1947 Martha Miller

1947  Grandmother Martha Miller, relation to Andrew and Mattie, early Millers in America, Sarah (Salli) Hochstetler considered a Native American, how Martha met Martin, a young bride and unusual marriage, keeping the children in the church; Nora Wingard’s cautionary story of white slavery; John Howard Yoder studies the ban, Andrew J. Yoder’s Meidung lawsuit in Wayne County, Ohio; the Russian Mennonite Exodus from Soviet Union and Berlin, Germany; Martha’s renown as tailor and seamstress.  

My father Andrew was close to his mother, perhaps a kind of eldest son stand-in for an absentee father. My mother Mattie also had high regards for her mother-in-law Martha, perhaps in part for shared life experiences. Both had lost their mothers before the age of ten, hence at a young age needed to grow up with many household duties. They learned many life and work skills at a young age. And both my mother and Martha loved a young man named Andrew. Her formal name was Martha, but her commonly-used name was Mattie, sometimes Mart Mattie, and we children called her Miller Mommy. She was a devout Christian, a caring mother, and an outstanding tailor and seamstress.

Martha got off to a good start with my mother at my parents’ wedding, much as Martin got off to a bad start. Martin decided not to come to my parents’ wedding, because he said, the pig pen needed to be cleaned that day. My mother’s explanation was that Martin had been host for his daughters’ weddings, but with his son Andrew’s marriage, there was only room for one rooster in the coop (my mother’s phrase), and this time it fell on her father Levi. But ever the positive responder, my mother, the young bride, prepared a plate of wedding food to be sent home for her absentee father-in-law. But Martha would have none of it; noting that if Martin did not have the time to come to the wedding, neither should anyone have the time to send him food and a piece of the wedding cake.

When we lived at the Hummel place, Martha was within easy buggy riding distance, and she kept in contact with our family. Even when we moved to Holmesville and were at a greater  distance, she helped us out in our time of need. In the winter of 1953 when both Mother and Father had the German measles, in fact the whole family was sick with the measles, she came up to our house and stayed with us for about a week, feeding and nursing our family. Perhaps I remember it all the more because that was the end of Martha’s visits in my childhood memory.  The following year my parents left the Amish church, and whatever Martha’s desires, the religious and cultural constraints cut off further visits.

My grandmother Martha grew up in a farm family near the town of Charm and within a half mile of where Martin lived. My aunts remember how Martha told them of young Martin walking and driving along the road (currently Township Road 156) past Martha’s place. He would call out and whistle at her, but the young girl would simply look down in modesty. Martha’s parents were Jacob M. and Barbara (Coblentz) Miller, and Martin’s were Jacob A. and Mary (Schrock) Miller. The fathers were often called Mike Jake and Andy Jake, and both Martha and Martin descended from the immigrants John Hannes Miller Sr. (1730-1798) and Magdalena (probably Lehman). The immigrant John is often called Indian John in the family histories because he was a neighbor when an Indian party attacked the Hostetler family during the French and Indian war.  

Although the story has iconic status as a lesson in nonresistance in the Amish Mennonite community, I will not retell it here because it is readily available in family histories and historical novels. In any case, the immigrant John had a son John Jr. who was born around 1752 and married to Freny Yoder; they lived near Meyersdale, Pennsylvania, Somerset County. Their offspring David Miller (1779-1840) and Elizabeth Troyer (1781-death date unknown) moved to Holmes County in 1814 with the first wave of Amish settlers into the area. Martin and Martha were between third and fourth cousins.

Oral history has Grandfather Martin’s great-grandmother Sarah (Salli) Hochstetler (1795-1875) being a Native American who was adopted as a child by the Hostetlers, and my father actively promoted this version of our ancestral history, calling his granddaughters Indian maidens. Andrew noted the high cheek bones in a remaining photograph of Sarah Hochstetler’s granddaughter Mary Schrock (1869-1909), my father’s grandmother. Andrew also believed he was genetically wired to prefer sleeping outside in the open air, another Indian trait. His Holmesville neighbor and Budget scribe Monroe Weaver held to the same theory and was said to have a certificate verifying as much--making my generation of Millers 1/32 Indian. Or as my brothers have occasionally noted, enough Indian blood to begin a Holmes County casino.  

Suitor Martin’s calling to the modest young Martha must have been successful, eventually. Martha and Martin were married by the Brethren minister Josiah Hostetler on April 28 of 1909 in the Dunkard (Brethren) meetinghouse at Bunker Hill near Berlin. If a Brethren marriage seems a little unusual for Amish young people, so were the steps which led to the marriage. Martha and Martin went to the Holmes County probate judge Richard W. Taneyhill in Millersburg to apply for a marriage license, in my Aunt Nora’s recall, “a man of few words.” Judge Taneyhill took down Martin’s name, address and birth date; he was 23 years old. Then he took down Martha’s vital information, but when she gave her birth date, April 25, 1895, and age, the judge looked up, sighed and said, “No, this cannot be. Are your parent’s living?” Martha would be three days past her fourteenth birthday when she got married. Yes, Martin said, her father is. Judge Taneyhill responded: “Well, we cannot go any further without him.”  The couple then went outside and summoned Martha’s father Jacob who signed giving permission for his young daughter to marry.

However unusual even scandalous the marriage seems today, everyone made the best of it. It was probably helped when contrary to local gossips’ suspicions, it was not an obligatory marriage because of pregnancy. Martin and Martha made proper amends in church and normalized their situation as a couple; she was baptized and they united their lives as members of the local Amish church district. Aunt Nora’s interpretation would add that Martha was unusually advanced and mature for her age, having already learned many homemaking skills, and that Martin about ten years her senior had unusually good tastes and wisdom in finding such a fine young girl for his wife. 

Martha was a devout Christian and at her funeral at the neighboring Sharby Atlee farmstead, when I was about 12 years old, the minister talked about her final godly wish that all the children would be part of the church; she meant the Amish, of course. The minister wept, and I knew he was talking about our family who by that time had joined the Mennonites. Actually, Martha and Martin did quite well as seven of her nine children joined the Amish church, and she has over one thousand thriving religious offspring of her communion in the Holmes-Wayne County and Shipshewana, Indiana, community today.  

Along these lines, Nora, Martha’s second oldest child, often told a haunting cautionary story for remaining Christian and Amish coming out of her teen years while working at the home of John and Mary Elder, a dentist and optometrist in Millersburg. An eighteen-year-old in 1931, Nora worked from Monday to Saturday as a live-in maid. One Monday when she went to the main highway 62 to catch a ride from Berlin to Millersburg, Nora was picked up by a truck driver who soon tightly gripped her wrist. To her fright, she was riding with a total stranger she had mistaken for a local driver. He began asking her questions: did she often take rides with unknown people? What was in her suit case? And why was she wearing a black dress?  Then the story takes an ominous note when the driver points to a large red boat he is pulling, calling it “the devil’s trap.” Still gripping her wrist, the driver says he is traveling to Louisiana where he has a recreation house along the shore, and he takes the boat out for recreation on the large bay.

Nora says that in her mind the stranger might as well have said he has a “white slavery house.” Her heart beating fast, Nora offered a silent prayer, “Lord, help me.” The driver finally asked her about her black bonnet, and Nora says it represents “our church, our belief.” Asked about the money she earns, Nora said she takes it all home: “I told him of my Father’s misfortune, and for my earning the bread for a family of ten.” Increasingly aware of his unusual passenger, the stranger asked about Nora’s nationality, to which she responded: “Well, we believe in God and the Holy Spirit. I’m now taking instructions for baptism in Jesus Christ.” They arrive at the Holmes County Courthouse square; the man admits he had planned not to let Nora off, but he slams his brakes and soberly said: “Goodbye little girl, I’ll never see you again, not on this side and not on the other.” In describing this incident later, Nora poetically ended that “the sound of wheels were lost in the distance.”

Martha’s desire that her children remain faithful in her church, whatever its ethnic and familial yearning, was also based on strong religious beliefs, dating back to the origins of Amish church in 1693 when the Amish and Mennonite factions emerged from the Swiss Brethren. One made an adult commitment to be baptized and to become a member of the church and to renege on that life-long vow was to subject oneself to the ban, social avoidance, or in German called the Meidung. At its best, the purpose of the discipline is to call a straying or excommunicated member to repentance. If one submitted to the church, all well, but if not, in biblical language, one has become a publican and a sinner, and the church calls such a one to repent and return to the fold. Most of the time, these issues are handled internally with little fanfare such as when the ministers came to visit Martin and Martha before the semi-annual council meeting and reminded them that having musical instruments in the house was not within the ordnung.  

