Hillgartner Family History: Hillgartner

(var. Hilgartner, Hillgaertner, Hilgertner, Hillgardner)

All known Hillgartners appear to originate from the tiny village of Kesselbach, or “Boiling Brook”, about 50 miles northeast of Frankfurt, Germany. The name of the village clearly derives from its proximity to the waters nearby. On the other hand, the origins of the family name are obscure. The early Oberhessischen records use Hillg_rtner as a sequence name over Hillgerter or Hildegart. Research by Kurt Hilgaertner suggests the name derives from Hildegardis (1279) or Hildegartis (1284). “-is” is a Latin possessive, so the surname could mean “of or by Hildegard”.

Then again, “garten” means garden in German, so the surname could also have meant Hilda`s garden. There is no “hill” in the modern language; a hill is a “berg” in Germany. There is, however, an archaic "hil", meaning bog or swamp. A dubious stretch might be the ancient word for “spear”, which was “hilde”. We can only be sure that we are not the descendants of a horizontally challenged gardener, however poetic our name is in English.

Kesselbach is one of several small villages in the German State of Hessen which together were all part of the Londorf parish in the 19th century. Today they make up the modern township of Greater Rabenau, which extends up the protected valleys of the Lumda into densely wooded mountains to the north and east.

Historically, the town grew up around the village of Londorf and its castle, established in 858 A.D. The small village of Geilshausen also dates from around this time. The village of Odenshausen is first mentioned in 1093. Rueddingshausen was founded to the north in 1238, and Allertshausen appears out from the spruce and beech forests in 1260. The 13th century also sees the still-tiny village of Kesselbach appear just south of Londorf.

Kesselbach still numbers less than 700 inhabitants. The modern Hillgartners have spread throughout Germany into Austria, Italy, and France. There are two long branches in Poland, and a significant offshoot in western Canada.

There are at least three distinct groups in the United States, descended from immigrants to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Iowa. There are pockets in Missouri, New York, and Texas. But they all trace back to the same region in Germany.

The first documented Hillgartner is Johann, a "bauer", or peasant farmer, born about 1580. His name appears atop a family tree prepared in 1936 for his descendants in Darmstadt. The earliest remaining parish record documents the birth of his granddaughter Anna in 1628.

This is not to say that there were not Hillgartners before Johann, or indeed from elsewhere in Europe. The records in the Londorf Kirchenbücher are very difficult to decipher; the condition of the oldest records, which begin in 1624, is very poor. Dr. Ned Benson managed to parse them out, in late 2002, uncovering two previously unknown brothers of Johann. But there are still large gaps, and a near-total lack of records from before 1600. This is probably due to the upheavals of the time.

The Thirty Years War was disastrous for Hesse and all of Germany. The war was fought entirely with poorly paid mercenaries whose only reward and source of supply was plunder. Towns and villages were ransacked time and again by the rival Protestant and Catholic armies as they marched up and down the country.

The town and castle of Londorf did not escape, although the inhabitants were in fact harder hit by the plague. You could disappear into the forests to evade an army; you couldn't run from the plague.

In the 1600's the Hillgartners spread out into the valley, forming three distinct branches of the family. The Hillgartners of Allertshausen appear to have been the most prosperous. There was another branch, mostly farmers, in Climbach. The Hillgartners of Kesselbach increasingly became merchants as well as farmers. And, in the middle of the 1700's, another branch sprang up in Darmstadt well to the south.

Matthaus Hillgartner

From the 17^th century on Londorf became the Rabenauer tracht, or hunting preserve. It also became the practice, around this time, for Hesse to maintain and drill a large standing militia, not so much to defend the territory, but to hire out to others to fight the wars of Europe.

Matthaus Hillgartner, the great-great-grandson of the original Johann, was a dragoon in the State militia. Born in 1731, he is a somewhat protean figure in Hillgartner genealogy. In 1767, he pops up in the parish records as the acknowledged father of an illegitimate son, Konrad, born to Katherina Schomber. There are no Hillgartners listed as godparents.

The Southern Hilgartners in Maryland trace their lineage through Matthaus. In their version, he married the girl. But the second page of the Darmstadt Stammbaum, which was prepared in 1936, does not mention Konrad at all. It only chronicles a marriage in Darmstadt a year later, in 1768, and the subsequent births of four more children. More mysteriously, the mother is not named.

