"When people used to complain about how expensive sugar was, I yoost tell them to remember all the hard work that went into it." 95 year-old Grandma Hohnstein says. And she should know, for the John Hohnstein family, along with the Adlers, Botts, Schwartzkopfs, Schreiners, and several hundred other German-Russian families from Hastings, spent six months of each year in back-breaking labor in the sugar-beet fields of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado in the years before World War II.
To the hundreds of German-Russians in particular who immigrated to Adams County in the years between 1880 and 1920, the beet-fields were providential, for they furnished labor and a living for whole families of willing, unskilled laborers. The cash the families earned during the growing season carried them through the rest of the year.
In 1887 the first sugar-beet seed was imported into the Platte valley from France and Germany, producing so well that two years later a sugar-processing plant was started in Grand Island. Within a few years, beet culture was widespread in the High Plains, centering in eastern Colorado and later in western Nebraska as irrigation increased the arable acres. In the earlier years, some beet production in Michigan attracted workers from Hastings. Curiously enough, none from Hastings ever seem to have worked in the Grand Island area.
Sugar-beet culture demanded much hand-labor, and the German-Russians were just the people for it in those years. They were willing, strong-muscled, unskilled workers, they had large families and the children could work in the fields with them, and their lack of proficiency in the English language was no handicap in the fields.
The first German-Russians arrived in Adams County in 1879, attracted by cheap land and the promise of religious and economic freedom. They were part of a large group of German farmers, thrifty husbandmen all, who had emigrated a century earlier from Germany into the fertile valleys of the Ukraine and the Volga in Russia, lured by Catherine the Great's guarantee of freedom from taxes, military conscription and religious interference. In 1874, however, Czar Alexander II rescinded those privileges, and the German-Russians began looking elsewhere, large colonies of them moving to Nebraska. Within the next quarter-century, hundreds of them arrived in Adams County. Although in Russia they had been farmers, when they settled in Adams County they did not take up land, settling instead in Hastings and eventually becoming artisans, craftsmen and factory workers.
The first newspaper reference to the annual hegira to the beet-fields appeared in the April 13, 1906 Hastings Tribune, which said that about two hundred families were preparing to leave Hastings about April 23. The next year, on May 3, 1907, the newspaper noted that "several hundred left yesterday and today" on three special trains. From the tone of the first story, it is obvious that the beet journey was a well-established procedure, familiar to the readers.
Peter Schreiner says that his entire family, including uncles, aunts and cousins, worked in the Colorado fields in the late 1890's, retiring from them about 1900, when they found permanent jobs in Hastings. They were part of a large group of workers even than. School records report children going to the beet fields during the 1890's.
Although the newspaper did not take note each year of the mass movement of the workers, so that there is no comparison of numbers from one year to another, apparently 1915 was one of the peak years. The Tribune of April 6, 1915, said that "about 800 workers" were under contract for the coming season, and that "last year the number was around 600." Some years the figures were given as family units, others as numbers of people. The May 8, 1919 Tribune said that 300 persons, representing 52 families, had gone to the fields.
Early in the spring the beet contractor--Henry Bott served for decades, sending people at first to the Michigan fields, later to Colorado and western Nebraska--would begin lining up families to work for specific growers. The father of each family would figure out the strength of his family and how many acres he and his wife and children could handle--a grown man could care for ten acres, the average was seven--and would contract for a given number of acres, at a set amount of money per acre. Some of the families had ten or twelve children. The Tribune of April 6, 1915, said that the contract price that year was $18 per acre; Mrs. Hohnstein remembers that in 1916, her family contracted for $25 per acre, and Henry Adler recalls the figure of $30 an acre, perhaps in a later period. Great Western Sugar Company records in Scottsbluff indicate that in 1927 the contract price was $24 per acre, with a 50cent per ton incentive for each ton the yield was over 12 tons.
Some of the families returned year-after-year to the same farmers, establishing a happy relationship with them. According to Reuben Bott, if the farmer and the grower couldn't get along, his father, the labor contractor, had to find another place for the worker and his family.
The sugar company, the Great Western of the American Sugar Company, paid the railroad fares, and many old timers, long-since retired from the fields, recall that the train trip was one of the most exciting events of the year, an excursion they looked forward to with eagerness.
