From the Heritage Book of the Original Fergus County Area, pp. 457-9
FRED JENNI SR. WAS A SMALL, BUT MIGHTY MAN
Condensed from an article published in the Lewistown News-Argus
¶ “Mama’s dead.”
¶ With those words, little Lena Jenni, 4½ met her older sisters and brother when they returned from school, Oct. 23, 1906.
¶ When Papa—Fred Jenni—received the sad news earlier in the day, he went tearing off with the horse and buggy to the old Catholic Hospital south of Main Street in Lewistown, Montana. He refused to believe. But Emma Flueckeger Jenni had died during minor surgery at the age of 33.
¶ Her death marked a turning point in Fred’s life. At an age when a man normally puts aside the reins of parental guidance, Fred, at 50, was suddenly saddled with the dual role of father and mother to eight children, ages 2½ months to 14 years.
¶ A Swiss immigrant, Fred was a hard-working farmer. He was a small man, not much over five feet tall, with a great deal of inner strength and courage, which helped him through those trying months and years after his young wife died.
¶ He came to America from Waldeck, Switzerland in 1869 at the age of 13, with his parents, Samuel and Anna Segesseman Jenni; two sisters, Eliza and Anna; and two brothers, Gottlieb and John. They settled on a farm at Amazonia, Mo. Fred went to school there for a year.
¶ In 1881 or 82, he and John left for Helena, stopping in Leadville, Colo., to work for awhile in the mines. Fred worked on a farm at Helena, [Montana], then came to Central Montana and homesteaded on Beaver Creek, eight miles west of Lewistown. John came later and filed on the adjoining 160 acres.
¶ Fred filed a claim for water rights on Beaver Creek and the two brothers built an irrigation ditch, which they shared over the years. When Fred was installing the headgate, a stranger, who happened to be [the artist] Charlie Russell, commented “You poor bugger!”
¶ Fred built a corral for his frisky horses first, then he and John built a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor. When their mother came out in 1884, the brothers built a big, two-room log house.
¶ Two years later their mother died of pneumonia. The brothers built a casket and neighbors joined them for the funeral service, held without a minister, in the Jenni home.’
Emma Flueckeger was also an immigrant from Switzerland. She was born Jan. 18, 1872, in Hutwyl, the daughter of Fred and Maria Flueckeger. The family, which included four other children; Fritz, Alfred, Frieda (the late Mrs. Fred Huppi of Lewistown), and John, came to America in 1883 and settled in Amazonia, Mo.
¶ Another child, Carl, was born there and adopted by a neighbor when his mother died less than a year later. When Carl was studying for the ministry in 1913, he spent the summer in Central Montana and helped start a young people’s group in Glengarry, where a church was then being built.
¶ Emma Flueckeger came to Montana in 1891 and Fred met her when she arrived in Cottonwood. Fred, who was already growing bald at the age of 35, and Emma, just 19, were married there July 2, 1891.
¶ Charlie Russell was among the wedding guests and danced with the pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed young bride who spoke only the German-Swiss language.
¶ Emma and Fred had eight children—Anna, Louise, Marie, Fred, Hulda, Clara, Lena, and Sam—during their 15 years together.
¶ They raised a big garden and stored potatoes in one cave, vegetables in another. They raised currants, gooseberries, strawberries and rhubarb. Milk was kept in large, shallow pans in a cupboard with screened doors. The cream was skimmed from it as it rose to the top and Emma and the girls made butter.
¶ Emma also made cheese, using a wash boiler of milk. The curd was put into tin frames and weighed down. Every few days it was washed and salted. With a one horse cart pulled by a buckskin named Buck, Emma took cheese, butter and eggs to Lewistown and sold them.
¶ She cooked on a Home Comfort stove, with a warming oven and copper reservoir that held several pails of water. In the winter, Fred would make several all-day trips to the mountains to get firewood.
¶ Kerosene was not always available, since it had to be freighted into town, and it was used sparingly. Fred and Emma had two lamps in the kitchen—one above the stove and another on the table. The members of the family all sat around the table to read. Fred, interested in the news of the outside world, read a great deal, often until after midnight.
¶ Homemade candles were used in all the other rooms.
¶ Fred was one of the more progressive farmers in the area. He was one of the first to have a horse-drawn mower, a great improvement over the hand scythe, and he did custom mowing for the neighbors.
