Höxter, on the Weser river in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, is one of the oldest towns in northern Germany, mentioned in written history as early as 823. In the time of Charlemagne, settlers on the Frisian Islands off the north coast of Germany may have been forced to leave their homes in a dispute over fishing rights. They may have sailed east to the mouth of the Weser River and upstream past Corvey Abbey to Höxter, where Freise became a dominant family name. In time, Höxter benefited from the rise of that abbey and became an important trading center.

The details of Herman Freise’s birth have been confirmed from state and church archives by Manfred Freise - Herman was born at 7:00 a.m. at Weserstrasse #7 in Höxter on December 20, 1848. At birth, his full given name was Ernst Friedrich Hermann Freise and he was known as Hermann. At his baptism on January 7, 1849, Ernst Freise, Friedrich Freise and Henriette Hubener were sponsors. Hermann was confirmed at St. Kiliani church in Höxter on March 29, 1863, by Rev. Konrad Beckhaus (1821-90), an important theologian and a widely known botanist of ferns and marsh plants. Click the camera icon by Hermann’s name to see photos plus documents showing his confirmation, citizenship, military service and his will.

As a young man in Höxter, Hermann Freise became an apprentice in the printing trade, skilled particularly at typesetting. He visited a number of places in Germany to further his training. Perhaps at one of those places he met Bertha Kalinke, who was born several hundred miles from Höxter in an area which has at times been a part of Germany and at times in Poland. She also may have left her home and worked in various places as a housekeeper or governess, perhaps even in Hōxter because that is where she and Hermann were married. In the church’s wedding records, Hermann is described as a typesetter. The document doesn’t identify April 6, 1878, as their wedding date but rather as the date of their copulation. Another document dated Feb. 22, 1871, when Hermann was 22, marks the completion of a period of military service; it transfers him to the “second class military reserve” and releases him from all military duties, including further registration in the military register, for normal peacetime. But it also says he remained subject to recall in an emergency until he reached the age of 31. Was that a reason Herman didn’t emigrate to America until he was 33?

Herman, at age 33, his wife Bertha, about 29, and their first two children, Minnie and Hugo, both younger then three, came to America in 1882. They settled in St. Louis, where Herman worked for the Eden Publishing Company, and then briefly in Chicago, where they joined a group of German Lutherans who in 1883 were among the first settlers in the area of New Salem, North Dakota. The organizers of that group, the German Evangelistic Colonization Society, had scouted locations in Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma but decided on New Salem, beyond which the railroad tracks had recently been extended. On April 4, 1883, about 200 settlers left Chicago for the West. Some of them were educated and of some means but few had been farmers; soon they unloaded their belongings on a virtually treeless prairie. More settlers, including Hermann and Bertha, joined them almost daily, either to start businesses in town or to locate a farming claim and build homes and barns as quickly as they could. Many stayed initially in a few short-term “immigrant cars” on a siding west of New Salem. A few, however, were disappointed in the poor rocky soil around New Salem; they accused the group’s organizers of having mislead them and returned quickly to Chicago. Nonetheless, the town slowly took root. In the area, streams did provide water until wells could be dug, and there were outcroppings of low-grade lignite coal.

Hermann wisely selected as his homestead a 160-acre "quarter-section" next to the railroad track four miles east of New Salem. In present-day terminology, it is on 41st Avenue just south of the tracks; in a Google maps view it is the first farm on the tracks east of New Salem and the only one before Judson, another two miles east. Sedalia may be the wide spot in the tracks a few yards east of 41st Avenue.

Herman’s homestead included a stream (visible in today’s aerial view) for water and an outcropping of the local lignite coal in the stream bank. It is said that he dug a small cave into that bank, put a roof over its entrance, and may have lived there for a winter or two until he could afford something better. A century later, his son, Paul Freise, delighted in showing John Windh that stream and the faintly visible indentation of that cave.

Life was difficult for those immigrants. Some had horses but more farmed with oxen. It took forever to prepare the ground with a slow team pulling a plow a few inches wide in fields up to a mile long. That first summer, many arrived too late to grow much of anything.

