Bruce Garver, a great-grandson of Henry (baptized "Heinrich") Lotz (1835-1906), has written the following "bio" of Henry, with some emphasis upon his relationship to the German immigrant family of eleven members in which he was raised and the equally large American family that he established with Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz (1838-1916) whom he wed on October 16, 1859, at the German Methodist Church in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio. When, quoting or reproducing parts of the following "bio" of Henry Lotz, please give credit to Prof. Bruce Garver and to "Find a Grave". Most of the digital photographs attached to Lotz and related family Find a Grave Memorials are part of "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio, a collection donated to Lane in June 2016 by Bruce & Karen Garver who own the original prints and tintypes from which these JPEGs and TIFFs have been professionally made. Bruce thanks his cousins Patty Kelly Carman and the late Wilhelm Christian Lotz for having provided information essential to his writing of Find a Grave "bios" of members of the Lotz and related families.
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WHY AND HOW THE LARGE LOTZ FAMILY CAME TO OHIO: During the mid 1850s, the family of Wilhelm Lotz (1807-1878) and Magdalena "Maggie" Lotz (1806-1890) immigrated in two groups to Ohio primarily in order to achieve economic security and a better life for their children and grandchildren and apparently with the intention of establishing their own iron foundry. Coming as they did from the small industrial town of Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia, the Lotz fathers and sons had already acquired skills in iron-making which would facilitate their immediate employment in the United States and their eventual establishment of their own foundry. Besides, father Wilhelm Lotz, as the eldest son in his family, would have received a modestly substantial inheritance that would have fully paid for steamship and railway tickets for his eleven-member family along with two sons-in-law and two grandchildren, to travel from Aßlar to Hamilton, Ohio. This inheritance would also have provided some of the capital necessary to obtain housing, to invest in the development of a small business, and to qualify for a bank loan or mortgage in any instances where family capital was insufficient to cover all necessary expenses. During the 19th century, the departure of the family of an eldest son from central or northern Europe to the United States was neither typical nor particularly unusual because such a son would obtain at least an equal share of the family inheritance and could therefore well afford to take the risks involved in immigrating to America in order to obtain better economic opportunities for himself and his wife and children.
Three generations of the family of Wilhelm and Maggie Lotz departed during the mid 1850s from the Kingdom of Prussia in which in property was expensive and labor was poorly paid in order to settle in the United States where property was comparatively inexpensive and where labor obtained higher wages. The related Lotz, Donges, and Bruck families probably chose to settle in Hamilton, Ohio, as opposed to another prosperous American industrial city, because some of their relatives, including several of the Donges and Bruck relatives of the widowed Elizabeth (Bruck) Donges (1805-1896) and her six children, had already established homes and businesses there. Such motives and this pattern of settlement have typically characterized "chain migration" to -- and also within -- the United States in all times and places. A secondary reason why Wilhelm and Maggie Lotz and their nine children came to Ohio during the mid 1850s was the fact that neither son Henry Lotz nor his younger brothers, William (Wilhelm) and Herman (Hermann) wished to perform obligatory active duty service in the Prussian Army. Comparatively few immigrants from continental Europe or from Great Britain immigrated during the 19th century to American states south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River, excepting Maryland and central Texas. All state governments within that vast region protected the practice of one of the world's most brutally oppressive systems of slavery, one which generally diminished the value of and opportunities for free labor and free enterprise. On the other hand, after1815, the free states of the rapidly developing agricultural and industrial Middle West attracted not only ambitious European immigrants but also Americans from New England and the Middle Atlantic states as well as American citizens who individually or in family groups moved out of states where slavery prevailed under state and local governmental protection and encouragement. The latter such citizens included Bruce Morton Garver's maternal Morton ancestors of Finnish and Swedish ancestry from Delaware, his Walden and Rees ancestors of English and Welsh ancestry from Virginia, and his Garver ancestors of Hessian German ancestry from Pennsylvania by way of North Carolina..
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AßLAR, KREIS WETZLAR, PRUSSIA, FROM WHICH THE LOTZ FAMILY DEPARTED: During the 1850s, the Kingdom of Prussia was still characterized by its authoritarian monarchical government, its class-ridden society, its large professional standing army, and its Junker nobility whose agricultural estates east of the Elbe River until 1806 had been cultivated by the labor of several million serfs. By 1850, the royal government of Prussia, after its Army had suppressed the 1848-1849 Revolutions on its own territory and on that of neighboring German principalities, was generally not admired by the inhabitants of its recently acquired territories west of the Elbe River such as Kreis Wetzlar, including its towns of Aßlar and Erda and its administrative center, the rapidly industrializing city of Wetzlar. Kreis Wetzlar was that portion of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Kassel (Hesse-Cassel) that the Kingdom of Prussia had acquired at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 with the approval of the Congress of Vienna whose peacemakers from the Kingdoms of Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire reorganized Europe after their armies had defeated those of the Napoleonic French Empire and its satellite kingdoms in German-speaking, Italian-speaking, and Polish-speaking Europe. Shortly after 1815, the Prussian government began to encourage and implement economic developments such as industrialization, railway construction, and scientific agriculture which improved the lives of all of Prussian subjects. Most effective of all of Prussia's innovations was its establishment in 1818 of the first universal, compulsory, state-financed, and tuition-free elementary school system in the world. This system soon became the model for all such systems promptly established in many other German-speaking principalities and eventually throughout most of Europe. Similar school systems independently arose at about the same time or had already arisen under local control in the six American states of New England, and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and in all of the newly created Middle Western states. Of course, such school systems did not begin to appear in the slaveholding American South until Federal Reconstruction began to introduce them into formerly Confederate states after 1865.
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OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS & SHORTCOMINGS OF PRUSSIAN RULE: Thanks to its universal, compulsory, state-financed, and tuition-free elementary schools established by law in 1818, the Kingdom of Prussia achieved a higher rate of literacy than any country in the world by 1850. Moreover, the full literacy of all Prussians provided an enormous stimulus to Prussia's rapid industrialization while also benefitting every Prussian subject, including those who immigrated to the United States. Moreover, in Kreis Wetzlar, the generally honest, educated, and efficient Prussian governmental bureaucracy, despite its authoritarian structure and practices, constituted a qualitative improvement over the licentious ruling elite and often corrupt administration of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Kassel, arguably among the worst of those in the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation dismantled by Napoleon in 1806. Anyone even casually acquainted with American history knows that the Hessian Landgrave (Landgraf) Frederick II (1760-1785) was handsomely rewarded by British King George III during and after 1776 for dispatching several regiments of the Landgrave's Hessian Army to help Great Britain attempt to suppress the American Revolution. Even though the Hessian ruling family used some of this ill-gotten revenue to encourage domestic improvements in agriculture and manufacturing, such improvements were designed primarily to enrich the established nobility and to promote the interests of government officials, of entrepreneurs, and of men who practiced the learned professions. Readers who desire to learn more about the "Old World" abandoned by German-speaking immigrants to the free states of "New World" America would be well advised to begin reading Hajo Holborn's "History of Modern Germany" in three volumes, arguably still the best survey of its subject published in any language. Readers who have a particular interest in Hessen-Kassel may wish to examine Charles W. Ingrao's clearly written, objective, and well-documented book entitled "The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform Under Frederick II, 1760--1785" (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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BROTHERS HENRY & WILLIAM LOTZ JOIN THEIR FATHER, WILHELM LOTZ, IN ESTABLISHING AN IRON FOUNDY & TOOL WORKS: Upon Henry Lotz's arrival with his parents, eight siblings, and other extended family members in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio, during the mid 1850s, Henry and his brother William Lotz (1839-1902), thanks to their elementary education in Prussian schools, their apprenticeship in iron-making, and their parents' modest amount of capital, became with their father Wilhelm Lotz (1806-1878) entrepreneurial co-owners and managers of a foundry engaged in manufacturing cast-iron tools and other implements. Eventually this enterprise was acquired by the much larger Hooven-Owen-Rentschler Corporation in which Henry Lotz's eldest son, William "Bim" Lotz (1863-1944) became a manager and stock-holder until forced out of management during the nationwide financial crisis of 1907, whereupon Bim Lotz sold his stock and moved with his wife, Ella, and their five children to San Jose, California, where he purchased several large orange groves.
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HENRY LOTZ & ELIZABETH CATHERINE (DONGES) LOTZ ESTABLISH A LARGE FAMILY AT HAMILTON, OHIO: On October 16, 1859, Henry Lotz wed Elizabeth Catherine Donges (1838-1916) at Hamilton's German Methodist Church that German immigrants had established in 1854 on South Front Street. The families of the young married couple had already beccome well acquainted because at least one marriage had occurred several generations earlier between members of the Lotz and Donges families in the former Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel. There, similar relationships through marriage had already established close ties between the Bruck and Donges families at Erda and between the Lotz and Schneider families at Aßlar. These nearby towns were within the Kreis Wetzlar administrative district ( literally " Wetzlar Circle") transferred by Hessen-Kassell to Prussia in 1814.
Together at Hamilton, Ohio, Henry and Elizabeth raised nine children born from 1860 through 1884 whose Find a Grave Memorials are linked below to each other and to those of their parents. Similarly below, Henry's Memorial is linked to those of his parents and his eight siblings. Truly remarkable in an age when high rates of infant and child mortality still prevailed was the fact the all nine Lotz children lived well into old age, the least-long-lived of them (Henry, Jr.) having died at age seventy-four and the longest-lived (Elizabeth "Lizzie") at the age of one-hundred and one. The Lotz family and related German immigrant families -- including the Bruck, Burkhardt, Reiff, Schiecke, Schneider, Seybold, Wellner, and Wismeyer families -- actively supported all religious, educational, and charitable work of the German Methodist Church and contributed funds to construction a larger house of worship completed in 1906 at 320 South Front Street. For example, Henry and Elizabeth Lotz donated funds to install the large stained-glass Neo-Gothic pointed arch window facing South Front Street, a window dedicated to the memory of Henry Lotz. This window was removed and sold piecemeal at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century. Additional information about the long lives and achievements of Henry Lotz (1835-1906) and Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz may be viewed in Bruce Garver's captions to the ten family photos posted to this Memorial, to the ten family photos posted to Elizabeth's Memorial, and to the many photos posted to the Memorials of Henry's & Elizabeth's siblings and nine children.
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HOW HESSIAN & PRUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS BECAME PATRIOTIC AMERICANS: Coming as they did from the authoritarian, class-ridden, and often corrupt society of former Hessen-Kassel and the more honest and efficient authoritarian government of the Kingdom of Prussia, members of the Lotz, Donges, Bruck, Burkhardt, Oetterer, Reiff, Schieke, Schneider, Seybold, Wellner, Wismeyer, and other related families appreciated the greater personal freedom as well as economic opportunities to be found in the United States north of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River. Moreover the similarities between the slave-owning self-styled aristocracy of a "Kingdom of Cotton and Tobacco" in the American South -- built upon the unrequited labor of hereditary black slaves -- and the privileged and licentious landed nobility of old Hessen-Kassel probably helped persuade many Hessian German immigrants to defend their adopted United States when most of the slave-state governments seceded from the Union during the spring of 1861. Before as well as after the advent of military conscription in the United States during 1863, sons and fathers of German immigrant families, like sons and fathers of long-established American families -- such as the Garver, Morton, and Johnson families -- chose to risk their lives in defense of the United States, its representative republican institutions, and its rule of law.
