I am working up a research proposal to identify all the tenants who lived in Minneapolis’s oldest house between 1853, when the first family moved out, and 1905, when the Hennepin County Territorial Pioneer’s Association bought it with the intention of turning it into a museum. Today I stopped in the special collections room at the Minneapolis Central Library to read through a 1983 research report, newspaper clippings, and other materials about the history of the house.
To my surprise, an article published in the February 13, 1927, issue of the Minneapolis Journal carried the headline, “DO YOU REMEMBER SPHIKENSHPOKENBLUNGGERFUNGGER? He Was Listed in First Minneapolis Directory of 1859, Preserved at Godfrey House.” I will be relying heavily on the Minneapolis city directories for my research, so I already know my way around them. When I checked the city directory from 1859-60, sure enough, there was Hans Von Shpikenshpokenblanggerfungger. According to the directory, he resided, on Main Street near the sidewalk.
Snipped from Commercial Advertiser Directory, for St. Anthony and Minneapolis; To Which Is Added a Business Directory, 1859-60 (St. Anthony and Minneapolis: H. E. Chamberlain, 1859), pg. 118.
Who was Hans Von Sphikenshpokenblunggerfungger? He can’t be found in any census records. Was this a case of atrocious spelling of a long German surname? Was it the whimsical alias of a local comedian? The 1927 newspaper article provides the answer. “Hans was really a joke of the publishers. He never existed save in their fancy, but his name was a byword in the pioneer homes of the time.” Perhaps it was a derisive nickname used by Yankee residents for German and Scandinavian immigrants in the city (though there wen’t that many yet in 1859; most residents were from New England or upstate New York).
The moral of the story is, you never know what real or fictitious people you will run across when doing genealogy research!
I recently led my mom and the rest of my immediate family on a fun day exploring family history in our own backyard. We toured of part of the region to which my mom never thought she had any special connection: the city of Minneapolis.
My mom always knew she had deep roots in Minnesota, especially to the city of St. Paul and its suburbs. She grew up in St. Paul. Her mother grew up there. Her maternal grandfather worked for years in the stockyards in South St. Paul. My mom also knew that some her father’s French-Canadian ancestors had lived in St. Paul’s northern suburbs of Little Canada and Centerville for generations, and she had an inkling a few of them had once been in St. Paul, too. (Indeed, one family was among the very first to stake claims in the future state capital in 1837, and in 1841 they donated half the land for the Catholic church that gave the city its name.)
When I first asked my mom and her brothers if we had any direct ties to Minneapolis—the western “twin” of the Twin Cities—they didn’t know. They didn’t think so. I was disappointed by that answer. I grew up in the western suburbs of the Twin Cities. When we went into “the city” for a concert or a baseball game or the farmer’s market, it was almost always to Minneapolis not St. Paul. My dad worked in one of the skyscrapers in downtown Minneapolis. When people from outside Minnesota asked me where I was from, I usually said Minneapolis. As I researched my mom’s family, I wanted to have some relationship to the city’s history. That’s where the action was when I was growing up. That’s where most of the action has been for a century and a half.
Since the 1850s, Minneapolis has been the beating heart of the regional economy. While St. Paul grew into a major city because it was the head of navigation on the Mississippi River and the state capital, Minneapolis grew even bigger because it had the Mississippi River’s only natural waterfall. St. Anthony Falls powered the city’s industries, transforming it into a global saw- and flour-milling superpower by 1880. Its mills processed grain from southern and western Minnesota and the Dakotas and timber from the vast north woods. (Recognizable brand names from this era of Minneapolis history include Pillsbury and Gold Medal Flour.) If my family’s collective memory was all we had to go on, then our family story remained peripheral to the story of Minneapolis. They lived in St. Paul and in the metropolitan area’s agricultural hinterland, but not in industrial Minneapolis.
Minneapolis skyline and west bank riverfront from across the Stone Arch Bridge. Note the Gold Medal Flour sign above the old Washburn mill complex. The ruined building next to that is the former Washburn A Mill, built in 1880, now home to Mill City Museum. Photograph by author, 2008.St. Anthony Falls from the Stone Arch Bridge. The geological setting beneath St. Anthony Falls is precarious. Indeed, it threatened the existence of the falls itself. In the late 19th century the falls was put beneath a concrete apron to stop its natural upstream erosion. Photo by author, 2008.
However, as I researched our LaBelle ancestors (the surname my mom and uncles were born with), I discovered that, in fact, three generations had lived, worked, fell in love, and died in the heart of the Minneapolis Mill District over the course of more than thirty years.
What follows is, first, a narrative of my family’s ties to the St. Anthony Mill District of old Minneapolis, and second, a rundown of the LaBelle family history tour on which I recently led my family.
Coming to Minneapolis
The story of the LaBelle migration to Minneapolis is long and complicated. I won’t detail it all here. It was a case of serial migration that lasted at least thirty years, from 1848 to 1878, and included three generations of migrants. The patriarchs were two brothers, Pierre (b: 1799) and Alarie Lebel (b: 1801). (The name had been spelled Lebel in Canada ever since Nicolas Lebel arrived in New France in 1654. LaBelle became the standard form in the U.S.) The migration started from a single spot—their family farms near Gentilly, Quebec—but it ended in towns across the northern United States. Descendants of Pierre and Alarie helped construct the final stretches of the transcontinental railroad in Wyoming, logged and sawed timber in northern Wisconsin, ran a saloon and grocery store in Bay City, Michigan, and became laborers and carpenters in Minneapolis. One descendent named George LaBelle ran the largest automobile-based transportation company in the Twin Cities in the mid 1920s and in 1928 was a founding partner in the Allied Van Lines cooperative.
My direct ancestral line brought up the rear. Patriarch Alarie Lebel was already an old man—a 65-year-old widower—when he first came to the United States in 1866. It appears he was cared for in turn by his various children. He settled first with the family of his son Uldorique (Roderick) in Brown County, Wisconsin. That’s where some of Alarie’s nieces and nephews (Pierre’s children) had settled in the late 1840s. By 1880, ol’ man “Alarie” had moved to Bay City, Michigan, where his daughter Adeline and her husband Patrick Pelletier ran a grocery store. Only in 1881, when Alarie was 80 years old, does he show up in the Minneapolis city directory for the first time. By 1881, Minneapolis made the most sense for Alarie to be cared for by his children. In the preceding decade, his children Ovid, Noah, Philonese, Olive, and Roderick had all moved to the city.
