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."

My Own Old House (Part 3): The Whitteker Family

The Whitteker family lived in our home during the 1880s. They were a middle class Cincinnati family that lived in suburban Wyoming for a few years, and spent much of the rest of their lives in the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati. The father, a salesman, paved the way for his children to get excellent educations and go on to have interesting careers--minister, nurse, artist--which took them across the country and the world.

In 1887 there was a county directory published which listed the residents of Wyoming and the street they lived on—but not house numbers, because they had not yet been assigned to homes in Wyoming. Because only two homes had been built at this point on East Mills Ave. (then called Wiley Ave.), and because Chalres S. Fay is listed as living at the corner of Wiley and Elm, it is my conclusion that the family of William and Mary Whitteker was living in our house in 1887. They may have moved there as early as 1882, when the Golden family moved out.

William Aaron Whitteker, Jr. (1852-1926), was born in Charleston, West Virginia, and was the son of a merchant. In 1878 he married Mary L. Fry (1851-1939); she was born in Florence, Alabama, daughter of Sarah and Thomas Fry. Thomas was a cabinetmaker, according to the 1860 Census.

William Whitteker came to Cincinnati from West Virginia sometime before 1875. His early jobs included florist and milliner clerk (selling ladies’ hats). While living in Wyoming, his occupation was listed in the county directory as traveling salesman. On later censuses he was reported as selling coffee and seeds.

According to the 1880 Census and 1881 Cincinnati City directory The Whitteker family had been living at 584 McMillan Street in Walnut Hills. When they moved to Wyoming in 1882, William and Mary had two children, Elliot (1879-1918) and Lilian (1881-1979). Daughters Juliet (1884-1950) and Gertrude (1887-1891—died of diptheria) were born while the family was living in the house on East Mills (Wiley) Avenue. Below is young Gertrude's death notice. I love that they call her "our sunbeam."

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, February 10, 1891.

William, Mary, and their children moved back to the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati before 1890, when a Cincinnati city directory lists them living at 255 Hackberry. They subsequently lived at 114 Kleine, and then spent at least 20 years living at 2621 Cleinview. Two more children were born after they moved out of Wyoming: Lois (1890-1991) and Homan (1894-1972).

I haven’t found much information about the family’s life while they lived in our house on East Mills (Wiley) Ave. However, the three children who spent their youngest years in the house went on to live very interesting lives.

The eldest, Elliot Huff Whitteker (1879-1918), interrupted his college studies at age 19 to enlist and serve with Company M, First Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in the Spanish-American War, 1898-99. He went on to continue his degree at the University of Cincinnati, and in 1904 graduated from Lane Seminary. Elliot became a Presbyterian minister, serving congregations in a number of Ohio cities and then in Illinois and Iowa. He married and had three children. His first wife, Maybelle Morris, died in 1912; Elliot's second wife was named Winnie. Unfortunately Elliot died of pneumonia in 1918 at age 39.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, February 7, 1918.

The Whitteker’s third child, daughter Juliet A. Whitteker (1884-1950), graduated from Cincinnati’s Hughes High School in 1903. She became a nurse and worked in Cincinnati for several years. In 1918 she was working in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in the 1920s in La Grande, Oregon. In about 1931 she moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where she worked for the Massachusetts State Board of Health. By 1940 she was living in Boston, and was a superintendent with the Massachusetts Health Department. The 1943 Boston City Directory listed her position as Nurse Supervisor for the Division of Child Hygiene. Juliet died at age 65 in 1950 on Cape Cod, but is buried in the family plot in Spring Grove Cemetery.

Source: La Grande Observer, November 2, 1922.

