The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR PETER TOMSEN Interviewed by: Mark Tauber Initial interview date: April 20, 2016 Copyright 2020 ADST INTERVIEW PART I Q: Today is April 20th (2016) and we are beginning our interview with Ambassador Peter Tomsen. We always begin with, in this case, providing Ambassador Tomsen with a small token of our esteem, the mug with our brand on it, "Cool Franklin," and begin with the first question - where was he born and raised? TOMSEN: Thank you very much Mark and thanks for this gift. Ben Franklin is one of the most popular Founding Fathers! I was born on November 19, 1940 in Cleveland and raised in small towns in Ohio. Q: Tell us a little bit about your forbearers, where they originated as you recall them. TOMSEN: My father had a very difficult childhood -he was an orphan. He was born in Oakland, California. His mother was from a farm family near Navarre in eastern Ohio. She married someone from central Ohio whose name was Tomsen. They went out to California in the first decade of the 20th century. Unfortunately, my grandfather abandoned my grandmother in the San Francisco/Oakland area after Dad had been born. My great-grandmother came out from the farm in eastern Ohio to help her, but my grandmother passed away from a disease in 1911, probably typhoid. So Dad was basically orphaned at two. Dad’s grandmother arranged for him to move in with relatives farming in Wisconsin. They shortly thereafter placed him in an orphanage. His grandmother talked one of Dad’s uncles on the Navarre farm into taking Dad in by providing the uncle with more land to add to his farm. 1 Dad was very miserable there. His older cousins gave him a rough time. His aunt rejected the school’s request to buy him glasses. The school’s threat to get a court order forced the purchase. That only toughened his predicament at home. As soon as he was eighteen, he walked away with a bag of clothes, determined to find his own way and to go to college. He graduated from Case Western Reserve. He met my mother who was teaching at an elementary school in Wooster near Cleveland. They settled in Cleveland near Lake Erie where I and my two older brothers, Jim and Jon, and a younger brother, Tim, were born. Another younger brother, Mike, and sister, Margot, were born later. My family line on my mother’s side --her maiden name was Yates-- is a more interesting story. Two cousins, very interested in our Yates’ family genealogy, have traced our Yates forbearers going back to the late 1600s when they settled in present-day Culpeper County, St. Mark’s Parish. Their farms were a few miles away from the county seat of Culpeper County, also named Culpeper. The Yates were of English origin --hard-working farmers intent on expanding their land holdings in Virginia, later in Ohio. A good illustration: my great grandfather, Civil War veteran Daniel Yates, wrote down his profession as “dirt farmer” in his 1861 regimental mustering-in document. The earliest Yates we have been able to specifically identify was Thomas Yates, born in the late 1600s or early 1700s. His father, also Thomas Yates, arrived in America at the village of York (now Yorktown), a port on the Virginia coast about 1670. We believe he was from southern England and sailed to America from Bristol in southwest England. The elder Thomas Yates, like thousands of other young, landless farmers, came to America as an indentured servant employee of the Virginia Company. In that era, the Virginia Company, like the Massachusetts Bay and the East India Companies, was a joint stock venture chartered by the English government to colonize vast tracts of the empire overseas. The Virginia Company loaded up their ships with indentured servants contracted to work for 3 or 4 years. At the end of the contract they were granted freedom and usually a plot of land. The first name “Thomas” continued as the name of the oldest Yates sons for four generations of our family in Virginia and Ohio. The earliest courthouse recorded land deed purchase my cousins traced was in 1728 in Culpepper, Virginia –up the Rappahannock River from York. They estimated that this Thomas Yates, probably the oldest son of the emigrant, was born before 1707 when he had to be at least 21 to have the land deed recorded at the Culpeper courthouse. 