Descendants report innuendos about inappropriate relationships between Keil and some of the women, and with certain families in the colony. I did attempt to incorporate some of that uncertainty, which can occur in communal groups where there is but one recognized leader and where that leader fails to prepare anyone else to take his place. Sexual innuendo is about power and its use. I hoped to convey the misuse of Keil’s power through a variety of means, without denying or minimizing the genuine commitment of the colonists to demonstrate the Diamond Rule by making others’ lives better than their own, as they believed they were called to do by Christ’s words. They were loyal Unionists during the War Between the States. They were communal in the sense of carrying out their Christian beliefs from the book of Acts, that each should give to a common fund and draw whatever was needed from it. They hoped to demonstrate the power of Christian love, operating within the larger world, by living compassionately and with joy, working well with one another and with their neighbors. A further discussion of these issues and others affecting the communal nature of Aurora can be found in Dr. James Kopp’s book Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage, to be published in 2008.
Wilhelm Keil died suddenly on December 30, 1877. By then, many colony properties had already been placed into individual hands, but much remained deeded in only Wilhelm Keil’s name in Aurora and in Bethel, in the name of his holding company. His family might have claimed it all, in both Bethel and Aurora, but Louisa and her surviving sons did not. Louisa died in 1879, and negotiations continued uninterrupted to dissolve both colonies and to distribute the monies in an equitable manner. Willapa was not included in any of these negotiations, so we can assume that it was indeed a separate colony, as Emma had always hoped; or that by the time of Keil’s death, nearly all of the former Bethelites who had stayed at Willapa had found their way to Aurora and were thus a part of that final distribution. While there were some disagreements during the years of negotiations, the colony was successfully dissolved in January 1883 with no lawsuits. A Bethel Colony Heritage Society continues in Bethel, Missouri, with a fall celebration each year to commemorate the colonists’ lives there.
The Keils are buried, along with Helena Giesy and other selected colonists, in a small cemetery not far from where the church stood in Aurora. The headstones of Wilhelm, Louisa, and Willie, their oldest son, who died as they were leaving Bethel to come west and who was brought across the continent to be buried in Washington Territory, have the motif of weeping willows; the other Keil headstones do not. Emma is buried in the Aurora Community Cemetery, not with the Giesy family, but at the edge of the Ehlen family plot.
The community of Aurora continues to be on the National Historic Register, and some of the original buildings are maintained as a part of the museum, where visitors can see a rotation of exhibits centered on various families, a range of colony artifacts, the herb garden, and the annual October quilt show. Many communities claim connection to this colony: those from Bethel, Willapa, and Aurora proper; surrounding communities where names like Knight are prominent; and descendants of those who interacted with the colonists, purchasing their tin lanterns and medicines, trading pottery for tailored clothing, attending events at the Park House or the fair, worshiping at the colony church, whether they were colonists or not. Should you visit this historical village where six hundred live today, you’ll find antiques stores in old colony buildings, pleasant walkways lined with flowers, and much of the same gentle hospitality that made it the most successful communal society in the west. Your visit will likely make you a storyteller too, just as it did for me. In 2009, the National Communal Society will meet in the Aurora area to correspond to Oregon’s one hundred fiftieth anniversary of statehood and to continue to explore stories of this remarkable group of German Americans in the west.
Many other helpers, from the editorial and production team at WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group to my neighbors not far from Starvation Lane, contributed greatly to this story and gave aid and comfort in remarkable ways. There are too many to name them all. Carol, Judy, Susan, Blair, Laura, Nancy, Gabby, Kay, Sandy, Dudley, Erin, and of course, Jerry, must be mentioned for their constancy in my life. Thank you.
Because of my own visits in researching the life of Emma Wagner Giesy, I have new stories to tell. Some will be included in a nonfiction book that will celebrate the quilts and crafts of the colony, especially their fiber arts, music, food, basket making, and furniture. Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt and Craft will be released by WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group in the fall of 2008 and will feature Emma’s quilts and many of the eighty quilts made by colonists during the colony period.
For further information contact www.auroracolony.com, Aurora Colony Historical Society, P.O. Box 202, Aurora, OR 97002, (503) 678-5754; or you can follow progress on this latest project at www.jkbooks.com or [email protected]. Thank you for helping me keep stories of remarkable historical women and their families alive. I hope you’re inspired to record your own family stories and the rich legacies they left behind.
Jane Kirkpatrick, 2008
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Emma writes, “I questioned whether expectation was a virtue one could nurture, or if once lost, would never sprout again.” Can hope be learned? Can we change how we feel, or must we depend on others to behave in ways that bring us nurture? Did Emma find a way to nurture expectation over anxiety?
