LONG VALLEY
Memories of Long Valley and Research on ancestry.com
Childhood in Long Valley, New Jersey
That warm Spring day in 1951 would have been just another day in my childhood if a photographer had not come to Long Valley, New Jersey to do a series of pictures of myself and my parents, Bob and Kay Swackhamer, for an article for American Magazine about their cottage industry--rugs that duplicated the art of hand-braiding. Almost seven decades later, I sit in my home in California and leaf through the 8x10 glossy photographs, like a slideshow evoking another time and memories from the viewpoint of a child.
I was six years old, living with my parents and my Aunt Marjory in the “family homestead,” a pretty white house with a veranda next to the Zion Lutheran church on the banks of the Raritan River. My father and aunt had been raised there and my parents had been married in the church. Their little scotty dog had escaped from the house and chased them down the aisle.
This is what the house looks like today, painted yellow and red, with a sign that says "Zion Lutheran Parish Center."
My father and aunt were the only Swackhamers that I knew. My grandmother, Wilhelmina Hayden, died when my father was three. All I knew of her life was that she had survived the Slocum disaster by hanging onto the paddlewheel while the boat burned. My grandfather, William T, ran the Swackhamer Garage, and then the Ford Agency in Long Valley. My father returned from Bucknell University to run the agency with my aunt when William T. died in 1934.
As I think back on this time, I remember stopping at a store next to the mill on the way home and looking at a television in the window. My father told me to pay attention to a dark moment in history. It was 1952 and Senator Joseph McCarthy was speaking.
We got a television soon after. I watched Howdy Doody after school.
In 1953 Aunt Marge took me to Hackettestown to a movie theater to see newsreel footage of the coronation of (This past weekend I watched the wedding of Harry and Meghan.)
In 1954 Billy Burr, a friend of my parents, took me to see Peter Pan on Broadway. Billy was Mary Martin’s understudy and so that day, because Mary Martin had flown into a wall, Billy stood in at rehearsal. It was exciting to see her fly across the Broadway stage hanging from a wire. I played hide and seek with the seven Lost Boys in the theater and I watched Run Tin Tin on television with Larry Hagman, Mary Martin’s son. It was a very special moment when the lights went down. This is Mary Martin singing “I’m flying.”
Another adventure was going to Madison Square Garden to see Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. The lights were all turned off and in he dark a herd of cattle entered the arena with fluorescent paint on their horns. The Sons of the Pioneers sang Ghost Riders in the Sky.
The Family Bible and Tintypes
The only other Swackhamer I knew about then was Samuel, whose name was on the bottom of a billboard beside the road coming into town. I remember that it read “Long Valley was settled in 1731 by Samuel Swackhamer.” Who was this person, I wondered— and what was his relationship to me?
I have a few relics from my family– a file of pictures and papers, a small book of tintypes from the 19th century—photographs of fifty people with their names written in pencil—and the family Bible. This Bible, written in German and lavishly illustrated with engravings, weighs twelve pounds and was published in Nurnberg in MDCC LXX – 1770. How did this beautiful object get to Long Valley—and how has it come to be in my possession almost 250 years later?
Written in pencil in the inside cover of the Bible is “Julia L. Swackhamer.” And in the tintype book there are three photographs with “Julia” or “Julia S.” also written in pencil in what looks like the same handwriting. The first picture in the tintype book is a gentleman with ponderous white sideburns, identified as “Grandpa Trimmer.”
Aunt Julia
On the first page of the Bible is a list of Trimmers, written in delicate script in brown ink, with dates. As I look at the tintypes and the Bible, it’s probable that the Bible was passed from one Trimmer to another and that Julia’s Grandpa Trimmer passed it to her.
I then remembered my father mentioning that after his mother died when he was three, he was raised by Aunt Julia. So the Julia in the tintype pictures was my great aunt.
Who brought the Bible from Germany so long ago? And was it used in services in the Zion Lutheran Church, which was founded more than 250 years ago? The church historian suggests that the first service was held in Long Valley in 1745, before the current church was built. The remains of the church built in 1774 can be seen on Fairview Avenue. I see my family home on the right of the picture, painted yellow. Via satellite tour, I see a sign on the door saying it is part of the church.
Samuel Swackhamer
Gene Swackhamer, President of the Swackhamer Dufford Historical Society, set off on a quest to find an answer to the question of who Samuel Swackhamer was. The result is The Emigration of Samuel Swackhamer and the Westward Migration of his Descendants by Gene L. Swackhamer (Gateway Press, 2007).