Alarie’s eldest son Ovid Lebel (b: 1831) is my direct ancestor. It appears he was the last member of the family to leave Quebec. My hunch is that Ovid was in line to inherit the family farm in Gentilly. Word from relatives must have convinced him and his wife Rosalie Goudreau that they could do better in America. Or perhaps Ovid believed he needed help caring for Rosalie, who began showing symptoms of some sort of mental illness in the early 1870s. (More on this below). Ovid and family came to the United States between 1875 and 1877, settling first in Houghton County, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula, and then trickling into Minneapolis during the summer and fall of 1878. Among the children Ovid and Rosalie brought with them was their sixteen-year-old son Ferdinand (b: 1862), my great-great-grandfather.
A Hard Life Along the Riverfront
Ovid LaBelle’s obituary, published in Minneapolis’s French-language newspaper Echo de L’Ouest, 13 Jun 1913. On microfilm at the Minnesota Historical Society.
The LaBelles needed work and Minneapolis needed workers. Upon arriving in the city, Ovid’s family moved straight into the heart of the mill district on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Ovid and the couple’s older sons found plenty of work as day laborers. The family couldn’t afford much for living quarters. In fact, the LaBelles’ first residence in Minneapolis was the oldest house in the city. Ovid’s 1913 obituary states quite clearly (in French) that “35 years ago he resided in the Godfrey House, the first house constructed in Minneapolis.”
Nowadays, the Ard Godfrey House is preserved as a museum, a memorial to the earliest Euro-American settlement at St. Anthony Falls. In 1848, prominent early Minnesota businessman Franklin Steele hired Maine native Ard Godfrey to build the first dam and commercial sawmill at the falls. As part of the deal to bring Godfrey west, Steele agreed to build a house for Godfrey and his family. According to a 1983 report on the house’s history, two French-Canadians, Charles Mousseau and James Brissette, built the small but surprisingly spacious five-bedroom home for Godfrey’s family to live in. The house stood on the east side of the river in an area that would be incorporated as the city of St. Anthony in 1855. The Godfrey family vacated the house in 1853 in order to move across the river to Minneapolis. There Ard Godfrey built a new home and mill just below Minnehaha Falls. (St. Anthony and Minneapolis merged in 1872.)
When the LaBelles arrived in the late 1870s, the Godfrey house remained in practically its original location near the riverfront. By then the dense St. Anthony mill district had been built around it. Nobody yet cared that the house was historic. It was simply old and probably a little rundown. It certainly was not in a desirable location. The area was noisy and dirty. On the same block could be found two iron foundries, a machine shop, and a warehouse, according to an 1885 Sanborn insurance map. Yet the fact that the home had five bedrooms and was close to so many industrial jobs made it a suitable boarding house. Newly arrived immigrants piled in family upon family.
When the 1880 census was taken, 28 people from six families were enumerated at the one and only address on the 100 block of Prince Street (site of the Godfrey House):
Ovid and Rose “Label” and five children
Oliver and Mary Juneau with three children
Ovid and Rose’s son Edward Label with his wife Josephine and three children
Ovid and Rose’s son Alfred Label with his wife Adele and one child
Joseph and Caroline “Belajah” [Belanger?] with two children
“Joashem” [Joachim] and Adeline “Turvil” with two children. Joachim Duteau dit Tourville was Ovid LaBelle’s maternal uncle, the younger brother of his deceased mother Genevieve.
All of the adults in the house had been born in French Canada. The adult males were all recorded as laborers. Since city directory listings for 1879 and 1880 suggest Ovid and Edward LaBelle had not moved from their original address in the city and since we know the Godfrey House was on the 100 block of Prince Street, we can safely conclude that these 28 people were all living in the Godfrey House in 1880. Each family probably rented a single room in the house while sharing use of the kitchen wing.
Cropped from 1880 U.S. census, Minneapolis election district 231, pg. 23. Accessed on Ancestry.com.
Another resident of the Godfrey House around this time was Zephirin Poisson (b: 1853), a French-Canadian man who also hailed from Gentilly. In America, he usually went by the name Frank Fish. His address in the 1879 Minneapolis city directory—Prince St. near 2nd Ave. SE—is identical to the address given for Ovid, Edward and Noah LaBelle. Zephirin’s first wife, Delia Tourville (b: abt 1849), was a daughter of Joachim and Adeline. Delia died in 1882, and in 1883 Zephirin married his second wife, Ovid and Rosalie LaBelle’s daughter Olivine (b: 1867). The LaBelles, Tourvilles, and Poissons obviously knew one another going back to Gentilly, but I suspect Zephirin and Olivine first noticed one another while they both lived at the Godfrey House in 1879. In any case, when Zephirin and Delia moved out of the Godfrey House later that year, they moved just a couple blocks east, to 419 Southeast 2nd Street, where they resided with several other members of the LaBelle family: Louis, Noah, and their families, as well as patriarch Alarie when he arrived in Minneapolis in late 1880 or early 1881.
The LaBelles were obviously poor. Ovid’s next residence near the corner of Polk and Winter Streets, where he lived continuously (with one exception) from 1881 to 1896, was first recorded without a street address simply as “near the junction of the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railroad.” Old city maps show that the house was literally in the middle of a railroad junction. Several other listings mention that Ovid lived “in the rear of building” at that address, which likewise suggests poverty. The railroad junction still exists, but the street grid has long since been removed for safety. Polk St. and Winter St. no longer intersect.
Davidsons’ Pocket Map of Minneapolis, 1886, with annotations for LaBelle residences mentioned in the text. Original at Hennepin County Library. Digital version online at Minnesota Digital Library.
