By Jane and Hope Adams, George and Beverly Musselman, Ruth Alexander, Sarah and Lynn ...

433 Pages·2016·4.18 MB·English

BByy JJaannee aanndd HHooppee AAddaammss,, GGeeoorrggee aanndd BBeevveerrllyy MMuusssseellmmaann,,
RRuutthh AAlleexxaannddeerr,, SSaarraahh aanndd LLyynnnn PPhheellppss,, MMaarryy aanndd EEwwaalldd FFiisscchheerr
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.
According to family legend, the name “Musselman” was bestowed
upon the immigrants by the agent who received them in the New
World. He probably did not understand German and our ancestors
were no doubt illiterate—the name might well have been a corruption
of “Moseman” or some variation thereof. But it became officially
“Musselman” in America and has so remained for almost three
centuries. According to Maria Adams, German wife of James Adams,
one of Harry and Anne’s grandchildren, the name is unknown in
Germany as a traditional family name. It is certainly common in
America. The internet lists many branches of descendents. It is well
known through the famous Musselman Applesauce, the Musselman
bicycle coaster brake and some well known sports figures with that
name. The first immigrants were fertile and produced many children
who gradually pushed farther west across the country seeking new
land. They were in turn fruitful and multiplied. We, however, are not
concerned with sorting out all of these distant connections. We are
concerned with only one line—that which traces back to John
Musselman of Shenandoah County, Virginia.
Families were large to provide help with the farm work, but there
was not enough land for all of the sons to inherit. In a pattern that would
repeat itself throughout the nineteenth century, some sons inevitably
struck out for new territory in the west. So it was with our great
grandfather John Musselman. In 1830 John (b. 1803) married a woman
by the name of Eliza Clemmer (b. 1813) and they migrated to Ohio.
Ohio had been a state since the year John was born but still had land
open for purchase and homesteading under the Land Act of 1820. Like
many immigrants heading for northern Ohio in those years, John and
Eliza probably came west by way of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825)
and Lake Erie. By 1834 they had settled on a homestead in a wilderness
6 . . . .. Beginnings in America
that would eventually become Emerald Township, Defiance County,
but bordered on and perhaps at one time belonged to Paulding County
directly south. Their land was situated on the south bank of the Maumee
River, a meandering stream that drains most of northwest Ohio and
adjacent areas of Indiana into Lake Erie at Toledo. They were located
several miles south of the future town of Sherwood, Defiance County.
Much of John Musselman’s property many years later became part
of the US Highway 127 right-of-way going north through flat rich farm
land, which is still relatively unpopulated, to central Michigan. At the
time of his venture in homesteading, the area was not regarded as
particularly desirable for settlement. Historically, the region had
belonged to the Wyandot Indian tribe and was the site of battles with
Indians following the American Revolution and during the War of
1812. But even with the removal of the Indians after they surrendered
their land in the Maumee Rapids Treaty of 1817, settlement did not
occur immediately for a couple of reasons. (There were not more than
3000 people living in the whole strip of northern Ohio west of Toledo
and north of the Maumee when John arrived in 1830.)
For one thing, transportation to markets was too difficult until the
completion of two canals, the Wabash and Erie and the Miami and
Erie. Like many Ohio rivers, the Maumee was not really navigable for
big barges. The two canals, which joined at the village of Junction in
the northeast part of Paulding County, opened up a means of shipping
produce east from this region (and from Indiana) via Lake Erie as well
as the Ohio River. Construction on the canals was started in 1825 but
not completed until 1845. By 1851, the high point of Ohio canal traffic,
the tolls on Ohio canals amounted to over $300,000. Railroads soon
replaced them, however, and by the turn of the century, they had fallen
into disuse.
But the primary deterrent to pioneers settling in northwest Ohio
in the 1830s was the “Great Black Swamp whose fetid waters lay over
the land with the stillness of death.” This area has been described as
“a pear shaped wasteland…120 miles long and 20 to 40 miles wide…
thickly forested and filled with malarial bogs and pools of water.”1 The
arrival of the canals provided incentives for extensive reclamation
during the middle part of the century. Settlers had to dig drainage ditches
Beginnings in America . . . .. 7
and clear timber before they planted crops. Farms were literally carved
out of the forests. Eventually, the pioneers were rewarded with bumper
yields from the rich soil. John Musselman and his large family must have
found plenty of work when they established the Musselman homestead
in this region. Many settlers and their sons worked for lumber
companies in the winter felling the huge oak and other hardwood
trees, clearing brush, and removing stumps for extra cash for their
families. Our father Harry claimed that he alone cleared five acres with
a hand axe—presumably on the land his father acquired in 1891.
John Musselman was one of the first settlers in what became
Emerald Township. It was not even organized until 1853, almost
twenty years after he took up land there. Like other farm families of
their generation, John and Eliza had a large family over a great number
of years. Eliza gave birth to fourteen children, thirteen of whom
survived. Ira, the next to the youngest, became our grandfather. Ira
was born in 1857 and told his son Harry he did not even know some
of the older family members, since twenty five years separated him
from his oldest brother. In addition to his first family, John Musselman
fathered two more children by a second wife after his first wife died.
In his ninety years, spanning most of the nineteenth century, this
hardy pioneer did more than farm and beget children. According to
his obituary, he was an active Mason, a “practicing physician”
(probably doing required frontier medicine such as lancing a boil or
pulling a tooth); he also served as a justice of the peace and operated
a tannery and shoe factory. In addition, he built the first school house
for the township in 1854 and he was noted as a great reader, particularly
of the county newspapers.
When Ira was born in 1857, his father was 53 years old, and the
boy grew up in the shadow of this energetic man. By that time, the
farm was well established and John Musselman was a recognized leader
in the rural community. Ira must have had a little schooling at the
township school, since he could read and write, and he presumably
shared in the life of the farm in those early years. He was too young
to fight in the Civil War, but his older brothers and brothers-in-law
may have. According to the Paulding County history, scarcely a family
in the county was not represented in the Union army. Paulding County