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  After the Revolutionary War, because these distinguished generals and leaders had visited the progressive town and learned about the quality of education offered at the Moravian Seminary and College for Women, “Fem Sem” opened its doors to non-Moravians at their urging. One of those visitors, George Washington, enrolled his niece, Eleanor Lee, in the school, and wrote the school rector in 1796 to seek admission for others. The student body of the 1780s and 1790s included daughters of prominent New York Dutch families, German families from Pennsylvania, and French families from the South. When families brought their daughters to “Fem Sem,” they stayed at the Sun Inn.

  Increasingly after the war, Bethlehem opened up to new, non-Moravian migrants. In the late 1820s, investors built the Lehigh Canal to transport anthracite coal, mined in the region and known as “black diamond,” from the hinterland to Philadelphia and beyond. Along with coal, lumber and other natural resources brought economic prosperity to the region—and transformed it. The canal lowered water levels in the Monocacy Creek, ending Bethlehem’s early cottage industries. The building of the railroads accelerated the scale of industrial development, making the exploitation of forests and coal mines even more profitable and attracting many new laborers. Several hundred non-Moravian immigrants from a variety of European countries moved into the area.

  With the growth of industry and the continued success of “Fem Sem” in Bethlehem, the Moravian community needed another inn. In 1822, they built the Eagle Hotel on the site where Count Zinzendorf and the first Moravians, along with their animals, had huddled in a modest log-cabin style shelter and founded the original Bethlehem settlement. At first, the community hired managers to run the hotel. In 1843, it was sold to Caleb Yohe and his wife Mary Straub, a non-Moravian couple who had run a smaller inn in the region.

  In 1845, the previously independent Moravian community of Bethlehem became a civilly administered borough of the state of Pennsylvania, with a population of more than one thousand. In the 1850s, iron ore was discovered in the nearby Saucon Valley, leading to the formation of the Saucon Iron Company. As the enterprise grew, building furnaces to smelt the ore, many more laborers came to Bethlehem, and the town’s population reached five thousand in the 1860s. The company, renamed the Bethlehem Iron Company in 1861, eventually became the giant and world-famous Bethlehem Steel Company.

  The Eagle Hotel was one of the centers of the community. By the time of the Civil War it had a reputation as one of the finest and largest hostelries in Pennsylvania. It sat in a prominent position in Bethlehem, welcoming travelers and summer tourists who enjoyed the picturesque local landscaped gardens and parks, including nearby Calypso Island. It would, over the course of the ensuing decades, host its share of wealthy and famous Americans such as the Waldorfs, the Astors, and Mark Twain, not to mention scores of ordinary honeymooners and vacationers.

  Caleb and Mary Yohe were active and respected members of the community. While they did not themselves formally become Moravians, they brought their children up in the Moravian Church after moving to Bethlehem. They lived at the inn with their five children: Anna (the eldest), George, William, Charles, and Samuel. A sixth child, Edward, died in infancy. Anna enrolled in the Female Seminary and Samuel attended Nazareth Hall, the Moravian boys’ boarding school. Edward was buried in the Moravian cemetery, God’s Acre.

  Conscious of the Biblical echo in their roles as proprietors of the inn at Bethlehem, the Yohes were wonderful hosts. The children pitched in, carrying out hotel chores. The Eagle hosted church and town functions, including elections. It was extremely well kept, and according to travelers’ accounts, guests enjoyed the home-cooked meals. The hotel’s brook trout, caught in nearby tributaries of the Lehigh River, was a specialty. But the Lehigh River also became a source of tragedy for the Yohes when their son Charles drowned in a terrible accident at the age of seven.

  The Eagle Hotel, c. 1874. (photo credit 1.2)

  Among the hotel’s special features were its putzes. A putz is a large-scale model or miniature replica of a series of vignettes, typically of a religious nature, such as the Nativity scene and other events in the life of Jesus. Moravians had a tradition of making putzes for Christmas, and the putzes in the Eagle Hotel were especially renowned in the region. Caleb’s son William, who would later become May’s father, had an artistic bent and a particular talent for constructing the Christmas displays.