Sudden Passions
Ovid’s wife Rosalie Goudreau LaBelle also moved to the house by the railroad junction in late 1880 or early 1881. However, her stay was much shorter. Rosalie suffered from some kind of mental illness. She was diagnosed with dementia, though I suspect modern doctors would call it something else. Since the early 1870s, she had been a difficult person to live with. She sometimes broke out in “sudden passion[s]” and “threaten[ed] others with injury.” Barely a year after they settled in Minneapolis, in December 1879, the family sought to have Rosalie committed to the state and placed in an insane asylum. She was committed by the probate judge but remained at home with her family until 1883. On June 29, 1883, she was sent to the Minnesota Asylum for the Insane in St. Peter.
Doctor’s notes tell us that she did ok there in the following years. A note from August 1884 says she was “very pleasant and quiet . . . contented and apparently happy.” A year later she was described as “slightly more irritable” but by 1886 and ’87 she was “fat and hearty” and “fat and happy.” From a modern perspective of mental health, perhaps the most telling indication of her well-being at the asylum was the statement made in 1884 that she “is very quiet but this may in part be due to the fact that no one in the hall can talk French to her.” Social isolation could not have helped her state of mind.
After four years, three months and two days in the asylum, Rosalie was released from the hospital and returned to Minneapolis to live with her family. Her condition had “improved” but she was not fully “recovered.” The final notes, from October 1, 1887, read, “seems pretty well received by friends on trial today,” which I take to mean that her friends and family were happy to see her again when she appeared in court to be evaluated for potential release.
Big Changes
Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, June 2017. Photograph by authorUniversalist Church, 1857. Public Domain, from Minnesota Historical Society via Wikipedia.
The old St. Anthony section of Minneapolis transformed around the LaBelles in their first decade in the city. Between 1880 and 1886 three of the most iconic parts of the St. Anthony skyline were constructed.
First, in 1877, the year before my branch of the LaBelle family moved in, the area’s French Catholics had purchased a twenty-year-old Greek Revival church from the First Universalist Society of St. Anthony and renamed it Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. The church was located a little more than a block west of the Godfrey House on Prince Street and became the LaBelles’ parish church as soon as they arrived. Between 1880 and 1883, the French Catholics significantly reshaped the structure, “adding a transept, apse and front bell tower with three steeples,” according to Wikipedia. It looks much the same today as it did in 1883.
Second, in 1880, a few blocks to the east of the church and directly across the street from the LaBelles who lived at 419 S.E. 2nd Street , construction began on the world’s largest flour mill. Opened in July 1881, the Pillsbury A-Mill remained the world’s largest flour mill for more than 40 years. I try to imagine the awe the LaBelles must have felt as they watched the six-story behemoth rise from the shoreline. I wonder whether they participated in the intricate dance of workers, machinery, and railcars that took place every day as tons of grain were shipped in and thousands of barrels and sacks of flour were shipped out of the mill. I envision conversations they had about how different their lives were in Minneapolis than they had been on that small farm in Gentilly.
Finally, the most eye-catching structure on the St. Anthony riverfront was built right next to the Godfrey House in 1886. In 1885, Minneapolis boosters organized an industrial exposition fair to be held the following year. Minneapolis had just lost out to St. Paul as the permanent home of the Minnesota State Fair, and Minneapolitans wanted to show off the industrial power of their city. A mostly vacant square between the Godfrey House and Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church was chosen as the site of the new Industrial Exposition Building. The building was completed in August 1886, and the initial 40-day fair attracted almost 500,000 visitors. The building later hosted the 1892 Republican National Convention. However, like so many showpiece buildings constructed for big events rather than long-term functionality, the exposition building struggled to find a purpose after the fair exhibitors left in 1893. The Exposition Building was torn down in 1940. (Wikipedia)
Industrial Exposition Building photographed from Pillsbury A Mill ca1890. I have highlighted the Godfrey House. Public domain via Wikipedia Commons.St. Anthony Falls and east riverfront, ca1905. Stitched together from three Library of Congress Negatives. Public Domain. The Pracna building, home to the bar Pracna since it was built in 1890, becomes relevant later.
At the start of 1887, the St. Anthony skyline was rather impressive. The LaBelles no longer resided in the Godfrey House, but most of them still lived in St. Anthony, within a few blocks of their original landing spot. They continued to attend Our Lady of Lourdes Church.
Life and Death
Rosalie returned from the asylum to the LaBelle household in the fall of 1887. She had missed the wedding of her daughter Olivine in 1883 and son Cyrille in 1886, but she returned in time to see three more of her children tie the knot. Daughter Celina married Edward Wilson ca.1889, son Ferdinand wed Rosalie Roy in 1891, and daughter Ermine married Victor Langlois in 1892.
My great-great-grandfather Ferdinand took a different occupational path from most of his siblings. After his brothers toiled all day as laborers packing bags of flour into railcars at the Pillsbury Mill or as lumbermen guiding river-borne logs into the city’s sawmills, they could stop by the saloons of Adolph Eisler or Solomon Robitshek and find Ferdinand behind the bar. Ferdinand worked as a bartender in Minneapolis for at least a dozen years and perhaps as many as twenty years. It was at one of these establishments (or a nearby restaurant) that he met his future bride.
A copy of Ferdinand LaBelle and Rosalie Roy’s wedding picture in author’s possession. Ferdinand and Rose are in front. The two behind are their friends and witnesses Carrie Beaudette and Louis St-Armand.
Rosalie Roy, or Rose King as she sometimes anglicized her name, grew up on a farm in Corcoran Township, twenty miles northwest of Minneapolis. Rose moved to Minneapolis to find work when she reached adulthood. A family story says she met Ferdinand at the restaurant where she worked. Perhaps the story confused which half of the couple worked in food service or maybe they both did. Perhaps they even worked at the same establishment. Unfortunately, Rose never appears in a city directory as an independent young woman, so the family story is all we have to go on.
I like to think Ferdinand and Rose hit it off because they could each tell stories about the challenges of living with mentally ill parents. Family stories passed down the generations tell us that Rose’s mother Desanges (Bolduc) Roy wept every time an animal was killed on the farm. We may sympathize with her desire not to harm animals, but such feelings did not make for a very good 19th-century farm wife. Rose’s father Elzear, we are told, went “religious crazy.” His religious fanaticism got so bad that his wife and children eventually drove him out of the house. He disappears from records after 1880. I think I have identified him in Minneapolis in 1888 and in Copley near Bemidji in 1900, in each case working as a teamster. But I can’t be 100% certain the records are for the same Elzear. In any case, Rose could match Ferdinand for stories about a dysfunctional home life growing up.
