My Garich Line
Early Garich history predating the immigration of Edward Joseph Garich in 1878/1879 has proved to be an enigma. Even those who have previously undertaken the responsibility of recording the Garich heritage are hard-pressed to provide material of Edward's life before he left Germany.
Vague remembrances place Edward’s homeland in the area of East Prussia, a district or state in Germany. However, any Germanic Garich material acquired so far relates to a line located in Croatia/Yugoslavia, an area somewhat removed from Edward’s supposed place of origin.
Efforts to locate information concerning Edward’s immigration have been unsuccessful. At this time, a “manual search” has been ordered through the United States Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, DC. Although Edward and his second wife, Anna Camelia (Cecilia?) Kroulik, also an immigrant, were recorded as “naturalized” on census records, their naturalization records have proved to be as elusive as their immigration records.
Tradition indicates that the family name was originally von Garich and that the “von” was dropped upon immigration. Although some believe that the “von” indicates some kind of royal ancestry, a German researcher maintains that “von” merely means “from.” Consequently, if our name was indeed “von Garich” back in the homeland, our family could have had origins in an area called Garich, or something similar to Garich. So far, efforts to locate such a region have been unsuccessful. (All research attempts have been conducted for both the Garich and von Garich surnames. Phone directory searches for Germany have uncovered some Gariches, but no von Gariches. Inquiries sent to the German Gariches have been unanswered.)
There is also some difference of opinion about Edward’s actual given name. According to his daughter, Clara, his name was actually Anton Edward. However, members of his “first family” by his first wife, Mary Hohman Garich, assert that his name was indeed Edward Joseph, a name that was subsequently passed along through the next three generations. Perhaps he was actually Anton Edward Joseph Garich, or perhaps Clara inadvertently affixed to her father’s name the given name of her maternal grandfather, Anton A. Kroulik.
Another mystery is Edward’s parentage. On his death certificate (Texas #55501), his father is listed as Edward Garich. However, in the space for his mother’s name, the word unknown appears. Of course, there could be simple and ordinary explanations for this lapse of information (his mother, for example, had died when he was born, and he was raised by grandparents); but an active imagination can surely invent a romantic cloud of mystery around our worthy ancestor!
What is known is that in 1878 or 1879, Edward Joseph (or Anton Edward?) Garich, a trained pharmacist, left his native Germany to seek his fortune in the United States. His father, Edward Garich, who had never remarried, had settled in Cuba, KS, after a trip across the Atlantic a few years before. The senior Garich, a small man with a big beard, was a carpenter by trade. The last years of his life were spent in Kansas City, Kansas, where he made his home at the Catholic Hospital and did carpenter work for his keep.
The younger Edward’s very first job in America was that of a gardener. At that time, he spoke no English, nor did he understand it very well. Instead of weeding a tomato patch, he cleared the ground and chopped it up, thus ending his gardening career rather abruptly. Unmarried at that time, he ran in the Oklahoma Territory State Run. After staking his claim for some land in the territory, he sold it and then settled in Severy, Kansas, where he worked his trade while running a dry goods store and married a local girl named Mary Frances Hohman. Although Mary was born in Iowa and her mother in Kentucky, she was the child of an immigrant father, who was born in Germany. By Mary, Edward fathered six sons and a daughter: Fred, Agnes Louisa, August “Gus” Hampton, Robert William, Leo/Lee F., Edward Joseph, and William “Bill.” Mary died soon after Bill’s birth.
Edward then met Anna Kroulik Schoedr/Schroeder, who had come to the United States from Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, by boat when she was eleven. Records indicate that Anna had been previously married to a man named --?-- Schoedr/Schroeder, by whom she had a son named Albert. In 1910 Albert Schoedr/Schroeder was living with his mother and step-father. He also visited his mother in Salem, IL, in 1942. However, his contact with the Garich family, including his mother, was apparently negligible.
At the time of Edward and Anna’s marriage, 15 Mar 1902, Anna was twenty-five and Edward forty-five, a difference in ages that was a source of controversy among Edward’s children by Mary, who were close to Anna’s age themselves. Although Edward and Anna stayed in Kansas for the next few years, the time marked by the birth of Percy Joseph “P.J.” in 1904 and Clara in 1908, Edward’s older children continued to pressure the couple about their “undesirable” marriage. Consequently, in 1911, when the Catholic Church wanted to establish a Catholic community in Arkansas, Edward and Anna moved with their two children, Anna’s Albert, and Edward’s youngest by Mary (Bill) to Cherry Hill, AR, where another son, Roy, was born in 1913. (Edward and Anna had twins--Joeie and Johnny Garich--born before P.J. Both twins, however, died at six months of age of “summer complaint,” severe vomiting and diarrhea.)
