The Palimpsest

Kirkendall, Richard S

English

Corn Huskers and Master Farmers: Henry A. Wallace and the Merchandising of Iowa Agriculture

Mansheim, Gerald

Prairie School Architecture in Mason City: A Pioneer Venture in City Planning

Curtis, Peter H

A Place of Peace in a World of War: The Scattergood Refugee Hostel, 1939-1943

Wortman, Allen

An Early Industry in Mills County: Ballast Burning

Goranson, Rita

Sod Dwellings in Iowa

Silag, William

A Mercantile History of Sioux City
in the 1880s
by William Silag
On the first clay of 1885, editor George Perkins of the Sioux City Journal wrote, 
“A city, like an individual, does not and can not 
live to itself alone [but must] grow in the grow­
ing needs of its environment. ” For Sioux City it 
was the needs of “the magnificent territory 
included in northwest Iowa, southern Dakota, 
lower Minnesota, and Nebraska across the 
Missouri River that has made Sioux City what it 
is today.”
Magnificent indeed, the territory stretched 
nearly one hundred miles north and two hun­
dred miles west toward the Rocky Mountains.
*
Sioux City stood south and east, the apex of a 
triangular range covering one hundred twenty 
thousand square miles. Long barren, the terri­
tory s agricultural possibilities remained 
untapped till the western railroads drew the 
Upper Missouri region into the mainstream of 
national commerce in the 1870s. None of this
© Iowa State Historical Department/Office of the State Histor­
ical Society 1984 0031—0360/84/0102—0026 $1.00
had been inevitable, Perkins reminded his 
readers New Year s morning: the natural
advantages, admirable and undeniable as they 
are, would never have lifted it to the important 
position it now holds without the concurrent 
agency of its businessmen, who have had the 
wisdom to see, and the energy to seize upon 
and profit hv these advantages.”
Perkins was partially correct, though eco­
nomic forces from outside the community fig­
ured heavily in the local success story of the 
1880s. Sioux City’s businessmen had been
w
unusually tenacious in their effort to forge 
transportation links between the Upper Mis­
souri region and the centers of American trade. 
Beginning in 1855 and continuing through the 
era of the Civil War, local businessmen had 
underwritten twenty-five years of relentless 
promotion — advertising, political lobbying, 
and investment in dozens of transportation 
projects — much of it quite costly to the munic­
ipal treasury and to the individual merchants
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involved. Yet in 1880 Sioux City numbered 
barely seven thousand people, not even half 
the populations of similarly situated Missouri 
River towns such as Kansas City and Omaha, 
whose growth Sioux Citians sought to emulate. 
These older cities had long since established 
themselves as entrepots of western agricultural 
commerce. Their hinterlands, having filled 
quickly in the wake of trunk-line railroad ser­
vice soon after the Civil War, already contrib­
uted mightily to the nation’s commodity 
markets. They had been spared delays in rail­
road constuction, poor harvests due to pests, 
and the untimely effects of a national business 
crisis in slowing the rate of rural settlement, all 
of which contributed to the Lite and somewhat 
sluggish start of Sioux City’s growth as a 
regional market center in the 1870s.
Economic prospects in the Upper Missouri 
improved considerably in 1880 when a consol­
idation of several of the city’s northern feeder 
lines into the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. 
Paul railroad system relieved Sioux City busi­
nessmen of an enormous financial burden and 
permitted them to concentrate on other com­
mercial interests. The consolidation gave Sioux 
City a place in James J. Hill’s Great Northern 
Railway network, stretching from the Great 
Lakes to the Pacific Slope. As editor Perkins 
noted at the time, “the importance of this sys­
tem, or the magnitude of its prospective busi-
ness, can hardly be overestimated,” for the
Great Northern made Sioux Citv the hub of✓
commercial traffic moving into and out of the 
northern prairie. It strengthened the city’s 
hold on the wholesaler’s market of the Upper 
Missouri country, which had been threatened 
periodically by commercial agents from 
St. Paul and even Omaha during the 1870s, and 
eventually would also bring tens of thousands 
of farm families, producers of grain and live­
stock, into Sioux Citv’s rural hinterland.✓
Until the late 1860s Sioux City’s wholesale market extended in long thin bands along 
the Missouri River and its tributaries to the 
north and west of the city serving army out­
