Carrie (Caroline) Marie Ritter Zumstein

(continuing on from the binder "Zumstein Family History")

"In Helvetia, Oregon U.S.A on October 21, 1907 Carrie Marie Ritter was born at the Yungen Farm. She was the second child of Elise and Fred Ritter. She joined a sister Lillian age eighteen months. Elise was 18 years old and Fred was 24.

Unfortunately circumstances caused Elise and Fred to separate before Carrie was born. They were then divorced. Two years later Elise married John Merz and Carrie soon had 5 brothers and 5 more sisters, Johnny, Louis, Edith, Marie, William, Eloise, Virginia, Donald, Jessie, and Kenneth.

The following is Carrie's story as she has written it herself, with a few clarifications added:

I was born at Helvetia, Oregon on Oct. 21, 1907. Mama's maiden name was Alice Yungen. When Mama was 15 years old Grandma Yungen died and she then had to keep house for Grandpa and her three brothers. When she was seventeen years old she married my Father, Fred Ritter. That marriage ended in divorce. Sometime later she met John Merz a friend of my Uncle Jake's, who worked with him at the logging camp in Aberdeen, Washington. Two years later, March 10, 1910, John and Mama were married, we always called him Papa. Mama wanted to continue caring for Grandpa Yungen so we all lived at Grandpa's house, on the Yungen Farm, until I was ten years old.

Grandma and Grandpa came to America with their five children in 1889. They settled in the Swiss settlement of Helvetia. Everyone spoke Swiss, Grandpa, as well as most of the other older folks, never learned English. Swiss was always spoken in the homes, church and Sunday school were conducted in German.

When I started school, I could not speak any English. Most of our school mates could not speak it either. Fortunately we had a teacher who could understand and also speak Swiss, which helped a great deal. We had another teacher in the second grade who could also speak Swiss. Being young we learned English quite rapidly. We had to walk two miles to school except in the spring. Weather permitting we could take a short cut through the neighbors field. Occasionally when we had a heavy snowfall Papa would take us and the neighbor children to school on a sled with a horse, at the same time taking the milk to the main road where it was hauled by wagon to Hillsboro to the condensary. During the winter months we wore high top shoes, like the loggers of today wear. They reached almost to our knees, with laces, hooks and two straps with buckles at the top. Oh, how we hated those shoes! Especially when a cousin could take her's off (when she got to school) and wear dainty slippers all day. But most children wore the same kind of shoes we did, with the muddy roads it probably was the best for us. Some times when we had to walk in the snow Mama would cut the feet off our worn out long stockings and sew a strip of elastic across the bottom to fit under the heel of our shoes. The snow would cling to the stockings, when we arrived at school we would strip them off and our shoes would be fairly dry. Our school was one room, one teacher and 55 students. I graduated from the eighth grade when I was 13, in 1921. For two or three years, in the summer we had several weeks of school to learn to read and write German. In my teens I started using Caroline as my legal name because I thought it sounded nicer.

Our church was near the school, and we attended Sunday School and Church regularly, rain or shine. Grandpa Yungen would walk with us so we didn't mind the long walk. Our pastor served two churches, five miles apart. In winter our services were always in the afternoon which we children didn't like very well. No time to play on Sunday afternoons! In the summer we had morning services. The congregation of both churches combined to have a picnic on "Children's Day" in the spring and a Harvest Festival in the fall. I can still remember the large tubs of ice cream and the 10 gallon milk cans full of lemonade that was served. What a treat that was for us country kids.

With 10 younger brothers and sisters at home there was always much work to be done. My sister Lillian helped mostly with the heavy work, scrubbing floors and lots of washing clothes by hand. One of my chores was to fill all the lamps and lanterns with kerosene and wash all the glass chimneys once a week. When I was 14, in good weather, I had to go with horse and buggy on Saturdays to North Plains, a small town five miles away, to get groceries. The horse was old and would never have run away yet I was always concerned he might not make it up the steep hill without stopping and backing down the hill. He never did.

In 1923 Papa traded the farm in Helvetia for a larger farm in Battle Ground, Washington. It was there that I first met Joe (my future husband) in November of 1924. He was asked by a friend of his to drive him out from Portland to see my folks. Before going back home Joe asked me to go out with him Saturday night to a movie at the Broadway Theatre in Portland. From that time on, we dated regularly. Always going to Portland and after the movie stopping to get a strawberry sundae before going home. At the time Joe was working on a dairy in Washougal. It was quite a long trip from there to Battle Ground, to Portland, bring me home and back to work at 5 a.m. to milk the cows. We were married in Vancouver at the Old Clark County Courthouse. We had a reception in Battle Ground at home. There is a photo of me in a wedding dress with Joe that was taken when Lillian insisted that I should wear her dress and veil for a picture. I never wore that dress at my wedding."

The next part in this story is their lives once they were married. That's for another post though.