A Nice Team Of Greys

When we have our rare Baumgart reunions, one thought always crosses my mind. All the people here exist because of a nice team of greys. This one is for the cousins on the Baumgart side. This is the story of how we came to be, as it was told to my mother by Grandma Bertha Baumgart, wife of Charlie, mother of Frances, Grace, Hazel, Lester, Violet, June, Albert Carl (Buster), Herman, Teddy, and Reuben. (I hope I didn't miss one!) With love, Pooch.

Perhaps Grandma was worried and anxious, but from all the stories Mom told, she was a pioneering woman who faced life head-on, no matter what life threw her way. From a teenage bride to a young widow and mother, then an elderly matron, and finally my grandmother, I heard Grandma’s life story from my mom.

Mom told me the stories about Grandma being “married off” at seventeen to a neighbor in exchange for a team of gray horses. The words “married off” implied that she was chattel, a burden to be handed over to someone else.  Mom never used the words “married off” to refer to any other couple in my memory, except for my father’s mother.

Mom recounted Grandma talking about the evening in the early winter of 1900. A neighbor, Charlie Baumgart, came to visit. Grandma and her sisters were sent upstairs while the adults talked.  Charlie, thirty-eight years old, had decided it was time to find a wife. Naturally, he sought out the nearest farm with unmarried daughters (a financial burden) and negotiated a deal.

“The girls sat upstairs in their one bedroom and listened through the floor vent, trying to guess who was going to be picked until it was agreed that it was going to be Berthie,” Mom said. (Berthie was the nickname given to my grandmother, Bertha)

“Why her?” I asked.

“Maybe they had plans for the other ones. She was getting old. It didn’t matter; they had so many girls they needed to dump them off on somebody,” Mom said. “Besides,” she went on, “Grandma said her parents got a nice team of greys in the deal.”

A “good” daughter understood her place was behind a man; women were regarded as second-class non-citizens. In 1900, women faced significant restrictions on their rights and opportunities. They were not allowed to vote or open a bank account, and reliable birth control methods were nonexistent. Employment options for women were limited to roles such as teacher, nurse, governess, or servant. Most universities would not admit women; besides, financial resources were not spent on a daughter’s education, as they were generally expected to marry and start their own families.  A daughter was under her father's rule, and upon marriage, the power was transferred to her husband.

  “Daughters were a financial drain. God forbid one of them got pregnant and brought home another mouth to feed.” Mom explained. 

I try to imagine how Grandma Bertha felt as she listened upstairs with her sisters. Was she scared or excited? Happy or terrified? Did she accept it as her lot in life? Marriage was forever; was she ready for that commitment? Her opinion was never considered at seventeen, and she married the thirty-eight-year-old stranger.

Grandma Bertha had no choice but to marry Charlie Baumgart and bear his children. A teenage bride who had never left the county or attended school beyond the eighth grade, her life was predetermined at birth. I think of her at seventeen. I wonder how any parent could hand their daughter over to a stranger to be used as a sexual object, broodmare, and farmhand/maid. As Mom liked to say, “That’s just how it was in those days.”

                There was no room for delicate sentiments in that time and place. Grandmother's brother was meant to inherit the farm and care for his parents in their old age. For daughters, there were no career options beyond marriage and motherhood. Grandma Baumgart's life was predetermined, and the Thomas family had too many mouths to feed. Poverty without hope leads to difficult choices. We now call it "food insecurity" and “financial instability of the underemployed” to make it all palatable, but it's simply hunger and fear.

Charlie, the man with the nice team of grey horses, was an itinerant horse trader with a small farm and no prospects. Grandma’s life would not have been easy. As a child, she would have baked bread alongside her mother, just as I did. She would have learned to make a meal for the men as they came in from the field and to work in the fields as well.

  Grandma went from working on her family farm with her siblings from dawn to dusk to running her household, which required even more responsibility and work.

Examining life in 1900 from the perspective of a poor woman reveals hardships that were unique to women. For menstruation, women had to use squares of rags sewn together, which they would wash and reuse. Laundry was done by hand, scrubbing on a metal board with ridges, rinsing, and wringing out by hand. As menstruation was a taboo subject during this time, washing these monthly pads was likely done secretly, hidden from the men and children in the family. Learning this from my mother for the first time, I was aghast.

  “How could they do this every month?” I asked.

