LITZES

     Johann Philip Litz, born in Germany around 1709, the second Litz to bring his family to America, sailed from Rotterdam on the ship “Patience.” Arriving in Philadelphia September 9, 1751, with his son Johann Wilhelm, he settled in Derry Township, Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania. Johann Wilhelm married another German immigrant, Maria Katarina Deininger (1729-1810), in 1755. They had seven children. Before 1776 Maria Katarina came to Wythe County, Virginia, a widow, where her sixth child, Leonard, married Julia Gose in 1788. (Julia Gose’s oldest brother Christopher also married Leonard Litz’s younger sister, Mary.) Leonard and Julia, living in Cripple Creek, Virginia, had nine children. The eighth child, (Colonel) John Peter Gose Litz (1802-1880) married his first cousin Sarah Gose in 1824. Living on Litz Lane in Burke’s Garden, Virginia, they had eight children, the fifth of whom was John Tiffany Huddle Litz (1834-1901).

My great grandfather John Tiffany Litz, raised cattle in Burke’s Garden, Virginia (where there is still a Litz Lane). During the Civil War, as a lieutenant of the Tazewell Troopers, he ran a supply wagon train from Virginia and Kentucky. (His father, the Colonel, was too old to fight and had to content himself with drilling troops.) His wagon guides were the locally famous scouts “Devil” John Wright and “Big Ben” Bates. He was delivering a herd of beef cattle to the Confederate Army when the Yankees captured him and took him to Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio, where he spent the rest of the war.   He was a popular man in prison because, with a set of miniature tools he had, he carved rings and brooches out of the black bakelite-like substance that littered battlefields, formed from gun cotton when cannon are fired. Its shiny black, like jet or gutta percha, made good mourning jewelry, much in demand in wartime. (Mother said she had seen her grandfather’s little leather pouch of tools when she was a child, probably at the house of one of her many uncles and aunts.) The guards took John’s jewelry into town and sold or traded it for food, which everybody shared, prisoners and guards alike. The Yankees liked him so well that when the war was over, they gave him a mule to ride home on.

In 1859 John Tiffany had married twenty-year-old Elizabeth Emily Thompson of Tazewell. They raised fourteen children, four daughters and ten sons. The Litz brothers were legendary and at least once had their picture taken abreast on horseback, looking like a small army. *

* Here are the bits and pieces I have been able to gather about the Litz brothers and sisters:

Samuel Thomas (1860-1909), the oldest, the image of his father John, married Sallie Dills. Their daughter, Sallie Ann, was a successful opera singer. My mother remembers being taken to see Cousin Sally at Keith’s Theater in Washington, DC.

Nannie Atelia (1862-1933) married Rages Sluss and moved to Morehead, Kentucky. She and Rages and their

children are buried on the Litz Place.

Sallie Ann (1861-1920) married Harvey McGuire. She was a famous cook and the mother of seven, including Litz McGuire, politician and mayor of Logan, West Virginia.

John Lindsay (1864-1939)), married to Georgia Dickenson, was a farmer, civiil engineer, president of the Litz Coal Company, Mayor of Coeburn, Virginia, and a Representative in the Virginia House of Delegates.

David Harold Peery (1866-1921), Uncle Harold, married Ella Howard. He was a farmer, trade and father of eleven. One of his grandsons became Chairman of the English Department at Princeton University.

Peter Gose (1868-1946), Uncle Pete, who married Lula Brown, was known for his physical strength.

Alma Zarahelma (1869-1940 married Etta Stauber. He was a successful businessman and President of the Bank of Tazewell. See more below.

James Gordon (1871-1944) married Lucy Belle Riggins. He was a familiar sight walking the dusty country roads with his briefcase and won the Diamond Belt from the Metropolitan Life Insurnance Compansy one year as their top salesman.

George William (1872-1916) my grandfather, married Ethel Gardner Wakefield of Ashland, Kentucky. See below.

Moroni Orson (1874-1955), (Roan) married Judith Effler and Mabel Cain. He became a lawyer and eventually a Judge of the West Virginia Supreme Court.

Mary Katherine (1876-1969) Aunt Kate married Tom Smoot and had three children.

Elizabeth Emily (1877-1890) died at thirteen, perhaps of typhoid fever.