The eldest daughter, Lilian Eveleth Quarrier Whitteker (her name as she had it listed in the University of Cincinnati Bulletin) (1881-1979), had the most unconventional life of the Whitteker children. She studied art at the University of Cincinnati and with Frank Duveneck. Lilian was active in local and regional art organizations in the first two decades of the twentieth century, including serving as vice president and as treasurer of the Cincinnati Women’s Art Club. She also spent a few months living in Los Angeles and Pasadena California in 1917-18. She was primarily a painter in the impressionist and post-impressionist styles, but in 1918 won accolades for creating French character dolls, some of which were purchased and presented to the Cincinnati Art Museum; others were obtained by the Chicago Art Institute.

Links to webpages showing examples of Lilian's art:

Doll Illustration

Portrait

Afternoon at the Park

Flowers

More Flowers

Landscapes

Sand Dunes

In 1920 Lilian moved to New York City, where she got involved in theater design. Then in the mid-1920s she moved to France. She went there with William Perry Dudley, landscape architect, who is described as her lifelong love (and who was married before going to France and remarried once there). William purchased the Donjon de Montbazon, a castle ruin in the Loire Valley of France, which he and Lillian worked together to restore. They were often visited there by other American artists, and in the 1950s Alexander Calder was a nearby neighbor. In the late 1930s, as war approached, William Dudley returned to the United States with his wife. Lilian, however, remained in France through the war, and spent six months imprisoned by the Germans in an internment camp in France because she was a U.S. citizen.

Montbazon Castle, Loire Valley, France
Source: http://www.suttonclonard.com/Z_Castle_Montbazon_Tours.htm

After the war she continued with her art, showing it in numerous exhibitions in France. When William Dudley died in 1965, he left the castle to the French government. Locals intervened wanting to allow Lilian to continue to live there and to try to transform the castle into an art center, but after four years this fell through, and Lilian had to move. She died in 1979, and was buried in the town of Montbazon. After her death over 400 pieces of her art were auctioned. The town of Montbazon established an art prize in her name and named a street after her.

This article (in French) tells her life story, includes several pictures of Lilian (including one of her as a child), and explains how her style of painting changed over time. Link to Article

My Own Old House (part 2) The Golden Family

Click here if you would like to read part 1, about my house in the 1870s.

It is difficult to discover for certain who lived in my house through the 1870s and 1880s. House numbers had not yet been assigned in Wyoming, so I can only make educated guesses (by process of elimination) about who likely lived in the house, when looking at U.S. Census records and City/County directories. I know its owner, Joseph Jewett was living on Springfield Pike and rented out this home.

The earliest residents I can document living in my house on East Mills Ave. (originally Wiley Ave.),  are the family of William Franklin Golden (1853-1882), his wife Anna Herbert Hickman Golden (1852-1889), and sons Clifford Clark Golden (1879-1915) and William Franklin Golden, Jr. (1882-1918), based on the 1880 Census. (I found record of the Fay family living across the street later in the decade, and am assuming they didn't move).

1880 U.S. Census Form

William was the son of Isaac Golden a grocer/baker who lived and had a shop on Elm Street in Cincinnati as early as the 1840s. However, he died when William was only nine, so William spent his youth living with relatives, including with his older, married sister’s family in Green Township.

Anna’s father was a Cincinnati-based wholesale tobacco merchant, Henry "H.J." Hickman, who moved from Kentucky to Cincinnati and then to Avondale. Anna demonstrated a lot a bravery as a young woman, when a burglar invaded her father's home (see article below).

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer February 27, 1877.

Anna and William were married in January, 1879. On the 1880 Census, instead of having an occupation, William was listed as living “on income.” This may have been due to illness—William died in 1882 (in Wyoming, probably at home) of tuberculosis, just a month before his second son, William, Jr., was born. He was buried in his father’s family plot in Spring Grove Cemetery, in Cincinnati. I wonder where the family's income came from, as on the 1870 U.S. Census he was a 16-year-old farm laborer. Maybe Anna’s father helped them out—in 1880 he was living in Avondale with two servants in his household, or maybe it was their siblings.