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BROTHERS HENRY & WILLIAM LOTZ & EIGHT CLOSE RELATIVES SERVED AS U.S. SOLDIERS DURING THE CIVIL WAR: Henry Lotz , husband and father, volunteered for service in Company "F" of the 162nd Infantry Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. His discharge certificate, whose JPEG is the third of ten photos attached to this Find a Grave Memorial, provides essential information not only about his military service but also about his personal appearance. Henry's younger brother, WIlliam (baptized "Wilhelm") Henry Lotz (1839-1902), served for three years in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Frederick Donges (born in 1841), the youngest of the two brothers of Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz, died on January 4, 1863, at U. S.. Army General Hospital No. 4 in Louisville, Kentucky., while serving in Company "K" of the 47th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. These experiences intensified Henry's, Elizabeth's, and William's desire to become American citizens and also helped to persuade them to become lifelong Republicans as they enthusiastically endorsed the Lincoln Administration's policy of ending the Rebellion of the Confederacy and obliterating slavery. I was told by Henry Lotz's youngest daughter, my grandmother Emma Lotz (1877-1962), and his middle son, my great uncle John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959), that their father's favorite Civil War song was "Marching Through Georgia." Several times I remember Uncle John Daniel Lotz having played this song for me on his piano. During the Civil War, Henry (christened "Heinrich") Lotz (1835-1906), served in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. Henry's brother, William Lotz, completed a three-year voluntary enlistment in the U. S. Army from October 13, 1861, to October 13, 1864, as a Private in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a unit recruited primarily in southwestern Ohio, including Butler County. The names of brothers Henry and William Lotz, their brothers-in-law, Jacob Seybold (1834-1899) and John Diedrich Anton Wellner (1826-1902), the two brothers of Henry's wife, Elizabeth (Donges) Lotz -- Frederick Donges (1841-1863) and John Ludwig Donges (1831–1922) -- and Elizabeth (Donges) Lotz's brothers-in-law, Henry Nuernberger (1815–1897) and Johann Phillip Oetterer (1827-1870), and Elizabeth's nephew, Frederick John Miller (1833–1897), are among the thousands of veterans' names inscribed within Hamilton's Soldiers, Sailors & Pioneers Memorial Monument erected in 1904 primarily to honor U.S. military veterans. Atop this Monument stands a seventeen-foot-tall bronze statue of a typical U.S. Civil War infantryman popularly called "Billy Yank." This Monument is Hamilton's largest and most visible reminder that a majority of Hamilton's residents, including almost all of its more than four thousand German immigrants, strongly supported the preservation of the Union and the eradication of slavery during the American Civil War. Bruce Garver's November 4, 2017, photograph of this Soldiers, Sailors & Pioneers Memorial Monument may be viewed at the Find a Grave Memorial of Henry's brother William H. Lotz (1839-1902).
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HENRY LOTZ'S DEATH & INTERMENT AT GREENWOOD CEMETERY: According to the records of the Greenwood Cemetery Association, Henry Lotz, Sr., died on June 8, 1906, at the age of seventy in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio, and was interred there on June 12, 1906, at Greenwood Cemetery in Section T, Lot 211, Grave 03. At that time, the large Lotz monument in Greenwood Cemetery cost $550.00 to quarry, erect, and inscribe. That monument, around which most of the Lotz family graves are clustered, is clearly depicted in the photo attached to this Memorial by "Running Deer" (Photo 12).
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WHY "HENRY LOTZ" IS BEST REMEMBERED BY THE AMERICANIZED VERSION OF HIS FIRST NAME AND BY HIS GERMAN-LANGUAGE FAMILY SURNAME. In the opinion of Bruce Garver, Henry Lotz's great-grandson and the author of this "bio" , Henry Lotz is best remembered and commemorated in the Americanized version of his first name. Henry Lotz (1835-1906) was known publicly as "Henry Lotz" after his immigration with his parents and eight siblings from Prussia to Butler County, Ohio, in 1854. But he was baptized as "Heinrich Lotz" in the Evangelical Church of his hometown of Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia during the month of September 1835. In Hamilton, Ohio, Henry and his family converted to German Methodism established by German immigrants in the United States. Typically German members of that religious faith acculturated fairly quickly to American culture and society. Henry Lotz served the United States during the American Civil War in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. Henry's brother, William Henry Lotz (1839–1902), completed a three-year voluntary enlistment in the U. S. Army from October 13, 1861, to October 13, 1864, as a Private in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a unit recruited primarily in southwestern Ohio, including Butler County. Two brothers of Henry's wife Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916) -- John Ludwig Donges (1831–1922) and Frederick Donges (1841–1863) served three-year terms of enlistment in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. John Ludwig Donges survived the war, but Frederick Donges died in a U.S. Military Hospital at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1863. All of the aforementioned Lotz and Donges relatives served the U.S. loyally under their Americanized first names and German-language family name. Henry and Elizabeth never returned to Prussia or to anywhere in post 1871 Germany but did pay to send their middle son, John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959) to Munich during 1892 & 1893 for a higher education in piano and violin under the tutelage of world-famous composer and pianist Josef Pembaur the Elder (1848-1923). For further related information, please view Bruce Garver's "bio" of John Daniel Lotz on Find a Grave Memorial No. 125021787 which is linked to Bruce's bios of Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz and her and Henry's nine children and other members of the extended Lotz-Donges-Bruck family.The elder Josef Pembaur's "Symphony in F Major, Op. 39 'In Tirol'" is available in audo on YouTube.
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A PORTRAIT OF HENRY LOTZ, circa 1884: Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, "Großpop" to his grandchildren, was born on September 13, 1835, at Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia, and died suddenly, quietly, and unexpectedly on June 8, 1906, at home on 532 South Front Street in Hamilton, Ohio. This photograph was made by the professional photographer Overpeck in Hamilton, Ohio, circa 1884, perhaps on the 25th wedding anniversary of Henry Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916). Attached to the Memorial of son Carl Wesley Lotz (1884-1960) is a JPEG photo of the touched-up and fancily framed version of this Overpeck photograph of Henry Lotz. Sr. This framed version was given in 1997 by Ruth Morton Garver and her children Bruce Morton Garver and Ann Clifton (Garver) Bell to their cousins Larry C. Lotz and Pat Hamblin Lotz whose three sons are the only great-great-grandchildren of Henry Lotz who still bear the Lotz surname. Whenever this JPEG photo is distributed in digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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THE SECOND ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH depicts the eleven members of the Lotz family in the year 1889 in Hamilton, Ohio. This large (21" x 15") photograph of 1889 depicts the eleven members of the family of Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio. This portrait was professionally made in a photographic studio, presumably in Hamilton. The occasion may have been the 30th wedding anniversary (October 16, 1889) of Henry Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Lotz. In the front row, left to right, are Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916); Ernst Garfield Lotz (1880-1963) born a few days after James Garfield's election as the 20th President of the United States; Elizabeth Christine ("Lizzie") Lotz (Wismeyer, 1860-1962), who lived beyond her 101st birthday; William M. ("Bim") Lotz (1863-1944); Carl Wesley Lotz (1884-1960, standing); and Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, Sr. (1835-1906, born in Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, Prussia, in the German Confederation). Carl Wesley Lotz was the grandfather of Larry, Bob, Don, Jim, and Marlene Lotz. In the back row, left to right, are Mary (Anna Marie) Lotz (Johnson, 1866-1948), John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959, seated), Edward George ("Eddie") Lotz (1875-1952), Henry ("Henny") Lotz, II (1868-1943), and Emma Lotz (Morton, 1877-1962), maternal grandmother of Bruce Morton Garver and Ann Clifton Garver Bell. Truly remarkable is the fact that all nine Lotz siblings (born from 1860 to 1884) lived into old age, as did their parents. The youngest to die was Henny at age 74 and the oldest was Lizzie at 101. Henry Lotz, Sr., an immigrant from Aßlar, Prussia, served in the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard during the Civil War and became an American citizen and a Republican. He named his fifth son after U.S. President James Garfield who had served as a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army during the Civil War and had earlier been a professor of classics at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. Whenever this photo is distributed in TIFF or JPEG digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at the Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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THE THIRD ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH is a digitized photo of the Civil War discharge certificate of Henry Lotz, Sr., of Hamilton, Ohio, who had served his enlistment of one hundred days in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard during the Civil War. This Civil War document complements our several sepia photographs of Henry Lotz, Sr. (1835-1906), by indicating that he stood 5' 11" tall (a remarkably high stature for that time and place) and had a "dark" complexion. Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, Prussia, the birthplace of Henry Lotz, has been misspelled as "Aslarr" on his Civil War discharge certificate. All other information therein is known to have been accurately recorded. Whenever this JPEG photo is distributed in digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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A FIRST VISIT TO ANCESTRAL AßLAR: Karen (Louise King Garver) and I (Bruce
Morton Garver), together with our infant son, Lee Albert Garver, first visited Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in January 1967 where we stayed for three days with my third cousin once removed Wilhelm Christian Lotz and his wife Else Kroll Lotz and met other Lotz cousins, including their son, Wilhelm Wolfgang Lotz (then an engineering student at the University of Giessen), and all of Wilhelm Christian's sisters and their families. Karen and I were already well acquainted with Wilhelm Christian's and Else's daughter, Gisela Lotz, who had lived with my parents and sister Ann in Worthington, Ohio, for a year and a half (1964-66) and who, together with my sister, Ann, had traveled in early August 1964 from Los Angeles, California, to Worthington, Ohio, with Karen and me in our 1961 Volkswagen "beetle." A photograph of the four travelers and further information about their cross-country journey may be found on the Find a Grave Memorial No. 134599145 honoring John Arthur Bippus (1902-1979),.
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HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE AND OTHER ITEMS FROM THE HOME OF HENRY & ELIZABETH CATHERINE DONGES LOTZ: Illustrated on this Memorial and on that of Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916) are several of the many household items that belonged to Henry and Elizabeth Lotz, including a framed reverse-glass-painted religious statement in German, a hobnail decanter, a set of four cruettes in a silver-plated container (a wedding present to Henry & Elizabeth) , and six hand-carved walnut side chairs, in one of which Henry Lotz, Sr., was found dead on June 8, 1906, by his son John Daniel Lotz who promptly carved a small notch in the back of the chair's seat. Valerie Louise Garver owns the harmonium organ that belonged to her Lotz great-great grandparents, Henry and Elizabeth. Bruce and Karen Garver display the "Mary Gregory style" painted glass pitcher that belonged to one of Henry Lotz's younger sisters, Christiane M. ("Christina") (Lotz) Reiff, who generously gave it in the summer of 1914 to her niece Emma (Lotz) Morton and her daughters, Edith Elizabeth Morton (Bippus) and Ruth Ernestine Morton (Garver) who always addressed their great-aunt Christina formally as "Aunt Reiff". A JPEG and detailed description of this "Mary Gregory style" pitcher appears on the Memorial to Christiane M. ("Christina") (Lotz) Reiff (1841-1915), a younger sister of Henry Lotz (1835-1906).
