Arms of God: From Prussia to Texas to Death in the Brazos River

By Tom Meinecke

Still under the effects of heavy anesthesia after heart surgery, the occurrence of the 1858 drowning of an ancestor in the Brazos Rivers overtakes the mind of the patient. Upon awakening, the experience of the drowning, exactly one hundred and fifty years to the day in the past constantly stays with him. Soon one coincidence after another weaves the present into the past and an incident leads him on a journey back in time to Prussia and the events and circumstances that bring his ancestors to Austin County Texas in the mid 1840s.

The Journey takes the family with roots back to the 1500s in Prussia, and a middle class existence to the extreme hardships of the sea voyage with the unbelievable crowded conditions in steerage, enduring storms, sickness and hunger to the point of starvation until finally landing in Galveston. Then they face the grueling and tiresome overland travel to their destination. With all the money spent for the sea voyage and overland travel, the family is relegated to tenant farming and slowing regains their fortunes and dignity to buy land after three years.

As life unfolds, the family grows its Texas roots and expands their influence and land. Then the tragedy of the two younger brothers drowning while crossing Los Brazos de Dios (The Arms of God) river hauling cotton to Houston devastates the family and presents the necessity of the family cemetery for the first two burials.

Suddenly the past and the present again collide leaving a sense that there is a force that flows through time like a river that flows continuously without end, and where we are today is only where we stepped out of the river.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452015972

Tom Meinecke

Tom Meinecke, a fifth generation Texan, graduated from high school and junior college in San Antonio and received his BBA degree from The University of Texas in Austin with top honors while working his way through college. He lettered in track in both high school and junior college.  He later received a graduate degree in banking from The Southwestern Graduate School of Banking at SMU in Dallas. His work career included being the manager of a telephone company at age twenty-three, then Personnel Director of an oil company. He then worked in the banking industry for the next twenty years where he started as an Assistant Vice President and Human Resources Director at the fifth largest bank in Houston and rose to Senior Vice President over Administration in six years with this one billion dollar bank. He was recruited to become President and CEO of a holding company bank and then President and CEO of an independent bank. He also served as President of Retail Lending for Texas for a Savings and Loan and a Manager for the Resolution Trust Corporation.  He left banking to become a Financial Advisor for the past seventeen years. Tom began his writing career by having his first book, The Last 880-Yard Runner, a memoir, published in 2007.  He has traveled to where his ancestors lived in Prussia/Germany back to 1530 A.D. and has spent two years of research for this book, Arms of God – From Prussia to Texas to Death in the Brazos River. He and his wife, Sandy, live in Sugar Land, Texas.  They have a son, two daughters and one grandson.

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Contents

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

ONE

THE AWAKENING

TWO

PRESENT TIME

THREE

HOME

FOUR

BEGINNING THE SEARCH

FIVE

THE SEARCH CONTINUES

SIX

MORE RESOURCES

SEVEN

WHY THEY CAME

EIGHT

COINCIDENCES

NINE

LOS BRAZOS DE DIOS

TEN

THE TRANSFORMATION

ELEVEN

THE DECISION

TWELVE

THE TRIP TO BREMEN

THIRTEEN

BREMEN

FOURTEEN

JOURNEY TO A NEW LAND

FIFTEEN

STEERAGE

SIXTEEN

THE DANGEROUS SEA

SEVENTEEN

THE CALM

EIGHTEEN

GALVESTON

NINETEEN

INDIANOLA, TEXAS

TWENTY

OVERLAND TO AUSTIN COUNTY

TWENTY-ONE

BLACKSMITHING

TWENTY-TWO

KENNEY, TEXAS

TWENTY-THREE

PLANTING TIME IN TEXAS

TWENTY-FOUR

OUR OWN HOME

TWENTY-FIVE

LIFE ON THE FARM

TWENTY-SIX

HIRED HELP & RELIGION

TWENTY-SEVEN

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE FATEFUL TRIP

TWENTY-NINE

THE REVERIE

EPILOGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This is a book of historical fiction. All of the Meineckes in the book were real people with factual birth, marriage and death dates. The author did some timing changes of certain events to accommodate the story, but many of the events were based on family information.

The author traveled to Perleberg, Germany (previously Prussia) the town where the Meinecke family lived before departing to the new world, as well as to other towns and villages in Northern Germany tracing the Meinecke family history back to 1530 Prussia.

OTHER BOOKS

BY

TOM MEINECKE

The Last 880-Yard Runner

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my ancestors, the immigrant Meinecke family who braved leaving their homeland to cross the ocean to a new land. They risked their fortunes and lives to gain freedom and the opportunity to receive the rewards of their industry and to give their descendants the gift of growing up in the greatest republic in the world, the State of Texas in The United States of America:

Johann Friedrich Meinecke, Sr.

