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| Yokum Brook Farm - ca. 2006 -- the Vahle homestead (The old tailor shop is visible at the rear of the house) |
On 27 Jun 1908, a son Franz Vahle was born in Fürstenberg,
Wesel, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany to Wilhelm and Elizabeth Whittler Vahle. He
was the youngest of the three children of a Roman Catholic family.
Franz trained to be a tailor. Both of his parents died
before 1928. As the drums of war were beating in Europe, in 1928 Franz’s older
brother Josef, a carpenter and a German veteran of the First World War, went to
Rio de Janeiro. Josef sent money to Franz and told him to go to New York and
find work there – that life in Europe was about to become a nightmare. When
Franz was settled, he should write to Josef in Brazil and Josef would come to
America. [That did happen and Josef came to Newport, RI, and worked as a
cabinet maker for the U.S. Navy.]
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| Steamer Alfred Ballin (Ancestry.com) |
On July 19th, 1930, with a few dollars in his
pocket, and filled with fear and courage – Franz arrived at the Port of New
York aboard the steamer Alfred Ballin. He spoke no English but the little he had
tried to learn on the passage.
Franz spent his last dollar on a piece of apple pie and a cup of
coffee and settled on a bench by a church in the city to plan what his tomorrow
should be.
That evening two Catholic nuns befriended him. They
heard his story. And they changed his life. They brought him to talk with their
priest. Then for some months, he worked at odd jobs in the convent and nearby church
and rectory; the sisters taught him English, the church gave him shelter, and
food.
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| Immigrant Franz Vahle ca. 1931 German Tailor (photo from naturalization file) |
In April of 1931, nine months after he arrived in America,
they told him that a Jesuit Seminary in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was looking
for a tailor to make new and repair worn cassocks and raiment for the brothers
and priests there. They provided funds enough to get Franz by train from New York
to Stockbridge, where the carriage from Shadowbrook fetched their new German
tailor to his new home.
Franz was enormously successful as a tailor to the Jesuit clergy.
Families of newly ordained Jesuit priests and brothers hired him on to outfit their young family clergymen heading out to new assignments and missions in odd corners
of the world.
In less than three years, Franz had carved out his place in the
United States. He worked very hard, and was very, very good at what he did. In
April of 1933, the Jesuit brothers helped Franz submit his Declaration of
Intention to become a U.S. Citizen.
Also by 1933, Franz had met a young woman in nearby Lenox, a
short walk from Shadowbrook Seminary. Anna Smith was the eldest daughter of a
Polish (Prussian) Catholic couple with an indecipherable surname who had
immigrated in 1902. Anna was born in New Jersey in 1905.
The popular tailor to the Jesuits of Shadowbrook and the bright young Anna
were married on November 6, 1933 at St. Ann’s
Church in Lenox and the marriage is also entered in Stockbridge where Shadowbrook then stood. Never was the
union of two poor immigrant families blessed and celebrated by so many clergy.
They rented a small farm on West Road in Lenox, and for a
few years, Franz continued to work at the Seminary building. Anna worked in the
office of a local fuel company. The first of their six children was born in
September 1934.
In September of 1935, a priest and a brother from
Shadowbrook witnessed Franz’s Petition for Naturalization. His citizenship was
granted June 29, 1936 at the Superior Court in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
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| Signatures of Rev. John Madden and Brother John Maher on Franz's Naturalization Petition |
The next three children followed in 1937, 1939, and 1941.
His Jesuit friends at Shadowbrook were apparently politically well-connected around the globe.
Late in 1940, the priests told Franz to buy the new tires his old truck needed
because “soon you won’t be able to buy them”.
By 1942, the population of priests and novices were
outgrowing the facilities of the old Carnegie mansion they had christened
Shadowbrook. Franz and Anna’s family was outgrowing their small rented place in Stockbridge.