Mom responded, “They just stayed pregnant.”

When Grandma married Charlie Baumgart in 1901, their bathroom was a small shack at the back of the house. Toilet paper consisted of a shelled corn cob or, during certain seasons, pages from the Sears catalog. Water was carried into the house and brought back out again. Six decades later, when I was born, my parents lived in the same situation.

Everything Grandma did was done by hand. If the technology existed to make her life easier, it was unaffordable. As the children arrived, the rendering of lard, soapmaking, and hundreds of other chores would have been done with the baby on her hip and the older children playing nearby.

One of the most strenuous and dangerous tasks was soap-making. Soap was made by boiling lard and lye, a caustic combination, in an iron cauldron over a bonfire in the yard.

The lye is made by pouring water over the ashes from the wood stove, which were plentiful because wood stoves were used for cooking and heating. The process was considered “women’s work”. When the mixture thickened, it was poured into the cast-iron soap molds and cut into thick off-white bars, with the scent of spoiled lard.

                The soap was used for handwashing, body washing, shampooing, washing dishes, and laundry. The lye made the soap caustic. Fortunately, only the “rich city people” had a bathtub, so bathing was rare, and the skin irritation was minimal. Deodorant and frequent baths were considered only for the wealthy, the “uppity” city people. An adult woman might have owned "toilet water," an ornate bottle of perfume used sparingly, likely only on church days.

Meals were prepared on a wood stove, but the wood had to be split with an axe to fit into the kitchen stove. After carrying in the wood and starting the fire, Grandma could finally begin to cook. Vegetables, whether canned, dried, or fresh, were from her garden. Some families might have had an icebox, a wooden container that kept food cool with chunks of ice.  The ice was harvested from frozen rivers and lakes during winter and stored in the icehouse, where it was covered with sawdust. However, ice storage was unreliable and often didn't last the entire summer.

The meat typically came fresh from venison or other game animals. Domestic animals were primarily raised to be sold to pay taxes or to buy items that could not be made at home. Grandma might have sacrificed an old hen that was no longer laying eggs. Chicken dinner was usually reserved for Sundays with family or visiting neighbors, and inviting the preacher often ensured that fried or stuffed chicken would be on the menu.

All meals were accompanied by coffee from the large enamel pot boiling on the back stove burner since dawn. When they couldn’t afford coffee, Grandma would roast and grind up barley to make a coffee-like drink. Homemade bread was served with each meal, and butter from the dairy cows was churned in the wooden churn.

Grandma worked in dresses and aprons, with her hair neatly pinned. Aprons were essential for protecting the few dresses they owned and reducing the frequency of laundry. At seventeen, Grandma was expected to keep a clean house, maintain a bountiful garden, raise their children, and always maintain the appearance of a peaceful home.

From reading old local newspaper articles, it seemed that most of Grandpa's work involved "going to town" and "visiting neighbors."   The farmland never appeared particularly fertile as we drove past the old homestead. It would have been worked to maintain life, never to profit.

“Your grandpa homesteaded the land, so he had to make improvements on it to keep it.  Damn few improvements if you ask me.” Mom would say as she told me about my grandfather.

For an elementary school project, I interviewed my parents about where they were born.  Dad said he was born “in the southeast corner of the living room.” Like all of Grandma’s children, he was born at home, with my dad arriving the same year Grandma’s oldest daughters had their own children.

  I doubt if Grandma Baumgart had the services of a midwife; there was little money to spare. Older married female family members oversaw home births at that time and in that area. Maybe an experienced neighbor would assist. Most likely, her mother or married sister was her midwife.

Mom told me a story one time of a woman in the family who almost died in childbirth. I believe it was on Dad’s side of the family. What I do recall was Mom saying, “That woman was a real bitch, and she hated her daughter-in-law. When that poor girl was having the baby in the bedroom by herself, that old bitch threw a lantern onto the bed next to her. She had to get up and put out the fire on the bed and lie back down and have the baby.”

I was speechless, but Mom didn’t seem that disturbed and went on with the story. “Oh, they had babies by themselves all the time; they had so many they could lay a blanket down in the field, have the baby, and return to work.” 

Mom seemed to miss the horror and cruelty toward the woman who was almost murdered in her story. Stories of trauma and cruelty made Mom look at the tales with a Zen-like approach of “that’s just the way it was.”