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.