posts and Indian agencies. Completion of local 
railroads feeding into regional trunk lines dur­
ing the 1870s doubled the potential size of that 
market and enabled local supply houses, 
including those headed by long-time Sioux 
City merchants Henry Booge, D.T. Hedges, 
and Edwin Kirk, to seek out customers for their 
groceries, hardware, and dry goods among the 
pioneer retailers of hinterland towns in north­
west Iowa. In addition, at least a dozen new 
wholesaling firms appeared in Sioux City to 
take advantage of the rising demand for farm 
and household supplies in the enlarged trade 
area.
For a few vears Sioux Citv’s claims on this
T he Palimpsest  27
3 3
•
28 T he Palimpsest
market went unchallenged, for neither Fort 
Dodge nor Omaha wholesalers expressed 
much interest in the territory. In 1872, how­
ever, the opening of the Sioux City and St. Paul 
Railroad brought commercial travelers from 
Minneapolis and other western cities into 
Plymouth, Sioux, and Cherokee counties, a 
development that infuriated Journal editor 
Perkins. Sioux Citians, including such sup­
pliers as Booge and Hedges, had helped 
finance construction of the northern rail line 
and now, ironically, it threatened to become 
their undoing. Perkins chastised local whole­
salers for permitting such an invasion and 
admonished them to repel the intruders with a 
more aggressive pursuit of the hinterland 
trade.
Statistics of commerce for these years are hard to come hv, hut it would appear from 
local newspaper advertisements that the Sioux 
City men managed to regain control of most of 
this market soon after the Chicago, Mil­
waukee, and St. Paul Railroad entered the 
Upper Missouri country in 1880. The immedi­
ate effect of the CM &: StP's absorption of the 
region’s smaller carriers was a reduction of 
freight rates for Sioux City jobbers, which 
enabled them to claim they could undersell 
their Minneapolis and Omaha competitors in 
most lines of merchandise. By 1885 they had 
secured a strong position in a market that 
would grow from about 100,000 people to more 
than 400,000 by 1900.
Sioux City’s pioneer wholesalers carried 
diverse inventories; a merchandiser such as 
Henry Booge offered retailers everything from 
farm machinery to soda crackers. As the num­
ber of hinterland retailers increased, however, 
each wholesaler in Sioux City tended to spe­
cialize in one or two areas of trade that had 
proved particularly successful and let new­
comers handle the abandoned lines of mer­
chandise. Milton Tootle, for instance, 
gradually divested himself of a large grocery
operation in order to concentrate on a more 
profitable dry goods business. Other Sioux 
City dealers began to specialize in hardware, 
boots and shoes, and drugs. By the mid-1880s 
hefty profits were made in every line of trade. 
As wholesale grocer Conrad Schenkberg dis­
covered, increases in the demand for goods
often outran a merchandiser’s ability to build✓
up an inventory. Schenkberg opened his busi­
ness in 1882 and enjoyed sales of $350,000 in 
the first year, $450,000 the next. When inter­
viewed in 1885, he said that he expected the 
annual figure to reach $650,000, but noted that 
“if we had double the capital we could easily 
double our business. We have all we can do.
Wholesale houses already employed a total 
of 412 men in 1881, about 20 percent of Sioux 
City’s entire labor force, and paid in wages 
nearly $200,000. In addition, local merchants 
gave work to an indeterminate number of 
artisans, express agents, depot clerks, and pro­
fessional men who involved themselves in one 
way or another with the rising tide of wholesale 
merchandise shipped through Sioux City on its 
way to consumers in the city’s hinterland. In 
the 1880s the traffic included feed grains, furs 
and hides, coal and stove wood, agricultural 
implements, liquor and wine, saddlery, dry 
goods and notions, boots and shoes, hardware, 
sewing machines, books and stationery, 
crackers, china, and crockery. Each of these 
products was the specialty of at least one local 
mercantile house. Commission merchants, 
commercial agents, and general dealers added 
a potpourri of other items to Sioux City s 
wholesale trade, helping to build up an annual 
sales volume that topped $6 million as early as 
1881. And the future beckoned, as an investor s 
guidebook noted that year: "the need of more 
commercial houses is the crying need of the 
city. The field is large, and the harvest is plen­
teous, but the laborers comparatively few.
Although trade statistics are not completely 
reliable, figures compiled for city directories in 
the 1880s show that between commercial
T he Palimpsest 29
agents and general dealers, Sioux City’s annual 