  In 1861, William, known as “Bill,” was twenty-one years old. He was of average stature, with dark eyes, a swarthy complexion, and wavy black hair. His mouth was small, his nose almost Grecian. He was not a particularly good student, but he had a fine voice for Moravian hymn singing and serenading.

  With the onset of the Civil War in April 1861, Bill enlisted as a 3rd corporal in Company A of the 1st Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers. The regiment was organized in Harrisburg, the state capital, in response to President Lincoln’s call to arms. Bill was issued a musket and twelve rounds of ball cartridge, a muslin haversack, and hard tack and bacon. Only weeks later did he get a uniform. His company trained briefly, and was then assigned to guard roads and rail lines in Harper’s Ferry, Frederick, and other sites in Maryland and Pennsylvania in order to prevent incursions by Confederate troops. The company didn’t see any combat. By July 1861 the regiment was dissolved, and its men mustered out of service.

  In November, Bill joined the 112th Regiment, a heavy artillery unit, for a three-year enlistment as a private. His unit, Battery G, served at Fort Delaware and then in 1862 was sent to Washington, D.C., to help defend the Union’s capital against Confederate incursions. Yohe’s unit was under the command of General Abner Doubleday, who had led Union forces at Fort Sumter. Yohe’s job was to help build fortifications and protective earthworks on the north side of the District of Columbia. He was promoted to sergeant.

  In December, Bill Yohe was back in Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg, at Camp Curtin, the largest Civil War military training facility in the Union. There he met twenty-year-old Elizabeth Batcheller. At five feet and three inches, “Lizzie,” as she was called, was six inches shorter than Bill. Thin, with a high forehead, grey eyes, long face, and pointed chin, she provided a marked physical contrast to Bill. They were married on Christmas Day, December 25, 1863.

  Lizzie’s family was from Massachusetts. Her mother died young. Lizzie had been raised by a mean stepmother who had then handed her over to an aunt. According to family history, Lizzie began making her own way in the world at the age of twelve, living for some time in Canada. How she survived is not clear. Bill brought Lizzie back to Bethlehem, where she took up residence in the Eagle.

  In June 1864 Yohe’s unit joined with the Army of the Potomac and laid siege to Richmond and Petersburg. Bill had been reduced in rank to a private, presumably for some kind of infraction. His artillery battery pounded Confederate positions for months with mortar fire from thirty miles of trenches surrounding Petersburg. As the Confederates fought doggedly to stave off defeat, Bill Yohe’s 1,800-man unit experienced heavy losses of more than 200 lives.

  The siege wore on through the year. In November 1864 Yohe completed his three-year contractual enlistment. He was discharged and returned home to Bethlehem, his family, and Lizzie.

  A few months later, on March 9, 1865, Bill rejoined the Union army, enlisting with the 95th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers. Bill’s unit was sent back to Petersburg, where the ten-month siege ended with the Confederate retreat to the west on April 2. Yohe’s unit joined other Union troops at Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 8, and then marched into Richmond, the defeated Confederate capital. On June 8, with the Civil War over, Yohe’s regiment participated in the Corps Review, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Nation’s capital.

  In mid-July of 1865, Bill returned to civilian life in Bethlehem, settling in with Lizzie at the Eagle Hotel. Nine months later, on April 6, 1866, Lizzie gave birth to a dark-haired daughter with beautiful blazing eyes, and da
rk skin like her father. Bill and Lizzie named her Mary Augusta Yohe.

  In 1867, the girl was baptized in the Moravian Church in a ceremony at the Eagle Hotel together with her cousin, John T. Parke, who was the son of her paternal aunt, Anna Yohe, and her uncle, John P. Parke. Her “sponsor” and godfather was a Bethlehem resident, Richard Goundie, who had been Bill’s captain in the army. May would later take the initials of her first, middle and last names to form her own nickname, “May.” She would also remain close to the Parkes, her nearest relatives, for much of her life.

  The end of the Civil War was good for business at the Eagle Hotel. Bethlehem hosted a railway station, Moravian College, the newly established Lehigh University, and other institutions. The Bethlehem Iron Works was growing quickly, with furnaces and foundries to produce the iron needed for the nation’s expansion in the post-war Reconstruction period.