Joseph Frank (1879-1943) was the first RFD mail carrier in Tazewell County in 1905 and thirty years later became County Supervisor.                                             Gratton Alexander (1882-1912) had begun a career in real estate when he died at thirty, unmarried, of a ruptured appendix. Many Litz sons were named Gratton Alexander in his memor

In 1878 following “some financial reverses” the Litzes removed to Witten’s Mill. Their final move was to Cavatt’s Creek, to what was known for over fifty years as the Litz home place, now owned by the Atwell family.

Two of the Litz brothers had Mormon names—Moroni Orson after the angel Mormons have cast in the role of Gabriel (that was Uncle Roan, the judge) and Alma Zarahelma for the first and last letters of the Mormon alphabet (A.Z., President of the Bank of Tazewell??) The story goes that a pair of Mormon boys on their two-year proselytizing stint stopped by the Litz home place and converted John and Elizabeth, making my great grandparents the first Mormons in the county. I have seen the white frame house set in a hollow below hilly green pastures where the Mormons were visitors. I can imagine the long evenings on the farm and how welcome the strangers would have been, with their diverting tales of this new revelation. Religion, after all, was the main source of family entertainment in that time and place. Maybe the conversion wore off after a while since the several children after A.Z. did not have Mormon names, and my own grandfather was a Methodist, I believe, when he married.

John and Elizabeth Litz are buried on a hill above the house beside their children Gratton, Elizabeth and Nan, Nan’s husband Rages Sluss, and several other Litzes and Slusses. The little graveyard is shaded by trees that have chanced to grow there and fenced against the cattle who have nevertheless broken through and knocked the stones crooked. There are a few infant graves and one or two stones that are illegible. There are also two graves for the brothers May, who died one summer two days apart, perhaps of some old-time illness like typhoid fever. Not relatives, just visitors taken sick who died and had to be buried quickly. Lost stories of that place.

*    *     *    *

My Litz Grandparents

Ethel Wakefield was the daughter of a Kentucky Methodist preacher. “We were poor but we didn’t know it because everybody else was poor too,” she liked to say. But even for that time and place the Ethel’s young life was austere. All the Wakefields had was what the congregation chose to give, in the collection plate or outright. In return the community expected the preacher’s whole family to be at its service. One of Ethel’s chores when she was eight or nine was to go up the mountain to a house where an invalid granny lay on a heap of straw by the stove. Her job was to change the straw a couple of times a week. When Ethel was punished she had to cut the switch herself and her mother applied it across her legs where, she said, it stung prodigiously. Their “summer vacations” were spent helping with the farm work on their grandparents’ Ohio farm. They loaded some chairs and all four children in a wagon and drove on up, camping along the way.

Ethel’s mother, Helen Richards Wakefield, was descended a few generations back from a planter family that had fled Haiti during the Toussaint L’Ouverture uprising. Perhaps a servant or slave helped them to escape by boat, but this is a common legend and may not be true. Helen Richards gave her children what I think of as rather highfalutin genteel names–Ethel, Eunice, Herbert, Edgar and Lawrence, no Sally Anns and Jim Bob’s for her–and had an artistic soul, painting on velvet, making quilts, filling her house with plants and cuttings. When the congregation replaced Edgar with a new man while he was still in his fifties, there was no such thing as a pension for retired Methodist ministers, so Helen and Edgar went to live with Ethel who was by then widowed. Eunice had died as a little girl and the Wakefields had always planned that as the only daughter Ethel would take care of them in their old age.

The Reverend Edgar Wakefield, rather dapper in the couple of photos I’ve seen of him, did not generate stories the way many of my forebears did. And the one I know is rather undignified. He wore a toupee which his little granddaughter, my mother, once accidentally pulled off while she was playing with him. She was hysterical, convinced she had scalped him. His wife outlived him and survived to sit rocking on the front porch and uttering dire things to my mother, her granddaughter and namesake, when she went out on dates with my father. Samples: “Remember who you are and who you serve,” and “Be sure your sins will find you out.” Privately she told mother, “A big man like that will wear you out, you have no business marrying him.” Altogether a heavy presence, but mother said that much of the maternal attention she got as a little girl came from her grandmother, who taught her to sew and draw and do crafts, baked cookies with her and so forth. Ethel was not domestic, as she put it, and after her widowhood at least not very maternal.