Ferdinand and Rose’s wedding took place at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. Their first five children were baptized there during the 1890s.
Ovid LaBelle watched his family grow exponentially during the 1880s and 1890s. But along with marriage and birth comes death. At least a dozen LaBelle children in Ovid’s extended family died young during the 1880s and 1890s, including Ferdinand and Rose’s daughter Delima. Ovid’s father Alarie Lebel, patriarch of the family, died in September 1890, age 89. After decades of living with his various children, Alarie’s final year was spent in a Minneapolis “inmate home for the aged.”
More surprising was the death of Ovid’s wife. Almost as suddenly as she had returned, Rosalie (Goudreau) LaBelle died. I was incredibly fortunate to find Rosalie’s death in the parish register of Our Lady of Lourdes (on microfilm at the Minnesota Genealogical Society). The books containing the parish’s burial registers before 1910 are lost. However, a single sheet of paper—two facing pages—survives from one of the older books, containing the last few burials of 1892 and most of 1893. Rosalie’s death was first one recorded in 1893. (Two other LaBelle relatives are listed on the second line of each page: Emma Bazinet, daughter of Calixte Bazinet and Olive Lebel [Ovid’s sister], and Dolphis, son of Joseph Lebel and Anne ??? [Ovid’s nephew Joseph and his wife Eleanora, per cemetery records]).
Riverfront property was valuable property , so Our Lady of Lourdes did not have its own cemetery. Most if not all of the LaBelles who died in Minneapolis were buried in St. Anthony’s Cemetery. The cemetery is located on the 2700 block of Central Avenue, two-and-a-half miles north of the St. Anthony Falls riverfront. It was the primary burial ground for Catholics of many nationalities who lived in the old St. Anthony part of Minneapolis. Remarkably, none of the LaBelles buried at St. Anthony’s Cemetery has a gravestone, They were apparently too poor to afford such luxuries. Perhaps the graves once had wooden crosses, but if they did they have long since disappeared.
Lost History
Two events obscured all of this Minneapolis family history from later generations. First, in late 1899 or early 1900, my great-great grandparents Ferdinand and Rose LaBelle decided to return to their agricultural roots. They left Minneapolis behind to purchase a small farm near Centerville in Anoka County. That farm is where my great-grandfather Alfred LaBelle was raised and where the family linked up with other French-Canadian families that had been in Centerville for several generations. Al had been born in Minneapolis. His baptism is recorded in the parish register of Our Lady of Lourdes. But Al was just an infant when his parents moved to Centerville, and it seems he never knew where he had been born.
Second, in March 1913 Ferdinand’s father Ovid LaBelle moved from Minneapolis into the Centerville home of another of his sons to live out the remainder of his life. He died two months later. Though Ovid had spent most of the previous 35 years in Minneapolis, he died and was buried in Centerville. Ferdinand and Rose are also buried there. To anyone taking just a cursory look back at this family line, it appeared they had always lived in Centerville.
Retracing Their Steps
Two weeks ago, I took my wife, daughter, and parents on a fun day exploring all of this history. Here’s a rundown of what we did, beginning with with two images for reference.
St. Anthony Falls and east riverfront, ca1905. Stitched together from three Library of Congress Negatives. Public Domain.I marked up this screenshot from Google Earth to match up landmarks with the 1905 photo and to show where we went on our walking tour of old St. Anthony Main.Pillsbury A Mill, June 2017. Photograph by author.
Tour of the Pillsbury A Mill.
We started the day with a 90-minute guided tour of the Pillsbury A Mill led by staff from the Minnesota Historical Society. Located less than two blocks east of the Godfrey House’s original location, the Pillsbury A Mill was the largest flour mill in the world when it was constructed in 1881. It held the title for decades thereafter. The 1881 city directory lists several LaBelles, including patriarch Alarie, at 419 2nd Street SE, across the street from the magnificent new mill. The mill has recently been remodeled into artist lofts. It was an A+ tour, and it looks like an amazing place to live.
Lunch at Pracna.
Pracna is the oldest bar still in operation in Minneapolis. It opened for business in 1890, which means Ovid, Ferdinand and/or Rose Roy might have dined there. In fact, considering they coexisted for so many years in the same neighborhood, I am confident one or more of my ancestors had a drink at Pracna more than a century ago. In the 1905 photograph snip below, it appears Pracna was build right next to the Godfrey House. However, Pracna sits on Main Street, while the Godfrey House is half a block back on Prince Street. Ferdinand never worked at Pracna, but since he spent about 20 years as a Minneapolis bartender, I had a drink in his honor. (I ordered a Hamm’s, the most historic local brew on the menu. It was first brewed in St. Paul in 1865.)
Tour of the Ard Godfrey House.Ard Godfrey House, June 2017. Photograph by author.
The Godfrey House is still standing after 168 years, though it has been moved three times in order to preserve it. It now sits in Chute Square, about a block from its original location. The Woman’s Club of Minneapolis owns the house today, and it is open for guided tours on summer weekend afternoons. As I described above, through sheer genealogical fortune, I believe I identified all of the boarders in the Godfrey House in 1880. Though I wasn’t looking for answers about the Godfrey House, since the records about my own family paint a fairly clear picture that they were there, I knew I could help the Woman’s Club fill in the story of the house. When we visited, I donated copies of the documents that link the LaBelles to the house. I also included a copy of an 1885 Sanborn Insurance map and a few parish records from Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church that help show how both the LaBelles and the house fit into the greater community during the 1880s.
Attempted visit of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church.
We tried to visit Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, but our timing was poor. Saturday afternoon around 2:00 is prime wedding time at a Catholic church, and we chose not to saunter down the aisle in our shorts and t-shirts admiring the architecture in the middle of their ceremony. A plaque outside the church says it is located near the spot where Franco-Belgian Father Louis Hennepin became the first European to see the falls of the Mississippi in 1680. Father Hennepin named the falls St. Anthony after his patron saint Saint Anthony of Padua.
