The Ihnken Shovel
The Texas Story Project.
My second cousin and I got our degrees from the University of Texas in San Antonio. We paid for our tuition by working together at a little greenhouse just outside of Castroville in the late 1990s.
We covered many topics of conversation during our soda and ice cream breaks over those years. On one occasion, John brought in an old research paper that his Grandma Ludell had written in the 1930s. For the subject of her paper, Ludell chose to interview her grandpa, Louis Ihnken. John never knew his grandma, who had died when his mother was only a year old. The paper had made it to John not through his mother’s side of the family but from his father and father’s brother. John’s father was at the St. Louis school when the nuns were throwing away old papers and asked him if he wanted to keep an old sketch about Louis Ihnken. John’s father gave it to his brother, who kept it for years before giving a copy back to John and his parents.
I remember the first time I read that old paper at the break table. Aunt Ludell had packed a hundred titillating details about my great-great-grandpa into her four-page narrative. Ludell began, “Louis Ihnken, the subject of our sketch, first saw the light of day on July 6, 1854 at Castroville.” His father, Gerhardt Ihnken, had come with Castro’s colonists from Grosswarm, Germany, in 1846. Louis spoke German to his father and French to his mother as well as English and Spanish. Beginning at age 12, Louis operated his father’s steam engine-driven cotton gin, saw mill, and planer. After schooling at St. Louis and St. Mary’s College, he was engaged in the freighting business. Later still, he drove a herd of horses to Indiana for his brother and eventually became a successful stock raiser.
Ludell's article continued. “Among a number of relics still retained in the Ihnken family, a shovel brought along from Germany is highly treasured.” I remember wondering what may have happened to the “highly treasured” relic. On the back page of her article, Ludell had placed a photo with the caption: “Louis Ihnken (still living) holding the shovel which his father brought from Europe in 1846.” I immediately recognized the long-forgotten Ihnken shovel. I remembered as a kid pretending it was an entrenching tool to dig fox holes.
Daddy had used it regularly to shovel mesquite coals from the fire to his barbecue pit. I ran home after work that day, straight to the corner of the storage house where my dad kept all his gardening tools, and there, leaning up against the dusty wall, was the little Ihnken shovel. Gerhardt brought it with him to Texas as he began his life on the frontier. It passed to Louis, and as my grandpa explained it, was used to clean ashes out of the fire place at the town house. My grandpa inherited it and used it at home on his share of the Ihnken Ranch. My dad used it while cooking steaks for us, and now, it sits in my home as a venerable reminder of our long Texas heritage.
Bradford Boehme is a San Antonio firefighter, a rancher and hay farmer on his family ranch in Castroville, and is happily married to a fellow 6th generation German/Alsatian Texan.
Posted August 01, 2014
