Biographical Sketch of Charles Ferdinand Penzel

Note: In my previous post, I introduced the "Families from Asch," emigrants from Austria's Bohemia who settled in Little Rock, Arkansas, from 1848 to 1857. This post is a biographical sketch of one of them, Charles F. Penzel, who became one of Little Rock's most successful businessmen after the Civil War.
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Charles Ferdinand Penzel emigrated from Austria to Little Rock in 1857 and after the Civil War became a leading merchant, pioneering banker, and prolific investor who rose to the first rank of capitalists in the city. Beyond his widespread business ventures, he was active, often as an officer, in numerous city economic development, religious, civic, and charitable organizations. At the time of his death on February 16, 1906, the Arkansas Democrat observed that he was, perhaps, the richest German-American in Arkansas. 

Born on October 8, 1840, Penzel was one of twenty-eight emigrants from Asch, a Bohemian city of about 9,000 and a district of about 20,000 people, who settled in Pulaski County between 1848 and 1857. When he arrived in Pulaski County, his parents and older sister Anna Katharina were living on farms near Granite Mountain. His sister had emigrated seven years earlier, in 1850, with her soon-to-be husband Christopher Reichardt, who also was from Asch.

Portraits of Rosa and Charles Penzel
from a story in the Arkansas Gazette, January 24, 1937

Before the Civil War, Penzel lived with the large family of Henry and Catherine Fisher, both of whom had emigrated from Germany in the 1830s, and he worked for Fisher as a carpenter. When the war began, he joined the confederate army, volunteering for Company A, Sixth Arkansas Infantry Regiment, the city’s former “Capitol Guard.”  Wounded slightly at Shiloh in April 1862, he nearly lost his life on September 20, 1863 at the battle of Chickamauga when he was shot through the mouth. Captured, he was sent first to a hospital then to a prisoner-of-war camp in Rock Island, Illinois 

In May 1865, the war over, Penzel returned to Little Rock and worked as a bookkeeper for the Kramer and Miller Family Grocery Store and Bakery. The store owners, Frederick Kramer and Charles Miller, were German immigrants and brothers-in-law: Kramer was married to Adelina Reichardt and Miller to Fredericka Reichardt. These women, from Asch, were the sisters of Christopher Reichardt, the husband of Penzel’s sister. 

Advertisement from Daily Arkansas Gazette, Aug. 11, 1865

The grocery store had opened in November 1863 after union troop occupied Little Rock, and it flourished. In early 1868, it moved from Main Street to a newly constructed three-story building at the corner of Markham and Commerce Streets, near the city’s ferry landing.  As the move took place, Penzel became a partner in the firm.   

               Kramer sold his share of the grocery store in 1872, and its name was changed to Miller and Penzel.  On August 28, 1875, Miller died suddenly. Penzel continued to operate the store, but in December 1876 – before Miller’s estate was settled -- the building and most of the store’s merchandise were destroyed in a fire. Penzel quickly resumed selling groceries in a nearby temporary location. In August, 1877, he reopened the store in a new building at the old location, and a few months later he bought Miller’s share from his estate and changed its name to Charles F. Penzel & Co. 

Advertisement in the Arkansas Gazette (Feb. 27, 1877)
announcing the reopening of Miller and Penzel at a temporary
location after its store building was destroyed in December 1876

After Miller’s death, Penzel had hired George Reichardt, also an emigrant from Asch and the brother of Fredericka Miller and Adelina Kramer, to help manage the store, appointing him in 1882 the store’s secretary and treasurer. Reichardt remained an officer of the firm during most of the years that followed and was its president after Penzel’s death. In 1886, Penzel changed the firm’s name to Charles F. Penzel Co. Grocers and later incorporated it. That name remained until 1922, when the store was sold to the American Wholesale Grocery Co. 

Arkansas Gazette advertisement (June 12, 1878)

In addition to the wholesale grocery business, Penzel developed a multitude of other business interests. In 1870, he invested in the city’s first building and loan association, and for the rest of his life invested in, and served as a director of, such financial associations. In 1875, he helped create the German Savings Bank, only the second incorporated bank in the city, and served as the bank’s first president, holding that office until 1883.  Under his leadership, the bank became one of the city’s most trusted and successful financial institutions.  

Penzel was appointed president of Exchange National Bank in 1885, a position he held until February 1888. The next year, he became president of Guaranty Trust Company, a small savings bank making real estate loans. In 1893, he again became president of Exchange National Bank, a position he held until 1903. A year later, he was elected president of the Arkansas Bankers Association.