However, sometimes the ban spilled out into public issues, even entering the courts. In November of 1947, an unusual trial was going on in Wooster, Ohio. Andrew J. Yoder, a former member of the North Valley (Helmuth) District Old Order Amish Mennonite congregation of southeastern Wayne County, Ohio, brought a lawsuit against the ministers because he had been shunned after he had transferred his membership to the near-by Bunker Hill Beachy Amish Mennonite Church. Yoder had made the change already several years earlier because he said he needed a car to drive his infant daughter, Lizzie, who needed frequent medical attention to the doctors and to medical attention at Wooster which was sixteen miles away.  The Beachy Amish permitted automobiles and met at the same Bunker Hill meetinghouse where Martha and Martin had been married almost 40 years earlier when it had been used by the Dunkards (Church of the Brethren). 

In any case, Yoder with the legal aid of attorney Charles C. Jones of Wooster, sought $10,000 in damages from each of the four ministers in the Helmuth District for the Amish church’s boycott against him and the denial of his civil rights. A jury trial was held with the four Amish ministers appearing in court; the jury awarded Yoder $5,000 of the $40,000 he sought in damages. As might be expected, the four ministers did not voluntarily pay, and a sheriff sale was held for the farm of bishop John Helmuth and the balance was paid by an anonymous donor.  

This unusual case caught the attention of twenty-year-old John Howard Yoder who grew up in the Oak Grove Amish Mennonite Church. Yoder had just graduated from Goshen College in two years and while awaiting an international relief assignment with Mennonite Central Committee was working in the family business, Yoder Brothers greenhouse in Barberton, Ohio. Yoder used this case to write his first scholarly paper to be published as “Caesar and the Mediung” in the Mennonite Quarterly Review.  Although Yoder is better known for his apologetics for Christian pacifism, closely related is his defense of a visible and accountable church of which the Amish provided a vivid example. Yoder provided a logical and analytic study of the court case, but notes that he believes it is inevitable to have some conflict between the law and a church which had ethical commitments.

Second, Yoder argued for the ban in principle, even if he may not agree with the way it was sometimes applied in the Amish church or in this specific Yoder case. In a sense in the article, Yoder became the theological and legal attorney the unlettered Amish ministers never had at the trial.  Yoder made several points which were to characterize his later thought, one of which was that the church could not be divided into neat spiritual and material functions.  Andrew Yoder was offended because the Amish consistently extended the spiritual breach into the material world, and he therefore sued the church for being consistent to its own self-definition. Yoder concludes: “I am led to agree with the Amish that Yoder was free to be a member of the church, and he was free not to be a member of the church, but he cannot claim the freedom to be at the same time both a member (economically) and not a member (religiously); for participation in the Christian social fellowship is not thus divisible.”  

Yoder would soon leave for Europe and here one of the most remarkable happenings in twentieth century Mennonite history would occur in Berlin, Germany.  The Berlin exodus as it became known to Mennonites around the world was an operation to help over a thousand Mennonites trapped in the Soviet-controlled sector of Berlin move to western Germany and Paraguay. At the end of the Second World War, many German-speaking people from the Soviet Union, including many Mennonites, followed the German army in its retreat westward. As the refugees who survived the trek reached Germany, North American and European Mennonites began to organize food, housing, and re-location for them. The relief agency Mennonite Central Committee became involved along with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. 

Peter and Elfrieda Dyck of the Mennonite Central Committee managed the refugee camp and coordinated the emigration process. If repatriated to the Soviet Union these Mennonites would have faced almost sure exile to Siberia or an early death or enslavement within the Soviet regime. The Dycks worked with Lieutenant Colonel W. B. Stinson, the American Chief of the Displaced Persons Division in Berlin sending lists of the refugees to the Russians, pointing out that according to the Yalta agreement, anyone who was not a war criminal, deserter, or collaborator should be allowed to leave. The negotiations of transporting over a thousand people through the Soviet zone seemed on and then off during the Christmas season and January until on 30 January 1947, word came that the Soviet official Marshal Sokolovsky had cleared the Berlin group for travel.

Within hours, the Mennonite refugees packed their bags and despite several delays, the group reached the train on time and arrived at the port in Bremerhaven safely. Of the 1,115 people who escaped from Berlin, most of them boarded the ship Volendam and headed for a new life in Paraguay. For the Mennonites who managed to flee from Soviet communism to the West, the Berlin exodus was seen as a miracle: “Now Thank We all our God.” They compared it to the biblical Hebrews exodus escape through the Red Sea from the Egyptian bondage. Despite the many trials and disappointments on the way, the Mennonites were thankful that they had managed to escape to freedom in the West.

Martha Miller probably paid little attention to these next county Wayne or next country Germany Mennonite experiences. Still, her church community had a long memory of gratefulness for being able to flee persecution in Switzerland and Germany coming to America, and she would have heartily agreed with John Howard Yoder regarding his definitions of the church. But mainly Martha kept on sewing (economically) and nurturing (religiously) her large family. Vocationally, one could hardly overstate Martha’s skill and achievement as a seamstress. She was widely known among the Amish for her skill in what my father called “made to measure” suits and clothing. Given her husband’s work patterns of being away all week and his problem with alcoholism, Grandma Martha became the primary parent, care-giver and the glue who kept the family together. Earning a modest income from her work, a kind of family tailor shop, she and the young adult children kept the large family economically afloat during the difficult 1930s Depression years.

Plain folks from far and wide came to have Martha sew suits and dress clothes for them. She would measure them, and my father made her a wooden chest where she kept the patterns. The chest was in my mother’s house until her death, and now sits in our great room. Although Martha was universally remembered by her children as easy-going and kind-hearted, she could also discipline errant youngsters, the chosen form being to order a child to time-out in the dark closet under the stairs. My father recalls that the other children sometimes called for mice and rats thus adding another layer of severity and perhaps humor to the punishment. But these were exceptions to harmony. The Miller children were good singers and musicians, and the children often sang together in the evenings at home, at school and at social gatherings. Grandma Martha had an accordion under her bed which she would play in singing with the children. It was a singing family in the non-perfection folk tradition; it was devotion, harmony, hope and goodwill through difficult times.

Sources on Grandmother Martha come from oral conversations with family members such as Aunt Ruth (Yoder) and Betty (Weaver). Grandson Aaron and I spent a day in 2009 visiting the Martin and Martha Miller homestead and burial sites. Also, Andrew Miller’s “Some Memories and Reflections on the Mart [Martin] J. Miller and Martha (Mattie) Miller Family” in Jacob A. Miller Heritage and Story 1864-1983 (privately published family history by Dorothy Hostetler Raber and others, 1983, pages 4-5). Nora Wingard’s white slavery story “A Trying Experience” is in Family Record of Jacob M. and Barbara (Coblentz) Miller 1861-1991 by Sarah Mae Miller (privately published, ca. 1991, pages VIII-X). As a youth I often heard variations of this young maiden saved from white slavery story among the Amish and conservative Mennonites; it was a cautionary story intended to convey the safety of remaining in the non-conformed church tradition and wearing the prayer veiling and plain clothes. Background on Martha and Martin’s courtship and marriage comes from Aunt Nora Wingard’s nine-page family letter she addressed to my brother Paul A Miller on July 22, 1996; the letter is in the Andrew A. Miller Collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana. In the marriage license incident Judge Estill is generally named in family accounts, but the 1909 judge was Richard W. Taneyhill, probate judge from 1882 to 1913, from a May 13, 2010, e-mail from Glennis Menuez, administrator of the Holmes County Probate Court office; background on the early Millers in America appears in J. Virgil Miller, Anniversary History of the Family of John “Hannes” Miller Sr. 1730-1798 (Morgantown: Masthof Press, 1998). Daniel E. Hostetler explores the historicity of Grandfather Martin’s great-grandmother Sarah (Salli) Hochstetler (1795-1875) being a Native American in “Do the Hochstetlers have Indian Blood? Part 2,” Hostetler Family Newsletter (June, 1997, 8-9). My father Andrew placed an ad in The Budget, (Sugarcreek, Ohio, April 8, 1992) stating: “It has only recently been verified that Mary Schrock’s grandmother was a full-blood American Indian adopted girl adopted by an Amish family of 14 children in Pennsylvania and was married to Andy Schrock of Holmes County, Ohio.” My father mentioned that Budget scribe Monroe Weaver had a certificate with this verification, but I never saw it. John Howard Yoder’s study of the Andrew J. Yoder lawsuit, “Caesar and the Mediung” appears in the Mennonite Quarterly Review (April, 1949, pages 76-98). The Berlin Exodus story in summary form appears on GAMEO, the Mennonite on-line Encyclopedia as “Mennonite Escape.” Fuller versions of the story are told in the juvenile’s story Henry’s Red Sea (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1955) and in the Dyck’s Memoir’s Up from the Rubble (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1991).  