Drive past the former Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged.
Now remodeled as an apartment complex, the former Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged was where Ovid LaBelle spent his final years, excepting the last two months when he moved to Centerville. The Home was both yet another legacy of the family’s poverty and a reminder of how much private charities helped out in an era before Social Security. (Location)
St. Anthony’s Cemetery.
To restate what I wrote above, land along the Mississippi River shore was prime real estate, so most churches in old St. Anthony did not have their own cemeteries. LaBelle patriarch Alarie died in 1890 and was buried there. Ovid’s wife Rosalie Goudreau LaBelle died in 1893, and I have to believe she was buried there too. Ferdinand and Rose LaBelle lost an infant daughter named Melina later in 1893. She was also buried there. In fact, more than 15 LaBelles were buried in the cemetery during the 1880s and 1890s. Astonishingly, NONE of them have a headstone or a marked grave of any kind. The families must simply have been too poor to afford them. The only evidence for their presence at St. Anthony’s comes from the cemetery’s register of burials, which ocassionally matches up with surviving parish records from Our Lady of Lourdes.
Stereotypes are often created in order to demean certain groups of people. There is usually a kernel of truth behind them, to be sure, but in serving their more sinister purpose most stereotypes blow that kernel out of proportion and/or unjustly link it to other unsavory characteristics. Eventually, though, some stereotypes become little more than a harmless joke.
Original illustration, Atlas des plantes de France, 1891, Autor A. Masclef. Wikimedia Commons.
Take the Irish and potatoes. Even before potato famine of the 1840s, the widespread reliance of Irish tenant farmers on potatoes became the source of a handful of derogatory nicknames and slang among the English. (Even the word Irish itself was used as a mocking adjective.) Worse nicknames welcomed the more than four million Irish refugees who migrated to America before, during, and after the potato famine, including several based on potatoes. These stereotypes were far from harmless. Violence and political repression faced Irish Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic, and they were often considered a different race of people altogether. (Unfortunately, little has changed. We still see almost rabid hatred applied not to those who abuse power and wealth, but rather to those who are poor and seeking refuge.) Stereotypes were a way of not-so-subtly reminding everyone about the existing power dynamic—the Irish were second-class citizens. Behind the name-calling was an implicit threat of something worse.
But as we’ve seen repeatedly among oppressed groups of people, the Irish found solidarity in the very things that made them stand out. They took pride in eating potatoes and in re-creating a sense of community at the local pub. Eventually—it took at least a century—descendants of Irish immigrants integrated into broader American society and no longer bore the brunt of nativist sentiment. Light skin certainly helped. (Some Americans, including many Irish immigrants and of some of their descendants, found other groups to fear and to hate.) Still, despite all the pressure to assimilate completely, certain aspects of the Irish cultural legacy lived on, including a diet rich in potatoes.
Basil Jordan, lover of potatoes, 1943.
In the Irish part of my family, the potato stereotype held fast and true. If anything, it grew stronger in America. My mother has fond memories of her grandparents Basil and Isabelle (Daly) Jordan. They were both American-born, but they retained important aspects of their Irish heritage. According to my mother, Basil loved potatoes. “No meal is complete without a potato,” he always said. And he meant it. He might have a fried potato for breakfast, boiled potatoes with his lunch, and meat and potatoes for dinner. He once told my mom she looked too thin (she has never had this problem) and should eat more potatoes.
Isabelle’s family, too, had deep, tuberous roots in Ireland. In fact, what prompted me to write this post was a recent discovery about Isabelle’s maternal grandparents, William and Mary (Cramsie) Reynolds. I was working on an article about the Reynolds family for an upcoming issue of The Septs, the quarterly publication of the Irish Genealogical Society International, when I came across a sale notice for the Reynolds’ farm in The Derry Journal. It was January 1881, and the family was preparing to leave County Derry for America that spring. With only a trunk or two to carry their most necessary and valuable possessions, William and Mary had to sell not just the farm land but almost everything on the farm too: livestock, stored crops, farm implements, household furniture, and more. They ran a modest farm and, as Catholics, were in fact fortunate to own the land they cultivated. Among their modest possessions, one thing caught my eye. According to the sale notice, “The Crop consists of Three Stacks Oats, a large quantity of Hay and Straw, and about Twenty Tons of Potatoes, of a superior quality.” It was true! Here was proof that some of my Irish ancestors grew—and apparently subsisted on—tons and tons of potatoes and little else, even thirty-five years after the Great Hunger. Twenty tons of potatoes was more than enough to carry the family of two adults and five children through winter with some to spare.
A final point. It’s worth remembering that many of the foods we identify with certain ethnic groups reflect not just voluntary cultural choices, but choices imposed by poverty. Irish peasants ate mostly potatoes and milk because they could afford little else. When we ask, “why did the Irish eat so many potatoes?” our answers are partly to be found in English colonization and the confiscation of land by Protestants. Held in poverty, most Irish Catholics could afford nothing but the potatoes they grew on their small plots of rented land. William Reynolds’ parents Frederick James Reynolds and Mary Hasson were apparently quite poor. They had emigrated separately to America in 1848, arriving in Philadelphia with little more than the clothes on their backs. (Philadelphia was not a welcoming place for Irish immigrants in the 1840s. When and why Frederick and Mary Hasson Reynolds returned to Ireland and how they acquired land there are some of the questions raised in my article.)
Like the Irish and potatoes, African-American “soul food” reflects a history of oppression. “Soul food” developed from slave cooking in the American South and, after the Civil War, in rural and urban poverty throughout the U.S. While we take pride in all the creative ways the Irish found to cook potatoes and the genius of African-Americans to create “soul food” from scraps, we must remember that if given the choice most of these people would have preferred the varied diets, unusual flavors, and luxuries (like sugar, tea, coffee, and better cuts of meat) that were eaten by the upper classes.