The families boarded the train, either the Union Pacific, parked north of the stockyards on B Street between Colorado and Minnesota, to go to the Scottsbluff area; or the Burlington, parked behind what later became the Swift plant on Second, between Kerr and Baltimore, to the Brush, Colorado area. Hundreds of townspeople would go to the loading area to watch the excitement--either friends and neighbors bidding farewell, or sightseers gawking at the activity. The Burlington special had started in Lincoln, stopping at various points along the way to pick up other beeters, and the Burlington staging ground in particular often resembled a reunion.
The family would take provisions with them for the next six months: trunks of clothing and bedding, pots and pans and simple crockery, and sometimes basic furniture. Always they took with them quantities of food, for out in the fields, where they were quartered, they were far from the grocery store.
"Before leaving Hastings, they would slaughter a hog or two," Henry Reiber recalls. "Most of it was made into sausage and put into casings. The lard was rendered and the sausage was fried down. These rings of sausage were then put in large lard cans and the hot lard poured over them. This meat was taken along and it kept very well." There was no refrigeration whatsoever in the shacks.
Grandma Hohnstein remembers that she always took with her what vegetables she could, and flour and other staples, and sometimes home-canned beef in jars.
Gear stowed away in baggage cars, people in the coaches, the beet-train would toot and chug on down the track. The family had locked their house, closed the shutters, and left with neighbors or whatever friends were staying on in Hastings the job of checking periodically to see that everything was all right at home.
With their contracts in hand to tell them where they were going, the families rode to their summer locations, the train stopping at central points in the beet area where the families got off, greeted the grower who had come to meet them, and then loaded their gear and families into the spring wagon that would take them to the fields.
Housing in the beet fields was furnished by the beet-grower, and the families who formed a tight little community in the south part of Hastings during the winter months were widely separated during the summer. Their quarters were within walking distance of the fields they had contracted to till. In the early years of the century, they sometimes were quartered in tents; by the 1910's, they were housed in two or three bedroom shacks, pr perhaps railroad cars. Much later, in the 1930's, sometimes they lived in substantial barracks-like buildings. In the shacks, sometimes primitive furniture was provided, but usually the families took bedrolls and a few pieces from home, often a kerosene stove and a wash-board. Henry Adler recalls that his family used apple boxes for whatever tables and chairs they had.
"The life of the beet workers is comparatively an independent one," the April 6, 1915 Tribune reported. "The man figures on how many acres he can take care of, and secures his contract from the sugar beet company. If he has been at work for a number of years his record is known, and if it is a good one, his own judgment is accepted as to how much he can care for. These 800 workers from Hastings will take care of a large acreage of beets in the aggregate, and they will get a considerable sum form it. One man, for instance, has contracted to take care of 30 acres. These will be cared for by himself, his wife, and a 14-year-old daughter."
By the time the beeters arrived in early May, the planting had been done by the grower, using horse-drawn mechanical planters, and it was time to block and thin the beets. Short-handled hoes in hand, men, women, and children stooped over to cut out 4-inch sections of the sprouting beets, leaving bunches of plants about an inch in height. When the plants reached four-inch height or had four leaves on them, the children--some as young as five or six years of age--got on their hands and knees, and straddling the rows, pulled out all the plants but one. These blocking and thinning operations were backbreaking work.
Grandma Hohnstein recalls that she spent the weeks preparing for the summer by putting knee-padding in her youngsters trousers; not all of the children were so fortunate, however.
Babies and toddlers too small to work in the fields were sometimes left in the care of four or five year old youngsters, often playing at the end of the rows, where the mother could keep an eye on them. Henry Adler remembers that umbrellas were placed over the playpens to shield the babies who were parked at the edge of the field. Reuben Bott recalls one woman who brought her two-week-old twins sons, depositing them in a wagon at the end of the row; she took time out from hoeing during the day to nurse them.
After the thinning was finished, it was time to begin the first hoeing. Each field had to be hoed two and sometimes three times during the season, and each hoeing operation took about 30 days. Sometimes the women and children took over the hoeing and the men helped the farmers for whom they worked, putting up hay, threshing and irrigating.