1946 Levi L. Schlabach

1946  Grandfather Levi L Schlabach, family’s martyr history, arrival in America, Levi’s optimism and family tragedy, death of Sarah Troyer, her children Roy, Mattie, Clara; marriage to Susan Raber her children Melvin, Abe, Katie, Mary; the work ethic; life during the depression; farm animal and food specialties; hunting; Mennonite beginnings in Puerto Rico.

My grandfather Levi L. Schlabach was born in 1893 during the year that Frederick Jackson Turner gave his famous lecture entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" before the American Historical Association in Chicago. Grandfather Levi died in 1979, one year before a cowboy-themed president Ronald Reagan occupied the White House. When my Grandfather Levi (L.L.) was born, about 8,000 Amish lived in the United States, when he died there were closer to 80,000. In many ways, the twentieth century was the American century; it was also the Amish century. Yes, dear reader, that historical sweep is too much territory for one Amish Mennonite life in Holmes County, Ohio, but in many ways my grandfather L.L. (as we knew him) lived elements of this national and religious story.

But some background. The Schlabachs trace their history to 16^th century Swiss Anabaptists and later with the Amish and the Mennonites. A cousin Ervin Schlabach traced the European roots of the Schlabachs all the way to an Anabaptist martyr ancestor named Jacob Schlabach. Our ancestor Jacob Schlabach appears to have been banished from Bern Switzerland in about 1660, returned and was imprisoned. He died in prison at about age 85 in the early 1670s, a martyr for his faith in the last of the Anabaptist persecutions in Switzerland. He missed making the Martyrs Mirror which was published as a first edition already at mid-century, or a decade earlier, 1660. In addition, Ervin Schlabach believes and gives some evidence that Jacob Schlabach is the likely author of one of the martyr hymns in the Ausbund (806).  

The Schlabachs came to the Americas in 1819 when John and Christian Schlabach, the sons of our immigrant ancestor Christian Schlabach Sr. (1751-1840), came to Pennsylvania. The brothers sent favorable word for the rest of the family to join them, and a year later, the two brothers were joined by their father Christian Sr. and five other children in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. By the mid-1820s the Schlabach family including our own ancestors Jacob (1786-1863) and wife Barbara Yoder (1756-1856) had moved westward to Walnut Creek Township in Holmes County’ where they are buried within a mile of where L.L. was born. My cousin Ervin Schlabach searched for the Anabaptist martyr roots of the Schlabachs, and I recall his felicity when he reported his discoveries. The martyr memory, however, was less pronounced to L.L. and his family, at least by the mid-forties when I was born. By then L.L. had become quite at home in a democratic and free American context. L.L. was expanding his farming (by this time he had bought a second farm near Millersburg) and helped start a Swiss cheese cooperative. We were no longer martyrs. Our distinction, according to L.L., was mainly that we were Levites, of the ancient Hebrew priestly tradition.

Ervin Gingerich, author of the Ohio Amish directories, said that he remembers L.L. well and when he moved from Walnut Creek over to Sharp Run district near Berlin with the little children—Roy, Mattie and Clara, Ervin said L.L. was an emotional person who might be found joking and telling stories with his friends and would also weep deeply when ministers told dramatic and moving stories in their sermons. We have a photo of L.L. and Sarah Troyer as a handsome young courting couple, he with an eager and hatsauftig (vigorous) expression and she with the gentle face of the Troyers. L.L. and Sarah were married in 1914 in the Amish church at age 21 so they would have been baptized probably about a year before then and joined the Amish church. It was probably a hurried marriage because Sarah was pregnant.

L.L. was an optimist and positive, but he also knew sadness and tragedy. His young wife of twelve years and mother of three, Sarah Troyer, died in a fire on Christmas morning at age thirty-four (see chapter 1944). Already, L.L. and Sarah had buried two infants, and now L.L. was alone with three young children all under the age of ten. By 1946, his last son who would carry his name Levi Jr. was born with Down Syndrome. L.L. was the father of what social workers would later call a blended family, but in L.L.’s case, the term hardly fits. There were two families, the family of the three oldest children from Sarah Troyer; and then the five children of Susan Raber.

The Schlabach Troyer children were close to each other in age and also in life experience.  However difficult the fiery loss of the young mother to L.L. and his children Roy, Mattie, and Clara, they only had positive things to say of their father and of the home during those times until the arrival of Susan Raber. My mother recalls a bereaved father who was kind to his children, cared for them physically, and comforted them emotionally. The children had nightmares (not hard to imagine after having seen their mother in flames), and would wake up at night, utterly frightened. They would go to their father’s room, knowing that he allowed his children to sleep in his bed, giving covers and comfort. Sometimes, when Mattie got there, Roy or little Clara had already arrived in the father’s bed. It was not unusual to have all three children end up in L.L.’s bed by morning, with the comforters and blankets to themselves, and the father sleeping on the edge with only a sheet.

In growing up I never heard my mother, Uncle Roy or Aunt Clara mention negative things about L.L. This could especially have been easy for the gentle-natured Roy who became an Amish bishop and the successful humble farmer and father, quite different in nature from his aggressive father. Roy married Iva Mast; Mattie my father Andrew A. Miller; and Clara Noah E. Miller of Sugarcreek. All three of these children lived full lives with stable and complementary mates, and raised large families of their own. Through them, L.L. and Sarah contributed about 200 descendants to the Mennonite and Amish community of the Holmes County Ohio region. Many of the children would be well known in the community as leaders in church, business, agriculture, medicine, education and law.

Three years after Sarah’s death, L. L. married a second wife Susan Raber who came to add another chapter to some of the step-mother stories which had been collected by the Brothers Grimm. Susan arrived at the Schlabach household as a maid or the more common term a hired girl, but before long L.L. married her, perhaps as much a marriage of convenience as of love. I stood beside L.L. when Susan was buried at the Pleasant View Cemetery near Winesburg, Ohio. At the gravesite as they shoveled in the earth, L.L. in a matter of fact tone commented “Dat geht mai Koch. There goes my cook.” L.L.’s second family took unusual turns, especially for the sober expectations of the Holmes County Anabaptist community.

Oldest son Melvin generally had an unhappy relationship with his father and never joined the church. He joined the Marines Corps at age eighteen and served for a number of years during the Korean War, later serving six years in the Air Force and became a decorated veteran. In 2009, he was named Veteran of the Year in Stark County, Ohio. Second son Abe married Suzie Mast and took over the family farm for a short time, but it was not a good fit, and he went on to become a bi-vocational Mennonite pastor for the rest of his life--a minister and a roofer. Katie married a young man of Appalachian heritage, Paul Phillips,  and both became faithful members of the Pleasant View Mennonites near Winesburg. To Katie and Paul’s credit, they both took care of the mentally handicapped Levi Jr. for over three decades until his death in 2009.

The youngest daughter Mary was close to my own age, and I served in the wedding party when she married Eli Yutzy in early 1960s. It was a hastily arranged marriage partly because Eli was of an intemperate disposition and also because Mary was pregnant. Mary and Eli tried to settle down then, and he was even called to become a minister in the Amish church, but to no avail. At about mid-age and after numerous children with Mary, Eli abandoned the family and at last notice lived somewhere down along the Ohio River, while Mary has done the best she could as a single mother and grandmother.

L.L. was positive, energetic and worked hard and that was my main recollection of my grandfather. One time we were waiting in line at a food stand at a farm sale. A family auction often had a food stand (we called it a restaurant) where one could buy hot dogs, soup and drinks. A neighbor made a comment to L.L. about his grandchildren being good eaters; presumably an attempt at a joke, but I heard it as a comment that we were consumers and not producers, and L.L. did too. He would have none of it, and chirped back to the neighbor. “Yep, they are hard workers; they’re all good helpers.” This was the highest honor L.L. could give to us, and it meant something important to us. We had heard from our grandfather L.L., to be hattshaftich and rawsich, hard-driving and energetic workers.

