Augusta Friedrich & Samuel Wolter

Johann Friedrich & Dorothea Hensler emigrated from Prussia with four children: Charles became a successful merchant in Madison; William married well and managed a productive farm near Beaver Dam; John August, our great grandfather, looked after Johann and Dorothea in their old age and raised six healthy children, including Arthur, on his 160 acre farm; and Augusta married Sam Wolter, a luckless farmer, romantic poet, brick layer, rag solicitor, dreamer and self-promoter with an uncanny instinct for failure and catastrophe.

Samuel Wolter was born in 1838, in Brietzig, Pomerania, in the swampy drainage of the Oder river. It's an inauspicious and dull region of today's northeastern Germany known primarily for the toxic algae blooms in the Szczecin Lagoon and its adjoining estuaries. His father was a farm laborer, a landless commoner and desperately poor, but each of his children received the requisite eight years of education -- just enough, I suppose, to make them unqualified for skilled work and dissatisfied with farm labor.

Page from the parish register in Breitzig, Pomerania, Prussia, documenting the christening of Samuel Gottfried Wolter, on December 9, 1838

Sam, being a reputably affable fellow, made friends with the son of a wealthy landowner, Carl Friedrich Hempel. Carl was well established as the elder son and stood to inherit the family's estate when his father died. But then he fell in love with a commoner, a young woman to whom Sam had no doubt introduced him, and married her. By so doing, he forfeited all hereditary rights to the family's estate, and it's probably about 1860, just before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, that he and his peasant wife sail to America.

It was fortunate timing for an exiled aristocrat with a little money to invest. The war was profitable for nearly anyone with capital, and Carl invested his assets in railroad stock. There was a frenzy of government-sponsored railroad building, and re-building, during the war years, and Carl grew wealthy very quickly. He wrote letters home, thumbing his nose at the family that had disowned him, and encouraging Sam to emigrate, probably even sending the money to pay his passage.

Then, as quickly as his fortunes rose, Carl Friedrich Hempel's fortunes fell. His young wife dies, followed by their only son. Most damaging of all, the war ends. The speculation that had made him rich during the war had, afterwards, left him with debts he couldn't repay. I haven't located Carl's headstone or any record of his death, but his biographer (a grand-niece of Sam's) says that he died eight or ten years after his arrival, "a poor man with a broken heart." It's about this time that Sam arrives, along with his brother, Johann Gottlieb.

Sam would later write a poem about their perilous crossing from Bremen during which the steamship Hansa, itself battered and crippled by high seas, comes upon another vessel in distress much more dire. They manage to rescue just three of the doomed ship's complement before it sinks beneath the waves. The Hansa then limps into New York harbor on Oct 25, 1865. Its passengers and crew, however, went unheralded for their bravery because none but Sam seem to have ever mentioned the incident. Which is strange, because as Sam describes it, the storm's fury was nothing short of apocalyptic. Even this prosaic summary of his poem, as reported by his grand niece, leaves the impression of an epic disaster:

"Dreams of a Promised Land vanished like mists before the sun, and for some, all hope of survival was abandoned. Despair was everywhere as the vessel was churned and tossed about like a mere cork by the waves of a ferocious sea. The cries of the passengers, the screams of children and babies clasped in their mothers' arms created a terror never to be forgotten for many days and nights. Continuous appeals by the pasengers to their Maker and God were made in prayer and in song -- Haare Maine Sela -- were like the healing balm of sunshine to a despairing heart."

And this is all before the Hansa came upon the disabled vessel with its drowning passengers and crew!

The two brothers made their way to Watertown, Dodge County, Wisconsin, where Carl Hempel found them work in a brewery operated by another of their Pomerania compatriots. Sam managed to hold on to the job for only a few months, and then moved on to Madison where he found work as brick layer. Over the next three years Sam and Johann managed to save enough to pay the passage of their two parents and three younger siblings. Or so it's reported. Johann seems to have been about as well-grounded in the real world as his brother. He preached in the Methodist Church for a number or years but moved on when unspecified charges were brought against him by a church official. It's likely he was never ordained, and his preacher's license, from a Methodist Conference in Berea, Ohio, is suspect. He later practiced medicine, claiming to hold a degree from a homeopathic medical college in Chicago. Well, admittedly, there was no AMA in those days. What money they saved may have been accrued from labors somewhat less than honest, but almost certainly never criminal.

The elder Samuel Gottfried Wolter, Sam and Johann's father, died just a year after his arrival in 1868. Their mother, Maria, lived a bit longer, long enough to be a strain on Sam's meager finances. Neither Johann nor Sam seem to have been in a position to look after them. Johann, in any case, is off chasing rainbows and unavailable to help. Sam, the responsible one, was determined to provide for his family by leasing property that his grand niece described as "a swampy tract of farmland south of Beaver Dam." It might very well have been part of Johann Friedrich's holdings -- which today constitute the southeast corner of the Shaw Marsh Wildlife Area -- and would explain how Sam and Augusta met. Their marriage is recorded in Dodge County on March 23, 1871.

Little, if any, income came from Sam's efforts as a farmer. His primary source of income was from rags which he collected and then sold to housewives for making into into rugs and floor mats. I remember Grandma Frederick (Edyth Grohndorff) had several large and impressive rugs made from old socks and rags which might very well have been obtained from Sam. With his rag business bringing in money, Sam starts a family of his own. Lydia is born in 1872. She has a troubled childhood which later in life develops into psychosis. She's arrested for arson after several fires in the area -- to a schoolhouse and a church among others -- are linked to her, and spends most of her life in asylums for the insane. Ida, born in 1877, may have similarly suffered from mental illness. She survived into old age, never married, and her life went unremarked. Their last daughter, Amanda, is born in 1880 and lives only eight years.

Between 1900 and 1910, Sam purchases five acres and a house in Burnett Corners, northeast of Beaver Dam. It's perhaps needless to say at this point, but it was, and remains to this day, some of the swampiest 5 acres in all of Burnett Township. There's a photo we have that was taken about this time, which appears to be a work party of Sam's nieces and nephews who would have come from as far away as St Louis to help the old couple (Sam was 72 and Augusta was 60) with the hopeless task of improving the property.

Sam is in overalls on the left, and the short, stout woman on the right is our great grand aunt, Augusta Wilhelmine Friedrich Wolter. Just visible behind Augusta is their mentally disabled daughter, Lydia, who gained notoriety as an arsonist. The woman with the shovel is the wife of Sam's nephew, Dr. Otto Leonard Wolter, who was practicing medicine in St Louis at the time. The elderly woman right of center may be Marie Schultz Wolter, Sam's mother. Between and behind them is Anna Elizabeth Wolter, Sam's niece, who married Herman Lueders and had a farm in Otter Tail. The others are likely Otto, Herman, and Johann's two other children, John and Adeline. In the wagon behind Sam is a small, shaggy dog, whose name has been lost to history. But its presence in the photo softens my heart for the poor, old, luckless and sentimental Sam.

Sam died in 1922 and Augusta followed him in 1928. Both are buried in the small cemetery beside their property in Burnett Corners. Lydia, who died in 1960, is buried beside them. Their two other daughters, Ida and Amanda, may be there as well, but their graves haven't been recorded. Sam's parents, Samuel and Marie, are buried beside their daughter, Anna Regina Schmidt, in the Wanderer's Rest Cemetery in Lost Lake Township, Dodge County, where Anna and her husband Carl Friedrich Schmidt had a farm.