It helped that Hermann’s farm adjoined the railroad track, for the train from New Salem could be asked to stop at a section-crew work station called Sedalia a quarter-mile away. Paul Freise recalls taking the train home from school many times in bad weather. In time, Herman prospered and even managed to return to Germany for a visit (two reports say 1909 or 1912) before he died of stomach cancer in 1912. The young Paul Freise recalls his father, as his health failed, saying he was grateful he’d been able to make that trip.

Herman’s wife, Bertha, had visited her mother in Berlin about 1908. Bertha’s father had died even before she was married. Her mother Johanne later married a man named Mecke, perhaps the foreman at her first husband’s shoe factory, with whom she had perhaps four children. Click the camera icon to see a 1908 photo of Bertha in Berlin with her mother, those half-siblings and their spouses and two grandchildren, but we know nothing more about them.

Herman became a naturalized US citizen at state court in Jamestown, Stutsman County, North Dakota, on Nov. 20, 1888. On his citizenship certificate, Herman is spelled with only one final "n" as it is in an English-language obituary in the New Salem paper. A German-language obituary in the Bismarck Stadts-Anzeiger (below) calls him Hermann. That obituary was also published in Germany, perhaps in Höxter, suggesting Herman kept in touch with family or friends there, though Paul Friese was unsure who they were.

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Paul Freise wrote of his father:

"Being a printer by trade, Herman was quite meticulous and exacting. He was a stern, strict disciplinarian. One would think of him as a perfectionist. He liked the plowed furrows to be straight! He was well-read, and he endeavored to improve his knowledge by further reading in both English and German. He subscribed to newspapers in both languages for both he and Bertha wished to gain fluency in English. To a degree they both did, certainly to the point of conversing adequately. Hermann encouraged his children to know both languages though they mostly spoke German at home. They also kept in touch with their families in Germany. Because he was trained as a printer, Herman occasionally worked as a printer when necessary, possibly in Jamestown and also for a German-language newspaper in New Salem, and so was able to supply food for the table, especially in the early homestead years before farming became productive. However, he did demand considerable work from his wife and children. He firmly believed in education and saw to it that his children received as much as possible in a nearby country school. He had been concerned about religion but found the conduct of some church members disillusioning. Shortly before his death he again showed an interest in religion."

Dr. Freise also mentioned that Herman insisted his wife and children worked hard, in part, so that he could visit the beer parlor in town. When Herman died, his two sons had to take over the farm. Charles was 19 and Paul, who stayed home from school for a year or two, was 14. Charles farmed there until he retired to town while Paul became a doctor.

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Herman's obituary appeared in the New Salem Journal:

Ernst Frederick Herman Freise passed away at his home southeast of New Salem Monday night at about seven o'clock after an illness of about one year.

Herman Freise, as he was known to the New Salem people, was born in Hoexter, West Phalen, Germany, on Dec. 20, 1848. He started to learn the printers' trade when a very small boy and learned it as they learned it in Germany in those days, and before coming to America worked in some of the largest publishing houses in Germany. He was married in April, 1878, in Germany, and came to America in 1882, stopping at St. Louis, Mo., where he worked in a German publishing house until he came to New Salem with the colony in the spring of 1883, and settled on the farm where he died. The early years of Mr. Freise's life, while he worked as a printer in the old country where the compensation was small in those days, and the first years in North Dakota, were a continual hard struggle, but late years like many of the old timers, he has been able to get ahead and at the time of his death left his family in fairly well-to-do circumstances. Mr. Freise has been one of the leading dairymen of this thrifty community for years, and was an active member and treasurer of the Morton And Oliver Counties Mutual Fire and Lightning Insurance Company.

At the time of Mr. Freise's death he leaves a wife and five children [though the obituary lists six names] and some relatives in Germany to mourn his death. The children are as follows: Miss Minnie Freise, nurse at the Bismarck Hospital; Mrs. Herman Rasch, Mrs. Richard Meyer, Charley, Gertrude and Paul Freise, the last three being at home.

The funeral was held Thursday, Nov. 14, at one o'clock from the German Evangelical church in this city, Rev. Fontana, officiating.The funeral was very largely attended by friends and old pioneers.

