Road Trip Through History: The German-American Heritage Center and Museum
My Own True Love and I might well have stopped at the German-American Heritage Center and Museum in Davenport, Iowa, for its building alone. The museum is housed in a building that was originally the “Germania”, a Gast Haus for German immigrants. Built in 1870, the Germania was one of the earliest of many immigrant hotels built in the area at the end of the nineteenth century and the last one still standing. It has been beautifully restored and adapted as a museum. We are suckers for old buildings and this kind of thing is jam for our morning toast.*
In some ways, the building itself is the largest exhibit in the museum:** an emblem for the experience of German immigrants that the museum as a whole explores.
The museum was well worth the stop. The main exhibit of the museum traces German history from 9 C.E. through World War II in short clear bites.*** It explains why big waves of immigrant occurred.**** It describes what the journey was like and what immigrants found when they got here. An entire room is devoted to German-American culture in Davenport, as a lens for German immigrant culture in America as a whole. The final section explains what happened to that culture when the United States entered World War I in April, 1917. (The short version? Erasure)
One thing the museum does particularly well is give immigration a face. For a part of the exhibit called “The Passport Experience,” visitors can chose an immigrant, represented by a card with a photograph, demographic details and a QR code, and follow them through a number of stations throughout the exhibit.***** Another feature, called “Step into my Shoes,” allowed visitors to trigger short films in which individual immigrants talk about their experiences by stepping into one of several sets of footprints on the floor.
The museum also included two smaller, thought-provoking exhibits.
The first, called “Hidden Hapsburgs,” looked at citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who emigrated alongside a number of Germans after the uprisings that shook Europe in 1848. Because most of them were German speakers, they are often treated as Germans when people write about the immigrants of 1848, but their experience was different in several important ways. Most notably, the Austro-Hungarian revolutionaries were pardoned in 1867 and had the opportunity to return home. The German revolutionaries were never pardoned. This exhibit was a real head smack for me. I was familiar with a great deal of the material in the main exhibit, but had never thought about Austro-Hungarian revolutionaries.
The second exhibit looked at the experience of immigrants to the Davenport area today and compares it to the experience of German immigrants in the nineteenth century. This exhibit centers on the work of a non-for-profit called Tapestry Farms.
Different in some ways. Alike in so many others.
*If you’re in Davenport and noticed a tall gray-haired man and a short red-haired woman walking around an unusual old building for no apparent reason or bending over to look at a sandstone foundation, it was probably us.
**Though obviously it wasn’t in the museum. Because that would require space to loop in on itself in a way possible only in a Terry Pratchett novel.
***Why 9 C.E. you ask? One word: Romans. Specifically, the Battle of Teutoberg Forest, when a alliance of Germanic peoples defeated the Romans and stopped Roman expansion. It is an important date in European history, but I must admit, the choice of 9 C.E. as a start date gave me the giggles.
****The first big wave occurred after the failed revolutions of 1848. The second occurred in the 1870s when German Catholics faced persecution in the new German Empire.
*****I first saw this technique used at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., where the effect was heartrending.
*****
Traveler’s Tip: If you’re in the Quad Cities during baseball season, checkout the schedule for the local minor league ball team, the delightfully named Quad City River Bandits. It’s hard to beat a summer night at a small ballpark.
Back on the Great River Road: First Stop, the John Deere Historic Site
My Own True Love and I are back on the Great River Road!
For those of you who are new to the Margins: In November, 2015, My Own True Love and I set out on an adventure. We headed south for a three-week trip along the Great River Road, a conglomeration of 3000 miles of local and state roads that follow the length of the Mississippi River. We started in Memphis, went south until we reached the end of the road in Louisiana, then headed back toward Chicago, stopping at whatever took our fancy. We thought we would make it all in one trip (pause for manic laughter), but our fancy led us to make lots of stops. We only got as far as Vicksburg on the way back.
Depending on how you count, we’re starting our fourth or fifth stint on the Great River Road, beginning at the Quad Cities, and are excited to be back on the trail. As always, I’ll post stories here on the Margins about the stuff we see.*
First up, the John Deere Historic Site in Grand Detour, Illinois—aptly named in our case since we stopped there on our way to the Mississippi.
Is it my imagination, or do all these old guys start to look alike after awhile?
For those of you who don’t know, John Deere was the innovator who made the first commercially successful plow, one adapted to cut through prairie soil and thus critical to America’s westward expansion. **
Before Deere, most plows were made of cast iron. These were more than adequate for the light soil of the eastern United States but did not work well in the stickier soil of the prairie and could not cope with the thick roots of prairie grass. Even when a farmer could cut through the the grass, he had to stop every few yards to clean off the soil that clumped off his blade.
Early John Deere plow, made in Grand Detour. Displayed at the Henry Ford Museum.
Deere was a Vermont blacksmith who moved west in search of opportunity. In 1836, soon after he moved to the new town of Grand Detour, Deere designed a steel blade that was “self-scouring” in response to complaints by the local farmers about the difficulty of working the prairie soil. (Repairing their broken plows made up a large part of his business.) The first year he made one of the new plows. The next year he made two. Then 40. Then 400. Ten years after he had made the first plow he was so successful that he moved the company to Moline, on the Mississippi because he needed access to better transportation—not only to ship plows out, but to ship materials in. In the early days he had to get his steel from England. (A story for another day.)
