~In a Far Away Continent~

The Immigrant Family

The "Germany" into which Carl Gabriel and Anne Rosine Kind were born during the 1840's did not resemble Germany, as we know it today. It was little more than a loose political confederation of thirty-nine states that had come into existence in 1815.

Some of these states were great powers; some were minor kingdoms and duchies; some were tiny principalities and some were free cities . An executive office or judiciary did not oversee this loose confederation, and the individual member governments held most of the rights of sovereignty. The decade of Carl and Rosine's births saw widespread famine throughout Europe due to massive crop failures. As a result of the economic effects of industrialization and of agricultural policies, widespread discontent, open rebellion and revolution were common.

By the time of Carl and Rosine's marriage in 1868, Otto von Bismarck was carefully guiding the German Confederation toward true unification. Toward the end of the Franco-German War, that unification came to fruition as the German Empire [January 18, 1871]. Carl served as a soldier in the German army, which defeated the French on May 10, 1871.

Carl and Rosine resided in Kraschnitz, Schlesien. Schlesien (Silesia) is an historic region that is today located in southwest Poland. An ancient Polish province, it passed into Bohemian hands in 1335, became a possession of the Austrian Hapsburgs in 1526, was taken by Prussia in 1742 and finally returned to Poland at the end of World War II. Kraschnitz was located in north central Schlesien, an area that was, at the time, populated almost entirely by Germans. It was a small rural community of approximately 1070 inhabitants, living in 151 households. The community had its own brewery and mill and shared a telegraph office and train station with the village of Politz, which was located three kilometers south of Kraschnitz. There was a large estate adjacent to the town, which was owned by the Volmerstein family. It was on this estate that Carl and his son Hermann worked.

Carl was employed by Graf (Count) von Volmerstein to maintain the estate grounds and gardens and the ponds that were stocked with fish. Years later Carl’s daughter Anne would entertain her children with stories of their grandfather tossing the fish from one pond into another in order to make an accurate count. Hermann, who had been born in 1872, worked as a kitchen boy in the Volmerstein schloss (country mansion), and he later told his own stories of the Grafin (Countess) and her friends; particularly their love of dresses with very low cut necklines.

At some time during the 1880's Carl and Rosine made the decision to leave Schlesien and to emigrate to the United States. In so doing, they and their children became part of the greatest wave of German immigrants to ever enter this country. The reasons for their decision may only be speculated upon. Hope for better economic opportunities, freedom from compulsory military service for their sons and possibly the desire to join former neighbors who had already emigrated would have provided strong motivation to leave the land of their births.

During this period there were a number of emigrant societies that had been established with the support of the German government to assist citizens who made the decision to emigrate. This assistance included information, advice and money. There were newspapers devoted entirely to the subject of emigration. One of the major centers of these societies was the city of Breslau that was located near Kraschnitz. "Chain migration" was at its peak at this time. Parts of communities and entire villages would pack up collectively and immigrate to the United States where they would settle in the same area and remain close in order to give psychological and financial support to each other. Often several people representing a number of families would make the trip first to determine which cities offered the best opportunities for jobs and housing. The Evangelical Lutheran Church was active in passing information between its parishioners in the new world and those in the old.

Once the decision to emigrate was final, there were certain requirements that had to be met by Carl and his family. All of their taxes had to be paid, their debts had to be cleared and the military obligations for Carl and his sons over the age of fourteen had to be discharged. The matter of arranging for transportation to the port of Hamburg in northern Germany from which they would embark would have been reasonably simple, as the country at that time had one of the most extensive rail systems in the world. The local station was located equidistant between Kraschnitz and Politz.

Some time in late February or early March of 1889, the family packed their belongings and said their good-bys. Hermann was given a Lutheran Prayer Book as a gift by the Grafin (Countess) von Volmerstein. Inscribed on the front inside cover of the book were these words:

For the blessed use of Hermann Gabriel and his family, with the wish, that in a faraway continent with its earthly home, he will not forget the future heavenly home.

Grafin Elisabeth von der Recke Volmerstein.

Hermann packed the prayer book and his textbooks, that he had used in school in Kraschnitz, and he and his parents and sisters, Anne and Emme, and his brothers, Carl, Paul and Fritz, made their way to Hamburg on the first leg of their journey to the United States.

