Mrs. Schuenemann and Daughters Carry On

Mrs. Schuenemann and Daughters Carry On

          “Buy your tree from the captain and your wreaths and garlands from his wife. They give a smile with each and every purchase. They’re the people you must see, if you want a Christmas tree!”

St. Pauls Church Newsletter

December 1908

Chicago, Illinois

            The waves settled themselves in the days following the gale of November 23, 1912, but another storm was brewing back on shore in Chicago – an emotional storm that hit the hearts of loved ones who tried to beat back the darkness of fear and worry when the Simmons failed to arrive as expected. Hours turned into days, and days into weeks. Family members of those on board looked across the waters for sight of the Simmons, but they saw nothing – no ship, no sails, no husbands, no fathers, no sons.

          Search efforts were limited by the season’s daylight that was quickly fading into the longer hours of night. Families watched and awaited a reassuring word of their loved ones, morning until evening, evening until morn, the salt of their tears burning their bloodshot eyes.

Brave Barbara Schuenemann refused to believe the Simmons had gone to the bottom, at least at first. On December 4, 1912, the Chicago Record-Herald ran the following article:  “No word came yesterday from the Rouse Simmons, the Christmas tree laden schooner now many days overdue at port here. Inquiry at countless coast towns brought forth nothing but these answers:  ‘Nothing known of the Rouse Simmons.’” The article continued:  “Despite the gloomy outlook, the wife of the belated vessel’s captain, Barbara Schuenemann, maintains that there is no cause for alarm.  Last night at her home, 1638 N. Clark Street, she gave the technical explanation of ‘head winds’ for her husband’s delay and added that the newspapers were showing the greatest worry.”

Barbara was trying to hold fast, refusing to believe the worst. But fear was seeping into her heart, little by little, as reported by other news articles. Fear was also consuming the hearts of families who had crew on board, paralyzing them with grief. The silence of not knowing was a burden too heavy to bear.

According to the Menominee Herald Leader, Menominee, MI, of December 5, 1912, it was reported that “grief frenzied relatives of those on board the vessel have been striving day and night since Thanksgiving Day to find trace of the missing ones.” 

Also published on December 5, 1912, came the following report from the Chicago Daily Tribune: “Philip Bauswein, one of the sailors, was engaged to be married to Miss Elizabeth Martin of 2012 Peterson Street, Chicago. She and Bauswein’s mother, Mrs. Frank Bauswein, of 3624 LaSalle Street, Chicago, began growing alarmed over the Rouse Simmons’ long absence more than a week ago. On Thanksgiving Day [November 28, 1912] they set out together to see if they could not learn something. A visit to the riverfront docks brought no news, and they then began calling up the Life Saving Stations along the ship’s route by telephone. The women talked to the stations at Two Rivers, Ludington, Sturgeon Bay, Sheboygan, and Kewaunee. Someone of the Kewaunee station told them of the sighting of the three-masted schooner, and this confirmed their worst fears. ‘We thought,’ said Mrs. Bauswein, ‘that the Chicago authorities ought to do something, and the next day we called on the harbor master. He laughed and assured us there was no danger, that the boat was just delayed by the wind. We weren’t satisfied with that and went to County Commissioner Harris. He could do nothing for us. Then we visited a man named Smith in the Board of Local Improvements in the City Hall. He was the only person among all of those we called on who seemed to show the slightest interest in our grief. He took us to the Mayor’s office. There, one of the men at the door told us to ‘come around tomorrow.’ Think of telling us to ‘come around tomorrow’ when those men might be perishing in the lake at that moment. We never saw the Mayor. He never knew we were outside. We went away crying.’”

          On Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1912, anxiety-stricken relatives were already in contact with Life Saving Station authorities on both sides of Lake Michigan, and, according to the Milwaukee Daily News of December 5, 1912, it was even earlier than that. By November 29, 1912, the Mayor of Chicago had relatives at his door, and on the same day the Chicago Daily Tribune published the first article alerting citizens of the missing schooner. Then Chicago watched and waited, and waiting is so long…

…The backbone of Barbara Schuenemann’s spirit held as steady as could be expected during these initial stomach-churning days of clock watching, finger tapping, and endless pacing. She endured the slowness of time along with everyone else, helpless to change the situation at hand, forced to face off with truth, to accept the reality that the light of hope was fading away.

