In 1900, Frank and Emma Larson considered themselves permanent residents of Limestone, New York. Frank was 39 years old, well on his way to establishing his grocery business in the center of town, and had 10 children living at home, ages 17 (Jennie) to infant (Dorothy). Several events of note occurred during that first decade of the 20th Century.

Immigration Continues

Once Frank Larson put his roots down in Limestone, the town became an important point of connection for his extended family. When Frank’s nephew Eskel emigrated from Sweden in 1900 he went straight to Limestone. A year later his fiancée joined him, and in 1902 they were married. Eskel’s sister Hulda and her fiancee came over around the same time, and were also married in Limestone. Eskel and Hulda’s parents (Frank’s sister Mary and her husband August) arrived in Limestone from Sweden with their two younger children around 1905. We don’t know exactly what Mary’s family did in Limestone or how long they stayed, but clearly Frank’s newly adopted town was an important landing pad for family members arriving from Sweden. Mary’s entire family would move to Rockford, Illinois, within a few years of their arrival, where they would settle, marry, and raise more children.

Filling Spiritual Needs

Most Swedish immigrants came to the United States as Lutherans, and we know from the Swedish church records that Frank grew up in a religious household. However, when Frank got to the wood camps in Pennsylvania there weren’t any Lutheran churches nearby, and he had other things to worry about as he adjusted to his new life, moved around, changed jobs, and decided where to raise his family. Once he established roots in Limestone, Frank was ready to find a church. While Limestone had Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian options, Frank was not drawn to any of them. The Free Methodist movement, however, while still rather new, seemed “more spiritual” to him than the other churches and just what he was looking for. So Frank joined a local group that was starting a branch of the church in their village.

The Free Methodist denomination was organized in 1860 in Pekin, New York, about 30 miles north of Buffalo. The original founders had separated (actually, got kicked out) from the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) that was prevalent in New York in those years. The new denomination arose out of dissatisfaction with the MEC practices existing at that time, which the Free Methodist founders felt were at odds with the original teachings of John Wesley. For example, the MEC rented out its pews and if one wanted a good seat on Sunday mornings they had to pay for it. In addition, the Free Methodist founders felt that the church placed too much emphasis on rigid rules and rituals, which they felt stifled the free expression of worship. Finally, a deep schism arose over race. Prior to the Civil War, the MEC allowed its members in the South to own enslaved people, and after the war the church continued to treat nonwhite people, as well as women, as less than equal. The Free Methodists, who stressed freedom and equality when it came to worship, but also in other matters, vehemently disagreed with this unequal and hierarchical approach. In fact, the Free Methodists began welcoming women into its leadership ranks very early on, including ordination as pastors. Given all this, it isn’t hard to imagine why Frank Larson gravitated toward a denomination that focused on taking a more compassionate stance toward life and worship, and that stressed (at least in their liturgy and teachings) the inherent equality and freedoms among people. I’m sure Frank recognized many of his own values as he learned about the values underlying the Free Methodist beliefs and practices.

By the time Frank got involved with the group establishing a Free Methodist church in Limestone, the new denomination was fast becoming a strong movement around the country that would spawn colleges and universities, regional conferences, and mission work outside the U.S. At its height the church boasted several hundred thousand members around the world.

The Free Methodist Church of Limestone was organized in 1897, and a church building was erected. The first trustees of the church included Frank Larson and, as it happens, Loretta Willis, who was the mother of my grandmother Josie Lucille, who married Frank’s son Fred. (I know, I know, it’s hard to keep up, but hang in there! Fred and Josie were both on the 1938 trip to California, so you will be hearing more about them).

Civic Involvement

Frank was an entrepreneur when he moved his large and growing family to Limestone. There was quite a bit of competition in Limestone when it came to general stores, and Frank’s was by no means the only one in town. As a new business owner, he had a vested interest in cultivating and maintaining good relations with the citizens and leaders of his community, and could not afford to remain a bystander waiting for business to come to him. After all, he had Emma and their eleven children to provide for, and those children would be attending the Limestone schools.

Frank also needed to ensure that Limestone would be a safe and vibrant community for young families, with quality schools and opportunities for healthy social connections. For these reasons he became actively involved in the affairs of the town.

I enjoyed discovering that Frank took a very active interest in his adopted community and was well-known in the town. In a pamphlet called “A Souvenir of Limestone,” published sometime between 1901 and 1905, we see this in the section titled “Business Men and Some of the Leading Citizens:”

Frank Larson is a native of Sweden. He came to this country and settled in Limestone. He is engaged in the grocery business. His marriage to Emma Hartburg was blessed with an interesting family of ten living children: Jennie, Fred, Eleck, Walter, Raymond, Florence, Julia, Helen, Dora and the babe.

What About John and Linus?