The family departed the port of Hamburg on board the S/S Wieland on March 17, 1889. The ship flew the German flag and was under the command of a Captain Barends. There were 530 passengers on board: 437 adults, 72 children under the age of ten years, and 21 infants under the age of one year. Carl and Rosine and their five younger children were manifested as a family group and most likely had their own small compartment. Hermann, age seventeen, was manifested with a number of single males who probably shared a common sleeping area. The ship steamed out of Hamburg into the North Sea, turned southward down through the English Channel and then southwestward across the Atlantic Ocean. It arrived in New York Harbor on March 29th, twelve days after it had left Europe.

Upon arrival, the Gabriels were processed at Castle Garden, an old fort on the lower tip of Manhattan [now Battery Park], which had been designated by the U. S. Government in 1855 as an immigrant station under New York state supervision. By 1889, Castle Garden was proving inadequate for the ever-increasing number of immigrant arrivals. The old fort was closed as a processing center in April 1890, to be replaced by the Barge Office until the opening of Ellis Island on January 1, 1892.

Carl and Rose*, Herman*, Anna* and Emma*, Carl, Paul and Fritz made the trip from New York City to Wilmington, Delaware, their new home. The news that greeted them upon their arrival was heart breaking. Ernst, another of Carl and Rose's sons, had been killed in Wilmington in a train accident while on his way to work on the morning of January 9, 1889. The family arrived to find the son who had emigrated from Germany before them already dead at the age of fifteen and buried in Riverview Cemetery. During the years between her 1868 marriage and her family's 1889 emigration from Germany, Rose had given birth to eleven children. Only six of the eleven would be living in 1900: Herman, Anna, Emma, Carl, Paul and Fritz.

Carl found employment as a laborer with the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad. He and Rose and the five younger children set up housekeeping at 1303 Wilson Street. Herman went to work as a baker for Charles Yetter and boarded at 11 East 14th Street. In 1892 when Carl moved the family to a larger house at 1316 East 14th Street, Herman rejoined them. They remained together until 1894 when Anna, at the age of eighteen, became a domestic servant in the home of George H. Bauman. Emma was working for W.M. Manufacturing Company, but continued to reside with the family on 14th Street.

The Wilmington neighborhood in which the Gabriels lived was decidedly German. The shopkeepers all spoke German, there was a German language radio station in the area, and there was a German newspaper available on Sundays. For these reasons and perhaps due to their ages when they had immigrated, neither Carl nor Rose ever learned to speak more than a minimal amount of English. If Rose needed to shop "up town", she simply carried along a sample of whatever item she intended to purchase. She would then show the item to the store clerk and indicate the quantity that she required. Their children, on the other hand, quickly learned to speak, to read and to write in English. There was at least one other family in the neighborhood that had emigrated from Kraschnitz. Rose and the mother had been childhood playmates, and they remained close friends after

* Anglicized spelling of their names

they immigrated to Wilmington. Anna and Emma had been close friends of the lady's daughter when they all had lived in Kraschnitz and continued as such after they came to this country. Many afternoons saw half a dozen of the older women seated around Rose's kitchen table eating crumb cake or apple cake and enjoying a real coffee klatsch (gossip session).

Herman Gabriel was the first of the children to marry. He fell in love with a young woman who had emigrated from East Prussia with her mother, her half- sisters and a half-brother in 1888. Mathilde Gezewski’s mother, Charlotte Kemske, owned a home at 1619 East 14th Street, just three blocks away from the Gabriel's residence at 1314 East 14th Street. Many years later Herman would tell his granddaughter, Flossie, that he had loved Tillie from the moment that he first saw her sitting on the porch of her family's house. Tillie was employed as a dressmaker. Herman still worked as a baker, but he was now baking for W. L. Gilbert. The couple was married on August 5, 1896 by Pastor Paul Isenschmid of the Zion Lutheran Church, the church that both the Kemske family and the Gabriel family attended. Emma Kemske, one of Mathilde's half sisters, and Thomas Brooks, a friend of Herman's, signed the marriage return as witnesses. Herman and Tillie moved into a house at 1610 East 14th Street, just a few doors from the Kemske home. Herman and Tillie would enjoy a long and happy marriage, but there were already problems brewing between Tillie and her mother-in-law, Rose Gabriel. The two women did not like each other.

Emma Gabriel married Emil Kramer on September 17, 1896. Emil had emigrated in 1888 from Muenchen-Gladbach, a town in Rhineland, Germany. At the time of their marriage, he was working as a morocco dresser [leather worker]. Pastor Paul Isenschmid performed their ceremony, and Anna Gabriel and Robert Falk signed as witnesses.