Sophie Koyn Meinecke

Karl Friedrich Ludwig Meinecke (my great grandfather)

Friedrich Wilhelm August Meinecke

Johann Friedrich Meinecke, Jr.

Marie Emilie Meinecke

Marie Wilhelmine Meinecke

Eduard Wilhelm Meinecke

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Researching this book allowed me to meet many new friends and relatives in different places, which would never have happened without this walk into the Arms of God. My thanks go to my cousins, Steve and Charles Meinecke in Lubbock, Texas, who supplied me with genealogy of the Meinecke family in Germany back to 1530 and the information that the family settled in Kenney, Austin County Texas. This encouraged me to go to Bellville, capital of Austin County and begin my search for the Meinecke Cemetery and history.

Others who helped me include:

W. M. Von-Maszewski (now retired), Manager of the Genealogy Department of The George Library, Richmond, Texas, directed me to several books for my research.

Pam and Jim Wyatt in Kenney, Texas, allowed me to meet with their aunt, Illa Meinecke (now deceased) and to obtain much of the Meinecke family information left to her by her deceased husband, Roy Meinecke, the last Meinecke in the Kenney area. Roy Meinecke had received the information from Henry Harms, who wrote down much of the actual history that he learned from his mother, Bertha Meinecke Harms, daughter of August Meinecke, one of the boy immigrants who came over in 1847.

Joy Neely in Bellville, Texas, assisted me in getting back in touch with the Wyatt family several years later when I decided to write this book. They provided more information and lent me more pictures, historic information and an original land purchase deed by Johann Freidrich Meinecke.

Joy Neely also encouraged me to apply to the Texas Historical Commission to have the Meinecke Cemetery designated as a Texas Historic Cemetery. She and her husband, Dr. Bob Neely assisted me in completing the application, including measurements of the cemetery, photographs, county plat map, copy of deeds and other information including follow–up requests from the commission. These efforts culminated with the approval and designation for the Meinecke Cemetery as a Texas Historic Cemetery in June 2009.

Dennis Jones with the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife at Brazos Bend State Park in Needville, Texas, gave me valuable information on the terrain and crops in the Austin County area of Texas in the 1840’s.

Lou Payton, Director of the Morton Cemetery in Richmond, Texas, described the path of the ferryboat crossing and the Brazos River stages, as well as information about the Morton Cemetery.

Liz Hicks, Genealogy Editor of the German-Texan Heritage Society, helped me find the actual date of arrival of the Barque Natchez in Galveston, as well as the name of the Master of the ship.

Imogene Storrs of Bellville, a cousin I met thanks to Joy Neely, helped with the measuring and cleaning of the Meinecke Cemetery. Cousins from Sealy, whom I met and assisted with the cemetery revitalization on a hot June morning, were Jackie Brandes and her brother, Vernon Goebel and his wife Martha Goebel.

Two long-time friends and college roommates, Ken Muenzler and Clarence (Botch) Schiller let me use their names as early German settlers.

In addition, most of all, my loving wife, Sandy, who went on research trips with me, did the scans for all photography and sketches for the book, gave me wise suggestions and encouraged me throughout the thought process and the writing of the book.

And lastly, but certainly not the least, my editor, Carol Woods of Plano, Texas, who guided me with many suggestions and corrections through many re-writes and factual additions that allowed the book have a voice to properly tell the story.

The Song of the River

And I wonder if life’s deep mystery

Isn’t much like the rain and the snow

Returning through all eternity

To the places it used to know.

William Randolph Hearst

(1863-1951)

"The past in never dead.

It’s not even past"

William Faulkner.

PREFACE

Perhaps life is a continuum like the flow of a river, and all of life runs continuously with both the past and the present in existence at the same time. If you enter life’s river at one place, it will be at a different time of life’s flow than entering at another place, but it is still the same river.

What if the life you live is a continuum of another person’s life, or you are living it again for that person? Possibly, we contain all the memories of all of our ancestors. When we have a feeling we have been there before, felt that before, known that person before or other feelings of déjà vu, perhaps it is real. We are just remembering.

We are the total of our genetics, and our life’s experiences are connected to others alive now as well as to those in the past. As all animals have instincts, passed on to them genetically, we have instincts (and memories?) that form our actions and feelings.

I sense that there is a force that flows through time and like a river flows continuously without end. When things happen that somehow connect us to the past or others we sometimes, in error, think of them as just coincidences. What if there are no coincidences? What if all things are connected and where we are now is simply where we stepped out of the river?

