Section 2 of 14

The Waskow name was rare for an immigrant. Of the 3 million Germans listed in immigration records as traveling to America between 1850 and 1880, only a dozen shared that surname.²² Henry Waskow’s paternal grandfather was a Lutheran farmer named Karl (also spelled Carl), who left Germany at seventeen in 1866. It was a popular time to depart. That summer Prussia, the largest German state, had orchestrated a one-sided military campaign known as the Seven Weeks War that had vanquished Austria and left the Prussians the supreme power in central Europe. The victorious Prussians had annexed their neighbors and formed a union of twenty-two states known as the North German Confederation. Many people fled the new confederation to avoid compulsory military service, helping fill passenger ships at such a rapid clip that more than one-third of immigrants arriving at American ports between 1865 and 1870 were Germans.²³

Karl Waskow might have faced conscription if he had stayed at home much longer. He lived outside the North German Confederation, but his home province of Oldenburg, in the low-lying peat moors and heath near the North Sea, was virtually surrounded by the kingdom-turned-Prussian-province of Hanover. Oldenburg joined the confederation within a year of Waskow’s departure and became part of the German Reich four years after that.

What Waskow wanted in America was land. It was readily available. Under the terms of the Homestead Act of 1862, the U.S. government gave 160 acres of public land free to any able-bodied man who could make it productive; the end of the Civil War in 1865 made homesteading more attractive to Europeans by removing from America the kind of military shadow that seemed to be looming on the Continent.

When Waskow arrived in New York City on November 19, 1866, on the steamship "Bremen"—one of three ships of the German-based passenger lines that arrived that day in the United States—he told the immigration office that he was a farmer. Like most of the other 489 passengers unloading from the Bremen, he gave no final stop for his journey, listing his destination merely as "U.S.A."²⁴

The New York Times recorded the arrival of the Bremen in a small front-page column labeled "Maritime News."²⁵ A few pages inside, columns of advertisements proclaimed the availability of regular steamship passage to ports along the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast. A popular destination was Galveston, not far from the Texas Hill Country where German-speaking settlements such as New Braunfels flourished in the middle third of the nineteenth century.

Waskow sailed to Galveston but did not stay long. He took a train to San Antonio, married a German girl named Theresa Otto who awaited him there and started a land-grant farm in the beautiful woods and rivers of Washington County, near the tiny town of Washington-on-the-Brazos where Texas settlers had met in 1836 to declare their independence from Mexico. On July 12, 1882, Theresa gave birth to a son, Frank Carl August Waskow, at their farm.²⁶

To the north lived a Catholic shepherd named George Goth, whose passage to Texas had been sponsored by a wealthy rancher. Goth and his German bride, Mary, were scratching out a living by tending sheep in the hills southwest of Waco when a daughter was born on April 12, 1877. They named the girl Mary, like her mother. She was five years old when her mother died.²⁷

Both families, the Waskows and Goths, moved to Fort Bend County, near Houston. Frank and Mary met there. They were married January 2, 1902, and like most farm couples worked side by side in fields they planted with cotton, the staple crop of Texas.

They had eight children—four boys and four girls. George Carl Waskow was first, born in November 1902. He was followed by Bertha Johanna in 1904; John Otto in 1906; Paul Frank in 1909; August, who had no middle name, in 1912; Selma Rosa in 1915; Henry Thomas on September 24, 1918; and Mary Lee in 1922.²⁸

Although Mary Waskow’s father was Catholic, she attended Lutheran services when she could. There was no Catholic church near the Waskow farm, but there were other opportunities for worship as well as a German-Lutheran school. The four eldest Waskow children attended Lutheran services and grew up speaking both English and German, which was one of the languages of classroom instruction.

Sometime in the second decade of the century, the growing Waskow family moved to another farm, near the towns of Weesatche and Nordheim in the hot and humid lowlands of the southern Gulf Coast. It was there that Henry was born in a De Witt County farmhouse. Again the family did not settle. When Henry was two years old the Waskows moved to a cotton patch in eastern Bell County, which lies along the highway that connects the central Texas cities of Austin and San Antonio with the north Texas twins of Fort Worth and Dallas. Mary Goth Waskow’s sister and brother-in-law had moved to Bell County sometime before, and the opportunity to be near family appealed to her and her husband.²⁹

Frank Waskow and the eldest boys loaded the family’s possessions into mule-drawn wagons and trekked the 150 miles northwest to the new farm. Mary and the youngest children made the trip by railroad.

Henry’s sister, Selma Barr, said, "He was so much smaller than me that I had to hold his hands while we walked through the train station."³⁰