The Winona Normal (aka Education/Teacher's) Schools and Martha Moller Wick (a follow up)

Winona, Minnesota, circa 1898, courtesy the Library of Congress.

Since my dad said he thought Martha Wick had not started teaching until she went to Washington state (where he now lives), I wanted to confirm what I thought about when Martha Wick had finished her teaching training in Minnesota.  On June 11, 1904, the St. Paul Globe announced on June 12, that Martha Moller Wick of Jackson county had completed the Elementary Graduate Course at the Winona Normal School in the town of the same name.  I am off to find pictures of it, and of any other information about the class.  I should be back in 15 minutes on less.  Enjoy the Time-Delimited Poster in the meantime:

The pictures I have found so far of Winona Normal School are from before or after the time she was here.  Still here, thanks to the Minnesota Historical Society are two pictures.  One a photograph from the 1890s shows the strict gender divisions that defined teaching of the time:

Notice men on left of photo, women on right.  And notice the class size.  Personal, not so much.

And here is one that shows the campus becoming colorful and pretty in the 1910s (thanks to cheap synthetic color dyes making such images affordable):

Okay, my bed time has come (later I suspect that those of normal school students but still necessary.

More soon.

Censuses, Indian Schools, and Martha Wick (later Marta Aresvik Putnam)

Compose

 Martha Wick when she was Marta Aresvik Putnam (1920s???)

[a major misspelling in title  fixed and some table display problems improved and an author's name added but I continue to work of formatting, Tuesday, May 11, 2010]

If you haven't noticed, it is 2010 and so the United States is trying to count all the citizens and residents of the United States. I'm sure David Letterman has done a 10 top ten reasons why answering the census matters. If I were to do it, it would probably have as number 8 so we could determine how make people tried to name the president with his name, misspelled it and number 1 would be taking best on how long it takes Metro (the Washington Area metro transit authority) to take the advertisements down in the buses.

But for us who like to look at the past, the Censuses are very useful to finding out who lived where and who they lived with. And even more fun can be figuring out who they lived near. In my family we tend to know the family history, but the whole point of writing is to put the family in some context. Now there is going to be some frustration in this blog. One of "challenges" of getting to the Census is that though the people can see them 70 (or 75 years) after the US collects them, "see them" for free in this case, means you have to be at a National Archives branch, or be at library that subscribes to Ancestry.Com (or pay yourself),** or dig through some resources at various Free Our Records sites rootsweb.com (closely associates with Ancestry) or FamilySearch.org.

Okay, enough about that. Let's get to some family stories gleaned from the census. In this case, it will be a census taken by the Minnesota state government and currently available at the Minnesota Historical Society for free and with a decent search interface. Many states took censuses in the middle of the decade so they could keep track of population changes, especially as immigration jumped in their state.  The least represented (in English) member of my paternal family is the adventurous Martha Moller Wick (later Marta Aresvik Putnam).  Her family came to Minnesota from Norway in [family time line needs to be consulted].  And in 1905, the state of Minnesota counted her and her family living in Jackson County, Minnesota.

Fifth Decennial Census of Minnesota Population Schedule

Fifth Decennial Census of Minnesota Population
Schedule.  Population Enumerated by me in the City
of Pipestown from 2 day June 1905 to 3 rd day June
inclusive.  J. J. Bessard.

Last

First

Loc

Sex:

Age:

Race

Place of Birth

Place Father Birth

Place Mother Birth

Yrs. in MN

Yr. in dist.

Job

ID

Wick

Thomas

[village]

M

58

W

Norway

Norway*

Norway

18

18

Day Laborer

5542810

Wick

Kjerstin

“

F

63

W

Norway

Norway

Norway

16

16

[blank]

5542544

Wick

Kristin

“

F

28

W

Norway

Norway

Norway

18

18

Teacher

Wick

Peter

“

M

26

W

Norway

Norway

Norway

18

13

Lumber Dealer

5542746

Wick

Martha

“

F

21

W

Norway

Norway

Norway

18

18

Teacher

5542626 or 5542620

Wick

Dora

“

F

19

W

Norway

Norway

Norway

18

18

Teacher

5542242

+ Headings have been changed.
*Don’t know why it is crossed out

Census ID is from online index of Minnesota Territorial and State Census Records (www.mnhs.org)

Census information is from Ancestry.Com  and transcribed by Lucy G. Barber

Now this little snippet tells us some interesting things. Clearly, the girls were all becoming schoolteachers.  Indeed Martha Wick was counted twice in this census since she was also counted at her school in the County of Pipestone along with her other teachers who were propbably all teachers at the Pipestone Indian School.

The Census for the town of Pipestone in Pipestone County was collected on the same days by the same enumerator as the one for Pipestone Village in Jackson County, but Mr. Bressard may not have notice the repetition or the Wick family considered Martha to be at home, even if she stayed at the School normally. Martha had only been in the district for 9.5 months.


