Tradesman

You know what people don't talk about much any more? Ditch digging. When I was growing up, ditch digging came up surprisingly often. It was used by parents to encourage children to do well in school, because "otherwise, you're going to end up digging ditches for a living." People struggling in their careers would shrug and say "well, I guess I can always dig ditches for a living." Ditch digging is hard physical labor but there was also the implication that it was kind of the bottom of the barrel with regard to not only pay but also required knowledge, kind of the ultimate unskilled labor.

So I've always thought it was kind of funny that Henry Frantz was a professional ditch digger.

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Henry Jay Frantz was born in 1857 in Catskill, New York. His parents, Frederick Frantz and Katerina Barbara Ackermann, were German immigrants. Henry had five brothers and two sisters, although three of his brothers and one sister died as infants.

Fred Frantz had served for 11 years in the German army and he was all about turning swords into plowshares. He'd heard there was lush, fertile farmland readily available in the United States, so in 1851, he and his wife and first child crossed the ocean to New York. Fred wasn't overly impressed with the undulating and heavily-treed landscape they encountered in New York's agrarian offerings along the Hudson River. In 1865, the family traveled west to central Illinois, where the land was so flat that you could see for miles in every direction.

Fred carved a successful farm out of the Illinois prairie. It was hard physical labor, no question -- once the incredibly deep roots of the sod were "busted" and the soil tilled, they would inevitably learn that the ground wasn't actually as flat as they'd thought. Without those deep roots to provide drainage channels, the water would pool, preventing planting or drowning crops.

To combat this, farms would bury drainage tile their fields. They still do, except that today, they use trenching machines and lightweight polypropylene tile. But in the 19th century, the trenches were dug by hand and the tile was made from clay. Although it sounds like a straightforward process, it turned out that you kind of had to know what you were doing in order to make sure the water's exit route consistently ran downhill; transits were just a wish for most; they sited elevations with telescopes and levels. Hand-laid clay tiles (considered quite collectible today!) have been found eight feet deep in some midwestern farms. Effective tile installation actually did take some skill!

July 4, 1884. Back: Grant Allison, Mary Frantz. Front: Mary Rilla Allison, Henry Jay Frantz. On the occasion of their marriage.

Fred's sons all followed him into farming, acquiring land around the town of Fairbury, Illinois. By 1885, all three brothers had married, but their bookish little sister, Mary, attended college in Geneseo. As we know, educating women only leads to trouble /* sarcasm off */ At 37, Mary ran against Civil War hero Samuel Farmer for the job of Postmaster... and won. She did marry the next year, but remained childless. In fact, compared to the families of Katerina Ackermann's sisters, Fred and Katie had far fewer surviving descendants. Henry's wife, the former Mary Rilla Allison, delivered four children who lived -- Ada in 1885, George in '87, Florence in '91 and Inez in '95. From newspaper accounts, Henry's farming career did not go especially smoothly. He opened a butcher shop for a while, but it failed. There were frequent mention of illness in the family. Henry joined his father-in-law, George Allison, for trips west into Iowa and Missouri, scouting for opportunities. Eventually, it appears Henry seized onto something he'd been quite good at -- digging ditches. In fact, he started a business, offering tiling to farmers, who apparently were very open to (i.e. thrilled with) the idea of not having to do it themselves. Henry employed a team of several men, one of whom was another civil war veteran, brother to the aforementioned Samuel. Sebastian Farmer was several years older than Henry but had been even less successful in farming (and life in general).

In 1897, the rented house in which Henry and his family were living burned down. No one was injured, but everything was lost. That was apparently the last straw for Henry. His impression was that the area around Des Moines, Iowa, would benefit greatly from some tile installation, and Sebastian Farmer volunteered to travel to central Iowa to evaluate the potential. Apparently, he reported back favorably, as, in 1901, the Frantz family moved from Fairbury to join Sebastian in Minburn, Iowa, stopping in Morning Sun to meet with a clay tile manufacturer, and have Inez's picture taken.

Henry's business really took off in Iowa. In 1905, Sebastian Farmer became ill and returned to Illinois, where he died in 1909 of tongue cancer. Henry continued to employ a modest crew of men. He moved his household to nearby Perry, Iowa, a slightly larger town with greater opportunities for education and employment for the children.

That same year, Ada married. She and Eugene Clement had five children, but her two eldest died, Reville at only a year of age and Olive at 10 of tetanus.

Florence was 17 when she eloped with Arthur Curler in 1909. They had two daughters but Arthur died of influenza in 1918.

George Frederick Frantz

In 1915, 28-year-old George "ran away" to join the Navy. He served for two years before being discharged for a never-named disability and returning to announce in early 1917 that he had found a wife. George was 30 now and his bride 21.

And in 1918, Inez married Fred Holmes, a divorced man ten years her senior. Their daughter was barely a year old when Fred was killed in an automobile accident.

Is it just me, or were they an exceptionally ill-fated family? Does it also sound like Henry's was an unhappy household, one that his children couldn't wait to depart? Inez told her daughter that the family was harassed during World War I, having yellow paint thrown on their house. She said that she wished her father could have just kept his mouth shut. For the longest time, I thought she meant that the German accent he inherited from his immigrant parents caused problems, or perhaps that he was suspected of being (or maybe he was) a German sympathizer. However, yellow paint typically says "coward" rather than "traitor." George's draft card notes tersely that he "Served 2 years in the Navy. Claims he was discharged for disability." While those claims *are* true according to official records, the wording certainly makes it sound as though whomever took his report had skepticism; it sounds as though George's disability was nothing easily discerned. Was Henry ashamed -- and townspeople angry -- that his son didn't re-enlist?

Whatever happened, George's marriage failed. He ran away again, this time for good, first to North Dakota and then to Montana, where he worked as a Machinist until his death in 1951. His sisters paid to have his body returned to Perry for burial but never spoke about him.

In 1921, Mary Rilla was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to the hospital in Oakdale, Iowa, just outside Iowa City, where she died several months later. Henry died the following year of food poisoning.

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In 2021, when I began working with genetic genealogy, I discovered that I had no DNA matches to Henry Frantz. Instead, I had extensive connections to the Farmer family. Three of the Farmer sons never had children, so it's impossible now to tell for sure which of them might have been Inez's father, but it sure seems like Sebastian is a good candidate. It is so hard not to speculate on how that happened. I really don't think anyone but Mary Rilla and possibly whichever Farmer brother it was knew that Henry was not Inez's father. But, however that happened, the situation can't have done much to improve the mood around the household. Henry's death certificate reports cause as "ptomaine poisoning." To me, in 2023, that means "botulism." But apparently it was more synonymous with "food poisoning" back then, something like salmonella. In researching this, I learned about "The Ripe Olive Scare of 1919-20," in which scientists really pinned down the clostridium botulinum toxins, where they were most likely to grow (string beans and, surprisingly, olives, especially in glass jars, which couldn't be heated as much as cans) and how to kill them before they killed anybody else. Sadly, entire families and large portions of a Sorority died before food safety standards were improved to prevent the toxin.