A Walk Through Minden: In the Lives of the Crone and Vegh Families

By Lillian Frazer

The writer follows the journey of her immigrant ancestors from their earliest beginnings in our great nation to their travels to the small coal mining camp of Minden nestled in the mountains of West Virginia. The story continues with the struggles of a coal mining family, the close-knit relationships with family and neighbors, and growing up as a coal camp kid. Life is difficult and poor in money but rich in what truly is important to the family---the love and heart-warming treasures that remain in their hearts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504970792

Lillian Frazer

Lillian, a native of West Virginia, lives with her family in the foothills of the beautiful Bull Run Mountains in Virginia. Her research and writings have been a challenging and rewarding passion. Lillian is an award-winning author of her recent books, Wildflowers and Train Whistles: Stories of a Coal Mining Family and Uncovering Roots: The Rheas of Augusta, Bath and Rockbridge Counties, Virginia.

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2016 Lillian (Sissy Crone) Frazer. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/05/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7081-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7080-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-7079-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015921362

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter One Phillip Crone and Frances Roycraft

Chapter Two Robert Edward Rudd and Virginia Traylor

Chapter Three Early Ancestry of the Rudd Family

Chapter Four Jacob Crone and Susan Beatrice Rudd

Chapter Five The Town of Minden

Chapter Six Jacob and the KKK

Chapter Seven Andrew Vegh and Fany (Fannie) Grandati

Chapter Eight Andy and Fannie Vegh and Family

Chapter Nine Lizzy and Buster and FamilyLate 1930s and Early 1940s

Chapter Ten World War II Years

Chapter Eleven Post World War II

Chapter Twelve Late 1940s and Very Early 1950s

Chapter Thirteen Family in Early 1950s

Chapter Fourteen Closing of the Mines

Chapter Fifteen Life after the Mines Closes

Chapter Sixteen

Epilog Our Mountain Dialect and Family Customs

About the Author

To my grandsons Connor and Garrett who keep me young in heart.

Acknowledgements

This writing was a great challenge and struggle for me as well as one of joy and love. My purpose was to capture portions of the lives of our family, portraying them as the people they were and not just another birth or death. I hope in some way I have accomplished that with the dignity they so well deserve. For any errors or emissions, I apologize in advance. Some dates were omitted intentionally for individual privacy.

To my daughter-in-law Christy, I give my upmost thanks and appreciation for the many long, long hours of editing.

I dedicate this book to all of my family. My Mom and Dad, Lizzy and Buster, were in my thoughts throughout this writing.

To my son John Michael and my grandsons Connor and Garrett, it is with love and joy I share some knowledge of your ancestors. It is because of my son’s encouragement that I continued to research and write.

To my brothers and sisters, Gene, Sue, Charles, Ann, Robert and John, we shared and continue to share special times in our lives which will always be in our hearts. To my aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and cousins, you are all a part of this. Thank you for your contributions. To each of you I give this special gift….a part of you and a part of me to pass on to our future generations.

Prolog: I have found many actual documents and census to verify much of my family information. There are no documents to verify some family history and general information. I can only rely on family history passed down from generation to generation.

Chapter One

Phillip Crone and Frances Roycraft

It’s best, I think, to go back as far as I can in describing my family’s earliest beginnings in America. My paternal great grandfather, Phillip Crone Sr., was born in 1846 in the town of Bayern, Bavaria in southern Germany.¹ Germans were the largest group of immigrants to America during the years of 1840 to 1880, and during the 19th Century eight million Germans immigrated to the United States.² Census indicates that in 1862, at the age of sixteen, Phillip came to America.

I learned about my great grandfather’s life from his great grandson, Lewis Crone. According to Lewis, Phillip left Germany with his brother. Phillip was a farmer’s son, and dreamed of owning his own farm. In the late 1800s, few peasant class people owned their own farms. Farming was a hardscrabble life. America was touted as a land of opportunity, a place where the streets were paved with gold. There was also the lure of the Land Act, the chance for peasant farmers to own their own land for as low as $1.25 per acre with generous credit terms.³

When Phillip arrived in Rochester he must have viewed endless opportunities. New York City was largely considered America’s original boomtown; nearby Rochester was known as The Young Lion of the West and later became Flour City.⁴ Phillip’s new hometown was the epicenter of a great agriculture community and the whole area prospered because of the gateway to the West, the Erie Canal.

Despite the booming entrepreneurial exploits during this time, an inconvenient distraction also simmered beneath the high hopes of starting one’s own farm. The Civil War had been raging for a year when Phillip set foot on the land of opportunity. As a German immigrant he could not have fully understood the array of political and social issues dividing the great nation he so desperately wanted to call home.