  Caleb Yohe was busy enlarging the hotel; an 1868 newspaper article reports him constructing a 450-square-foot addition to an already sprawling building. To beautify the town, Caleb also planted hundreds of trees along the street, on the river bank, and on Calypso Island. Bill increasingly specialized in putz-making. Though putzes were normally exhibited only during the Christmas season, Bill’s work was so artistic and popular that his putzes stayed up year-round. Caleb and Bill even constructed a special room at the hotel for the putzes, described by a guest of the time as follows:

  Behind the bar of the Eagle tavern, at Bethlehem, in the common room, there has been a large aperture made in the wall of the house, ten feet long, by four feet high, opening into a room built outside of the house, about ten feet square, covered over with a glass roof, as in hot-houses. In this room, William W. Yohe, son of mine ancient host, Caleb, erects each fall a putz; some miniature winter scene. In the spring he replaces this by a summer view, sometimes imaginary, oft times real. On one occasion he made a view of a town in Western Virginia, the scene of one of the earliest battles of the late Rebellion, which a Union refugee at once recognized as the home he had just fled from. Mr. Yohe is quite celebrated in Bethlehem as a putz builder of much good taste.8

  May Yohe, age two. (photo credit 1.3)

  Aside from working in the hotel, making and repairing its putzes, Bill could not find satisfying work. Lizzie sewed bonnets, hats and other clothing for girls at “Fem Sem.” She, like Bill, had a fine singing voice and sang with the choirs, even though she was not Moravian. She also developed a reputation as a free spirit.

  Things did not go well between Bill and Lizzie. In 1869 they tried setting up a household in Philadelphia, a two-hour train ride from Bethlehem, likely relying on help from Bill’s sister Anna and her husband John Parke, a conductor for the North Pennsylvania Railroad and city resident. The move did not help matters; Bill and Lizzie separated and divorced in 1871.

  After the divorce, young May lived with Lizzie on Chestnut Street, as her mother set up a milliner and dressmaking shop. She would often visit with her father and grandparents in Bethlehem, going back and forth with the Parkes.

  May was aware of her childhood in a divided household. Rather than blame her parents for the failed marriage, she claimed that they “did not belong” in Bethlehem with “the thought, the gossip, the habits, the vision of the small town.”9

  Though later in life she scarcely remembered her father, May formed good, strong memories of her grandparents and pleasant recollections of life at the Eagle Hotel. Decades later, Bethlehem’s old-timers recollected hearing a nursemaid’s shrill voice calling out “May!” to get her out from behind the boxes, barrels, and trunks at the hotel.10 As a child in Bethlehem, May was able to develop some of her natural talent for singing by joining in with the community choirs, observing the wonderful Lieberkranz singing groups, and performing for guests at the hotel. Visitors remembered the young girl singing and dancing in the lobby.

  Between Lizzie’s own outlook and the “Fem Sem” training of Anna Parke, May did not think being a girl put her at any disadvantage. She called herself a “tomboy” and played ball and climbed trees, mostly with boys. She developed a self-confidence that was to serve her well, and also sometimes spur her to take risks.

  Recalling her earliest memories, she wrote, “I‘ve always been a devil.”

  My earliest recollection is of picking a bank. It was my own bank, but I had all the delicious thrill of a real robbery. My relatives had given me half-dollars, quarters and dimes until I had quite a little sum. My mother had told me to keep this money in my toy bank and I would buy Christmas presents for my family and friends with the money.

  But in the meantime, I had got into bad company. I had a little friend named Rachel who taught me how to open the unopenable bank with a hat pin. I would pry and pry into the bank, get a handful of money at a time, and I would take Rachel and myself to the theater and buy candy and ice cream.

  At last, the week before Christmas came and my mother said, “Now we will open the bank.” When she had opened the little iron house in a legitimate way, she found there just thirty-five cents. She got a confession from me.11

  In school, whether in Bethlehem or Philadelphia, May benefited from the Moravians’ emphasis on education. She spoke German and English, and appreciated the tutelage that awakened her “soul to the beauties of music and art.”12

  In 1872 May’s father Bill married Rebecca Lewis. He ran for and was elected chief engineer of the Bethlehem Fire Department. He asked for the community to help him “do the right thing” in bringing the department up to a proper standard, and the Bethlehem Daily Times endorsed that view. Bill conducted drills in German, and he and Rebecca lived at the fire station. Lizzie continued to live and work as a seamstress in Philadelphia.