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WHY AND HOW THE LARGE LOTZ FAMILY CAME TO OHIO: During the mid 1850s, the family of Wilhelm Lotz (1807-1878) and Magdalena "Maggie" Lotz (1806-1890) immigrated in two groups to Ohio primarily in order to achieve economic security and a better life for their children and grandchildren and apparently with the intention of establishing their own iron foundry. Coming as they did from the small industrial town of Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia, the Lotz fathers and sons had already acquired skills in iron-making which would facilitate their immediate employment in the United States and their eventual establishment of their own foundry. Besides, father Wilhelm Lotz, as the eldest son in his family, would have received a modestly substantial inheritance that would have fully paid for steamship and railway tickets for his eleven-member family along with two sons-in-law and two grandchildren, to travel from Aßlar to Hamilton, Ohio. This inheritance would also have provided some of the capital necessary to obtain housing, to invest in the development of a small business, and to qualify for a bank loan or mortgage in any instances where family capital was insufficient to cover all necessary expenses. During the 19th century, the departure of the family of an eldest son from central or northern Europe to the United States was neither typical nor particularly unusual because such a son would obtain at least an equal share of the family inheritance and could therefore well afford to take the risks involved in immigrating to America in order to obtain better economic opportunities for himself and his wife and children.
Three generations of the family of Wilhelm and Maggie Lotz departed during the mid 1850s from the Kingdom of Prussia in which in property was expensive and labor was poorly paid in order to settle in the United States where property was comparatively inexpensive and where labor obtained higher wages. The related Lotz, Donges, and Bruck families probably chose to settle in Hamilton, Ohio, as opposed to another prosperous American industrial city, because some of their relatives, including several of the Donges and Bruck relatives of the widowed Elizabeth (Bruck) Donges (1805-1896) and her six children, had already established homes and businesses there. Such motives and this pattern of settlement have typically characterized "chain migration" to -- and also within -- the United States in all times and places. A secondary reason why Wilhelm and Maggie Lotz and their nine children came to Ohio during the mid 1850s was the fact that neither son Henry Lotz nor his younger brothers, William (Wilhelm) and Herman (Hermann) wished to perform obligatory active duty service in the Prussian Army. Comparatively few immigrants from continental Europe or from Great Britain immigrated during the 19th century to American states south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River, excepting Maryland and central Texas. All state governments within that vast region protected the practice of one of the world's most brutally oppressive systems of slavery, one which generally diminished the value of and opportunities for free labor and free enterprise. On the other hand, after1815, the free states of the rapidly developing agricultural and industrial Middle West attracted not only ambitious European immigrants but also Americans from New England and the Middle Atlantic states as well as American citizens who individually or in family groups moved out of states where slavery prevailed under state and local governmental protection and encouragement. The latter such citizens included Bruce Morton Garver's maternal Morton ancestors of Finnish and Swedish ancestry from Delaware, his Walden and Rees ancestors of English and Welsh ancestry from Virginia, and his Garver ancestors of Hessian German ancestry from Pennsylvania by way of North Carolina..
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AßLAR, KREIS WETZLAR, PRUSSIA, FROM WHICH THE LOTZ FAMILY DEPARTED: During the 1850s, the Kingdom of Prussia was still characterized by its authoritarian monarchical government, its class-ridden society, its large professional standing army, and its Junker nobility whose agricultural estates east of the Elbe River until 1806 had been cultivated by the labor of several million serfs. By 1850, the royal government of Prussia, after its Army had suppressed the 1848-1849 Revolutions on its own territory and on that of neighboring German principalities, was generally not admired by the inhabitants of its recently acquired territories west of the Elbe River such as Kreis Wetzlar, including its towns of Aßlar and Erda and its administrative center, the rapidly industrializing city of Wetzlar. Kreis Wetzlar was that portion of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Kassel (Hesse-Cassel) that the Kingdom of Prussia had acquired at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 with the approval of the Congress of Vienna whose peacemakers from the Kingdoms of Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire reorganized Europe after their armies had defeated those of the Napoleonic French Empire and its satellite kingdoms in German-speaking, Italian-speaking, and Polish-speaking Europe. Shortly after 1815, the Prussian government began to encourage and implement economic developments such as industrialization, railway construction, and scientific agriculture which improved the lives of all of Prussian subjects. Most effective of all of Prussia's innovations was its establishment in 1818 of the first universal, compulsory, state-financed, and tuition-free elementary school system in the world. This system soon became the model for all such systems promptly established in many other German-speaking principalities and eventually throughout most of Europe. Similar school systems independently arose at about the same time or had already arisen under local control in the six American states of New England, and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and in all of the newly created Middle Western states. Of course, such school systems did not begin to appear in the slaveholding American South until Federal Reconstruction began to introduce them into formerly Confederate states after 1865.
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OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS & SHORTCOMINGS OF PRUSSIAN RULE: Thanks to its universal, compulsory, state-financed, and tuition-free elementary schools established by law in 1818, the Kingdom of Prussia achieved a higher rate of literacy than any country in the world by 1850. Moreover, the full literacy of all Prussians provided an enormous stimulus to Prussia's rapid industrialization while also benefitting every Prussian subject, including those who immigrated to the United States. Moreover, in Kreis Wetzlar, the generally honest, educated, and efficient Prussian governmental bureaucracy, despite its authoritarian structure and practices, constituted a qualitative improvement over the licentious ruling elite and often corrupt administration of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Kassel, arguably among the worst of those in the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation dismantled by Napoleon in 1806. Anyone even casually acquainted with American history knows that the Hessian Landgrave (Landgraf) Frederick II (1760-1785) was handsomely rewarded by British King George III during and after 1776 for dispatching several regiments of the Landgrave's Hessian Army to help Great Britain attempt to suppress the American Revolution. Even though the Hessian ruling family used some of this ill-gotten revenue to encourage domestic improvements in agriculture and manufacturing, such improvements were designed primarily to enrich the established nobility and to promote the interests of government officials, of entrepreneurs, and of men who practiced the learned professions. Readers who desire to learn more about the "Old World" abandoned by German-speaking immigrants to the free states of "New World" America would be well advised to begin reading Hajo Holborn's "History of Modern Germany" in three volumes, arguably still the best survey of its subject published in any language. Readers who have a particular interest in Hessen-Kassel may wish to examine Charles W. Ingrao's clearly written, objective, and well-documented book entitled "The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform Under Frederick II, 1760--1785" (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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BROTHERS HENRY & WILLIAM LOTZ JOIN THEIR FATHER, WILHELM LOTZ, IN ESTABLISHING AN IRON FOUNDY & TOOL WORKS: Upon Henry Lotz's arrival with his parents, eight siblings, and other extended family members in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio, during the mid 1850s, Henry and his brother William Lotz (1839-1902), thanks to their elementary education in Prussian schools, their apprenticeship in iron-making, and their parents' modest amount of capital, became with their father Wilhelm Lotz (1806-1878) entrepreneurial co-owners and managers of a foundry engaged in manufacturing cast-iron tools and other implements. Eventually this enterprise was acquired by the much larger Hooven-Owen-Rentschler Corporation in which Henry Lotz's eldest son, William "Bim" Lotz (1863-1944) became a manager and stock-holder until forced out of management during the nationwide financial crisis of 1907, whereupon Bim Lotz sold his stock and moved with his wife, Ella, and their five children to San Jose, California, where he purchased several large orange groves.
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HENRY LOTZ & ELIZABETH CATHERINE (DONGES) LOTZ ESTABLISH A LARGE FAMILY AT HAMILTON, OHIO: On October 16, 1859, Henry Lotz wed Elizabeth Catherine Donges (1838-1916) at Hamilton's German Methodist Church that German immigrants had established in 1854 on South Front Street. The families of the young married couple had already beccome well acquainted because at least one marriage had occurred several generations earlier between members of the Lotz and Donges families in the former Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel. There, similar relationships through marriage had already established close ties between the Bruck and Donges families at Erda and between the Lotz and Schneider families at Aßlar. These nearby towns were within the Kreis Wetzlar administrative district ( literally " Wetzlar Circle") transferred by Hessen-Kassell to Prussia in 1814.
Together at Hamilton, Ohio, Henry and Elizabeth raised nine children born from 1860 through 1884 whose Find a Grave Memorials are linked below to each other and to those of their parents. Similarly below, Henry's Memorial is linked to those of his parents and his eight siblings. Truly remarkable in an age when high rates of infant and child mortality still prevailed was the fact the all nine Lotz children lived well into old age, the least-long-lived of them (Henry, Jr.) having died at age seventy-four and the longest-lived (Elizabeth "Lizzie") at the age of one-hundred and one. The Lotz family and related German immigrant families -- including the Bruck, Burkhardt, Reiff, Schiecke, Schneider, Seybold, Wellner, and Wismeyer families -- actively supported all religious, educational, and charitable work of the German Methodist Church and contributed funds to construction a larger house of worship completed in 1906 at 320 South Front Street. For example, Henry and Elizabeth Lotz donated funds to install the large stained-glass Neo-Gothic pointed arch window facing South Front Street, a window dedicated to the memory of Henry Lotz. This window was removed and sold piecemeal at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century. Additional information about the long lives and achievements of Henry Lotz (1835-1906) and Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz may be viewed in Bruce Garver's captions to the ten family photos posted to this Memorial, to the ten family photos posted to Elizabeth's Memorial, and to the many photos posted to the Memorials of Henry's & Elizabeth's siblings and nine children.
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HOW HESSIAN & PRUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS BECAME PATRIOTIC AMERICANS: Coming as they did from the authoritarian, class-ridden, and often corrupt society of former Hessen-Kassel and the more honest and efficient authoritarian government of the Kingdom of Prussia, members of the Lotz, Donges, Bruck, Burkhardt, Oetterer, Reiff, Schieke, Schneider, Seybold, Wellner, Wismeyer, and other related families appreciated the greater personal freedom as well as economic opportunities to be found in the United States north of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River. Moreover the similarities between the slave-owning self-styled aristocracy of a "Kingdom of Cotton and Tobacco" in the American South -- built upon the unrequited labor of hereditary black slaves -- and the privileged and licentious landed nobility of old Hessen-Kassel probably helped persuade many Hessian German immigrants to defend their adopted United States when most of the slave-state governments seceded from the Union during the spring of 1861. Before as well as after the advent of military conscription in the United States during 1863, sons and fathers of German immigrant families, like sons and fathers of long-established American families -- such as the Garver, Morton, and Johnson families -- chose to risk their lives in defense of the United States, its representative republican institutions, and its rule of law.
