A spinning wheel tale

MIKE KONIECZNY wrote today's article. Mike is a talented writer and I am certain you will enjoy this tale of a spinning wheel lurking about his family. Read on. . . and see the Shadows from the Past pictures for today.

THE SPINNING WHEEL: Like many in the Oak Harbor area, one branch of my family tree extends back to Germany. In the years after the American Civil War, a tidal wave of German families emigrated to this part of Ohio. The American government was not so intrusive, the land was cheap, and, in my ancestors' case, the German Lutheran Church was already well rooted. It is amazing just how many of the families that comprised the congregants of St. John Church in Oak Harbor came from a group of villages north of Berlin hard by the city of New Strelitz. Holding with long standing family traditions, I married a local girl of similar lineage, and when I tell my "city" friends that our families have been neighbors for 300 years, they look at me like I belong in the movie, "Deliverance".

For the record, the family names were Bunge, Paepcke, and Michael. They came across the ocean in October of 1881 on a ship named the Lessing and settled with other family and friends just north of Oak Harbor. The family patriarch, Carl Michael, built a house at the corner of Bier Road and Route 19 that still stands.

One hundred and twenty-eight years have come and gone since their emigration. Perhaps 10 items exist yet in family possession that we can identify as having crossed the Atlantic in their company. The largest of these is an old spinning wheel now in my possession here in Phoenix Other than being a wonderful anachronism; its most distinguishing feature is that there are no family stories attached to it All other existing items that made the ocean passage had some nugget of identification handed down in family lore. Why would the most conspicuous of these artifacts be lacking a story and might that absence reveals something of its history?

Before launching into speculation, it is necessary to understand the history of cloth creation. In the time before the Industrial Revolution and extending in rural areas into the 1860's, the only way to get cloth was to use a spinning wheel. Across Northern Europe in the first half of the 1800's spinning flax into linen was a cottage industry that supplied wonderfully durable linen to an increasingly urbanized population. Indeed, my grandmother used linen dish towels into the 1970's originally brought from Germany 100 years before!

The genesis of linen is the grass, flax. A whole sub-culture grew up around its planting, growing, harvesting, preparing, combing, and eventually spinning into cloth. Kept alive by historical re-enactors, the old ways are on exhibit on the Internet's YouTube and can be found by Googling: "Flax Processing YouTube" and "Flax Spinning YouTube". Spinning flax marked the step in its processing where it passed from an outside male dominated responsibility to a female dominated inside chore. There are many different types of spinning wheels corresponding to their areas of origin. Mine is a Saxony Spinning Wheel--the spinning wheel of fairy tales--which was quite common across northern Europe. I suspect that most of the old spinning wheels that exist in the living rooms and attics of the Oak Harbor area are this type.

Given its importance in the life of the average peasant family, the spinning wheel was the most important implement a woman could own. They were lovingly passed down from mother to daughter. A woman's identity often became mystically intertwined with her spinning wheel. Reflective of all this is that in the English language the part of the spinning wheel that held the raw flax, the "distaff", has alternately come to mean "woman".

By 1881 the Industrial Revolution's ability to make cheap and plentiful cloth replaced a family's reliance on a spinning wheel. But as family heirlooms and symbols of simpler times they, no doubt, were still very important to the older women in the community...which brings me back to my family.

In Carl Michael's little band that crossed the ocean that fall, was his 70 year old mother-in-law, Johanna Paepcke Bunge. Born seemingly in another era in 1811, she must have had childhood memories of the bon fires lit all over Europe when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. In the only picture of her that yet survives, her wizened visage fairly drips of stubbornness. It is my theory that the spinning wheel was hers.

German peasants were nothing if not doggedly practical. That practicality would be tested in packing for their trip to America. Storage space was severely limited in such a trans-ocean voyage and there was no room for a bulky, outdated spinning wheel. If need arose in their new home, one could always be purchased there.

But sometimes practicality gets held hostage to family dynamics. If parents live long enough, there comes a time in EVERY child-parent relationship where simple decisions based on logic and practicality become affronts to the 5th Commandment. Generally the 5th Commandment wins.

I can only imagine the argument that took place between the generations over the spinning wheel. The little old lady won, and the spinning wheel was, no doubt, the last item disassembled and packed for the trip. Of course they never used the spinning wheel after arriving in Ohio and so shortly thereafter it got shoved into the corner of the attic and forgotten. Maybe the argument was so severe that any mention of the spinning wheel brought forth bad memories. Perhaps that explains why no stories were ever attached to the spinning wheel and passed down across the generations. We will never know for sure but maybe--just maybe-- somebody in heaven is smiling--or fuming--after looking down on this article.

Warm friendship

Like the setting sun...

Shines kindly light

On everyone

**BURMA SHAVE**

(by Harold Lewis)