Our history must date back to Germany as all available records point that way. Abraham I and family lived in the south-western part of Pennsylvania in an area from Pittsburg south to the border of Maryland and from Pittsburg east to the cities of Johnston and Altoona. This is assuming he is the first Switzer to leave the Fatherland and come to the New World.
The a/m territory is so mountainous the counties run south by southeast in accordance with the ridges of the Alleghenies, instead of north and south and east and west. Although the Alleghenies and Blue Ridge mountains are not nearly so high, as they are much older, than our western Rockies, the terrain is very rugged and rocky. Many of the roads still wind their ways up the sides of the mountains, but all are paved with a ten foot wide slab as the red clay of the hills is very slippery when wet to the of being almost untravellable. During our forefathers’ stay in them only the government ones were paved.
Abraham I, Abraham II and Abraham III spoke fluent German as betokened by the term, Pennsylvania Germans. Abe III was my grandfather and spoke excellent English as did grandmother, but they didn’t teach their children to be bilingual. Mabel Switzer Hamilton Of Nuevo, Calif., also a granddaughter, tells me she was in her grandparents’ home when they needed some one. Grandfather was quite sick, at times delirious, but he would pray and sing in excellent German, but when speaking to a German friend in his later years, he would often put a word or two of English into the conversation as he had forgotten some of his native language.
His pre-meal blessing had many German words and phrases, such as “Danke fur Brot and Fleisch.” I was too young then to notice any non-English words. My father, George Abraham IV, sang German songs with good pronunciation but had to wait until I studied the language in my 3rd and 4th years of high school, then told him what he was singing. I believe I must be a throwback to him in size, as my father was 68 inches tall and weighed about 160, while mother weighed 90 pounds until her last years when she became quite plump at 110. My 205 pounds certainly have been inherited somewhere.
Abraham II moved to the Shenandoah Valley of north-western Virginia and settled near the villages of Mt. Solon or Mt. Sidney, 12 miles apart, in Staunton vicinity. He owned land there and threatened to disinherit Abe, Jr., if he went west on a wagon train — however, grandfather “wanted to get away from red soil and rocks.” His boyhood home was eight roomed with a chimney built of field rocks. It has since burned to the ground, Marguerite Switzer took a picture of the large chimney in 1938, which we have.
A Switzer burial ground has been turned into ordinary farming ground as the wooden markers rotted away years ago. There are many descendants of Abraham II, living or dead, who still live in that neighborhood: Jacob Pumphrey, whose wife was Mary Switzer, Peter Swisher, Andy Bryan, Cleora Yeakel, Harry(?) Lutz and Piercey Lair.
Abraham III married Matilda Bryan in 1852 and the two headed a wagon train 2 years later to look for better land and more pleasing surroundings. After 7 weeks of travel, they stopped at Vermont, Ill., or Astoria, which are adjoining towns. Some of the wagons turned north and went to what is now Marietta, Ill., and New Philadelphia where their descendants are living now. They are George Jeffries, John Swisher, Winnie Harris Ellis and other of whom I have no record.
The settlers built log cabins with a ceiling of smoothly shaven small trees, which presented a fairly flat surface on the bottom, which was the ceiling of the lower floor and the floor of the upper floor. Father slept up there as a small boy on a straw tick or on one filled with cornhusks or dried grass. He told me when he heard the wind soughing in the trees, he imagined it might be one of the many groups of men who scoured the country after the Civil War to shoot Southerners who settled north of the Mason-Dixon line and those of the North who settled south of the line.
They merely called a man to his door and killed him in front of his family. Spirit ran very high for many years. As a 21-year-old teacher in Louisville, Ky., 1917–1918 I went to dinner one Saturday and heard them arranging to attend the Decoration Day exercises on May 15. I spoke up and said, “Why, aren’t you two weeks ahead of time, May 31 is the real Remembrance Day.” The landlady informed me thus: “You northerners have your May 30th, but we good people of the South decorate the graves of our dead soldiers May 15.” Due to the united efforts of the two factions in wars since then, I believe there is very little hatred now.
Grandmother Switzer’s oldest relative we can find trace of was Benjamin Bryan of Pennsylvania who lived about 1775. His son, Benjamin, Jr., was born about 1800 and as a young man went to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and married Persis Lair. They were your maternal grandparents. Elements of both the Bryans and the Switzers were in the wagon train, which grandfather Switzer headed.
As I mentioned before, father was born near Astoria and Vermont and went to the Macomb-Bardolph district with his parents. When he married Nettie Booth in 1881, they moved to the farm adjacent to the Pleasant Hill school in McDonough County, 2 miles from the farm which was owned by his father. It was of 92 acres and he rented part of the Booth farm, which lay just to the east of it. He acquired it at his first wife’s parents’ death and had 162 1/2 acres which lay in one lot, approximately 1/2 mile square.
Uncle Theodore Switzer farmed for a few years, then turned to law, which he had been studying while farming and had quite a successful career in the city of Macomb. At one time he served as the elected mayor of the city. Uncle Whitefield became a C.B. & Q. station agent at Tennessee, Ill., for many years until he was pensioned off and continued living in that village until he passed away. Uncle Will Switzer rented his father’s farm when he retired to Bardolph to live. It has since been sold to John Brewbaker, the next neighbor to the west. Aunt Minnie Switzer married Ezra J. Wetzel and settled on a farm 4 miles west and 1/2 mile north of her father’s farm. It is approximately 6 miles north of Macomb on the Macomb-Roseville and Monmouth Road.
Moms and I had Switzer relatives all around us on farms and in Bardolph and Macomb when we set up housekeeping in 1921. To them, whether still living or passed to their rewards, we tender our most heartfelt thanks for any favors which we received from them. Grandfather Switzer was born in 1832 and died in his cottage approximately five years before his wife, my grandmother, who was also born five years before him. They lie at rest in the Oakwood cemetery in Macomb, Ill.