The Jan Richards quote in the front of this book speaks of community rhythms. What rhythms did Emma discover in Aurora? How did grief and loss interfere with her acceptance of those rhythms?
In your own communities (book groups, professional associations, faith communities, etc.) have you ever felt at the edge? What was that like? What strengths did you gain from being in “the backwaters”? What were the trials? How did the women in Emma’s house church, and Brita, represent people at the edge?
Most novels begin with a character having a desire. What did Emma desire? Did she achieve it? How did the author show Emma’s desires changing? How do our desires change as we enter new communities or face new trials or opportunities?
What roles did landscape, relationships, faith, and work play in the telling of Emma’s journey? Can you identify how these four threads are woven into the fabric of your own life? Do they bring you strength or threaten to bring tendering to the experiences of your life, causing disintegration from exposure to caustic material, rather than nurturing?
Did Emma work hard enough to bring unity to her family? Did she rely on her own strengths, rather than trying to “see God” in the situation, as Karl advised her often? Were there steps she didn’t take that she could have used to bring her family together? What surprised you, if anything, about her decision to allow her sons to remain with Martin?
What outside factors began to change the communal aspect of the Aurora Colony? Did Emma’s activities contribute to that change in any way? What role did the deaths of the Keil children play in how the colony changed?
Communal societies are marked by tension between individual needs and community desires. While most of us don’t live in communal societies, how do we experience those same kinds of tensions? How do conflicts get resolved without the presence of a communal leader to dictate what will happen for the good of the community?
What role did quilting, painting, singing, even making glasses provide in Emma’s journey to find meaning? What role do the arts and crafts play in our lives? Are they undervalued as sources of mending in our lives? How might their status be enhanced? Or should they be?
What impact did the absence of a church building have on Aurora’s development and in the lives of Emma, Louisa, Helena, Matilda, and the other colonists? Why do you think Keil waited so long to build the house of worship? And why did he limit services to twice a month? How does a person of faith continue to grow spiritually when a religious leader restricts curiosity and exploration of faith issues?
Where did the house church women draw their str
ength from? What do you think the verse from Malachi, presented at the beginning of this book, has to say about hearkening together and creating books of remembrances? How do you experience that happening in your life? How could you?
If you speculated about future relationships between Emma and her children, how might you characterize them? What about her relationship with her siblings and her parents? Are there times when tensions with immediate family cannot be resolved? What hinge can keep us together, agreeing to disagree, perhaps, while remaining engaged? What hinders those resolutions in families today?
Are women the brooms of the world, as artist Alison Saar observed in the initial story quote? How do ordinary women find meaning within everyday life? How does the Goethe observation (page 300) that Emma makes about sweeping in front of our porches relate to this artist’s quote?
What restored (as in the French for “restaurant”) Emma? What restores you? Can you teach and share those skills, experiences, behaviors, and actions with those you love? What support would you need in order to find that restoration in your life?
The author is available at predetermined times to join book groups by speakerphone. To find out more, visit her Web site www.jkbooks.com and click on Book Groups. She welcomes your comments and questions on the public guest book located there. Schedules of when she may be in your community are available there as well.
THE AURORA COLONY ARTICLES
OF AGREEMENT—1867
All government should be parental, to imitate the parental government of God.
Societies should be formed on the model of the family.
All interests and all property are kept absolutely in common.
Members labor faithfully for the general welfare and support.
The means of living is drawn from the general treasury.
Neither religion nor the harmony of nature teaches community in nothing further than property and labor.
The family is strictly maintained; people marry, raise, and train children.
Each family has its own house, or separate apartments, in one of the large buildings.
The children of the community are sent to school, open year round.
Dr. Keil is president and autocrat. He has selected advisors to assist in the management of affairs. When vitally important changes or experiment is contemplated, nothing is done without the general consent of the community.
Plain living and rigid economy are inculcated as duties from each to the whole: Labor regularly and waste nothing. Each workshop has a foreman. The fittest comes to the front. Men shall not be confined to one kind of labor. If brick masons are needed and the shoemaker is not busy, the shoemaker makes brick.
GLOSSARY
aber but
ach oh no!
Ach, Jammer! an expression of frustration
Behnickel a traditional Christmas persona bringing gifts
bitte please
Frau Mrs.
Fräulein Miss
Fraktur unique printing designs; a German calligraphy
gross Haus large house
gut good
Herr Mr.