Barbara was a person of deep faith and was undoubtedly praying for the life of her love. If she was, it was a prayer that would not be answered, a prayer that could not be answered because the husband she longed to step through the doorway, into this place of sweet home, was already buried at the bottom of the lake. The time for praying had passed, the life she wished spared already ended.

The winds continued to wail in the days following November 23, 1912, and the skies shed their tears. Rain, snow, sleet and fog hampered rescue efforts. Despite valiant search attempts, the Simmons could not be found. The only witnesses to its final demise were the silent stars, the speechless moon, and the wild wind that howled on in its strange tongue none could understand. The secret of the Simmons was held tight.

            On December 3, 1912, the Chicago Record-Herald interviewed Mrs. Schuenemann who believed, at the time, that there was no cause for alarm.  On December 4, 1912, a contrary article published by another newspaper, the Chicago Daily Journal, gave evidence of the emotional rollercoaster Barbara Schuenemann was riding between hope and despair. Under the sub-headline “Wife of Captain Schuenemann Watches and Grieves for Missing” it was reported: “Hoping against hope, Mrs. Schuenemann, wife of the captain, has sat day and night at an upper window of her home, and with powerful glasses scanned the lake in hope of getting sight of the vessel. Her home is almost opposite Lincoln Park. From her window she is able to look over the trees of the park and with the glasses can sweep the lake for miles… ‘Oh, I can’t believe that the ship is lost with my husband aboard,’ said Mrs. Schuenemann, as she sat with a pair of glasses before her favorite window today. ‘If the ship was wrecked there ought to be something to show it. If I only knew my husband and those on board were safe I would be satisfied, but the thought of them out in the cold lake suffering, perhaps starving, is more than I can stand.’ The captain’s wife has been made seriously ill by the strain and worry under which she has been laboring. Her sister-in-law, Mrs. Bertha Schuenemann, is her constant companion and nurse. Both women take turns looking through the powerful, marine glasses out upon the lake.”

            The Chicago Record-Herald and the Chicago Daily Journal were only two of many newspapers that followed the Simmons tragedy. The Chicago Daily News of December 5, 1912, published an interview they conducted with Captain Schuenemann’s eldest daughter, Elsie:  “A lovely girl, with hair the color of golden rod, stood at the breakwater at the foot of North Avenue and peered far out into the fog and mist. She was Miss Elsie Schuenemann, the daughter of Captain Schuenemann, the owner of the cargo. Through the sticky mist came the deep bass note of a passing freighter, but she saw nothing of the missing schooner. Each day she has gone to the water’s edge to watch for her father’s vessel. ‘I know he will come back,’ she said, although she had difficulty in keeping back the tears. ‘Mother and I are not afraid. We have confidence, and I guess we are not as frightened as others.”

Bundled up against the cold, relatives of the missing men were walking along shorelines toward nowhere, sending forth prayers over the vastness of the waters where their loved ones lay below.  Hope and fear co-existed simultaneously in those long hours of uncertainty as relatives navigated their way through the difficulty of those straining days, waiting for a welcomed word. Several hopeful reports filtered in, tempting relatives to wonder, “Dare they believe?”  Joy and sorrow, hope and fear, were layered upon each other. The hour of the crew’s return was beyond knowing, and emotions teetered. One moment it seemed as if reunions were a heartbeat away, and the next moment unfolded itself in dread – in dread of what may come to pass, or what already was.

According to the Milwaukee Sentinel of December 6, 1912, Miss Elsie Schuenemann could be found where the sea and shore met. She was “at the lighthouse near the harbor to Chicago, to be among the first to watch her father’s boat with its 27,000 evergreen trees sail into port.” Elsie watched and waited, her eyes turned outward, searching for her papa whose body would not return, but whose spirit was beside her already at the water’s edge, watching along with her. And only he knew they watched in vain, for he was not coming; what remained of him was already there.

On December 12, 1912, the Chicago Inter Ocean reported that a search party was being organized and “Miss Elsie Schuenemann, daughter of the lost skipper, has volunteered to accompany the party.”

Elsie Schuenemann, age 20 in 1912, exemplified courage beyond her years. She was shouldering an experience that could have crushed her, shattered her. Instead, the fire of this trial was defining her.

