Servants' Hall - History of Appleton and America

Servants' Hall - History of Appleton and America

Mary Deimer was the last cook employed by the Rogers at Hearthstone.  She started when she was 14 years old.  She probably had only four or five years of grade school education.  She labored 16 hours a day in the kitchen.

She must have been an excellent cook.  Henry retired and he and Cremora moved to Chicago to live in the Plaza Hotel in 1893. Apart from maybe a few prized items, they took only two things with them:  Their clothes and Mary as their cook.

Mary is an excellent representation of the people who worked as domestics in the Rogers household.  They were generally:

- Working class

- Immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants, and

- Catholic.

Mary was born in Germany and spoke German as her first language and at home.  The 1885 census shows two unnamed German born women servants living with the family at Hearthstone.  One could have been Mary Deimer.

Appleton was a boom town from 1860-1880, growing 400%.  Most of the new citizens were immigrants and most of those were from Germany.  Even through 1917, more than half the people living in Wisconsin were born outside the US.

Most of the servants in the Rogers household spoke German. In fact, more people living in Appleton probably spoke German than English.  Appleton had three daily German-language newspapers but only two daily English-language newspapers in the 1880s.  Two of the German papers were published until World War One and the third, the Appleton Volksfreund, was published until the 1930s.