The ray from the photoelectric cell is the unseen source which opens doors so miraculously as a person approaches.

Perhaps nothing appeals more to the mechanically minded than the automatic window closer which works so swiftly when the alarm sounds the hour for rising.

The control and use of electricity are certainly one of man's greatest achievements, and many a home is a better place in which to live because of it.

Let electricity work for you; let it help you to preserve your eyesight.

From Decorating the Home (p. 127) by Ethel Lewis. (Published in New York by the Macmillan Company in 1942.) The lamp images in this post are also from Decorating the Home.

Did you notice? The electric refrigerator, electric range, electric water heater, and electric clothes washer aren't even mentioned, though they totally changed women's lives. They're part of the "labor-saving equipment" that Lewis breezes over.

I must admit that I take them for granted also -- as long as my electrical appliances work, I don't give them the grateful appreciation that they deserve.

The Broadbent Building Near Cadiz, KY

German and Austrian POWs in Trigg County, Kentucky, during World War II

UPDATED February 13, 2008

We've been told by several people that this large building along Highway 68/80 east of Cadiz, KY, was built by German prisoners of war during World War II. The building's rounded corners are cited as evidence that the construction crew was German.

I assumed this to be true because I knew the government had programs that provided POW laborers to American farmers and other industries. With so many men gone to the war, America was desperate for laborers. Without support behind the lines, the war effort would fail.

I thought it likely that the prisoners came from Camp Campbell, just 20 miles southeast of the Broadbent Farm (or possibly from Camp Breckenridge, near Morganfield, KY.)

As it turns out, the story we heard and my speculations were partially correct, but several details were wrong. After I originally wrote this post, a Prairie Bluestem reader researched the story of the building with someone who remembered its construction. John wrote:

My dad says he remembers going down with the Broadbents to "Camp Campbell" and picking up those German soldiers. His dad also used German POW's on his farm. He did not remember [Mr.] Smith Jr. [Broadbent] using Germans to build the "seed house" as they called it. Mainly they worked in the fields. Most of the POW's were farmers back home and were glad to work instead of being in the stockades. They weren't allowed to pay them much; they mostly paid them in cigarettes and fed them really well. The Germans may have had something to do with the construction, but my dad didn't think they did.

John's father checked with some of the Broadbent family, and this week, John wrote again:

I finally got the scoop on the old seed house. It was built by 19 WWII POWS. They weren't German though. They were Austrian. [Mr.] Smith Jr. [Broadbent] went to Camp Campbell and picked up 40 originally, and kept 20 to work on the building. All were working out except for one of them. He happened to be the only German among those 19 Austrians, so I am sure there was a conflict there. As for the architects, they were out of Des Moines, IA. So it was definitely built by POW's, just of the Austrian persuasion rather than German.

The sign over the building's door says "Broadbent's B&B Food Products." Apparently the building was once used in the production of Broadbent Farm's famous, prize-winning hams, sausage, and bacon. Broadbent Hams was sold to new owners in 1999, but I don't think this building was included in the deal.

In our family, this building is associated forever with an unfortunate highway breakdown. A couple years after we moved here, we were coming home from a long trip to Missouri and Kansas. When we turned off I-24 onto Highway 68/80, our little VW Fox lost its ability to change gears. You can't go anywhere when your car is stuck in neutral!

We had to push the Fox off the highway into the parking lot of the old Broadbent building. Then we called our pastor. He is a kind soul; he came in his van, armed with automotive fluids and tools. When the breakdown proved too serious for a roadside remedy, he drove us home. It was a bad ending to a long, hard day of driving and a long week of traveling.

When I showed these photos to Isaac, he immediately identified it as the place where we pushed the Fox off the highway. As an afterthought, he mentioned that it was built by POWs.

