Letters
of a German American Farmer
By Johannes Gillhoff
[Editors note:This is an excerpt from Letters of a German Farmer written by Johannes Gillhoff.]
"Whoever wants to farm should stay in Iowa. That's what I think," says Jurnjakob Swehn. "In Iowa there's plenty of everything; plenty water, plenty hay, plenty corn, plenty potatoes, and plenty opportunity."
Early in the twentieth century, Johannes Gillhoff created Jurnjakob Swehn: the
archetype of the upright, honest mensch who personified the German immigrant.
The character was derived from hundreds of letters written to Gillhoff's father
by former students who had emigrated to northeastern Iowa from Mecklenburg in
northeastern Germany. Gillhoff's farmer-hero, planting and harvesting his Iowa
acres, joking with his neighbors during the snowy winters, building a church
with his own hands, proved so popular with the German public that a million
copies of the German edition are in print. Translator Richard Trost has made
the book available for the first time in English as Letters of a German American
Farmer.
Between 1853 and 1877, some 90,000 Mecklenburgers emigrated to the United States
with hopes of discovering political freedom, liberation from strict religious
codes, and increased personal independence. Iowa seemed as good a place as any
for some, including Gillhoff's Jurnjakob Swehn, to settle in the New World.
In Iowa, Swehn builds a log house and makes a success of farming, marries, raises
a family, and becomes an elder in the Lutheran church. He writes through the
winter, waiting for spring's thaw when his pen will give way to a plow. He learns
to be a farmer in America where, he says, "a farmer has to do everything
and be everything: carpenter, cabinetmaker, blacksmith, bricklayer, even a shoemaker."
He sends word of his fortune, along with truths of his new life to his old German
teacher. "My dear friend," he writes, "you see how it all came
true for a kid off the sandy land of Hornkaten in Mecklenburg who dreamed of
having two herds of cows as he moved out into foreign parts. Now we have plenty
of everything, plenty of land and livestock. And it all cost plenty of sweat."
A translator and retired pastor from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,
Richard Trost sets out to explore his own genealogy, which parallels Jurnjakob's,
and tell a personal story. In doing so, larger tales of Mecklenburg immigrants
and of Iowa history are related.
The Mecklenburgers' mass migration and settlement in the mid-1800s was very
much a nineteenth century phenomenon in Iowa. On the heels of homesteaders,
German immigrants arrived, settled and proceeded to make the state home. Even
today, gravestones at local cemeteries in Iowa's Clayton and Iowa counties bear
witness to the presence of families named in the book.
Letters of a German American Farmer is available at local bookstores
or directly from the University of Iowa Press.