View Minnesota Places in a larger map

The two places were not close, so I think he wrote down the wrong place and he meant County of Pipestone, or I am underestimating how far people were willing to travel. It is true that when Martha Wick marries George Rockwell Putnam in 1913, they do so in the home of her parents in Worthington, Minnesota which is in Jackson County.

 Superintendent Home for Pipestone Indian School (now used to store records!!!) National Park Service

The fact that Martha is teaching at an Indian School is fascinating to me.  During my graduate studies, I learned about these schools as agents for trying to transform the "savages" into Americans.  There have both been good histories about the schools and their cultural impact:

I hade the chance to hear Philip J. Deloria talk about this book and recommend looking for it: Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

A more recent article looks at how women schoolteachers experienced this teaching:
D Cesar, JK Smith, THE PORTRAIT OF WOMEN TEACHERS IN INDIAN TERRITORY, American Educational History Journal 2008
Full disclosure, I have not read this article, but it is available for all of us to read.

Some searching also suggests some books on the place specifically:
Eagle, Adam Fortunate. 2010. Pipestone: my life in an Indian boarding school. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press
See full disclosure above.

And then there is the wonderful woman writer whose name completely escapes me who writes about Minnesota and Plains Indians in the present and the past. Thanks to yet another Lucy relative and reader: Louise Erdrich is the writer. Lucy S. now get a free question answered.  If you have a title you want to recommend put it in the comments.

The eleven teachers came from a variety of places, exposing Marta to women from around the country. Most were born in the United States: Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, North Dakota, and four from Minnesota.  One was from Nova Scotia.  I haven't checked yet, but I suspect that the women were considered federal employees and this may explain why Martha left to go teach in Washington a few years later.  All the women teachers are listed together and then the male teachers.

For the family story, one of the myths I've mentioned about Martha/Marta is that she seemed so unsophisticated next to the Putnam family, but of course if she taught in these schools and met women from so many backgrounds, she learned manners, decorum, and a lot about class.  I remember my dad saying that she also like Native American items, which this might explain. 

Of course, as often happens with these explorations I have a list of both questions and tasks now:

• Find out if teachers were federal employees and thus look for them in guides to federal employees (and/or request Martha Wick's personnel records from National Archives
• Learn if Minnesota county divisions changed or if this was a likely mistake or ???
• Determine when Marta Wick finished her Normal School program at Menota, Minnesota

**Ancestry.Com is not popular with all people, including me, who are not fond of paying for access to public records, even if the people who do the volunteer work for them at many archives across the country are super nice people. See one Genealogy Newsletter for some explanation.

Lucy introduces Ethel to Maurice (Matchmaking and the Southern Pacific)

[amended later on 5/2, edited for clarity since name repetition is confusing, and to add a factoid about biofixs photos]
I've wondered how my great-grandfather Alvin Barton Barber met Lucy Lombardi.  Both families had lived in Portland, Oregon, but both Alvin and Lucy had left by the time their engagement is announcement in The Smart Set column of the San Francisco Call in 1908.  That mystery (which may not be a mystery to some other family members)  remains a little obscure.

For a different mystery, my father sent the Cesar Maurice Lombardi letters to lots of Lombardi descendents and I heard back that my great grandmother may have been responsible for introducing a fellow Bryn Mawr student to her brother Maurice Ennis Lombardi.  Ethel Rogers Peck came from New York State

She graduated the same year as Lucy Lombardi.

Maurice went to Yale University and finished in 1900 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He then enrolled at UC, Berkeley where he continued his father's tradition of being well-rounded and received a bachelor of science degree in 1904. He then became a Petroleum Engineer working in San Francisco, but living in Berkeley.



His father notes that he worked for a company who worked on the California oil fields of the Southern Pacific, a phenomenon described by Upton Sinclair and portrayed recently in the movie, There Will Be Blood (2007). Here's a headline from 1907 when Maurice must have hit his stride:

So when does Lucy introduce her friend Ethel to Maurice. The answer I think is in the letters by the Grandfather to the Grandchildren. The Cesar Maurice Lombardi notes he took the younger Maurice with him to Lucy's graduation in 1904 (and heard W. T. Stead speak to him to him through a medium**). So this is a likely chance, since Maurice had mostly been in California since Lucy began at Bryn Mawr.

But I will have to do some more searching to see if Ethel Peck shows up as a visitor in California. It might help if I go find out when Ethel and Maurice were married. So if someone wants to comment on that, I will go search it down. I did the research and found Mrs. Ethel Peck Lombardi listed in the
Woman's who's who of America: a biographical dictionary of contemporary women of the United States and Canada, 1914-1915 (American Commonwealth Club, 1914):
**I'll complete a research task for anyone who can tell me in a comment something interesting about W. T. Stead besides the circumstances of his death. Here's his picture, just to entice you into the challenge:

There's another interesting set of images at: http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/william-thomas-stead-biofix-pictures.html.  The photo fans in the readership should check them out, they are panoramics called biofixs that show a person. The link is to an article about flip-books.