On February 15, 1899 Anna Gabriel married Wilhelm Hofmann. Wilhelm and a brother had come to the U.S. from Stuttgart in 1884 to avoid the German draft. Strangely enough, they immediately joined the United States Cavalry and were posted to a fort in the Oklahoma Territory. After completing his enlistment, Wilhelm moved to Wilmington where he found a job with the railroad and then with Edgemore Ironworks. He and Anna were also married by Pastor Isenschmid. Anna's brother Paul Gabriel and her sister Emma Gabriel Kramer served as their witnesses.

Herman and brother Paul joined their father Carl and their brother Charly at the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad yards in 1899. Fritz went to work with them in 1903 at the age of thirteen, and he stayed there until he joined the United States Marine Corps in 1906 or 1907. Herman would stay on with the company, which was a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, until he retired in 1942. Paul remained until 1904 when he went to work as a boilermaker. Charly worked at a number of other jobs during his lifetime: ice house laborer, hose inspector for the Electric Hose and Rubber Company, service man for a Wilmington public school. Carl continued to work for the railroad until just before his death in 1921.

By 1900 the second generation, the first to be born in the United States, was well started. Frederick Carl had been born to Herman and Tillie Gabriel in 1896. Paul Hermann followed in 1899. Emma Rose Kramer was born in 1897 and her sister Annie Mildred arrived on February 28, 1900. The family was growing.

In 1903 Carl and Rose Gabriel moved from 14th Street to a house on Marsh Road. It was a two-story frame structure that was situated on about three quarters of an acre of land. It had two bedrooms, a parlor and a dining room, a kitchen and an attached shed. The necessary [outhouse] stood about eighty feet to the rear of the main building. When Carl and Rose, Charly, Paul and Fritz moved into the house there was no running water and no electricity. A wooden pump provided water from a well in the yard, and oil lamps were used to light the rooms. When the city of Wilmington ran water mains to the area, a water line was run to their kitchen. The house had a coal stove in the kitchen for cooking and one in the middle room for warming the house in winter. The second floor was not heated. Paul Gabriel later told his daughter Hazel that he and his brothers would walk along the railroad tracks gathering pieces of coal that fell off the railroad cars. They would take the coal home to use in the stoves. Rose kept a steaming pot of soup bubbling on the stove and a pot of coffee was always next to it. Carl planted a vegetable garden every year, and he kept chickens and ducks and geese for their eggs. The open fields across the road from the house were used as pasture. About a mile across these fields were the railroad yards.

Some time around 1902, Herman was injured in an accident while cleaning out an ash pit in the steam engine roundhouse. An engine, whose wheels were supposed to be locked out, rolled over his left hand, severing the four fingers and leaving only the thumb. The railroad company management moved Herman inside to a desk job as a clerk. He did well in this new capacity. He had a knack for math and for organization. By 1907 he had been promoted to foreman, and within a couple more years he was an assistant yardmaster. The family moved to 416 McCabe Street in 1920. By the time he retired at the age of seventy, Herman had served the Pennsylvania Railroad as yardmaster of the Wilmington yards for twenty-one years.

Herman walked from his home to work most days. Quite often on his way home in the evenings, he would stop by to visit with his parents, as their house was on his way. The problems between Tillie and Rose had not improved over the years. Herman’s children, Fred and Paul, and now Alice born in 1904 and Herman, Jr. born in 1909, saw very little of their Grandmom and Grandpop Gabriel. The older boys did know their Uncle Paul quite well, however. He lived with Herman and Tillie during 1899 and again from 1904 until he married in 1906. The children's Aunt Anna and Uncle William Hofmann lived next door from 1901 until they moved to Philadelphia several years later. While Herman attempted to maintain the relationship with his parents, Tillie and the children spent their time with her family, the Kemskes. The mutual dislike between Rose and Mathilde now acted as a wedge between the older Gabriels and the younger Herman Gabriels. That wedge would eventually cause a split within the family that would last for more than half a century.

Emma and Emil Kramer and their children continued to live in Wilmington, first on East 14th Street and later at 1325 Davis Street, which was just around the corner from Carl and Rose's house on Marsh Road. Their first two daughters were joined in 1902 by Anna, in 1910 by Emil II and finally in 1921 by Betty. Emil had left his original employment as a leather worker some time before 1900, and he had gone to work for the railroad. He worked first as a car builder and later as a car inspector. The close proximity of the Kramer's home to the elder Gabriel's home, allowed Emma and her daughter Mildred to assist Rose in later years with a number of domestic chores.