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An obituary in German appeared in a local German-language newspaper, the Bismarck Stadts-Anzeiger, the sense of which is as follows:

"On Monday, the 11th of November at 7 p.m., after a long illness Ernst Friedrich Hermann Freise died of stomach cancer at his home in Sedalia. He numbered among the oldest settlers in this area and had experienced all the difficulties of pioneer life from the beginning on. Over the course of years, he had worked to develop a beautifully situated farm, which he has now left to the members of his family. Despite the years he had lived in this country, he always maintained a good German consciousness. He was a member of the "Prince Heinrich Lodge" of the German order of the “Sons of Herman,” whose members themselves gave him a final honor guard. For years he was also the treasurer of the Morton And Oliver Counties Mutual Fire and Lightning Insurance Company and a true and correct member of that society.

Mr. Freise was born on December 20, 1848, in Höxter, Westphalia. In his birth city was he also educated, learning, after his confirmation, the printing trade. On April 6, 1878, he was married to his now sorrowing wife Bertha, whose maiden name was Kalinke. In 1882 he came with his family to America and landed in St. Louis, Missouri, where he found employment with the Eden Publishing House. In 1883 he came with his family as members of a newly founded colony to New Salem, where he established a homestead farm, the same one on which he lived continuously until he died. Already for several years he had been in failing health, yet he never gave his afflictions much notice until those burdens overtook him. He several times sought help from skilled doctors, but they finally knew his ailment to be incurable. At his death he had lived 63 years, 10 months and 11 days.

In death he leaves his mourning wife, two sons, Charles and Paul, and four daughters, Minna, Anna, Tillie and Gertrude. Two of the daughters are married, Anna to Mr. Herman Rasch and Tillie to Mr. Richard Meyer. Daughter Minna works as a nurse at the Bismarck Hospital and took care of her father until the end. Another son, Hugo, preceded his father in death. Mr. Freise is also survived by two sons-in-law, three grandchildren, and in Germany his 90-year-old mother-in-law and four brothers- and sisters-in-law.

His burial began Thursday noon with a worship service. In attandance were numerous mourners from the Peace Church, where Rev. Fontana preached words of consolation from First Peter: 13-15 to the sorrowful.

May he rest in peace."

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Herman’s death was also noted in Germay:

A notice of Herman’s death was also printed in Germany, probably in Höxter. It consisted of the first two paragraphs of the above German-language obituary, plus two interesting introductory comments . . that Herman had visited friends and relatives there three years earlier, and that before emigrating from Germany he had been a member of the "Westfalia Singing Society” and the volunteer fire fighters.

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John and Elsa Windh visited Höxer in 1976:

In recent years, the town in Höxter in eastern North Rhine-Westphalia numbers about 15,000 residents. In its historic center are many lovely old half-timbered buildings, including the Rathaus (city hall), and the St. Kiliani Church where numerous Freises were baptized, married and buried. The house at Weserstrasse #7 where Herman was born and raised was built in 1610, just steps from the Rathaus and the church. It is visible on a postcard from 1904 (sent by Manfred Freise) but was later torn down and replaced. Without realizing it, in August of 1976 the John Windh family happened to eat lunch in a snack bar just a door or two away from that address.

In 1976 at Weserstrasse #7 there lived a Miss Emma Freise, age 83, who wrote to Dr. Paul Freise that Herman Freise’s father August, a weaver, bought the 1610 house in 1850 from Adolf Bollens, his father-in-law. In 1854 he then sold the house to Emma’s family. Emma’s uncle Wilhelm was born in the 1610 house on February 5 or 6, 1862, just 14 years after Herman Freise, but she believes they were not immediately related. That uncle Wilhelm came to America in 1880, she said, but as a sheet-metal worker in New York state or New England he was struck in about 1900-1904 by a sheet of copper roofing from a church tower during a lightning storm.

In 1972 Paul Freise serendipidously established contact with Dr. Manfred Freise, a dentist in Bonn, the capital of West Germany. American newspapers had told of a German-born American woman who returned to Germany for her dental care and deducted the travel as a medical expense. That dentist was simply identified as Dr. Manfred Freise in Bonn. Paul had heard there was a dentist in his German family, so he wrote to “Dr. Freise, Zahnartzt, Bonn, West Germany.” And the letter was delivered, starting a relatiohship which first led John and Elsa Windh to meet Manfred in Bonn in January of 1973, in August of 1976 and again in August of 1984 and then saw Manfred visit them many times in Kenosha and Racine, Wisconsin, when he attended February dental conventions in Chicago. Unfortunately, Paul and Manfred never met.

