We last left off with Mata when she was enrolled in primary school. Fast forward a few years, and she’s attending high school in Two Rivers. She would have started having to think about what she wanted to do in her future, not unlike the anxiety high school students feel now.
After some digging around online, I was able to find this 1905 photograph from the University of Wisconsin archives. We can see a 17-year old Mata in the 3rd row, 5th from the left, standing slightly taller than those around her.A report card from Mata’s last year of high school, the same year as the previous photograph (1905)
Mata’s parents had grown up on farms and had not had much of a formal education other than some years in tiny country schoolhouses. But they were able to scrimp and save enough money to offer their children better opportunities than they had had, and all of them would use that opportunity and all find their own paths in life. Mata, being the oldest, was the first. After finishing high school in Two Rivers, she went to Oshkosh Normal School (which later evolved into the current University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh). She attended it for two years, and received a teaching license in 1909.
Mata was apparently too busy with her studies at Oshkosh Normal School to write to her friend, Nellie
J.A.H. Keith, the president of Oshkosh Normal School, wrote this about Mata as a later job recommendation: “Her scholarship was very good in normal school. She was always to be relied upon and she bears her responsibility well and cooperates well. Miss Hartung was full of promise on leaving here and made a great success of her work after leaving the normal school.”
We can get a rough idea of Mata’s personality around this time from a short note written to her by a D.R. Clow, dated November 14, 1907:
“You have a fine voice, but can learn to handle it better. You do not open your mouth enough to let the sound out freely. Go into the public speaking class, or take special pains with your decorations about handling your voice. You have the temperament too for doing good work as a reader. As you spoke I could not keep away the thought that at the next moment I should hear the playing of a piano.”
By her own later admission, Mata was incredibly shy at this time, mentioning one experience in a later autobiographical essay: “I was hampered by shyness. No wonder that at the high school prom I sat there watching the rest dance and again a repeat at the Normal. In fact one time the Chemistry teacher asked me to dance. And that was such a highlight that I did not care if I had had no other chance.”
Mata’s teaching license, which she received in 1909 after two years at Oshkosh Normal School
This would start Mata on a journey that would take her as far away as 1,500 miles away from her hometown and into multiple isolated small towns over the course of more than a decade. But for her first teaching job, she would teach for a few years in a village in northern Wisconsin named Dunbar, about 130 miles from Two Rivers. Her time there will be covered in the next article.
I have been fortunate enough to have a lot of photos and documents related to my family’s history. The main person covered by this documentation is my great-grandmother, who had the interesting name of Mata. I’m going to write a series of short posts covering different parts of her life as well as the lives of others in the family, and while there is less about information about Mata’s childhood, I have done my best with what I have, so here it goes.
I believe this is the earliest photo I have of Mata, who is probably around 3 years old, c. 1891
Mata was born on a cold winter day on January 21, 1888. Her family was fairly prominent in the small town of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, which had a population of around 2,500 at that time. Her father, Louis, had a successful career as a florist, growing the flowers on his farm in greenhouses. German was spoken in the household. While both of her parents were born in and grew up in the US, her grandparents had immigrated from Germany in the mid-1800s. The 40-acre property, which included a big house, greenhouses, a barn, and a park called Floral Park. Mata had two siblings, a brother named Norbert (born 1891) and a sister named Leatha (born 1897), both of whom I’ll write about in separate articles in the future.
Mata’s childhood home in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. She is seen here in the center with her aunt on the left and her sister on the right, c. 1899
Much of the information I have about Mata’s childhood comes from a very short autobiographical essay she wrote towards the end of her life. The information is vague and doesn’t really show her more poetic writing style of her younger days, but here is an excerpt from that essay:
“Each morning the neighbor boy would get our cows and take them with the neighbor’s cows to our pasture. At that time we all drank real milk. As children we had fun. The old hay barn was just perfect. So hide and seek was a favorite game. Then came baseball and the sand box plus dolls. But we had less fun than the neighbor children because there was work to do.”