Besides Mary eventually moving with her entire family to Rockford, Illinois, the rest of Frank’s siblings stayed in western Pennsylvania and New York, eventually transitioning away from the logging and tanning industry and pursuing other entrepreneurial vocations as they matured and began raising families. John and his family of six children were still living in Allegany, New York, at the turn of the century, but within a few years would transition to Bradford, just across the Pennsylvania border from Limestone. In Bradford, John would also establish a grocery store, perhaps inspired by his brother’s growing success. The families of John and Frank visited each other frequently.

Linus, who had changed his name from Larson to Turner, eventually settled in Port Allegany, Pennsylvania, which is about thirty miles from Allegany, New York, and about 30 to 40 miles from Limestone and Bradford. Turner, as he was known, married and had two children. After a brief stint as a preacher, by 1910 Turner had become a merchant in the shoe business, evidence that he probably started out in the tanneries just as his brothers had. (As an aside, Port Allegany was also where Will Larson lived for a time and met his wife Annie before moving to nearby Wilcox, where he would have his tragic accident in 1892.)

Settling Down and Moving Around

So it appears that in the first decades of the 20th century my Swedish ancestors sprinkled themselves all around the western ends of Pennsylvania and New York, and this sprinkling in the same region would continue as the children of the brothers who emigrated had children of their own who married, moved away but not too far, and continued the pattern of settling and growing up in the area. Frank had ten children live to adulthood. John had six. Linus had two. Will had one. Each of these children had children, who had more children, and so on and so on. From the searching my brother and I have done so far, most of the second generation children stayed in the area and went to places like Allegany, Olean, Salamanca, Jamestown, Little Valley, Macchias, Fredonia (all in New York), as well as Port Allegany, Bradford, Oil City, Warren, and Meadville (all in Pennsylvania). In these early years travel between these towns would have been quite challenging, whether by horse and carriage or by car. The roads were not paved and involved narrow, rocky pathways, steep hills, sharp curves, deep rivers with rickety bridges, and would have required careful maneuvering when vehicles came upon each other going in different directions. In winter or during rainy periods there would have been slippery ice or sloppy, sticky mud to add to the stress of driving. Newspaper descriptions of accidents and injuries on the roads were common. Nevertheless, in spite of the dangers, there appears to have been quite a bit of travel between towns by the Larson family members, a strong indication of how closely connected they were to each other.

By the time the third and fourth generations came along, in the mid-to-late 20th and early 21st centuries, my ever-more-distant cousins were much more mobile and, as a result, much less likely to stay within a small, relatively contained, geographically restricted region their entire lives. The reasons for this are varied, of course. Education, economics, social connections, aspirations and dreams, no doubt all play a part in decisions about where one lives and settles down. In the region of New York and Pennsylvania we’re talking about here, the logging, tanning and oil industries were actively declining in the early 1900’s. These industries had operated on a massive scale for over two generations in the 1800’s, and their disappearance led directly to the economic struggles of many small towns that had no industry of comparable size to replace the ones that were gone. These towns found various ways to shift and adapt, but that process took time, and many of the children and descendants of the original settlers decided not to wait around and simply moved elsewhere. Nevertheless, as someone who is several generations away from having grown up in this region, I have a strong and undeniable sense of coming home whenever I visit the area, and I suspect that is true for some of my cousins, however distantly related. The stories told by my grandmother, my mother, and the other relatives I met as a child and reunions I attended with people whose connections to me were always confusing, left me with a sense of family and community that is still very palpable, magnified by all the research I’ve been doing these last months as I work on The 1938 Project.

Illness and Death

Scarlet fever was a known and feared infectious disease, associated most commonly with young children under the age of 10. Sometimes misdiagnosed as measles, delayed recognition of the disease could prove fatal. Scarlet fever is caused by streptococcal bacteria (“strep throat”) and spreads easily through the air in ways we are familiar with because of the Coronavirus in current times. A scarlet fever pandemic raged around the world in the late 1800’s and into the early 1900’s. With no known treatment and high mortality rates, families were left to manage as best they could and hope that their children were able to fight off this terrible and painful disease. Quarantining for several weeks was necessary to prevent spread to other family members. There would be no effective treatment until penicillin was developed in the 1940’s.

Frank’s second-eldest child, Alma, died in May, 1902 of scarlet fever and pneumonia. It had to be heartbreaking for this close-knit family to lose Alma, which probably occurred over a period of just a few short weeks. I’m guessing that Frank and Emma were shocked to discover that her illness was indeed scarlet fever because it rarely occurs in adults or children older than 10 or 11. Alma was 17. The course of the disease would have been painful to witness, involving the sudden and unexpected appearance of a sore throat, a bright red rash and “strawberry” tongue. These early symptoms would have been followed by fever along with headache, chills, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. The skin rash typically develops within one to two days of the initial sore throat and coughing. It is typically very red (hence the word “scarlet” in the name), and resembles a severe sunburn. The skin feels like rough sandpaper. For those who survive, the fever abates within 7-10 days, but the rash and rough skin can linger for days or weeks on the body, face, hands and feet. During the contagious period, there likely would have been a sign on Frank’s house alerting people to the fact that there was a patient with scarlet fever inside, and telling them to steer clear.