So Franz and Anna bought a six-acre farm bordered by Yokum Brook in Lenox – a
place with a large barn for livestock and equipment, a three-bedroom house, an
old ice house and outhouse, and a variety of sheds and buildings for chickens
and pigs and sheep. Grazing land and fields to grow their own food. Like in the
‘Old World’, they could be self-sustaining with the help of their three growing
sons and a daughter.
And Franz could move his clerical tailoring operation out of
Shadowbrook to his new location about a mile or so away.
On June 16, 1942, with the help of
his Shadowbrook friends, Franz and his children moved to their new home in
Lenox, while Anna was at the hospital giving birth to their fifth child, fourth
son, John Joseph Vahle. (Their sixth child, a second girl, was born there in
1945.)
To set up his business as Tailor to the Clergy, Franz needed
a building separate from the house and the clamor of five children. There was a
gas station on the corner of the road down the street apiece. They were going
to put a new building there, so Franz bought the old gas station building and moved it to
his new home – setting it perhaps twenty feet behind the house. He put in a
kerosene heater, added shelves for his bolts of cotton and gabardine, set up his sewing
table, ironing table, and cutting table and his sewing machine – a gift from
the religious brothers he served. Until the day he died, he devoted his days to
making cassocks, Roman collars, and three-peaked birettas for Jesuit priests in
all parts of the world.
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| Franz with his truck ca. 1950 |
In March of 1956, the Shadowbrook Seminary burned to the
ground. It was an awful event, easily seen from the Vahle farm. The priest and
the brother who sponsored Franz’s naturalization were among the many who died
in the fire, as was the Shadowbrook mechanic who sponsored his original Declaration of Intention. Franz spent endless hours, working in his shop day and night, to replace some of the religious garb the survivors would need.
Shadowbrook was rebuilt in 1970, but Franz had never recovered from the fiery loss of so many of the friends who had helped him build such a good life so far from the land of his birth.
Franz died in that house in 1974. Anna remained there until
her death in 1991.
In 1991, the property came into the hands of the son John
who was born the day the family moved into it. Since 1992, John and I have
lived here, maintained the house and the barn and the old tailor shop and an
old chicken coop. Essentially, yes, John has lived here all of his seventy-five
years. I am an old Irish-Yankee Cape Cod girl who moved to the Berkshires in
1969, but John has always been a Massachusetts highlander.
The house and barn are in fine fettle, but the tailor shop
and the chicken coop have not aged gracefully. They became dangerous as time
took its toll.
The old gas-station-turned-tailor-shop stood in the place
where Franz originally put it until today, August 21, 2017. It was demolished this
morning. The chicken coop will be gone by the end of the week.
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| The old tailor shop on Friday August 18, 2017 |
In cleaning out
the old shop, we found one last lonely cassock with a small tear in a sleeve.
There were metal patterns for the Roman collars and the birettas, too. The cassock would
never survive a washing, so I fluffed it in cold air in the drier for an hour with
a softener sheet. The vile odor of mildew is gone. I packaged it carefully in
fabric safe plastic. I don’t know what will become of it, but it’s will to
survive is astonishing.
In place of the tailor shop, we will be placing a new
Amish-built shed – a beautiful building about 10’ by 12’, with barn-like doors,
and windows, and shutters – a building which would have given Franz all the
space he needed to cut and sew and press all those yards of black gabardine. It
will be more functional for a couple of aging folks – now it will house a lawn
tractor, snow blower, snow rake, and miscellaneous garden tools. It will be
guarded by my mother’s small garden statue of St. Francis sitting in the window.
MRP
Lenox, MA
For more on Shadowbrook, please see:
In a Facebook post in 2014, Fr. James Martin, SJ refers us to an extensive collection of photos of the "Old Shadowbrook" and the Shadowbrook fire, from the archives of the New England Province, and Holy Cross, curated by Alice Howe:
MRP
Lenox, MA
For more on Shadowbrook, please see:
In a Facebook post in 2014, Fr. James Martin, SJ refers us to an extensive collection of photos of the "Old Shadowbrook" and the Shadowbrook fire, from the archives of the New England Province, and Holy Cross, curated by Alice Howe:
