To paraphrase the question asked in the Gospels by incredulous people about Jesus of Nazareth: can anything good come from Okarche, Oklahoma? I invite you to come and see.
May the farmer from Okarche inspire you as he has me!
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What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Quartet No. 4: “Little Gidding,” Section V
Chapter 2
Son of the Red Earth State
Originally within the Cheyenne-Arapaho Nation, Stanley Rother’s hometown of Okarche developed around the train depot constructed by the Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway. It built its Kansas-Texas line through the area in 1890 — only one year after a land run on the “Unassigned Lands” had established Oklahoma City.
Two years later, the 1892 opening of the Cheyenne-Arapaho territories to non-Indian settlement brought a sudden rush of eager settlers to what became the town of Okarche, a name created from the first letters of Oklahoma, Arapaho, and Cheyenne.
It is not difficult to imagine why Stanley Rother’s German farming ancestors would have been attracted to owning and cultivating land in the 3.5 million acres suddenly opened for the taking in Oklahoma territory.
A Long Lineage of Germans, Farmers, Catholics
In 1893, 31-year-old Frank Emil Rother and his wife, Gertrude Giefer, Stanley Rother’s paternal great-grandparents, arrived in Oklahoma from Minnesota and bought the land near Okarche, where Stanley would be born and raised. Frank Emil, who anglicized his name from Franz when he emigrated from Prussia at the age of 16, came to America with his parents and five of his siblings — all of whom had settled in or around New Trier, Minnesota.
When Frank Emil and Gertrude announced their plans to leave Minnesota and move to the newly opened territory known for its iron-rich red dirt, they shocked the rest of the Rother clan — who resorted to disastrous predictions of their future to scare them into staying: “The Indians will kill you” and “You’ll never make it, you’ll be back.”
It didn’t work. Frank Emil and Gertrude, along with their four children, as well as Gertrude’s mother and stepfather, left Minnesota for the unfamiliar territory of Oklahoma, traveling by train. Their furniture, farm equipment, and even their horses were carefully arranged in a boxcar. Frank Emil is still described in family lore by his stamina and physical strength — and is remembered for his ethic of hard work.
In 1910, the oldest son of Frank Emil and Gertrude, Frank A., wed Elizabeth Schlecht at Holy Trinity Church in Okarche. Within a year, Elizabeth gave birth to their first child and named him Franz, continuing the long Rother family tradition of naming their firstborn in honor of St. Francis. He would one day be Stanley’s father.
Stanley’s maternal ancestors — the Schmitts — also emigrated from Germany, leaving Trier in 1843 for Johnsburg, Illinois — what is now a village in northwest suburban Chicago. In thanksgiving for surviving the treacherous voyage across the Atlantic, Frederick Schmitt built a small white chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The building still stands today, alongside what is now Chapel Hill Road. It is maintained by descendants of the Schmitt family.
Frederick Schmitt (later anglicized as Smith) married Wisconsin-native Anna Ottis in October 1882. Around the same time, the Schmitts moved from Illinois to an all-German settlement in St. Bernard Township, Nebraska, about 80 miles northwest of Omaha.
Then, around 1902, the Schmitt family relocated to western Oklahoma. The second of their 10 children was John K. Schmitt (by then, Smith), who married Mary Werner on October 10, 1907. They were blessed with a dozen children, the fourth of whom was named Gertrude Katherine Smith (Stanley’s mother), born in 1913.
The Schmitts/Smiths, like the Rothers, were farmers — and devoted Catholics, active in the daily life of Holy Trinity Church in Okarche.
Becoming Oklahomans
On November 29, 1933, Franz A. Rother married Gertrude Katherine Smith, and she soon thereafter gave birth to Stanley Francis Rother — the first of five children.
The year Stanley was born, the Rother family farm was one of 213,325 working farms in the state of Oklahoma, historically the peak year for family and tenant farming. But it was a tough place and time to be a farmer. Not only was the country still recovering from the market crash and the Great Depression, but Oklahoma and the Great Plains had also been hit hard with terrible drought and horrendous dust storms, creating what became known as the Dust Bowl.
The town of Okarche, founded two years before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, now boasted a population that hovered around 450 people, most of them German by birth or descendants of German immigrants, like Stanley’s family.
In a 1995 interview with historian Father David Monahan, Franz Rother, Stanley’s father, remembered the division between English speakers and German speakers. In his family, Franz grew up speaking German, and he even took German his first four years at school at Holy Trinity. “If my dad would catch us kids talking English,” Franz noted, “he would say, ‘Don’t you kids know how to speak?!’ ”
For the Catholic community, bilingual services were the norm. Following the tradition of their pastor Monsignor Zenon Steber, when someone met a priest or a sister in Okarche, they would first salute them with the words, “Praised be Jesus Christ” (in German). Monsignor Steber’s homilies at Holy Trinity Church were in both German and English.
According to Franz, there was a big department store in town called “Hau-Eischen,” an L-shaped building that wrapped around the bank and fronted on Main Street. The department store stood at the site of what is now Eischen’s, the oldest bar in Oklahoma — and famous for its secret-recipe fried chicken. When Stanley was born, U.S. Route 81, a fully paved federal highway, ran through the township of Okarche. By the time he turned four, the Northwest Highway (OK-3), connecting Oklahoma City and Okarche, was opened as a gravel-surfaced road.
The Rother Family
Born on March 27, 1935, in the midst of a western Oklahoma dust storm, Stanley Francis Rother grew up instinctively connected to the land — and the land he belonged to was grand, made up of big, expansive skies, and miles and miles of rolling prairie visible in every direction.
Although Franz and Gertrude named him Stanley in honor of the many relatives in Gertrude’s lineage named Stanislaus, when it came time for his baptism two days after he was born, Monsignor Steber would not baptize the baby boy unless his first name was Francis, continuing the family tradition of naming their first boy after St. Francis of Assisi.
But in spite of his baptism record stating it otherwise, to his extensive family and other friends, he was always Stanley.
Franz and Gertrude’s family grew quickly. On May 24, 1936, 14 months after Stanley, Elizabeth Mary (Betty Mae, now Sister Marita) was born. A year later, James Henry (Jim) was born on July 13, 1937. The following year tragedy struck the family when a baby girl, Carolyn Ann, was born on November 10, 1938, and she unexpectedly died the next day. Two years later, on June 2, 1940, Thomas Joseph was born. With four children under the age of five, life in the Rother farmhouse must have been busy and full of life.
In 1933, shortly before he and Gertrude Smith were married, Franz Rother made his first payment on their house. Built in 1918, this house where the five Rother children were born and raised is now