Fraser family - Family

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Contents

TO DAVE, SUZAN,

AND MAGGIE

We can believe in the nothingness of life,

we can believe in the nothingness of death

and of life after deathbut who can believe

in the nothingness of Ben?

THOMAS WOLFE

Look Homeward, Angel

FAMILY TREES

Reverend John Bachman (seated) and his family in 1909. His wife, younger daughter, and sons-in-law stand behind him. The young man on the left is my grandfather Osie Hursh. The seated woman is my grandmother Flora Bachman Hursh. Uncle Bill, the baby in the dress, has just been christened

CHAPTER 1

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY began on a Tuesday. On that day, all my great-grandparents but one were living in Ohio or Indiana. Mr. and Mrs. Harry E. Frazier and their four children lived in Indianapolis, in a neighborhood of many vacant lots and telephone poles. Mr. and Mrs. Louis W. Wickham and their three children and hired girl lived at 237 Benedict Avenue, Norwalk, Ohio. The Reverend John Bachman and his wife and two daughters lived in New Knoxville, Ohio, where he was pastor of the First German Reformed Church. Mrs. Elizabeth C. Hursh and her three grown daughters and one son lived at 86 Greenfield Street, Tiffin, Ohio; her husband, Professor O.A.S. Hursh, lay in a nearby cemetery, beneath a $200 monument inscribed with a Latin quotation and the years, months, and days of his life.

O.A.S. Hurshs initials stood for Osiander Amariah Sylvester. At his birth in 1846, his parents decided to leave the choice of a name to their minister; when the minister announced it at the babys baptism, they were surprised. Osiander was a figure of the Protestant Reformation in Germany whose stridency in debate won him many enemies and created disputes which sometimes required the intervention of Martin Luther himself. The name was self-invented; it means holy man in Greek. Amariah came from the Old Testament, where it is the name of a number of walk-on characters. It is Hebrew for God has spoken. Sylvester was apparently added just for meter and flourish. Taken together, the three names are a small sermon in themselves, and suggest that naming babies was a job which the Hurshes minister would have liked to do more often. In later years, however, his efforts turned out to be wasted; the child he baptized almost never wrote his names out full, and people generally referred to him by his initials. If he ever had a nickname less formal than O.A.S., nobody today remembers it.

O.A.S. Hursh had a dark beard, dark eyes set well apart, a broad forehead, and dark, fly-away hair which he sometimes controlled with a tonic of one part Jamaican rum mixed with two parts cod-liver oil. He grew up on his fathers farm near Ithaca, a town in southwestern Ohio which has a hitching rail on its main street to this day. When he was fourteen, he taught in a country school to earn money for college, and he continued to teach full- or part-time for the rest of his life. In his twenties, he kept a pocket diary, which I have. It begins with the eclipse of the sun on August 7, 1869, and ends with his first day as professor of Latin and Greek at Heidelberg College.

O.A.S. Hursh was a fan of sermons. Sometimes he attended several in one weekend. Afterward he kept notes on them, and went over them in his mind the way a person today might do with movies. His family was Lutheran, but he went to other churches as well. When he had a free afternoon, he would harness a colt to a light hickory buggy and go sailing along the Miamisburg and Eastern turnpike, just for something to do. He began to give orations himself in the Heidelberg chapel. At his commencement he delivered the Heidelberg Address, titled The Study of Mind. In the audience was a young woman named Elizabeth Chapman, whose brother and sister went to Heidelberg. She was from Stark County, in the eastern part of the state. Her father farmed, raised cattle and merino sheep, and served a term in the state legislature. The family had the first square grand piano in the county, a Boardman & Gray. O.A.S. Hursh and Elizabeth Chapman met at the commencement, and married at her fathers house on Christmas Day, 1873. They returned to Tiffin, and with a loan from her father built a brick Victorian house across the street from the campus. In 1874 they had a daughter, Alice, and in 1876, Elinor, and in 1879, Grace. During the summer, O.A.S. studied at the Heidelberg Theological Seminary, and soon was ordained a minister in the German Reformed Church. He never had a parish of his own but filled in for other ministers when they went on vacation. On Sundays in July and August he gave a sermon called Christianity the True Manhood in churches in Navarre, Richville, and Mohican, Ohio. In August 1881, maybe after a hard schedule of traveling and preaching, he came down with typhoid fever. He died two weeks later. The monument his wife bought for him, a six-foot stone obelisk and pedestal, now leans slightly to one side. The years have weathered the Latin inscription until it is no longer readable; some of the pencil notes in his pocket diary look as if they might have been made last month.

Sunday, Aug. 29 1869. At home greater part of the day Sister Amanda and I took a buggy ride to Uncle Simons to bid the folks farewell. They emigrate to Ill. next Tuesday. We called at Mr. Robesons this eveningTraded breastpins.

Monday Aug 30 1869. Started for Tiffin this afternoon by the way of Dayton. Traveled nearly all night. Met Zerbe at Urbana. Reached Tiffin at 7 a.m.

Wednesday Sept 1st. School opened today a number of new students in attendance. Prospect encouraging.

The private acts, the secret walks of men, if noble, are the noblest of their lives.

New Year1870. In Tiffin. Weather unpleasant. Snowed all day. Spent the day in meditation, prayer, and reading. Attended Firemens Fair this evening. Oysters.

Tuesday Jan 4th 1870. The twenty-fourth anniversary of my birthday. Arose early this morning. Consecrated myself anew to the Service of Almighty God.

Importance and necessity of Union. An alliance against Satan. When I hear persons talking in a selfish manner about the excellence and superiority of their own denomination I am reminded of Christs rebuke to his disciples &c.

4th of July 1870. Cramer and I went to Put-In-Bay Island to-day. Set up a tent on the beach spent one week on the Island. Were employed in fishing, rowing, bathing, reading, walking about the Island &c. Had a huge time of it.

Mr. and Mrs. Harry E. Frazier were good at math. Harry met Maude Breneman when both were working in the bookkeeping department of a lumber company in Canton, and they married in 1890. Maude had a cute face, with a mouth that turned down at the corners, and hair in tight curls around her forehead. Harry was a short, natty man whose mustache, nose, and round spectacle lenses seemed to be jostling for control of the center of his face. In company, Harry would sit quietly and then all of a sudden come out with something that showed hed been listening all along and had had enough tomfoolery. He was an active member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and taught and superintended Sunday schools. At meals, he said long gracessometimes, on special occasions like anniversaries, very long. In the evening he and Maude would get out a card table and play double solitaire.