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“A Mennonite Woman in ‘Thanksgiving Town’: The Employment of Edith Swartzendruber, 1935-1941”

Labor’s Heritage, v.3, #1, Winter 1991

Edith Swartzendruber Nisly was born in 1919 to Elmer and Mary Bender Swartzendruber on a farm near Wellman, a small town in southeastern Iowa. The family had lived in the area since the 1850s, when her great grandparents settled there to farm and raise a family. Her great-grandfather became minister of the first Amish Mennonite congregation officially organized in the area. In the decades to follow the Swartzendrubers maintained close ties to farm and church, but Edith encountered an influence that ultimately caused her to see the non-Mennonite world differently than her parents or earlier generations viewed it. In the mid-1930s she took a job at a small turkey processing factory, an employment experience that altered her perceptions but did not change her values. What follows is a narrative by Edith’s daughter of that work experience.

Edith’s father served as a minister in this growing, tightly-knit Mennonite community. By the 1920s and 1930s there were five Mennonite churches in the area and a total of 1000 to 1500 members. Upper Deer Creek Mennonite Church, where Edith worshiped with her family, had a weekly attendance of around 300 people. These people not only worshipped together but they sent their children to the same public schools nearby, they conducted their business with each other as much as possible and they socialized with each other. In the first decades of the twentieth century, when transportation limited mobility and church beliefs called for strong community ties, the lives of the Mennonites of rural Wellman, Iowa, were closely interrelated. Church, school and family consisted mainly of the same people. In addition, they retained the German vernacular and conducted church services in that language until nearly 1940.

Mennonites believed in a strong sense of community. Salvation was closely tied to the life of the church and its members as they made decisions together throughout their lives. They intended to live this community life separate from the world, most notably through non-resistance and nonconformity. Non-resistance meant several things to Mennonites. First and foremost, it indicated that they would not take part in any war, that life rather than death was the business of the church. It was also a part of their everyday lives through peaceful interpersonal relationships. Nonconformity also had several facets. The most readily apparent was a distinctive mode of dress. The church felt that its members should dress plainly and simply. Women wore long dresses and white prayer veilings over their hair. Men shunned ties. Both men and women wore subdued colors. More than an issue of morality, clothing signified humility in a world of pride, promoted uniformity within the church and helped to maintain a separation from the world. Nonconformity also meant a lifestyle that eschewed the accumulation of material goods, embraced a simple form of life and level of consumption and promoted honesty in business transactions.

In 1933 when Edith was fourteen and ready to graduate from the eighth grade, she encountered an obstacle in the form of an unwritten but firm church belief that forbade high school attendance. Education, the church felt, was unnecessary and would draw young people away from the church and the community. Edith loved school and did not want to quit. Her parents, particularly her father who had longed to go to college, disagreed with the church’s views on education but as the minister’s family, they felt a need to acquiesce in the congregation’s desires. Edith and her parents agreed that she would attend high school for one year, a compromise discouraged by the church but one that it grudgingly allowed. At the end of the school year in 1934, Edith finished her studies and began her work life.

The years of the depression touched this rural community, but apparently not to the extent that they affected much of the rest of the United States. The Swartzendrubers lived on the farm that had belonged to the family for several generations. They had land on which to grow crops and food to put on their table in much the same way that they had done in previous years. Edith remembers their large garden that they maintained every summer: “I think it was one of my mother’s aims to have a clean garden because I know we hoed and hoed and kept it clean, kept it so that it produced well. And we not only planted a few things. We planted enough potatoes for the winter and enough sweet corn and peas and beans and beats and everything.” The family never lacked a variety of fruits and vegetables. In addition to the garden they had an orchard and berry patch that produced cherries, peaches, plums, apples, grapes, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries.

A source of income for those years was a family milk business begun in the early 1930s. The Swartzendruber family had cows but at the time there was only a market for the cream; so they began to make chocolate milk, bottle it, and sell it in Wellman. In assembly line fashion, the entire family helped in this enterprise. One of them mixed the milk and chocolate while the others filled, capped, and cased the jars. Edith’s father made a motorized bottle scrubber and capper to facilitate the process, and they maintained a thriving business for a number of years. Every weekday during the summer months, they filled six to eight cases, each containing twenty-four bottles, put them on ice and hauled them to town to sell to the grocery store, the creamery, and to several other businesses that kept milk to sell much as many places have soda machines today.