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BROTHERS HENRY & WILLIAM LOTZ & EIGHT CLOSE RELATIVES SERVED AS U.S. SOLDIERS DURING THE CIVIL WAR: Henry Lotz , husband and father, volunteered for service in Company "F" of the 162nd Infantry Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. His discharge certificate, whose JPEG is the third of ten photos attached to this Find a Grave Memorial, provides essential information not only about his military service but also about his personal appearance. Henry's younger brother, WIlliam (baptized "Wilhelm") Henry Lotz (1839-1902), served for three years in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Frederick Donges (born in 1841), the youngest of the two brothers of Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz, died on January 4, 1863, at U. S.. Army General Hospital No. 4 in Louisville, Kentucky., while serving in Company "K" of the 47th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. These experiences intensified Henry's, Elizabeth's, and William's desire to become American citizens and also helped to persuade them to become lifelong Republicans as they enthusiastically endorsed the Lincoln Administration's policy of ending the Rebellion of the Confederacy and obliterating slavery. I was told by Henry Lotz's youngest daughter, my grandmother Emma Lotz (1877-1962), and his middle son, my great uncle John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959), that their father's favorite Civil War song was "Marching Through Georgia." Several times I remember Uncle John Daniel Lotz having played this song for me on his piano. During the Civil War, Henry (christened "Heinrich") Lotz (1835-1906), served in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. Henry's brother, William Lotz, completed a three-year voluntary enlistment in the U. S. Army from October 13, 1861, to October 13, 1864, as a Private in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a unit recruited primarily in southwestern Ohio, including Butler County. The names of brothers Henry and William Lotz, their brothers-in-law, Jacob Seybold (1834-1899) and John Diedrich Anton Wellner (1826-1902), the two brothers of Henry's wife, Elizabeth (Donges) Lotz -- Frederick Donges (1841-1863) and John Ludwig Donges (1831–1922) -- and Elizabeth (Donges) Lotz's brothers-in-law, Henry Nuernberger (1815–1897) and Johann Phillip Oetterer (1827-1870), and Elizabeth's nephew, Frederick John Miller (1833–1897), are among the thousands of veterans' names inscribed within Hamilton's Soldiers, Sailors & Pioneers Memorial Monument erected in 1904 primarily to honor U.S. military veterans. Atop this Monument stands a seventeen-foot-tall bronze statue of a typical U.S. Civil War infantryman popularly called "Billy Yank." This Monument is Hamilton's largest and most visible reminder that a majority of Hamilton's residents, including almost all of its more than four thousand German immigrants, strongly supported the preservation of the Union and the eradication of slavery during the American Civil War. Bruce Garver's November 4, 2017, photograph of this Soldiers, Sailors & Pioneers Memorial Monument may be viewed at the Find a Grave Memorial of Henry's brother William H. Lotz (1839-1902).
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HENRY LOTZ'S DEATH & INTERMENT AT GREENWOOD CEMETERY: According to the records of the Greenwood Cemetery Association, Henry Lotz, Sr., died on June 8, 1906, at the age of seventy in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio, and was interred there on June 12, 1906, at Greenwood Cemetery in Section T, Lot 211, Grave 03. At that time, the large Lotz monument in Greenwood Cemetery cost $550.00 to quarry, erect, and inscribe. That monument, around which most of the Lotz family graves are clustered, is clearly depicted in the photo attached to this Memorial by "Running Deer" (Photo 12).
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WHY "HENRY LOTZ" IS BEST REMEMBERED BY THE AMERICANIZED VERSION OF HIS FIRST NAME AND BY HIS GERMAN-LANGUAGE FAMILY SURNAME. In the opinion of Bruce Garver, Henry Lotz's great-grandson and the author of this "bio" , Henry Lotz is best remembered and commemorated in the Americanized version of his first name. Henry Lotz (1835-1906) was known publicly as "Henry Lotz" after his immigration with his parents and eight siblings from Prussia to Butler County, Ohio, in 1854. But he was baptized as "Heinrich Lotz" in the Evangelical Church of his hometown of Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia during the month of September 1835. In Hamilton, Ohio, Henry and his family converted to German Methodism established by German immigrants in the United States. Typically German members of that religious faith acculturated fairly quickly to American culture and society. Henry Lotz served the United States during the American Civil War in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. Henry's brother, William Henry Lotz (1839–1902), completed a three-year voluntary enlistment in the U. S. Army from October 13, 1861, to October 13, 1864, as a Private in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a unit recruited primarily in southwestern Ohio, including Butler County. Two brothers of Henry's wife Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916) -- John Ludwig Donges (1831–1922) and Frederick Donges (1841–1863) served three-year terms of enlistment in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. John Ludwig Donges survived the war, but Frederick Donges died in a U.S. Military Hospital at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1863. All of the aforementioned Lotz and Donges relatives served the U.S. loyally under their Americanized first names and German-language family name. Henry and Elizabeth never returned to Prussia or to anywhere in post 1871 Germany but did pay to send their middle son, John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959) to Munich during 1892 & 1893 for a higher education in piano and violin under the tutelage of world-famous composer and pianist Josef Pembaur the Elder (1848-1923). For further related information, please view Bruce Garver's "bio" of John Daniel Lotz on Find a Grave Memorial No. 125021787 which is linked to Bruce's bios of Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz and her and Henry's nine children and other members of the extended Lotz-Donges-Bruck family.The elder Josef Pembaur's "Symphony in F Major, Op. 39 'In Tirol'" is available in audo on YouTube.
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A PORTRAIT OF HENRY LOTZ, circa 1884: Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, "Großpop" to his grandchildren, was born on September 13, 1835, at Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia, and died suddenly, quietly, and unexpectedly on June 8, 1906, at home on 532 South Front Street in Hamilton, Ohio. This photograph was made by the professional photographer Overpeck in Hamilton, Ohio, circa 1884, perhaps on the 25th wedding anniversary of Henry Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916). Attached to the Memorial of son Carl Wesley Lotz (1884-1960) is a JPEG photo of the touched-up and fancily framed version of this Overpeck photograph of Henry Lotz. Sr. This framed version was given in 1997 by Ruth Morton Garver and her children Bruce Morton Garver and Ann Clifton (Garver) Bell to their cousins Larry C. Lotz and Pat Hamblin Lotz whose three sons are the only great-great-grandchildren of Henry Lotz who still bear the Lotz surname. Whenever this JPEG photo is distributed in digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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THE SECOND ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH depicts the eleven members of the Lotz family in the year 1889 in Hamilton, Ohio. This large (21" x 15") photograph of 1889 depicts the eleven members of the family of Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio. This portrait was professionally made in a photographic studio, presumably in Hamilton. The occasion may have been the 30th wedding anniversary (October 16, 1889) of Henry Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Lotz. In the front row, left to right, are Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916); Ernst Garfield Lotz (1880-1963) born a few days after James Garfield's election as the 20th President of the United States; Elizabeth Christine ("Lizzie") Lotz (Wismeyer, 1860-1962), who lived beyond her 101st birthday; William M. ("Bim") Lotz (1863-1944); Carl Wesley Lotz (1884-1960, standing); and Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, Sr. (1835-1906, born in Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, Prussia, in the German Confederation). Carl Wesley Lotz was the grandfather of Larry, Bob, Don, Jim, and Marlene Lotz. In the back row, left to right, are Mary (Anna Marie) Lotz (Johnson, 1866-1948), John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959, seated), Edward George ("Eddie") Lotz (1875-1952), Henry ("Henny") Lotz, II (1868-1943), and Emma Lotz (Morton, 1877-1962), maternal grandmother of Bruce Morton Garver and Ann Clifton Garver Bell. Truly remarkable is the fact that all nine Lotz siblings (born from 1860 to 1884) lived into old age, as did their parents. The youngest to die was Henny at age 74 and the oldest was Lizzie at 101. Henry Lotz, Sr., an immigrant from Aßlar, Prussia, served in the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard during the Civil War and became an American citizen and a Republican. He named his fifth son after U.S. President James Garfield who had served as a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army during the Civil War and had earlier been a professor of classics at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. Whenever this photo is distributed in TIFF or JPEG digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at the Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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THE THIRD ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH is a digitized photo of the Civil War discharge certificate of Henry Lotz, Sr., of Hamilton, Ohio, who had served his enlistment of one hundred days in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard during the Civil War. This Civil War document complements our several sepia photographs of Henry Lotz, Sr. (1835-1906), by indicating that he stood 5' 11" tall (a remarkably high stature for that time and place) and had a "dark" complexion. Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, Prussia, the birthplace of Henry Lotz, has been misspelled as "Aslarr" on his Civil War discharge certificate. All other information therein is known to have been accurately recorded. Whenever this JPEG photo is distributed in digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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A FIRST VISIT TO ANCESTRAL AßLAR: Karen (Louise King Garver) and I (Bruce
Morton Garver), together with our infant son, Lee Albert Garver, first visited Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in January 1967 where we stayed for three days with my third cousin once removed Wilhelm Christian Lotz and his wife Else Kroll Lotz and met other Lotz cousins, including their son, Wilhelm Wolfgang Lotz (then an engineering student at the University of Giessen), and all of Wilhelm Christian's sisters and their families. Karen and I were already well acquainted with Wilhelm Christian's and Else's daughter, Gisela Lotz, who had lived with my parents and sister Ann in Worthington, Ohio, for a year and a half (1964-66) and who, together with my sister, Ann, had traveled in early August 1964 from Los Angeles, California, to Worthington, Ohio, with Karen and me in our 1961 Volkswagen "beetle." A photograph of the four travelers and further information about their cross-country journey may be found on the Find a Grave Memorial No. 134599145 honoring John Arthur Bippus (1902-1979),.
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HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE AND OTHER ITEMS FROM THE HOME OF HENRY & ELIZABETH CATHERINE DONGES LOTZ: Illustrated on this Memorial and on that of Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916) are several of the many household items that belonged to Henry and Elizabeth Lotz, including a framed reverse-glass-painted religious statement in German, a hobnail decanter, a set of four cruettes in a silver-plated container (a wedding present to Henry & Elizabeth) , and six hand-carved walnut side chairs, in one of which Henry Lotz, Sr., was found dead on June 8, 1906, by his son John Daniel Lotz who promptly carved a small notch in the back of the chair's seat. Valerie Louise Garver owns the harmonium organ that belonged to her Lotz great-great grandparents, Henry and Elizabeth. Bruce and Karen Garver display the "Mary Gregory style" painted glass pitcher that belonged to one of Henry Lotz's younger sisters, Christiane M. ("Christina") (Lotz) Reiff, who generously gave it in the summer of 1914 to her niece Emma (Lotz) Morton and her daughters, Edith Elizabeth Morton (Bippus) and Ruth Ernestine Morton (Garver) who always addressed their great-aunt Christina formally as "Aunt Reiff". A JPEG and detailed description of this "Mary Gregory style" pitcher appears on the Memorial to Christiane M. ("Christina") (Lotz) Reiff (1841-1915), a younger sister of Henry Lotz (1835-1906).
Bruce Garver, a great-grandson of Henry (baptized "Heinrich") Lotz (1835-1906), has written the following "bio" of Henry, with some emphasis upon his relationship to the German immigrant family of eleven members in which he was raised and the equally large American family that he established with Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz (1838-1916) whom he wed on October 16, 1859, at the German Methodist Church in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio. When, quoting or reproducing parts of the following "bio" of Henry Lotz, please give credit to Prof. Bruce Garver and to "Find a Grave". Most of the digital photographs attached to Lotz and related family Find a Grave Memorials are part of "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio, a collection donated to Lane in June 2016 by Bruce & Karen Garver who own the original prints and tintypes from which these JPEGs and TIFFs have been professionally made. Bruce thanks his cousins Patty Kelly Carman and the late Wilhelm Christian Lotz for having provided information essential to his writing of Find a Grave "bios" of members of the Lotz and related families.