¶ He also had one of the first horse-powered hay balers and did custom bailing.
¶ Fred sold hay to the livery stable, where Penney’s store now stands in Lewistown. He also did some freighting, from Helena to Billings, Fort Benton, Gilt Edge, Kendall and Maiden.
¶ The freighters hauled oats and other grain, wool and pork to Billings. They brought back barbed wire, machinery, nails, dried fruit and canned goods to the stores and 50 gallon barrels of whiskey for the many bars.
¶ The coming of the railroad in 1904 put an end to the freighting business.
¶ The tracks for the new Jaw Bone Railroad were laid from Harlowtown to Glengarry during the summer of 1902. It was a big occasion for the Jenni family when the first engine came chugging into Glengarry one Sunday.
¶ Fred, Emma, the seven girls in their pretty white dresses, and young Fred (known as Fritz) drove to Glengarry in their three-seated buggy with the fringed top and matched team of spirited horses. As the engine rolled down the tracks, it got bigger and bigger in the eyes of the young Jenni girls.
¶ About 1900, the older girls started attending the McMillan School about three miles from their home. As they walked along the roadway they could see the bench between Cottonwood and Beaver Creeks and the stage coach coming into the relay station at the east end of the Beaver Creek Valley. Fresh horses were hitched up to the coach, and soon it would pass them on the road, horses at a trot, going west to Moore and other points.
¶ Fred and John Jenni, Julius Peterson, and Mike Brass built a school, later known as the Jenni School, in 1902. It was about 1½ miles from Fred’s place and he served on the school board for many years.
¶ When smallpox vaccine became available, he took all the students to Lewistown for vaccination. It was 40 degrees below zero, so he lined the bobsled with blankets and covered the children well.
¶ Emma’s health began to fail in 1898. In the spring of 1906 she was expecting her eighth child, and her sister, Frieda, came to help her. Emma died in October of that year.
¶ Fred and Frieda took the children to see the body at the undertaker’s parlor and later to the funeral, held in the old Presbyterian Church, across Fifth Avenue and closer to Main Street than the present church.
¶ The undertaker’s parlor was a large room, part of it used for storage, located at 6th Ave. and Main Street. Nearly 70 years later, Hulda, then 8, could recall the floor of foot-wide boards with cracks between them. It was scrubbed clean. The casket rested on two chairs, with a runner carpet in front of it and curtains beyond. Members of the family sat on either side of the casket and one by one the children were taken up to it for a last look at their mother.
¶ When Aunt Frieda left in November, Fred and the older girls were left with the task of rearing the younger children. Anna, about 24, and Louise, 13, assisted by Marie, 11, took over the housekeeping duties. Fritz was nearly 10. Hulda was 8, Clara 6, Lena nearly 5 and Sam was about 3 months old.
¶ A neighbor, Mrs. Michael Trepp, took Sam and reared him, and he later took the name of Trepp.
¶ Anna had started to cut patterns of doll dresses when she was a very little girl. She began to make dresses for herself and her sisters when she was about nine and continued to do until her marriage.
¶ Louise had taken over most of the cooking before her mother died. She and her sisters did the baking, laundry, ironing and made butter, bread and cheese. They mixed bread and set it to raise before school. Papa came in to punch it down and shape the loaves, and the girls baked it after school.
¶ Anna helped her father with the outside chores. Fritz did the milking and went out in the fields to plow. The children helped Papa butcher the hogs and cure the pork. When he butchered a beef, they canned it.
¶ After his wife’s death, Fred bought an organ. He could play by ear, but he taught himself to play by note. “Nearer My God To Thee” was his favorite song. Anna learned to play from a beginner’s book and practiced by the hour.
¶ Fred’s niece, Clara Mercer, and her four children, came to spend the summer of 1907 with the John Jenni family. She started a Sunday School for the two families. They met at one home or the other and then had Sunday dinner together.
¶ Later, Sunday School was held in the Jenni School and then in a room over a store in Glengarry.
¶ As time passed, the Jenni children married and moved into their own homes, but the family ties remained strong.
¶ Fred continued to operate the home ranch and, for a time, Marie, her husband, Ernest Reuss, and their three children lived there and helped with the ranching.
¶ Fred was hard of hearing for many years making communication difficult. He died in July 1944, at the age of 88….
