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By Jane and Hope Adams, George and Beverly Musselman, Ruth Alexander, Sarah and Lynn ... PDF

433 Pages·2016·4.18 MB·English
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BByy JJaannee aanndd HHooppee AAddaammss,, GGeeoorrggee aanndd BBeevveerrllyy MMuusssseellmmaann,, RRuutthh AAlleexxaannddeerr,, SSaarraahh aanndd LLyynnnn PPhheellppss,, MMaarryy aanndd EEwwaalldd FFiisscchheerr This book is gratefully dedicated to our parents and our grandparents. Without them we wouldn’t be here and there would be no story. Jane Esther Musselman Adams George Hayes Musselman Ruth Ann Musselman Alexander Sarah Alice Musselman Phelps Mary Ellen Musselman Fischer The Musselmans of Sunset Lane, 1998: Jane, Ruth, Sally, George, Mary Acknowledgements Many people have contributed to the writing of these pages. The participation of all the Musselman siblings and their living spouses was essential, of course. George, especially, deserves thanks for his genealogical research, his first draft of the section on the Aunts, Indian Trail Lodge, and the Extended Family, as well as putting much of the copy on disk for editing and general adminis- tration. Sally Musselman Phelps, also, assisted in the Aunts’ story as well as her own work. Jean Musselman Santa Maria let us use her Lake Michigan cottage for one planning session. Beverly Musselman hosted us once in Farmington Hills, and Mary Musselman Fischer put us up twice in Hastings, Minnesota, as well as providing space for the family archives. We owe special thanks to Anne Musselman Shannon and her step-daughter Linda Shannon for preparation of final copy, arranging for printing, and copying the pictures. Mary Musselman Robertson designed and produced the cover. Sally Phelps helped outline the material and, with the help of her son-in-law Tom Stone, converted a PC disk to a Mac format for those of us who are technically challenged. Jane and Hope Adams hosted Ruth Alexander for a few days so she could get their stories on tape. Beverly Musselman proof read some of George’s copy. Jane, Andy and Sarah Alexander assisted in telling Bill Alexander’s story, as did his sister and niece, Betty and Nancy Bonell. George Musselman cheerfully drove us to the Musselman homestead in Ohio, to East Lansing, and did research in Saginaw. Mary and Ed Fischer explored Traverse City for information on Indian Trail Lodge. The Archives office at Michigan State University, the East Lansing Public Library and the Paulding County Library in Ohio were all extremely helpful. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Saginaw, Michigan, graciously sent us what records they had of the Green family. Finally, we never could have accomplished this without computers and e-mail, so perhaps we owe a debt to the technological genius of our century which enabled us to write history, even if we did not make it. —Ruth Ann Musselman Alexander, General Editor and Compiler © 2000 Musselman Sibling Association Table of Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 Beginnings in America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Musselman Line 4 The Green Line 17 2 Anne and Hap 1900-1920 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3 Growing Up in East Lansing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Jane’s Story 92 George’s Story 107 Ruth’s Story 140 Sally’s Story 170 Mary’s Story 189 4 Indian Trail Lodge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 5 The Aunts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 6 Extended Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Musselmans 249 Greens 253 7 The Outlaws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Hope’s Story 259 Beverly’s Story 273 Bill’s Story 279 Lynn’s Story 295 Ed’s Story 297 8 The Second Half of the Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .311 The Adams Family 312 The Musselman Family 322 The Alexander Family 343 The Phelps Family 390 The Fischer Family 410 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421 Time Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425 Chart of the Family Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Although separated by geography and by the demands of work and growing families, five Musselman siblings—Jane Adams, George Musselman, Ruth Alexander, Sally Phelps and Mary Fischer—have managed to maintain close relationships since the last of us vacated the family home in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1956. Periodic reunions and gatherings for holidays, weddings and funerals as well as back and forth visits among the next generation have kept family ties and connections strong. We even celebrated the joyousness of our family feeling by contributing to and publishing a family cookbook, largely through the efforts of Mary Fischer and Sally Phelps. Most of our gatherings involve food—a genuine Musselman passion, clearly visible in our substantial figures. We enshrined a Musselman physical charac- teristic when we called it The Thick-Thigh Cookbook: Masticating with the Musselmans (For Those Who Prefer Eating to Sex). Since the book included notes and comments about our celebrations and personalities, it might have sufficed as a testament of our family relationship. However, as the years pass (we are now “the old folks”) we realize that our lives, with those of our parents and children, encompass all of the twentieth century and that they probably illustrate many of the events, movements, and changes during this era. We think it might be useful to record our stresses and strains as a family, our adventures and laughter and tears, in the historical context of the “American Century” through which we have passed. We want to leave this record for our descendants—whether they are interested in it or not. By shaping our memories and thoughts and experiences in some orderly fashion and relating them to the world in which we lived, we hope to understand more clearly who we are, where we have been, and how we got to this point in our lives. In the process, we expect to savor again those experiences that have been sad and funny, joyous and Introduction . . . .. 