wholesale trade volume approached $25 mil­
lion by the end of the decade. This booming
business benefited the local economy in sev-✓
eral ways. It kept hundreds of men working 
throughout the year, enriched their employ­
ers, and provided capital for investment in a 
variety of other business enterprises. Railroad 
extension projects typically consumed some of 
the merchants’ profits, but so too did a number 
ol manufacturing plants built in Sioux City to 
take advantage of its excellent location in an 
increasingly important consumer market. Fac­
tories ranged in size from the tiny shop of 
George Douglass, inventor of “Dr. Douglass’s 
Portable Combined, Turkish, Russian, Elec­
tro-vapor and Sulpher Bath,’’ to the mammoth 
Paris Stove Works, built at a cost of $500,000 
and employing 400 workers. Other industries 
producing goods for sale by the region’s 
retailers included the Sioux Citv Plow Works, 
Pech s Pump and Windmill Company, a soap 
factory, the Sioux City Pottery Works, an over-
' Sioux City Illustrated, 1888)
all manufactory, and the Sioux City Vinegar 
Company. All told, more than a hundred facto­
ries were established in Sioux City during the 
1880s, at least half of them seeking to exploit 
the consumer markets established in the citv’sj
hinterland by local wholesalers.
The mercantile trade by itself spawned 
enough manufacturing activity to rank Sioux 
City among the industrial leaders of the trans- 
Mississippi West before 1900. Yet wholesaling 
and the factories serving it constituted only half 
the business community built by Sioux City 
merchants to tap the resources of the Upper 
Missouri. While local merchandisers secured 
the region’s consumer market, dealers in agri­
cultural commodities looked for ways to bring 
regional grain and livestock into Sioux City 
mills and stockyards for processing. Like the 
wholesale houses, the processing firms had 
been active for years before the population 
boom of the 1880s, creating a system of collect­
ing and marketing that enabled farmers in the 
Upper Missouri country to leap into commer­
cial production almost immediately when they 
began harvesting.
No enterprise better symbolizes the risinginfluence of Sioux Citv business interests✓
over the entire Upper Missouri country than 
the meatpacking industry. Beef and pork pro­
cessing made Sioux City Iowa’s fastest growing 
manufacturing center after 1880; in ten years 
the old steamboat port became one of the 
industrial capitals of the trans-Mississippi 
West. High returns from local packing plants 
attracted the attention of investors in New York 
and competitors in Chicago and lured some of 
Sioux City’s businessmen into realms of high 
finance and corporate intrigue unimaginable to 
the pioneer butchers who founded the industry 
a few vears after the Civil War.j
Meatpacking in Sioux City dated back to the 
first years of railroad service in northwestern 
Iowa. Begun by butcher James Booge as an 
auxiliary of his brother’s wholesaling business,
30 T he Palimpsest
the town’s first slaughterhouse was simply a 
small shack beside Perry Creek near the cen- 
tral business district. Booge’s business grew 
quickly in its first years and forced him to move 
to larger quarters several times. His success 
also drew other butchers into the field. In 1879 
Sioux City’s 150 packinghouse workers pro­
duced dressed beef and pork valued at $1.5 
million. Seven firms shared the market that 
year but Booge’s plant accounted for more than 
90 percent of the city’s total output of meat 
products.
As spectacular as his firm’s growth had been 
in the previous decade, this was only the begin­
ning for James Booge. In 1880 he announced a 
major expansion of his company’s operations 
and the relocation of the plant to a spacious site 
on the city’s south side. The new factory cost+ w
$250,000 to build and covered ten acres on the 
flatlands between the Missouri and Floyd 
Rivers. When it opened in 1881, 350 workers 
manned the company’s receiving pens, killing 
floors, and hanging rooms; wages averaged $6
per day. A few years after completion of the 
new plant, Booge incorporated his firm in 
order to finance further additions to the facility 
prompted by steadily rising orders for its meat 
products. By the mid-1880s Booge handled 
2,000 hogs and 300 cattle per day most months 
of the year; in 1885 his slaughterhouse could 
barely keep up with receipts in the busy winter 
season. The outlook on the demand side was 
equally favorable. Not only was the market for 
western meat growing, but recent technologi­
cal advances in the industry, notably refriger­
ated railroad cars, assured western beef and 