Many of the Gariches responding to my inquiries have been descendants of Edward’s “first family.” In phone conversations with some of them, I discovered that their branch of the family had retained the “old” pronunciation of the Garich name--saying GARRICK instead of GARRISH. The pronunciation change for our branch of the family occurred during the Salem, IL, Oil Boom in 1939. The German pronunciation of GARRICK for a name spelled GARICH was apparently too confusing for people in the Salem area. Because so many persisted in mispronouncing the name, P.J. Garich decreed that GARICH would forevermore be pronounced GARRISH, thus surrendering a bit of his heritage to small-town stubbornness.
In Cherry Hill, AR, Edward Garich prospered. He purchased 160 acres of farm land for $3200 and built a house for his family there. Skilled with his hands, he added screen doors and screen windows to his home. These screen additions were the first of their kind in the Arkansas community. Later he sold this house and moved into another one closer to town. He also opened a general store, Garich Grocery Store, which was similar to Lum and Abner’s Pine Ridge, AR, Jot-’Em-Down Store, popularized by a national radio show. Garich Grocery Story also served as the local drug store, where Edward continued his work as a pharmacist. During this time he also served as postmaster of Cherry Hill and helped to build a Catholic church there.
The Garich home was always open to newcomers to the community, and whole families would stay there until they could find jobs and housing. There were lively games of checkers between Edward and Father Gallagher, the Catholic priest who came from Mena to conduct services and also stayed with the Gariches. Both parties would break into German at the height of the checker game. On Saturday nights, the rugs were rolled up, and there was music and dancing.
Edward Garich had a favorite saying, “When food tastes best, that’s the time to quit eating.” Apparently he practiced what he preached, for he was a tall and thin man. Anna Garich said that her husband was also inclined to pout when they had a difference of opinion. At one time in Cherry Hill, he stayed in the barn for two weeks, refusing to speak to Anna while the children took him his meals and daily changes of clothing.
The Garich children attended grammar school in a two-room schoolhouse in Cherry Hill. P.J., who did not like school, cut his classes constantly but somehow managed to graduate from the eighth grade. However, he elected not to attend boarding high school in Mena, AR, preferring instead to clerk in his father’s grocery store. (In his thirties, P.J. did further his education with a number of correspondence courses that included refrigeration and electronics.)
When P.J. was sixteen, he ran away from home. Little is known about his experiences during this time, but when he returned to Cherry Hill three years later, he was ready to settle down.
On 23 May 1923, he and Delia Cagle were married by a Cherry Hill justice of the peace on the JP’s front porch.
Ironically, P.J. encountered family resistance to his marriage just as his parents had. One reason for the objections was that P.J. was two years younger than his twenty-one-year-old bride. The major problem, though, especially in the eyes of Anna Garich, was religion: P.J. was raised a Catholic; Delia, a Protestant.
Perhaps his parents’ stern disapproval caused P.J. to turn to his new father-in-law for work. Walter Cagle, a tall and thin man with ears that “could sail a plane,” was a blacksmith in Oden, AR, and P.J. became his apprentice. Nicknamed “Gigpole” by his friends, Walter taught P.J. to shoe horses, sharpen plows, work with iron, and make gigpoles (poles used to spear fish and frogs).
During these apprentice years, P.J. and Delia had two daughters: Doris Joann, born in 1924 in Oden, and Jonnie Marie, born in 1925 in Cherry Hill. (P.J. also acquired a tattoo at this time. This tattoo of a girl with Mae West proportions and in a bathing suit became a source of embarrassment to P.J., who always wore long-sleeved shirts to conceal the mark.)
Because the area around Oden was poverty-stricken and did not hold many opportunities, P.J. and Delia moved their family west to Oklahoma, where P.J. began the trade that would establish his future reputation: oilfield welding and machine work. Two more daughters were born to the couple in Oklahoma: Lela Jeanne in Sallisaw in 1927 and Iris Oleta in Allen in 1928.
When the East Texas Oil Boom occurred in the early 1930’s, P.J. obtained a position with the Spencer-Harris Machine Shop in Gladewater, TX. There in 1933, P.J.’s final child and only son, Walter Edward, was born.
The Depression years of the 1930’s brought extra hardships to the already struggling family of seven. On some days P.J. was lucky to earn a whole dollar for a full day of back-breaking work. Because of these difficult times, P.J. was sometimes forced to work for people who stole oil from the pipelines. During the night, he welded a “hot” line to the pipelines; then others would tap the lines. P.J.’s pay was fifty dollars for each night of this dangerous work. Fortunately, he was never apprehended, but he faced the risk willingly to feed and clothe his family. In fact, his efforts and Delia’s thrifty and resourceful ways quite sheltered the Depression’s severity from their children, who have few, if any, recollections of any deprivations normally associated with this period of history.
When the Salem Oil Boom occurred in 1939, Spencer-Harris transferred P.J. to Salem, IL. Because of a housing shortage that resulted from the oil boom, P.J. and his family moved several times, living in Iuka and Sandoval before finally settling in Salem.
At the beginning of World War II, Anna Garich came to live in Salem. Her youngest son, Roy, had been drafted into the Army, and her husband, Edward, had died the day after Pearl Harbor, 8 Dec 1941, in Kilgore, TX, where Edward and Anna had moved after leaving Cherry Hill. Edward’s death had caused a family crisis because his children by his first wife wanted him buried in Kansas by Mary, but Anna wanted him buried in Cherry Hill. After some negotiations, during which Anna urged P.J. to guard the family cash register, Edward’s body was taken to Frankfort (Marshall County), KS, for burial.
With Anna’s arrival in Salem, Delia sought to make peace with her mother-in-law by converting to Catholicism. Doris had already expressed interest in the religion, and Delia decided that the whole family should make the conversion. Though P.J. had moved away from the church, his family’s conversion convinced him to return.
P.J.’s success and reputation in the oil fields were growing rapidly by now, and he was promoted to head foreman of the Salem shop. In 1946 W.T. “Dutch” Stanford hired P.J. away from the Spencer-Harris Company, and P.J. started an oil field machine shop which immediately began production on a web guide, a machine that rolls material in a uniform row with the proper tension to maintain alignment.
Eventually, when there was no longer a need for the oil field shop, P.J. bought the place and continued to operate it on the same premises until 1959, when he moved to a site on Route 50 West in Salem, where P.J. Repair Service is now. At the time, however, the business was known as P.J.’s Machine Shop. There P.J. earned the reputation of being the best mud pump man in Southern IL.
After P.J.’s son, Edward, was discharged from the Army, he became part of the crew of P.J.’s Machine Shop, where he had worked as an apprentice during his high school years. The professional relationship between father and son was productive. In 1962 they designed a drilling rig derrick that was the first of its kind.
When P.J.’s health began to fail, the result of years of heavy smoking that had produced his emphysema, P.J. sold the business to Edward in 1964. P.J. and Delia then retired to Mena, AR, where P.J. was free to raise cattle, to fish, and to gossip with his buddies as they drank coffee in a local cafe.
On 14 Apr 1971, at the age of sixty-seven, Percy Joseph “P.J.” Garich died of lung cancer. He was survived by his wife, five children, fourteen grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.
Now, in July of 2009, his wife, Delia Cagle Garich, has also passed away, dying in Mt. Ida, AR, 17 May 1997, at the age of ninety-five. Three of their daughters have passed away: Jonnie Marie Bass died of cancer in 1988; Lela Jeanne Garich Cleveland died in 1993 of cardiac arrest following hospitalization for emphysema; Doris Joann Garich Marcum died of cancer in 2002. Their son, Walter Edward Garich, died of cancer in 2006.
[Sources: Catherine Garich de Bernardo, L. Jeanne Cleveland, Delia Cagle Garich, Edward Joseph Garich, Mrs. D.J. Garich, Clara Garich Van Horn via Betty Van Horn Link, Robert E. Seabridge, Mrs. Pat Garich, Mr. and Mrs. W.E. Garich, Doris Garich Marcum, Greenwood County (KS) Historical Society, census records, marriage records, birth records, death certificates.]
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