At one time Henry Adler was a ditch-rider, opening the gates so that farmers could have their share of irrigation water; it was a hazardous job, and through the years several horse-mounted ditch-riders were killed over arguments about water rights.
There were other jobs, too. Reuben Bott said that during World War I, "I had the job of exterminator. At the end of the rows and through the fields, I erected tripods and hung a lantern at the top, with a big kettle underneath it containing water and paris green to catch the millers which were laying eggs in the beet plants. Each morning I made my rounds with a one-horse cart, putting coal-oil in the lanterns, cleaning the Paris green. I was 13 years old."
Although at the peak of the season the field workers labored from sun-up to sun-down, the mother's work was never-ending; she fed the family in the morning, cleaned up the dishes and hurried tot he field, leaving there to prepare the noon meal and clean up from it, and went back to the field to work until supper-time. In the evenings, she did the family washing in the nearby irrigation ditch, mended clothing, set bread, and did other necessary household tasks to keep her family going. Grandma Hohnstein remembers that she baked bread twice a week, and sometimes in the evening when all her other chores were finished she did domestic work for the grower's family. She also had a little garden beside their shack, raising cucumbers and other vegetables, and had a flock of chickens for meat and eggs. From the grower's milk-cow, she was able to get milk for her family. She doctored her children, for the family was miles from a telephone and a doctor. She used honey and onions in lard to cure her 8-month old baby's whooping cough. One summer she acted as midwife, helping deliver the grower's wife of a baby.
At times during the summer, the hoeing was finished and extra work for the farmer caught up so that the men and boys could go fishing, a favorite sport. Because families were scattered over a wide area they had little organized social activity. "Each man lives on the ground he is taking care of," the April 6, 1915 Tribune reported. "Social life is not very much in the beet fields as yet, and sometimes folk walk five miles on Sunday to visit some particular friends."
But Sundays were most often devoted to churchgoing, for the German-Russians were religious people. The sociability the beeters found in church was the only association they had with other families during the summer months. Depending on where they were located, they went to a country church or into the nearest town, perhaps Bayard, nor Minatare, or Scottsbluff to Sunday services. Grandma Hohnstein remembers that one summer an itinerant minister came by "the big house" and conducted services there; otherwise, the family walked several miles down the road to an old schoolhouse where on Sunday the people of the neighborhood conducted their own Sunday School. When the family lived near Minatare, they walked five miles each Sunday to services in town--and five miles back home again.
In late September or early October, the beet harvest began. The Tribune story of April 6, 1915, said that "The beets are removed form the ground with machines, but the work is taken care of by the company, independently of the help of those who have cared for the growth of the plants," but those who worked in the beet-fields remember differently. They have vivid recollections of the work they did with the harvesting.
As the horse drawn diggers lifted the beets out of the ground, the workers separated them, shook off the dirt, and topped them with machetes. Children put the stems and leaves into one pile to be used later as cattle feed, and the other workers piled the beets on the ground. Each grower was allowed to ship only two loads of beets a day to the processing plant, leaving the rest in storage piles on the ground; since the beets in the whole area were harvested at the same time and the sugar plant could not handle all of them at once, this simple quota system was devised. Harvested beets in storage piles lost a pound of sugar content per ton per day; by accepting the same quantity from each grower each day, the factory gave equal treatment to all the growers.
By early November the beeters were back in Hastings; most of them remember that they were in their own homes before Thanksgiving. They had been paid off in cash--Grandma Hohnstein remembers that one year, when the grower gave her husband the earnings for the season, he said "Now you have more money than I," and she says, "He may have been right!" That money would keep the family going if the father and other wage-earners were not able to find work until the next beet season. The amount varied, depending on the number of acres and the contract price per acre, but usually ranged from $1,000 to $1,500 per family.
Peter Schreiner has a less rosy recollection, however. He said that "at the end of the season, the beeters would pay off their grocery bills, and then have to start charging all over again." He may have been remembering a later, less frugal period, however, and not the times when the housewives made their own soap, canned their own vegetables, and raised their own chickens, in between doing all of the sewing and tailoring for their families.