Gene discovered that Samuel was born in a small town in Germany, Althussheim, in 1700. When he was nine years old, he had to flee with his father, Daniel, and his mother, Eva, from an invading French army. They returned to find their home and barn burned and livestock gone.
Samuel married Eva Hoffman and they had a son, Johannes Konrad. They had three more children but they all died, as, finally, did Eva. Samuel remarried Anna Katherine Kuch and they had one child who also died.
Samuel lived during the reign of Frederick William I. Realizing he would always be a peasant growing food for a King’s army, he contemplated going to America. Letters from there gave a glowing report of a life of freedom. Katherine was enthusiastic and so Samuel, his wife, and Johannes Konrad endured a difficult voyage, and ended up finally in 1731 in German Valley.
The new land was hospitable, but not to Katherine, who died soon after arriving.
Samuel married his third wife, Elizabeth Miller, sometime after 1732. Gene has tracked eleven healthy children from this marriage. Johannes Konrad, the one surviving child born in Germany, lived to be 100 or 101 and died in Long Valley. When Samuel died, at his funeral the minister said that he had fathered 25 children and had 73 grandchildren. Nine of his children remain to be identified. They established branches of the family in many different places, in particular Ohio, Pennsylvania and Canada. And so, from Samuel’s progeny there are thousands of Swackhamers.
Although Samuel was seeking peace coming to the new land, his descendants have fought in many wars here— on this land, the American Revolution and the Civil War—and overseas WWI ,WWII, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, and the Middle East wars.
This is William T.’s draft registration card for World War I. The registrar was John E.D. Naughtright. I see a John Naughright in the tintype book. Is he the one who signed my grandfather’s WWI draft registration card?
Family Tree—Discovering Ancestry.com
Having thoroughly enjoyed Gene’s tales of Samuel’s voyage, and wondering if I could learn anything more with the ancestry.com data base, I went to the website and clicked on “create a free family tree.” It took me only a few minutes to enter the names of myself, my father, my aunt, and the grandparents I had never met. (My mother’s Irish and Latvian ancestors are another project.) In his book Gene had warned of the difficulty of tracking one’s lineage back to Samuel, given the huge number of his descendants and how far afield they are scattered. It seemed unlikely that I would be able to figure out my relationship to him without more effort than I was willing to expend. Gene wrote about the painstaking genealogical research he had done, which involved travel, locating documents and poring over tiny handwriting.
But I was about to be very surprised.
The ancestry.com data base, which today has over 60 billion records, links census records, neatly translated from handwriting to a standardized form, data linked to existing family trees, and numerous other sources like immigration lists and birth and marriage certificates. Searches are instantaneous.
And so, I clicked on William T. Swackhamer.
His father was George Trimmer Swackhamer
His father was Philip Welsh Swackhamer
His father was Jacob Swackhamer
And his father was Johannes Konrad Swackhamer—Samuel’s firstborn, who was born in Germany and died 100 (or 101) years later in Long Valley.
So with a few taps on the trackpad, I had effortlessly discovered that Samuel Swackhamer was my 5th great-grandfather.
Records showed that all eight generations (these five plus William T, my father and myself) had lived in Long Valley or one of the towns close-by. And all the deceased, except my father, were buried in one of the cemeteries in or close to Long Valley.
Before Samuel
Continuing with ancestry records, and matching them with what Gene found:
Samuel’s father was Daniel
His father was Christopher
His father was Amandus
His father was Johannes
His father was Jacob — 1546-1606— my 10th great grandfather
My first entries, which I suppose you could call the trunk of the tree, formed a straight line up of thirteen generations. I added Samuel’s known children and then I added a few others, deciding to limit my tree mostly to Long Valley residents. Location is a useful limiter in the Ancestry data base.
As long as women take their husband’s names, genealogy is a patriarchal business. A friend has a hand-written family tree with hundreds of names— all men. With ancestry.com, women are included.
In tracking back to Jacob, I found the names of the mothers. Beginning with mine, the Long Valley mothers were: Katharine Wikstom, Wilhelmina Hayden, Frances Margaretha Trimmer, Elizabeth Trimmer, and Susan Margaret Terryberry. The mothers in Germany , beginning with Samuel’s were Eva Hoffman, Eva Schmidt, Barbara Theobald, Catherine Schafer, and Margaretha Model, my 9th great grandmother.