The kind interpretation would be that Matthaus did the right thing by Katharina, and was promoted or transferred to the more strategic posting in the big city. Alternatively, the louse may have skipped out on the luckless girl and started over.

The Kirchenbuch tends to support the latter premise. There is no further mention of Matthaus. Of course, he may simply have not been much of a church-goer. But Konrad, the abandoned son, reappears some twenty years later in five entries. Evidently he followed in his father’s footsteps up to a point, becoming a Darmstadt Musketeer, but doing the right thing and marrying Elisabetha Daupfer. All five of their children were born in Kesselbach, so he either returned or never left.

The Hilgartners of Baltimore

Konrad the fusilier’s first son Ludwig married Helene Mueller of Allertshausen. Both Ludwig and Helene Hilgartner ended their days in America, arriving on 18 June 1868 abroad the Steamer "Berlin", courtesy of their oldest son.

The junior Ludwig was born in 1804 and married Kunigunda Dietz. He immigrated to the United States in 1851 at age 19. Settling in Maryland, he worked as a stone cutter and bricklayer, making tombstones and doing masonry work.

He developed a business relationship with a stone mason, Gottfried Schimpf, and in 1863 they founded the Stone company of "Schimpf and Hilgartner". The business thrived, and In 1873 Ludwig bought out his partner.

By 1879 Hilgartner was one of the most prominent and well-known finishers of marble in the United States, employing 22 workers and machinery powered by a thirty horse engine. Ludwig brought his two sons, Andrew and Charles L., in the finishing shop, working their way up as apprentices, and in 1885 the company was renamed L. Hilgartner and Sons.

Ludwig’s success enticed most of his family over to America as well. His brother Johann’s son, Henry Louis, became a surgeon and went on to found the Texas Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital in Austin.

Heinrich Mathew, the third brother, founded the Hilgartner Blacksmith and Carriage Works in Towson. He also married Jenny Steiber and raised fourteen children. Two of his grandchildren became involved in Baltimore politics. Florence Hilgartner Fox's stepdaughter was the wife of sometime County Councilman Eugene Kibbe. Her sister Jeanette or “Nett”, lost her new husband John Marshall during the 1921 flu epidemic. During the 1930's she became the close friend of longtime Baltimore County Democratic Party boss Harrison Rider.

Jeanette and Florence Hilgartner in front of the Carriage Works

Ludwig Hilgartner passed away on January 4, 1902. The company kept the name L. Hilgartner and Sons until 1906, when it was incorporated as the Hilgartner Marble Company of Baltimore City. It continued to grow under the leadership of his son Charles L., at one point having branches in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Carrera, Italy. The company Ludwig founded remains in business today as the Hilgartner Natural Stone Company, Inc.

The Hillgartners of Burlington

In the 1800’s, Burlington, Iowa became something of a Mecca for German-speaking immigrants to the United States. Land was plentiful and fertile, and the early settlers didn’t abandon their mother tongue. So the settlers came, in waves like the wheat.

The first Hillgartner to arrive in Burlington was Wilhelm, born 1835 the son of Johann Balthazar and Catharina Strack. He was not the first immigrant to Iowa from the Kesselbach area. Wilhelm married Elizabeth Magel in 1862, daughter of Siebert Magel, who was born in Gelshausen and arrived in 1835 when (according to the 1879 History of Des Moines County) “the settlements at that time were few and far between; Burlington but a small village.”. Siebert did well, “becoming a Democrat, owner of 165 acres of land and several thousand dollars' worth of city and other property “, and clearly the news of his success got back to Kesselbach. As for Wilhelm, he became a Republican and prosperous farmer of “175 acres of land, well stocked and improved”, and had seven children.

Soon another Hillgartner arrived, the son of Johannes and Catharine Henkel of Kesselbach. He and Wilhelm were second cousins, both the great-grandsons of Johannes Wilhelm and Eva Romer. Born Johannes in 1838, he Americanized his name to John G. Hillgardner and married Louisa Helmick. When she died young, he remarried to her sister Lucinda.

In 1870 a third Hillgartner appeared, according to the 1890 census. Born in 1847, Caspar was the younger brother of John G., and also adopted the Hillgardner spelling. He married a local girl and settled down the road from John G.