The Chicago Inter Ocean of December 11, 1912, ran the following headline: “Skipper’s Daughter Shoulders Burden.” The article read: “The head of a dependent family; staggered by indebtedness; with nothing like adequate relief in sight; her mother seriously ill of grief and uncertainty; yet Elsie Schuenemann, daughter of the skipper of the lost Rouse Simmons, is cheerful. Misfortunes that would crush stout hearts of men do not cloud the sunshine from her life. She thanks everybody for their solicitations in her behalf. Then she asks them to forget her and her troubles and look to the fifteen other families who lost breadwinners when the Rouse Simmons went down. ‘Look them up – they may be in need,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. I can fight my way out some way.’ Despite the claims of the brave little skipper’s daughter that the family was not destitute, it was admitted that the loss of the Rouse Simmons and cargo had incurred debts of over $5,000. ‘But I can pay that, every dollar,’ the girl continued. ‘See, I have my father’s Christmas tree business. That will tide us over a bit. But the families of sailors and timber cutters on the boat may be really in need. Please look them up.’ People flocked from all quarters of the city to see the boat, buy trees and wreaths, and congratulate Miss Schuenemann for her spirit…”

…She became her mother’s right arm in the dark days of 1912. Some of these days were bearable for Barbara, and she showed herself a pillar of strength, but others were difficult beyond imagination. Barbara Schuenemann was a woman of immense courage and she proved this, over and over, during her lifetime. Yet grief excuses no one from the company of its presence, and Barbara Schuenemann grieved fully when she realized that nothing would ever be the same again.  She wept, covering her face with her hands, trying to hold back her tears, to hold back her pain, to hold back the sadness flowing out of her eyes.

Never again would she hear the sound of her husband’s footsteps on the other side of the door, or hear his laughter, hearty and rich. Never again would she lie beside him, watching the rise and fall of his chest in the early morn hours as daylight was born anew. And never again would she know the feeling of being loved as only he could love her. (She never remarried during the twenty-one years between 1912 and her death in 1933.) Never again. They were such final words, and the allness of what this meant invaded her, wearing her tired, tired heart down to nothingness. She was alone, and it was too hard to believe. She retired to her empty bed with her empty feelings.

Barbara Schuenemann’s pain was still fresh, her questions still unanswered, when her eldest daughter, Elsie, began weaving Christmas wreaths and making plans to dock a borrowed ship in the Chicago harbor to sell salvaged trees picked up along the beaches of Lake Michigan. “The time spent by Miss Elsie weaving garlands and superintending preparations for the establishment of a new Christmas ship are hours stolen from the bedside of her sick mother,” reported the Chicago Inter Ocean of December 10, 1912. “Mrs. Schuenemann is kept in ignorance of these preparations on account of her condition.”

“Captain” Elsie resumed her family’s place at the Clark Street Bridge. It was where her father’s customers would have expected to find the Schuenemanns, so it was there she would be found…

          …By December 11, 1912, Barbara Schuenemann had dried her tears and was beside Elsie selling trees, greeting the many persons who came to assist the family. Barbara was trying to come to grips with her future, while coming to grips with the past. There were two very good reasons for her to recapture the courage her now dead husband had once needed years earlier when his brother went missing, and they were looking to her for strength. Their names were Pearl and Hazel, Elsie’s younger twin sisters. Their care was now her sole responsibility…

…Christmas Day, 1912. Late was the hour. A reporter from the Chicago Record-Herald came to Barbara Schuenemann’s borrowed ship to interview her. He reported on the following day: “Mrs. Schuenemann’s daughters, of whom there are three, came to the boat late in the evening, and the sad mother closed up shop to go home with her children for a cheerless Christmas night… There was no attempt at celebration in the little home at 1638 N. Clark Street. In fact, the greatest concern of members of the family was how they were going to keep that same little home from being swallowed up in the financial squall which has followed the skipper’s loss. They are facing bankruptcy as a result of their disheartening failure to resuscitate the Christmas tree business left so unsteady by Captain Schuenemann’s losing fight with a Lake Michigan gale. Their attempt resulted in a substantial loss, adding to the already long list of obligations which they had inherited… Uncomplaining, the widow spent most of her Christmas Day on the tree ship straightening up the books which had added so many financial worries to her already abundant supply. With all she expressed determination to keep on… ‘I am still in the fight. We will continue next year, for our fight is to save our home…’ With the season now past, Mrs. Schuenemann is confronted with the job of disposing of the vast stock left over. She must remove it from the schooner which was loaned her for the season. Then she is facing long payrolls that have grown out of her husband’s ill-fated 1912 business. In Manistique, Michigan, where Captain Schuenemann had engineered the harvest of an unusually large stock of Christmas greens, there are scores of woodsmen waiting for their pay. On every hand she is finding the same situation, and the indebtedness of the business is estimated at $8,000. ‘If I can only pull through and manage to make good all the obligations contracted by my husband I will be happy,’ said the widow in that connection. ‘He had no doubts of his ability to make them good with the holiday business, and I know he would want me to make up every cent.’”

