JOSEPH DRUFFEL SR. HISTORY (Written in 1959)
Joe and his younger brother, Bill, were the first to make the jump. They embarked at Bremen on the second of July in the year 1884. Joe was then 22 and Bill was in his teens. They landed in New York City ten days later and took the train the next morning bound for St. Louis by way of Buffalo and Cleveland and they landed in St. Louis on July 15th. There, Joe worked as a carpenter while Bill, being a baker by trade, got a job in a grocery store. Things were tough for all immigrants in those times, but it seemed hardest for Bill on account of his youth. He had to get up around three in the morning and then spend a long day at hard work. So the two brothers, who were primarily interested in farming anyway, decided to go to Centralia, Illinois, where they “knew somebody” from the old country. Unfortunately, the name of this acquaintance has not been preserved.
Anyway, Joe and Bill Druffel took off for Centralia, Illinois, on September 13 of the same year. They stayed there until the next May. On May 18, 1885, Joe left Centralia, returning to St. Louis where he got a job in the Griesedick Brewery for about a year when on June 28, 1886, he left this company and went to the famous Anheuser Busch Brewery, where he worked hard and capably for over a year until the famous strike came on in 1887 when work stopped. Again the record is blank here, as what Joe did after the strike. It seems he occupied his time going to school, learning the language and such things. His wife recalls that it must have been at this time that he invested in a small musical instrument called a “zither” and took lessons on it from a St. Louis lady teacher.
The Account picks up again on the following year, in June 1887. Having left St. Louis in May, he took a trip to St. Elizabeth, Missouri, in the Missouri Ozarks, to see his cousins, the Doerhoffs. The older ones still remembered (in 1950) this visit. Joe and Bill’s mother was a Doerhoff.
The record loses track of Bill at this time; but, the writer is assuming he and Joe were together on this visit, also. Maybe he still had his job in St. Louis, assuming that he came back from Centralia with Joe. Anyway, in the meantime, Joe’s and Bill’s two older brothers, Frank and Ben ( Franz & Bernard), together with their sister, Mary, and “two girl friends” came from Germany landing in New York in the year 1886 in January or February. This party stayed in New York a few days to get the “lay of the Land” in this country, finally landing in Huron, South Dakota, where they took up land and farmed. After getting the feel of the country, the two “girl friends” consented to marry Ben and Frank. Then on June 10, 1887 they were visited in Huron by their two younger brothers from Missouri, Joe and Bill.
The record shows they stayed for a whole month, so the “Druffel Boys” together again for the first time since they year 1884 when Joe and Bill started out on their bold venture of leaving home to go to America. They must have had quite a reunion and pow wow during those never to be forgotten days of June and July of 1887. Ben and Frank had married and were farming, which is what they all wanted to do when they arrived in this country. Bill related what a tough time he had in St. Louis and in Centralia, Illinois, where he worked on farms as a day laborer. He often told his nephews later how hard it was for him because of the softness of his hands from working indoors all the time. Joe, while he had found jobs in the trade of his choice, nevertheless, became frustrated by the Anheuser Busch Brewery strike that laid him off. So the upshot of it all as the decision that Joe and Bill, the original “shock troops” of the band, should strike out for the “New World” in the New World namely the much talked about OREGON COUNTRY, for those were the days of the “Oregon Trail” and the cry throughout the world of “Go West, young man, go West”.
Hence, July 26, 1887, Joe and Bill left Huron, South Dakota and landed In the Dalles Oregon, on the lower Columbia River. What attracted everybody to the Dallas, the record does not state but there must have been some special reason. Probably for reasons of transportation in those pioneer days.
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Anyway, two days after arriving in the Dalles, the two adventurers entrained for Spokane where they arrived on July 30, 1887. August 29th, that year, Joe got a job in the Gorko Brewery. What he did the month before he got this job is not recorded; but, it is easy to imagine he must have been scouting around for land, because these four boys were always wanting to go into farming in this country.
The following year of 1888 Ben and Frank sold their farms in Huron, South Dakota, and came to Spokane too. Frank bought a farm in the Palouse Country near Pine City, southwest of Rosalia. The records seem to show that in the spring of this year all four of the Druffel boys were busy farming around Rosalia, Washington. Then came the great disaster of 1889 in this locality, namely, the Spokane fire, which practically destroyed the entire business part of the city of Spokane. Joe and Addie Druffel, 1893
Here should be mentioned the typically western pioneer life the four brothers and sister, Mary, lived on the island in the Spokane River where the Great Northern Depot now stands. Before the fire, which was in the month of August , they camped in a shanty here with their sister keeping house for them. The accounts of this fabulous life in a shanty on an island in the middle of the Spokane River are rather nebulous, having become sort of in the category of anachronous folklore.
All we want to do in this brief account is to get everybody married and living happily ever afterwards.
| Addie and Joe Druffel, 1943? |
The year after the Spokane Fire found a little damsel of 13 by the name of Addie Freitag sent by her mother from Riverside, Iowa to Spokane all by herself to find a job and make her way in life (this story seems partially in conflict with the narrative by her sister marked ** below). In 1893, Joe was at Mass on Sunday and was conveniently nabbed by the pastor to be the Godfather for a baby being baptized whose parents were so poor and lonesome in the devastated city of Spokane that they couldn't even find sponsors for their child's baptism. And, the Godmother, nabbed at the same time, was this little lady from Iowa. She was only seventeen then, and lonesome in a strange city, and Joe Druffel was in his early thirties by this time. So, the two struck up a friendship and got married shortly afterwards in the same year (1893).
Bill, the youngest, went back
to Germany in 1899 to marry an old school- days friend and return to settle
down in the Palouse Country. In the meantime, Mary found an old towns-mate from Oelde, Germany, in Spokane by the name of Henry Zellerhoff. He was driving a beer wagon and the story told about Mary ‘s wedding is the fact that her husband went back to driving his beer-wagon immediately after the wedding ceremony as he didn't even get the day off.
Joe and his wife lived in Spokane for five years and leased a farm near Pine City, to which they moved and farmed until 1903. He later bought a farm near Colton where their eleven children grew up. He bought several places also, known as the Kraut and Maynard places. His two brothers, Frank and Ben helped him move two houses together, with four horse teams, and this is the house, Vic, his son later moved (to make room for a new house). The children all went to Colton Catholic schools.
The farm was hard to farm because of the creek and road between the farm buildings. Later, a highway was built to Pullman and this made the farm near the road. He later bought land from Wilson Haney, Rosgen, Flowers and Ferguson, which the sons and daughter, Bertha, now farm. In 1932, he moved to Colton and bought the Joe Klein home. Here he lived until he died in 1954. His wife, Addie, still lives here (1959).
** Information noted by Miriam Nesbit, a granddaughter (on 2-2-94) indicates that Addie's sister Rose Frietag related that Addie was accompanied by her father, Adam Frietag, and uncle, Lawrence Schmidt, Jr. to Spokane in 1889 when she was 13 years old. A big strong girl, she planned to work at a German boarding house near 3rd and Stevens Street in Spokane. The rest of the family moved west and took a homestead at Usk, in the Calispell Valley, north of Spokane. Addie remained in Spokane.
(The above history of Joseph Druffel Sr. and family was written probably by the fourth son, Rev. Henry Druffel.)