A later photo of the 40-acre Two Rivers property that shows the greenhouses in the back and a newer house on the right
A school journal from 1899-1900 also survives, containing two short essays written by a pre-teen Mata. The first, titled “Thanksgiving Vacation,” describes an average day of fun children’s activities during Thanksgiving break, 1899. Here it is in full, including mistakes and misspellings:
“On Thanksgiving day, I and my brother went to the woods. While we were on our way I met Ella Wehausen and she said she would go along with me. Elsie Kamm and her brother and Ella’s cousins all went. First we went into Mrs. Schultz’s farm and we found winter greens with berries. While we was were picking winter green a hunter’s dog came out and we were so frightened that we ran away and I fell down. Then we came to where there was some a kind of swamp; and there we found cat tails and we all picked some. Then from there we went to our woods. My brother and Elsie Kamm’s brother went to get some whips and then went home but all the rest of us went into the woods, then we went into our park, here we sat down on the bench. Then we cleaned our clothes for they were all full of some kind of things that stick to us. While we were setting there a few drops of rain fell and we thought we would go home. Thanksgiving forenoon I was chopping a little wood just for fun and Elsi Kamm’s brother too. After a while the Panki boys came, and we said “We will play hiding and seek.”One blinds and counts up to fifty, then the one that hides say ‘Bushel of wheat bushel of rye who isn’t ready holler I,’ and then if know [sic.] one says ‘I’ then the one that blinds hunts us. The boys made bows and arrows and had lots of fun.”
Mata, around 8 years old, with her father and brother, c. 1896
The second short essay from 1900, titled “Our Picnic,” briefly describes a school activity:
“I wasn’t at the school picnic only once and I cannot remember about it but we had a picnic ourselves in our park. We had We went about two o’clock we had our baskets in our wagon. Sometimes we have ice cream and have tables and benches out. There where we put what we bring eat on. We play a great many games. We have a little pond in our park and a bridge over it. Some times we have a large picnic and a great many people of Two Rivers go out there, we give lunch and coffee and ice cream. Sometimes at our picnic we have our pictures taken by Mr. Braun. A dish of ice cream costs 5 cents we have a stove in a shed and where we make our coffee there. In the shed there is a basket board which we push aside and give our ice cream and coffee but most of the people take their lunch along but always by ice cream. We give with the ice cream some of those little white cookies. Then when they are ready to go a bus gets them. They go about four o’clock. After awhile we go to.”
Of course, there was a lot of work to do on the big family farm, but Mata and her siblings also went to school when they were old enough. For Mata, it was a rough start at first. According to her autobiographical essay, an older neighbor boy walked her to the kindergarten schoolhouse and after only five minutes, she ran back outside after the neighbor boy and he walked her back home. But after that rocky start, she recovered and became a good student, as we can see in some of her surviving report cards.
Mata’s earliest surviving report card, from the 1895-1896 school year.
This would all be foreshadowing for Mata’s future job as a teacher, where she ended up going off to small towns far away, but those are stories for different articles.
Quite a few years ago, I inherited a ton of old family photographs going all the way back into the 1800s, with most being from 1910s through to the 1960s, covering multiple generations of one side of my family. One of the main characters in this massive pictorial narrative is my great-grandmother, Mata. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1914 and went on to pursue teaching.
This postcard photo showing Libby, Montana c. 1919-1920 was found among many hundreds of family photographs
This took her to a few various small towns to teach in small schools in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1919, she found herself out west in Libby, Montana teaching English, whose population was 1,500 at the time, having only within the past decade more than doubled in size.
Mata kept a diary during her time in Libby, expressing a disillusionment with teaching as a profession that she had been feeling for a long time. The pages of this diary were found unbounded and scattered, but I was able to piece it back together and make a makeshift binding for it.
A postcard image of the new high school where Mata taught. The building still stands today, though it is not in use. When Mata taught there, it was only a few years old.Mata herself, standing on a wooden plank walkway near the school
In the end, Mata’s stay in Libby was brief: only about a year, and she moved on to another location. This post is really just an excuse to share some of the photos that probably wouldn’t see the light of day otherwise. There might be more photos of Libby among the photos, but when I received the photos, they were all mixed together: all locations and time periods jumbled with few captions to help. Whenever I can match some together, I’ll make some more posts here. And whenever possible, I want to give local museums or archives digital copies of photos showing their area.
unpublishedhistory 