Whether this hardworking trait was a family cultural trait (and in my experience it was), an appropriation of the Weber's Protestant work ethic, or simply a part of our Swiss German rural background, I do not know. But it certainly was carried in our family and community, and none greater than by L.L. And the work ethic was often associated with productive physical activity and not standing around like shopkeepers, paid preachers or teachers or traveling peddlers. My mother and Aunt Clara told stories of Jewish men coming from Akron and Cleveland during the thirties. I do not know whether Jewish was perhaps shorthand for urban, but the designation was always there. In any case, these urban folks were willing to work for a day and to take food along back to their families. Later in life, I would discover that the depression left a deep impression on many families of saving and the fragility of our economic situation.

However the Depression to the Schlabachs was mainly that if you worked hard and had land (presumably without too much debt), God would take care of you. Low land prices were even an opportunity; during the 30s L.L. moved onto a larger farm at Sharp Run (several miles east of  Berlin), and bought a second farm near Millersburg where he raised heifers. Working is a cherished virtue in the Amish community; in fact, as a child it was one of the markers of Amish identity. We worked harder than our English-speaking (non-Amish) neighbors, or at least so we thought. Still, even within the Amish community and our family, L.L.’s work ethic could become contentious.

As a youth, Mickey Schmidt of the former Sharp Run Dairy, worked for L.L. one summer on the farm and in 2007 he said the main thing he remembered was that L.L. really made him work. Mickey responded positively, but not everyone did, including some of L.L.’s own children and my father Andrew. I felt it especially because my father came from a large Martin and Martha Miller family of mystics, singers, seamstresses and craftsmen. For about 14 years, my father worked hard to do the Schlabach norm of farming and paying off our 80-acre farm—in part it always seemed to me in deference to L.L.’s work ethic. He did it in the sense of the young Hebrew Jacob working seven years for Rachel and another seven for Leah; this is what was required to meet the Schlabach family expectations. But after doing his 14 years for what L.L. required for my father’s beloved Mattie, my father then did what was he loved most which was becoming a book seller, a minister, a merchant, and a musician.

Among L.L.’s own children, he had a divide between the workers and those who did not want to work (at least on L.L.’s terms). His first three children seemed to respond positively to this character trait; the latter children not as well. Susan’s oldest son Melvin especially felt L.L. was holding him only to farm work, almost as a slave, when he wanted to pursue other options. When the sixties came along with hippy young people visiting the Amish countryside seeking simple living and counter cultural alternatives, L.L. scorned them for not working.

In 2007, my mother and I visited the burial grounds where the immigrants Christian and Magdalena Schlabach are found between Berlin and Walnut Creek. Here we visited with Jonas Yoder, a direct descendant of the Schlabachs who told us of young L.L. He said that at a wedding when only a few people had arrived, they started singing. The singing was pretty weak at the singing table, and then they saw L.L. in back of the room and they summoned him to come up and join the singers. “Then it went!” he said. L.L. sang with infectious vigor and gusto and everyone joined in. Whatever, L.L. did, he did with great enthusiasm. I may be overstating the working element here, but it was also a quality which today would be called leadership: being sought out for starting a cheese cooperative, leading singing, financial counsel, and organizing a frolic. When my parents put up a pole shed, it was L.L. who directed the swarm of volunteers to accomplish the project in one day. Many people respected him and followed him; others found him overbearing and intrusive.

As a boy in the fifties, I visited L.L.’s farm in the summer when one might spend a week during the haying and threshing season. L.L. had a general 100-acre farm of dairy, layers, sheep and hogs which would have been common during the fifties. But he had some specialties within that farm which seemed to fit his fancy and interest in a certain breed. Along with the white Leghorn layers in the hen-house, L.L. had a small flock of Dark Cornish hens and roosters around the barn. He also kept some sheep, and these were all of a breed called Cheviot, a hardy white-faced English sheep in which he took considerable pride. It was only a small flock of about ten, and when you approached them, they would all turn facing you with the little ears perked up and twitching their noses.

Finally, for hogs, he had Spotted Poland China (he even had a little sign of the hog breed by the lane) which was a black and white spotted hog as the name suggests, today known only as the Spots or the Spotted. He kept most of the hogs in a pen at the end of the lane and along the road with a stream running through the hog pen. Within the hog pen was a building along with a hog house beside the barn. I recall at times helping L.L. to herd a sow or boar down the lane and over a bridge between the two buildings. The pigs must have made a sufficient impression that I made a large wooden Spotted pig toy (painted by Ivan Moon) for our children when they were small. But none of the children had much interest in it, and it has been mainly a safety hazard.

L.L. and Susan also had specialty foods and drinks at their house during the summer. They  would make root beer, and I can still see the dark brown bottles lying in the grass by the garden and warmed by the sun. Root beer was a favorite summer afternoon drink and not far away in the milk house by the barn, L.L. kept some additional harvest season refreshments: real beer, for which little grandsons need not apply. Inside the house, on a shelf one would always find a can of Planters’ Peanuts with a little brown toy man in the shape of a peanut beside them. Another favorite food often found on his living room dresser was a box of chocolate-covered maraschino cherries. In the fall, L.L. and Susan made apple butter in a big copper kettle, and in the winter more treats appeared inside the home and shop attached to one side of the house, and usually unheated. In the winter time, especially around Christmas the shop became a dependable warehouse of chocolates and nuts. A large bulk piece of milk chocolate laid on the counter and one could go and chop off a piece. On another part of the counter were also hickory nuts and English walnuts, and one could crack them and take them back to the main house for eating.    

L.L. had another rural complement to his work ethic: hunting. He went to Michigan and Ontario to hunt for deer, and he had a number of shotguns and a thirty-aught-six rifle which he used for deer. Many of the photos we have of L.L. are with guns or game. When we moved to our farm at Holmesville, he came up and took us grandsons along to hunt small game of Ringneck pheasants and Cottontail rabbits, and then we posed with the kill. Not too far from the Schlabach home place is Raber’s Bookstore, a bookstore where they publish The New American (often called Raber’s) Almanac and where one can get all kinds of German Bibles and books for the Amish home, school and church. In the next building is a gun shop where one can buy and trade guns. Reading and hunting were diversions for L.L. in his working. Ben Raber’s biggest book of over 1,000 pages was the Martyrs Mirror. On the title page of many of the editions of the Martyrs Mirror is a peasant farmer with a spade in the soil, in the background a bird singing, a tree, and a house. The script says Arbeite und Hoffnung, Work and Hope. I always thought the little man in the drawing was my grandfather: Levi L. Schlabach.

A world away from L.L.’s Schlabach’s German speaking Holmes County, his Mennonite cousins were learning Spanish and beginning congregations in the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. In 1946, the Menonites founded churches in the small rural communities called La Plata and Pulguillas, both in the interior mountain range of the island and near the picturesque town of Aibonito. One of L.L.’s Walnut Creek neighbors Carol Glick had already arrived in 1945, learned Spanish and was teaching at the Barranquitas Baptist Academy. Hence, when the newly formed La Plata church needed Sunday school teachers they called on the bilingual Carol Glick.  Several years later, Glick would begin teaching at a school the Mennonites founded in Pulguillas and which was called Academia Menonita Betania (Bethany Mennonite Academy). She worked with the school for many years, and later in her retirement years when the school seemed endangered, returned to give it support by working with the local Puerto Rican leadership.

The first pastor of the La Plata church was Lester Hershey, and he soon expanded the Mennonite mission to the isolated barrio called Rabanal. Here, he and his wife Alta got help from a Preston, Ontario, nurse named Marjorie Shantz who arrived on the island in the mid-forties as a young nurse and would often ride mule back along the narrow mountainous trail to reach the mission outpost. Twenty years later Marjorie Shantz would be a nurse with the voluntary service unit in the barrio of Botijas Numero Uno (1), near Orocovis.  

Another mission volunteer who arrived at Puerto Rico in 1949 was Mabel Miller as a young  Amish woman from Holmes County, Ohio where she would have been known colloquially as Miel Abe’s Mabel. I remembered references to her as a child, and as it turned out, her sister was a well-loved baby sitter for the Roy R. and Berdella Miller family of Berlin. Mabel served till 1951, and then returned to the island regularly as a volunteer at intervals from 1954 to 1961, and finally during 1983 and 1984. Today it may seem unusual for a young Amish woman to enter a Mennonite service program, but at mid-century the cultural differences of the Amish and the Mennonites were not so great, and a number of Amish served in the Mennonite programs. Others in Puerto Rico serving during this period from our Ohio community were an Amish man Elmer Gingerich from nearby Hartville (1943 to 1946) and a young Mennonite physician H. Clair Amstutz and family from Kidron (1945 to 1947).