Heimat more than a house, a place of belonging
Hinterviertel seat or a person’s backside
ja yes, pronounced “ya”
Junge boy
Kartoffel potato
Kinder children
nein no
Oma grandmother
Opa grandfather
Sehnsucht a yearning or longing (of the human spirit) for something of meaning
Schellenbaum A bell-like instrument known in English as the Turkish Crescent. Popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the large instrument combined music with a symbol of authority or standard of allegiance. The colonists handcrafted their Schellenbaum.
Scherenschnitte German folk art; cutout paper pieces are glued together to create objects, such as trees, flowers, animals, or decorative elements for certificates.
Schottische a dance with three
Scatter Soup made with a slim batter similar to Chinese egg drop
Tannenbaum a tree, especially at Christmastime
Zwerg dwarf
A Sneak Peek At…
Aurora
An American Experience
in Quilt and Craft
The True Story Behind the Change
and Cherish Historical Series
by Jane Kirkpatrick
On Sale Fall 2008
Craft
Past and Present Intertwined
Spare and splendid, the quilts and crafts of the old Aurora Colony still comfort and inspire as treasures of identity and legacy. Their presence, collected by descendants and those passionate about former stories, are preserved inside the properties owned by the Aurora Colony Historical Society at the Old Aurora Colony Museum and the Stauffer-Will Farmstead near the present day village of Aurora, Oregon. Additional quilts are owned privately and often shared for exhibits. Aurora is Oregon’s third national historic district, where the society has preserved nearly one hundred quilts and textiles, as well as baskets, furniture, tools of tin, and wood and other artifacts, all connected with the colony period (1856–1883). They’re showcased in an 1862 ox barn or an 1865 farmstead or an 1876 log cabin. These artifacts reflect the simple passions of a faithful people.
In Oregon’s verdant Willamette Valley, between 1856 and 1883, lived a cluster of German Americans seeking something more, something splendid at both a spiritual and secular level. They found it in their Christian communal society, one of the only successful such communities in the West founded in the mid–nineteenth century.
Not unlike the Amana Society of Iowa or the Harmonists of Pennsylvania, the colonists expressed their values and traditions through their interactions with the world around them. In contrast with this twenty-first century when people are often disconnected from the work of their hands, from extended family, and from faith, these colonists demonstrated who they were by their unique artifacts and traditions, their food, music, furniture, and fiber arts—and by living out their Christian faith in community. They passed their stories down from one generation to the next through their quilts, crafts, and traditions. Unfortunately, they did not always talk about them, so descendants and curators must interpret their meaning and allow the works of their hands to be their voices.
We are privileged 153 years later to experience a part of their lives in our contemporary world and consider how we are bound with them through threads of art and community, faith and healing, past and present intertwined by the works of their hands.
I began seeing quilts and crafts as stories while wandering through antique stores and imagining how people once used a strange-looking tool or how many hours it took to quilt a now-worn Ocean Wave. Then several of my novels were chosen to be interpreted through quilts by various quilting groups in the Northwest. The beauty and uniqueness of these fiber “stories” made me more conscious of quilts as narratives and how such crafts reflected the women who had made them.
My interest was cemented a few years later when I was invited to be the guest scholar for a weekend retreat of quilters. Though I have never quilted, they asked me to speak of stories and how they inform our lives. While I talked, the women from around the country sewed and stitched, having brought their material and machines with them to the Willamette Valley.
During a break, I paged through a book by retreat leader Mary Bywater Cross and there found a story of a quilt made by Emma Wagner Giesy. Her story, and the story of the colonies she came from, led me to Aurora and its roots in Germany; then to Indiana, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Washington, and finally to Oregon. Her fiber art served as her legacy.
The Change and Cherish Historical Series (WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group) chronicles this woman’s journey to celebrate her voice in a society that often acted tone deaf to its female members. In the process of researching and writing, I fell in love with the stories and the way the community stumbled and righted itself as it
chose to carry out its faith and philosophy in an everyday world.
It is my hope, and the hope of the Aurora Colony Historical Society that telling the stories of these treasures through text and pictures of artifacts and crafts will inspire a reader’s own exploration of family, legacy, and community. Perhaps these artifacts will allow a new look at family objects, especially the crafts that enrich our lives and help memorialize the triumphs and tragedies of our ancestors. I invite you to join me on this journey of another place and time, as we explore the landscapes, relationships, work, and faith of these German Americans and their wish to live a simple, meaningful life in the American West. May the work of their hands bring you comfort.
A MENDING AT THE EDGE
PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS
12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921
Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, translated out of The Original Tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised. New York: American Bible Society, 1858.
A Mending at the Edge: A Novel (Change And Cherish) Page 41