This wonderful photo of students at St. Peter Lutheran School was contributed by Lori Freise. It was the spark that I needed to address a conundrum that has been bothering me for years with some of our early photos.
While it is intriguing to make note of the expressions and body language of the students in this photo, my eye went directly to the young boy in the middle of the third row who is dressed in a two-toned sweater. The body of the sweater appears to be tan, while the lapel and trim are a darker brown or black. The older boy behind him is wearing a slightly different version but has his buttoned up to the top.
We can place the time frame of this photo sometime between 1903 and 1937 because the teacher in the background is Charles Meinke. He taught at the West District School during those years, according to the Centennial of St. Peter Lutheran Church booklet from 1947. (The West District School was the same school that still exists along Schaumburg Road, just east of today’s St. Peter Lutheran Church.) Judging by the clothes and the hair styles of the girls, the photo seems to have been taken sometime between 1908 and 1910.
This, though, is the photo that first captured my interest. How many of those same sweaters do you spot? From my vantage point, there appears to be six young boys wearing the sweater–two in the front row and four in the same row as Teacher Meinke. Zooming in on the slate in the front, we can see that this photo was taken in 1912. There are leaves on the trees in the background so we have to assume this was either in the spring or fall of 1912; hence, the beginning or the end of the school year.
This led me to wonder where these sweaters originated. Was it a knitting pattern that the women of the area passed around? Did a peddler who traveled through the area have multiple sizes that he sold? Did J. Fenz & Son General Merchandise at the southwest corner of Schaumburg and Roselle Roads stock it in their clothing section? It could have been any one of those possibilities.
Until, that is, when the following picture came into our collection and then I did a double take. The older man in the front, with the white beard, is wearing the. exact. same. sweater. So, apparently, this wasn’t just a popular sweater for boys, it was also popular for men!
This photo was most likely taken by Fredrick Pfingsten who was an early photographer in Schaumburg Township. It is winter and the mixed group of men and women are gathered around a woodpile. The men have been sawing logs and branches of all sizes at the Thies, Rohlwing, Fasse or Panzer farm. How do we know these farms were where the action was taking place?
The people are identified from left to right as: Herman Thies, Chris Fasse, Herman Rohlwing, Alma Panzer, Emma (Panzer) Rohlwing, Ferdinand Panzer, Sophia (Fasse) Panzer. The back of the photo says Herman Thies is a neighbor and cousin of Fred W. Pfingsten. Christoffer Fasse is father of Sophia Panzer. Ferdinand Panzer is Sophia’s husband. Alma and Emma are sisters and they are daughters of Ferdinand and Sophia Panzer. Herman Rohlwing is the husband of Emma. Herman Rohlwing is also brother to Emma (Rohwling) Pfingsten, wife of Fred Pfingsten.
The fact that an older man can be seen wearing the sweater did not make the mystery of its origins any easier to solve. It could still indicate a knitting pattern, a peddler or the J. Fenz & Son store.
Then I happened to stumble across this photo from Palatine High School on eBay and, there, in the middle of the photo is the same sweater on another young man. This helped to narrow the focus of where the sweater originated.
We know that young people from Schaumburg Township did not begin regularly attending Palatine High School until the 1930s so this young man could not have been from our area. Thus, his parents most likely did not purchase the sweater at J. Fenz & Son. Chances are good, too, that he probably lived in the village of Palatine so his mother was probably not related to the ladies of Schaumburg Township who would have been passing around a knitting pattern.
If we look more closely, we can also see that the clothing the rest of the young men are wearing is clearly store bought. In fact, all of them are wearing suits except for the young man wearing the sweater. It then seems probable that this sweater, too, was store bought.
Where, then, would men and boys from, both Palatine and Schaumburg Township have been able to purchase the same sweater? If not a peddler or a local dry goods or mercantile store? What other shopping options were available at the time? How about the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue which was the general store/Amazon of its day?
According to the Sears archive, the catalogue became widely disseminated in 1896 with the advent of Rural Free Delivery that made it fiscally affordable to mail to people like the farmers of Schaumburg Township.
With that in mind, I pulled up the Fall 1912 Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue in the library subscription of Ancestry, checked their index for sweaters and, there, on page 370 I hit pay dirt.
It isn’t a sweater–it’s a “sweater coat”–and it was sold in a variety of styles and colors. Obviously, this particular style and color was especially popular. One has to imagine that the .38 cent model in the lower left corner caught the eye of a number of families. Or, possibly, it is the $1.65 model above it with the darker trim.
The male version appeared in the catalog as well for $1.39.
The affordability of the sweater and the easy availability of the catalog made this an easy purchase–which is how it wound up as a Sunday best type of garment on the young men of Schaumburg Township.
Jane Rozek
Local History Librarian
Schaumburg Township District Library
jrozek@stdl.org
History of Schaumburg Township 