The families returned home on the train, opened their houses again, and the children started to school. Some of them, the Hohnstein children in particular, would attend school in Scottsbluff for the first month or so of school and bring their records back with them, but most of the children did not bother, going to classes only after their return to Hastings. Because the children attended school only six months of the year, rather than nine, their education suffered. In the early days, in particular, the youngsters were handicapped by not being exposed to the English language until they went to school, and the double disadvantage shows up in school records. In the 1895-96 school year, for instance, large numbers of 13 and 14 year-olds in First Ward (later renamed Lincoln School) were in the second and third grades; journal entries show that 22 students at one time that year "left to work." Other school records for the First Ward for the period 1893 to 1900 indicate that groups of students in the first, second and third grades were put in a single classroom, under one teacher, to study reading, spelling and numbers, only--not the full course that other students had. Those same records indicate that in the 1898-99 school year, 29 students in the second grade "left to work," and that in one class of 107 students, the average attendance 48, and that in another class of 83 students, the average attendance was 37. (In 1900 the journal-book type of record keeping was changed, and there are no comparable records fro the years after that.)
Miss Nina Carpenter, longtime principal of the First Ward school, coped with the problems of fluctuating attendance, when the enrollment would double at the end of the beet season, and then want again when the next season started. She was cognizant of the problems of the students whose school-terms were short and whose only knowledge of English came then, and it was she who inaugurated special instruction for the beet-children.
The East Ward, later renamed Alcott, also had beet-children among its students, although the problem there was never as great as it was in the First Ward. In earlier years, school attendance on the high school level was not a problem, for most of the beet-children left school as soon as they reached 14, later 16, the legal age at which they could quit school.
As the German-Russian immigrants became Americanized, they began to find other jobs to sustain them on a year-round basis, and gradually they left the beet-fields. Many were employed in the brickyards, and some on the railroads. Reuben Bott recalls that some worked on the rip tract, where damaged boxcars were repaired. Younger men and boys worked at the horse collar factory or the harness shop, girls worked at Hagers candy kitchen or at the cigar factories. Other avenues of earning a living were opening up to the new generation who now spoke English.
Gradually, too, the beet fields began to be mechanized, although the demand for hand-labor existed until well after World War II. In the mid-1920s, the sugar company stopped paying railroad fares; if families wanted to work in the fields, they had to provide their own transportation. From the mid-1920s onward, many of the beeters were young bachelors, from 16 years of age upward, who drove ramshackle cars out to the fields, bunked in the dormitories which were then provided, and went into town, by car, on Saturday night to booze it up, fight if necessary, and end up with massive hangovers. Fewer and fewer family groups made the trip.
As the number of German-Russians in the fields diminished, the slack was taken up by Mexican laborers, and during World War II, to a lesser extent, by Japanese internees and by Italian and German prisoners-of-war, working under guard. By that time very few German-Russians from Hastings were making the annual pilgrimage to the beet fields.
Today improvements in many areas have eliminated most of the hand labor in the beet fields. A new monoseed has been developed which produces only one beet per seed, rather than the lettice-like sprouting which required blocking; herbicides and mechanical cultivators control weeds; electronic machines thin the beets with an electric-eye device; and mechanical harvesters dig and load six or eight rows at a time. What Mexican-American laborers are employed in the fields are paid $2.15 per hour.
The German-Russians who are still in the sugar beet areas now are there as landowners, descendants of the hardworking beeters who thriftily saved their money and bought land; much of the land around Scottsbluff is now owned by second or third generation German-Russian beet-workers.
Some of the beet-workers who died there, during the season, are buried near the beet-fields. It was far easier to bury Grandpa in Scottsbluff, than to bring him back to Hastings. The saga of the German-Russian beeters who did backbreaking labor and lived under primitive conditions in order to get ahead explains some of the strength of character in the Great Plains today.
SOURCE:
Adams County Historical Society
Historical News Vol. 6, No. 3, ..June, 1973; Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1973; Vol. 6, No. 5 October, 1973
Sources For Additional Research
Adams
County Historical Society [email protected]
PO Box 102 Hastings NE 68902
Adams County Naturalizations 1871 - 1929
Adams County Marriage License Index 1871
- 1973
Adams County Tombstone Index
Adams County Newspaper Death Index 1877-1960s
Adams County Probate index 1971-1920
later in progress
Many other resources
American Historical Society of Germans from Russia
631 D Street, Lincoln NE 68502
Email [email protected]