We are all ‘living stones,’ descendants of immigrants

by Marilyn Salzl Brinkman

St. Joseph

My husband, Harold, and I have been parishioners in St. Joseph for 27 years since moving from St. Catherine’s in Farming. I was asked by Father Jerome to talk about the early immigrants in St. Joseph.

Father Francis Pierz was one of the very first immigrants to come to Clinton – the early name for St. Joseph. He came to minister to the Indians but was also a major reason countless immigrants came to settle in many parts of Minnesota, including St. Joseph.

The 75th anniversary parish history book reveals Father Pierz made arrangements in 1856 to celebrate Mass with the new settlers in the St. Joseph area. He brought with him from his native Slovenia his 12-year-old nephew, Joseph Notsch Jr. The history tells us “this strippling youth would accompany him on his trips, help carry his luggage, serve Mass, and when necessary do the cooking. Joseph eventually settled down in St. Joseph, where he was later joined by his elderly father, Joseph Notsch Sr.” They were among the first immigrants in St. Joseph and family descendants are still here today.

Among the names of the other early settlers who emigrated from their homelands to St. Joseph are Schindler, Heinen, Lauermann, Lodermeier, Walz, Nierengarten, Rennie, Roeder, Schroeder, Horsch, Kraemer, Loso, Fiddler and others. These first settlers came from Germany, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, other European countries and even Russia. Many came because they heard from Father Pierz that this area was the land of “milk and honey.” Some came from refugee camps, some to avoid being inducted into armies, some for religious freedom and many came so they could own land. Still others came for the adventure. They all came for a better life.

The Lodermeier family’s journey from Germany to St. Joseph was a five-year struggle. Crecencia and Simon Lodermeier left Irrlach, Germany on April 23, 1850. They traveled by stagecoach to Ourzburg; from there they sailed on the Main River to Mainz in a steamboat, then down the Rhine River to Rotterdam and then to France. Then they spent 28 days by sea on board a three-masted ship before landing in New York on June 8. They left New York on June 10 and traveled to Albany, to Buffalo, to Cleveland, to Pittsburg, and from there to Butler, Penn., where they were married on June 30.

The couple lived in Butler until March 5, 1852, then moved to Armstrong County in 1855. From there they traveled down the Allegheny River, the Ohio River and up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and 30 miles below Galena, Ill., they suffered shipwreck and lost many of their belongings.

Cholera broke out on the steamboat. Five persons died between St. Louis and Galena. They saw hearses in the streets. They arrived in St. Paul on March 6, 1855. With two other families, they hired two conveyances to get to Sauk Rapids, paying a tidy sum of $38 per person. They were broke.

When they arrived in Sauk Rapids, the drivers of their wagons told them the blacksmith in town was German. He would surely give them lodging. There they slept on the upper floor of a granary.

Finally, arriving in St. Joseph, they noticed one small log hut and a log church with a cross but without a roof or windows. The log house was occupied by a man named Linnemann. After their difficult five-year journey, the Lodermeiers located land in St. Joseph and became well-known pioneer settlers there. They became American citizens.

Ilsa Walz came as a refugee to escape the Russian army from the Sudetenland, at the time an area located along the Czechoslovakian border. Refugees told them stories of people hanging onto trains to get away, freezing hands and sometimes finally falling off to die under the rails. Many went to Dresden, the “International City,” where they died when it was fire-bombed in World War II. Older people who could not leave turned on the gas in their homes to die in peace.

Ilsa wrote, “Since I was only 15 years old, the older women told me to cover my face with ashes to look older (to) avoid being raped or sent to a cabin in the forest where Russians kept their women . . . As we left we could take only what we could carry. We were marched to the East German border to plant trees. When we heard we were going to be marched to work in a uranium mine, a friend and I decided to escape at night through the forest into West Germany. There I found a job as a florist. Then, with the help of Catholic relief agencies I came to St. Joseph.” (No dates were given for this. It was probably in the mid-1940s.)

Mrs. Joseph Dorsch, also a refugee, came from East Prussia. She wrote the Russians herded her and her sister into a box car that took them to the peat bogs of Siberia. Their starvation diet consisted mainly of sawdust, water and some greens. Because her sister could not force herself to eat it, she died of typhus and was buried in a mass grave. All that kept Mrs. Dorsch alive was her hope to see her husband again in West Berlin at the home of a relative. After seven months, when WWII ended, she weighed only 89 pounds. She was marched back to East Berlin with the other refugees. She was covered with lice and wearing an old coat and dirty footwear, but she found a hole in a barbed-wire fence separating East and West Berlin. In West Berlin, she located her husband. A Catholic relief agency helped them come to St. Joseph.

The new immigrants worked hard to eke out a living in their new country. Few spoke English when they came. Settlers from different regions of the same country often spoke differing dialects of their country’s language as well. All did not always go as they had hoped.

However, through hardship and hard work, they persevered. For survival, these early settlers helped each other and worked together. They formed cooperatives – threshing crews, quilting bees, barn-raisings, and they practiced simple neighborliness when help was needed.

Evidently, for the very first settlers, their Catholic faith was a major force in their lives. They desired a larger church, one more majestic than a log church with a cross that had been built in 1856.

For this, too, these hardy Catholics gathered together. In 1867 an architect was hired to design the church that would replace the old to accommodate the fast-growing congregation. Father Cornelius Wittmann, “met with cooperation on all sides,” according to a 1946 parish history. Granite boulders were hauled from a quarry four-and-one-half miles away by farmers with yokes of oxen . . . “and the work progressed rapidly.” As the walls mounted, the boulders were hauled in carts and wheelbarrows up a long-inclined plane. These thick, heavy walls of fieldstone and cut granite stand as testimony to the skills and craftsmanship of the early German stonemasons in central Minnesota.

The new church was finished and consecrated on June 29, 1871, and the parish was by then “totally free of debt.”

This church, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in St. Joseph, is the oldest Catholic Church still in use in Stearns County and the oldest consecrated church in Minnesota.

In an oration on the feast of the 75-year dedication of the church, this was written:

“The prelate who blessed these walls, the clergy who assisted, the lay people who attended are resting in their graves, awaiting the resurrection. Nevertheless, those who in any way helped towards the erection of the church and for the good of the parish, which is materially represented by the church building, are like so many living stones that have their place in the heavenly temple, in God’s kingdom.”

We are all living stones. We are all descendants of refugees and immigrants. Had not our parents and grandparents left their mother countries to come to this area, for whatever reasons they had, we would not be here.

Please note, dear readers: You will find a more complete history of the church and parish house in the Fourth of July program for Joetown Rocks.

(Marilyn Salzl Brinkman, who lives at Kraemer Lake, is a local historian and a columnist who writes about a  variety of topics, mainly of a historical nature.)