pork packers that their product could be trans­
ported safely in bulk to eastern markets.
Chicago processors, the long-time leaders of
the industry, watched the Sioux City meat
market closely. Several of them were consider-
#
ing extensions of operations to take advantage 
of the increasing beef and pork production of 
the western prairie. In northwestern Iowa 
alone, the dollar value of animals for slaughter 
totaled $5.7 million in 1884, double the
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Silberhorn Packing Companys Plant. (Sioux City Illustrated. 1888)
T he Palimpsest 31
Booge Packing Companys Plant. (Sioux City Illustrated, 1888)
amount of five years earlier. Moreover, new 
cattle and hog farms in Nebraska and Dakota 
promised to accelerate the growth of the 
region s livestock herds. The Chicagoans made 
no secret of their interest in Sioux City; 
through 1884 and 1885 the Iowa city buzzed 
^ith rumors of the imminent arrival of the 
Swifts or the Cudahys.
As it happened, however, the first of the 
Chicago firms to build in Sioux City was a 
relatively small corporation headed by William 
Silberhorn. Late in 1885 the Chicagoan 
announced plans to build a slaughterhouse 
adjacent to James Booge’s plant on the city’s 
south side. Completed two years later at a cost 
of $750,000, the new facility boasted a capacity 
of 3,000 hogs, 1,000 cattle, and 500 sheep per 
day. There is no evidence to suggest that Sil- 
berhorn s arrival in Sioux City caused Booge 
am trouble; the livestock market of the Upper 
Missouri region was large enough for both of 
them and it continued to grow. Indeed, at least 
a few investors believed that it was growing fast
enough to support still another packinghouse, 
for in 1888 a company headed by Edward 
Haakinson, a prominent Sioux City livestock 
dealer, entered the local packing industry. 
Haakinson s Union Packing Company 
occupied buildings recently erected and then 
abandoned by a British packer, Robert Fowler, 
who became seriously ill before he moved into 
his new quarters and abruptly decided to leave 
the business. Fowler sold Haakinson a half- 
dozen buildings, including a six-story killing 
house, a five-story packing plant, a four-story 
dressing room, a smokehouse, an icehouse, 
and an office building.
Booge, Silberhorn, and Haakinson did a 
combined business of $7.6 million in 1889, 
enough to rank Sioux City fifth among the 
nation s meatpacking cities. Together they 
employed some 600 men in factories and stock- 
yards that filled an area of 1,500 acres on the 
Missouri River flats. They leased the holding 
pens that surrounded their slaughterhouses 
from the Union Stockyards Company, a sepa-
32 T he Palimpsest
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Sioux Citi/s Pierce Street, looking north from Fourth Street, in the mid-1880s. (Album of Sioux City, 1888 '
rate corporation formed in 1884 by wholesaler 
D.T. Hedges, shipper Fred Evans, and Ed 
Haakinson, who served as the company’s chief 
of operations in its first few years. Competitors 
in theory only, Sioux City’s meatpackers 
divided seats on the stockyard’s board of direc­
tors among themselves and through this orga­
nization guided the development of Sioux 
City’s processing industries until business 
crises in the 1890s forced local packers to sell 
their plants and equipment to Chicago process­
ing corporations.
Until then, at least, the regional economy centered in Sioux Citv made enormous 
progress. Largely through the efforts of local 
wholesalers and manufacturers, the people of 
the Upper Missouri region joined the main­
stream of American commerce. While Sioux 
City’s processors took farm produce from the
hinterlands for sale in consumer markets in the 
United States and in Europe, its merchan­
disers brought the world’s goods to retailers 
scattered through the region. As the volume of 
their trade increased, so did the size of their 
community, up by thirty thousand people dur­
ing the 1880s. And by then, this much was 
clear: the welfare of these urbanites relied 
heavily on the prosperity of the region s farm­
ers and retailers, the source of Sioux City com­
merce. D
Note on Sources
This article, which is based on information from state and 
federal censuses, local newspapers and business directo­
ries, and commercial publications issued in Sioux City 
during the 1880s, is a revised version of a chapter of the 
author s Ph D. dissertation, City, Town, and Coun­
tryside: The Ecology of Urbanization in Northwestern 
Iowa, 1850-1900 (The University of Iowa, 1979). Copies 
of the dissertation are on file at the State Historical Soci­
ety in Iowa City and at the Sioux City Public Museum.