I can only imagine how Emma must have fretted over her second-oldest daughter, caring for her as best she could but helpless to do much as the disease progressed. She also had to keep Alma separated from the other children, especially the young ones, five of whom were under the age of 11. In such a large family, it could not have been easy for Emma, who was trying to care for her daughter, or for Alma’s siblings, who wanted to play and interact with their sister. The stress of the ordeal surely took an emotional toll on the entire family, but most particularly on Alma’s mother Emma. I like to think that she had lots of help from nearby relatives so that she was free to focus on loving and caring for Alma.

Up to this point in our Larson story I have not spent much time talking about Emma Hartburg, but she did in fact have siblings and members of her own family just down the road in Bradford, who presumably might have been able to help care for the younger children. That said, it appears she was not very close with her siblings and their families. According to Frank’s daughter Florence, Emma’s family members in the U.S., who worked in construction, resented Frank’s apparent success in Limestone. Flo also reported that the Hartburgs “hit the bottle” and didn’t come to Limestone very often because they knew there would “just be coffee out.” If true, then Emma would have been relying on members of Frank’s family rather than her own to help her run the house and manage the needs of the other children during Alma’s illness. She also would have had her own Jennie, 19, and Fred, 16 to help out.

In normal circumstances, and assuming Alma was otherwise healthy, she probably would have had an immune system adequate to the task of fending off the fever and bacteria. There is some evidence that she may have been feeling better and convalescing because she was able to “trim” a hat for her younger sister Florence, who was 10 years old, for the Memorial Day holiday coming up in a couple of weeks. Tragically, she contracted pneumonia and the combination of the two diseases probably led to the fatal result. Flo remembered that Alma was wearing a “pneumonia jacket” near the end of her life, which in those days was a common method of trying to control the temperature to keep the patient warm while the pneumonia ran its course. Given that scarlet fever involves high fever, and that Alma may have been just coming out of that disease, it must have been difficult to decide which was best when they realized she had contracted the pneumonia - wear the jacket to keep temperature from dropping too far, or take the jacket off to relieve the fever? Flo described Alma as “so roasting” that she opened up the jacket to cool off, and then “died in a day or two.” I’m sure the family was devastated, and that the Memorial Day holiday was a very sad one that year.

The Youngest Is Born

Two years after Alma died, in 1904, Frank and Emma’s youngest child, Bertha, was born. By this time Emma was 42 and I’m sure she was probably glad to be changing diapers for the last time, having given birth to Jennie twenty years earlier when she was a mere 22. Bertha was referred to affectionately as “Babe” by the older family members, and as an adult she was known as Bertie. Bertie was one of the 1938 travelers, so you will be hearing more about her another time.

The Oldest Gets Married

In 1905, Jennie married Bob Burnett in Limestone, and they moved to Bradford and had a baby there in 1908, Flo LaMar. In the Bradford 1910 census Bob is listed as “grocer,” which makes me wonder whether he went to work for Jennie’s Uncle John for a time. Jennie’s family eventually moved to Bakersfield, California, where she began referring to herself as Jane (making it hard on genealogy sleuths trying to find her…). The 1938 roadtrippers spent two weeks in Bakersfield so there will be more to come about the California family.

Visiting “Dear Old Mother”

Where from Here?

We are working our way through the early part of the 20th century, setting the stage for Frank’s epic trip in 1938. The second decade of the century was eventful in the lives of the Larsons, as was the roaring 20’s leading to the Depression in the 30’s. We will make our way through time over the next few weeks. In the background I will be making the final preparations for my own (literal) journey through their memories, which begins October 1. Please consider subscribing if you’d like to continue this journey through time and place with me.

Sources for this article

Some of the information contained in this article came from the following sources:

• American Society for Microbiology (2023). Scarlet Fever: A Deadly History and How it Prevails. https://asm.org/Articles/2023/January/Scarlet-Fever-A-Deadly-History-and-How-it-Prevails

• Swedlund, A.C. and Donta, A. K. (2005). Scarlet fever epidemics of the nineteenth century: a case of evolved pathogenic virulence? in Herring, D. A. and Swedlund, A. C., eds. Human Biologists in the Archives: Demography, Health, Nutrition and Genetics in Historical Populations. Cambridge University Press. 159-177.

• Skipwith, D.F. and Freeman, M.K. (2008). Scarlet fever. US Pharm. 33(3):48-58.