Johanna Schmidt

SCHMIDT ROUW ROWE

Posted By: Connie Swearingen (email)
Date: 10/16/2010 at 15:43:42

History of Woodbury County, Iowa 1984

Johanna Schmidt
By Annette (Gray) Carlson and Nancy Ellis

Johanna Rouw/Rowe was born March 2, 1901, in Veenedaal, Holland, sixth of the eleven children of Gerritje and Everett Rouw. Her first twelve years were spent in Holland and she still retains fond memories of her childhood there. The family lived in a typical brick house, one room, one story high, with a barn attached at the rear. The children’s beds, enclosed like large cupboards, line the room, and ‘Jo’ would eavesdrop on the adults’ evening conventions through her bed curtains. The house and barn were kept immaculately clean; as Jo was too young to help with the milking, the scrubbing fell to her lot.

Children in Holland attended school all but two weeks of the year. More than once, Jo would hurriedly grab a pair of wooden shoes from the assortment left outside on the doorstep and ‘clomp’ off to school, only to be overtaken by an angry older sister who had walked the two miles in a pair of shoes a size too small. The teachers in the schools were all men; parents paid by the week for their children’s education. Jo learned to knit and crochet in the Dutch schools and these skills are one of her trademarks yet today.

The homes in Holland were surrounded on there sides by canals. Farmer were compelled to go by water to reach their strips of farming land. The canals also provided amusement for the children when they were free from school and their work in the fields. In the summer they would swim, race in boats, and gather the flowers that grew along the banks; winter would find them skating on the ice. Jo, however, never mastered ice skating; she even had trouble with the beginner’s method of pushing a chair around on the ice.

When Jo was twelve years old, her parents, being inspired by the frequent letters form their friends in America, decided to sell all their belongings and set out for the land of opportunity. A number of their friends planned to travel with them, but the plans were foiled when Jo developed appendicitis and the Rowe family had to take a later departure. Her older sisters were unhappy with her over this, as they had planned to spend the voyage with their hometown sweethearts. Most of the family, however, spent the fourteen days aboard the Ryndam Ship suffering from seasickness. Jo had great fun scampering around the decks and playing hop-scotch with the other children on board. She was dressed in her first pair of leather shoes, a brown helmet-shaped hat with bright feathers jutting from the top, and dresses copied from pictures of the lasts American fashions. One of the first Americans, Jo saw, upon arrival in New York, offered her a banana. She refused it, having never see the fruit before, she thought it was a big bean. The newcomers were also puzzled by their first sight of someone speaking into a telephone.

The Rowe family traveled by train to Pella, Iowa, where friends had arranged a farm home for them. The train trip took three days, and the family ate food they had brought with them form Holland. Jo remembers that her mother had baked bread with raisins in it to help keep it from drying out. The Dutch community of Pella offered more familiar surroundings, and the future looked rosy. However, within the first year Jo’s father died an accidental death, leaving her mother with ten children, ages one to eighteen. They were: Altje ‘Alice’, Jannige ‘Jenny’, Welmempe ‘Wilma’, Wilhelmina ‘Minnie’, Wilhelm ‘William’, Herman, Johanna, Everett, Geredena ‘Dena’, and ‘Hendreike Clazena’ Henrietta. The family moved into town and all the children who were old enough went to work.

Jo did housework at a large farmhouse for nearly two years, then worked another two years as a typesetter for the Pella Weekblad newspaper. She earned six dollars a week there, and all but 25 cents went to her mother for household expenses. By this time, she had mastered the English language, so she moved to Des Moines in search of better work. She did housework there and later addressed envelopes for the popular magazine, The Successful Farmer.

The flu epidemic of 1918 found Jo back in Pella, working as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, a converted dormitory. Here she developed a life-long friendship with Mr and Mrs Neville Gray, and when they moved to Blencoe, Monona County, Iowa, she moved as well. In Blencoe, she again did housework and also worked in the Post Office. Here too she met John L Arndt, son of Herman and Christina Arndt. His brothers and sisters were: Minnie, Herman, Louis, Jane, Henry, Bernard, Lawrence, Robert, Ellen, and Edna. Jo and John were married March 10, 1921, in Morningside, by Rev Frank J Reed. To make the journey to the city, John had spent most of his savings, $2000, on a bright shiny automobile.

Jo and John spent the early years of their marriage on farms near Blencoe. In 1932 they moved to the Hibbeler Ranch, near Battle Creek, Iowa. Here, John was the ranch foreman and Jo managed the house, cooking, cleaning, and washing for fifteen hired men. She baked at least twenty loaves of bread a week, ‘setting’ the yeast the night before, in a kitchen equipped with a cookstove, a kerosene stove, and wooden table. (Supplies were stored in the pantry and the outside cave served as the ice box.)

They spent four years on the ranch and in 1936 moved to Battle Creek, where John became agent for the Standard Oil Company, operating the bulk plant there. During World War II, Jo dorove one of the delivery trucks and John drove the other. At one time, she fell of the running board of her truck onto a pipe, seriously injuring her back.

John Arndt passed away April 22, 1945, and Jo carried on the oil business for about a year, then worked in the bank in Battle Creek. She was married to Ray Schmidt on March 5, 1949. He was the son of Simon and Karen (Hansen) Schmidt, Danish immigrants who farmed near Battle Creek. His brothers and sisters were: Amy Finch, Ernest, Clifford, Dorothy Bell, Marguerite Hall, Milton, Evelyn Bell, Esther Smith, and Arlene Luder. Ray and his first wife, Katie (Johnson) had farmed near Lawton. When Katie died in 1947, he and his adopted son, Gordon, moved to Sioux City where Ray was employed by National Tea Company until his retirement.

In 1969, Jo and Ray traveled to Germany to visit Gordon, his wife, Ursula (Kromback), and daughter, Antje, in their home in Dusseldorf. They also visited Holland and Jo was able to see her childhood home again, as well as the tulips that inspired her life-long love of beautiful flowers. Ray died July 31, 1978.

Although Jo has had no children of her own, she has been mother and grandmother to many friends and neighbors throughout her life, and her home is always open to them.