In addition to farm work, Edith’s mother had organized and was now head of the church sewing circle. Mary and her daughters spent many hours preparing quilts and clothes for the monthly meeting, items that were sent to the Mennonite Central Committee to be used in worldwide relief work. “We cut a lot of garments, made a lot of dresses. We would have them all cut out at home before we ever went to the sewing [circle meeting] so they were ready to work on. That responsibility came to the one who was in charge and [Mother] was in charge a lot of the time. I well remember spending days doing nothing but cutting clothes.”

The year of 1935 was a pivotal one for the family. The birth of the seventh and last child and the marriage of the eldest daughter occurred. In addition, some family members sought employment outside the farm environment: the three oldest daughters at the Maplecrest Processing Plant and their brother, Morris, at the Kalona Oil Company where he delivered fuel oil.

In 1928 A. C. Gingerich founded the Maplecrest Turkey Hatchery on his farm that bordered on the Swartzendruber family farm. By 1935 many of the local farmers had begun to raise turkeys for Maplecrest, and the operation outgrew its farm beginnings. Gingerich built a processing plant in Wellman and expanded his operation from hatching turkeys to dressing them for market. A special spur line ran from the railroad to the loading dock. After workers dressed the turkeys, they loaded the birds onto freezer cars and sent them to New York, Chicago, Cleveland and other cities. The business brought much needed jobs to Wellman, and between 1930 and 1939 the population grew thirty-two percent, largely due to the new labor force. The town came to be known as the turkey capital of the United States and was often called “Thanksgiving Town” or “Turkey Town.”1

If the people needed jobs, so too, Maplecrest needed the workers and it was a simple matter to get employment. One only had to walk in and ask for a job. In the fall of 1935, Edith, her older sisters, Mildred and Effie, and her mother’s half-sister, Fannie Bender, were among those who sought work preparing the turkeys for market.

The acceptable and available means of earning money for them at that time was to find work in other Mennonite homes or as farm hands. The Swartzendruber children had seldom “worked out” previously. Their mother needed them to help with farm work during their father’s frequent travels across midwestern and mid-Atlantic states on church-related business. Prior to 1935, Effie was the only daughter who had worked away from home, serving as a hired girl in the home of a neighboring Mennonite family.

Despite the fact that Edith and her sisters had not worked away from home before, the decision to do so was not a particularly difficult one. The owner of Maplecrest, A. C. Gingerich, was a longtime friend of Edith’s father, Elmer. They had grown up together, attended the same school and played on the same baseball team. The Gingerich family belonged to another Mennonite church in the area. Even though the number of Mennonites working at Maplecrest was never more than fifteen to twenty percent of the total, going to work there, in at least one sense, did not make the Swartzendruber sisters feel like they were leaving the community. Edith recalled, “I wanted to go. I had never done anything like that before and I had company to do it so I wasn’t afraid to start something new.”

Turkeys were only in seasonal demand in the 1930s and the job was, therefore, available only in the fall of the year. “Thanksgiving Town” was an appropriate name for the town that was home to this new industry. From late September until Christmas the plant was the scene of furious activity: “Turkey was a holiday bird. It was not a year round meat like it is now. Most of the sales were over Thanksgiving and Christmas.” During the season, Sundays and Thanksgiving Day were the only times the plant closed. As Thanksgiving and Christmas approached, the work slowed down. “They tried to have them [the turkeys] all out of the fields before Christmas,” Edith explains, “They weren’t prepared to handle water and feed in cold weather, when it was below zero.”

Coming when it did, Edith’s new job conflicted with farm work. “Of course we had to chore and we had to go out and husk corn by hand in the fall,” Edith remembers, “so we couldn’t always go to work because corn husking was in October too. If you couldn’t go [to work] you just didn’t go…If there were rainy days, we would go to [Maplecrest] and then would husk corn in between.” Sometime in the 1930s the family bought a corn picker which lightened the load but did not remove the need for farm hands. The children still had to help at harvest time. Workers could choose when to report to work at Maplecrest dependent on when their parents needed them for farm work.

Work at Maplecrest usually commenced at 6:00 a. m., but prior to that hour the three young women had other tasks to complete. They were often up before 5:00 a. m. to milk the cows before leaving home on their seven mile trip to work in Wellman. The days were long and the work tiring. The length of the workday varied according to the number of turkeys that came in with any given batch. Maplecrest contracted with farmers who took the turkeys in the spring and raised them for the company. In the fall, Maplecrest sent people to these farms to inspect the turkeys and to determine when they were ready to be butchered. They then would send trucks to load and bring them to the plant.

