Category: Slice of Life

Farmers in early 1900s bringing cotton by wagons to Macek Gin in Rosenberg

The current flood of immigrants along the southern border between Texas and Mexico follows two hundred years of people who believed Texas was the land of opportunities. Today’s immigrants into the state come primarily from South America and Mexico, traveling thousands of miles to reach the Rio Grande River to cross over it to the Promised Land. In the 1800s European immigrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean in sailing ships that often used Galveston, Texas as a port of entry. One of these immigrants, Henry von Rosenberg, was born in Switzerland but came to the United States in 1843 at the age of nineteen, became a dry goods clerk who eventually owned the most dry goods stores in the entire state, the president of a major railroad company, owned a bank, became a wealthy philanthropist who supported the establishment of a library in Galveston. The town of Rosenberg was named for him in 1880.

“By the turn of the century, local land developers were sending promotional literature to the northern and midwestern states, explaining that ‘the famous Brazos Valley […] has the most fertile land in America,’ and showing pictures of green spaces, fruit orchards, wagons of cotton waiting to be ginned and Victorian homes, all intended to entice more settlers to the area. Soon there were people of German, Czech, Polish and Mexican ancestry flocking to the area.” (City of Rosenberg history)

On October 20, 1898 my maternal grandmother named Bernice Louise Schlinke was born in Rosenberg, Texas; she was the granddaughter of a family on her mother’s side from Germany who came to Galveston aboard a ship that wrecked in the Galveston harbor and another family on her father’s side that came from Prussia (now known as an area that includes parts of Germany, Poland and Russia). My grandmother, like most of us who live in America, came from a family of immigrants.

In October, 1910 my grandmother Louise would have had her twelfth birthday. She received a post card from her friend Lydia, and I found it mixed in with my mother’s cards and photos that I went through after her death in 2012. Why did my grandmother keep this card for sixty-two years, or more importantly, why did my mother keep the card after my grandmother’s death in 1972? Maybe for the same reason I can’t force myself to throw it away. The card represents a part of history – my family’s history for sure, but the children of immigrants who saw Texas as their destination just like the families of immigrants along the border today.

Lydia and her two sisters on other side of post card –

wish I knew which one she was

(Lillie and Orrie were Louise’s older sisters, Annie a cousin who lived with the Schlinke family)

I was a child when I knew Lillie, Orrie and Annie along with two other younger sisters Dessie and Selma – the Schlinke girls. The family usually gathered once a year when Aunt Orrie came to visit us from California. She and my grandmother were always close not only in age but also in character. In 1917 my grandmother married James Marion Boring, a man eleven years her senior, an entrepreneur/wanderer who settled with her and their four children in Richards, Grimes County, Texas where he operated a number of unsuccessful businesses until his untimely death at the age of 51 in 1938. His family also had lineage from Europe but migrated to Texas from places in the east. Louise Schlinke Boring maintained ties to Rosenberg after his death because Mr. Boring (as she called him to me) had a brother Clement Howard Boring and other family there. My mother, dad, my maternal grandmother and I visited my great uncle and cousins periodically during the time we all lived together in Richards in her house, but in 1964 following my graduation from Columbia high school in West Columbia, Texas our connection to Rosenberg shifted dramatically when my father became Assistant Superintendent of Instruction for the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District there.

Please stay tuned for more of the Rosenberg connection.