On March 14, 1906 Paul Gabriel married Alice Mary Peterson of Wilmington. Pastor Isenschmid of Zion Lutheran Church performed the ceremony, just as he had for each of the other married Gabriel children. Paul worked as a boilermaker in Wilmington, in Philadelphia and later in New Orleans. While in New Orleans in 1913, he was offered a job with the United States Isthmian Canal Commission. He accepted their offer of "immediate employment (as) boilermaker ...Isthmus Panama ...sixty five cents (per) hour...free bachelor quarters... transportation free". Paul sailed for Panama on March 29, 1913 on board the steamer Turrialba. His wife Alice and their daughter Beatrice, born in 1909, remained in the States. Another daughter, Hazel, was born in Philadelphia in 1920. By that time Paul was employed by Traveler's Insurance Company. Paul and Alice and the girls often drove over to Wilmington to visit with Paul's parents and to take them riding in their car. Although, he had very little formal education, Paul was an avid reader and a whiz at math. He spent hours over books that he borrowed from the public library. He was a self-educated man, and his success with Traveler's reflected his lifelong yearning for knowledge.

Charly Gabriel was active in neighborhood politics and he enjoyed sports; particularly amateur boxing. He was a volunteer fireman for years. He never married, so he continued to live with his parents. As Carl and Rose grew older, his daily presence and devotion to them made their lives a little easier.

Fritz Gabriel, who had joined the United States Marine Corps, served in the Philippines and in many of the Pacific islands where the US maintained a military presence. On the occasions that he visited his parents in Wilmington while on furlough, the entire neighborhood would fly American flags to welcome him home. His nephews who lived nearby loved to watch him polish his uniform brass and spit shine his shoes. They enjoyed being "seen" with him when he walked down the street in his dress uniform.

On July 16, 1921 Carl died at his home on Marsh Road. He was seventy-six years old. His death was attributed to gastric carcinoma (stomach cancer), but by the time he died the cancer had become generalized. After Carl became sick, Emil, Jr. recalled bicycling to the store every afternoon to buy a pint of ice cream for his Grandpop. It was the only food that Carl's body would tolerate. On July 19, 1921 Rose buried her husband of fifty-three years in Riverview Cemetery. Then she and her son Charly returned to the house on Marsh Road.

Fritz' military unit had been dispatched to Haiti in early 1921 to suppress a revolt. While there, he contracted some type of fever. He was shipped back to the states on a troop carrier. His sister Emma Kramer and his brother Charly traveled to New York City to meet the ship. Fritz was so ill that he did not even recognize them. He was moved to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC for further treatment. Emma's husband Emil Kramer obtained a railroad pass for his wife's use, and she made the trip between Wilmington and Washington to visit her brother almost every day. Most days she made the trip alone. But on some occasions her son Emil, Jr. accompanied her, and at other times her brother Charly went with her. During his illness Fritz' weight dropped from about 180 pounds to just over 100 pounds. He did not recover from the tropical fever. Frederick “Fritz” Gabriel died, and his body was removed to Wilmington where he was given a military funeral from his mother's home on December 3, 1921.

Rose gave up the house on Marsh Road in 1922. She and Charly moved in with Emma and Emil Kramer and their family. Rose had become severely handicapped with rheumatism in both legs, and she was barely able to walk. She spent her days reading her bible, and listening to the German language radio station. On Sundays Emil, Jr. would ride his bicycle to a neighborhood newspaper stand to buy the German language newspaper for his Grandmom. In 1928, following the death of her husband, Emma Kramer moved her family to 704 East 23rd Street. Rose and Charly made the move with them. It was here on February 11, 1931 at 6:00 in the evening that Rose died. She was buried next to Carl at Riverview Cemetery on February 14, 1931.

Anna R. Gabriel Hofmann died in 1934 and Emma Louise Gabriel Kramer died in 1942. Hermann Carl Gabriel died in 1950 and Paul Gustave Gabriel followed in 1960. Carl “Charly” F. Gabriel passed in 1965. The lives of the immigrant generation had come full circle. It would now be up to their descendants to make what they would of the opportunities offered to them "in a faraway continent."

Elizabeth Gabriel Uiterwyk
Tampa, FL 1992