150th Anniversary of the Klitz Family
Immigrant Thanksgiving
by Timothy Klitz on 11/04/18
Thanksgiving, 1869
By Mary Kay Hensley
The Klitz family arrived in the United States in late August, 1869. They then traveled from New York to Quincy, Illinois in Adams County, a distance of approximately 1,000 miles. Quincy, located on the Mississippi river was served by steamboats and railroads by this time. Quincy had 24,000 residents and 6 Pieper households in the 1870 census. Prior research indicates Elizabeth Pieper Klitz, the wife of Johan Bernard Klitz and Wilhelm Pieper were siblings. The Pieper and Klitz families lived in the southwest quarter or District 6 in Quincy. As many as 70% of the inhabitants of this area of Quincy were immigrants from Germany. The south side also became known as Calftown, due to the fact that nearly every household possessed a cow. The Klitz family arrived at the end of the growing season, too late to plant a garden, and probably had to depend on the generosity of relatives and other immigrants for food supplies at first. Quincy was a large enough town to have general stores, butcher shops and other establishments if you had money to spend.
Periodic days of Thanksgiving had been celebrated in the United States since it’s founding to show gratitude for its many blessings. Individual states also observed days of Thanksgiving, though not as a united national effort. In 1863, just a few years before the Klitz family arrived and following the Civil War, President Lincoln made Thanksgiving a nationwide holiday.
I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. –from Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Thanksgiving, October 3, 1863
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, changed the official date of Thanksgiving from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday of November.
We can assume the Klitz family would have had a modest Thanksgiving dinner that first year. We don’t know what type of fireplace, stove or oven they had available and this may have influenced what they prepared. Since Quincy was located on a large river, wood was available as fuel. Also, fish and other meat animals would have been available for hunting, trading or purchase.
One of the most popular cookbooks at the time was “Miss Leslies Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches”. This book had more than 60 editions, starting in 1837. It is said Mary Todd Lincoln owned a copy and some historians believe she taught herself to cook with it. I am reprinting a recipe below from this book with modern day measures and substitutions in parenthesis.
Pumpkin Pudding
Ingredients:
1 pint of pumpkin (2 cups cooked or canned plain pumpkin puree)
½ pint of warm milk and ¼ pound of butter (2 cups heavy whipping cream)
¼ pound of sugar (1 cup of sugar- a little more than the original recipe to suit modern tastes)
8 eggs
1 wine glass of rose water (2 Tablespoons rose water/available in Middle Eastern Markets)
1 wine glass of wine (2 Tablespoons of white wine)
1 large tea-spoonful of mace and cinnamon mixed
1 grated nutmeg (this is too much spice for today’s tastes, use only ½ teaspoon of each)
Original Instructions:
Take pumpkin that has been stewed soft and pressed through a colander. Melt in warm milk, the butter, and sugar, stirring well together. If you can conveniently procure a pint of rich cream it will be better than the milk and butter. Beat eggs very light, and add them gradually to the other ingredients, alternately with the pumpkin. Then stir in the rose water and wine mixed together; powered mace, cinnamon and nutmeg. Having stirred the whole very hard, put it into a buttered dish and bake it three quarters of an hour.
Modern Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the cream and sugar. Gradually add the pumpkin puree and beaten eggs alternately, beating after each addition. Whisk in the rosewater, wine, and spices till well blended and smooth. Grease a 2 qt. dish with butter and pour batter into dish. Bake pudding 85-95 minutes till the center no longer wobbles. Remove from oven and cool. The surface may crack a bit as it cools, its part of the charm. Serve pudding at room temperature or cold, topped with sweetened whipping cream.
Sometime between August, 1870 and early March, 1871, the Klitz family moved to Colfax County, Nebraska. The homestead papers state Bernard Klitz lived on the land starting March 23rd, 1871, so that left only a small amount of time to prepare the ground to plant fields and gardens for that crop season. We assume they brought seed with them from Quincy. We don’t know what kind of dwelling they lived in or how they heated it and cooked their food. Hay/grass (twisted into “cats”) burning stoves were probably used at first since wood was not available on the plains. Cow chips (dried manure) and corn cobs were also burned. There is a notation in the Olean Centennial Book that before the church was built and people had to travel to St. Charles for services, a distance of 15-18 miles, they would stop in the Elkhorn River bottom and chop wood.
Foods available in Nebraska would have been different than what they were able to eat in Quincy. Perhaps they brought dried/salted pork, potatoes and other preserved foods with them to Nebraska. Again, they probably depended on the generosity of the Pieper family who had moved to the Olean area of Nebraska ahead of the Klitz family. The Olean community was organized as early as 1874, and the Olean Centennial book states a store was located there as early as 1869. As the railroad laid tracks in the early 1870’s more town sites began to spring up across Dodge, Colfax, Cuming and surrounding counties.