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WHY AND HOW THE LARGE LOTZ FAMILY CAME TO OHIO: During the mid 1850s, the family of Wilhelm Lotz (1807-1878) and Magdalena "Maggie" Lotz (1806-1890) immigrated in two groups to Ohio primarily in order to achieve economic security and a better life for their children and grandchildren and apparently with the intention of establishing their own iron foundry. Coming as they did from the small industrial town of Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia, the Lotz fathers and sons had already acquired skills in iron-making which would facilitate their immediate employment in the United States and their eventual establishment of their own foundry. Besides, father Wilhelm Lotz, as the eldest son in his family, would have received a modestly substantial inheritance that would have fully paid for steamship and railway tickets for his eleven-member family along with two sons-in-law and two grandchildren, to travel from Aßlar to Hamilton, Ohio. This inheritance would also have provided some of the capital necessary to obtain housing, to invest in the development of a small business, and to qualify for a bank loan or mortgage in any instances where family capital was insufficient to cover all necessary expenses. During the 19th century, the departure of the family of an eldest son from central or northern Europe to the United States was neither typical nor particularly unusual because such a son would obtain at least an equal share of the family inheritance and could therefore well afford to take the risks involved in immigrating to America in order to obtain better economic opportunities for himself and his wife and children.
Three generations of the family of Wilhelm and Maggie Lotz departed during the mid 1850s from the Kingdom of Prussia in which in property was expensive and labor was poorly paid in order to settle in the United States where property was comparatively inexpensive and where labor obtained higher wages. The related Lotz, Donges, and Bruck families probably chose to settle in Hamilton, Ohio, as opposed to another prosperous American industrial city, because some of their relatives, including several of the Donges and Bruck relatives of the widowed Elizabeth (Bruck) Donges (1805-1896) and her six children, had already established homes and businesses there. Such motives and this pattern of settlement have typically characterized "chain migration" to -- and also within -- the United States in all times and places. A secondary reason why Wilhelm and Maggie Lotz and their nine children came to Ohio during the mid 1850s was the fact that neither son Henry Lotz nor his younger brothers, William (Wilhelm) and Herman (Hermann) wished to perform obligatory active duty service in the Prussian Army. Comparatively few immigrants from continental Europe or from Great Britain immigrated during the 19th century to American states south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River, excepting Maryland and central Texas. All state governments within that vast region protected the practice of one of the world's most brutally oppressive systems of slavery, one which generally diminished the value of and opportunities for free labor and free enterprise. On the other hand, after1815, the free states of the rapidly developing agricultural and industrial Middle West attracted not only ambitious European immigrants but also Americans from New England and the Middle Atlantic states as well as American citizens who individually or in family groups moved out of states where slavery prevailed under state and local governmental protection and encouragement. The latter such citizens included Bruce Morton Garver's maternal Morton ancestors of Finnish and Swedish ancestry from Delaware, his Walden and Rees ancestors of English and Welsh ancestry from Virginia, and his Garver ancestors of Hessian German ancestry from Pennsylvania by way of North Carolina..
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AßLAR, KREIS WETZLAR, PRUSSIA, FROM WHICH THE LOTZ FAMILY DEPARTED: During the 1850s, the Kingdom of Prussia was still characterized by its authoritarian monarchical government, its class-ridden society, its large professional standing army, and its Junker nobility whose agricultural estates east of the Elbe River until 1806 had been cultivated by the labor of several million serfs. By 1850, the royal government of Prussia, after its Army had suppressed the 1848-1849 Revolutions on its own territory and on that of neighboring German principalities, was generally not admired by the inhabitants of its recently acquired territories west of the Elbe River such as Kreis Wetzlar, including its towns of Aßlar and Erda and its administrative center, the rapidly industrializing city of Wetzlar. Kreis Wetzlar was that portion of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Kassel (Hesse-Cassel) that the Kingdom of Prussia had acquired at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 with the approval of the Congress of Vienna whose peacemakers from the Kingdoms of Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire reorganized Europe after their armies had defeated those of the Napoleonic French Empire and its satellite kingdoms in German-speaking, Italian-speaking, and Polish-speaking Europe. Shortly after 1815, the Prussian government began to encourage and implement economic developments such as industrialization, railway construction, and scientific agriculture which improved the lives of all of Prussian subjects. Most effective of all of Prussia's innovations was its establishment in 1818 of the first universal, compulsory, state-financed, and tuition-free elementary school system in the world. This system soon became the model for all such systems promptly established in many other German-speaking principalities and eventually throughout most of Europe. Similar school systems independently arose at about the same time or had already arisen under local control in the six American states of New England, and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and in all of the newly created Middle Western states. Of course, such school systems did not begin to appear in the slaveholding American South until Federal Reconstruction began to introduce them into formerly Confederate states after 1865.
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OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS & SHORTCOMINGS OF PRUSSIAN RULE: Thanks to its universal, compulsory, state-financed, and tuition-free elementary schools established by law in 1818, the Kingdom of Prussia achieved a higher rate of literacy than any country in the world by 1850. Moreover, the full literacy of all Prussians provided an enormous stimulus to Prussia's rapid industrialization while also benefitting every Prussian subject, including those who immigrated to the United States. Moreover, in Kreis Wetzlar, the generally honest, educated, and efficient Prussian governmental bureaucracy, despite its authoritarian structure and practices, constituted a qualitative improvement over the licentious ruling elite and often corrupt administration of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Kassel, arguably among the worst of those in the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation dismantled by Napoleon in 1806. Anyone even casually acquainted with American history knows that the Hessian Landgrave (Landgraf) Frederick II (1760-1785) was handsomely rewarded by British King George III during and after 1776 for dispatching several regiments of the Landgrave's Hessian Army to help Great Britain attempt to suppress the American Revolution. Even though the Hessian ruling family used some of this ill-gotten revenue to encourage domestic improvements in agriculture and manufacturing, such improvements were designed primarily to enrich the established nobility and to promote the interests of government officials, of entrepreneurs, and of men who practiced the learned professions. Readers who desire to learn more about the "Old World" abandoned by German-speaking immigrants to the free states of "New World" America would be well advised to begin reading Hajo Holborn's "History of Modern Germany" in three volumes, arguably still the best survey of its subject published in any language. Readers who have a particular interest in Hessen-Kassel may wish to examine Charles W. Ingrao's clearly written, objective, and well-documented book entitled "The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform Under Frederick II, 1760--1785" (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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BROTHERS HENRY & WILLIAM LOTZ JOIN THEIR FATHER, WILHELM LOTZ, IN ESTABLISHING AN IRON FOUNDY & TOOL WORKS: Upon Henry Lotz's arrival with his parents, eight siblings, and other extended family members in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio, during the mid 1850s, Henry and his brother William Lotz (1839-1902), thanks to their elementary education in Prussian schools, their apprenticeship in iron-making, and their parents' modest amount of capital, became with their father Wilhelm Lotz (1806-1878) entrepreneurial co-owners and managers of a foundry engaged in manufacturing cast-iron tools and other implements. Eventually this enterprise was acquired by the much larger Hooven-Owen-Rentschler Corporation in which Henry Lotz's eldest son, William "Bim" Lotz (1863-1944) became a manager and stock-holder until forced out of management during the nationwide financial crisis of 1907, whereupon Bim Lotz sold his stock and moved with his wife, Ella, and their five children to San Jose, California, where he purchased several large orange groves.
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HENRY LOTZ & ELIZABETH CATHERINE (DONGES) LOTZ ESTABLISH A LARGE FAMILY AT HAMILTON, OHIO: On October 16, 1859, Henry Lotz wed Elizabeth Catherine Donges (1838-1916) at Hamilton's German Methodist Church that German immigrants had established in 1854 on South Front Street. The families of the young married couple had already beccome well acquainted because at least one marriage had occurred several generations earlier between members of the Lotz and Donges families in the former Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel. There, similar relationships through marriage had already established close ties between the Bruck and Donges families at Erda and between the Lotz and Schneider families at Aßlar. These nearby towns were within the Kreis Wetzlar administrative district ( literally " Wetzlar Circle") transferred by Hessen-Kassell to Prussia in 1814.
Together at Hamilton, Ohio, Henry and Elizabeth raised nine children born from 1860 through 1884 whose Find a Grave Memorials are linked below to each other and to those of their parents. Similarly below, Henry's Memorial is linked to those of his parents and his eight siblings. Truly remarkable in an age when high rates of infant and child mortality still prevailed was the fact the all nine Lotz children lived well into old age, the least-long-lived of them (Henry, Jr.) having died at age seventy-four and the longest-lived (Elizabeth "Lizzie") at the age of one-hundred and one. The Lotz family and related German immigrant families -- including the Bruck, Burkhardt, Reiff, Schiecke, Schneider, Seybold, Wellner, and Wismeyer families -- actively supported all religious, educational, and charitable work of the German Methodist Church and contributed funds to construction a larger house of worship completed in 1906 at 320 South Front Street. For example, Henry and Elizabeth Lotz donated funds to install the large stained-glass Neo-Gothic pointed arch window facing South Front Street, a window dedicated to the memory of Henry Lotz. This window was removed and sold piecemeal at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century. Additional information about the long lives and achievements of Henry Lotz (1835-1906) and Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz may be viewed in Bruce Garver's captions to the ten family photos posted to this Memorial, to the ten family photos posted to Elizabeth's Memorial, and to the many photos posted to the Memorials of Henry's & Elizabeth's siblings and nine children.
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HOW HESSIAN & PRUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS BECAME PATRIOTIC AMERICANS: Coming as they did from the authoritarian, class-ridden, and often corrupt society of former Hessen-Kassel and the more honest and efficient authoritarian government of the Kingdom of Prussia, members of the Lotz, Donges, Bruck, Burkhardt, Oetterer, Reiff, Schieke, Schneider, Seybold, Wellner, Wismeyer, and other related families appreciated the greater personal freedom as well as economic opportunities to be found in the United States north of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River. Moreover the similarities between the slave-owning self-styled aristocracy of a "Kingdom of Cotton and Tobacco" in the American South -- built upon the unrequited labor of hereditary black slaves -- and the privileged and licentious landed nobility of old Hessen-Kassel probably helped persuade many Hessian German immigrants to defend their adopted United States when most of the slave-state governments seceded from the Union during the spring of 1861. Before as well as after the advent of military conscription in the United States during 1863, sons and fathers of German immigrant families, like sons and fathers of long-established American families -- such as the Garver, Morton, and Johnson families -- chose to risk their lives in defense of the United States, its representative republican institutions, and its rule of law.