As Edith recalls the workday, “We sometimes worked from six o’clock in the morning until nine at night until they had the bunch filled that were there that they had hauled in because the season was so short. The trucks would come in and we had to finish the truck. We couldn’t let them on the truck overnight. So we worked long days and were tired.” The size of the flocks varied from 2000 to 3000 birds. The company typically knew how many turkeys would be coming in and informed its employees how long they could expect to work the following day.

Preparing the turkeys for market involved several steps. The first thing that needed to be done was to unload the trucks. After that the turkeys were hung on a moving chain and several employees killed them by sticking them in the necks. The turkeys then were put through scalding water to rough their feathers in preparation for removal. A hot wax bath came next followed by a dip into cold water to set the wax. After the wax machine, several more people broke the wax, a process that removed most of the feathers. The last step prior to packing and shipping required removing the fine pinfeathers that remained. The turkeys were “New York-dressed” meaning that they were killed and cleaned but the heads were left on and they were not gutted. They were frozen immediately and shipped this way.

Edith and most of the female employees were involved in the process of removing the fine pinfeathers, what they referred to as “pinning” the turkeys. The birds hung by their legs every two feet on a chain that moved them slowly back and forth around the room until they reached an inspector and the packers. The women would start pinning the turkeys and move along with them around the room until they had completed the task. For this task, the company paid them on a piecework basis, approximately three or four cents per bird. Edith recalls that when they worked fast enough “a lot of us could make as much as, oh, maybe thirty or forty cents an hour and that was good, good wages at that time, for that period. So you really liked to work there.”

The excitement of a new job quickly wore off. The women were walking constantly and reaching up to complete their task. “it was a pretty tiresome job and the days got long and tiring. It was a little boring because it was the same thing over and over all day long.” Turkeys hung with their heads down and blood continually dripped on the women. Sometimes it was easy to pick out the pinfeathers or there were few left after the wax was removed. As often as not, however, it was difficult for the women to finish the task. They used blunt knives to pull out the pinfeathers, but they were not supposed to scrape the turkeys. Birds that were scraped became dark and discolored when they were frozen.

When each woman finished pinning a turkey, she then moved back to the beginning of the line to pin another bird. Edith recalls the strenuous process:

We followed and tried…to get them as close to the wax fellows as you could cause then you had all this distance and if you got done [before the line ended at the inspection point] you could go back and get another one. But if you didn’t get done…you had to follow it all the way around. It didn’t go fast. It was a long way. And you continually worked at least at eye level. The legs would have been higher than our head a little bit. We were working above our head and down on this turkey to its neck since it was hanging by its feet.

The women wore large rubber aprons to protect themselves from the dripping blood. Each of the women was assigned a number and in her apron pocket carried numbered tags to place on the turkeys when she pinned them. After turkeys passed inspection, another woman removed the tags and tallied the number of birds each woman pinned.  When a turkey did not satisfy the inspector, that person called out the tag number and hung the turkey on a side rack. The woman who had worked on the bird was expected to return and bring the turkey up to the required standards.

Maplecrest halted the work to accommodate a half hour lunch break. The company operated a lunch counter on the second floor of its building, but Edith and her sisters usually carried their lunch from home. There were no other specified breaks in the day; however, employees were free to take additional breaks if necessary: “When we wanted to go to the rest room or something we just went. And if you wanted to take a little more time out you just lost more turkeys.”

Discipline appears to have been relatively lax. Edith remembers, “The foreman wasn’t standing over us. You could take breaks. You just took them on your own time because you weren’t pinning. When you worked by the piece, if you weren’t working you weren’t making anything either. I don’t remember that they ever got on us for anything.”

Occasionally, the women were given a rest from the job when the trucks were late delivering the next batch of turkeys.

Sometimes we had to wait on the trucks and then it would run into the evening. While we waited we were not getting any money since we were being paid by the bird. We would usually wait up in the restaurant. You couldn’t go far away because you never knew when the truck would come and the chain would start….We were just glad for a chance to sit down because the rest of the time we were walking continually following the chain around to pin the turkey. We got tired but we were young.

