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Kendallville:
What a grand-daughter was told about life on an Indiana farm
Growing up in Minnesota, Adelheid Mueller Nickel heard many stories from her father Ernst Mueller about farm life in Kendallville, Indiana.
My father spent his childhood in Kendallville, Indiana, where he was born. His job was to look after the sheep — mainly the lambs. He kept a chart, a board on which he recorded every lamb born in the flock. When he’d find a lamb dead in the morning, he would mark it [with a funeral cross] Eins todt (one dead). He had names for most of them, as Heidi and Peter did. After all, he had heard the Heidi story read many times by his mother.
Every evening they all gathered in the kitchen near the cookstove and mother would read to the whole household. Even the hired man sat and listened. When she read Shakespeare, which she often did, the hired man would comment, “That sure was good," even though perhaps he understood little of the story — but he liked the sound of the elegant words.
They lived quite alone on a section of land. Their parents had been immigrants. One day the two oldest girls were walking along the country road when they saw a neighbor boy. This was before they had a brother. They came home and told their mother, “We saw an angel.”
Their living room was so large, it was said the family carriage (Kutsche) with horses could fit in it nicely. There was no heat in the living room, and that is why the kitchen was such a cozy place in the winter. The kitchen also was huge and full of activity. All the learning was done there. Their mother had been a governess in Europe, so she was a very fine teacher. The oldest girl [Mimi or possibly Dodo, second-oldest and a professional writer], a beautiful writer and poet, always insisted she never went beyond the third grade.
Later the family moved to Chicago, where their father was an editor of a newspaper, Die Rundschau, and the children entered a formal school. Perhaps there were no divided grades at that time — just three divisions: I. Beginners, II. Middle, III. Advanced. [So “beyond the third grade” may have been the equivalent of “beyond grade school.”]
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