Somedays family history leads into bittersweet understanding of today.
My paternal ggrandfather saw Milwaukee as THE place for his emigration from the soggy farmlands of what ~160 years later is now the Spreewald international biological reserve roughly midway between Berlin and Dresden
Impoverished as second sons often were, unhappy with the failed people's summer revolutions of 1848, and still young enough to need to evade the Bismark's conscription, of all places he aimed his emigration here.
I'm not quite sure what he hoped. Historical profiles suggest it was a growing town, literally a new boom town on the bluffs overlooking an inland freshwater sea. It was becoming industrial and had the reputation of being the "New Athens," It was a place where progressive social thinkers saw a chance to create a great future. The people of that city were big into public education and insisted on a High School with a 'Normal' department that trained elementary teachers. Education really was upward mobility...
So I looked for and I found a record of my grandfather, at age 9, in attendance of Milwaukee's 8th district school (a bit west of what is now called Walker's Point). The site of the school he attended is still a public school ground--Kagel Elementary--although the building is not the one from the late 1860's.
In true American fashion, the neighborhood is still a place of immigrant dreams. Now those visions are probably dreamed more in Spanish than the Bohemen-German of the immigrants living between the now 'historic' Mitchell Street on the south and the Cream City brickyards and the post civil-war industrial canals on the north. True, this wasn't Grand Avenue with the mansions of brewers like Pabst and Miller, but it was still a starting place for hundreds of familys. Certainly it was the place in America where this part of my family's American experience started.
So I went and checked on how that neighborhood elementary school, the place that should still be a garden for it's children's future, is doing.
It ranks in the bottom 3% of schools in WI!
I have no doubt the children there are still bright and willing and that the parents in that neighborhood still dream as big about their childrens' possibilities as did my ggrandfather and ggrandmother.
But, it's something of a heartbreak to realize from how far back today's kids in that neighborhood are asked to start.
I can't shake the feeling that a shadow has fallen across the once bright glory of what was the 'New Athens.'
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