The company allowed the women additional reprieve when a batch of turkeys came through that was particularly difficult to pin. When that happened the foreman stopped the chain giving the women time to catch up before more turkeys came down the line. At other times when they did not finish a turkey before the inspection point, they had to hang it on a side rack to complete it before hanging it back on the main chain for inspection.

The men who worked at Maplecrest completed tasks that required lifting. The turkeys were large, between eighteen and thirty-five pounds. Men unloaded the trucks, hung the birds on chains, killed them and removed the wax. After the pinning process, women inspected them, and men took them from the chain and packed and loaded them in the freezer. In addition. To the jobs of pinning turkeys or removing and tallying the tags, women also worked in the lunchroom and the office. The office workers, whose jobs were year-round, did the bookkeeping and secretarial work.

The job in Wellman brought the young Mennonite women into contact with people and a way of life that they had not seen before. There was only a small group of Mennonite women who joined this work force and for the most part they did not mingle with the others. The differences were obvious due to distinct Mennonite dress and hair styles, and the distance between the groups was not easily narrowed. For the most part relationships were good while not intimate, but there was occasional antagonistic behavior directed at the Mennonites. For example, a few women from town learned that they could take advantage of the Mennonite women. Edith recalls:

We often got the bad deals….They would watch and if there was a real pinny [difficult] turkey on the chain they didn’t go until someone else went. And the rest of us, we finished then went and took whatever was there. We often got the bad ones and then you couldn’t make as much. But these other ladies who didn’t care, they made the most money.

Edith also remembers:

Another thing that some of those girls did…if they happened to have a bad turkey and you had a good one and you left, they sometimes switched your number on their turkey. You knew that when [the inspector called your number] that it was not a turkey that you would have left.

The Mennonite women never complained since their training at home and at church taught them to avoid disputes. They simply did their best to control who they worked beside and tried to get along without any conflict.

The environment which Edith and her sisters entered opened up a new world to them:

There was an awful lot of rough talking and swearing and stuff. I have wondered already how did the folks feel about us being in the type of environment we were in there because it was rough. A lot of the women smoked and that was a time when not a lot of women smoked. And that bathroom and the cloak room, we just didn’t sit in there very often because that was where they smoked and talked so ugly. And I sometimes thought that they probably talked worse, said nasty things and dirty stuff on purpose for our sake to see if they could shock us, see what we’d say.

As much as possible the different groups of women stayed away from each other.

The new contacts, however, were not all unpleasant ones. Edith also made friends with whom she maintained ties throughout the years. The women helped each other become accustomed to job procedures, teaching the newcomers as they arrived. No orientation existed except as they provided for each other. Years later one woman thanked Edith for helping her learn the job tasks:

She said I befriended her which I really don’t remember. She said I showed her how to go about it and get started and really appreciated it because she knew no one when she came in there to work, and she said I came and talked to her and took her with me to work….She said she always felt that I was a good friend of hers because of that.

While working outside the farm brought Edith in contact with the larger world, it did not make her independent of her family. She kept a small amount of money to buy a treat when she went to town, but most of her income helped her parents buy necessitites. Edith’s brothers and sisters also turned their wages over to the family:

I think that it was the understood thing by most people at the time that you gave most of your money home until you were twenty-one, but they bought what we needed or they gave us the money to buy what we needed. I didn’t have a new coat ever until the fall we got married. I always wore something that was handed down to me from one of the others. I was smaller so I naturally got them. I sometimes resented that. I would have liked to had something new once in awhile myself.

For seven years, from 1935 until 1941, Edith left the farm in the fall to earn money pinning turkeys at Maplecrest. Her days were spent working, her evenings, when she did not work late, at home with her family.

I make it sound as if we did nothing but work. We had things going in the evenings occasionally … a young people’s gathering of some kind … I guess I remember most the good evenings we had at home ofttimes reading and so forth during the wintertime when we weren’t’ so busy like it was in the fall. I well remember us sitting around the living room and everyone reading and doing what they wanted. Where nowadays if you have a family that will sit down in the evening together and each do their own thing in their own living room it would be a rarity. Sometimes we sang and sometimes we played games. We learned a lot of songs.

She and her brothers and sisters attended singing school and practiced shaped-note, a cappella singing at home in their spare time.

Saturday was a time to prepare for Sunday. When the children were not working at Maplecrest they cleaned and baked because, as the minister’s family, they almost always had Sunday guests. Even when they worked at Maplecrest, they usually could go home early on Saturday because the company tried to schedule fewer loads of turkeys. Saturday evening was always a time to study the Sunday School lesson, rest or memorize Bible verses in preparation for Sunday.