"Well, gentlemen, life is just one blessed thing after another!" C. Maurice Lombardi (and a song quiz)

http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/12842

My great-great grandfather Cesar Maurice Lombardi came Switzerland to the United States.  He first lived in New Orleans, and then went to Texas, where he worked in several business, before moving to Portland, Oregon to work for the Gordon Grain company.  From 1913 to 1916, at the request of my grandmother, he wrote a series of letters to his grandchildren (my grandfather Cesar Lombardi Barber among them) telling his life story.  These letters were then printed in 1948 with enough copies for all the children, grandchildren, and great children alive at the time.  Last year, the Lombardi's family gathered in Houston for a reunion and my dad lent his copy to the Woodson Research Center and Special Collections at Rice University. Ceasar M. Lombardi met the man who gave Rice University his name in New York City and was was instrumental in getting located it located in Houston, Texas. The Archives only had an old old xerox of it, so the opportunity to scan a clean copy for its own records was highly attractive. Some vicissitudes happened, but he got it back both as the printed volume and a scan for the rest of use just this week.

There is much wonderful material in it, including much about life in Portland, Oregon from 1898-1906, but I'm just going to give you background on the title of this entry. It came from a man that Mr. Lombardi worked with as editor of the Galveston Daily News. Mr. Briggs wrote it in 1948 to my great grandfather Alvin B. Barber reflecting on his memories of Mr. Lombardi. Briggs wrote that Lombardi was always interested in the young men with whom he worked on the paper. In addition, he was sympathectic to the pressures of putting out an interesting and accurate newspaper. Mr Briggs, by 1948, a senior officer of the First National Bank in Dallas, Texas, wrote of him:

It was Mr. Lombardi's courtliness of manner toward everyone and his kindly consideration of, and ingenuous interest in, young men of his staff, that attracted me to him first. In diffusing the spirit of these rare virtues, I never knew him to fail or to tire, regardless of provocation or disappointment. He met every situation, however difficult, with the equanimity of a philosopher, displayed so vividly in his familiar little phrase, "Well, gentlemen, life is just one blessed thing after another!"
{[Need to get formal citation to this volume]}

I love the double-entrendres in the phrase. Is blessed, a blessing, or a reverse use of blessed for damned. His letter show that he experienced hardship, success, true love, and exhaustion. He moved a lot and knew that he lost friends as a result. And though he was a Texan for most of his adult life, he never much like the place, it was too hot for him who was raised in the Swiss Alps, so he always considered his home in Berkeley California, his homestead.

And in one of those odd coincidences common in my family, my paternal grandfather was born in Berkeley, my mother graduated from high school from Berkeley High, and my brother lived there for a while.

The overlapping paths of people in Portland, Oregon are even more complicated, so I'll just show you a nice picture from around the time this clan of my family lived there:

Anyone want to guess the name of the song that might be connected to this car?

A Puzzler and A Game about Bryn Mawr College and Lucy Lombardi Barber

[updated 4/19/2010, in response to some corrections]
One of the re-occuring patterns in my family that strike others as odd, but actually makes sense if you think about the social spheres in which both my mother's and my father's parents operated, almost sounds like one of those odd puzzles. My mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother, all went to Bryn Mawr College, but they were not direct descendants. How is this possible, the puzzler asks?

The answer is that my father and my paternal grandfather both married women who went to Bryn Mawr and my paternal great grandmother went to Bryn Mawr. (I went to Haverford rather than Bryn Mawr, a story for a different forum).

Some of you may associate Bryn Mawr with the quote of M. Carey Thomas that "only our failures marry." My distant memory suggest that it is important to read the rest of the text surrounding this quote. As I recall, it was more a statement meant to imply only our failures JUST marry and raise children; others, marry, raise children, and stay active in their profession and their community.

I will focus here on Lucy Lombardi, later Lucy Lombardi Barber, who did marry, but was hardly a failure. She is pictured above with me in 1967.

Lucy Lombardi graduated in 1904. As indicated by the Program from Bryn Mawr from 1905, she came to Bryn Mawr with considerable education first in Portland, Oregon, and then later at Miss. Shipley's Miss Baldwin's School (a prep school across from Bryn Mawr College)


Thanks to some digitization projects we can see what these places looked like:
Here is one of the halls at Bryn Mawr:

As was common in such schools, women published literary magazines. Below is my great-grandmother's take on Tennyson's poem about the old clock:



I like the reference to her Waterbury watch as the new measure of time, but have not had time to trace down the reference. [see comments below for information] Otherwise, literary comments are welcome; she is not around to be sensitive about criticism, and had a good sense of humor so probably welcomed it.