FRED JENNI SR. WAS A SMALL, BUT MIGHTY MAN
Condensed from an article published in the Lewistown News-Argus
¶ “Mama’s dead.”¶ With those words, little Lena Jenni, 4½ met her older sisters and brother when they returned from school, Oct. 23, 1906.
¶ When Papa—Fred Jenni—received the sad news earlier in the day, he went tearing off with the horse and buggy to the old Catholic Hospital south of Main Street in Lewistown, Montana. He refused to believe. But Emma Flueckeger Jenni had died during minor surgery at the age of 33.
¶ Her death marked a turning point in Fred’s life. At an age when a man normally puts aside the reins of parental guidance, Fred, at 50, was suddenly saddled with the dual role of father and mother to eight children, ages 2½ months to 14 years.
¶ A Swiss immigrant, Fred was a hard-working farmer. He was a small man, not much over five feet tall, with a great deal of inner strength and courage, which helped him through those trying months and years after his young wife died.
¶ He came to America from Waldeck, Switzerland in 1869 at the age of 13, with his parents, Samuel and Anna Segesseman Jenni; two sisters, Eliza and Anna; and two brothers, Gottlieb and John. They settled on a farm at Amazonia, Mo. Fred went to school there for a year.
¶ In 1881 or 82, he and John left for Helena, stopping in Leadville, Colo., to work for awhile in the mines. Fred worked on a farm at Helena, [Montana], then came to Central Montana and homesteaded on Beaver Creek, eight miles west of Lewistown. John came later and filed on the adjoining 160 acres.
¶ Fred filed a claim for water rights on Beaver Creek and the two brothers built an irrigation ditch, which they shared over the years. When Fred was installing the headgate, a stranger, who happened to be [the artist] Charlie Russell, commented “You poor bugger!”
¶ Fred built a corral for his frisky horses first, then he and John built a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor. When their mother came out in 1884, the brothers built a big, two-room log house.
¶ Two years later their mother died of pneumonia. The brothers built a casket and neighbors joined them for the funeral service, held without a minister, in the Jenni home.’
Emma Flueckeger was also an immigrant from Switzerland. She was born Jan. 18, 1872, in Hutwyl, the daughter of Fred and Maria Flueckeger. The family, which included four other children; Fritz, Alfred, Frieda (the late Mrs. Fred Huppi of Lewistown), and John, came to America in 1883 and settled in Amazonia, Mo.
¶ Another child, Carl, was born there and adopted by a neighbor when his mother died less than a year later. When Carl was studying for the ministry in 1913, he spent the summer in Central Montana and helped start a young people’s group in Glengarry, where a church was then being built.
¶ Emma Flueckeger came to Montana in 1891 and Fred met her when she arrived in Cottonwood. Fred, who was already growing bald at the age of 35, and Emma, just 19, were married there July 2, 1891.
¶ Charlie Russell was among the wedding guests and danced with the pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed young bride who spoke only the German-Swiss language.
¶ Emma and Fred had eight children—Anna, Louise, Marie, Fred, Hulda, Clara, Lena, and Sam—during their 15 years together.
¶ They raised a big garden and stored potatoes in one cave, vegetables in another. They raised currants, gooseberries, strawberries and rhubarb. Milk was kept in large, shallow pans in a cupboard with screened doors. The cream was skimmed from it as it rose to the top and Emma and the girls made butter.
¶ Emma also made cheese, using a wash boiler of milk. The curd was put into tin frames and weighed down. Every few days it was washed and salted. With a one horse cart pulled by a buckskin named Buck, Emma took cheese, butter and eggs to Lewistown and sold them.
¶ She cooked on a Home Comfort stove, with a warming oven and copper reservoir that held several pails of water. In the winter, Fred would make several all-day trips to the mountains to get firewood.
¶ Kerosene was not always available, since it had to be freighted into town, and it was used sparingly. Fred and Emma had two lamps in the kitchen—one above the stove and another on the table. The members of the family all sat around the table to read. Fred, interested in the news of the outside world, read a great deal, often until after midnight.
¶ Homemade candles were used in all the other rooms.
¶ Fred was one of the more progressive farmers in the area. He was one of the first to have a horse-drawn mower, a great improvement over the hand scythe, and he did custom mowing for the neighbors.