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BROTHERS HENRY & WILLIAM LOTZ & EIGHT CLOSE RELATIVES SERVED AS U.S. SOLDIERS DURING THE CIVIL WAR: Henry Lotz , husband and father, volunteered for service in Company "F" of the 162nd Infantry Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. His discharge certificate, whose JPEG is the third of ten photos attached to this Find a Grave Memorial, provides essential information not only about his military service but also about his personal appearance. Henry's younger brother, WIlliam (baptized "Wilhelm") Henry Lotz (1839-1902), served for three years in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Frederick Donges (born in 1841), the youngest of the two brothers of Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz, died on January 4, 1863, at U. S.. Army General Hospital No. 4 in Louisville, Kentucky., while serving in Company "K" of the 47th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. These experiences intensified Henry's, Elizabeth's, and William's desire to become American citizens and also helped to persuade them to become lifelong Republicans as they enthusiastically endorsed the Lincoln Administration's policy of ending the Rebellion of the Confederacy and obliterating slavery. I was told by Henry Lotz's youngest daughter, my grandmother Emma Lotz (1877-1962), and his middle son, my great uncle John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959), that their father's favorite Civil War song was "Marching Through Georgia." Several times I remember Uncle John Daniel Lotz having played this song for me on his piano. During the Civil War, Henry (christened "Heinrich") Lotz (1835-1906), served in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. Henry's brother, William Lotz, completed a three-year voluntary enlistment in the U. S. Army from October 13, 1861, to October 13, 1864, as a Private in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a unit recruited primarily in southwestern Ohio, including Butler County. The names of brothers Henry and William Lotz, their brothers-in-law, Jacob Seybold (1834-1899) and John Diedrich Anton Wellner (1826-1902), the two brothers of Henry's wife, Elizabeth (Donges) Lotz -- Frederick Donges (1841-1863) and John Ludwig Donges (1831–1922) -- and Elizabeth (Donges) Lotz's brothers-in-law, Henry Nuernberger (1815–1897) and Johann Phillip Oetterer (1827-1870), and Elizabeth's nephew, Frederick John Miller (1833–1897), are among the thousands of veterans' names inscribed within Hamilton's Soldiers, Sailors & Pioneers Memorial Monument erected in 1904 primarily to honor U.S. military veterans. Atop this Monument stands a seventeen-foot-tall bronze statue of a typical U.S. Civil War infantryman popularly called "Billy Yank." This Monument is Hamilton's largest and most visible reminder that a majority of Hamilton's residents, including almost all of its more than four thousand German immigrants, strongly supported the preservation of the Union and the eradication of slavery during the American Civil War. Bruce Garver's November 4, 2017, photograph of this Soldiers, Sailors & Pioneers Memorial Monument may be viewed at the Find a Grave Memorial of Henry's brother William H. Lotz (1839-1902).
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HENRY LOTZ'S DEATH & INTERMENT AT GREENWOOD CEMETERY: According to the records of the Greenwood Cemetery Association, Henry Lotz, Sr., died on June 8, 1906, at the age of seventy in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio, and was interred there on June 12, 1906, at Greenwood Cemetery in Section T, Lot 211, Grave 03. At that time, the large Lotz monument in Greenwood Cemetery cost $550.00 to quarry, erect, and inscribe. That monument, around which most of the Lotz family graves are clustered, is clearly depicted in the photo attached to this Memorial by "Running Deer" (Photo 12).
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WHY "HENRY LOTZ" IS BEST REMEMBERED BY THE AMERICANIZED VERSION OF HIS FIRST NAME AND BY HIS GERMAN-LANGUAGE FAMILY SURNAME. In the opinion of Bruce Garver, Henry Lotz's great-grandson and the author of this "bio" , Henry Lotz is best remembered and commemorated in the Americanized version of his first name. Henry Lotz (1835-1906) was known publicly as "Henry Lotz" after his immigration with his parents and eight siblings from Prussia to Butler County, Ohio, in 1854. But he was baptized as "Heinrich Lotz" in the Evangelical Church of his hometown of Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia during the month of September 1835. In Hamilton, Ohio, Henry and his family converted to German Methodism established by German immigrants in the United States. Typically German members of that religious faith acculturated fairly quickly to American culture and society. Henry Lotz served the United States during the American Civil War in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. Henry's brother, William Henry Lotz (1839–1902), completed a three-year voluntary enlistment in the U. S. Army from October 13, 1861, to October 13, 1864, as a Private in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a unit recruited primarily in southwestern Ohio, including Butler County. Two brothers of Henry's wife Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916) -- John Ludwig Donges (1831–1922) and Frederick Donges (1841–1863) served three-year terms of enlistment in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. John Ludwig Donges survived the war, but Frederick Donges died in a U.S. Military Hospital at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1863. All of the aforementioned Lotz and Donges relatives served the U.S. loyally under their Americanized first names and German-language family name. Henry and Elizabeth never returned to Prussia or to anywhere in post 1871 Germany but did pay to send their middle son, John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959) to Munich during 1892 & 1893 for a higher education in piano and violin under the tutelage of world-famous composer and pianist Josef Pembaur the Elder (1848-1923). For further related information, please view Bruce Garver's "bio" of John Daniel Lotz on Find a Grave Memorial No. 125021787 which is linked to Bruce's bios of Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz and her and Henry's nine children and other members of the extended Lotz-Donges-Bruck family.The elder Josef Pembaur's "Symphony in F Major, Op. 39 'In Tirol'" is available in audo on YouTube.
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A PORTRAIT OF HENRY LOTZ, circa 1884: Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, "Großpop" to his grandchildren, was born on September 13, 1835, at Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia, and died suddenly, quietly, and unexpectedly on June 8, 1906, at home on 532 South Front Street in Hamilton, Ohio. This photograph was made by the professional photographer Overpeck in Hamilton, Ohio, circa 1884, perhaps on the 25th wedding anniversary of Henry Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916). Attached to the Memorial of son Carl Wesley Lotz (1884-1960) is a JPEG photo of the touched-up and fancily framed version of this Overpeck photograph of Henry Lotz. Sr. This framed version was given in 1997 by Ruth Morton Garver and her children Bruce Morton Garver and Ann Clifton (Garver) Bell to their cousins Larry C. Lotz and Pat Hamblin Lotz whose three sons are the only great-great-grandchildren of Henry Lotz who still bear the Lotz surname. Whenever this JPEG photo is distributed in digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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THE SECOND ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH depicts the eleven members of the Lotz family in the year 1889 in Hamilton, Ohio. This large (21" x 15") photograph of 1889 depicts the eleven members of the family of Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio. This portrait was professionally made in a photographic studio, presumably in Hamilton. The occasion may have been the 30th wedding anniversary (October 16, 1889) of Henry Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Lotz. In the front row, left to right, are Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916); Ernst Garfield Lotz (1880-1963) born a few days after James Garfield's election as the 20th President of the United States; Elizabeth Christine ("Lizzie") Lotz (Wismeyer, 1860-1962), who lived beyond her 101st birthday; William M. ("Bim") Lotz (1863-1944); Carl Wesley Lotz (1884-1960, standing); and Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, Sr. (1835-1906, born in Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, Prussia, in the German Confederation). Carl Wesley Lotz was the grandfather of Larry, Bob, Don, Jim, and Marlene Lotz. In the back row, left to right, are Mary (Anna Marie) Lotz (Johnson, 1866-1948), John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959, seated), Edward George ("Eddie") Lotz (1875-1952), Henry ("Henny") Lotz, II (1868-1943), and Emma Lotz (Morton, 1877-1962), maternal grandmother of Bruce Morton Garver and Ann Clifton Garver Bell. Truly remarkable is the fact that all nine Lotz siblings (born from 1860 to 1884) lived into old age, as did their parents. The youngest to die was Henny at age 74 and the oldest was Lizzie at 101. Henry Lotz, Sr., an immigrant from Aßlar, Prussia, served in the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard during the Civil War and became an American citizen and a Republican. He named his fifth son after U.S. President James Garfield who had served as a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army during the Civil War and had earlier been a professor of classics at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. Whenever this photo is distributed in TIFF or JPEG digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at the Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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THE THIRD ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH is a digitized photo of the Civil War discharge certificate of Henry Lotz, Sr., of Hamilton, Ohio, who had served his enlistment of one hundred days in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard during the Civil War. This Civil War document complements our several sepia photographs of Henry Lotz, Sr. (1835-1906), by indicating that he stood 5' 11" tall (a remarkably high stature for that time and place) and had a "dark" complexion. Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, Prussia, the birthplace of Henry Lotz, has been misspelled as "Aslarr" on his Civil War discharge certificate. All other information therein is known to have been accurately recorded. Whenever this JPEG photo is distributed in digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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A FIRST VISIT TO ANCESTRAL AßLAR: Karen (Louise King Garver) and I (Bruce
Morton Garver), together with our infant son, Lee Albert Garver, first visited Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in January 1967 where we stayed for three days with my third cousin once removed Wilhelm Christian Lotz and his wife Else Kroll Lotz and met other Lotz cousins, including their son, Wilhelm Wolfgang Lotz (then an engineering student at the University of Giessen), and all of Wilhelm Christian's sisters and their families. Karen and I were already well acquainted with Wilhelm Christian's and Else's daughter, Gisela Lotz, who had lived with my parents and sister Ann in Worthington, Ohio, for a year and a half (1964-66) and who, together with my sister, Ann, had traveled in early August 1964 from Los Angeles, California, to Worthington, Ohio, with Karen and me in our 1961 Volkswagen "beetle." A photograph of the four travelers and further information about their cross-country journey may be found on the Find a Grave Memorial No. 134599145 honoring John Arthur Bippus (1902-1979),.
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HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE AND OTHER ITEMS FROM THE HOME OF HENRY & ELIZABETH CATHERINE DONGES LOTZ: Illustrated on this Memorial and on that of Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916) are several of the many household items that belonged to Henry and Elizabeth Lotz, including a framed reverse-glass-painted religious statement in German, a hobnail decanter, a set of four cruettes in a silver-plated container (a wedding present to Henry & Elizabeth) , and six hand-carved walnut side chairs, in one of which Henry Lotz, Sr., was found dead on June 8, 1906, by his son John Daniel Lotz who promptly carved a small notch in the back of the chair's seat. Valerie Louise Garver owns the harmonium organ that belonged to her Lotz great-great grandparents, Henry and Elizabeth. Bruce and Karen Garver display the "Mary Gregory style" painted glass pitcher that belonged to one of Henry Lotz's younger sisters, Christiane M. ("Christina") (Lotz) Reiff, who generously gave it in the summer of 1914 to her niece Emma (Lotz) Morton and her daughters, Edith Elizabeth Morton (Bippus) and Ruth Ernestine Morton (Garver) who always addressed their great-aunt Christina formally as "Aunt Reiff". A JPEG and detailed description of this "Mary Gregory style" pitcher appears on the Memorial to Christiane M. ("Christina") (Lotz) Reiff (1841-1915), a younger sister of Henry Lotz (1835-1906).
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WHY AND HOW THE LARGE LOTZ FAMILY CAME TO OHIO: During the mid 1850s, the family of Wilhelm Lotz (1807-1878) and Magdalena "Maggie" Lotz (1806-1890) immigrated in two groups to Ohio primarily in order to achieve economic security and a better life for their children and grandchildren and apparently with the intention of establishing their own iron foundry. Coming as they did from the small industrial town of Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia, the Lotz fathers and sons had already acquired skills in iron-making which would facilitate their immediate employment in the United States and their eventual establishment of their own foundry. Besides, father Wilhelm Lotz, as the eldest son in his family, would have received a modestly substantial inheritance that would have fully paid for steamship and railway tickets for his eleven-member family along with two sons-in-law and two grandchildren, to travel from Aßlar to Hamilton, Ohio. This inheritance would also have provided some of the capital necessary to obtain housing, to invest in the development of a small business, and to qualify for a bank loan or mortgage in any instances where family capital was insufficient to cover all necessary expenses. During the 19th century, the departure of the family of an eldest son from central or northern Europe to the United States was neither typical nor particularly unusual because such a son would obtain at least an equal share of the family inheritance and could therefore well afford to take the risks involved in immigrating to America in order to obtain better economic opportunities for himself and his wife and children.
