Glattfelder Gazette

In August 1912, in a leased grove on what had been Solomon Falkenstine’s farm, somebody called the family to dinner and the sky opened. “The diners stood about the tables with their umbrellas over their heads,” a York paper reported. The family didn’t own so much as a shed, and some of them considered going home. Then the rain stopped and the sun came out, and the people who had been thinking about leaving stayed.

That same summer the family talked about buying ground “upon which some sort of shelter can be provided.” By August 1913 a pavilion stood on a hill above the old homestead. In 1914 a few members built a refreshment stand for less than $100, and in some years of the 1920s it sold more than 100 gallons of ice cream. Canvas flys and a deck came later, and by 2003 a roof covered it all, so nobody had to stand in the rain to eat.

Most of belonging looks like staying one more wet hour. Stay through the bad hour, then go home and do something about the rain.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/gazette/standing-in-the-rain-with-umbrellas

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 103–104. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

In November 1912 several directors of our association went out to a grove on a hill in Springfield township, York county, and started clearing it. They didn’t own it yet. For seven summers the reunion had met on other people’s land, and the board had just agreed to pay Martin Glatfelter $200 for a little under three acres. The deed came on January 21, 1913.

That August the Rev. Adam Stump dedicated a 44-by-64-foot pavilion with a dirt floor. Then the bill came due. Seventy-eight relatives gave $412, the land and pavilion cost $915 that first year, and the last of the directors’ loans wasn’t repaid until August 1919. The place got its name, Heimwald, home woods, in 1914, though the grove had really been the homestead of Casper’s brother-in-law, Henry Walter, across the creek from Casper’s.

Families drift, and a feeling can’t be found again on a map. A hill can. If you belong to anything that runs only on habit and goodwill, give it an address.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/gazette/home-woods

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 95–97. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

On January 14, 2004, the municipal council of a small town near Zurich voted to send four hundred dollars to a family reunion in Pennsylvania. The town was Glattfelden, the place Casper had left in 1743. The family was his. The money went toward getting Heimwald Park ready for the hundredth reunion. “We entirely appreciate,” the council wrote, “all the efforts people and society undertake to make traditions stay and survive.”

The amount was small. What it crossed was not: the same ocean Casper crossed, in the opposite direction, and two hundred and sixty-one years. When he sailed in 1743, the leaving was meant to be permanent. Emigrants did not expect to hear from home again. But the line never fully closed, because particular people on both shores kept reaching across it, generation after generation.

This is the last story of our first season, and the right one to end on. A beginning reaches forward much further than the person who makes it can ever see. Casper could not have pictured Heimwald, or the reunion, or this newsletter, or you. The line he opened by leaving in 1743 has never closed. It runs straight through you, and it asks only what every generation before gave it: that somebody keep reaching across.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/the-town-that-sent-400-dollars

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 155–157. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

When Casper Glattfelder died in the early spring of 1775, he had fifty-five grandchildren. He had met five or six of them. The rest arrived after he was gone. The man who started this entire American family never got to see the family he started.

Six sons who lived to raise families became fifty-five grandchildren the record can name, and the line has not stopped multiplying since. His last surviving grandchild, Catharine, died in Ohio in 1887 at ninety-two — a hundred and twelve years after Casper was in the ground, in a state that was wilderness when he died. Today more than fifty thousand of his descendants are alive across the continent, under a dozen spellings of his name.

Casper saw almost none of it. He measured his decision to leave Switzerland against a sick crossing, a dead wife, a wrong farm, and twenty hard years of clearing ground. The jury was still out when he died. The verdict is us, and he never got to read it. Most of the people who decide the shape of a family never live to see the shape it takes.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/fifty-five-grandchildren

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 12–13. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

When a surveyor finally measured Casper Glattfelder’s farm in 1770, he noted it had been improved for about twenty years — cleared, fenced, built on, worked hard. And in all that time Casper had never legally owned a foot of it. He and Henry Walter were, in the family historian’s blunt phrase, pure-and-simple squatters.

It was not carelessness or poverty. Penn land was cheap, and plenty of honest families lived the same way, working unclaimed ground for years before bothering with the paperwork. Casper died in 1775 without ever holding a clear deed to the farm he had worked for nearly thirty years.

Here is what complicates the picture. The same man who would not file his own land warrant made the trip to Philadelphia to become a naturalized citizen, served as road supervisor and constable, helped organize his church, and built a neighbor’s coffin when the man died. He let the paperwork that protected only himself slide. The obligations that bound him to his neighbors, he met every time. Live now, file later — but pay what you owe the people around you.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/squatters-for-twenty-years

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 7–9 and 43. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

When Casper Glattfelder sold his first American farm in 1746, he did not sell it because it had failed. He sold it, the family has always said, because it did not look like home. So he went looking for ground that did.

