Forty Years on the Great Plains

The 1920s brought the ordinary rhythms of small-town family life for. Fritz and Theresa’s family — trips to visit relatives, notices of paid labor, the day-to-day texture that fills life between headline moments. And then, in quick succession, came loss. On November 6, 1925, Theresa passed away in Hartington at just 49 years old, after 21 years of marriage. The family placed a “card of thanks” in the local paper that November — a small, formal gesture of gratitude to the neighbors and friends who had sustained them through their grief, and one that tells us something about the community Fritz had, by then, become part of.

He outlived her by only seven months. Fritz Brand died on June 9, 1926, in Hartington, Nebraska, at the age of 54. His obituary ran in The Hartington Herald that June, and later community retrospectives remembered him among the area’s “pioneers” — a word that, for a boy who arrived on an orphan train with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, feels rather grand but also feels true.

Fritz and Theresa died intestate and, after Fritz’s death, Theresa’s brother was left to sort out the property owned and bills due. Among the paperwork for everyday items listed on account at local stores was a statement of account (pictured below) from The Hartington Herald newspaper. While a subscription to the local paper is not unusual, the length of time the publishers were willing to extend credit to Fritz and his family is.

I will continue searching for records of young Fritz’s parents, the circumstances which led him to his journey west, and his early childhood in New York City. I look forward to learning and sharing more about the other boys who came on that Orphan Train with Fritz, as well as to learning and sharing more about Theresa’s early life on the Nebraska plains. For now, the best thing I can do is to hold and share the contradictions of Fritz’s life, that in spite of all its hardships, resulted in the pragmatic and resilient children Fritz and Theresa left behind.