Today we’ve got an unusual GPOD submission. Janelle Molony is sharing with us the story and some photos of her great-grandparents, Louis and Martha Nasch, from St. Paul, Minnesota.
The German-American Nasch family in St. Paul, Minnesota, produced an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables and vibrant blooming flowers in their post-WWI front yard “Victory Garden.” Despite anti-German sentiments, many immigrant families aided the war efforts overseas through home gardening. Nasch family photos from the 1910s to 1920s show lush grapevines, fruit-laden trees, and waist-high shrubs, as well as the fantastically large heads of summer cabbage (likely to be canned into “Liberty Cabbage” sauerkraut). Martha Nasch believed they had every color of the rainbow growing at some point. Louis Nasch maintained his neighborhood-famous garden up into his old age.
The source of green-thumb pride offered a spiritual and emotional boost to the Nasch family during both good times and in hard. Even long after the war, the remembrance of sweet scents and rainbows of color is often on the mind of Martha Nasch, patient #20864 of the Saint Peter State Hospital for the Insane. Her adulterous husband sent her to this institution, two hours away, on a cold January morning in 1928.
In a collection of poems written from behind bars, Martha cataloged the precious jewels of her home garden: the roses, iris, and larkspur, as well as alstroemeria, phlox, daisies, dandelions, and blood-red “Crested Cockscomb” celosia. “Flowers are part of memories,” she wrote in one poem. It seemed every flower the family grew came with a memory of a person, place, or time no longer accessible to her.
Her husband, Louis, was a stickler for keeping the garden neat, and he punished children for picking the flowers. Martha showed her poetic adoration to her little boy, Ralph, whom she missed daily. He once picked yellow dandelion weeds from the lawn and asked for his mother to add them to a vase. This sweet memory is, unfortunately, surrounded with much more heartbreaking tales of missing loved ones, patient injustices, and feelings of betrayal by her husband.
Martha’s memories include and expose historically accurate treatment of women of the 1920s thought to be insane. But like many women institutionalized in this era, Martha was not mentally ill. Planted in floral metaphors and analogies, Martha shares her thoughts on the experience, and she begs her family back home to plant the one flower that was missing: the blue forget-me-not.
September 1934: Martha Nasch poses for a news reporter in her front yard garden after being released from her seven-year committal in the state’s insane asylum. Photo: ACME/N.E.A.
Left to right: Ben and Clara Keis, Emma Gruening, Martha and Louis Nasch Jr. in their St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood home garden, circa 1914–1919. The photographer is unknown.
August 1926: Martha Nasch “is resting her hand up on grape vine fence,” as captioned by photographer Louis Nasch Jr. Immediately under her hand is an early bunch of grapes.
September 1926: Martha Nasch sits with her four-year-old son, Ralph, in the backyard. Behind her appears to be a large crop of basil. They are looking at stems of Celosia.
This image of Louis and Ralph in the garden was photographed by Martha Nasch six months prior to her forced removal to the insane asylum, where she stayed nearly seven years to treat a so-called case of nerves.
August 1928: Ralph Nasch, age six, stands in front of phlox and holds a bouquet of “Cockscomb” to show his mother during one of his bimonthly visits to the hospital. This is one of an extremely few photos that was saved from the time Martha was away from the family home. Photo: Louis Nasch Jr.
Janelle has more information about her great-grandmother on her website: JanelleMolony.com/SevenYearsInsane
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