A Mercantile History of Sioux City in the 1880s

Horton, Loren N

A Struggle for Office: The Sherman-Brown Imbroglio

Smith, Jr, Raymond A

Sports and Games in Western Iowa in the Early 1880s

The Invention of the Electronic Digital Computer at Iowa State College, 1930-1942

Salvaneschi, Lenore

The Fourth of July
bv Lenore Salvaneschi
W hen I was a child, it was almost impossi­ble to decide which was better, Christ­
mas or the Fourth of July. True, Christmas 
usually provided a ‘new’ dress made over from 
one of my mother’s or sister’s old dresses, the 
holiday lasted a little longer with Second 
Christmas Day, and it afforded a good week’s 
vacation in which to read the books which were 
found under the Christmas tree. But the 
Fourth of July was shiveringly exciting, with 
people from all the neighboring towns, even 
from as far away as Cedar Rapids, gathering on 
the St. Stephen’s church grounds, to enjoy a 
full afternoon and evening of entertainment. 
Moreover, the day after the Fourth had its 
attractions also. Then the clean-up committee 
was at work, and we venal little souls helped 
with the scouring of the church grounds, with 
an eye to finding a dime or nickel around the 
pop stand or bowling alley. One could be 
almost certain of finding some discarded 
Cracker Jack prize or, if nothing else, shreds of 
a burst balloon which could be stretched out 
and blown up into miniature balloons the size 
of one s fingertip. And there were always heaps 
of pop caps which we took apart and attached to 
the skirts of our dresses (little girls didn’t wear 
slacks in those days) or in the case of the boys, 
to our overall bibs. Not until 1 was an adult did I 
learn that the word “overhaul’ was really and 
more logically overall.
Preparation for the biggest day of the sum- 
mer started at the end of the school year, about
© Iowa State Historical Department/Office of the State Histor­
ical Society 1984 0031—0360/84/0708—0118 $1.00
the middle of June in the case of our parochial 
school. The teacher drenched and drilled his 
pupils in three- and four-part songs, “speeches, 
plays with a country flavor (usually a take-off on 
a classroom situation with some smart-alecky 
kid revealing things that happened at home) 
and the inevitable flag drill, which later would 
be performed to the music of the congrega­
tion’s volunteer band. The same teacher would 
have been drilling his girls’ choir in such songs 
as “Glowworm/’ and the participants would 
have been preparing their patriotic costumes of 
red, white, and blue crepe paper, which in 
those flapper days showed clearly the healthy 
quality of our village beauties. A day or two 
before the Fourth, the children came once 
more to the church grounds to practice the 
entire program and especially to review the 
flag drill. That exercise was a torture, standing 
in the hot July sun, raising the flags above the 
head, crossing them, and marching from one 
end of the baseball field to the other. The sun 
always took its toll, especially in that year when 
the whole school had just been vaccinated for 
smallpox. More than one youngster, white- 
faced as the catalpa blossoms expiring in the 
Iowa heat, finished the drill prone under the 
trees.
fhe part of the preparation that we par­
sonage kids liked best was the setting up of the 
stage and the building of the benches and 
refreshment stand. The smell of fresh pine 
lumber, mixed with the fragrance of catalpa 
blossoms, was heady enough to make all the 
neighborhood youngsters show their skill at
i t
it» i
The Palimpsest 119
*V
St. Stephens school students practicing the flag drill for the 1926 Fourth of July picnic. (G. Rickets
Collection, SHS1)
leaping the benches straight in a row. By the 
Fourth, most of us usually exhibited honorably 
skinned shins and elbows.
How we prayed for sunshine on the Fourth 
of July. Usually we were lucky, but one year, 
the year of the terrible drought, we were luck­
ily unlucky. The Fourth was the day the rains 
finally came and spoiled the picnic entirely. 
But everyone rejoiced in the miracle of
moisture. For weeks my father had been✓
gloomy; when a thunderstorm arose, it always 
followed the path of either the Cedar or Iowa 
Kiver, and missed those of us who were situ­
ated between. Hope rose and fell with every 
cloud that summer. When on the morning of 
the Fourth the clouds actually gathered above 
Atkins and produced a wicked storm, we 
dashed out at the first drops of rain, literally let 
