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).