We went back in time during last week to Galena, Ill. – a once prospering lead mining town with a population of 14,000 that now hovers around 3,000 and depends heavily on tourism dollars.
Climbing the hill to tour the fully furnished mansion the city fathers gave to General Grant after the Civil War, we looked across the picturesque valley at the tidy red brick buildings and towering white church steeples built on the hills on the opposite side of the river. As with El Dorado’s Main Street improvements, it took many deep pockets from Chicago to restore 85 percent of the surviving buildings which are now listed with the National Register of Historic Places. A tour guide took us in a compact stone house, the first in Illinois, and pointed out various artifacts from the time. Squeezing our way around the tiny basement shop and three roomed living quarters above, we tried to visualize that in a time of one-roomed cabins the stone house earned the label of mansion in its day.
While I appreciated the architecture and investment in restoration, it demonstrates the inability of a community to thrive without local industry.
The quaint, historical community provided the site for a third reunion with two of my husband’s brothers – we live in three different states. The visit begins with the brothers swapping puns, jokes and stories – and puns. The puns never really stopped during the entire weekend. As one said after the first go round, “You started it.” We wives recognized our inability to stop it, so we started our own conversation separate from the men.
But mostly, we spent this visit catching up with each other and sharing pictures from one brother’s summer voyage on a ship with sails off the coast of Maine and the other brother’s journey East to track down Amish and Mennonite ancestors across the northeastern states.
As the family historians they find the graves, pictures and stories and contacts with folks who know the ancestors or their stories.
Their grandchildren often join them and eagerly look forward to finding another grave or former house where a Hershberger or related ancestor once resided. I foresee a future generation of historians from those grandchildren. We reap the benefit of their hobby with yearly updates on their discoveries.
Last year their ancestor search took them to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to a track down Jacob Hochstetler and the site of the “Hochstetler Massacre.” We heard about our pacifist ancestor who had held firm to his beliefs even under an Indian assault on his family during the French and Indian War.
The night of Sept. 19-20, 1757 a small group of Delaware Indians surrounded the Hochstetler home. “The young teenage sons Joseph and Christian reached for their hunting rifles in an attempt to kill or scare off the attackers, but their father, true to their Christian pacifism, did not allow them to kill the attackers even at the risk of their own death. The Indians set fire to the house and the immigrant mother, an unnamed daughter, and a teenage son Jacob were all tomahawked. An Indian by the name of Tom Lions claimed to have scalped Jacob’s first wife. Jacob and his sons Joseph and Christian were taken captive, but all of them were released after some years and they returned to Berks County,” according to the ExplorePAhistory.com.
While other descendants still in the Amish community hold up the event as an example of true pacifism, those in our branch of the family who served in the U.S. Army would at least have shot the rifles to scare off those attacking their loved ones.
The weekend visit fulfilled its goal of allowing the Hershberger men time to renew contact with their roots, their shared childhood and to realize again the many characteristics they have in common.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org)