Early records show that the land was very fertile in Colfax County and bumper crops of corn, potatoes, and turnips were harvested from the newly tilled land. The Klitz family may have brought farm animals with them from Illinois as well. Bison were no longer in eastern Nebraska in 1870. Other small game like rabbits and wild ducks would have been available. Cows and chickens were owned and used to produce milk and eggs and did not find their way to the dinner table immediately. All animals were grass fed and not breed to be as tender as today’s meat sources. Fried chicken, as we know it today, was not common until well after 1900. Grilled food was not popular, since recipes that stewed or simmered meat produced a more edible result. Gravy was a very popular part of every dish to add extra flavor and moisture to dried/salted meat. We don’t know how the Klitz family obtained water when they arrived in Nebraska, but can assume drilling a well and constructing a windmill was a priority. In later years, the house on the homestead had a hand water pump in the kitchen, as its only source of running water. Early settlers also built caves, as a means of storing food under cooler conditions. Jarred foods extended the use of what was grown in the garden and root vegetables and apples could be stored for many months. Again, we don’t know how soon the cave on the Klitz homestead was dug, but can assume it was also a priority. We know the Klitz family bartered/traded eggs that they produced for other provisions they needed from the store. I have a reusable wooden egg case with John Klitz written on the side that was used for this purpose. They may also have traded or sold butter and cream at the store, especially in later years.
Here is a recipe, reprinted from The Book of Household Management (1861) that may have been on the Klitz Thanksgiving table their first year in Nebraska. Hopefully, they had sauerkraut to eat with it.
Rabbit Stew
Ingredients:
1 rabbit
3 teaspoonfuls of flour
3 sliced onions
2 ounces of butter
A few thin slices of bacon
Pepper and salt to taste
2 slices of lemon
1 bay leaf
1 glass of port wine
Instructions:
Slice the onions, and put them into a stewpan with the flour and butter; place the pan near the fire, stir well as the butter melts, till the onions become a rich brown color, and add by degrees, a little water or gravy till the mixture is of the consistency of cream. Cut some thin slices of bacon; lay in these with the rabbit, cut into neat joints; add a seasoning of pepper and salt, the lemon and bay-leaf, and let the whole simmer until tender. Pour in the port wine, give one boil and serve.
Time: About ½ hour to simmer the rabbit.
Seasonable from September to February.
The Klitz family had a lot to be thankful for that first Thanksgiving in Nebraska. They owned their own land and had harvested a crop. They could not even have imagined how many hundreds of descendants would grow from their humble beginnings. They did not know that the land they lived on and traveled so far to find would still belong to one of them 150 years later. They offered thanks for many things, but most of all, they thanked God that they were finally HOME.
References:
www.vintagerecipes.net (Includes more than 32,000 recipes dating back to 1658.)
www.gutenberg.org (a project to digitalize 58,000 books including cookbooks)
What’s on the Menu? (menus.nypl.org) (a project to transcribe historic restaurant menus by the New York Public Library—so far more than 1.3 million dishes have been listed)
Neil, E., The Everyday Cookbook with Illustrations, Regan Printing House, Chicago, 1892.
Graber, Kay; Nebraska Pioneer Cookbook, University of Nebraska Press, 1974.
Welsch, Roger and Linda; Cather’s Kitchens, University of Nebraska Press, 1987.
125 Years of God’s Faithful Love, Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church, Olean NE. 1999.
A Century of Integrity, Dodge, NE. Centennial, 1986.
How does one tell the story of their past?
by Timothy Klitz on 06/16/18In the twenty or so years we've been researching our family history, we've added bits here and stories there from a variety of places and sources. We've scoured church books that span a couple hundreds of years, ordered and bought many books that give context to the times and places of our ancestors, spoken with dozens of relatives, friends, and people we've just met who've all added to the story. And it's all coming together for the reunion in a little more than a year. We hope everyone learns something new at the reunion, and we want to learn new things too, so be sure to share your stores, photos, ideas with us.
Welcome to the 150th Anniversary of the Klitz Family in Nebraska Blog!
by Timothy Klitz on 08/09/17
We are less then two years from the 150th Anniversary celebration of our Klitz ancestors are we are working hard to make it a great weekend.
We already have a general outline of events and developing what will hopefully be a fun, informative weekend with the greater Klitz family.
If you are interested in helping out with the weekend, or have not been added to our mailing list yet (email and paper lists), please send us an email at info@klitzfamily.com.
Look to this blog for more information on the Reunion Weekend, and also check out our Facebook page linked at the top of this blog page. (If you are not a member of the Facebook group, please let us know and we can invite you to the group.)