Barbara Schuenemann’s resilient spirit in the face of tragedy is revealed to us in those few uttered words.  “I am still in the fight,” she said, expressing her “determination to keep on.”  Then she went about the tasks at hand “uncomplaining.”

“We will continue next year,” promised Barbara. It was settled in her soul.

Her husband’s sacrifice had been to brave the seas so Chicago would have her trees, and Barbara’s sacrifice had been to allow him. This had cost her dearly. It cost her worry, fear, and dread. In the end, it also cost her the realization that all of her fears were not for naught.

Christmas tree voyages were unpredictable journeys over unpredictable waters. Barbara Schuenemann knew the dangers, and she knew the risks. She knew all she was up against as well as anyone could have.

She had pleaded with her husband prior to his 1912 trip to give up the voyages because of the danger, and her husband had consented, promising her his 1912 trip would be his last with trees.

Yes, Barbara Schuenemann knew what she faced in no uncertain terms. Yet she also knew how important the Schuenemann tradition had become to so many people. Her husband had made the decision to carry on when his brother, August, perished, and his commitment cost him no less than everything. It was a price she, too, was willing to pay…

…Barbara Schuenemann could have quietly bowed out from the tradition. She could have chosen to retreat to a place as far removed from her memories as the road would take her - a place away from shores, ships, and Christmas itself lest she be reminded of those terrible days. Yet she chose to stay where she would be a companion to the details of her husband’s fate. Why? Perhaps she knew there would never be a hole deep enough in the wide world over to bury her memories. Perhaps she knew her memories would be buried only when she was.

So courage and fear went to war against one another in Barbara’s heart, and courage won.

She understood the lake had been her family’s enemy, but it had also been their friend, having provided a source of income to the Schuenemanns for many years…

…Winter melted into spring in 1913, and spring into summer. The last leaves of autumn fell, and the first snows of winter arrived, dusting the emerald hued evergreens of Northern Michigan pearly white. And Barbara Schuenemann was there to see it.

The Chicago Daily News interviewed Mrs. Schuenemann on November 28, 1913, when she returned to Chicago with her load of Christmas trees. She had this to say:  “It was splendid up there in the big woods. I was there for eight weeks and it seemed like one long holiday for me. Perhaps it was because I felt that somehow my husband was there with me. That’s where he would have been had he been alive, and I felt somehow he was there anyway. And the smell of the pines was good, and the clear, starry nights, and the sound of the chopping all day long as the sharp axes went crunching home at the feet of the young trees. I shall never miss it. Every year I shall go to the Northwoods, and after I am dead there will be others to carry on the work.”

The very ground she stood on, the air she breathed, heavy with the scent of pine, the stars above her, were all quiet reminders of days past when she and her husband had been together in this place. “I felt somehow that he was there,” said Barbara. Her words were peaceful, her comfort certain.

This was the place her husband would have been had he not perished a whole Christmas ago. She was breathing the air he would have breathed, looking heavenward upon the stars he would have seen, and she knew she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

There is something that pulls a person back to home, wherever – or whatever – that home may be. For some it is a building – a farmhouse where four generations of your family have lived. For others, it is the people within, no matter the locale.  And for still others, home can be a life’s work – a feeling of contentment while doing what brings you greatest joy. For the Schuenmanns, home was not only the circle of love that united them, it was also the deep satisfaction they experienced while surrounded by their evergreens.

President John F. Kennedy once used the evergreen tree to symbolize a person’s ability to withstand life’s toughest blows. He said, “Only in winter can you tell which trees are truly green. Only when the winds of adversity blow can you tell whether an individual or country has courage and steadfastness.” 

The President’s words take on a whole new meaning for those who have lived in northernmost places where temperatures can plummet from 20 degrees above zero to 20 degrees below in a snap, and wind chill temperatures can dip even further to nearly a hundred degrees negative. 

