Merry Christmas to All

The rather belated holiday issue of the (print) Hoffman Family newsletter has been published. We want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a wonderful new year. I've drawn a greeting for you.

Workin' On the Railroad

[reprinted from the Henry Hoffman Family News of January 2002]

Henry Hoffman arrived in Illinois as the railroads boomed

When Henry Hoffman arrived in the U.S. in 1854, according to his 1889 biographical sketch, he “soon made his way to Chicago believing that the Great West offered the best opportunity for the poor man to acquire a home.  On his arrival in Chicago, he secured work on a grading train, and made his way to Scales Mound in [Jo Daviess] county.  Here he determined to make for himself a home, and, returning to Chicago to get his baggage, he came back to Scales Mound, and upon getting there had but twenty cents in his pocket.”

If Henry only had twenty cents, he needed other work. In an 1854 U.S. Gazetteer is the tantalizing statement in the description of Galena, Jo Daviess County: “A branch of the Central railroad from Peru to Galena is about to be constructed.” The grading train on which he worked his way from Chicago was probably part of the construction of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad to Freeport, or the Illinois Central from Freeport to Galena.

From the map you can see that in 1850 Illinois had barely begun the construction of rail lines, the total perhaps 120 miles, none extending across state lines. The newspaper in New York when Henry arrived in March of 1854 advertised rail travel to Chicago with connections to St. Louis or Dubuque, Iowa, but there were still no bridges then and much had yet to be constructed. Henry's arrival coincided perfectly with the expansion of rail lines in Illinois and the development that followed.

The Illinois Central Railroad (IC), a private company, was chartered by the state of Illinois in 1851 and from the state received the first federal land grant for railroad construction. The interior of Illinois was then thinly settled and the railroad was expected to encourage development and provide cheap transportation of grain and livestock for the settlers. Of course the railroads needed the new customers as well.

The charter to Illinois Central did not dictate the route which had been chosen to run north-south, but did require the inclusion of five specific places: Galena and Dubuque, Chicago, Cairo in the south and the southern terminus of the Illinois and Michigan canal. This last was an eye-opener for me—what was this canal and where was the terminus?

Actually, it might be a bit of a puzzle solution. The canal ran from Chicago to La Salle or Peru in central Illinois on the Illinois River linking Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. The two towns fought over designation for the railroad and I'm still not sure which won. Finally though I see how Peru could be an important place, first as part of the important waterway transport and then for the railroad. The 1854 gazetteer says the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad intersected the IC there and I've seen an historic map that makes it look like a major junction. Finally we might understand how Henry Hoffman came to marry a woman there and even file his naturalization papers in La Salle County.

Segments of the IC were completed and a painting of a work crew in 1856 shows piles of ties and a tent town along the rails. Fourteen miles of track from Warren to Scales Mound was done on Sept. 11, 1854, so was probably where Henry worked. The railroad opened in September 1856, but it was only partially completed. It wouldn't have been a comfortable ride.

By 1860 Illinois supported many miles of rail lines all across the state in a network that played an important role in support of the Union Army during the Civil War. Bridges did eventually span the Mississippi River carrying the trains, but the first to do so at Rock Island, Illinois, was destroyed by a steamer, thought by many to have struck the bridge intentionally.

Steamboat owners and all those connected to river and canal traffic were fighting a strategic battle against the railroads in which the Mississippi bridges were vital. The owners of the ship that struck and burned the bridge sued the railroad claiming the bridge caused a change to the river currents that swept the riverboat out of control.

The case came to trial in Chicago on Sept. 1, 1857 with the railroad represented by Springfield, Illinois, lawyer Abraham Lincoln. The case is now represented as pitting Northern versus Southern economic interests as stifling the railroads would continue shipping of Midwestern produce southward on the rivers making St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans national centers of trade. But victory of the railroads took that flow eastward making Chicago and New York primary markets.

I found it amazing to imagine the country at that point when shipping was on rivers and canals. Henry Hoffman's part in the building of Illinois rail lines was small, but he would have endorsed the shift away from the south that benefited the north in the Civil War.

Henry's selection of Derinda Township over Scales Mound in Jo Daviess County took him somewhat away from the railroad, but as he later specialized in the Chicago yearling market for his calf production, he was able to benefit from the railroad's existence.

Brought to light by the World War I draft registrations was that nearly all the men of the family in Savanna, Illinois, and La Crosse, Wisconsin, worked for the railroad. So while the first generation made use of building the railroad, the following generations became part of it.

Jacob Benz's son George in Savanna and Henry Benz in La Crosse were employed by the CB&Q while the others (La Crosse: Louis Kjarsgaard; Savanna: Lawrence O'Neal, Harry Hoffman, Clarence Bowers, Otto Grill and Rudolph Hoffman) worked for the CM & St. P. I reported these facts, but was chagrined (having been drilled on railroad abbreviations as a child) to have no idea what the acronyms stood for. Of course it was easy to learn about these railroads and the Library of Congress even has historic maps of their routes on the Internet.