UPDATED December 5, 2018
Continental Drone Aerial Photography's video on Facebook about the Broadbent Seed House

 

Interesting links:
German POWS in North America
German POWs in Alabama
Story of a German artist and sculptor who was a POW at Camp Breckenridge

Montana Shepherds of the 1940s

Earth, sky, and sheep

Lee, Russell,, 1903-, photographer. Herder with his flock of sheep on the Gravelly Range, Madison County, Montana. 1942 Aug.
Image source: Library of Congress

Related image:
Another 1942 photo of a huge flock of sheep in Montana

Related post on this blog:
Montana Sheepherder's Life in 1920

Life in the Country before Electricity

Rural Kentucky in the 1930s and 1940s

With Christmas just around the corner, my days at work have been very busy with one customer after another. I've been working full-time, and honestly, it's been exhausting.

All of this makes me remember my one-time job at the little country store with fondness. I did spend a lot of hours there, but it was a relatively stress-free job less than a mile from my house. I made sandwiches, cleaned the store, and ran the cash register. Another of my jobs was visiting with the customers while they sat down to enjoy a snack.

Here's something I wrote back in my country-store days, about some of the reminiscences I heard from the old fellows who gathered there every day.

I take a lot of trips down memory lane at the little country store when the old-timers sit around with their "co-colas" and reminisce. The other day they were remembering straw ticks in their beds. By the end of the winter, they had worn a little nest in the straw where they could snuggle down completely warm under a pile of quilts even though snow might blow through the cracks in the log walls.

Another thing they all remember fondly is home-canned meat, fixed in a gravy. I've heard them say many times that their (rural) families never were hungry even during the Depression. Everyone had a big garden, pigs, and milk cows. They butchered the pigs in the winter and either smoked or canned the meat. They raised what they ate and ate what they raised!

The creamery sent a truck out once a week and people put their cream cans out on the road to be emptied by the driver. He left the cream money from the week before tucked under the handle on the lid. The ice truck also came once a week.

They went to bed early because kerosene for the lamps and batteries for the radios were expensive. On Saturday night, the young folks gathered at the store to socialize. They came in a car or on a mule if they had one, and if they didn't, they walked.

Electricity and paved roads changed everything!

60th Wedding Anniversary Celebrated

A nice event at our church

Wilbert ("Hap") and Marion Heilman, were married in 1947. The image above (my snapshot of their photograph) shows them on their wedding day.

The Heilman's celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary today. Their four children had a small reception for them this afternoon at our church.

Mrs. Heilman told me she weighted 115 pounds the day she was married, and her mother made her wedding dress. They were married in a Lutheran church, in or around Evansville, Indiana.

They made their home in the Evansville area, and over the years, four children were born. As it happened, they had some neighbors whose name was Roeder. In the mid-1960s, the Roeders opened a John Deere implement in Hopkinsville, KY. They invited Hap to work in the repair shop, and Hap accepted the offer.

The Heilmans moved to Hopkinsville, and they've been here ever since. I think the implement had been open a few years already, before they moved here, 35 years ago or so. The three daughters all stayed around Evansville, but their son (the youngest of the family) moved to Hopkinsville with them. He still lives in Christian County.

Hap has retired now, and he and Marion live on a small farm near St. Elmo, in southeastern Christian County. They don't get out much anymore, due to their health. I know that this was quite a day for them.

All of their children were at the reception, and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren were present also. Hap and Marion raised a nice family. I enjoyed seeing them together today.

Code of Outdoor Ethics

Responsible behavior in natural and rural areas

1. Respect the property of rural residents and ask before using it. Save fences, close gates and bars, go around planted fields.

2. People, livestock, trees, and birds were never meant to be target-practice backstops.

3. Respect the law. Catch enough legal fish to eat and then stop.

4. Clean up your camp. Don't litter the highway with trash.

5. Finish what you start. Carelessness with fires is cussedness.

6. Leave the flowers and shrubs for others to enjoy.

-- Seth E. Gordon (1890-1983), conservation director for the Izaak Walton League of America.

Quoted from Shafer's Universal Scrap Book, by Jacob H. Shafer. Published in 1945 by The Shafer Speech Service, Sunbury, PA.

Technorati tags: Seth E. Gordon, conservation, outdoor ethics, behavior code, Izaak Walton League

Old Bridges at Land Between the Lakes, KY

Eggner's Ferry Bridge and Lawrence Memorial Bridge

The Eggner's Ferry Bridge on August 11, 2007

The Eggner's Ferry Bridge (pictured above) crosses the Tennessee River at Fenton, on the west side of Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes. The Lawrence Memorial Bridge crosses the Cumberland River at Canton, on the east side of Land Between the Lakes.