I can only speculate why my great grandfather who sought freedom and economic opportunities greater than Europe offered, would enlist in the Union Army at the height of the Civil War. According to his descendants, enlist he did.

German American sentiment was mostly anti-slavery as it was similar to the serf system that they escaped abroad. Many German immigrants chose to live in industrialized, economically progressive Free States to avoid competing with slave labor. Perhaps Phillip enlisted to help protect his new homeland.⁵

German Americans like Phillip were the largest group of immigrants to enlist in the Civil War. Many were offered enlistment bonuses for joining the Union Army. By the economic standard of the day, these bonuses could keep their family alive for a year, thus a strong incentive to enlist. In 1863, the Enrollment Act allowed rich men to avoid Union Army enlistment by either paying a $300 commutation fee (for this draft round only) or supplying a substitute (for the current and all future drafts). Immigrants, the poor, or the uneducated made ideal substitute soldiers, especially in the prosperous North. The war became known as the rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight.⁶ For many it was a matter of survival; for others there was simply the spirit of adventure and glory alluring to youth.

Another possible influence that could explain Phillip’s enlistment is his proximity to former slave Frederick Douglass, the most famous abolitionist of all, who lived in Rochester during this time. Douglass was the most ardent orator of his day on the subject of abolition. His speeches were fiery and his rhetoric was so powerful that few who heard them were not impressed.⁷ It is possible young Phillip heard his speeches in Rochester and was motivated to join the Union cause.

I was not surprised that I could not locate official documents verifying Phillip’s service, as many service records from the Civil War no longer exist. Phillip told his children and grandchildren of his plight while in the Union Army; he even kept a Union flag at home while living in the South long after the war concluded.

After returning from war in 1865, the youthful Phillip met a young woman named Frances Roycraft. My great grandmother, Frances, was an Irish girl born in 1847 in the Town of Ogden, New York. Frances’ brother, William Thomas Roycraft, was five years her elder. William fought for the Union Army in the 93rd New York Infantry while Frances worked as a domestic on West Avenue in Rochester, an area called Dutchtown.⁸ Most thought it was filled with Dutch people but the name is a mispronunciation of Deutschtown, which means German town.

William was taken prisoner at the battle of Petersburg on June 22, 1864 and sent to Andersonville Prison at the age of twenty-two.⁹ During the earlier part of the Civil War, the North and South exchanged prisoners; however, as the war progressed, the North began to refuse prisoner exchanges with the Confederates because black and white prisoners were not treated equally. As a result, Confederates transported most of their Union prisoners deep into the South to foil rescue attempts by the North.

The tiny village of Andersonville, Georgia was an ideal prison site. Andersonville had land, a good water source and was located near the Southwestern Railroad, making prisoner transport easy. The prison was named Camp Sumter, and on February 27, 1864 the first prisoners arrived. The 26.5-acre camp was designed for 10,000 prisoners but when prisoner exchanges ceased, Camp Sumter swelled to 32,000 prisoners. The water source quickly became polluted. Many of the prisoners were wounded, starving, and had only minimum shelter such as rustic tents constructed of rummaged scraps or simply bare holes in the ground. With polluted water, horrific living conditions, and no medical treatment, disease was rampant. Those who perished were dumped in mass burial grounds outside the prison stockade.¹⁰

Henry Wirz was the prison commander at the time William was held. After the war, Wirz was tried and executed for murder and conspiracy to kill or injure prisoners. Many people considered Henry Wirz a martyr for the Confederates while others considered him the vilest criminal of the war.¹¹

Nearly 13,000 of the 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter died mainly from unsanitary diseases.¹² Robert H. Kellogg, sergeant major in the 16th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, described his entry of the prison camp on May 2nd 1864:

As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect;—stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin. Many of our men, in the heat and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness. Can this be hell? God protect us! and all thought that He alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then.¹³

According to POW records, William transferred from Andersonville Prison on October 31, 1864 to Millen Prison in Georgia. This prison was called Camp Lawton and the stockade was built on a farm near Millen. Prison life here was also a miserable existence.

In my search for records on William, I located a John Crone from 87th Pennsylvania Infantry, Company E. Coincidentally, John was captured at Petersburg on June 23, 1864 and sent to Andersonville Prison at the same time as William Roycraft. John Crone was transferred on October 31, 1864 from Andersonville Prison to the Millen Prison. Was this John Crone, a prisoner of war with William Roycraft, related to the Phillip Crone who would eventually marry William’s sister? I don’t know, but