Burlington Route. The CB&Q was The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (or just the Burlington) an 1856 merger of four short lines near Chicago. It was a line that expanded through land grants and also remained fiscally sound. In 1970 the CB & Q merged into the Burlington Northern Railroad along with the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific. Burlington Northern merged again in 1995 with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad creating the current BNSF railroad.

Perhaps the Burlington's best-known achievement took place in 1934 with the introduction of the Pioneer Zephyr - America's first diesel-powered streamlined passenger train.

The Milwaukee Road. The CM & St. P was the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific (the last “P” a later addition) and was in fact a familiar face when I saw its logo. A Granger Railroad like the CB & Q, its focus was the midwestern farmland.  The CM & St. P did not fare as well financially as it underwent bankruptcy at several points, the final blow coming in 1977. Thousands of miles of line were abandoned and what remained was sold to the Soo Line in 1986.

Sadly 1970s hopes of revival of U.S. passenger trains have not been realized.

In the Year 1609

Tonight we watched a PBS Nova special that spent a lot of time discussing telescopes. It reminded me of the piece I wrote for the newsletter on 1609. Following is a reprint of the article from the Henry Hoffman Family News of January/February 2001.

In the Year 1609: The moon was first drawn using a telescope, Heini Hoffmann was born in Oberglatt.

    For Christmas [2000] I gave Dick Galileo's Daughter, a book by Dava Sobel, just because it looked fascinating. It was a fortunate choice; he enjoyed it enough to encourage me to read it too. It is a very readable account of the life of Galileo (1564–1642) in Pisa, Padua and Rome, enlightened by letters from his elder daughter, a cloistered nun.
     Fueled with interest in the 17th century I read Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier's novel based on a painting by Dutch artist Vermeer in the 1650s. The plot was a disappointment, but the book brought to life that time in Delft. I learned that details were mined from the excellent Vermeer and His Milieu, a Web of Social History by John Michael Montias who looked at all sorts of documents of the painter, his friends and three generations of family. The last required genealogical assistance to weave together the names, places and dates to create historical biography. I wish I had access to and could read similar documents in Zürich!
     Galileo's intellectual and aristocratic world is informative for all of Europe, but daily life in conservative, mostly Protestant, Delft was surely closer to that in Zürich. Not having the Catholic faith's need to hurry, probably the same custom was followed in Zürich as in Delft to baptize a child one or two weeks after birth at a service following the Sunday sermon. Creating a 1609 calendar shows the March 5th date of Heini Hoffman's baptism was on a Sunday.
     Bibliographies led me to other books. Interesting is Asimov's Chronology of Science & Discovery which has entries for each year like Grun's The Timetables of History, but only covers a few events, but in some detail. In ArtBook Vermeer I was surprised to learn that the map on the wall in one of his paintings had west, not north, at the top, supposedly common at the time. It looks strange.
     I was especially taken with the pages from Galileo's notebook with the first illustrations of the moon's surface as seen with a telescope in 1609. The telescope was accidentally invented in Holland the previous year but kept secret as a military advantage, but rumors quickly ran through Europe and Galileo easily built his own. He is the first known to have turned it to the sky where he could distinguish the stars of the Milky Way and the mountains and “seas” of the moon.


     Galileo's inventions include a pendulum clock, but that didn't come until the end of his life in 1641. He was blind by then and the model built for him by his son. Try to imagine life in 1609 with no clocks as we know them. He died in January of 1642; Isaac Newton was born Christmas of that year, one of my favorite men of science.
    Exploration was big in 1609 when Henry Hudson, searching for a Northwest passage, reached New York Bay (Manhattan, located by Verrazano in 1531) and sailed his ship Half Moon up the river that would be named for him all the way to the site of Albany. One of Vermeer's ancestors had dealings that year with founders of the East India Company.
     In Oberglatt, the baptism register was begun in 1600. Men named Hoffman first appear as witnesses, Claus in 1602 and Hans in 1605. Soon their own children appear. For some reason the name Hoffman is underlined in these records though others are not. This continues for some years, then another name is underlined. Sadly, around 1609 many baptisms do not list the mother. The given names in this record are diminutives which at this time are very common in the records. These are probably for Heinrich, Jacob, perhaps Gertrude. Heini was always so named. In 1654 his son Hans was born who would become the Ehegaumer.


     I also brought home from the library books on The Thirty Year's War (1618-1648—Switzerland just managed to stay out of this one, but the ending of it had important results for its autonomy and neutrality) and The Black Death or plague which was still a scourge of the 17th century. It was a time of great invention and discovery, but was still very primitive in health and education.