3 miserable, rewarding and difficult, boring and exciting, triumphant and devastating. In the process perhaps we will learn something about ourselves and our world. We’ll leave it to generations that follow us to determine whether these pages will clarify for them where they are going in the next century, but we hope that they will at least get acquainted with the family from which they have sprung. We write these memoirs not because our experiences have been significant in any notable way, but because of their very ordinariness. We are not famous and our contributions to the world have been modest. We will never make it into a history book that we do not write ourselves. We are boringly typical of a “wasp” American family in the twentieth century: white, Protestant, of mixed northern European heritage. Nonetheless, our lives chronicle the movement of American people from farming to professions, from Midwest small town life to residing in urban centers across the country and the world, from large families to small or blended families, from education ending with grade school to acquisition of professional and graduate degrees. We are unusual, perhaps, only in that we have been endowed with extraordinarily healthy genes. Our parents and most of our grandparents and aunts and uncles lived to old age, some to their nineties. Although we have surely known tragedy and sorrow, we have largely avoided terrible accidents, diseases, and disasters. We have also been extraordinarily blessed with healthy children. In the spring of 1996 we, the five offspring of Harry Hayes and Anne Isabel (Green) Musselman and our living spouses, attended an “Elder Hostel” hosted by the University of South Alabama. The main subject of study was WRITING, in particular the writing of memoirs. Author Terry Cline, the main lecturer, said, in effect: “Just start telling the history of yourself and your family from your perspective. Your descendants will thank you for it. If others in your generation do the same, a multi-dimensional picture of your life and times will result.” The five of us accepted the challenge and what follows is the result of our efforts. ➥ Chapter One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beginnings in America The Musselman Line We begin with our forebears. We trace our lineage to European peasant stock—large families of healthy people who migrated to America over the course of three centuries. Our family descends from immigrants from England in the seventeenth century, from the “Pennsylvania Dutch” who arrived in the eighteenth century, from the Irish Protestants who emigrated through Canada during the famine of the 1840s, from Scots in the late nineteenth century who also came through Canada. The identifiable connection to the Musselman line appears at the beginning of the nineteenth century when our nation was less than two decades old. We know that a John Musselman was born in 1803 in Shenandoah County, Virginia, where his family had been living for perhaps three generations. This area, known as the “Old West,” was settled largely by Scotch-Irish and the more numerous Germans who arrived after coastal and tidewater regions of the colonies were mostly occupied. Many of the Germans came from the Palatinate near the Rhine where they had suffered religious and economic persecution during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the War of Spanish Succession or Queen Anne’s War (1701-1713). Furthermore, Quaker William Penn had established Pennsylvania on the basis of religious liberty. He published a pamphlet that circulated in Europe advertising that fact, and the possibility of buying cheap land on reasonable terms in what would become a great agricultural region. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, these “Palatines,” as they were sometimes called in America, began to emigrate in large numbers. Some of them were members of Protestant groups like the Beginnings in America . . . .. 5 Mennonites and the Dunkers (or Church of the Brethren). They arrived in Philadelphia and made their way inland by the easiest route to establish farms in the Great Valley of the Appalachians or to join family members who were already there. They formed a substantial portion of Pennsylvania’s population (known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, a corruption of “Deutsch” or German). The Musselmans were part of this ethnic group that eventually drifted south into the Shenandoah Valley. According to family legend, the name “Musselman” was bestowed upon the immigrants by the agent who received them in the New World. He probably did not understand German and our ancestors were no doubt illiterate—the name might well have been a corruption of “Moseman” or some variation thereof. But it became officially “Musselman” in America and has so remained for almost three centuries. According to Maria Adams, German wife of James Adams, one of Harry and Anne’s grandchildren, the name is unknown in Germany as a traditional family name. It is certainly common in America. The internet lists many branches of descendents. It is well known through the famous Musselman Applesauce, the Musselman bicycle coaster brake and some well known sports figures with that name. The first immigrants were fertile and produced many children who gradually pushed farther west across the country seeking new land. They were in turn fruitful and multiplied. We, however, are not concerned with sorting out all of these distant connections. We are concerned with only one line—that which traces back to John Musselman of Shenandoah County, Virginia. Families were large to provide help with the farm work, but there was not enough land for all of the sons to