¶ He also had one of the first horse-powered hay balers and did custom bailing.
¶ Fred sold hay to the livery stable, where Penney’s store now stands in Lewistown. He also did some freighting, from Helena to Billings, Fort Benton, Gilt Edge, Kendall and Maiden.
¶ The freighters hauled oats and other grain, wool and pork to Billings. They brought back barbed wire, machinery, nails, dried fruit and canned goods to the stores and 50 gallon barrels of whiskey for the many bars.
¶ The coming of the railroad in 1904 put an end to the freighting business.
¶ The tracks for the new Jaw Bone Railroad were laid from Harlowtown to Glengarry during the summer of 1902. It was a big occasion for the Jenni family when the first engine came chugging into Glengarry one Sunday.
¶ Fred, Emma, the seven girls in their pretty white dresses, and young Fred (known as Fritz) drove to Glengarry in their three-seated buggy with the fringed top and matched team of spirited horses. As the engine rolled down the tracks, it got bigger and bigger in the eyes of the young Jenni girls.
¶ About 1900, the older girls started attending the McMillan School about three miles from their home. As they walked along the roadway they could see the bench between Cottonwood and Beaver Creeks and the stage coach coming into the relay station at the east end of the Beaver Creek Valley. Fresh horses were hitched up to the coach, and soon it would pass them on the road, horses at a trot, going west to Moore and other points.
¶ Fred and John Jenni, Julius Peterson, and Mike Brass built a school, later known as the Jenni School, in 1902. It was about 1½ miles from Fred’s place and he served on the school board for many years.
¶ When smallpox vaccine became available, he took all the students to Lewistown for vaccination. It was 40 degrees below zero, so he lined the bobsled with blankets and covered the children well.
¶ Emma’s health began to fail in 1898. In the spring of 1906 she was expecting her eighth child, and her sister, Frieda, came to help her. Emma died in October of that year.
¶ Fred and Frieda took the children to see the body at the undertaker’s parlor and later to the funeral, held in the old Presbyterian Church, across Fifth Avenue and closer to Main Street than the present church.
¶ The undertaker’s parlor was a large room, part of it used for storage, located at 6th Ave. and Main Street. Nearly 70 years later, Hulda, then 8, could recall the floor of foot-wide boards with cracks between them. It was scrubbed clean. The casket rested on two chairs, with a runner carpet in front of it and curtains beyond. Members of the family sat on either side of the casket and one by one the children were taken up to it for a last look at their mother.
¶ When Aunt Frieda left in November, Fred and the older girls were left with the task of rearing the younger children. Anna, about 24, and Louise, 13, assisted by Marie, 11, took over the housekeeping duties. Fritz was nearly 10. Hulda was 8, Clara 6, Lena nearly 5 and Sam was about 3 months old.
¶ A neighbor, Mrs. Michael Trepp, took Sam and reared him, and he later took the name of Trepp.
¶ Anna had started to cut patterns of doll dresses when she was a very little girl. She began to make dresses for herself and her sisters when she was about nine and continued to do until her marriage.
¶ Louise had taken over most of the cooking before her mother died. She and her sisters did the baking, laundry, ironing and made butter, bread and cheese. They mixed bread and set it to raise before school. Papa came in to punch it down and shape the loaves, and the girls baked it after school.
¶ Anna helped her father with the outside chores. Fritz did the milking and went out in the fields to plow. The children helped Papa butcher the hogs and cure the pork. When he butchered a beef, they canned it.
¶ After his wife’s death, Fred bought an organ. He could play by ear, but he taught himself to play by note. “Nearer My God To Thee” was his favorite song. Anna learned to play from a beginner’s book and practiced by the hour.
¶ Fred’s niece, Clara Mercer, and her four children, came to spend the summer of 1907 with the John Jenni family. She started a Sunday School for the two families. They met at one home or the other and then had Sunday dinner together.
¶ Later, Sunday School was held in the Jenni School and then in a room over a store in Glengarry.
¶ As time passed, the Jenni children married and moved into their own homes, but the family ties remained strong.
¶ Fred continued to operate the home ranch and, for a time, Marie, her husband, Ernest Reuss, and their three children lived there and helped with the ranching.
¶ Fred was hard of hearing for many years making communication difficult. He died in July 1944, at the age of 88….
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