This pattern of fall work at Maplecrest was broken when Edith married William Nisly, a yojng Mennonite man from the same community. In 1935 he had arrived from Kansas, which his family fled after the dust storms had ruined their crops. The wheat yield had fallen from forty-five bushels to ten bushels per acre and it became impossible to support themselves. The family decided to move to another Mennonite community and chose Wellman. Once there, William also helped support his family by working at Maplecrest, where he packed turkeys into crates for shipping.

William and Edith married in November 1940. Edith worked a short time at the beginning of the turkey season that fall and then quit to prepare for her wedding. After the nuptials William went to Flint, Michigan, to pick up a new 1941 Chevrolet and deliver it to a dealer in Oregon. For their honeymoon, William and Edith drove the car to the West Coast and received travel expenses as compensation. They returned to Iowa and began to farm 125 acres that they bought from William’s parents. In the fall of 1941 Edith returned to Maplecrest for her final season of work there.

The war in Europe had begun, and in the fall of 1942, William left to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS), the Historic Peace Churches’ alternative to the draft.2 Because of his religious belief in non-resistance, William registered as a conscientious objector and worked as an orderly in a hospital rather than taking part in the war. When he left, William and Edith sold their farm, and Edith, now six months pregnant, went to live with her parents. She moved to northern Indiana in 1944 to be near William, who was working as an orderly in a Kalamazoo, Michigan, mental hospital. His CPS allowance was not enough to support the family so she worked for three months packing and shipping flower bulbs and plants at a nursery.

After the war, the Nisly family returned to Iowa and moved onto the Swartzendruber home place and resumed farming. From then until 1961, Edith’s work consisted of unpaid labor: raising eight children and running a home and farm. Her only connection to the poultry industry was the farm’s turkey flock. Of her six siblings, only she and one sister still lived on farms in 1950; only she remained on one in 1960. After 1961, Edith and William bought a grocery store in Kalona, a neighboring town, and together they co-managed it for eleven years. When they left that business, Edith worked at Pleasantview, the Mennonite-operated nursing home in Kalona. In 1980 she returned to school at a nearby community college and fulfilled an old dream to further her education. She became a certified medical aide and remained at Pleasantview until her retirement in December 1989.

Judged by most standards Edith Nisly did not have an unconventional work life. Due to her background, however, the time she worked off the family farm from 1935 to 1941 had a lasting impact on her. It was a new experience not only for her personally but also for her generation of Mennonite young people, who were used to the social isolation of their church community. Despite the daily drudgery of the job, Edith enjoyed the opportunity to meet new people, to try something different and to help her family in a time of need.

Her employment experience at the Maplecrest packing plant was not difficult as it only involved her time a few months of the year for seven years. In addition, it was easier for Edith and her sisters to leave their community for work because they knew the factory owner who, as a neighbor and fellow Mennonite, understood their work patterns and lifestyle. They could take off for farm work, leave early on Saturday, and never work on Sunday. They sacrificed nothing except their isolation.

Life changed for this Mennonite family when their daughters began to work at Maplecrest. Although they retained their traditional ties to church, community, farm and family, Edith and her sisters enlarged their contact with the world around them. The contacts did not change Edith’s views of the church or her relationship to her family, except perhaps to strengthen her appreciation of those ties; it did, however, alter her view of the world. She, along with her community, had to learn to deal with non-Mennonites. The result of this experience was the loss of social separation that meant so much to this church community. They had to learn to maintain their beliefs and community ties while learning to function in a continually broadening context.

 

NOTES

Hope Nisly is a graduate student in the departments of history and library science at the University of Maryland. Like her mother, she also grew up near Wellman, Iowa.

 

FOOTNOTES

1 Bob Godlove and Henry Wenger, “Maplecrest,” in Wellman Centennial Book: 1879-1979 (Wellman, Ia: Wellman Centennial Committee, 1979), pp. 72-73.

2 The Historic Peace Churches include the Mennonite Church, Quakers and the Church of the Brethren. In 1939 Congress passed the Burke-Wadsworth bill allowing conscientious objection on religious grounds. This granted members of the Historic Peace Churches exemption from participation in war and permitted them to perform alternative service in the Civilian Public Service.

 

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