inherit. In a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the nineteenth century, some sons inevitably struck out for new territory in the west. So it was with our great grandfather John Musselman. In 1830 John (b. 1803) married a woman by the name of Eliza Clemmer (b. 1813) and they migrated to Ohio. Ohio had been a state since the year John was born but still had land open for purchase and homesteading under the Land Act of 1820. Like many immigrants heading for northern Ohio in those years, John and Eliza probably came west by way of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825) and Lake Erie. By 1834 they had settled on a homestead in a wilderness 6 . . . .. Beginnings in America that would eventually become Emerald Township, Defiance County, but bordered on and perhaps at one time belonged to Paulding County directly south. Their land was situated on the south bank of the Maumee River, a meandering stream that drains most of northwest Ohio and adjacent areas of Indiana into Lake Erie at Toledo. They were located several miles south of the future town of Sherwood, Defiance County. Much of John Musselman’s property many years later became part of the US Highway 127 right-of-way going north through flat rich farm land, which is still relatively unpopulated, to central Michigan. At the time of his venture in homesteading, the area was not regarded as particularly desirable for settlement. Historically, the region had belonged to the Wyandot Indian tribe and was the site of battles with Indians following the American Revolution and during the War of 1812. But even with the removal of the Indians after they surrendered their land in the Maumee Rapids Treaty of 1817, settlement did not occur immediately for a couple of reasons. (There were not more than 3000 people living in the whole strip of northern Ohio west of Toledo and north of the Maumee when John arrived in 1830.) For one thing, transportation to markets was too difficult until the completion of two canals, the Wabash and Erie and the Miami and Erie. Like many Ohio rivers, the Maumee was not really navigable for big barges. The two canals, which joined at the village of Junction in the northeast part of Paulding County, opened up a means of shipping produce east from this region (and from Indiana) via Lake Erie as well as the Ohio River. Construction on the canals was started in 1825 but not completed until 1845. By 1851, the high point of Ohio canal traffic, the tolls on Ohio canals amounted to over $300,000. Railroads soon replaced them, however, and by the turn of the century, they had fallen into disuse. But the primary deterrent to pioneers settling in northwest Ohio in the 1830s was the “Great Black Swamp whose fetid waters lay over the land with the stillness of death.” This area has been described as “a pear shaped wasteland…120 miles long and 20 to 40 miles wide… thickly forested and filled with malarial bogs and pools of water.”1 The arrival of the canals provided incentives for extensive reclamation during the middle part of the century. Settlers had to dig drainage ditches Beginnings in America . . . .. 7 and clear timber before they planted crops. Farms were literally carved out of the forests. Eventually, the pioneers were rewarded with bumper yields from the rich soil. John Musselman and his large family must have found plenty of work when they established the Musselman homestead in this region. Many settlers and their sons worked for lumber companies in the winter felling the huge oak and other hardwood trees, clearing brush, and removing stumps for extra cash for their families. Our father Harry claimed that he alone cleared five acres with a hand axe—presumably on the land his father acquired in 1891. John Musselman was one of the first settlers in what became Emerald Township. It was not even organized until 1853, almost twenty years after he took up land there. Like other farm families of their generation, John and Eliza had a large family over a great number of years. Eliza gave birth to fourteen children, thirteen of whom survived. Ira, the next to the youngest, became our grandfather. Ira was born in 1857 and told his son Harry he did not even know some of the older family members, since twenty five years separated him from his oldest brother. In addition to his first family, John Musselman fathered two more children by a second wife after his first wife died. In his ninety years, spanning most of the nineteenth century, this hardy pioneer did more than farm and beget children. According to his obituary, he was an active Mason, a “practicing physician” (probably doing required frontier medicine such as lancing a boil or pulling a tooth); he also served as a justice of the peace and operated a tannery and shoe factory. In addition, he built the first school house for the township in 1854 and he was noted as a great reader, particularly of the county newspapers. When Ira was born in 1857, his father was 53 years old, and the boy grew up in the shadow of this energetic man. By that time, the farm was well established and John Musselman was a recognized leader in the rural community. Ira must have had a little schooling at the township school, since he could read and write, and he presumably shared in the life of the farm in those early years. He was too young to fight in the Civil War, but his older brothers and brothers-in-law may have. According to the Paulding County history, scarcely a family in the county was not represented in the Union army. Paulding County

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draft of the section on the Aunts, Indian Trail Lodge, and the Extended Family, as well as putting much of the .. go to Lansing, Michigan (the Cincinnati, Jackson and Mackinaw) and would one day take Harry .. child, our grandfather George Green, was born in Grand Blanc in 1864. We know little of hi
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