2 Thomas Yates married Sarah Morgan in Culpepper. Their eldest son, another Thomas, of course, was born in 1740. He married Elizabeth Ziegler. Her parents, Zieglers and Zimmermans, arrived in Culpepper from Germany in the late 1600s and early 1700s respectively. They, too, were farmers. Thomas Jr. and Elizabeth’s youngest son, Abner Yates, also our direct ancestor, was born in about 1773. He married Clara Smith in Culpepper. They moved to Virginia’s far western, Shenandoah Valley (present day) Rockingham County, Linville Village, to farm and raise a family in the 1790s. County land tax records from the period locate their farm 8 miles north of Harrisonburg, the county seat, near a major Indian trail cutting through the Appalachian Mountains to Ohio and Kentucky. Interestingly, Abner Yates, along with John Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s great- uncle, and Daniel Boone’s wife’s parents, were active members of the same church --the Linville Creek Baptist Church. President Lincoln’s great-grandfather (another Abraham) and John Lincoln were early members of the church. The younger (President) Abraham’s father had moved his family to Kentucky in 1782. The church also adjoined the Indian trail. The minutes of the church committee’s meetings have survived to this day. They recount how Abner Yates, John Lincoln and Daniel Boone’s in-laws, the Bryans, managed church activities. Fascinating reading! The Yates’ homestead and the church have long since disappeared. But the still privately- owned Lincoln family home and cemetery stand nearby today on Route 42, about one hundred yards away. It is fronted by one of those white and black historical signs, “Lincoln’s Virginia Ancestors.” Following the leap-frog pattern west of many thousands of land-hungry pioneers, Abner and his family, including his only son and my direct ancestor born in 1799, another Thomas Yates (!), emigrated over the Appalachian Mountains to Ohio. The Ohio Genealogical Society records state that, during the 1820s, Abner and Thomas Yates were among the earliest pioneers to settle in north central Ohio’s (present day) Wyandot County. They became firm Methodists and abolitionists in Ohio. Some members of the family moved to Kansas to influence that territory’s entrance into the Union as an anti-slave state. The pattern of mixed, northern European marriages, English, Scotch-Irish, Irish, German, Dutch, Swiss, Scandinavian marriages in Virginia continued on the Ohio Frontier. Thomas Yates married into a local Dutch family, the Crauns. They had eleven children. 3 The third son, Civil War veteran Daniel Yates, my great-grandfather, was born in 1839. He died in 1931, nine years before I was born. May I briefly add here that the Northwest Ordinance, the last Act passed by the Continental Congress, called for the surveying and dissecting of all land in the then Northwest Territory –covering the 5 later states Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin– won from Britain in the 1983 Treaty of Paris. In Ohio, the very unequal 1817 Treaty of Maumee (Ohio) following the Indian wars forced about eight Indian tribes to surrender some four million acres of lands to settlers. They received broken promises of reservation lands and stipends for tribal chiefs. Congressional legislation sub-divided the rich Northwest Ordinance farm lands, top down, into counties. The counties were divided into townships, the townships into one- mile by one-mile squares, or sections, containing 340 acres each. The squares today are still called sections. In each township a portion of one section was set aside for schools. Some have been preserved and can be seen along country roads down to today. Abner Yates took advantage of Congress’ liberal 1820 Land Act charging only $120 an acre. He bought most of Section 10 in Sycamore Township in the northeastern part of Wyandot County. Wyandot County land records record he sold 40 acres to his son Thomas for only $50 an acre to get him started after his marriage to Elizabeth Craun in 1833. Q: The only thing I would add here is that the original Yates who settled in Ohio benefitted from two main issues in U.S. history -the Northwest Ordinance- the one thing the Continental Congress did right, and the creation of the Erie Canal. That was one of the ways they would get goods to market, up to the lakes and to the ports. TOMSEN: You are so right. And the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in those 5 states. The advent of the railroad in the 1830s also made transportation of farm produce and livestock to markets more efficient. After Abner Yates’ passing in 1847, Thomas moved his growing family north to adjoining Wood County. He bought 160 acres outside rural West Millgrove village, ten miles east of the town of Fostoria. The farm was adjacent to two other local farm families --the Kellys and the Kigers. The Yates, Kigers and Kellys intermarried, enlarged their land holdings, built comfortable houses and bigger barns, constructed winter houses in West Millgrove and buried their dead in West Millgrove cemetery adjoining Yates Road. 4 My great-grandfather Daniel Yates’ mother was a Kelly.