Week 7 - Unusual Source - Ella Rossow Besch

 

Week 7: Unusual Source - Ella Rossow Besch

Can you imagine taking a 3,000 mile journey by car in 1940? One of the most unusual sources I've been fortunate to have is a copy of an 80-year-old letter written by my wife's Great Grandmother, Ella Rossow Besch. It narrates in great detail a car trip she and her husband, John Julius Besch, took in the summer of 1940 from Eatonville, Washington to North Dakota and Minnesota.

This letter provides a feel for what it must have been like. There was no Interstate Highway system, there were still some sandy/dirt roads. The best roads were hardtop and only two lanes wide. There were no modern motels, just little collections of cabins here and there for them to stay overnight. They drove 10-12 hours a day beginning at 4 am and stopping by late afternoon. But Great Grandma's descriptions of things she saw provided us more of that feel. She, as a farm girl, commented on how good or poor crops and livestock looked along the way. She reported on storm damage that had caused acres and acres of broken trees and buildings. She commented on the rough and tumble badlands surrounding Roosevelt National Park. She commented on people she saw, road signs she read and trains along the way. She also seemed to be eating ice cream whenever possible,...what an adventure for two people born in the 1880s.

The Rossow and the Besch families were both farm families who emigrated from Germany to Wisconsin in the 1860s-1870s. The Rossow family moved west in 1905 and homesteaded between the small North Dakota farm towns of Raleigh and Flasher. The Besch family homesteaded about 300 miles east near Appleton, Minnesota around the same time. Both families were huge by today's standards. Ella was one of eleven while John was one of eight.  By the time Ella and John and all their siblings had married and had children, there were Rossow and Besch relatives all over the Dakotas and Minnesota. My wife remembers her grandmother saying on many occasions that she had 93 first cousins. Tara says, "Grandma never needed to make a new friend in her life!" By 1940, Ella and John had one parent and many brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins with which to renew face-to-face ties.

The road-trip letter is 24 hand-written pages long and covers every road taken, every town traveled through, places they stayed overnight, gas stations used, tire changes required, every place where they ate a meal, roadside attractions, and a visit to Yellowstone National Park. Most importantly, it documents every brother, sister, cousin, old friend and acquaintance by name that they encountered and what they did for entertainment while visiting each one. This letter allowed us to verify all the Rossows and Beschs in Tara's family tree and add details about husbands, wives and offspring we didn't have.

The trip took 56 days from start to finish (27 June - 22 August 1940). A copy of the letter came into Tara's hands thanks to three 3-ring binders of family genealogical information passed to her by her Grandfather Roy. What a treasure trove of information, and a first-hand account of what would have been the trip of a lifetime.