Ethel married in 1909 at the age of 27 (?), against her parents’ wishes. She had met George Litz in her hometown of Panther, Kentucky, where she had a job working up the day’s accounts for the Ritter Lumber Company. Every night her figures went on the train to Mr. Ritter in Columbus, Ohio, letting him know how much lumber he had bought and sold. She could add a column of figures by glancing at it. In spite of her eighth grade education and the constraints of an intensely religious upbringing, she was intellectually curious, interested in Biblical scholarship as long as it was very fundamentalist, foreign lands as presented by the National Geographic Society, and women’s rights. She met George Litz, Vice President of the Ritter Lumber Company, at her job, and he courted her for some time. Finally he said, “If you don’t marry me before I’m 40 you won’t get me,” and they made a plan.  She caught the train to Columbus, where she and George were married. Then he had to leave immediately on a business trip so she got back on a train to Washington, DC, where she spent two weeks with her uncle Byron Richards waiting for George to come and take her to her new home in Columbus. Uncle Byron lived on A Street NE right off East Capitol and if I know Ethel she saw as many of the sights as she could while she was there. She was thrilled to see the “big men in Congress” as she sat in the gallery and the important buildings. It was her first city.   That blissful time may be partly why she eventually settled in Washington.

There would be a lot of business travel in George and Ethel’s few years together. He was buying and selling timber and mineral rights both for Ritter and for himself and involving himself in the affairs of the mountains. He rode the hills and hollers on horseback in his younger days, though by the time he married he probably took the train most of the time. He hurried to the scene of mining accidents to protect the widows who were given a lump sum in compensation by the mining company and were often quickly fleeced by itinerant confidence men selling phony shares and worthless insurance. He also founded a home for the children orphaned by these mining accidents, which were a regular part of life. On the way to the Litz home place there is a church for which George Litz gave the ground. His good deeds were legion and his contacts wide. There was for years in Grandmother Litz’s baby grand piano, where a lot of papers were stored, a photograph of Devil Ance Hatfield and his boys sitting on their front porch, each with a rifle over his knee, a memento presented to George by Ance himself..

Grandmother talked to us often about her five years of married happiness. There is even a love letter extant, as mushy as you like. Growing up she had never had a pair of shoes that cost more than two dollars but George bought her twenty-dollar riding boots. He also bought her her own horse and when that horse threw her, much to her dismay he shot the animal. They had a beautifully furnished house at 1298 Bryden Road in Columbus, with oriental carpets and her own silver and china, and servants. The Litzes entertained a great deal and sponsored the education of young Christian boys and girls. I have an elegant cut glass punch bowl from which tee-totalling drinks were served.

Ethel lost two babies before giving George the child he wanted in 1915. She had a tipped uterus, either congenital or caused by lifting heavy bags of rice as a girl (not sure why she was doing this heavy lifting), and went to Chicago for massage treatments to correct the condition. My mother suffered from the same thing and when she had her miscarriages (three) my grandmother said, “There was never any trouble like this in my family.” A sad example of their mostly failed relationship. Mother must have learned from her cousins or aunts that that wasn’t true. (She herself was told that it was all

psychological and would never have borne me had she not finally gotten another opinion and had her uterus adjusted.) George was overjoyed to have a little girl. Twenty years earlier he had had an illegitimate daughter, Georgia, with a hired girl who worked for his family. He had claimed Georgia as his own, educating and supporting her, but longed for a child he could live with and enjoy in a real family. My mother, Helen Elizabeth, was that child and he adored her.

On the subject of Georgia, who was an acknowledged part of the extended family, my mother thought there was a good chance she was really A.Z.’s child because “he always took such a great interest in her and she looked exactly like him.” Perhaps George and AZ had both dallied with Georgia’s mother and by the time Georgia was born, AZ already had his Etta, so George agreed to claim paternity. Or perhaps Georgia really was his. The scandal of her birth was long past when she came to take care of Helen Elizabeth when George was killed. Ethel was completely incapacitated for weeks, and never really recovered from losing George. Mother said Georgia gave her the only real birthday party she ever had. She made an unfortunate marriage to a man with the unpleasant name of Hitt and AZ moved heaven and earth to get her a divorce. Whereon she married him again. That’s all I know about Georgia.

Mother was eighteen months old when her father died. He was on the way to the scene of a mining accident, riding a handcar from which he fell or was thrown. He had internal injuries and died of peritonitis few days later. Here is the telegram he sent Ethel from the hospital in ______ North Carolina. Ethel reached him before he died though he was unconscious by then. Mother screamed until she had to be taken out of the hospital by a nurse. She remained phobic about hospitals all her life. A Columbus doctor who might have been able to operate was on his way, but travel was blocked by the famous Johnstown flood.