When we think about our cultural inheritance from ancestors in such groups, we ought both to celebrate the perseverance and resourcefulness embodied by their cuisine and recognize the systems of power that limited their culinary (and nutritional) choices in the first place. It’s OK to be both proud and upset by the truth of your family history. So have a laugh when you find proof that the kernel of a now-harmless stereotype turns out to be true, but remember that such stereotypes usually have deeper, more sinister histories. Consider this fact not just when researching your own family’s immigrant ancestors but also when you look at your neighbors today.
Our ancestors were just as political as we are today. The issues may have changed—do you care more about currency backed by silver or about immigration and terrorism?—but voting is as important as ever. Since today is another monumental presidential election in the U.S., I thought I should write a short post about how genealogists can learn about the politics of our ancestors, using a few of my own relatives as examples.
The power of democracy
As the America nation expanded geographically during the 19th and 20th centuries, so too did the number of people who could vote. Through grassroots activism and the hard work of many individuals, earlier limits based on property, race, and gender gradually fell by the wayside. This ever-expanding democracy was one of the “pull”-factors that enticed millions of immigrants to the United States in the past two centuries. The immigration process can sometimes offer us our first tantalizing clues about our ancestors’ politics.
First of all, the date our ancestors left their homelands might suggest that they had a certain political affiliation in their native country. For example, 17th century migration from England to America happened in waves that were directly tied to changing political conditions in England: most notably the Separatist and Puritan migrations to New England between 1620 and 1640 and the Royalist “Cavaliers” who settled in Virginia during the English Civil War of 1642-51. Likewise, several German and Bohemian families in my ancestry left central Europe during the late 1840s and early 1850s, a time when political retribution was common after the failed revolutions of 1848. For people seeking a more liberal, democratic form of government, America was an obvious choice. If your ancestors were among these particular groups, you’ve got a good starting point for understanding how their political (and religious) beliefs fit into the context of their times.
I think it can also be suggestive to consider how long it took our immigrant ancestors to become U.S. citizens once they arrived. Some of them declared their intent to become a citizen within months after first setting foot on American soil. Others waited years, and some never even tried. Their haste (or not) in becoming a citizen gives us a clue to how engaged they were politically. Becoming a citizen meant earning the right to vote (if they were white and male, depending on the era). But just like today, some people were apathetic about participating.
My 4x-great-grandfather Abraham Pattison immigrated in May 1861, settling near Madison, Wisconsin. Not long after, in October 1862, he declared his intention to become a U.S. citizen. He was eager to participate in American politics at a critical moment in American history. According to his son Henry, Abraham wanted to join the Union army but his wife implored him to stay home. In the end, they compromised. Abraham stayed in Madison, but he helped train and organize official recruits at Camp Randall before they left for the battlefronts.
Parties and issues
It is often quite difficult to know who our ancestors voted for or why. (Indeed, the secrecy of the ballot is one of its key features.) But sometimes you’ll stumble across a document that provides clear answers about their political opinions. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to have ancestors in some of the few places for which voter rolls have been digitized. But even if you can’t find your ancestors in those records, you’ll probably still be able to learn something about their politics.
Abel Dunham (1819-1899) and his first wife Rachel Harding (1816-1886). Photo shared on Ancestry.com by user RDunham35.
Some of our ancestors were outspoken about particular issues, and their views were recorded in newspapers or county histories. For example, one of my ancestors, Abel Dunham (1819-1899), was an outspoken abolitionist. His staunch Republicanism is noted in every county history sketch about Abel or one of his children. One sketch (of two) in Past and Present of Pike County, Illinois, reads in part:
Mr. Dunham was a prominent abolitionist, doing everything in his power to suppress slavery, and when the Republican Party was organized to prevent its further extension he became one of its stalwart advocates. Later he was again connected with a party of reform—the prohibitionist, for he was an earnest advocate of the cause of temperance and in fact his influence was ever given on the side of progress and improvement and for the amelioration of the hard conditions of human life.
Similarly, searching through newspapers I came across an article that helped me and my wife understand the political sentiments of her great-great-grandfather Erhardt Lenhardt (1844-1929). Lenhardt was a well-to-do immigrant brewer in Litchfield, Minnesota. Amidst the heated debates about currency leading up to the presidential election of 1896, Lenhardt was noted in the St. Paul Globe as one of the “influential Democrats” who had thrown their support behind Republican nominee William McKinley and the policy of “sound money.” It was an unusual position; most Democrats supported “free silver” that year. Indeed, “free silver” was the primary campaign issue for Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan.
Why did Erhardt Lenhardt cross party lines with his support? As it turns out, Lenhardt had invested $15,000 in a municipal bond from the state treasury department in 1895. He had a lot to lose if the value of the state’s fixed interest payments were reduced by inflation. Thus, the picture comes into focus. As a businessman and investor—more specifically as a lender—Lenhardt risked losing money on his investment if a flood of new (silver-backed) currency entered the economy and depreciated the value of each dollar he was supposed to be repaid by the state. That was enough for him to overlook other Democratic policies he might have supported and Republican policies he may not have liked.
Political affiliations often pass from one generation to the next (although I’m sure we all know of counterexamples). One line on my Irish side voted Democratic for several generations, even as the party itself gradually moved from the right to the left on many issues. Abraham Pattison’s son Henry ran as a Democrat for Wisconsin state assembly from Pepin and Buffalo Counties in 1914. (He lost badly, receiving less than 15% of the vote.) As something of a consolation, two years later a Democratic senator named him postmaster for the city of Durand.
Some of Henry’s children and grandchildren were even more involved in the Democratic party. Henry’s grandson Basil Jordan (1902-1983), my great-grandfather, worked in St. Paul Union Stockyards in South St. Paul, Minnesota. He helped organize a labor union there. My grandmother remembers him hosting clandestine meetings at their house in St. Paul when she was a little girl. (The Twin Cities were a hot spot of labor activity during the 1930s, and the stakes were high.) Basil wasn’t a socialist or a Communist, just an everyday working-class Democrat who supported organized labor.
Photo courtesy Mary Ann Pattison.
Basil’s brother Tom Jordan was raised by his grandparents Henry and Kate Pattison. As an adult, Tom was an active Democrat. He owned and operated the Prindle Inn in Durand, Wisconsin, and he sometimes invited Democratic politicians, including President Kennedy, to stay there. Finally, here is a picture of Henry Pattison’s youngest son Francis “Fal” Pattison with sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey. I don’t know the story behind the photo, but the political affinity fits with what we know about the Pattison family.