I have not found the wife of Jacob, my 10th great grandmother. It is enjoyable to contemplate what this unknown peasant woman in the 1500s set in motion when she gave birth to a little boy. And to wonder who came before her.
With a little poking around, I found my own connection with Gene Swackhamer. When you begin a family tree with your own name on Ancestry, it tells you what your relationship is to each new addition. Gene is my third cousin twice removed.
I confirmed that Julia was William T’s sister—my great aunt.
Census records told me that the family had always been farmers. George T broke with that tradition to work for the post office, possibly as postmaster, before opening a general store.
This is a tintype of George Trimmer Swackhamer
The Family Tree
When you search for a name on Ancestry, a good source of information is other family trees. I found numerous family trees with thousands of links to the people on my tree. As tempting as it is to create my own enormous tree now that I have these links, I’ll be content with adding what I have found from the Long Valley Swackhamer family to the huge data base for other people to use. The Deborah Hayden Swackhamer Family Tree is public and can be viewed by anyone.
Having satisfied my curiosity about my relationship to Samuel, who the Julia of the tintypes and Bible inscription was, and roughly how the Bible came to me through the Trimmer family, I decided to fill in a few more details of my branch of the Long Valley Swackhamers.
Wilhelmina Hayden
Looking though the pile of pictures, I see one labeled Marjory age three. A little girl is sitting on the lap of a woman I realize must be my grandmother, Wilhelmina Hayden.
Following up on the story my father told me about his mother surviving the Slocum disaster, I found that on June 15, 1904, 1358 people, mostly women and children from Little Germany, the lower east side of New York City, gathered for a day on the water on the paddleboat steamer General Slocum for the 17th annual Lutheran Church picnic. Only 321 passengers survived. This 45 minute documentary about the disaster includes footage of people at that time in New York.
The 1900 Census reveals that nineteen-year-old Wilhelmina Hayden (father British, mother German) was living on 2nd Avenue in New York as a boarder with John Holthusen, a language teacher, his wife Gesina and daughter Clara.
She married William T. Swackhamer and had two children— Marjory and Robert. She died in 1916 in Long Valley.
I once wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Review of Books and signed it Deborah Hayden, thinking of my grandmother Wilhelmina Hayden, about whom I knew so little. When the letter was published, I decided to use Deborah Hayden as a name for publication and, in short, that persona took over from Deborah Swackhamer. So today I am Deborah Hayden, who hasn’t a clue who her English great-grandfather Hayden was.
William Trimmer Swackhamer
My father was raised in Long Valley and as a young man worked for his father, William T, first in the Swackhamer Garage and then as a distributor of Ford cars which were shipped by rail to Long Valley where they were assembled and painted.
William T. Swackhamer
Bob and Kay
In 1941 Bob met my mother, Kay. She kept a tiny diary that recorded their first dates. They went flying together, and to parties, and skiing. She records taking the instruments for the first time. (Later, she became an acrobatic pilot.).
She wrote in the little diary “I love him so much.”
They were married on June 12, 1942.
Willow Run
In 1944, Bob and Kay moved to Michigan where Bob was a civilian test pilot at Willow Run air base.
Mother told me that test pilots wives never said goodbye—always “so long.” I had imagined my father taxiing down a short runway, flying a small fighter plane, so it was a surprise when I googled Willow Run and found that it was an 80 acre manufacturing and assembly factory for the production of B24 fighter aircraft, planes made of 1,225,000 parts. On eighteen hour shifts, one plane was completed every 55 minutes.
I discovered that the plant was conceived of and built by Henry Ford. So my father went from assembling cars made by Ford Motors to testing planes built in a Ford plant. I knew that Hitler had a picture of Henry Ford next to his desk and that he pinned a metal on Ford’s chest. Hitler was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938. How Henry Ford changed to the man who produced fighter planes to defeat Hitler is a story that deserves more research. Ford built 6,972 of the 18,482 total B-24s and produced kits for 1,893 more to be assembled by other manufacturers
At the end of the Willow Run documentary, a pilot and three crew members walk out of the hangar to board a plane to test. I realize the pilot climbing into that enormous plane could have been my father. I wonder what it was like to feather an engine on one of those huge planes that had never been flown.
I was born in Ann Arbor on March 15, 1945.