The funeral, which was held in Tazewell, was huge. There were 200 automobiles, far more than Tazewell’s streets could hold. The lawn of AZ’s fine house on Main Street was completely covered with flowers. Ethel always said she shook hands with men from seven states at t he funeral, from the top brass at the Ritter Lumber Company to a backwoodsman who told the story that when his cabin burned down “Uncle George” had given him a check for a thousand dollars. There was no one like him. He has a large mausoleum in the Litz family plot. And Ethel lies beside him now, underneath the headstone she had made up except for the date far in advance, impatient for the reunion.

Grandmother Ethel stayed on in her house in Columbus until my mother was ten years old. She wore mourning the whole time, pulled the darkness around herself and refused to get on with life. I have some of her widow’s weeds, fans, veils, gloves, handkerchiefs. A whole accessorized world of misery. Judge Strother whose first name I don’t know but whose moustache was remarkable, was my grandfather’s best friend. He courted Ethel to no avail. She could never think of marrying again.

My mother spent the summers in Tazewell with her cousins, and that probably saved her from the worst collateral effects of the damage to her mother. Mother and daughter were very different. Helen Elizabeth was blonde like her father and very very pretty from the beginning. Impulsive, flirtatious, brainy and dramatic. Grandmother was as dark as a gypsy, olive-skinned and black-eyed. Someone remarked on the difference in coloring between her and her daughter and she famously answered, “I married a white man.” She was a little sadistic to children, having been raised that way herself, relishing stories of lepers and other sinners. She was also a beautiful woman, upright and slender, with fine features and a great laugh. When she laughed she was completely abandoned and anything could set her off from a silly joke to a funny idea. But she was lost in the wilderness of her tragedy and her religion, which pounced on her like a wild beast after George died. It offered the prospect of seeing him again in heaven but showed her what a sad and sinful place the earth is and how useless if not wicked worldly pleasure and happiness are. Not much left over for my mother. Mother even felt that Ethel regretted that George had died and his child was left when it would have been so much better the other way.

After ten years, AZ took steps. He was Ethel’s guardian and Mother’s. In a move both high-handed and completely necessary, he sold the Columbus house out from under Ethel and told her she had enough money to travel anywhere she wanted for as long as she wanted to find a place to make a new home. So she booked a trip to the Holy Land, conducted by a Dr. Somebodyorother, a Bible scholar. She was always connected with such people. Ethel and Helen Elizabeth sailed–on a ship with Anna Pavlova as a fellow passenger (presumably she was not going to the Holy Land, though who knows?)–and Helen was the pet of the ship, playing up to the religious crowd with extensive Bible quotations (she had a great memory, always) and famously goody-goody remarks. She answered someone who was casting doubt on the faith, “You are only sowing the tares, the good seed has already been sown.”   When they landed back home in New York, the pier was piled high with their souvenirs and trunks of new possessions and no word of their impending arrival had reached the family. They had to wait some hours for money to be wired to transport them to a hotel.

Next Grandmother travelled to San Francisco, I believe following some evangelist, perhaps Aimee Semple McPherson, or Gypsy Smith or Billy Sunday. She was a great fan of all of them, Billy Graham most of all. In later years she listened to them on the radio and sent them money and sang hymns along with them. At this time of mother’s childhood she went in for Bible study and attended lots of services and revivals. Mother was lonely and remembers sitting in the park in San Francisco telling stories to strangers about her mother and father and her many many brothers and sisters.

Grandmother also went to Chicago to attend the Moody Bible Institute. I know that in Chicago my mother fell off a swing and bit through that line just above the pad of her chin—the scar was there but didn’t show at all.  She also fell into a lake when the young woman who was minding her and some other children was looking the other way, showing off a pretty watch, an engagement present.  Someone caught sight of Mother’s straw hat floating on the water and that saved her.

Finally the two of them landed up in Washington, DC, and AZ bought them a five-bedroom house at 3602 34^th Street NW, right on a bus line. For several years Ethel had a car and it became a community resource, taking neighbors to the hospital and friends on various expeditions. But even after she gave up the car, a day never passed that she didn’t hop on the bus and go somewhere. She was not domestic. She liked to be out and about, hunting Friday bargains or attending church services. She took us grandchildren, to Constitution Hall on Wednesday nights to see the National Geographic slide show lectures. Though she always praised country virtue and country folk and kept some of her country ways of speaking, she would never have gone back.