Finally, a little context for the arrival of the Mennonites to Puerto Rico which had become a protectorate of the United States at the end of the Spanish American War in 1898. In 1942, General Lewis B. Hershey, the director of Selective Service, granted permission for Civilian Public Service (CPS) program to operate in Puerto Rico because it was an American territory. The CPS leaders wanted to work overseas because they felt there would be more significant contributions which they could make beyond the forestry work to which many of them were assigned in the continental United States. They especially hoped to go to China, but when all work on foreign soil was ruled out, they jumped at the Puerto Rico opening.

CPS was a Brethren, Quaker and Mennonite alternative to military service, and the Brethren immediately dispatched the Hartville, Ohio, native Andrew W. Cordier (later a founder of the United Nations) to do an exploratory trip in 1942.  This developed into the three Historic Peace Churches (Mennonites, Brethren, Quakers) beginning programs at three areas of the island. But in many ways the CPS service programs were an extension of the earlier Roosevelt New Deal projects called Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA). The liberal poet politician Luis Muñoz Marín (1898-1980) had brought Eleanor Roosevelt on a well publicized trip of the impoverished island, and they got the island included in the New Deal programs for agriculture and community development and land distribution.  By 1946 Puerto Rican Jesús T. Piñero was named governor of the island, and two years later Puerto Ricans were granted the freedom to vote for their own choice of governor: they elected Luis Muñoz Marín.

Much of this chapter comes from a paper “Levi L. Schlabach and Why Columbus Discovered America” which I read at an Elizabethtown College Young Center conference “The Amish in America Conference: New Identities and Diversities,” June 7-9, 2007. The Puerto Rico Mennonite beginnings come from Justus G. Holsinger, Serving Rural Puerto Rico (Scottdale: Mennonite Publishing House, 1952). Background on Mabel Miller comes from her brother John M. Miller of Dundee, Ohio, via my brother Paul A Miller, June 25. 2010, e-mail. 

1945 Andrew A. Miller

1945  Andrew A Miller, my father’s many abilities, Martin and Martha Miller family, a hunting accident, schooling and   Clarence Zuercher, Martin’s addiction and gifts, a family of singers and music, Andrew’s Christian conversion, family separation and the ban; higher education, Edward Yoder and World War II, Karl and Arthur Compton and Hiroshima.

From my infancy in the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, my father Andrew was a successful small 80-acre Ohio farmer. He and my mother Mattie paid off the Hummel place farm near Berlin, and then we moved to an 80-acre farm east of Holmesville which they cultivated with a small dairy, hogs, chickens, horses and a big garden, similar to other small rural farmers of that time. What seemed to distinguish my father when as a child I became aware of him was that he could do about everything else too.

This admiration is natural for a small child’s awareness, but I thought I had more claims for my father than most. Andrew was first a farmer, but he was also an avid reader, a writer for religious periodicals, an editor of Herald der Wahrheit, a book seller (a bookstore called Goodwill Book Exchange), an amateur musician (singing and playing the guitar and other instruments), roofing and spouting contractor, and a mister-fix-it with any tool. And these were all projects, before the mid-fifties after which many new ones were added every several years. When he and Mattie moved to the Hummel farm in the mid-forties he was in a strong farming phase, even though very little in his family background would have prepared him for this vocation. If my mother Mattie came from the landed yeoman farmer Schlabachs, my father Andrew’s Millers came from a financially impoverished mother-led family of trades and craftsmen who tried to keep food on the table on a three-acre plot and an alcoholic father.

Andrew’s father Martin gave some support to the family by working on the county roadways, much of the time as a machine or grader operator. For many years he drove a Galion road grader or a maintainer, as it was called. In the winter he would cut wood with my father Andrew and brothers Dan and Raymond and also helped him in some hunting and trapping, selling the fur pelts of mink and muskrats. Still Martin’s work seemed to keep him away from home generally a week at a time, and one has some sense of an absentee father.

One of the most memorable events in Martin’s life was when he lost his arm in a hunting accident at age 45. Martin with sons Andrew and Raymond (then 12 and 6 years old) went rabbit hunting, and the gun went off by accident, shooting himself through the elbow. This traumatic event, what with Martin being a bleeder, involved the surgery of removing a part of the arm inside the small house. The children were taken to a next room with the local bishop comforting them, they sang hymns and Andrew said that he saw an angel was sitting on a corner dresser watching over them. In any case Martin lost his arm three inches below the elbow, and became known to the neighbors as One-Armed-Mart.  This tragic event seemed to so define Martin and Martha’s family that during the summer of 2011 when several hundred descendants gathered for a reunion, the details of this accident with all its shock and pain took center stage in telling the family story.

My father recalls that “two years later, as a 14-year-old I took my dad’s place cutting brush and building roads by hand labor through the middle of the winter under President Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration and the National Recovery Act. Every worker got 50 cents an hour, plus surplus food from the government, and you did not have to be poor to get a job.”  One other element about Martin which gave a sad coloration to the family and surely factored into the family’s poverty was Martin’s alcoholism. This was an embarrassment and was not discussed openly by many in the family, but my mother and father mentioned it candidly, especially as a cautionary story on the damage drunkenness does to a family’s well being.

As a boy Andrew seemed to get respite from the family in school and by his love of learning, reading and writing.  He attended the one-room Wise’s school, made friends with the Mennonite John Beechy’s children, especially Mark, and was a teacher’s favorite with his ease in learning.  Andrew was a good student with report cards which show lot of Bs and As and some Cs. His first two grades were with teacher Etta Engle; Grades three and four with Boyd W. Miller and the rest of his schooling with Clarence (C.F.)  Zuercher. Andrew had a special affection for the acclaimed rural teacher and naturalist Zuercher from whom he also learned to play the guitar. And Martin encouraged his son in school, even attending the school’s evening entertainment programs, lit with gas lanterns. After his eight grades, Andrew took some German classes at the Berlin High School in the evenings, and often mentioned his regret that he could not continue further schooling. Andrew and his teacher Zuercher went on nature hikes, hunting and trapping with each other. Andrew literally had a back 40 acres of woods behind the little house and yard along what is now State Route 557 between Berlin and Charm. And they had the Doughty Valley stream with mink and muskrats to trap and explore on the other side of the road.

And to the family, he became a stand-in for his absentee father; he was soon working away from home, bringing income as did his older sisters, Ada and Nora, and his younger sisters and brothers would do: Esther, Mae, Raymond, Ida, Daniel, Ruth and Betty. As a young parent, Andrew would write on “drunkard fathers” noting the harm to innocent children. He wrote: “Perhaps only these children who by experience know what it is to see their worried mother draw the window blinds aside and gaze searchingly out into the darkness and stillness of the night for the one whom she entrusted her earthly life and happiness to—only to expect an intoxicated husband at a late hour. Horrible!” One has the clear impression Andrew is reflecting on his own Friday night experience with his mother. In any case, Andrew also turned inward, becoming a loner; besides his mother and later his wife Mattie, he seemed to have few close friends, either in youth or as an adult.

But it’s unfair to define my father’s family too much with Martin’s addiction, Martin was also a person who felt deeply, loved his children, had deep religious sentiments, and loved music. Toward the end of his life, he gave up drinking, and died as an honorable Christian member of the Amish church. The children remembered his regularly visiting neighbors, especially the widows and widowers and reading the Bible. He gave warm greetings to the young children when he returned from work, lifting them up to his face and being the emotionally engaged father of talented children: craftsmen and musicians. Martin’s children were respected in the neighborhood and church community, and aside from being good workers who helped provide for the family, they were artistically oriented and musicians. They seemed to learn to play about every type of instrument from guitar to harmonica.

Martin often sang  around the house and in the morning when he got up early, getting the fire going, the children would hear him singing German hymns and the English gospel songs such as “All the Way my Savior Leads me,” then common among their pietistic and revivalist Christian neighbors. Later in life Betty and her family would sing these songs with my father around my father’s Lookout Camp fires, and I often heard Nora singing them with her family at Shipshewana when I would visit her on Sunday afternoons in the 1990s. Andrew’s sister Ruth learned to play the guitar in the barn, among straw bales. She said that they had instruments in the house, but at church council meeting, the church elders would tell Martin that he would need to get them out of the house and have his children under control. So he had the children take the guitars and instruments into the barn. But with time they moved back into the house, until the next council meeting and then the instruments would go out again-- for a while. Andrew said this father’s own standard was that music should be “uplifting and honoring to God.”

