My Own Old House (part 4): The Schramm Family

After the Whitteker Family moved out, there is a gap of a few years where I am not sure who rented and lived in our house. But in 1893 Otto B. and Sophia Froehlich Schramm purchased the home from Joseph and Cecilia Jewett. The Schramms lived in our house for over fifty years

Otto B. Schramm (1857-1943) was born in Buffalo, New York, to German immigrant parents, Augusta and Ludwig Schramm. Before 1865 Augusta brought Otto and his brothers, Julius and Herman, to Cincinnati and remarried. Her second husband, Conrad Mette (a copper smith), was also a German immigrant. The Schramm boys lived with their mother, stepfather and younger half-siblings in a building that still stands at the southeast corner of Schiller and Main Streets in the Mount Auburn section of Cincinnati, across from the Rothenberg School, just north of Liberty Street from Over-the-Rhine. The family lived in a multi-unit building, filled to the brim with German immigrants and their children.

Building at Southeast Corner of Main and Schiller, Cincinnati.
Source: Google Street View.

Building at Southeast Corner of Main and Schiller, Cincinnati.
Source: Google Street View.

According to the 1880 Census there were 21 people in six families living in the right (south) side of this building and 24 people in three households in the left (north) side of the building. The 1891 Sanborn maps show a cooper (barrel making) shop to the rear of the building; it was run by one of the residents, Christian Benus. The map also indicates a saloon in the first floor of the north side of the building.

Sanborn Insurance Map, c. 1891.
Source: Ohio Link.

Otto’s wife Sophia Froehlich Schramm (1859-1943) was the girl next door (or the next floor). Also the daughter of German immigrants, when Sophia was in her teens her father, Jacob, died. She, her mother Melissa, and sisters Frederica and Anna, lived in the same building as the Mette/Schramm family from the late 1870s until she married Otto in 1882.

Otto and Sophia’s parents and many of the other residents of their building and neighborhood worked as craftsmen, laborers, and employees of local manufacturing firms. As a teen, Sophia worked as a gold leaf cutter, as did two of her sisters. However, Otto’s life took a different turn, and he became a white-collar businessman. According to the 1870 Census he was an “apprentice to a lawyer,” at age 13. This may be an exaggeration of whatever form of work he was doing to help out in a lawyer’s office. In 1940 he told the census taker that he had attended high school for two years. In 1880 at age 23 Otto’s occupation is listed as stenographer—he worked for a number of years for the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton Railroad.

In 1882 Otto and Sophia married and moved from Mount Auburn to the suburban village of Carthage (now part of Cincinnati). While Otto’s occupation continued to be listed as stenographer in City and County Directories and in the 1900 Census, he developed a much larger involvement in local business than that title might suggest. Sometime between 1880 and 1890 Otto founded and ran a coal supply company. The coal yards were located in Lockland, Ohio, on the north side of Poplar (McLaren) Avenue, just east of the train tracks that separate that village from Wyoming. In 1900 he won a contract to supply 1,400 tons of coal to the County Infirmary, according to an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Sanborn Insurance Map.
Source: Ohio Link.

Source: Wyoming Historical Society.

In 1887 Gideon G. Palmer, Wyoming resident and president of the Palmer Flour Mills in Lockland, nominated Otto B. Schramm to be a member of the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. In 1888 Otto and four others founded the Lockland-Wyoming Building and Loan Company. 

It is likely that Otto and Sophia rented the home on E. Mills Ave. (then called Wiley Ave.) before they purchased it in 1893 from Joseph and Cecilia Jewett; they may have moved there in 1890. Otto and Sophia raised four children in the home: Alice Florence Schramm (1883-1965), Fredrick Schramm (1887-1900), Arthur Felix Schramm (1890-1968) and Sophia Schramm (1895-1901). Unfortunately Fredrick and Sophia both died of diphtheria as children. While now preventable through vaccination, diphtheria—caused by bacteria—was a common cause of death into the 1920s.

Otto and Sophia’s eldest daughter, Alice, was born while they were living in Carthage, and was 10-years-old when they bought the house on E. Mills. In 1904, when she was 21, she married Clifford Scott, who had grown up in nearby Carthage and Hartwell. Early in their marriage, they lived on Oliver Road in Wyoming and Clifford worked in a spring factory. They had two children at that point, Lowell Schramm Scott (1905-1973) and Marguerite Alyce Scott (1908-1999). Unfortunately, the marriage was rocky. In November 1913 Alice filed for divorce, claiming that Clifford “frequently struck and beat her” and had a habit of “calling her names, striking her and throwing things at her.” A divorce was granted in January 1914, but the two remarried just six months later.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, November 13, 1913.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, January 28, 1914.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, July 19, 1914.

A few years later, when Clifford registered for the World War I draft in 1918, the family was living in Devon, Connecticut, near Fairfield, where he continued to work for a firm that made springs. The couple’s third child, Howard Arthur Scott (1919-2000), was born while they were in Connecticut. Less than a year later, when the 1920 Census taker came around, Alice and the children were living with her parents in our house on E. Mills, without Clifford. But in the family was soon back together again, living in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1922, where Clifford worked as an auto mechanic. 

In the mid 1920s the Scotts returned to Cincinnati, and lived at 40 Ferndale Avenue, just a few blocks away from Alice's parents, and Clifford once again had a job in spring manufacturing. In 1931 Marguerite married Herman H. Miller; the couple began a family in Dayton, Ohio, but often visited the Schramm family home. During the 1930s Alice and Clifford divorced again. Subsequently, Clifford moved to Los Angeles, and Alice and 20-year-old son Howard moved to the Oakley section of Cincinnati where they lodged in the home of two elderly, widowed sisters. Eldest son Lowell lived with his grandparents in the house on East Mills, and worked as an accountant for a gas company. In October of 1940 Howard enlisted in the U.S. Army, and in February of 1941 so did Lowell.

Arthur Schramm, son of Otto and Sophia, was three years old when his family bought the home on E. Mills Avenue in 1893. Arthur grew up in Wyoming, attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, graduated in 1913, and became a civil engineer. After college, he lived in Roswell, New Mexico, married Beatrice Greiner, and worked for a tile manufacturing company. Sometime before 1923 Arthur moved to Houston, Texas, where he wed his second wife Kate Laprade (1882-1971). The 1930 Census reports him living in Kansas City, Missouri, where he spent the rest of his career with the packers and stockyard division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Kansas City, Missouri; he was head of the department when he retired in 1958. Arthur was also a Life Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Arthur married Kate Laprade and had one daughter Mary Katherine Schramm (1926-1988).

Kansas City Stockyards, 1943.

Source: Library of Congress.

After her sons joined the Army, Alice lived for a time with her aging parents. But in December of 1943, the following obituaries appeared in the Cincinnati Post and Cincinnati Enquirer.

Source: Cincinnati Post, December 20, 1943.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, December 21, 1943.

Otto, Sophia, and their children who died of diphtheria, Frederick and Sophia, are buried in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery. Their graves are marked by the flat stones in the foreground of the photo below.

After their parents' death, Alice and Arthur inherited the house, but sold it within a year. One of them left their mark on the house--this graffiti is on the back, second story, up under the eaves. I'm guessing it was done by a teenage Arthur, maybe given the job of painting the metalwork on the roof valleys and gutters (because the paint is red). It says "A.D. 1907 - A.S."