the drops fall into our mouths, and perked up 
as quickly as the parched young plants of corn. 
Gleefully we went barefoot, tried out all the 
best — muddiest and deepest — puddles, and 
ended the day in an orgy of ice cream which the 
sodden picnic committee had sold to my father 
at half-price. For once — but only for once — 
we didn't mind that the Fourth had been
am »
p \l s |M s
sI
/ //r Atkins girls choir in patriotic dress for the Fourth of lulu celebration in 1929. (G. Rickels Collection 
SHSl)
rained out.
Ordinarily on the day of the big celebrationwe would have awakened to the sound of
firecrackers exploding in the neighborhood.
We were never permitted any of our own, our
joys being limited to the more decorous display
of sparklers and an occasional daring firewheel
which always fizzled miserable. (1 sometimes
suspect this was my father s secret revenge,
since he considered fireworks, together with
most everything else which we considered
exciting, as being extremely dangerous.) The
refreshment stand committee arrived earlv and
*
prepared its tempting displays. There were 
huge washtubs filled with ice and a most con­
fusing display of pop. It was almost impossible 
to decide among the flavors, each one repre­
senting a special form of nectar to youngsters 
whose tastes had not vet been jaded bv all the 
television-advertised colas. The strawberrv
0
was always such a beautiful color, and frizzed so 
prettily when blown up with a straw; the grape 
was heavy, intoxicating; the orange — my 
brother’s favorite — was all right; but my final 
choice was always cream soda, a flavor of no 
particular identity, but one which seemed to 
include all delicious flavors at once.
There were big cardboard boxes filled with 
boxes of Cracker Jack, baskets filled with nickel 
bags of peanuts, and in later years, even boxes 
of candy bars which got deliciously soft and
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The Palimpsest 121
sticky in the heat of the day. And who could 
ever forget the ice cream cones — vanilla, 
chocolate, or strawberry — which dripped 
down our fingers, attracted flies and bees, and 
gave almost every child a “schnurrbart” at least 
once during the day. We knew that later there 
would be hot dog sandwiches — the ketchup 
and mustard were already staining the fresh 
boards of the stand — and hamburgers, mixed 
in bigdishpans in the parsonage kitchen. You 
don t mind if we just work over here on your 
table. The Hies are a nuisance over there. No 
matter what our parents thought about the 
invasion of privacy, we kids loved the running 
in and out and the pungency of the chopped 
onions and pepper which were added to the 
ground meat.
Near the old sehoolhouse, which served as 
parsonage garage, cob- and woodshed, the 
Vorsteher had set up a bowling alley and soon 
the scent of cigars, the hearty laughter, and the 
crash of pins indicated that the older men had
started their dav of fun.✓
By one o’clock the church and school grounds were full of Model A s and 
Chevies, and friends and relatives from neigh­
boring towns were greeting each other, wan­
dering over the cemetery, and waiting for the 
program to begin. In the meantime, the com­
mittee had attached a tarpaulin across one 
angle of the church, from outdoor stage to 
church entrance, and here was the fishpond, a 
place of eternal hope and almost certain disap­
pointment, at least for me. Why was it that the 
person before and after me always found some 
substantial prize, like a celluloid doll, attached 
to her hook, while I never got more than a box 
of Cracker Jack, which I coidd have bought 
anyhow with one of my five tickets (each school 
child received five tickets, worth five cents, 
imprinted with the church seal, in recompense 
for performing that day). By this time the front 
seats were all lined with the older ladies of the 
congregation, the middle-aged ones in the next
rows, and the men, with their Sunday straw 
hats, standing behind. We children were hid­
den behind the curtain of the fishpond, waiting 
our cue to go on the stage.
Never was there a more receptive audience. 
Everyone seemed prepared to laugh. No trag­
edies were ever enacted on that stage except 
when some youngster forgot his lines, or when 
some exceptionally emotional child dissolved 
in stage fright and ran of! crying to his mother s 
lap. The latter humiliation occurred at my first 
stage presentation. The situation was not at all 
helped by the teacher’s apology that I had 
known my piece perfectly the day before. The 
