By Jane and Hope Adams, George and Beverly Musselman, Ruth
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
By Jane and Hope Adams, George and Beverly Musselman, Ruth Alexander, Sarah and Lynn Phelps, Mary and Ewald Fischer 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.