Identity and Origins
In 1852, the Crimmel family emigrated from the Hessen region of what is now Germany to south Wheeling, Virginia. Wheeling had a German population that may have attracted the family. Immigrants from this time period often, upon arrival in the United States, would ride trains to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then ride in boats down the Ohio River to settle in cities along way. An alternative route to Wheeling (from Baltimore) involved the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and/or the National Road. Although Hessians had been making glass since the Middle Ages, it is not known if the Crimmel family members learned glassmaking skills in Europe. However, Henry Crimmel’s father and both brothers were also glassmakers. Germans were being recruited to work in glass factories during the 1850s. By the 1870s, family members lived across the river from Wheeling in Bellaire, Ohio.
Read more about this topic: Henry Crimmel
Famous quotes containing the words identity and/or origins:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)