One of the most consequential and lasting events in my father’s life was a Christian conversion experience at age seventeen. Although never an adolescent given to rowdy behavior and rebellion against his family and community, this experience seemed to be a crisis personal experience of feeling sinful,  alienated and estranged from God as often experienced in the Protestant evangelical tradition. For most of my father’s life, this crisis experience, being converted, was a defining mark of Christianity. People were divided into those who had had this kind of conversion experience and those who did not. It was not that other categories such as denominations, church membership, baptism, and ethical living were unimportant. But Andrew generally considered them secondary to this basic internal spiritual experience. For my father it was a matter of the heart which elicited prayer, devotion, ethical living, and Bible reading. In a speech he gave to the Amish mission group in 1953, he said “he did not read anything but the precious Book itself for six months after his conversion; for fear that he would lose the new-found bliss that flooded his soul.” So important was this experience to him.

As a child, it was hard for me to get a fair reading on my father’s family, given that we were cut off from that side of the family during our growing up years when my parents moved to Holmesville and joined the Mennonites, hence were in the ban. The positive side of the ban, also called shunning, for a bonded Christian community is that this clear boundary nurtures the unity and interdependence of the church community and its members. As an adult I recognize this value and respect this boundary maintenance as a part of the health of the Amish church. But for a young child, there is also a cost to family loneliness and separation. My father may have added to the Amish Millers’ defensiveness by becoming a missionary during these years, feeling that the traditional Amish were spiritually asleep and needed to be awakened to more expressive evangelical spirituality and witnessing.

My parents never made us feel like victims because of the ban, at the same time that they were certainly not supporters of it. For example, when my cousin Esther Troyer married Melvin Miller in 1957, our family was invited to the wedding. When it came time to eat, Esther’s mother Ada came out to our family and told her brother Andrew that a separate table was set for us in the basement. I suppose this may have taken on an additional personal element because the wedding was at our old Hummel place west of Berlin. My father’s response was okay, Mattie and children let’s go, there are other places to eat at Berlin and Holmesville. We left and nothing much more was said; we simply stayed out of my father's family circles. On balance, one notes that the Martin and Martha Miller family has had a good Amish retention rate, with eight of the ten living children remaining in the Amish church.

Andrew had a number of informal names during his life; the one I knew best during my growing up years was Mart Andy (Martin Miller’s son Andrew), hence I was sometimes called Mart Andy’s Levi. He himself used various signatures such as Andrew, A.A. (Andrew Alvin), and simply Andy. In the 80s when he owned a music store (Miller Music), gave music lessons, wrote songs, and recorded cassettes, he became known as Music Andy. In those later decades my father turned to music to re-interpret his family origin as a Holmes County version of the virtuous Appalachian mountain family. If in the forties and fifties, my father was Andrew, now he was clearly Andy, to paraphrase Loretta Lynn, a road grader’s son. He wrote a song called “Holmes County Ohio” which evokes a cottage on a hillside, evening sounds of the whip-poor-will, barefooted boys running through clover, all without radio or TV, juke boxes, and all singing “In the Sweet By and Bye.” The hard-scrabble economic conditions of the Miller family were recompensed by the down-home philosophy, “that life consists not in the abundance of possessions,” but of being “a close-knit family with lots of love.”

If my father’s 1945 Holmes County Amish community had misgivings about higher education, some Mennonites had embraced schooling and formal education. In Scottdale, Pennsylvania, Edward Yoder had become a Latin and Greek scholar and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He remained a nonresistant Christian pacifist as an editor at Mennonite Publishing House and wrote various pamphlets and booklets for the Mennonite and Amish young people who were serving in alternative camps called Civilian Public Service (CPS.). He wrote the definitive history of the Mennonites in Scottdale with a study called “Coming of the Mennonites to Westmoreland and Fayette County.” He also often took walking hikes with his young son Virgil and envisioned the local Mennonites taking care of the old Alte Menist Fayette County burial ground in Upper Tyrone Township which had become a weed and briar patch.

But we remember Edward Yoder mainly because of his journal, and on Groundhog Day of 1945, he confided in his journal that the Russian troops heading west were within 50 miles of Berlin. He feared that Europe would slide into chaos, with the American troops returning with “a hollow victory.” He thought the Europeans may make “an even bigger fool” of Roosevelt than they did of Woodrow Wilson a generation earlier.  He concluded, “Of course, one ought to be an optimist, so they say, yet even many an optimist wakes up to sad disillusionment in time.” Six weeks later, on March 26, 1945 Edward Yoder died; he was 42 years old.

Other descendants of the Amish Mennonites not only embraced higher education but became active participants on the national stage. Descendents of the Hessian Amish Mennonites were key participants in the Second World War; Germany surrendered in May of 1945, but the war in the Pacific continued. By the summer of 1945 American scientists had developed successful atomic bomb tests, and advising the government were outstanding physicists such Karl Compton (president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT) and his brother Arthur Holly Compton, the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics winner who had been director of the Metallurgical Laboratory of the Manhattan Project since 1941. Compton grew up in Wooster, Ohio, the son of Otelia Holly Augspurger and Elias Compton.

Otelia Holly Augspurger was raised among the Hessian Amish Mennonites in the Apostolic Mennonite Church of Trenton, Ohio, in Butler County near Cincinnati. This Amish Mennonite settlement was begun in 1819 by families from the Alsace Lorraine region between France and Germany.  Compton’s grandfather Samuel Augspurger was a conscientious objector during the Civil War and his ancestor, the immigrant Daniel Holly was a minister in the Hessian Church from 1841 until he moved to Illinois in 1848. Arthur Compton recalled that the immigrant Holly “reacted so vigorously against the effort of an army officer to impress him in military service that flight from France to Germany became necessary.”  On July 23, one day before President Harry S. Truman told Joseph Stalin of the USA’s intention to use the weapon against Japan, Wooster, Ohio, native Arthur Holly Compton, was asked: “Washington wants to know what you think?”

“What a question to answer! Having been in the very midst of these discussions, it seemed to me that a firm negative stand on my part might prevent an atomic attack on Japan. Thoughts of my pacifist Mennonite ancestors flashed through my mind. I knew all too well the destruction and human agony the bombs would cause. I knew the danger they held in the hands of some future tyrant. These facts I had been living with for four years. But I wanted the war to end. I wanted life to become normal again. I saw a chance for an enduring peace that would be demanded by the very destructiveness of these weapons. I hoped that by use of the bombs many fine young men I knew might be released at once from the demands of war and thus be given a chance to live and not to die.” Compton voted with J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, and on August 6, 1945, the American Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on the inhabitants of Hiroshima, Japan; by September 2 of that year, the Japanese government surrendered. 

Sources on my father’s family and come from oral conversations with family members and from “Some Memories and Reflections on the Mart [Martin] J. Miller and Martha (Mattie) Miller Family” in Jacob A. Miller Heritage and Story 1864-1983 (privately published family history by Dorothy Hostetler Raber of Berlin, Ohio, 1983, pages 4-5). Andrew’s song “Holmes County, Ohio, appears in this same publication. My father’s school grade cards are with John D. Roth at the Mennonite Historical Library of Goshen College. The quote on Andrew’s conversion experience comes from Witnessing (September-October, 1953, page 4), copies in the Andrew A. Miller Collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church. The “Drunkard Fathers” quote comes from an Andrew A. Miller publication called Christian Fellowship Review (March 14, 1954, page 4), copies in the Andrew A. Miller Collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church. Edward Yoder’s journal entries come from Edward Yoder: Pilgrimage of a Mind (privately published, 1985, page 470). Yoder’s history is The Mennonites of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania (Scottdale: Scottdale Mennonite Church, 1942) appeared earlier in Mennonite Quarterly Review. I wrote a short note on Arthur Holly Compton in “Thoughts on my pacifist ancestors…” Mennonite Historical Bulletin (April, 1994, page 13); a longer version is in Atomic Quest (New York: Oxford, 1956, pages 206, 247). I originally ran across Compton in reading David McCullough’s Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, page 441). 

1944 Mattie Schlabach Miller

1944 Birth September 15, my mother Mattie Schlabach Miller, buying the Lapp and Hummel places, Mattie’s schooling and practical education, Sarah Troyer’s death and a sad Christmas 1927, Mose Troyer, romance and death of Raymond D. Yoder, Nora Miller, marriage to Andrew A. Miller, Harold S. Bender’s “The Anabaptist Vision,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Mennonites, Amish and World War II.