Finally, a little game that others can help me with: One one of the mysteries of the Overrepresented Family is when people first met. Likewise, I am curious about the networks within which my great grandmother was active in. So here's just a raw list from the 1905 Program of people who would overlapped at Bryn Mawr with Lucy Lombardi. If you know who someone is, or have a guess of how that adds to the connection, put it in the comments. All names come from here The Program of 1905:[list is by no means inclusive, indeed it is quixotic]

Helen Adams Wilson, pg. 200
Evelyn Walker, pg. 199
Clara Louise Whipple Wade, pg 198
Alice Goddard Waldo, pg. 198
Eloise Ruthven Tremain, pg. 197
Helen Whithill Turner Flexner, pg. 196
Agnes Maitland Sinclair, pg. 193
Edna Aston Shearer, pg. 192
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, pg. 192
Emma Dunwoody Roberts, pg. 189
Marion Reilly, pg. 189
Helen Jackson Raymond, pg. pg. 189
Lucy Rawson, pg. 188
Louis(?) Lyman Peck, pg 187
Marrion Parris, pg. 187
Marion Edwards Park, 187

[oops, bored. Skipping to the A's
Maria Hawes Albee, pg. 152
Alice Anthony, pg. 153
Eleanora Frances Bliss, pg. 156
Elizabeth Middleton Bryan, pg. 158
Mary Wiley Cameron, pg. 159
Amy Lilley Clapp, pg. 169
Katherine Innes Cook, pg. 162.

Some obvious family connections come with
Bertha Havens Putnam, pg. 188
Mary Skerry Rockwell, pg. 190
oops see comments for correction

Correct and comment away!

Lucy G.

The delay between stories and information

I was pleased to spend 3/18/2010 with my father and his brother and his sister.  Alas, the time was limited and though we did share the reading of some memorable letters between his parents and others, there was no really time to consider anything.  Here's a picture from 1969 with many folks represented.

Polar Explorer George Rockwell Putnam

Over at the National Archives where I work there was a series of talks and movies on Polar Expeditions in February that include a number of cool activities, including a feature on Admiral Peary who [might have] reached the North Pole in 1909. My great grandfather George Rockwell Putnam did not go on the 1909 trip, but he did join Peary on earlier trips to Greenland and the Artic. He describes them in some detail in his memoirs, Sentinel of the coasts; the log of a lighthouse engineer, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1937. But I've been interested in looking at the coverage of the events as they happened. Before I write about that I do want to note that Admiral Peary house is about three blocks from where I live now and has a nice sign on it. I suspect it was not a coincidence that my great grandfather bought a house not far away from Peary. Both of them were active in the National Geographic Society.

So here's the story as reported at the time, in 1896, Peary had organized to make another exploration of Greenland. According to the New-York Tribune, his main goal in May of 1896 was to retrieve a huge meteorite he had found the previous year and bring it back to New York. The meteorite was -- eventually -- retrieved and is on display at the New York Museum of Natural History (there's even a video about the Meteorite it is really kind of important, though Peary did take it away from the Inuit people who both used the hard surfaces and had stories about its origins). Here it is in the Museum:

Probably because these trips were getting expensive and some people wondered if Peary took too many risks, he asked two other scientists to form groups to research other ideas and to share expenses. The group Putnam joined was known as the Benton Group or Boston Party depending on the reports (for some of this background see an article from 1897 in Technology Quarterly) Putnam was then working for the US Coast and Geodetic Society and was most interested in confirming that gravity varied at the poles than at the equator. This issue was important because it related to whether the earth is solid or not which was a subject of great debate at the time. More specifically, it was key to navigation. Since these variations in gravity affected a compass and its "true north." Navigational devices today have to account for this in all sorts of ways but as they depend less on magnets and more on GPS satellites, it may become less important. When Putnam was doing this work, precise settings required the use of a pendulum and precise marking of the stars. Here's the pendulum set up


He could only set up on land. Greenland was controlled by the Danes and he repeatedly praises them in his account of the process. He had to be on a solid surface and have good weather. It did not always happen. The trip took place from July 6 through October. As soon as he could, the pendulums had to be sent back to Washington to make sure they still were accurate. I'm not much of a mathematician so I can't explain all the calculation he preformed to understand the variations he saw. But he was apparently quite satisfied. Peary's hope to get the meteorite was however foiled and he was quite glum when they returned in September 1896. The next year he got the big one! Meanwhile my great grandfather in 1897 had his salary raised to $1,800 and was off to study the Pribilof Islands.

Alaska Natives. Three native boys on St. Paul Island, pictured with one of the St. Paul reindeer.
Originally uploaded by The U.S. National Archives