Flora Margarethe Augusta Zogg Terry
My dad Russell Terry Mason was 10 years old when his maternal grandmother—my Grandma Jessie Mae [Terry] Mason’s mother Flora—died. As the oldest grandchildren—my dad’s older sister Marilyn and his cousin Pat Henry—have already passed, I decided I should get busy asking for my dad’s recollections, as well as those of his younger sisters, Melinda and Martha, and their cousins. Melinda was 8 when Flora died, and Martha was 6.
I’ve often wondered at Flora’s full name. It seemed like such a mouthful. To look at a newborn baby and name them Flora Margarethe (pronounced like Margaretta) Augusta Zogg seemed to indicate the grand expectations her parents had of her. I imagine her first name came from her grandfather Florian. Her middle name Margarethe was her mother’s middle name. I have yet to discover the origins of Augusta.
Flora was baptized in the German Evangelical Lutheran Church on June 6, 1886, with her godparents listed as Peter and Maria Weirich. (Sadly, Flora’s godfather Peter died only two months later as a result of a mining accident.)
Flora’s parents were married on April 23, 1883 and went through a bitter divorce when Flora was a young child. From court records, we know that Mathias accused Anna of shirking her wifely duties, complaining that he was forced to prepare his own meals before going to work. Anna did not appear in court to contest his accusations, and the aftermath resulted in their young daughter being left in the care of Mathias’s extended family.2
Flora left Missouri as a child and moved to Orchard, Texas with her grandparents Florian and Anna [Gabathuler] Zogg and aunt and uncle, Josiah Quinn and Ursula [Zogg] Quinn. By 1900, her grandparents had passed away and 16-year-old Flora was living with the Quinns.
At age 21, Flora married Willis Oscar Terry (born 16 Aug 1875 in Terryville, Texas to John Alpheus Terry and Julia Middlebrook) in Orchard, Texas (August 1, 1906). Willis worked as a section foreman for the railroad. Within the first year of their marriage, Flora gave birth to their eldest daughter, Myrtle Anna Terry. In subsequent years, they had three additional daughters: Ethel Alberta Terry, Jessie Mae Terry (my grandmother), and Edith Annette Terry.
“When I knew her, she lived in San Angelo with Myrtle Henry, her eldest daughter in a rock house at 110 Logan Street,” Melinda recalls. “Grandma had the front room, just to the right as you walk in the house…a sunny, pleasant room.” I remember that room as Ethel’s room, as she lived there with Myrtle when I was growing up. Myrtle and Ethel lived together in that house until they were close to their 90s.
In her later years, Flora took up painting, and you can find many of her paintings still hanging on the walls of my Aunt Melinda’s home. A prolific artist in her own right, Melinda recalls, “Jessie and Ethel, Flora’s two middle daughters, got together and bought Grandma a wooden box of oil paints and probably also paid for her lessons at San Angelo College (now Angelo State University). Mother said that her professor said that her strokes were like needlework. Her paintings were like embroidery.”3
Flora’s mother Anna passed away in Kansas City at the age of 65 (d. 29 Nov 1927), although there is no evidence that Flora knew where her mother was nor that her children ever met Anna. We don’t know whether Flora was aware that she had a half-brother Fredrick Jacob Schulze and a half-sister Margret Schulze, who had died at the age of 19 (d. 30 Aug 1915). Read more about this discovery.
Flora’s father Mathias died of tuberculosis after moving to Colorado at the end of his life, along with his third wife Margaret Pauline [Langworthy] Zogg, to take advantage of the healing air. He had been in the tuberculosis sanitorium in Colorado Springs at the time of his death at age 67 (d. 01 Apr 1928). Although I have heard that Flora and her children had visited Mathias when he still lived in Missouri, I have no first-hand accounts of those visits. It is unknown whether Flora ever met any of her half siblings: Pearl, Hulda, Dixie, Martin, Paul, Lily, and Lelah Zogg.
Willis and Flora followed his work on the railroad, first living in Fort Bend County, then in Alvin, Brazoria County, and finally in Tom Green County outside San Angelo, Texas, having retired to a farm on Old San Angelo and Bronte Road.
After her husband Willis passed away (d. 19 Nov 1940), Flora stayed with her daughters. “She was just a housewife,” my father recalls of his grandmother Flora. “I was probably her favorite because I was the only boy. I remember her walking us to Sunday School when she came to visit. Mother was a Methodist and Daddy was a Baptist. I imagine she was a Methodist too.”
Today, people might flinch at the description “just a housewife.” Flora was of a generation of women who weren’t expected to achieve anything more than raise their family. Her daughters’ lives are a testament to the work she did. Myrtle was a school teacher, Ethel a bookkeeper and office manager, Jessie a businesswoman who owned and operated a florist and craft shop, and Annette a military officer’s wife who earned her bachelor’s degree at age 45 and then worked in human resources. They were strong, independent women, and I can only imagine that they must have gotten some of their grit from their mother Flora, and perhaps even from her mother Anna (who was clearly independent enough to immigrate to America on her own, and unwilling to endure an unhappy marriage). In all, Flora’s daughters raised eight children to adulthood and survived the loss of four babies at birth.