Arkansas Gazette
April 13, 1875

Beginning in the last half of the 1870s, Penzel expanded his business interests. He started a manufacturing company that milled flour, another that made soap, and still another that built barrels. He co-founded the Little Rock Street Railway Company to operate a streetcar line. He was a director, and often an officer, of companies engaged in diverse businesses, including insurance, railroads, street cars, utilities (gas, gas lights, electricity, and electric lights), and river shipping. Also, he dealt in cotton and lumber (he was president of the Arkansas Lumbermen’s Association in the 1880s) and invested in mines, bridges, rural land, and Little Rock real estate (he was co-owner of a large subdivision that opened in 1889).   

From the start of his career, Penzel promoted local businesses. He joined the city chamber of commerce at its creation in the late 1860s and in 1880 led an effort to revitalize it. In the 1890s and early 1900s, he was a local Board of Trade officer. Also, he was among the businessmen who created a Cotton Exchange and undertook other initiatives to improve Little Rock’s cotton trade. Further, Penzel spoke out for merchants, pressing the city government to operate more efficiently, demanding that federal regulators enact fairer tariffs and railroad shipping rates, and weighing in on other important public policy issues. In addition, Penzel supported, and often led, efforts to create tax districts to upgrade local streets, drainage, and bridges and to build new water and sewer systems.

Outside of the business world, Penzel played a leading role in Little Rock’s German Lutheran Church and its construction of a grand house of worship. In 1868, soon after the church came into existence, he was elected its first secretary. Later, when the Lutherans constructed a new church building, opened in 1888, he was cited as one of a half dozen people who had contributed the most to its completion. Although he was a member of the church until his death, in his later years he attended the Presbyterian Church.

Among Penzel’s many charitable activities, he and his wife led efforts to acquire and operate a home for Little Rock’s orphans. He was on the board of directors of many organizations assisting the poor, such as the Relief Association, the Children’s Aid Society, and the Old Ladies Home. Also, Penzel helped found the city’s humane society and was for several years its president. In addition, he was an officer of state and local confederate veterans groups. Despite his outsized role in Little Rock’s civic life, Penzel joined no secret societies, such as the Masons, that were then popular with businessmen.

Penzel Home, Arkansas Gazette, Aug. 14, 1887

Penzel had an interest in local politics, but rarely engaged in party affairs. He became a United States citizen on August 3, 1866 and registered to vote in 1867.  The democratic party nominated him seven times to serve as a Justice of Peace on the Pulaski County Court, and he was elected each time.

Penzel Mausoleum at
Mount Holly Cemetery 

Penzel married Rosa A. Eisenmayer (1850 – 1938) of Illinois, the daughter of German immigrants, on January 1, 1873. They had three daughters:  Hedwig Penzel [Forsyth] (1873 – 1939), Hildegard Penzel [Wright] (1875 – 1953), and Marcella Penzel (1883 – 1976). The family often entertained Little Rock’s social elite at lavish parties held in its home. In his private life, Penzel was a cultured, disciplined, and sober man who enjoy writing poetry and traveling. A colleague noted that although he was “decidedly forceful in all business,” he was “a quiet, modest man." Following his death on February 16, 1906, Penzel was buried at Mt. Holly Cemetery in a large marble mausoleum, designed by architects George R. Mann and Aloysius Downey. Among his descendants is great-grandson Charles Penzel Wright Jr. who in 1998 won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was the United States’ poet laureate in 2014-2015.

Sources  

“Charles F. Penzel Died Suddenly.” Arkansas Gazette, Feb. 17, 1906, p. 1.

“Death of Charles F. Penzel.” Arkansas Democrat, February 16, 1906, p. 4.

Necrological. Arkansas Democrat, Feb. 18, 1906, p. 2.

J.D. McClatchy (interviewer). “Charles Wright. The Art of Poetry No. 41.” The Paris Review, issue

113, Winter, 1989 (accessed on-line).

Penzel, Charles F. papers, Arkansas State Archives, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Penzel family collection, BC.MSS.11.01, Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Arkansas Studies Institute.  https://cdm15728.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/findingaids/id/4764

A poem entitled “Arkansas Traveler” written by Charles Penzel Wright about his great-grandfather can be found at this link:  https://voca.arizona.edu/readings-list/45/52

  

On May 28th, the City of Hof will hold its 586th Schlappentag

The most distinctive feature of Hof, Germany, located at the top of East Bavaria, is its annual Hofer Schlappentag. This year on May 28, it will hold its 586^th celebration to mark that day.