Anna Hickman Golden, William Franklin Golden, Jr., and Clifford Clark Golden.
Source: Bruce Black

The family likely moved out of Wyoming soon after William's death. Sadly, Anna died in 1889 in Wooster, Ohio of pneumonia, leaving her sons, aged 10 and 7, orphans. Anna was buried in her father’s family plot in Spring Grove Cemetery.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer March 30, 1889.

As of the 1900 Census, the two boys, now young men (21 and 18), lived with Anna’s sister, Grace Hickman, in College Hill. They both served in Company C, First Infantry, Ohio National Guard in the first decade of the 20th century. Census and death records indicate that later Clifford was a teamster and William was a driver for a rag collector.

Ultimately, like their father, both Clifford and William died of tuberculosis, both at age 35. Each spent the last weeks of their lives in the Cincinnati Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Price Hill, which is now the Dunham Recreation Center.

A video about the Tuberculosis Sanatorium:

A newspaper article about the sanatorium: http://www.examiner.com/article/day-26-price-hill-s-dunham-from-tuberculosis-hospital-to-recreation-center.  And another link to its current use as a recreation center http://cincyrec.org/search/facility.aspx?id=44.

Clifford was buried with his mother in his maternal grandfather’s plot in Spring Grove Cemetery in 1915. However, at his death in 1918 William, Jr., was buried in Cincinnati’s Potters’ Field in Price Hill—the cemetery for the poor and indigent, located near the Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Which makes me wonder why? Did he have no family around to facilitate his burial in Spring Grove? Or had he in some way alienated them? Or did he not want to be buried there? Or did no one from the Sanatorium even bother ask?

An article in City Beat about Potters' Field: http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-21868-price_hill_potters_field.html

Coming up next in my house's history -- a family of artists...

My Own Old House (part 1)

The house that captured my heart when we moved to Wyoming dates from about 1874/1875. Its footprint appears on a map published in 1875 by the Wyoming Land and Building Company (WLBCo) in a flyer advertising the lots for sale in their subdivision, the former Archibald Burns farm. At that time, the street was named Wiley Ave., after Burns’ grandson. This home and one across the street were built while the lots were owned by the WLBCo, and were sold to men who were partners in that enterprise, but who lived elsewhere in the community.

1875 Map--house is on lot 4, at the bottom, on what was then called Wiley Ave.

The house’s brick construction is unusual for the period in Wyoming. Most other Wyoming homes built in the late nineteenth century were wooden—many of the early real estate investors and developers in Wyoming were members of the Stearns Family, which owned the Lockland Lumber Company. The stickwork in the house's gables is quite elaborate, and is very similar to that found on several homes of the same general style and floor plan (but built of wood) in blocks to the south, in what was the Village of Hartwell (now part of the city of Cincinnati). Were these homes all the work of the same carpenter/builder?

I have many unanswered questions about the early history of my house. Why did the WLBCo build it? It is not likely that it was a “model home” as we see in subdivisions today. In the 19th century, it was not the subdividers, but lot buyers who contracted for home construction. Was it built to earn money for the WLBCo through rents? A place for lot purchasers to live while their own nearby home was constructed? An example of the kind of construction WLBCo owners hoped to see on adjacent lots?

In 1878, four years after the house was built, Joseph F. Jewett (1835-1922) and Cecilia E. Jewett (1842-1914) purchased it. He was one of the partners in the WLBCo. They lived on Springfield Pike, and Joseph Jewett was also partner in a Cincinnati company that manufactured paper and cloth bags, primarily intended to hold flour and grain.  He was characteristic of many of the early residents of Wyoming—prosperous men who had lived in Cincinnati and continued to run businesses there, but who decided to move their family to one of the quickly growing suburban enclaves outside the city.

It is difficult to discover who lived in the home through the 1870s and 1880s. House numbers had not yet been assigned in Wyoming, so I can only make educated guesses (by process of elimination) about who likely lived in the house, when looking at U.S. Census records and City/County directories. In upcoming posts I will have more information on the first family I can document living in the house, and then several of those who followed.