Most of our relatives weren’t influential enough to be photographed with national political figures. Others, like journalists and judges, were ostensibly obligated to be keep their political views private. To give a final example using yet another Pattison, Henry and Kate’s son George Leo “Judge Lee” Pattison, spent 32 years as an elected judge in Buffalo County, Wisconsin. His job demanded impartiality, and George was proud of his track record. Though from a staunchly Democratic family, he was first appointed by a Republican governor. Perhaps most suggestive of his impartiality, he never had a decision overturned by the state supreme court.
To sum up this post, celebrate the fact that we live in a democracy and that you have the right to vote. Then get out and find the compelling political stories in your family’s past. What issues mattered to your ancestors? Did any of them run for or hold elected offices? Can you figure out for whom they voted and why? It’s a fascinating search, and it’s less trivial than it first appears. I think it helps inform the present. Most of us have ancestors with a wide range of political beliefs. (On my dad’s side are relatives who have been Republicans for as long as the Pattisons have been Democrats.) Just like today, it is more useful to try to understand why these people valued what they valued than to dismiss them out of hand for belonging to a particular political party.
This post is the first in a brand new series called “You Died How?” in which I investigate bizarre and unusual deaths in my family tree. For more about the series, read this.
A poor French-Canadian
The first unfortunate soul in our exploration of unfortunate deaths is my great-great-grandfather Oliver Delphis Dupre.
Oliver usually went by some version of his middle name: “Dolphis” or “Adolphus.” He was baptized May 6, 1881, at St. Genevieve Catholic Church in Centerville, Minnesota. Located about 18 miles north of St. Paul on a chain of small lakes, Centerville is both the name of a township and the small village within it. In 1847, Dolphis’s grandfather Olivier Dupre (1830-1914) had migrated from Sorel, Quebec, to St. Paul—then part of Wisconsin Territory—with his maternal grandparents and aunts and uncles. A few years later Olivier became a pioneer settler in Centerville. By the time Dolphis was born, Centerville had grown into a small but vibrant French-Canadian community. Even though all of his family had been in the U.S. for more than 30 years before his birth—indeed, both of his parents had been born in Minnesota—Dolphis grew up speaking mostly French.
Fast forward. In October 1917, Dolphis was 36 years old and had a wife and eight children to look after. They still spoke French at home. His eldest child, my great-grandmother Alice, was 14. The youngest, a baby girl named Rosella, had just been born in July. The family lived precariously on a small rented farm near Forest Lake, Minnesota.
Dolphis had never been rich. He began his working career as a day laborer in Centerville. He married Mary Emalina “Lena” Marier there on April 15, 1902. Around 1906, he and his young family moved a few miles north from Centerville to Forest Lake, where they lived in an unfinished house by the railroad tracks. My great-grandmother Alice, born in 1903, remembered the house this way in an autobiography she wrote in old age:
This house by the track had one big room downstairs where the cooking and eating were done. One part where we ate was the living room. The bedrooms were upstairs and the only petitions [partitions] were curtains on a wire. The house wasn’t finished—only two-by-fours. I can remember seeing my Dad’s violin hanging on the wall. He played it quite often and we liked that.
The Dupres were poor. Trying to survive Minnesota winters in a house without insulation must have been miserable. But Dolphis apparently kept his family in good spirits with music on his old violin. He probably played old French folk songs; two of his great-grandfathers had been voyageurs, and they would have sung some of the traditional rowing songs to their children and grandchildren.
In Forest Lake, Dolphis worked as a teamster for the American Grass Twine Company, which owned thousands of acres of swampy grassland west of town. Each day, he drove a team of horses and a reaper through mucky fields of razor-sharp wire grass. The cut grass was dried and sent to St. Paul where it was turned into wicker furniture and rugs. Some of Dolphis’s brothers-in-law worked in the fields with him and his father-in-law worked at a nearby stable. For all of them, pay was at most a few dollars a day. (Here’s a great post on another genealogy blog about the wire grass industry near Forest Lake.)
Some time in the early 1910s, Dolphis quit the Twine Company. He and Lena rented a farm near Forest Lake. “It wasn’t modern of course,” recalled Alice, “no electric lights, only lamps, had to bring in water from the pump and for cooling and heating we had wood stoves, so there had to be plenty of wood cut, ahead [of time].”
Farming was hard work.
We led a happy life there on the farm but it was a lot of work for my mother [Lena]. In order to cook she had to get the kitchen range quite hot before she could cook and most of the time it was three meals a day. She had big washings and a lot of ironing. When I was old enough I would help. My father [Dolphis] had help too[.] [H]is Dad stayed with us[,] and now and then his brother (my Uncle Evod & his wife Stella) would come for awhile especially in the summer.
When Alice wrote about her childhood, she was never very clear on the dates. But her uncle Evod, Dolphis’s youngest brother, married Stella Bernard in June 1915, so we have a good idea when these particular memories were from. Evod and Stella probably lived at the farm with Dolphis and Lena for most of the summers of 1916 and 1917.
Was it an accident?
We know Evod was also visiting in October 1917, when the fateful event occurred. I’ll let Alice explain what happened.
In the fall it was potato picking time. After dinner my Dad and his brother Evod went hunting in the woods near by, they would hunt just about every day while my Uncle was with us visiting[.] [W]ell on October 16, 1917, they hunted again at the same place and were gone only a short time when we all heard a loud yell and my mother ran across the plowed field, she felt there was something wrong. She didn’t come back right away, and sure enough my Dad had been shot and she had stayed with him until he died. His brother said his glove hooked the trigger and that’s how my Dad was shot. It was a shock to all of us. My Grandpa hitched up the mules and went for a coroner in Forest Lake. The mules must have sensed what had happened, they surely took off fast, very unusual for mules to go so fast. My Dad was taken away and we were all pretty upset, that night and after that. We didn’t know what we were going to do.