My earliest recall of my mother Mattie was of a hopeful and positive woman, especially regarding her children. I was the third of five boys, and neighbors and friends often said to Mattie that they hoped some time she would get a little maudlie (little maid) too. But my mother bristled, protesting what she considered to be a condescending comment—however well intended. No, her boys are good workers, helpful in the house and they took turns drying the dishes at every meal. They helped her in the garden and in the house, and she was very thankful for them. We all understood: don’t even hint of anything negative about my boys. Eventually, about a decade after my birth, three girls were born, but a child grew up in Mattie’s household with the feeling few things could give an adult more pleasure than, well, children, yes, to be one of Mattie’s children.

I was the third born with my oldest brother Paul born in February of 1942 and Roy in June of 1943, all of us born within about 16 months of each other. I was born September 15, the first day of squirrel hunting season, and my father Andrew was gone for most of the day. When he returned, my mother and a maud (a maid, but often in our context a live-in relative), had delivered another healthy son into the Miller household. Later in the day our family doctor Luther High came by to see that everything was okay. Mother said I was a “very good baby,” which meant easy to care for, crying only when I was hungry and sleeping a lot. She especially appreciated this trait, what with having now three small boys for whom to care.

My mother and father lived on a small farm in the Sharp Run area several miles west of Berlin in Holmes County, Ohio. We called it the Hummel place for a previous owner, and my parents had moved there two years earlier; it was a hidden little farmstead with all the buildings behind a knob by what is now Township Road 310. It was already the second place my parents had purchased after getting married in March of 1941. If my mother was a positive and hardy parent, she was also a thrifty marriage partner for my father Andrew. Mattie was born in 1918 and by the time she was age 22 and married Andrew, she had saved a thousand dollars which she combined with my father’s thousand dollars savings to purchase their first home. 

As an unmarried woman, Mattie worked outside the home, and her father Levi allowed her to keep all her money. Dad was very good to us, she often said, and I was a good saver. Of course, we got up early and helped around the house and farm before working outside too, she said. Mattie and Andrew were the ultimate Jefferson yeoman landowners; they made the purchase already before they were married. This was what we called the Lapp place (also named for a previous owner), which was about a mile from where my father’s parents Martin and Martha Miller lived, along what is now Township Road 354. Brother Paul was born there in 1941.

A word here on names, now that I am a sentence removed from Mattie’s mother-in-law Martha, most commonly also known as Mattie in oral conversation. The two names were often used interchangeably in our community. My mother’s name was Mattie Schlabach on her birth certificate; she always used that name, and she hated nick-names. I will use that term for her throughout this text. The only other name I ever heard for her was Andy Mattie, a term to distinguish her from the other Matties in our area by her husband. Her mother-in-law was formally called Martha, and I will use that name throughout this text. Generally, I will use the formal names in this manuscript, unless there are descriptive reasons why other names may be appropriate.

Mattie was a practical young child, and formal schooling was not high on her priorities. At age five, she rerolled at Mast School near her home in Walnut Creek Township in the year 1923-1924. A one-room school, she was the only first grader, and her brother Roy was in the 3^rd grade with the teacher Erwin Stutzman. They generally walked in the Fall and Spring and often took a sled in the Winter. By grade three, she was attending Troyer Ridge and her teacher was a single young man Roy R. Miller. By 1930-1931 and grade six she had moved and we now find her  at the Sharp’s School east of Berlin with teacher Earl E. Miller. Mattie attended school for eight years and completed seven grades; she repeated grade three. 

In looking at the report cards, it is not immediately apparent why this repeat. Her first year notes in grade three are similar to her second year, a C student with some Bs and a few Ds. What is apparent in grade three second time, 1927-28, was her attendance and absence. That Fall, the first two grading periods she missed only two days; the next five periods, she missed 35 days. This high absence was surely related to the first great tragedy in Mattie’s life, the death of her mother at Christmas.

Mattie’s reading skills were of a practical nature; as an adult reading the Bible, the evangelist Billy Graham’s books, and Norman Vincent Peale’s positive thinking magazine Guideposts. Her mathematical knowledge was equally practical, giving her the financial skills to run a large household, a small farm, and a mobile home business. As we used to say, she knew how to balance a checking account. In writing, Mattie was actually quite a scribe, sending letters to her children all over the world and annually sending birthday greetings to her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She became famous to her family for her phonetic spellings of the English language and underlining of the important words of the Hallmark cards' printed text (that would be almost all of it). It was again in her practical side that inside each card she would include a five-dollar bill. She also kept a diary from 1970 until her death in 2013.

If I remember my mother as optimistic and hopeful, it was not because her early life experiences conditioned her for this disposition. She met tragedy early. When Mattie was nine years old, her mother Sarah Troyer was burned to death on Christmas Day in 1927. That morning Sarah was lighting a kitchen wood stove with kerosene and the embers exploded lighting her. Sarah ran into Mattie’s bedroom where the mother and daughter tried to snuff out the flames with a bed comforter. Then Mattie ran barefoot to the barn for her father Levi Schlabach. Meanwhile her brother Roy headed out, also barefoot through the snow, to a neighbor who had a telephone, asking for help. The telephone operator in Berlin who handled the tragic call was Lydia Miller (later Kretzinger), who often told me how she remembers the sad call so well. 

Her mother Sarah was taken to the Union Hospital in Dover where by evening she was dead. Mattie would grow up as a young girl with additional womanly roles with her brother Roy and younger sister Clara and without a close kinship to
her step-mother. One could hardly overstate Mattie's love for her father Levi and admiration for her brother Roy,
and one has a sense that this early crisis and motherless 
experience may have shaped much of that affection. Later in life Mattie reflected on this tragedy saying: “Only the good Lord knew why he wanted to take my mother Sarah home because she was a kind woman and had good 
background.” 

Sarah was the daughter of Moses and Susan Miller Troyer, 
a family line which provided some gentleness to our 
Schlabach genes. If the Schlabachs were aggressive and hatsauftig (energetic), the Troyers were more mild tempered 
and easy-going. I recall the visits of our great-grandfather 
Mose (1871-1954), known locally as Hossaoarsch Mose 
(seat-of-his-pants Mose), even if physically our Troyer ancestors were known for small behinds. So a little more background on names. 

Nicknames, I have discovered, are plentiful in communities where people share a select number of formal names whether in a barrio in Puerto Rico (José and Maria) or an Amish settlement in Ohio (Mose and Mattie). Hence, we need to distinguish which Mose or Mattie. While we’re on Moses, here’s another example of how nicknames worked, often opposite of their literal meaning. The notable Holmes County Kleine Moses J. Miller (1811-1897) was a leader among the Walnut Creek Amish during the nineteenth century when the Amish divided into two communions. Bishop Kleine Mose led what one hundred years later became the largest Amish community in North America. Little Mose was actually a tall man of six feet two inches and equally big in influence. Another notable contemporary was Kleine Mose’ uncle Gross Moses P. Miller (1802-1877), also a Walnut Creek Amish bishop and leader of the group which by the twentieth century became the numerous Holmes County Mennonites. Both Kliene and Gross Mose were big in the church heritage of all Holmes County Amish and Mennonites.

But back to our great grandfather Mose Troyer who stayed a few days at our house, bringing a small suitcase and occupying the south bedroom while we boys slept in the north one upstairs. We rifled though his suitcase during the day while he was outside and found Life-saviors (we lifted a few) and cigars (which we left alone). He would walk us boys to Jamison’s general store in Holmesville and buy root-beer barrels to suck and a kite to fly in the Spring. Although a farmer, in the Winter Mose went South, working with the animals at the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus headquarters in Sarasota, Florida. Mattie remembers her grandmother Susan Miller (1874-1935) as also a kind woman and being very helpful to them after her mother Sarah died. Grandfather Mose was an early learning to me that one can be in good standing with a group if you remained loyal at heart and on the basics. Otherwise, you might still be slightly unconventional.

One of Sarah’s lasting influences on Mattie was her steady and kind temperament and her large garden, providing domestic stability, tranquility, care and food for her family by doing a lot of canning in the summer. Mattie learned these skills early from her mother and always had a large garden for her family, even in 2011, canning food for her children to great grandchildren. Thus, she provided a sense of plentitude and largesse for her family whether we were living with good income and savings or during times of low cash flow and reduced savings.

My father was good at generating income and also in spending; hence my mother was complementary for her saving habits. She had thrifty instincts and was the de facto financial manager of our household. She put up half the money for the first house she and Andrew purchased at marriage, and when the family moved over to the Hummel place where they soon made good money with raising hogs with a large tile shed and running water and Andrew working at roofing. Mattie helped on the farm and kept cash needs low by feeding the young family from her garden, hence building up savings, should they decide to move. In the seventies, when the family was in the mobile home business and overextended in some purchases and later on some building projects at Lookout Camp, it was Mattie who stepped in to eliminate the indebtedness. She guarded the expenditures and made the monthly payments.

