Frederick Court: dictated a day before his death, 1931
In 1832 Frederick Mohl, a descendant of the ancient family of von Mohl of Austria, sold out all of his possessions in Germany, chartered a ship (a sailing vessel called Baron von der Cappellen), formed a colony of about thirty families, and came to America. After a very long and hazardous voyage, he landed in Baltimore, Maryland. It was found thast the coffer of the ship had been robbed. The immigrants scattered, leaving Mohl completely crushed and without funds. His wife having saved quite a sum of money on her person, they finally went to New York City, where he reared his two children, who were born in Gemrany. Fritz his son when grown came to Texas to join his half-brother Christian Frederick Duer. Louise grew to be a very beautiful woman, and became the wife of Carl Court. Their first child was born in Warehouse Point, Connecticut. Fritz married Miss Aurelia Hadley and went into the grocery business, a hotel (the Fanerin Hotel) situated on the conrer of Fanerin and Franklin where the Old Post Office now stands. This hotel had an annex, a two-story brick home that ran up to Congress Avenue.
Carl Court went into the grocery business on Travis between Preston and Prairie, and lived on the corner of Prairie and Travis, the present site of the Columbia Dry Goods Company, where their second child was born, Mrs. Henry St. John Waggaman of this city.
After a few years in business in Houston, Carl Court had an attractive offer, to continue in his profession in Kentucky, where his third child, Mrs. Ada Norton (deceased) was born. Through the solisources of his wife's brother, CF Duer, he came back to Texas and became associated with his brother-in-law at Rose Hill in the northern part of Harris County, on the stage road from Houston to Montgomery and Huntsville. Rose Hill was the horse change for this stage.
I was born on February 4, 1860 on a little 80-acre farm one mile from Rose Hill, a nice weather-boarded and celied house on the road toward Houston. This house still stands. I remember distinctly the large log-built stable that housed the stage horses while they were resting, awaiting the return of the stage from Huntsville. The home and store-building, the ford around Spring Creek with its grand approach on either side, with beautiful fish, clear water running down, a footlog across, the glass insultators in the tall pine trees in which the telegraph wire rested in the line between Houston and Huntsville—all made a very vivid picture in my mind, which I have never forgotten. But the clear spring branch, with its deep swimming hole that ran from the beginning of the pines near which Uncle Duer's gin was built and down to Spring Creek as one of the feeders that enlarged it.
I was born just at the beginning of the turbulent times in the South, after Lincoln was elected president and the Abolitionist Party came into full sway with the idea of ruling in our Southland. This idea of course was very obnoxious to the slaveholders and the Southern States rebelled, starting with South Carolina and followed by the balance.
When I was a year old, my father joined the army of Texas under Van Dorn at Galveston and, because he had been a soldier in the Prussian army, was sent to Brownsville, Texas to drill troops. At that time Brownsville was surrounded by swampy malarial country. My father contracted malarial fever which developed into sorosis of the liver, from which he died on August 18, 1861—when I was a year and a half old.
These many occurences and the feverish conditions drew all the men in the South into the army because the conflict between the North and South had begun.
This threw my mother Louise on this little 80-acre farm to make a living for her four children, the eldest of whom, my brother Carl, was just nine years old. This she accomplished most successfully, raising cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, pigs, chickens—in other words,"living at home." God, how I wish I had learned from her. White pickle that she used in preparing her ham before she smoked them, in the little 10-foot square log smokehouse, in hickory smoke. I can taste them even now, they were sweet and good. Then the ash barrel, that stood beside the kitchen door, in the outside, where she dripped her lye from the wood ashes to make her lye soap with. The loom in the corner of her room, where she wove the cotton she raised, and the wool from the few sheep that she owned, to make the clothing for the family, and the spinning wheel on which we children spun the yarn. Our coffee was made from large red sweet potatoes, cut into squares and dried in the sun. All a very simple life, during the terrible four years of the Civil War.
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