Both these long bridges were built in the early 1930s, before the rivers were dammed and the lakes were formed. Before Kentucky Lake was filled in 1944, Eggner's Ferry Bridge underwent modifications. According to explorekentuckylake.com, new pilings were built and the bridge was raised in 1943. The Lawrence Memorial Bridge underwent a similar procedure in preparation for the damming of the Cumberland River and the filling of Lake Barkley (which took place in the 1960s) .

Highway 68/80, the road on which these bridges lie, has become a major, well-traveled, east-west route through southern Kentucky. Most of the road is now 4-lane. Land Between the Lakes is a popular recreation spot for both tourists and residents, and many of these bridge-crossers are towing campers or boats behind them. All in all, a lot of traffic pours across these bridges every day.

The two bridges were declared functionally obsolete in their last inspection. They are scheduled to be replaced within the next decade, and that will be a good thing for the motorists who must cross them. The bridges are too narrow for modern traffic. It's not uncommon to hear of someone whose rear-view mirror was knocked off while crossing these bridges.

The new bridges will have 4-lanes with shoulders and an additional lane for foot and bicycle traffic. They will cost an unbelievable $80 to 100 million each. Highway 68/80 will also be made 4-lane through Land Between the Lakes. The project is still in its design phase. Construction won't start until 2008 or 2009, and it will take several years to complete.

School buses from Christian County are not allowed to cross the Lawrence Memorial or Eggner's Ferry bridges. When our high school teams play Murray (west of Land Between the Lakes), they travel about fifty miles farther so the buses can cross the rivers on I-24's wider, safer bridges.

Eggner's Ferry history

The Eggner's Ferry Bridge over the Tennessee River is named for the ferry that was there for many years before the bridge was built. The ferry was established by Milton Eggner, (who also ran a stagecoach business and had a mail-carrying contract) in the 1850s.

During the Civil War, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman mentioned Eggner's Ferry in a dispatch that warned of Union forces on the road to Murray. According to a listing of tavern licenses, in 1865, both Wm. Price and O. Walsdrop posted bonds and were licensed to operate a tavern at Eggner's Ferry. It is not clear if they operated the same tavern or different ones.

Eggner's Ferry is mentioned as an address in the 1924 obituary of Mr. Temolean ("Mollie" Leneave. An image of the Eggner Ferry when operated by John L. Jackson has been posted at Webshots by a Trigg county resident. Mr. Charles Hill Bradley, mentioned in a 1931 book of Calloway County biographies, owned an interest in the Eggner ferry and store. He may have been one of the last owners, because the bridge was built in 1932.


Read more:
"Bridge forum draws crowd", Murray Ledger

Updated 1/29/2012

Old Gas Station in Hopkinsville, KY

A relic of the golden age of 2-lane roads

Everyone who lives around Hopkinsville, KY, will recognize this building. It stands on the north side of the street near the intersection of Highways107 and 68/80/41/109. Peace Park is across the street to the south.

It was obviously built as a gas station, but it's been a while since any gasoline was sold on the site. The architecture suggests it was constructed in the 1940s or 1950s, when cars were still small. It was never a large station; it had only one bay in the garage, and only one set of pumps.

I wonder if this little gas station was put out of business when Y'all's Shell Mart, a large self-service station with half a dozen pumps, opened on the opposite corner. Or maybe the little station had trouble with the EPA about its gasoline storage and couldn't afford to modernize.

During the time we've lived in Hopkinsville, I remember a donut shop in the building, and later, a vacuum cleaner repair shop that changed owners at least twice. Most recently, someone was displaying some flea-market things outside the building. I am not sure if they were still repairing vacuums inside or not.

Today, I noticed that the little station seems to be empty again. It's also overdue for a shingle job. It wouldn't surprise me if someone decides to tear it down. I thought I'd better take its picture while I still had the chance.

UPDATE: My son says this little station was moved here from another location. He remembers this from a documentary about the history of Hopkinsville. I'd love to hear from anyone who knows the story.

Technorati tags: vintage gas station