Mattie also seemed to get from her Troyer mother a sense of the group. When Mattie inherited (family) or chose (church) a group, she very soon discovered the spiritual and cultural center of the community and placed herself there. This instinctive placement in itself was a leadership position of strength, although of quite a different kind than that exercised by her husband Andrew or her father Levi (L.L.). Especially for her husband she provided a kind of ballast and practical grounding to his emotional energy and intellect. The one entity where she did not center was with Andrew’s family, the Martin and Martha Miller family, especially with her father-in-law Martin. Still, Andrew’s closest sister Nora was also Mattie’s good friend which brings us to my mother’s second great tragedy.

At age 18, Mattie lost her boyfriend Raymond D. Yoder (1911-1936) with whom she was engaged to be married. The romance began early. Already when Mattie was age 15, a Mary S. Miller wrote into Mattie’s autograph book: “Cows like fodder/Cows like squash/Mattie likes Raymond/She does by gosh.” Several months later, another friend Katie Miller of Holmesville would write in the same book: “Cedar is the best of wood/Kissing does Mattie more good/Smoothens her lips, brightens her eyes/And gives Raymond more exercise.” During the mid-30s the Yoder family lived near Prophetstown, Illinois, and Mattie carries on an active correspondence with Raymond and his sister Mary, some letters which still survive. On July 4, 1936, Mattie writes to “Dear Friend” Raymond with three pages of news about family, community, work, and church such as going to a youth singing and walking home with Esther and Andy (probably Raymond’s first cousin and later my father). She closes: “It’s just like a dream that you are coming in, but hope it will happen before long. No day too soon… From a True Friend Mattie.” At the bottom of the last page, she says “Answer soon” and “excuse poor writing.”

From my mother’s later descriptions Raymond, whom she generally called Isaac Dan’s Raymond, was a devout Christian, a good singer, and her true soul partner even if seven years  her senior. Raymond was a hemophiliac and died quite suddenly at age twenty-five on October 22, 1936. His mother Sarah (Mrs. Dan I. Yoder) wrote several long letters of grief to Mattie  lamenting the loss of her two sons (Ura had also died at a young age) and of the family’s financial misfortunes in moving back from Illinois. She hoped she and Mattie could find comfort in illness, death and misfortune being the Lord’s chastening, which is ultimately rewarded to those who are patient and faithful. This view she ascribed to Raymond as well. A year later in 1937, Sylvanus Schrock, also Raymond’s cousin and the young husband of Mattie’s good friend Nora Miller, also died, killed in a farm accident. These young men were hemophiliacs and died of bleeding, leaving one widow Nora and her two little children and eighteen-year-old Mattie who might as well have been a widow. Mattie now said she would never get married.

Still, love and romance re-kindled for Mattie, and by December of 1938 Raymond’s sister Mary was writing to Mattie with news of the latest courting and dates and concludes: “Well, I heard you had company Saturday night again. Ha!“ Isaac Dan’s Mary may have been referring to her first cousin Andrew because Mattie had started dating Andrew A. Miller. Meanwhile, her friend Nora had met a very eligible widower from Shipshewana, Indiana, named Joseph J. Wingard. Mattie and Andrew married in the Spring (March 14) of 1941. By the Fall of the same year, Nora and Joseph were married; Andrew and Nora were also brother and sister.

My parents were members of the Amish church, a group which nurtured the traditions of the sixteenth century European Anabaptists. Our paternal ancestor Hannes Miller had arrived to Philadelphia already in 1748 and our maternal ancestor Christian Schlabach by 1819. In 1944 the Mennonites who also descended from the Anabaptists had a church historian Harold S. Bender who authored a booklet called The Anabaptist Vision. The small 1944-publication was actually a printed copy of the presidential address which Bender, the academic dean of Goshen College, had given to the American Society of Church History in December of 1943.

Until then, most historians had consigned the Anabaptist movement at best as a virtuous nuisance to be tolerated or at worst a dangerous radicalism to be outlawed. But the tide was changing in the twentieth century, especially in pluralistic North America. Bender used this forum to note the contributions of his church tradition especially in three understandings: (1) the Christian life as discipleship, (2) the church as a visible and voluntary fellowship, and (3) the ethic of love and nonresistance.  Bender’s thesis was embraced in the academy and his booklet was embraced by the humble Amish and Mennonites, selling over 32,500 by January of 2009.  The Anabaptist Vision would become a kind of charter around which late twentieth-century Anabaptists confessed their identity, certainly for most of my adult life time.

Bender’s idea of discipleship came from the German term Nachfolge Christi, but the term was also in the air because of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s influential book called The Cost of Discipleship.The book published in German, English and other languages, contrasted what he called cheap grace with costly discipleship, and the cost for the German pastor Bonhoeffer during 1944 was to sit in the Tegel military prison while awaiting trial on charges of being part of a plot to kill the German führer Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was influenced by African American worship and theology when he studied and taught at New York’s Union Theological Seminary during the early thirties, even teaching Sunday school at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. He returned to Nazi Germany and gave pastoral and seminary leadership of what was known as the Confessing Church, meaning the Free Church which refused to submit to Nazi control. Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging at dawn on April 9, 1945, just three weeks before the Soviet troops entered Berlin and a month before Nazi Germany surrendered. 

By September of 1944 when I was born, the Allied troops had liberated Paris, and were moving into Germany. But to my parents, the Second World War seemed distant to their yearly rhythms of planting and harvesting, reading and babies. Both in our home and at church meetings, the young couple kept on using the German language, the Pennsylvania German dialect or Dutch. Instead of a daily newspaper, they had the Bible, an Anabaptist hymnbook called The Ausbund and the thick Martyrs Mirror as guides. They also subscribed to a German and English periodical called the Herald der Wahrheit (Herald of Truth) and a Mennonite English weekly called the Gospel Herald.

The closest my mother Mattie came to the war was that her husband Andrew was drafted two months after their wedding (June 13, 1941), and as a Conscientious Objector to war assigned to a Civilian Public Service (CPS) camp near Bluffton, Indiana. The assignment was all; Andrew got a farm deferment. Meanwhile, one of her school teachers Roy R. Miller now at the Berlin High School was drafted, as was her sister Clara’s boyfriend Noah E. Miller of Sugarcreek. Roy R. Miller went to serve as educational coordinator at a CPS camp near Sideling Hill in Pennsylvania, and Noah E. Miller did several years in forestry service at Three Rivers, California. While in this alternate service, Roy made new friends: a young woman from Columbiana, Ohio, called Berdella Blosser, and a young couple from Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Ralph and Elizabeth Sieber Hernley.

The information about my mother Mattie Miller was gathered from oral family conversations, much by Mattie herself when most of this was written in January, 2010. Regarding being a good baby, I often heard this characterization by Mattie and she wrote about it on a 50^th birthday card 1994, now in that year's correspondence file. Mattie’s mother Sarah’s death account comes from “Woman Dies from Burns on Christmas” published in the Holmes County Amish Gemeinde Register by Aunt Clara Miller sometime in 1994; a copy is in my file. Mattie’s schooling information is from her yearly grade cards and quotes from Mattie’s letters with her boyfriend Raymond D. Yoder (1911-1936) and family members are in a cache of letters she retained from the 1930s, currently held by John D. Roth at the Goshen College Mennonite Historical Library. In that same collection is a letter from Raymond’s mother Sarah (Mrs. Dan I. Yoder) referenced above is January 30, 1937. Mattie’s teenage autograph book is in this same collection. Basic genealogies of the Miller and Schlabach families I have used are: J. Virgil Miller, Anniversary History of the Family of John “Hannes” Miller, Sr. (ca. 1730 – 1798), (Morgantown: Masthof Press, 1998) and Harvey Hostetler two opus books: Descendents of Jacob Hochstetler (Brethren Publishing House, first printing, 1912) and Descendents of Barbara Hochstetler (Mennonite Publishing House, first printing, 1938); both have been reprinted many times. The story on The Anabaptist Vision (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1944) is available from Albert Keim’s article, “History of the Anabaptist Vision,” Mennonite Historical Bulletin (October, 1993, pages 1-7). Andrew Miller’s June 13, 1941, letter assigning him to a CPS camp is also in Mattie’s collection at the Mennonite Historical Library.