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.