A second Wilhelm showed up in 1882, with a young girl in tow whom he immediately proceeded to marry. Wilhelm Hilgaertner was the much younger cousin of John G. and Caspar, and also a second cousin to the first Wilhelm. Born in 1854, his father was Wilhelm Hilgaertner, a stone mason in Kesselbach who had prospered . The younger Wilhelm fell in love with Anna Luisa Roemer, whose family was not so well off. Evidently his father forbade or vehemently disapproved of the match. So the young couple decided to elope, booking passage to America from Antwerp, and making their way to Iowa. They soon were able to bring over her parents and sisters as well.

Jakob and Margarete Hillgartner and family, c. 1896

The early 1890’s brought yet another Wilhelm to Burlington. Born in 1871, William E. was the son of Jacob, the younger brother of the first Burlington Hillgartner, and Margarete Schafer. Jacob had stayed behind to become the village constable in Kesselbach. He was rather an imposing and autocratic presence; perhaps the reason why his eldest son elected to leave Kesselbach. Or maybe Wilhelm simply wanted to get back to the land.

(l. to r., Margarete, Ludwig, Peter, Eleonore, Jakob, Karl; Katharina in window, c. 1896)

William set up a farm in Burlington Township, and married Martha Louisa Klaus in 1895. She was the daughter of Michael Klaus who had himself immigrated from Weinheim, Darmstadt, and Wilhemina Roembke, who was born in Prussia. Not long after the birth of their second son in 1898, William abruptly pulled up stakes and moved to Missouri.

A final Hillgartner arrived in America on his way to Burlington in 1901. Heinrich or Henry was my great-grandfather’s younger brother, and arrived at Ellis Island with his young wife Ida, listing his occupation as butcher. But after touching base with his uncle Wilhelm, he too moved on, becoming a traveling salesman and never really laying down roots.

The Missouri Hillgartners

Four Generations
of Hillgartners,
on the farm outside Fulton, Missouri, 1951:

son Frank Edward;
great-grandson Delbert Lionel;
patriarch William E.
grandson
William Lawrence.

In 1898, William E. Hillgartner left Iowa and moved to the rolling hill country outside of Fulton, Missouri, where my grandfather, Delbert Benjamin, was born in 1899. Why he left is unknown, but Fulton is the seat of Calloway County, which managed to secede from both the North and the South during the Civil War (becoming “The Kingdom of Calloway”), and its reputation for stubborn independence probably suited him just fine.

Settling in just outside of town, William and Martha Louise raised three sons: Frank, Roy, and Delbert, who all took up farming in the area as well. My great-grandfather remained an active farmer well into his 80’s, until the death of his wife in 1956. I particularly remember the goats and bees they kept, and the smell of his ever-present pipe.

Delbert, the youngest son, married Gladys Lawrence, daughter of Oscar Lehman Lawrence and Alice Stambaugh. The Stambaughs were long established in the area; Oscar’s father had migrated to Fulton from Texas, where Oscar’s maternal grandfather, Albin Dearing, was a well-known Baptist preacher along the Red River.

Delbert built a home for his bride which is still standing, although no longer on its original site. In the 1980’s local preservationists realized it was the last log cabin left in the county, and had it moved and reconstructed closer to the city limits.

Tragedy struck in 1923 when, just four months after the birth of his second child, Alice Blanche, Delbert was felled by typhoid fever. Gladys eventually remarried, to Albert “Pop” Klick, but the Depression forced William to leave school to help out on the farm. Not long after he would have graduated, William packed a bag for Chicago, where he studied electronics at night school. When war was declared, he enlisted in the Signal Corps, and saw service in France and Belgium.

Coming home, Bill became a radio engineer at WIBC in Indianapolis, providing the live coverage of the Indy 500 auto race each year. He married the station's music librarian, Rosamond Tillotson, who also appeared on a morning talk show as “Helen Baker”. Married in 1946, they had two sons, Delbert and Malcolm, in Indianapolis.

In 1952, William was accepted into the Foreign Service with the Voice of America. His first posting was to Morocco, when Tangier was still an International Zone, where daughter Deborah was born. It was at this time
that he made the trip back to Kesselbach to visit his granduncle Jacob, who passed on the records and photographs we have in the family today.

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