My father’s youngest sister Martha has very few firsthand memories of her grandmother as she was so young when Flora passed. “I don’t ever remember being scolded by her, but then I was probably the most obedient, compliant, loving child of the four of us,” she laughs. “I remember going with Daddy over to the train depot to get Grandma off the train that was coming in from San Angelo. At the time, I think she was living with Myrtle and Frazier.”
Melinda, my father’s middle sister and a writer herself, remembers her 8-year-old impressions of her grandmother: “She was a round, pleasingly plump woman, as chubby people were described back then in the 50s. She had long, gray hair which I don’t remember seeing in any other way but twined in two braids from behind her ears, then draped across her skull in a kind of headband. She wore simple dresses, cottons I guess, with colorful prints of tiny flowers, modest and mid-calf or so. Her eyes were clear and light gray or blue. They weren’t twinkly, but more steadfast. Not solemn, but alert and attentive.”
Her grandchildren most remember her reading the Bible, playing hymns4 on the upright piano in their living room, and taking them to Sunday School at the Baptist Church down the street from their home in Ballinger.
“I don’t remember seeing Grandma cook or clean or do much else except read her Bible. I have it amongst her stuff,” Melinda explains. “She would take us to The First Baptist Church where she would sit in the middle section of pews, fairly close to the front. We knew to be quiet when we were with her. You could feel her eyes on you, just like you knew to behave when Mother cut her black eyes at you. I knew Grandma could be stern, but she was always a calm, steady and a reassuring presence. Kind of like the Holy Spirit is to me today.”
When Flora died at the age of 70 (d. 15 Aug 1955), she had been to visit her youngest daughter Annette in Wyoming and suffered a stroke. She was brought back to San Angelo, but died in the hospital. She was buried alongside her husband Willis in the old Orchard Cemetery in Fort Bend County, where her grandparents and the Quinns were also laid to rest.
Alongside the photos I have of Flora, and the memories of her grandchildren, Melinda has entrusted me with a shadowbox that my Grandma Jessie made to keep and display some of her mother Flora’s treasures: jewelry from when she was a baby, her handkerchief, her thimble and sewing scissors, and a porcelain bowl used for powder.
1 Although her death certificate reads November 25, 1884, her baptismal record reads November 13, 1883. Census records from 1900 indicate 1884, as does her headstone. Perhaps the alteration to 1884 was a result of a desire on the part of the family to cover the fact that, had she been born in 1883, her mother Anna would have likely been pregnant before the couple was married.
2 Mathias Zogg went on to marry two additional times and have children with each wife, but Flora was the only child of her parents’ union. Anna Knust was missing from the family records for decades, until a DNA match revealed that she had moved to St. Louis and had a second family, with a son who grew to adulthood and a daughter who died as a teenager. We don’t know whether Flora ever knew where her mother ended up, but no one else in the family held this knowledge.
3 Melinda’s reflections on her grandmother’s paintings: “She painted mountains in Wyoming when she went to visit Annette, her youngest daughter. She painted a derelict house in Ballinger where she visited Mother. Marilyn remembered sitting with her as she painted it just around the block from where we lived on 11th street at the time. We used to call it “the haunted house!” Marilyn’s kids have that painting. One Christmas Grandma gave each of us kids a painting. I have two or three of them. One is of a rabbit racing into a hollow log. I like to think it is a scene from Ethel’s ranch Just outside Ballinger where we used to go fish or sail the wooden boats we had made with Daddy’s help, propelled by rubber bands attached to whittled propellers. Another was of a Mother Cat standing in the front doorway of her house holding a broom with kittens outside on the stoop. It illustrates a popular children’s rhyme at the time that begins: Three little kittens one stormy night / Began to quarrel and then to fight. / “I'll have that mouse!” / Said the littlest cat. / “You’ll Not have that mouse!” / “We’ll just see about that….etc. Her paintings adorned our walls throughout our childhood even through our teenage years when Paul Anka, Bobby Rydell, The Beatles and other posters adorned them as well. We also had original oil paintings!”
4 Melinda says: “I remember sitting next to her as she played ‘Bringing in the Sheets.’ Of course it was really ‘Bringing in the Sheaves,’ but I had no idea there was such a thing as sheaves then. But, I could understand why we would rejoice in bringing in fresh sun-dried sheets.”
This post is part of a planned series recording the memories of the current oldest generation's memories of the oldest generation they knew first-hand.
See related posts about Flora: Flora's Photo | The Ruby Red Cup
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