The John Deere Historic Site is located on the land where Deere lived and worked in Grand Detour. It includes the actual Deere house as it existed before the family moved to Moline, an enclosed archeological dig of his blacksmith shop with attached exhibits and a brief film, and a working blacksmith shop built to the dimensions rediscovered in the dig. Tours of the site begin whenever there are guests. (Touring the site without a guide is not an option. Tough on those of us who like to pause and think about the exhibits.) The Deere story is told with a slightly different emphasis at each of the three stops. In addition to being interested by the story, I was fascinated by the fact that the tour guides consistently “first-named” Deere and his wife—something I haven’t seen at other historical sites. It gave feeling of intimacy, as if the Deere family were their neighbors. As I suppose they were in some ways.***
The blacksmith shop was the high point of the visit, which is entirely appropriate given that the story of the Deere plow begins in his blacksmith shop. I’ve seen many blacksmiths give demonstrations of their craft/art/science but it never fails to enthrall me. There is something truly magical about the process. The blacksmith on duty during our visit to the John Deere site, named Lloyd, was one of the best I’ve seen, not simply because of his considerable skill with the metal but because of the breadth of knowledge about steel, implements, and smithing.
In short, the John Deere Historic Site is well worth a stop if you’re near Dixon, Illinois (the biggest town near Grand Detour).
*If you want to read about our earlier trips, search by Great River Road, or check in the category Road Trip Through History.
**My Own True Love is originally from South Bend, home to the Oliver Chilled Plow, which also claims to have helped “tame the prairie.” He wanted to know how the Oliver plow related to the Deere plow. The docents he asked did not know—not surprising since we were at the John Deer Historic Site, maintained by the John Deere Foundation. So I took a little dive down a very small rabbit hole once we got back to the hotel room. (And why not, I ask you?) The Oliver plow was made of chilled cast iron, using a process developed in 1869 and patented in 1873. It was cheap, durable, and well-designed to use in any type of soil. It, too was a smash hit with farmers. In fact, for a time the Oliver Chilled Plow Works was the largest plow manufacturer in the world, with the trademark “Plowmakers for the World.”
***This might not have caught my attention at another time, but I am currently struggling with the question of whether to call a historical figure by her first name. It is a fraught question, particularly when you are writing about a woman. I spent some thinking about this question in my newsletter, back in December 2020. I’m not sure I have progressed in my thinking since then.
____________________________________
Travel Tips:
1. Dixon is home to Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home, as opposed to his birthplace which is further down the road. We decided we weren’t prepared to take an hour-long tour of a house only a little bigger than the one I grew up in. You might decide differently.
2. There is another, much larger, John Deere museum in Moline, Illinois. It is well worth a visit if you’re interested in agricultural history or big machinery. (I’m not being sarcastic. We spent several hours there on a previous trip to the Quad Cities, long before I started this blog. It was fascinating.)
Poland’s “May Coup”–1926
These days I am deep in the history of the years between the two world wars. Some of it was familiar at the point that I began, at least in broad outlines. But the fact of the matter is that a whole lot of history happened across Europe in those twenty-one years that never popped up in my historical studies, formal or otherwise.* Some of those stories are inherently small. (*Coughs: Free State of Fiume. *) Others, like the story I’m going to share today, are not so small. I’ll share as many of them as I can here over the coming months. Taken as a whole they create a much richer picture of just how unsettled Europe was between 1918 and 1939. **
Let’s go:
At the end of World War I, the Republic of Poland was established as an independent country after more than a century of being divided at various times and various ways between France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, and the Russian Empire. Independence was not all beer and sausages. Under the leadership of nationalist hero Jozef Pilsudski,*** the new country was faced with a ravaged economy, extensive war damage, border conflicts with the Russian Red Army and a political blank slate.
In 1921, Poland adopted a constitution modeled on that of the French Third Republic, with a president and a two house legislature. Like its contemporary, the new Weimar Republic, the Republic of Poland was unstable, with supporters of a democratic republic challenged by the nationalist and antisemitic National Democracy party. The country’s first president was assassinated by a supporter of the National Democracy party only five days after taking office. Pilsudski helped stablise the country through a second set of elections, and then retired from active politics. What he did behind the scenes was another story.
By 1925, public unrest was increasing thanks to the government’s inability to solve problems of hyperinflation and mounting unemployment. At the same time, some terms of the recently signed Locarno Treaties appeared to threaten Poland’s independence, or at least leave it without allies in the face of potential German aggression. Pilsudski became increasingly critical of the elected government and eventually issued statements demanding the elected cabinet’s resignation.
On May 12, 1926, Pilsudski marched on Warsaw at the head of several units of the Polish army. His forces captured bridges over the Vistula River, effectively isolating the city, and demanded the resignation of the cabinet. After three days of urban fighting, the president and prime minister resigned in order to keep the coup from escalating into a full-scale civil war. A new government was formed in early June, with two of Pulsudski’s cronies as president and prime minister. Pilsudski refused to form a government in his own name, taking the position of minister of defense instead. In fact, he was the most influential politician in Poland until his death in 1935 and did his best to protect his country against a German invasion.
There are echoes in this story of things that were happening in Germany, in Italy, in Fiume. No wonder Sigrid Schultz and her comrades regularly reported that there were rumors that war was in the air.
*While there are plenty of holes in my historical education that I find shocking, that’s not what I’m talking about here. The simple fact is that the more you learn about history, (or anything else for that matter), the more you realize you don’t know.
**There will still be holes, because that is the nature of the beast.
***There should be several diacritical markers in his name, but the last time I tried to be correct about Slavic language markers the software that sends blog posts to email subscribers went on strike.****
****You didn’t know you could subscribe? There are subscription blocks for both this blog and my bi-weekly newsletter at the top of the sidebar if you read this on a computer. I haven’t figured out to make them work on a telephone yet.