Class Pictures

     "Happy in Hainesport" celebrates blooming where you are planted.  I represent the third generation of my family to make a lifelong home in Hainesport.

     My great-grandparents came from the Alsace region of what was then Germany (but is now France).  My great-grandfather went to work in the Columbian Iron Works Foundry.  My great-grandmother set up housekeeping.  Unfortunately, she found herself a young widow with three children to support when her husband drowned in a boating accident.  She became the manager of the boarding house where most of the foundry's single male employees lived.  The boarding house sat on the site of what is now The Bradford Estate on Marne Highway.

     Since my great-grandmother was working, she entrusted her three older sons with the care of my infant grandmother (born in 1893).  My grandmother told me that her brothers dug a hole in the ground and plopped her into it, so she wouldn't crawl off while they played.  I guess that was a nineteenth century play pen.  Eventually, my great-grandmother remarried.  My grandmother always said her step-father was a wonderful man.

     My grandmother went to school in the building that is now the Hainesport Senior Center.  Even then the annual class picture was a tradition.  I don't see any kids making faces, though.

Hainesport School Class Picture 1893

Hainesport School Class Picture 1895

     You'll find the hole digging baby sitters, Charles and Eimel Keinle, in the second row (boys standing behind girls), fourth from the left (Charles) and eighth from the left (Eimel).  Dominic Kienle is in the third row, ninth from the left.

Hainesport School Class Picture 1903

     The first girl on the right, standing in the third row, is my grandmother, Anna Keinle Pagel.  The boy who would one day be her husband, William Pagel, is sitting in the bottom row, fourth from the right.  Grandmom told me that she didn't have an interest in my grandfather.  He, on the other hand, told her from the time they were small that they would be married some day.  He stopped by her house frequently bearing gifts from the day's hunt.  It took a lot of pheasants and rabbits, but she finally relented.  They were married in 1916.

     If you have deep roots in Hainesport, you might have a relative in these pictures.  My grandmother identified as many people as she could remember when she gave these photos to me.  Here are the last names:

Albright
Bozarth
Bridge
Clivers
Cleveland
Cook
Deacon
Eicker
Elsinger
Endress
Gauntt
Greenwald
Gsell
Hampton
Nack
Nichman
Ritter
Rummel
Schilick
Street
Troutman
Van Sciver
Walthers