 

Sign advertising Schlappentag, showing the wooden
shoes (Schlappen) and the special Schlappenbier

Before explaining what the Hofer Schlappentag is and why it has been around for more than half a millennium, I want to mention some other notable features of this hilly city of 48,000 people that sits on the banks of the Saale River. An important one is its location. Following World War II, after Germany was divided into sectors, Hof was a border town in the American Zone. Across the border was the Russian Zone, which in 1949 became the German Democratic Republic. 

From that time until 1990, Hof was on the front lines of the Cold War, facing a heavily fortified border. Its train station was full of relieved travelers who had successfully weathered the ordeal of passing from East to West Germany, and stressed passengers who were about to undergo the indignities attended upon travelers who wished to enter the DDR. 

Another important aspect of Hof’s location is that it lies a few miles distant from the western finger of Bohemia that probes into Germany big southeastern belly. This part of Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic, is a narrow peninsula surrounded on three sides by the ocean of Germany. For decades, until 1917, it was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and a large percentage of its residents had a Germanic heritage and spoke German. After WWI, it became part of Czechoslovakia. (On the map above, the peninsula is located in the western part of the Cheb region, which is in the far west of the Czech Republic. Hof is a few miles north of the top of the peninsula.) 

 

Hof Center Center, with St. Mary's Church

The boundaries and ethnic makeup of the Bohemians in this isolated peninsula caused few problems until the early 1930s. Then, some Germans – adherents of the Nazi Party -- living there and in neighboring parts of Bohemia started complaining of mistreatment by Czechoslovakians, demanding to be brought into the German Reich.  Their rabble rousing provided one of the flimsy excuses Hitler used to justify sending the German army into Czechoslovakia in 1939. When the 1000-year Reich was disassembled in 1945, Czechoslovakia – under the guidance of the Soviet Union – expelled all ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland (including the peninsula), even those whose families that had lived there for centuries and who had not supported the Nazis.  Many of those expelled settled nearby in cities such as Hof and Marktredwitz and in the land surrounding them.

 

Hof City Center

(One city in the Czech peninsula is named Aš  [in German, Asch], and it is a thirty-minute ride from Hof on a slow train. From Asch and surrounding area, about 27 persons from the Reichardt, Geyer, Penzel, and Wunderlich families emigrated to Little Rock from 1848 to 1856, where many became prominent citizens. But that is another story.)

 

Detail for Hof's Turnhalle 

Present-day Hof is a pleasant city with the distinctive architecture of Eastern Bavaria that features multi-story buildings of different colors standing next to each other. Also it has a welcoming city center, anchored, as expected, by the largest and oldest church in town. The city center offers, among its mixture of businesses, two large book store. It is a pedestrian zone, so many restaurants offer outdoor seats from which to watch the parade of Hofers. Scattered about the center city are men and women (known locally as Wärschtlamo) with brass cauldrons filled with hot coals to boil wursts for hungry patrons.  

It is in the city center that much of the Schlappentag celebration takes place. The story of Schalppentag begins in January 25, 1430. On that sad day, Hof was attacked by Hussites, who easily routed the Hofers, who apparently did not put up much a fight. After the Hussites ransacked the town and moved on, the pitiable Hofers came to beg the Prince of Brandenburg for relief from taxes they owed him. They had nothing they could pay. The Prince was a bit irked, but granted ten years of relief from taxes with the condition that the Hofers would arm themselves and prepare to defend the city in the future.

Wurst seller with his brass Cauldron 

They agreed to the condition, and in 1432, the city government required its healthy male residents, most of whom were tradesmen, to join the protection guard and attend at least one instructional session on musket shooting a year.  As time passed, the protection guard members grew less enthusiastic about their annual training requirement, but continued to show up to avoid paying a fine. Many men put off the training until the last day possible, the first Monday after Trinity Sunday (which falls in late May or the first part of June). In 2018, Trinity Sunday is May 27^th.

At first, only a dozen or so men, wearing their work clothes and wooden work shoes (clogs), known as Schlappen, walked down the street as the work day began to the indoor shooting range for their instruction. They would wait their turn for their musket-shooting lesson.

Over time, more of the men waited until the Monday deadline for completing training, and they would meet up to walk together to the shooting range, clopping down the street in their wood shoes. Finally it became a tradition for most of the protection guard to march together early on Trinity Monday to receive their training.

So on May 28, 2018, Hofers, joined by other volunteers in wooden shoes, will form for the 586^th time a marching line and proceed through the city to the training site. That re-creation of the long tradition is followed, I understand, by many opportunities for merriment, especially if you enjoy beer, because that day – and only on that day -- an especially strong locally brewed beer – Schlappenbier – can be sold in the city. By tradition, however, the beer cannot be sold to visiting Hussites,. 

