August Spies was 31 at the time of the Haymarket Affair, May 4, 1886. Born in Hesse near Kassel, Germany, he emigrated with his mother and siblings after the death of his father in 1872.
In 1880, he lived at Ashland and Milwaukee, or West Town, with his mother and his siblings. In the 1880 census he was working as an upholsterer but by 1884 he was an editor at the Arbeiter Zeitung which was headquartered at Wells and Madison. West Town in Chicago was and is famously Polish but there were many German immigrants living there, as well.
In 1880, Georg Engel lived at Milwaukee and Ohio, also West Town, with his wife Helena and his two children. Engel had a toy shop and had emigrated in 1874. Louis Lingg had arrived in Chicago in the early 1880s and was boarding with William Seliger who had also just arrived. Address is currenlty unknown.
After the Haymarket Affair, Spies, Engel, Parsons, Fischer were executed. Lingg committed suicide in his jail cell after someone smuggled in a bomb.
**
I set out to see where my relatives lived in relation to Spiess and Engel and what their daily movements may have been like, possibly crossing paths with the anarchists.
Braun - 1870
Bridgeport 1880 South Halsted
Fred Drantz, Friedrich Bernhard - emmigrated in 1885 to Gilman IL. Still living there in 1900 and moved to Chicago by 1910
Bechtloff South Halsted 1900
No comments:
Post a Comment