Once in her later years my mother drove Ethel back to the hills of her youth for a week, giving up smoking for the duration in order to do it. (Grandmother knew she smoked of course and bitterly remonstrated with her, but she never smoked in front of her mother.) They drove to see various relatives but also just meandered and G. Litz would say, “I think I know the family that lives down that way, they were Sister Smoot’s cousins,” or whatever, and mother would take the turn and there would be the family sitting on the front porch and there would follow an amazing reunion after forty years, everyone recognizing everyone instantly and as full of gossip as if they had never skipped a beat.

Ethel’s brother Herbert came to live with her at 34^th and Porter. He worked in the neighborhood as a handy man and they were companionable in a completely undemonstrative way. My sister Paula was particularly fond of him, admiring the little notebooks he wrote in, miniscule handwritten entries about the weather, what he had heard on the radio and I’m not sure what else. My father said he had seen Herbert sneak along the sidewalk on his way to the bus stop, bent over so the hedge would hide him from Ethel. Her staccato “Herbert!” followed him down the street. He was on his way downtown perhaps to have a beer and a cigar. Who knows? He had gone to the First World War, to France I believe, and is buried in Arlington Cemetery. He died of appendicitis in 1954 or 1955 and Grandmother Litz lived alone from then on, unafraid, independent–and always a trial to my mother.

Ethel became a hoarder over the years—mostly newspapers and articles and Friday bargains. But also flattened tin cans for the long-over war effort, bacon grease for cooking and the proverbial box of “pencil ends too short to save.” When she died we cleared eight tons of trash out of the house including three broken glider swings from the basement, several pressure cookers and bags of unopened mail. Even the roses saved from my fifth birthday cake. There were certain things like radios and tinned salmon that were magical to Grandmother. She kept buying them and there were tens of puffy tins of salmon and fourteen or so broken radios in her house. (Some of the radios were not actually silent but would only tune to a gospel station.) There were another few tons of good solid furniture, chifferobes and cedar chests and bedroom suites. And books and pamphlets and tracts. For years she had entertained missionaries and outfitted them with all the Friday bargains she bought. (I wonder whether any of them used the pressure cookers she gave them in their jungle missions. I guess no reason why not. She certainly loved the pressure cooker technology even though they occasionally blew their stacks and ruined the ceiling, while always ruining anything cooked in them.) Winter pajamas, summer pajamas, flannel underclothes, seersucker anything, woolen blankets, these were some of the things she could not resist on sale. Most of what she bought was of good quality and after the missionaries stopped coming, we girls wore a lot of it. But mostly cooking it all just piled up. Grandmother was ashamed of her hoarding mess and mother was ashamed for her and with her. It was very very complicated. Shame was a bumper crop in my family. And you didn’t have to do anything but appear unattractive in some way to reap it. The tension and embarrassment that gathered around Grandmother’s messy house could not have been greater had she been a criminal.

Grandmother’s house had indeed “got away from her” but it was cosy and interesting in lots of ways. There was a Hoosier cabinet in the kitchen where we often made peanut butter cookies which she believed to be more wholesome than most sweets (condensed milk was okay too) and a trestle table where we sat to eat her not very good country cooking and canned peaches or kadota figs. I liked it all. At home we would never have had canned anything and no desserts ever. While we ate we listened to religious radio and Paul Harvey and whenever some new outrage was reported she said, “It’s the awfullest thing in the world.” There was a special rhythm to this statement that I cannot reproduce orthographically. She telephoned my mother regularly to report on the evil in the world. She was particularly horrified and fascinated by earthquakes, leprosy, and eight-year-old girls who had twins. Mother was horrified by her avidity. She wanted so much a warm, reasonable, handsome world for herself and her girls. And she managed it most of the time. In spite of Grandmother and the Old Rugged Cross.

However, Mother saw no harm in in a brief fling with the old hymns when she and I did the dishes together. We “walked in the garden alone when the dew was still on the roses”, we sang of “the white city where we had a mansion a harp and a crown”, and went on to secular weepers like the Tennessee Waltz and Goodnight Irene. We knew hundreds of songs, comic college songs, folk songs, country songs and pop songs of the 30’s and 40’s. I always enjoyed it when it was my turn to do the dishes with her. Daddy liked to sing too and was a much better singer than either of us but he was too critical of a false note for me to enjoy singing with him. He went in for the pop songs of his youth and a few dramatic ones like Brother Can You Spare a Dime. He always broke our hearts with the line, “Say don’t you remember they called me Al,” because after all, he was Al. But that was as sentimental as he got. The luxurious emotion of our repertoire repelled him. I can understand his point of view now, but at the time I never saw his point about anything because we didn’t like each other.