Koeltzow family In Grimes County
A small 84-page paperback book was published in 1962 by the Oklahoma Historical Society in the Chronicles of Oklahoma. It was titled, “From the Brazos to the North Fork, the Autobiography of Otto Koeltzow.” The topic is of the early, often painful struggles, of immigrants into the still raw beginning of Texas in the late 1800s.
The following is the first of a few Sandbar histories taken mostly verbatim within quotation marks from this book. It is basically an early history of not only Grimes County but Texas and the frontier.
Koeltzow begins: “I was born in the rich province of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, near Peterstorf, Germany on April 29, 1875. While my father, Ludwig Koeltzow, was an energetic and capable farmer, he could not prosper because tax collectors took at least half of what the people produced. As I recollect stories told of the oppressions suffered by the German people, I am certain that I would rather be a lowly tenant in the United States than a landowner in Germany. But high taxes were not the only hardships suffered by the German people in the nineteenth century. Compulsory military service and a state-sponsored system of education and religion were disagreeable too. The schools and churches belonged to the central government. The schoolteachers and clergy were paid from the national treasury. Religious toleration and freedom of worship were not permitted. The families of our community became restless under this tyranny, and several made plans to emigrate to America, where, it was reported, people were free.
“Father decided to join the exodus. After selling his land and livestock he had enough money to buy passage to the new country for the eight members of our family. I was seven years old and had been in school for one year when we sailed from Hamburg aboard the Ruhgia in November 1883.”
After a storm ridden trip that took 17 days instead of seven to luckily arrive at New York, the family changed ships to Galveston, arriving the first day of December 1883. They boarded a train to Brenham. In early times, landowners had worked the land with African-Americans, but with the arrival of Germans, proprietors preferred German sharecroppers and tenants because, it was claimed, they were reliable workers and produced good crops.
The Koeltzow family went to work for an early German landowner that had come to the United States before the Civil War, owned 4,000 acres of cotton land and 500 slaves. The slaves left following the Civil War and he was desperate for workers. The landowner failed to live up to his share agreement and stripped the Koeltzows of its earnings to the point they nearly starved. Otto’s father went to see a German lawyer in Brenham, but the lawyer warned the landowner was too powerful to tackle in the local courts.
The next day the family cobbled enough together and were soon in Grimes County near Roans Prairie east of Anderson as tenant farmers.
Koeltzow continued: “Our second year in Texas was much better than the first, for, after we had paid the rent, there was enough cotton and corn left to buy one yoke of oxen and a wooden moldboard plow. While Roan’s Prairie was a fine farming region, it had its disadvantages. We were 14 miles from Anderson, the closest trading center and site of the school and our church...the Lutheran. On Sunday, we had to get up at two in the morning in order to get to church on time. When we couldn’t borrow a wagon, we had to walk the 14 miles. So, in the fall of 1885, we moved to a farm near Anderson. My brothers, sisters, and I were enrolled in the local parochial school. I was nine years old, and, while I had already studied for one year in Germany, most of what I had learned had been forgotten. Thus, I had to start all over again. But school days were happy times.”
(Koeltzow story to be Continued; by Betty Dunn, Two Rivers Heritage Foundation. See www.tworiversheritagefoundation.org for more info and membership).