Manfred said that centuries ago many Frisians came to live in the city of Höxter. They were resident fishermen in the East Frisian Islands off the north coast of Germany who, after Charlemagne took away their fishing rights, sailed east on the North Sea to the mouth of the Weser River and then considerably upstream, just past Corvey Abbey, to the city of Höxter. Thereafter, for a long time Freise was the most common family name, and perhaps still is. In Höxter’s historic center we saw a Textilhaus Freise and a Fleischerei Freise, where a plaque on the wall traced that family back to 1635. For years there was an annual reunion of Freises in Höxter (click that camera icon) and a periodic Freise newspaper, of which we have several digital issues.

Manfred arranged for our family to spend an August 1976 evening and overnight in Höxter with a genial couple, Rudolf and Marie Freise, who offered us a simple supper of black bread, cold meats and cheeses served on wooden bread boards. When we asked if he was related to Elsa’s dad, Rudolf, age 79, asked if we knew her grandfather’s birthdate, the address where he lived, or what was his guild. Since we never expected to visit Höxter when we left home that January, we had none of that information with us. To paraphrase his German, Rudolph replied “That’s unfortunate. I live here on Westerbachstrasse, it’s only three blocks long, and there are four Hermann Freises living here. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

Manfred also put us in touch with a Hermann Freise, age 83, in Höxter who showed us some of the city but was not related to us. In later correspondence with Dr. Paul Freise, Hermann supplied eight single-spaced pages of detailed genealogical information from St. Peter’s church in Höxter about hundreds of people named Freise, but neither are any of them related to Paul Freise. Rudolf and Marie, mentioned above, are included there, where we see Rudolf was an “owner-manager” born in Höxter on Oct. 23, 1897, and Marie Jordan Freise was born March 25, 1901, in Güttersloh. Perhaps at the time of our visit, they lived at Wiehenbrink #8 in Höxter. Rufolf’s father, Ludwig OTTO, born in 1846, had been a master baker at Bahnhofstrasse #3.

Since our visit in 1976, surely other family members have been to Höxter as well, including Eunice Freise Kjaer and her husband George in 1978.

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“Coming to America” from a booklet created for a Klusmann reunion in New Salem on June 18-19, 2005.

By far the largest number of German immigrants went to America in search of an improved standard of living. Political and religious freedom probably motivated fewer emigrants than did the threat of Prussian military service. We do know that ever since the 18° century, detailed information about American business cycles, wages, and food prices was publicized in Germany.

In a broader sense, economic and political motivation cannot be separated. As a matter of fact, when the decision to emigrate was motivated by a desire to become a farmer with one's own land or a craftsman with one's own business, this also implied a rejection of the rigidity of the social class structure in the German states. A German official stated that “emigrams were infected with the disease of a concept of freedom and an idea about statehood and that emigration fever was making the ‘lower class’ rebellious.”

Emigrant groups who left the Old World in the 18° and early 19* centuries were also religiously motivated. In the intolerant environment of Europe, they had not been permitted to shape their own community life. In addition, wheat crop failures, poor wine harvests and a potato blight made for more misery.

The dream of most German immigrants in the 18‘ and 19 centuries was the debt-free ownership of a farm. Some would take up residence in a city first to build up savings of $50 to $150. Around 1850 in the Midwest this sum was suffcient for a down payment on a farm of about 40 acres, which was about the size needed to make a living. In addition, the immigrant needed about $500 to acquire implements, cattle and seed grains, as well as food that would last until the first harvest. The minimal amount of money needed to start a family farm on the western prairies around 1870 was a team of horses, a plow and other field implements as well as seed grain, which together cost about $1200. That was more than the average annual income of a factory worker.

The decade of 1880-89 saw 1,445,181 German immigrants come to the US, more than any other decade from 1820 to 1990.

Why people would leave a home land in search of freedom is a fascinating story. Our ancestors were part of that story, people who took risks to find a new beginning.