The Braiding Machine
When the war ended and Willow Run ceased bomber production, we moved to Oakland, California and bought a ranch style house with a rose-covered picket fence for $7,000. The post-war times were optimistic. Bob got a job as regional sales manager for Stinson aircraft. The Stinson newspaper reported that he had 2,000 hours in the air, beginning in 1932. He trained as a co-pilot for Penn Central Air Lines and instructed Naval cadets in a private contract school. He held a commercial, instrument, instructor and multi-engine licenses. And he had been a Willow Run test pilot.
After traveling for Stinson for some time and wanting to spend more time with his wife and new baby, Bob started a flight school with Kay. They bought a small plane.They told me I squealed with delight when they let me take the stick and make the little plane dive.
In 1950 we went to Damariscotta, Maine for my aunt’s wedding. My grandfather owned Bay Shore Machine Shop, which had made parts for, and won awards from, the navy during the war.
My father, who already had mechanical ability from assembling Ford cars in Long Valley, worked with my grandfather, Fred Wikstrom, learning to use the lathes and drill presses in the machine shop. I remember the sweet smell of machine oil and the pin-up posters in the bathroom. My grandfather let me run the lathe, but he joked that I had to stand on a sheet of newspaper because I was so short. My Irish grandmother, who had been the receptionist at the Algonquin Hotel in New York during the flapper round table times, cooked lobster which cost $.25/pound.
My grandmother, my great aunts and my mother were adept at hand-crafts, one of which hand-braided rugs. My father, observing them work, wondered if he could design a machine that would duplicate the art of hand-braiding. This is a picture of my great aunt Annie sewing rugs.
Working in my grandfather’s shop, he designed and build a machine to do that. Hand-braiding involves using ten fingers to alternate three strands of wool, one over the other. Bob’s machine used three large spools moving in a figure eight pattern to feed wool to a front unit of three smaller cones that folded the wool and moved in synch with the back to create the braid. The machine when finished was 16 feet long and weight a half a ton.
This picture is an ink drawing of the braiding machine. It shows the front of the machine with the cones that folded and braided the strands coming from the large spools in the back. I remember an especially pleasing repetitive clicking sound as the cones circled one another.
In 1952, we moved back to Long Valley and again lived with Aunt Marge. My parents started a business designing and producing rugs made by this machine. They rented a two story building on the other side of the stone bridge a short walk from the house. The bottom floor had been a blacksmith shop, the top a big meeting hall, where I played with other children. I recently discovered it was where the KKK met. There was a skeleton in the closet.
The cottage industry business was called “Contour Braided Rugs.” They designed, produced and sold beautiful wool rugs, up to 9x12 in size.
Downstairs Bob wound the wool onto the spools (and I helped). The strand of braid that came from the front cones fed upstairs through a hole in the ceiling to where Kay sat at a sewing machine. She started with sewing one piece of braid folded back on itself and kept sewing until a 9x12 rug was completed. Bob designed and built a metal table with a fan underneath that blew air through holes to float the rug so that it could be easily turned while sewing. He later sold a number of these tables to carpet manufacturers in the south. We called it the flying carpet machine.
They calculated having produced a million feet of braid.
While New England hand-braided rugs were made from scraps and rags, these rugs were made from the finest wool, dyed to order for designs created for individual homes. And while hand-made rugs ended with a tapering butt end, my mother figured how to splice two ends of a circle of braid into an invisible seam that made the rug reversible—a technique that came to her in a dream. Kay also made handbags out of the braid and one day she put a bag on her head and came up with the idea of a braided hat. Both sold well in the upscale department stores of New York.
Bob was granted a patent in 1955.
The October 1956 issue of Better Homes and Gardens featured one of the rugs on their cover.
This is the article in American Magazine. The journalist romantically summarized the business “Love Braids a Rug.”
After Long Valley, we moved back to Maine, and then to Laconia, New Hampshire, where I went to high school. My father continued to invent under the company name “Mechanical Motions.” Below is a picture of a snow blower.
They lived in Laconia until, being in failing health, they moved to be near me in California. Kay died in 1979, after thirty-seven years of marriage, Bob in 1988. Because of their love of flying, they both asked to have their ashes scattered at sea from a plane, a wish I honored.
In 1963 I followed in my father’s footsteps and enrolled at Bucknell University. On holidays I visited Aunt Marge in Long Valley. One visit that stands out in my mind is Thanksgiving, 1963. We watched the John F. Kennedy funeral with Ann Metz in her stone house by the bridge.
Marge died in 1965, having lived her whole life in Long Valley, except for the years she spent at Douglass College.
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