 In such places the evergreen survives and thrives in a world laid bare by winter, a world numbed into submission by the severity of the season. Submission is evident across January countrysides. Yet amid this harshness stand the evergreens, seemingly untouched by winter’s heavy hand, with a constancy strengthened from within.

Evergreens. They are symbolic of strength, courage and steadfastness. Appropriately, the Schuenemann memory will forever be linked to the trees they loved. Some evergreens have roots, trunks and branches; others have bodies, arms and legs. Barbara Schuenemann was one of them…

…In 1913 the cold winds were blowing around her. She was in the Upper Peninsula gathering her first harvest of Christmas trees without her husband. A storm hit the region shortly before her ship was scheduled to head to Chicago with its load of trees.  She told the Chicago Daily News on November 28, 1913, after she arrived back in the city, that it was “just such a storm as that which robbed me of my husband.”

…Barbara Schuenemann carried on her husband’s legacy by doing a man’s work in a man’s world, a remarkable accomplishment given the fact that women didn’t even have the right to vote when she and her daughters took the helm of the family operation, as well as the helm of various ships.

The Fort Dearborn Magazine of December 1921 reported: “In loyalty to her husband’s purpose in life of providing the best of Christmas trees for Chicago, Mrs. Schuenemann took up the work after his death. Every year since, this brave sailor’s wife has gone up into the forests of northern Michigan and Wisconsin, personally selected her trees, and returned with them to Chicago. Owing to the scarcity of boats occasioned by the war, Mrs. Schuenemann has for a few years been obliged to give up the Christmas ship, but has brought her trees in by rail and sold them from a little shop on Clark Street.”

The Chicago Tribune of December 13, 1934, reported a family friend of the Schuenemanns also made mention to the scarcity of boats during World War I. He said, “The captain’s wife was plucky. She went after the trees herself. Every year, until during the war, when the government bought her boat, she brought the trees down in the vessel. She loved those trees.”

In 1921 Barbara Schuenemann did not own a vessel. Rather, she had chartered a ship to carry her trees to Chicago. The Chicago Tribune of December 22, 1974, reported: “Barbara Schuenemann, dubbed ‘The Christmas Tree Lady,’ carried on the family tradition until she was old and gray. Some years the trees arrived by rail, others by ship. In 1921 the ship she had chartered sank in Lake Superior during a storm just before she was to receive it.”

The Chicago Tribune of June 16, 1933, reported in Barbara Schuenemann’s obituary: “In 1912 Captain Schuenemann went down in a terrific lake storm as he was bringing a cargo of Christmas trees to the city on the Rouse Simmons. His widow continued his work, taking the helm of various craft to bring trees to the city each Yuletide for many years. Since 1925 trees have been brought by freight cars to her warehouse.”

Details remain unclear as to the exact years that ships were owned, and the exact years that ships were chartered by the Schuenemann women. Also unclear are the exact years trees were shipped by rail due to severe weather, or by lack of a vessel.

“Captain Herman’s widow, Barbara, and her three daughters, continued to bring evergreens into Chicago for another twenty years, first by sailing schooner, then by rail.”

Soundings (Publication of the

Wisconsin Marine Historical Society)

Winter 1963-1964

Written by Theodore S. Charrney

St. Pauls Church reported in 1914: “Mrs. Barbara Schuenemann is carrying on successfully the business of her husband, the captain of the Christmas Ship which went down to unfathomed depths with all on board. She has been up north superintending the loading of a great ship with Christmas greens, which now lies in the usual place at the Clark Street Bridge.”  

On December 6, 1915, the Chicago Daily News published a photograph of Elsie Schuenemann at the wheel of the Christmas Ship and reported it was “the boat that carried Christmas trees to Chicago from Michigan.”

St. Pauls Church of Chicago reported in December of 1917 that Elsie Schuenemann was at the helm of a Schuenemann ship. The church’s newsletter, written by the church pastor, reported: “And did you read the fine story of Captain Elsie Schuenemann bringing her Christmas ship, heavily laden with trees, safely into Chicago’s harbor?” Another article, written by the pastor after Elsie’s 1917 marriage, referred to Elsie as “the girl who brings a ship down from the wilds of northern Michigan laden to the last inch of space with trees for the children’s Christmas.”