ONE

THE AWAKENING

8 June 1858

The Brazos River

I DROWNED IN THE BRAZOS RIVER IN Texas, on 8 June 1858. It was a Tuesday. My brother, Wilhelm, and I were crossing the Brazos at Fort Settlement on a ferry. With our yoke of oxen, we were hauling a wagon loaded with bales of cotton to the small but growing town of Houston, Texas on the Buffalo Bayou. We would travel from our home in Austin County to Fort Settlement, which some people were now calling Richmond, and then on to Houston. The 70 to 80 mile trip would take six or seven days. This was the only route over which our oxen could pull the heavily-laden wagon.

For the past several years, our family harvested cotton and took it to Bellville to be ginned and bound for delivery to market. At first, Papa, with Karl and August, my older brothers, made the trip to Houston by oxen to sell the cotton on the market square. As Karl and August got older, Papa let just the two of them make the journey. Later on, they took me, too. But now things had changed.

Karl married and moved this past summer just as our two sisters, Marie Emilie and Marie Wilhelmine had in the last two years. August also married last year and stayed near the farm on some of the land Papa had given him, but he was busy building a new house and bringing in the crops. I was now twenty-two and certainly capable of taking the cotton to market, but Wilhelm had just turned fourteen, and Papa was worried that he was too young to make this trip. But it really took two people to handle the yoke of oxen and a wagon full of cotton, and Papa was getting up in years. I convinced him Wilhelm would do just fine as my partner.

Once we got to Houston and had the cotton weighed and sold, we planned to spend the night with Mama’s cousin, Fritz Krueger, just as Papa and our brothers had. Fritz, his wife, Annie, and family lived on their farm a mile south of the business area of Buffalo Bayou on the main street of Houston. We were looking forward to seeing their newest arrival, Anna, now only two years old.

We were getting close to completing our trip as we neared Fort Settlement where we would spend the night under our wagon unless we could find someone who would put us up. That and a nice breakfast the next morning would be worth the dollar most charged, before we set out on the last leg of our trip to Houston. First, we had to cross the dangerous and unpredictable Brazos River on the ferry. With the rains at this time of year, the Brazos could rise several feet in a short time and cause heavy currents. Papa had warned us about the crossing. As we came near it, my fears increased, as the water was up and a drizzling rain continued to pelt us. Wilhelm had never learned to swim and I could, but not very well.

The ferry was a long flat raft without any type of railing. Ferrymen, under the direction of the ferry captain, pulled it across the river by long heavy ropes. The ferry could only handle one wagon with oxen at a time. We slipped and slid as we drove our oxen down the sloping bank; the rain felt like pellets pounding us as we descended. Lightning streaked across the sky like stark tree limbs and thunder boomed.

We boarded the ferry and paid the captain the three dollars in coins he charged to cross. He took in our frightened faces, nodded and said that it would be a tough crossing today. As the boat began to slowly pull away from the bank, we listened to the groan of the ropes and the gushing sound of water pounding the sides of the craft. Our worst fears had found us.

We edged into the current with the ferry straining against the pulley rope that stretched from one bank to the other. The ferrymen sweated and swore as they hauled on the heavy ropes. The captain walked the length of the raft with a long pole that he stuck into the river bottom to help move the raft along. The punishing rain created a misty overcast. We could not see the other side of the riverbank, and the noise of the rain and thunder made it barely possible to talk with each other.

As we neared the middle of the river, the oxen became even more frightened, rolling their eyes, shuffling their feet and bawling loudly as the boat tilted and twisted and the noise of the ropes grew more strident as the ferrymen strained harder to control the boat. The ferry rocked and bobbed like a light pole with a heavy fish on the end. Wilhelm stood beside and held one ox while I did the same with the other, trying to quiet them.

Suddenly both oxen panicked. One dropped to a knee, throwing the wagon off balance. The oxen, still hitched to the wagon, lunged overboard, knocking Wilhelm into the raging river. Even though I could not swim well, I was much stronger and the older brother. I jumped in to save him. The current carried Wilhelm and the oxen under the raft while the wagon banged up against the underside of the ferry. The raging river sucked me under as well. The mass of the raft had us trapped. Through the dark, roiling water, I barely saw Wilhelm. Near us, the oxen flailed wildly. We were pulled into the dark abyss of the Brazos River.

A strange sensation washed over me. Suddenly all was calm and rays of light seemed to filter through the water from the sky. In the peaceful dark, I drowned along with Wilhelm and the oxen that day.

*

Now, I am in complete darkness, but I am alive. How can that be? I cannot