Three generations of the family of Wilhelm and Maggie Lotz departed during the mid 1850s from the Kingdom of Prussia in which in property was expensive and labor was poorly paid in order to settle in the United States where property was comparatively inexpensive and where labor obtained higher wages. The related Lotz, Donges, and Bruck families probably chose to settle in Hamilton, Ohio, as opposed to another prosperous American industrial city, because some of their relatives, including several of the Donges and Bruck relatives of the widowed Elizabeth (Bruck) Donges (1805-1896) and her six children, had already established homes and businesses there. Such motives and this pattern of settlement have typically characterized "chain migration" to -- and also within -- the United States in all times and places. A secondary reason why Wilhelm and Maggie Lotz and their nine children came to Ohio during the mid 1850s was the fact that neither son Henry Lotz nor his younger brothers, William (Wilhelm) and Herman (Hermann) wished to perform obligatory active duty service in the Prussian Army. Comparatively few immigrants from continental Europe or from Great Britain immigrated during the 19th century to American states south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River, excepting Maryland and central Texas. All state governments within that vast region protected the practice of one of the world's most brutally oppressive systems of slavery, one which generally diminished the value of and opportunities for free labor and free enterprise. On the other hand, after1815, the free states of the rapidly developing agricultural and industrial Middle West attracted not only ambitious European immigrants but also Americans from New England and the Middle Atlantic states as well as American citizens who individually or in family groups moved out of states where slavery prevailed under state and local governmental protection and encouragement. The latter such citizens included Bruce Morton Garver's maternal Morton ancestors of Finnish and Swedish ancestry from Delaware, his Walden and Rees ancestors of English and Welsh ancestry from Virginia, and his Garver ancestors of Hessian German ancestry from Pennsylvania by way of North Carolina..
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AßLAR, KREIS WETZLAR, PRUSSIA, FROM WHICH THE LOTZ FAMILY DEPARTED: During the 1850s, the Kingdom of Prussia was still characterized by its authoritarian monarchical government, its class-ridden society, its large professional standing army, and its Junker nobility whose agricultural estates east of the Elbe River until 1806 had been cultivated by the labor of several million serfs. By 1850, the royal government of Prussia, after its Army had suppressed the 1848-1849 Revolutions on its own territory and on that of neighboring German principalities, was generally not admired by the inhabitants of its recently acquired territories west of the Elbe River such as Kreis Wetzlar, including its towns of Aßlar and Erda and its administrative center, the rapidly industrializing city of Wetzlar. Kreis Wetzlar was that portion of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Kassel (Hesse-Cassel) that the Kingdom of Prussia had acquired at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 with the approval of the Congress of Vienna whose peacemakers from the Kingdoms of Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire reorganized Europe after their armies had defeated those of the Napoleonic French Empire and its satellite kingdoms in German-speaking, Italian-speaking, and Polish-speaking Europe. Shortly after 1815, the Prussian government began to encourage and implement economic developments such as industrialization, railway construction, and scientific agriculture which improved the lives of all of Prussian subjects. Most effective of all of Prussia's innovations was its establishment in 1818 of the first universal, compulsory, state-financed, and tuition-free elementary school system in the world. This system soon became the model for all such systems promptly established in many other German-speaking principalities and eventually throughout most of Europe. Similar school systems independently arose at about the same time or had already arisen under local control in the six American states of New England, and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and in all of the newly created Middle Western states. Of course, such school systems did not begin to appear in the slaveholding American South until Federal Reconstruction began to introduce them into formerly Confederate states after 1865.
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OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS & SHORTCOMINGS OF PRUSSIAN RULE: Thanks to its universal, compulsory, state-financed, and tuition-free elementary schools established by law in 1818, the Kingdom of Prussia achieved a higher rate of literacy than any country in the world by 1850. Moreover, the full literacy of all Prussians provided an enormous stimulus to Prussia's rapid industrialization while also benefitting every Prussian subject, including those who immigrated to the United States. Moreover, in Kreis Wetzlar, the generally honest, educated, and efficient Prussian governmental bureaucracy, despite its authoritarian structure and practices, constituted a qualitative improvement over the licentious ruling elite and often corrupt administration of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Kassel, arguably among the worst of those in the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation dismantled by Napoleon in 1806. Anyone even casually acquainted with American history knows that the Hessian Landgrave (Landgraf) Frederick II (1760-1785) was handsomely rewarded by British King George III during and after 1776 for dispatching several regiments of the Landgrave's Hessian Army to help Great Britain attempt to suppress the American Revolution. Even though the Hessian ruling family used some of this ill-gotten revenue to encourage domestic improvements in agriculture and manufacturing, such improvements were designed primarily to enrich the established nobility and to promote the interests of government officials, of entrepreneurs, and of men who practiced the learned professions. Readers who desire to learn more about the "Old World" abandoned by German-speaking immigrants to the free states of "New World" America would be well advised to begin reading Hajo Holborn's "History of Modern Germany" in three volumes, arguably still the best survey of its subject published in any language. Readers who have a particular interest in Hessen-Kassel may wish to examine Charles W. Ingrao's clearly written, objective, and well-documented book entitled "The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform Under Frederick II, 1760--1785" (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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BROTHERS HENRY & WILLIAM LOTZ JOIN THEIR FATHER, WILHELM LOTZ, IN ESTABLISHING AN IRON FOUNDY & TOOL WORKS: Upon Henry Lotz's arrival with his parents, eight siblings, and other extended family members in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio, during the mid 1850s, Henry and his brother William Lotz (1839-1902), thanks to their elementary education in Prussian schools, their apprenticeship in iron-making, and their parents' modest amount of capital, became with their father Wilhelm Lotz (1806-1878) entrepreneurial co-owners and managers of a foundry engaged in manufacturing cast-iron tools and other implements. Eventually this enterprise was acquired by the much larger Hooven-Owen-Rentschler Corporation in which Henry Lotz's eldest son, William "Bim" Lotz (1863-1944) became a manager and stock-holder until forced out of management during the nationwide financial crisis of 1907, whereupon Bim Lotz sold his stock and moved with his wife, Ella, and their five children to San Jose, California, where he purchased several large orange groves.
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HENRY LOTZ & ELIZABETH CATHERINE (DONGES) LOTZ ESTABLISH A LARGE FAMILY AT HAMILTON, OHIO: On October 16, 1859, Henry Lotz wed Elizabeth Catherine Donges (1838-1916) at Hamilton's German Methodist Church that German immigrants had established in 1854 on South Front Street. The families of the young married couple had already beccome well acquainted because at least one marriage had occurred several generations earlier between members of the Lotz and Donges families in the former Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel. There, similar relationships through marriage had already established close ties between the Bruck and Donges families at Erda and between the Lotz and Schneider families at Aßlar. These nearby towns were within the Kreis Wetzlar administrative district ( literally " Wetzlar Circle") transferred by Hessen-Kassell to Prussia in 1814.
Together at Hamilton, Ohio, Henry and Elizabeth raised nine children born from 1860 through 1884 whose Find a Grave Memorials are linked below to each other and to those of their parents. Similarly below, Henry's Memorial is linked to those of his parents and his eight siblings. Truly remarkable in an age when high rates of infant and child mortality still prevailed was the fact the all nine Lotz children lived well into old age, the least-long-lived of them (Henry, Jr.) having died at age seventy-four and the longest-lived (Elizabeth "Lizzie") at the age of one-hundred and one. The Lotz family and related German immigrant families -- including the Bruck, Burkhardt, Reiff, Schiecke, Schneider, Seybold, Wellner, and Wismeyer families -- actively supported all religious, educational, and charitable work of the German Methodist Church and contributed funds to construction a larger house of worship completed in 1906 at 320 South Front Street. For example, Henry and Elizabeth Lotz donated funds to install the large stained-glass Neo-Gothic pointed arch window facing South Front Street, a window dedicated to the memory of Henry Lotz. This window was removed and sold piecemeal at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century. Additional information about the long lives and achievements of Henry Lotz (1835-1906) and Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz may be viewed in Bruce Garver's captions to the ten family photos posted to this Memorial, to the ten family photos posted to Elizabeth's Memorial, and to the many photos posted to the Memorials of Henry's & Elizabeth's siblings and nine children.
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HOW HESSIAN & PRUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS BECAME PATRIOTIC AMERICANS: Coming as they did from the authoritarian, class-ridden, and often corrupt society of former Hessen-Kassel and the more honest and efficient authoritarian government of the Kingdom of Prussia, members of the Lotz, Donges, Bruck, Burkhardt, Oetterer, Reiff, Schieke, Schneider, Seybold, Wellner, Wismeyer, and other related families appreciated the greater personal freedom as well as economic opportunities to be found in the United States north of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River. Moreover the similarities between the slave-owning self-styled aristocracy of a "Kingdom of Cotton and Tobacco" in the American South -- built upon the unrequited labor of hereditary black slaves -- and the privileged and licentious landed nobility of old Hessen-Kassel probably helped persuade many Hessian German immigrants to defend their adopted United States when most of the slave-state governments seceded from the Union during the spring of 1861. Before as well as after the advent of military conscription in the United States during 1863, sons and fathers of German immigrant families, like sons and fathers of long-established American families -- such as the Garver, Morton, and Johnson families -- chose to risk their lives in defense of the United States, its representative republican institutions, and its rule of law.
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BROTHERS HENRY & WILLIAM LOTZ & EIGHT CLOSE RELATIVES SERVED AS U.S. SOLDIERS DURING THE CIVIL WAR: Henry Lotz , husband and father, volunteered for service in Company "F" of the 162nd Infantry Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. His discharge certificate, whose JPEG is the third of ten photos attached to this Find a Grave Memorial, provides essential information not only about his military service but also about his personal appearance. Henry's younger brother, WIlliam (baptized "Wilhelm") Henry Lotz (1839-1902), served for three years in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Frederick Donges (born in 1841), the youngest of the two brothers of Elizabeth Catherine (Donges) Lotz, died on January 4, 1863, at U. S.. Army General Hospital No. 4 in Louisville, Kentucky., while serving in Company "K" of the 47th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. These experiences intensified Henry's, Elizabeth's, and William's desire to become American citizens and also helped to persuade them to become lifelong Republicans as they enthusiastically endorsed the Lincoln Administration's policy of ending the Rebellion of the Confederacy and obliterating slavery. I was told by Henry Lotz's youngest daughter, my grandmother Emma Lotz (1877-1962), and his middle son, my great uncle John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959), that their father's favorite Civil War song was "Marching Through Georgia." Several times I remember Uncle John Daniel Lotz having played this song for me on his piano. During the Civil War, Henry (christened "Heinrich") Lotz (1835-1906), served in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. Henry's brother, William Lotz, completed a three-year voluntary enlistment in the U. S. Army from October 13, 1861, to October 13, 1864, as a Private in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a unit recruited primarily in southwestern Ohio, including Butler County. The names of brothers Henry and William Lotz, their brothers-in-law, Jacob Seybold (1834-1899) and John Diedrich Anton Wellner (1826-1902), the two brothers of Henry's wife, Elizabeth (Donges) Lotz -- Frederick Donges (1841-1863) and John Ludwig Donges (1831–1922) -- and Elizabeth (Donges) Lotz's brothers-in-law, Henry Nuernberger (1815–1897) and Johann Phillip Oetterer (1827-1870), and Elizabeth's nephew, Frederick John Miller (1833–1897), are among the thousands of veterans' names inscribed within Hamilton's Soldiers, Sailors & Pioneers Memorial Monument erected in 1904 primarily to honor U.S. military veterans. Atop this Monument stands a seventeen-foot-tall bronze statue of a typical U.S. Civil War infantryman popularly called "Billy Yank." This Monument is Hamilton's largest and most visible reminder that a majority of Hamilton's residents, including almost all of its more than four thousand German immigrants, strongly supported the preservation of the Union and the eradication of slavery during the American Civil War. Bruce Garver's November 4, 2017, photograph of this Soldiers, Sailors & Pioneers Memorial Monument may be viewed at the Find a Grave Memorial of Henry's brother William H. Lotz (1839-1902).