Alice’s narrative continues, “My Uncle was questioned for a few days, trying to figure out if it was an accident. He was questioned right at the house. They must of found out it was an accident because the questioning was over.” Indeed, Dolphis’s death certificate confirms that officials had deemed the shooting an accident. The family story passed down the generations that Evod was leaning his gun against a fence as Dolphis climbed over, and that’s when his glove caught and pulled the trigger.
Dolphis Dupre’s death certificate. I had a devil of a time finding it because it was not properly transcribed in the Minnesota death index. I blame Dr. E. E. Wells, the coroner, and his unorthodox handwriting.
Alice’s memories of the visitation are even more vivid. The forensic evidence she describes supports Evod’s story of accidentally firing his gun while leaning it against a fence.
Then my Dad was returned to the house, in those days they viewed the body at the house. I was always afraid of the dead. Just before my Dad was to be buried my Mom had me come to the coffin even though I didn’t want to but she begged me and I finally looked at him, he looked so nice but he had a bebe mark on the side of his chin and Mom said he (my Dad) was shot in the stomach but the bebe[—]or I should say a bebe[—]came out there. I was 14 so I remember quite a few things especially when Mom wanted me to touch him she had to take my hand, he felt cold.
Dolphis was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Forest Lake three days after his death. I took this photo of the gravestone in 2014. (Note: This is the only record of any kind that has “J” as an initial. I think bad, loopy cursive “O” was probably misinterpreted by the stone’s designer.)
Consequences
Most of the deaths I will write about in this series had serious consequences for the surviving family members. The Dupres were hanging on by a thread as it was. Without Dolphis, they were in trouble.
Though Lena was only 33 when she was widowed, she never remarried. She carried her family through the most difficult times on the strength of her own hard work and the help of her older children. Lena and her eight children moved first into a house they rented on the cheap from her sister and brother-in-law Angeline and Jim Patrin. Then they moved in with Lena’s parents. Finally, they settled into another rental not far from “Uncle Jim’s place.” Alice was 14 and therefore old enough to be responsible for the younger kids. Lena started working for money. As Alice recalls,
My Mom got a job for a while at the hotel in Forest Lake[.] [S]he could walk there. I took care of the kids and when there was extra soup left over the hotel keeper would give it to my mother and she’d take it home and of course with 8 mouths to feed the soup disappeared fast, it was so good. Then she bought a sewing machine on time (sic) and sewed for ourselves also for others.
The 1920 census shows that 16-year-old Alice was earning money as a servant for a family in town while 15-year-old Roy worked odd jobs for petty cash. They had become the family’s breadwinners.
Occupations of Lena Dupre and her children according to the 1920 U.S. census of Forest Lake, Minnesota. Screen shot from Ancestry.com.Alfred “Al” LaBelle poses on his Harley-Davidson, ca. 1920. What a stud. (Sorry for the bad photocopy. It’s all I have!)
Being the oldest child was hard on Alice. She never said so in her writing, but it is clear she subconsciously sought a way to ease the burden on herself and her family. A nice young man would do the trick. Her uncle Jim was into motorcycles, and “one day he brought a friend along.” The friend was Al LaBelle, 20 years old and proud owner of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “We went together three months,” she remembers. “Al kept coming to see me and we got married June 14, 1920.” Alice now had her own breadwinner, and her departure meant one less mouth to feed at home.
Alice had found her escape. She had also demonstrated the path each of her younger siblings would follow. As they reached their teens, they went to work for money to support their mother (and eventually their widowed grandfather, too). In 1930, for example, Lena’s 19-year-old son Walter worked as a truck driver in the construction industry, but he still lived at home. 18-year-old son Clarence worked odd jobs like Roy had once done. Everyone in the family sacrificed to get by, but thankfully no one starved or otherwise died as a direct result of Dolphis and Evod’s hunting accident. (The only other noteworthy death was Dolphis and Lena’s daughter Pearl, who died of diphtheria in 1925, age 16 .)
What were they hunting?
I find the whole story fascinating. It’s not just knowing how Dolphis died, but understanding through Alice’s narrative what his life and death meant for the family. The only detail I thought was missing was what animals the two brothers were trying to kill when the stray bullet found Dolphis instead.
I went searching through newspapers in hopes of finding the answer. A death notice or obituary might say more about the circumstances of his death. I came up empty with the first couple papers I searched. I feared his death might not have been printed anywhere since working class foreigners (as French-speaking Dolphis and his family were often considered by the dominant class of Yankees and high-achieving German-Americans) didn’t receive much notice in those days. I did, however, note the high volume of fatal duck hunting accidents recorded in the newspapers that October.
One of the duck hunting accidents stood out to me for several reasons. First, it was national news covered in every paper I checked. Second, it involved someone I knew from my family tree. And third, it was eerily similar to the Dupre death story. On October 21, five days after Evod accidentally shot Dolphis, U.S. Senator Paul O. Husting (D-WI) was killed. He was out duck hunting with his brother on a lake in east central Wisconsin. With ducks in sight he called fire, sat up slightly in the boat, and took the full charge from his brother’s shotgun square in the back. This death was also deemed an accident. I recognized Husting from my genealogy research as the Senator who in December 1915 had nominated my 3x-great-grandfather Henry Pattison to be Postmaster of Durand, Wisconsin.
Stillwater Daily Gazette, Wednesday, October 17, 1917, pg. 3.
In any case, I was prepared to accept that Dolphis’s death had not been recorded and move forward with the presumption that he also died hunting ducks. Then I checked the Stillwater Daily Gazette out of Stillwater, Minnesota. There it was. “Dolpha O. Dupre Accidentally Shot by Brother While Hunting Rabbits.” The short news story doesn’t add anything to Alice’s account, except that they were hunting rabbits. It ends with a somber reminder of the accident’s consequences: “the deceased leaves a widow and eight children, the oldest 14 years of age, to mourn the loss of husband and father.”
I shared this latest discovery on Facebook with a bit of humor—I mean, who dies hunting bunny rabbits?—and my friend Courtney chimed in to remind me. “How very Elmer Fudd,” she wrote. Touche. Considering how my research transpired, this clip seems appropriate.
The first unfortunate soul in our exploration of unfortunate deaths is my great-great-grandfather Oliver Delphis Dupre.
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