  In 1874, Caleb and Mary Yohe sold the Eagle for a whopping $30,000 to George Myers. Myers closed the Eagle temporarily to have its exterior remodeled by architect Stephen Decatur Button in his popular Cape May style. Bill continued to make and repair the putzes at the Eagle for the new owner and went to work as a detective. In November of that year he had to deal with the harrowing case of a delusional mother who drowned her infant in the Lehigh River.

  The next year, Bill was approached about creating a huge putz for the floral section of the Centennial Exhibition of the United States, to be held in Philadelphia in 1876. The proposed putz, which was expected to be a big draw for visitors to the exposition, was to be 60 feet wide by 50 feet deep and would depict the scenery of Pennsylvania with its hills, valleys, forests, and grasslands. The scene would include flowing water, mosses, ferns, flowers, and plants, as well as rustic bridges, farm scenes, mills, vehicles, an iron furnace, the railroad, and other features. Hoping for more stable work, Bill also applied, without success, for a long-term fabricator position with the Centennial Exhibition.

  Yohe continued his detective work, gaining notice for his observational skills in solving crimes, but failing to find regular employment. Using his parent’s proceeds from the hotel sale, Bill bought a two-and-a-half-story brick house at Hillsdale Garden in Bethlehem to house Caleb, Mary, and his family.

  MAY YOHE’S FAMILY

  Because the country was in the midst of an economic depression, good jobs were hard to find. Bill opened a restaurant, the Hillside Garden. It specialized in wine, beer, cigars, private rooms for social occasions, and lunch for respectable ladies and gentlemen. The town’s Coronet Band furnished the music on opening day as customers enjoyed beer and lunch. But success eluded Bill. Later that year he pulled out of the restaurant business to become a detective for the New Jersey Central Railroad. Failing at that, too, he became a private detective with a friend in Easton, Pennsylvania. In 1878, he applied for a passport, purportedly to go to Brazil, but never went.

  Bill Yohe’s best moment came perhaps one day in the winter of 1880. As a detective, he was called to Santee Mills, a few miles north of Bethlehem, in the early hours of a brisk and snowy morning. More than a hundred local folks had gathered at a farmhouse, where neighbors had found the bodies
of Jacob and Annie Geogle, brutally axed to death. It was clear the murderer was a boarder, Joseph Snyder, who had unsuccessfully attempted to rape the Geogles’ teenage daughter. She had escaped, and now Snyder was missing. Yohe cleverly discerned his hiding place in a pile of straw, handcuffed and questioned him, and held him for arrest. The incensed crowd called for vengeance, assaulted Yohe, and moved to lynch the suspect. Yohe valiantly tried to turn back the crowd and prevent the lynching, putting himself at risk, and even entangling the rope—all to no avail. Snyder was hanged by the mob. Newspapers, though, described Yohe as a hero.13

  Such heroics in Yohe’s life, as in the course of his Civil War service, were often followed by failings. In 1882, veering from the law, he was arrested twice for forgery. He wrote a fraudulent check for $200 and tried to cash it at the First National Bank of Bethlehem. Two weeks later, he tried to cash two checks of $200 and $225 at the town’s Lehigh Valley National Bank. As a newspaper report pointed out, this “act of a wayward son falls with crushing effect upon his aged parents.”14

  It turned out that Bill had forged other checks—about $3,000 in all. Given their prominence in the community, the elder Yohes were embarrassed and paid off their son’s debts, though additional claims emerged afterward that were paid by a public sale of Bill’s personal effects. Bill left Bethlehem and headed west to Montana and Colorado, fully out of May’s life, and never to be seen again by the family.

  After the sale of the Eagle, the eight-year-old May increasingly spent time at her mother’s in Philadelphia. Lizzie may have chaffed at the constraints and embarrassment she had faced in Bethlehem’s tight-knit community as a divorcee, leaving a mark upon May’s own perceptions. Indeed, May’s mythologizing of Lizzie’s Native American background may have been a way of asserting that her mother (and, by extension, May herself) retained their freedom and independence from the small-town mindset. In any case, May saw her mother and herself as cast-offs from Bethlehem.