For pictures and videos from previous Schlappentag celebrations (in German), see:

https://www.hof.de/hof/hof_deu/57-hofer-schlappentag.html

https://www.tvo.de/mediathek/video/hofer-schlappentag-2017-hof-feiert-seinen-nationalfeiertag/

Prague Spring, May 1, 1968

Dubcek's Picture at '68 May Day Parade

Some journalists and commentators have been referring to the citizen uprisings in the Middle East as the "Arab Spring," adapting the term "Prague Spring," which referred to the liberalization of Czechoslovakia in the first half of 1968.  While the "Prague Spring" and the "Arab Spring" differ in important ways, they do have one important element in common:  one sought and the other seeks to peaceably inject elements of democracy into deeply authoritarian systems.

Unlike the present Arab citizen uprisings against long-time rulers, the Prague Spring was initiated by newly selected leaders of Czechoslovakia.  The efforts were widely supported by citizens, but raised the concern of the leaders of the Soviet Empire into which Czechoslovakia had been thrust after World War II.

The Prague Spring was initiated by Alexander Dubcek, who became First Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party in early January, 1968.  Dubcek's actions were supported by Ludvig Svobota after he became President of Czechoslovakia in late March 1968.  The proposed economic and social reforms came after a long period of stagnation, and they followed calls for changes by several brave intellectuals who risked jail by speaking out.

Prague, May 1, 1968 

Dubcek's action program called for more freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement.  He suggested that multi-party government would be possible in the near future.  He proposed  re-orienting the economy to give consumer goods more priority.  Dubcek called his reforms, "Socialism with a human face." He and his government began to implement this reform plan in April 1968.

When the Prague Spring was taking form, I was a student in Vienna, which is about a four-hour train ride from Prague.  The changes in Czechoslovakia were exciting for Austrians, but also created anxiety:  they remembered what had happened in Hungary in 1956 when the  Hungarians had rebelled against the Communist system.

In late April, my university, the Institute of European Studies, arranged for interested students to travel to Prague to see the city and to observe the traditional May Day Parade, a big celebration in communist bloc countries. I eagerly signed up for the trip, and thus was there on May 1, 1968 for the happy celebration of the early days of the Prague Spring. While there, I took the pictures shown in the post.

Lining up in Prague for the Parade, May 1, 1968

I am no expert on what usually happened at May Day parades in communist countries, but from what I was told by people in Prague, this parade generated much greater excitement among the participants than the usual May Day parades.  While it had a plethora of red flags, they did not have a hammer and sickle.  Many marchers had signs with the word "Demokracie" on it.  Some marchers carried signs with Dubcek's picture on it; very few or none (I didn't see any) carried signs with pictures of Brezhnev or Lenin.

Waiting to March in May Day Parade, Prague, 1968

This 1968 May Day was impressive for the numbers of people with flags and signs who paraded through the city of Prague.  Several of the marchers carried young children on the shoulders. The atmosphere seemed jolly. This apparently was a time of great hope for the marchers.  They had a government that offered freedoms that had been missing since this country had been sold out to the Nazis in 1938.  The new government held out the possibility that Czechoslovakia would be able to rejoin Europe and regain the level of prosperity that it had had in the 1920s.

Child with Czech Flag, 1968, Prague May Day Parade

Of course, all of the hopes were smashed on August 20, 1968 when 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2,000 tanks rolled into the country. The invasion -- which was not resisted by the Czechoslovakian military -- removed Dubcek from power and reversed the democratic reforms.

(Most of the tanks entering Czechoslovakia on August 20th and 21th came through Uzhgorod, a Ukrainian border town.  I later came to know that city well because I managed a project that linked Uzhgorod State University and the University of Georgia in a training program from 1995 to 1999.  I visited the city often during this time, and some residents told me their memories of the great noise and confusion created by the massive build-up of tanks for the 1968 invasion.)

Reading Newly Free Press in Prague

The Prague Spring experience makes me a bit pessimist that the Arab Spring will, in the short run, achieve the desired democratic changes and liberalization of society.  However, we can hope that the citizen uprisings will, as with the Prague Spring, contribute in the longer term to better lives for those who desire more freedoms and fuller integration with the rest of the world.


Update, May 1, 2013:

I have found a couple of additional pictures of the May 1, 1968 May Day Parade in Prague. One of the pictures contradicts a statement above that the Lenin's picture was not carried in the parade. As the picture below shows, at least one picture of Lenin was in the parade.

The second picture shows a boy sitting on the shoulders of his dad, holding dearly onto his hair.

Prague May Day Parade, 1968 with Picture of Lenin and other Communist Heroes

Young Boy at May 1, 1968 Parage in Prague