attendant disgrace brought on a sick headache, 
which took considerable amounts of cream 
soda to cure.
At the conclusion of the children’s program, 
the band took the stage and the pupils stepped 
briskly to the tune of ‘Stars and Stripes For­
ever,” and other Sousa marches, in our flag 
drill. The audience applauded, and the smaller 
children ran in and out, confusing our forma­
tions but adding to the fun. Once the flag drill 
was over, we were free to run. There was a ball 
game on the school grounds, youngsters were 
tumbling about the school pump after their 
trips to the ice cream stand, the bowling alley 
was lively, and the potato, sack, and egg races 
began on the south side of the church. The 
noisiest part of the day came when the hog- 
calling contest was announced. To anyone not 
raised on a farm, or at least within hailing dis­
tance of one, the sight and sound of a portly, 
sun-dyed farmer standing on a bench and 
delivering himself of a mighty Poo-ee, Pooee, 
Pooee, POOee’ would have seemed absurd, 
but the crowd understood and loved it when 
the stentorian performance of Henry 
Schminke won the prize.
I n the evening, lights were strung around the bandstand and the refreshment stand. 
Still more cars arrived, many of them with the 
younger adults who had brought their dates. In
122 The Palimpsest
One of the highlights of Fourth of July celebrations in Atkins was the hog-calling contest. In the above 
photograph Henry Haerther urged the celebrants to come one, come all to enjoy Henry Schminke s hog­
calling style. (C. Rickels Collection, SHSI)
those seemingly innocent and moral days, a girl
would hardly dare to hold her boy friend s hand
0
in public; if the young man leaned his arm 
across the girl s shoulder, he was considered 
extremely “fast” — and so was she! We chil­
dren had no idea what the word meant, but we 
knew that it gave us the right to peek askance at 
such worldly characters.
1 he evening program was usually given over 
to performances by the girls’ choir, in their 
patriotic dress, and by the Walther League, 
the youth organization of the church. The Wal­
ther Leaguers were even more tongue-tied 
than the youngsters, and performed in such a 
safe fashion that they often succeeded in 
obscuring any plot the play might have 
boasted. Occasionally some luckless person 
would be chosen to read the Declaration of
Independence, and the eloquence of his read­
ing diminished in proportion to the squirming 
of the audience. By this time the parents with 
cranky, squealing babies were driving away, 
the older men had begun to drone out some 
German songs, and the younger adults were 
playing “party games (one didn’t dare call 
them square dances) on the area that had 
served as a ball diamond during the afternoon.
By this time, Father had shepherded his 
family home through our own gate, warned us 
to pull the shades (“For goodness sake, there 
are still people about!”), and insisted that we 
use the indoor facilities that one night. During 
the summer we made frequent use of old 
“Tant9 Meyers, the wooden structure down 
the south sidewalk, but since there had been a 
continuous stream of visitors to our privy all
The Palimpsest 123
(G. Rickels Collection, SI I SI)
up the church yards. Our help consisted not so 
much in disposing of any trash left over, but in 
hoarding it in our rooms, where it quickly 
incurred the wrath of our older sister, who 
didn’t appreciate dead butterflies, broken pen­
cils, cigar bands, and bottle caps littering her 
dresser or the top of her cedar hope chest. 
Even the night after the Fourth it was hard to 
relax and to realize that for the “grand and 
glorious we would have to wait another whole 
year. Our dear mother usually put on the fin­
ishing touch by saying, “There, you can hear 
the locusts again, right after the Fourth; that 
means that summer is almost over and fall is on 
its way!” n
clay, we had to wait until it had been sanitized 
the next morning by a proper scrubbing with 
broom and boiling lyewater suds.
It was difficult to settle down with the Mcin- 
nerchor still exercising on the stage outside our 
window, and with all the once-in-a-year indul­
gence exercising itself in our stomachs. No 
wonder that we woke up with our parents at 
five the next morning, they to restore their 
house and yard to its usual order, and we to join 
our friends in “helping” the committee clean


The Fourth of July

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