He and Henry Walter moved south, turned down one tract over timber too heavy to clear, and kept going up the south branch of the Codorus until they reached a valley that seemed just right. Casper took the west side of the creek, Henry the east, their kinsman Hildebrand just beyond. Three families from Glattfelden rebuilt the cluster of neighbors, land, and church they had left in Switzerland. Family members who have since traveled back to the old Swiss village keep coming home and saying the same thing: the country there looks like the homestead along the Codorus.

Casper had every practical reason to grab the nearest decent field and never move again. Instead, carrying his losses and four motherless children, he kept walking until he found the hillside that felt like his. A century later the railroad ran a line through that valley and named the stop Glatfelter’s Station. His name is still on that ground, which tells you he chose right.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/the-place-that-looked-like-home

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 7 and 40–41. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

About noon on March 21, 1976, a tornado skipped across York County and found the family’s 63-year-old pavilion at Heimwald. The York Daily Record said the winds picked it up and dropped it into destruction. The phrase turned out to be precise. A 1934 repair had left the roof resting on its posts, held down by nothing but its own weight. For forty-two years that was good enough. It took a tornado to find the shortcut.

Then the directors faced the question every wrecked thing forces: rebuild at what size? Grief and pride both said put it back full size. The numbers said they could not afford it. So they built a smaller pavilion for $8,600, paid with insurance and about fifty family gifts, without a cent of debt.

That was the wise, unsentimental choice. Smaller and standing beats grand and gone. As the family’s finances recovered through the 1980s, the directors restored the pavilion to its full original size and rededicated it. The full pavilion the family meets under today exists only because their grandparents were willing, for a while, to settle for less.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/lifted-up-and-dropped-into-destruction

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 133–134. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

In 1966 a new president opened his term with a question almost no leader will ask out loud: if the reunion was dying, would it not be decent to give it a proper burial? It was a fair question. Attendance had fallen from more than 300 in the early 1950s to about 120 a decade later, and the two veterans carrying the association had told a reporter they were not sure it could last.

The board took the question seriously. One director suggested handing Heimwald Park over to the county. Instead, early in 1967, they chose to keep going — and backed the choice with something concrete: an endowment to keep the park in repair no matter how thin any single year ran. The first year brought in about $1,500. It did not reach its modest $10,000 goal until 1984, seventeen years later.

No single gift saved the reunion. What saved it was a discouraged board on a bad day deciding the family was worth more trouble than it was worth abandoning, and then doing the slow, dull work for a generation before anyone could be sure it would hold.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/should-we-give-it-a-decent-burial

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 125–127. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

On October 3, 1910, a York County court granted a charter to the Casper Glattfelder Association of America, and a family became a corporation — a legal person that could own property, sign contracts, and outlive everyone who created it. That was close to unheard of. The newspapers called them one of the first families in the country to do it.

They did it to solve a plain problem. Two reunions in, the family was meeting every August on land it did not own, and when the borrowed grove was sold out from under them, they decided to stop depending on anyone’s goodwill. A handshake committee cannot hold a deed. A chartered corporation can. Within three years they bought the ground overlooking the old homestead that the family still gathers on today.

Of the seventeen men who signed the charter, nine died still in office, the last of them in the 1940s. The association did not die with them. That was the whole point. They understood that enthusiasm fades and founders die, so they built a body that did not depend on any one person staying alive or interested. It is still standing.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/one-of-the-first-incorporated-families-in-america

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 91–93. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

Before Casper ever set out for America, his older brother tried to go first. John Peter Glattfelder decided in 1742 to take his wife and six children to Pennsylvania. He died that spring, before the party had even crossed the Swiss border. His family carried his body home and buried him in the town he had been trying to leave.

His widow, Salomea, crossed anyway. A year later she gathered the six children, the youngest not quite two, and sailed with Casper’s group. What became of her, the record will not say. But her children left clear tracks, and the tracks run south — into the Carolina and Virginia back country, where over the generations the name settled into a spelling most of them no longer recognized: Clodfelter.

For years nobody could prove the link. In 1912 the family historian stood up at a reunion and announced he had found it beyond a doubt. The southern Clodfelters descend from John Peter, the brother who died at the border. He failed at the one thing he set out to do, and thousands of people are alive today because of the journey he planned and never took.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/the-brother-who-died-before-the-border

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 4–5 and 15–16. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.