Click here for description and photos of the S S Kaiser Wilhelm II, the ship Wilhelm and Theresia and their children took from Germany to America.
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Click here for historical info on the Glasgow and the Boone's Lick region of Missouri.
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| Wilhelm and Theresia and their children were among the 450,000 immigrants processed through Ellis Island during 1892, its first year of operation. All their names are listed, one after the other, on the ship's manifest dated 9 August 1892. You can read them at no charge by visiting the website of the Liberty - Ellis Island Foundation. Search for "W Westhues" — only one person of that name is in the Ellis Island records. |
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| Click here to learn the extraordinary story of Theresia Westhues's mother: "Theresia Peters and her Sons — Catholic Colonists." By 1906, fourteen years after Wilhelm and Theresia migrated from Germany to Glasgow, Missouri, thereby reuniting with her mother and brothers in the Peters family, all of the latter had moved away from Glasgow. Wilhelm and Theresia's family, by contrast, sank deep roots in the Glasgow area, enduring for generations, even to the present day. |
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The main event this afternoon is introducing the members of
the eight branches of the Westhues family in America, so that the older generation
can renew acquaintance and the younger generation can identify the people they've
heard Mom or Dad talk about. But before those introductions, I've been asked
to say a word about the trunk from which these eight branches sprouted, the
people who started the Westhues family on this continent. I mean Wilhelm and
Theresia Westhues, the couple who packed their four trunks in Germany one hundred
years ago, bundled up their six children, traveled by train to Bremen, embarked
there for the 10-day Atlantic voyage on the S. S. Kaiser Wilhelm II, transferred
in New York to a Wabash train for three more days journey deep into the interior
of this continent, arriving at last in their new hometown.
Wilhelm and Theresia were not early settlers. The United States
had already celebrated its centennial by the time they arrived, and the population
of Missouri (which in 1820 had been just 20,000 people of European descent)
had reached almost 3 million by 1890. The town of Glasgow was already well-established,
having been founded in 1836 by old American settlers from Virginia and Kentucky,
who brought with them the culture and the plantation economy of the South. This
college where we have gathered was already 40 years old by the time Wilhelm
and Theresa arrived. The Civil War, in which this Protestant and English-origin
region of Little Dixie had sided with the South, had ended 30 years before.
How then did it happen that Wilhelm and Theresia, our grandparents
or great- or great-great-grandparents, moved to join the American nation a century
ago? Missouri, let it be said, was a famous place in Münsterland, Westphalia,
the region of Germany near Holland where they lived. Half a century earlier,
when Missouri was being opened for settlement, thousands of Westphalians had
moved to the counties west and south of St. Louis—Washington, Warren, Osage, Gasconade, Franklin, and Perry Counties. Their reason for coming was
aptly summarized by a German official at the time (1852):
The prosperity is ever more in decline. A
considerable emigration to America has taken place. This was not rooted in any
political motives, but simply the increasingly obvious realization that spinning
and weaving are heading inevitably toward ruin.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, growing
flax and processing it into linen was a mainstay of the Münsterland economy.
By 1850, that industry had all but collapsed. Mechanized production of linen
in Great Britain was driving the German home-weavers out of the international
market, and so was the ever-growing popularity of cotton, as an alternative
to linen. Times were tough in Münsterland. In the mid-1850s, Missouri looked
like the promised land to any landless peasant willing to work. One transplanted
German who had moved here described it this way:
America is indeed a splendid land. Here a
person can still acquire something. In Germany, I didn't have as much property
as I could hold in my hand, and dared not hope, no matter how hard I worked
and saved, ever to acquire any property. What you see here belongs to me. I
have had to work terribly hard, but I have something to show for it. Here I
have eaten more pork in one year than I have seen in Germany my whole life.
By the 1860s and 1870s, almost everybody in Münsterland
had some friend or relative in Missouri. In addition, after the Civil War, a
couple of dozen German families from west of St. Louis pulled up stakes again
and moved farther up the Missouri River to the Chariton River bottoms, the swampy
floodplain west and northwest of Glasgow that had not been cleared in the initial
settlement by the Virginians and Kentuckians. Many of you here have ancestors
from those families: the Flaspohlers, Haskamps, Holtwicks, Schaefers, Westhoffs,
Aholts, Himmelbergs, Sellmeyers and Bruckses, among others. These were the families
that established the German rural community near Glasgow, and helped found all
three of the local Catholic parishes, St. Mary's, All Saints in West Glasgow,
and Immaculate Conception in Aholt.
But these families were still writing to the relatives and
friends in Westphalia they had left a few decades earlier, and that is how Wilhelm
and Theresia Westhues came to hear about this town of Glasgow, Missouri. At the
invitation of friends, the John Stockman family moved to Glasgow from Münsterland
in 1868. At the urging of the Stockmans, the Joseph Fuemmeler family came in
1875. The Fuemmelers had been friends of the Ben Pfortman family in Münsterland,
and so persuaded them to come over in 1885. Ben Pfortman then wrote about the
good prospects here to his cousin, Theresia Dilkaute Peters.
This Theresia Peters was not the one who married Wilhelm Westhues.
She was her mother, by that time a widow with five unmarried sons at home, along
with one son in military service and the daughter who had married into Wilhelm Westhues. In 1888, the elder
Theresia Peters moved with her five sons to a farm north of Glasgow, on the edge of
the bottoms. She wrote beckoning letters to her daughter.
Now the man whom the daughter, the younger Theresia, had married
was not in all respects a prize catch. Wilhelm Westhues was not a firstborn
son, and thus did not stand to inherit land of his own. He was hardworking,
frugal and responsible, but in Münsterland at that time, it was only the
eldest son who inherited the farm. No matter how hard they worked, Wilhelm and
Theresa had no prospect of ever owning their own farm there.
Why then did Wilhelm and Theresa come to America? For a combination
of reasons: to be reunited with her mother; to find a place where not only they
but their children could have farms of their own; and also to escape German
militarism, of which Wilhelm had unhappy memories from his years as a conscript
in the army.
They arrived in 1892—with twelve-year-old Theodore
helping take care of the little ones, with the younger Wilhelm (William G.),
with eight-year-old Joseph (who would later become a priest), with six-year-old
Theresa (who would die young), with four-year-old Henry and baby Ben. They travelled
in steerage, poor German peasants that they were. All the money they had totalled
$1500—this according to Uncle Fritz's wonderful memoir that Sister Mary
included in her genealogy book five years ago. With that money, and with loans
from Theresia's mother and the bank, they bought the house and farm, which had
at that time just 37 acres, where Father Jack presided at Mass for us this morning.
There they had four more children: Mary, John, Anna, and Fritz.
Eight of Wilhelm and Theresa's children—all except
Joseph and Theresa—got married and had large families. Now is a good time
to have a look at the families they produced.
Endnote: The general argument here has been
drawn from Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: from Germany to Missouri (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987; quotation taken from p.
69). Information on German settlement in and around Glasgow, Missouri, taken
from K. Westhues, I See the Cross: Centennial History of St. Mary's Parish (Glasgow, Mo.: St. Mary's Parish, 1966). |