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HENRY LOTZ'S DEATH & INTERMENT AT GREENWOOD CEMETERY: According to the records of the Greenwood Cemetery Association, Henry Lotz, Sr., died on June 8, 1906, at the age of seventy in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio, and was interred there on June 12, 1906, at Greenwood Cemetery in Section T, Lot 211, Grave 03. At that time, the large Lotz monument in Greenwood Cemetery cost $550.00 to quarry, erect, and inscribe. That monument, around which most of the Lotz family graves are clustered, is clearly depicted in the photo attached to this Memorial by "Running Deer" (Photo 12).
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WHY "HENRY LOTZ" IS BEST REMEMBERED BY THE AMERICANIZED VERSION OF HIS FIRST NAME AND BY HIS GERMAN-LANGUAGE FAMILY SURNAME. In the opinion of Bruce Garver, Henry Lotz's great-grandson and the author of this "bio" , Henry Lotz is best remembered and commemorated in the Americanized version of his first name. Henry Lotz (1835-1906) was known publicly as "Henry Lotz" after his immigration with his parents and eight siblings from Prussia to Butler County, Ohio, in 1854. But he was baptized as "Heinrich Lotz" in the Evangelical Church of his hometown of Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia during the month of September 1835. In Hamilton, Ohio, Henry and his family converted to German Methodism established by German immigrants in the United States. Typically German members of that religious faith acculturated fairly quickly to American culture and society. Henry Lotz served the United States during the American Civil War in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard from May 2, 1864, to September 4, 1864. Henry's brother, William Henry Lotz (1839–1902), completed a three-year voluntary enlistment in the U. S. Army from October 13, 1861, to October 13, 1864, as a Private in Company "H" of the 37th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a unit recruited primarily in southwestern Ohio, including Butler County. Two brothers of Henry's wife Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916) -- John Ludwig Donges (1831–1922) and Frederick Donges (1841–1863) served three-year terms of enlistment in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. John Ludwig Donges survived the war, but Frederick Donges died in a U.S. Military Hospital at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1863. All of the aforementioned Lotz and Donges relatives served the U.S. loyally under their Americanized first names and German-language family name. Henry and Elizabeth never returned to Prussia or to anywhere in post 1871 Germany but did pay to send their middle son, John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959) to Munich during 1892 & 1893 for a higher education in piano and violin under the tutelage of world-famous composer and pianist Josef Pembaur the Elder (1848-1923). For further related information, please view Bruce Garver's "bio" of John Daniel Lotz on Find a Grave Memorial No. 125021787 which is linked to Bruce's bios of Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz and her and Henry's nine children and other members of the extended Lotz-Donges-Bruck family.The elder Josef Pembaur's "Symphony in F Major, Op. 39 'In Tirol'" is available in audo on YouTube.
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A PORTRAIT OF HENRY LOTZ, circa 1884: Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, "Großpop" to his grandchildren, was born on September 13, 1835, at Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in the Kingdom of Prussia, and died suddenly, quietly, and unexpectedly on June 8, 1906, at home on 532 South Front Street in Hamilton, Ohio. This photograph was made by the professional photographer Overpeck in Hamilton, Ohio, circa 1884, perhaps on the 25th wedding anniversary of Henry Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916). Attached to the Memorial of son Carl Wesley Lotz (1884-1960) is a JPEG photo of the touched-up and fancily framed version of this Overpeck photograph of Henry Lotz. Sr. This framed version was given in 1997 by Ruth Morton Garver and her children Bruce Morton Garver and Ann Clifton (Garver) Bell to their cousins Larry C. Lotz and Pat Hamblin Lotz whose three sons are the only great-great-grandchildren of Henry Lotz who still bear the Lotz surname. Whenever this JPEG photo is distributed in digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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THE SECOND ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH depicts the eleven members of the Lotz family in the year 1889 in Hamilton, Ohio. This large (21" x 15") photograph of 1889 depicts the eleven members of the family of Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz in Hamilton, seat of Butler County, Ohio. This portrait was professionally made in a photographic studio, presumably in Hamilton. The occasion may have been the 30th wedding anniversary (October 16, 1889) of Henry Lotz, Sr., and Elizabeth Catherine Lotz. In the front row, left to right, are Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916); Ernst Garfield Lotz (1880-1963) born a few days after James Garfield's election as the 20th President of the United States; Elizabeth Christine ("Lizzie") Lotz (Wismeyer, 1860-1962), who lived beyond her 101st birthday; William M. ("Bim") Lotz (1863-1944); Carl Wesley Lotz (1884-1960, standing); and Henry (Heinrich) Lotz, Sr. (1835-1906, born in Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, Prussia, in the German Confederation). Carl Wesley Lotz was the grandfather of Larry, Bob, Don, Jim, and Marlene Lotz. In the back row, left to right, are Mary (Anna Marie) Lotz (Johnson, 1866-1948), John Daniel Lotz (1872-1959, seated), Edward George ("Eddie") Lotz (1875-1952), Henry ("Henny") Lotz, II (1868-1943), and Emma Lotz (Morton, 1877-1962), maternal grandmother of Bruce Morton Garver and Ann Clifton Garver Bell. Truly remarkable is the fact that all nine Lotz siblings (born from 1860 to 1884) lived into old age, as did their parents. The youngest to die was Henny at age 74 and the oldest was Lizzie at 101. Henry Lotz, Sr., an immigrant from Aßlar, Prussia, served in the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard during the Civil War and became an American citizen and a Republican. He named his fifth son after U.S. President James Garfield who had served as a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army during the Civil War and had earlier been a professor of classics at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. Whenever this photo is distributed in TIFF or JPEG digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at the Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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THE THIRD ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPH is a digitized photo of the Civil War discharge certificate of Henry Lotz, Sr., of Hamilton, Ohio, who had served his enlistment of one hundred days in Company "F" of the 162nd Regiment of the Ohio National Guard during the Civil War. This Civil War document complements our several sepia photographs of Henry Lotz, Sr. (1835-1906), by indicating that he stood 5' 11" tall (a remarkably high stature for that time and place) and had a "dark" complexion. Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, Prussia, the birthplace of Henry Lotz, has been misspelled as "Aslarr" on his Civil War discharge certificate. All other information therein is known to have been accurately recorded. Whenever this JPEG photo is distributed in digital form, please give credit to Bruce & Karen Garver and "the Garver-Morton-Lotz-Bippus-McCloskey Family Digital Photograph Collection" at Lane Public Library in Hamilton, Ohio.
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A FIRST VISIT TO ANCESTRAL AßLAR: Karen (Louise King Garver) and I (Bruce
Morton Garver), together with our infant son, Lee Albert Garver, first visited Aßlar, Kreis Wetzlar, in January 1967 where we stayed for three days with my third cousin once removed Wilhelm Christian Lotz and his wife Else Kroll Lotz and met other Lotz cousins, including their son, Wilhelm Wolfgang Lotz (then an engineering student at the University of Giessen), and all of Wilhelm Christian's sisters and their families. Karen and I were already well acquainted with Wilhelm Christian's and Else's daughter, Gisela Lotz, who had lived with my parents and sister Ann in Worthington, Ohio, for a year and a half (1964-66) and who, together with my sister, Ann, had traveled in early August 1964 from Los Angeles, California, to Worthington, Ohio, with Karen and me in our 1961 Volkswagen "beetle." A photograph of the four travelers and further information about their cross-country journey may be found on the Find a Grave Memorial No. 134599145 honoring John Arthur Bippus (1902-1979),.
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HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE AND OTHER ITEMS FROM THE HOME OF HENRY & ELIZABETH CATHERINE DONGES LOTZ: Illustrated on this Memorial and on that of Elizabeth Catherine Donges Lotz (1838-1916) are several of the many household items that belonged to Henry and Elizabeth Lotz, including a framed reverse-glass-painted religious statement in German, a hobnail decanter, a set of four cruettes in a silver-plated container (a wedding present to Henry & Elizabeth) , and six hand-carved walnut side chairs, in one of which Henry Lotz, Sr., was found dead on June 8, 1906, by his son John Daniel Lotz who promptly carved a small notch in the back of the chair's seat. Valerie Louise Garver owns the harmonium organ that belonged to her Lotz great-great grandparents, Henry and Elizabeth. Bruce and Karen Garver display the "Mary Gregory style" painted glass pitcher that belonged to one of Henry Lotz's younger sisters, Christiane M. ("Christina") (Lotz) Reiff, who generously gave it in the summer of 1914 to her niece Emma (Lotz) Morton and her daughters, Edith Elizabeth Morton (Bippus) and Ruth Ernestine Morton (Garver) who always addressed their great-aunt Christina formally as "Aunt Reiff". A JPEG and detailed description of this "Mary Gregory style" pitcher appears on the Memorial to Christiane M. ("Christina") (Lotz) Reiff (1841-1915), a younger sister of Henry Lotz (1835-1906).
Family Members
Siblings
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Helene Wilhelmina "Mina" Lotz Schneider
1832–1864
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Louise Elizabeth Lotz Wellner
1834–1901
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Elizabeth "Lizzie" Lotz Seybold
1837–1901
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William Henry Lotz
1839–1902
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Christiane M. "Christina" Lotz Reiff
1841–1915
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Katherine "Kate" Lotz Burkhardt
1843–1927
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Anna Marie Lotz Schieke
1847–1928
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Herman Ernst Lotz
1849–1910
Children
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Elizabeth Christine "Lizzie" Lotz Wismeyer
1860–1962
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William M. "Bim" Lotz
1863–1944
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Mary (Anna Marie) E. Lotz Johnson
1866–1948
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Henry "Henny" Lotz Jr
1868–1943
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John Daniel Lotz
1872–1959
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Edward George "Eddie" Lotz
1875–1952
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Emma Lotz Morton
1877–1962
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Ernest Garfield Lotz
1880–1963
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Carl Wesley Lotz
1884–1960
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