In 1918 the church reported:  “This year they had no boat, so Mrs. Schuenemann shipped the trees, thousands of them, to Chicago by rail.” 

Barbara Schuenemann was well familiar with the railway stretching from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the city of Chicago. She would often return to Chicago via rail after she and her husband harvested trees, saying her goodbyes to Captain Schuenemann in Thompson, Michigan, and then returning back home to await his arrival…

          …According to the Chicago Tribune of 1933, and also according to the Algoma Record Herald of 1925, the year 1925 may have been the final year trees were sold from a schooner docked in the harbor.  The Algoma Record Herald article reported that Barbara Schuenemann was selling Christmas trees in 1925 from a ship, and the article also reminisced of earlier years. It stated: “In 1914 [Mrs. Schuenemann] chartered the Fearless, and with her eldest daughter and a crew of ten went up to the snow-packed forests. She supervised the men, and the ten lumberjacks who had worked so long for the captain, and she brought down the precious cargo. Mrs. Schuenemann has never missed a year with her Christmas Tree Ship. Gray-haired men, some of them the pillars of Chicago’s business structure, now descend the rotting stairs, go aboard, and sit in the little cabin. They talk to the wrinkled woman with the calloused palms, and with Elsie, now married, of the forty years that have passed…. The woods are thinning out now, and the good trees have to be carted for miles to the water’s edge. And the sharp winds slash the face and hands more bitterly than they did when the ‘Mrs. Captain’ was younger.”

Note:   The Schuenemann family provided Florence Moran, Historian for Schoolcraft, Michigan, with their personal scrapbook when she was gathering information on the Christmas Tree Ship in the 1970’s.  The family shared with Mrs. Moran an original newspaper clipping containing two newspaper photographs and the following caption:  “Mrs. Barbara Schuenemann in the midst of the spruce and balsam trees which her little schooner, Fearless, brings every Christmas from the northern woods to gladden the hearts of young and old at Yuletide. Photo left – The Fearless at its Chicago dock.   Early passersbys halted on the bridge and stared down in amazement; from jib to tiny cabin aft were piled hundreds of Christmas trees – little ones for a baby’s single candle, larger ones to hold a family’s gifts, and big ones to fix a Sunday school’s attention.” The newspaper photographs were later published in the book A History of Thompson, Michigan.  (The photographs appear to have been taken in the mid-1920’s.)

The Schuenemanns had served the City of Chicago long and well, and earned the respect of many - including “pillars” among its people.

By 1925 Barbara was aging. Her hands were calloused, her flesh, wrinkled. The “sharp winds” of life were wearing her down on the outside, but nothing could reach the inner steel of her soul. Her heart remained ever green until her very last Christmas in 1932, at the age of 67. 

“As you pass down Clark Street and near the bridge,” her church reported in December of that year, “you will find a great array of Christmas trees in the improvised warehouse and on the outside of it you will be greeted with the cordial smile of a dear old mother…. She is again busy at her same old loving duty, feeling like a newborn child, full of enthusiasm and joy. She is here to help bring joy this year like never before. She dispenses Christmas trees. You all know her. It is good Mother Schuenemann, the widow of the ill-fated Captain Schuenemann, the Christmas Ship man, who never returned to the shores, but with his great cargo of Christmas trees went down into the deep in that terrible night of storm. And since then Mother Schuenemann has felt the urge to ‘carry on.’ The Chicago Tribune never fails to pay her a tribute of respect and admiration. Her Christmas trees, which she herself sought in the northwoods of Michigan and Wisconsin, will adorn the Christmas homes of many Chicago citizens this year. There is always a desire for green trees when the long night of winter is upon us.”

Home. For some it is a building, for others, a life’s work - as it was for Barbara Schuenemann when she was among her trees. Her husband had known this contentment before her, and her daughters would cherish it after she was gone.

“Every year I shall go to the northwoods,” promised Barbara Schuenemann in 1913. “It seemed like one long holiday for me. I shall never miss it.”

Her promise held true until her death over twenty years later. Then her promise became a prophecy:  “And after I am dead there will be others to carry on the work.”

In December of 1933, St. Pauls Church reported: “Mrs. Elsie Schuenemann Roberts, the eldest daughter of the departed Mother Schuenemann, is perpetuating the memory of her parents by preparing on a large scale to furnish the homes of Chicago with beautiful Christmas trees.”

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