# Dresden to Santa Fe **A Baker in the Adobe Oven** Helbig • Bergman • Metzelt • Erbse Our story now changes back to another branch of the family. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Saxony was one of the cultural jewels of German-speaking Europe, and its capital, Dresden, was the finest ornament of all. Strung along both banks of the Elbe in a broad river valley cradled by low hills and vineyard slopes, the city wore a baroque skyline that travelers called "Florence on the Elbe"—the domed Frauenkirche, the Zwinger palace, the Hofkirche, and the old stone bridge that had carried traffic across the river since the Middle Ages. It was a royal residence city, the seat of the Saxon monarchy and its court, and it held that curious arrangement of a largely Lutheran citizenry living under a Catholic crown, with the kings' grand court church rising amid a Protestant populace. It was here, in this beautiful old capital, that the American story of the Helbig family began. ## The Family in Dresden **Robert "Traugott Wilhelm" Helbig** was born in Dresden on 23 May 1852, the son of **Johann Friedrich Traugott Helbig** and **Caroline Louise Adelheid Bergman**. His people reached back into Saxony for at least a generation more: his father had been born about 1825, and an earlier **Johann Fredriech Traugott Helbig**, born about 1797, died in Dresden on 7 September 1880. Robert came of age in a Saxony being drawn, through the 1860s and 1870s, into a unified Germany under Prussian leadership—an era of upheaval and opportunity that would end, for many Saxons, in emigration. Dresden in these years ran on many things at once: it was a court and government town, but its outer districts were filling with workshops and factories, and between the palaces and the machinery lay the ordinary working life of a large city—markets, breweries, building trades, and the food trades that fed a rising population of well over two hundred thousand. Among these trades was baking, and it was as a baker that Robert was trained, a skilled craft learned under the guild traditions of the German trades and, as it turned out, portable enough to carry across an ocean. On 23 February 1877, in Dresden, Robert married **Pauline "Friederike Bertha Auguste" Metzelt**, known as Pauline, who had been born in the same city on 8 November 1853, the daughter of **Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Metzelt** and **Friederika Louisa Schulz Erbse**. Like Robert, she had grown up amid the trappings of an old royal capital, and the couple established their first household in the streets where both had been raised. Records place them in Dresden in October 1877 and again in June 1880, and there their first two daughters were born: Johanne Ernestine on 27 October 1877, and Margarethe Elisabeth on 25 June 1880. The family's roots in Dresden were deep, but the same forces transforming the city into a modern industrial capital were uprooting ordinary families across Germany. Emigration to America surged through the 1870s and 1880s, and around 1880 or 1881 the Helbigs joined that great westward tide. When they crossed the ocean, they exchanged the baroque towers along the Elbe for a life in the American Southwest that could hardly have been imagined from the streets of their Saxon youth. ## An Unlikely Landing at Santa Fe Robert's trade was recorded plainly on the ship manifest: _baker_. It was that skill that gave him his first footing in America, and it carried him to an improbable place. He settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and found work at the Indian School in nearby Albuquerque, serving as an industrial teacher during the fall term of 1882. The school opened that October with eighty-six Pueblo and Navajo pupils, housed in rough wooden structures the boys had reinforced with adobe walls to feel at home. When the term began, the storeroom off the kitchen was filled with "light, fine bread, baked in an adobe oven at the school, by Robert Helbig," while a Mrs. Helbig worked beside him as the school's cook. It was an unlikely place for a Dresden-born baker to find himself—part of a small corps of instructors keeping the school running on funds so thin that much of it, the school book frankly admitted, "having to be made up by the generosity of the people." Whatever became of Pauline and the two little girls born in Germany remains one of the unresolved sorrows of the record. By the time of the 1900 census Pauline had died, somewhere in New Mexico before the century closed, her exact date and place of burial unrecorded. She was not yet fifty. Both daughters born in Dresden had also vanished from the record without a trace; family memory holds that two of Pauline's daughters died after the family reached the United States, one account placing their deaths in Kansas, though no record of these losses has been found. Robert's later marriage record described him simply as "widowed from Paulina Metzel." ## A Turbulent Santa Fe Life Robert's years in Santa Fe unfolded in vivid, sometimes turbulent episodes preserved in the local press. He kept an orchard and a garden in the upper part of town, and worked for a time as a dairyman. In July 1889 he hauled a man named Antonio Borrego before 'Squire Padilla's court after finding him "having a 4th of July picnic" in his cherry trees; ordered away, Borrego struck Robert with a stone and "skinned up his face considerably." In 1891 he captured a large snake in his orchard and had it "bottled up on exhibition" at Ireland's drug store, where townsfolk argued over whether it was truly a rattler. His greenhouse burned to the ground one night in March 1900, and that August a "vicious bull" assaulted him and broke his left arm in two places, nearly costing him his life. In New Mexico the family had also grown. **Gertrude Marie Helbig** was born on 29 August 1883 in Santa Fe, followed by Albert Fred on 13 February 1885, Barbara in 1888, Marie Mary Hedwig on 21 September 1890, and Frances Kathryn on 10 January 1896—all born in Santa Fe. But the family's turbulence turned to grief in the summer of 1898. On the evening of 17 August, ten-year-old Barbara, "bright and amiable," was suddenly seized with violent cramps and convulsions at the family's home on eastern Manhattan street. Despite the best efforts of her parents and friends, she died in agony near midnight. An autopsy, performed at her father's own request, concluded she had somehow taken strychnine from a bottle of poison kept in the house. She was buried in Rosario cemetery. On his forty-ninth birthday, 23 May 1901, at six o'clock in the morning at the Santa Fe cathedral, Robert married Emma Braun, a widow from Philadelphia previously married to Charley Rights and identified in the records as a Lutheran. The Vicar General Fourchégu, who performed the ceremony, required of her the customary promise: that any children of the new marriage be baptized and raised Catholic, and that Robert's existing children be permitted to practice their Catholic faith freely. Gertie W. Helbig stood among the witnesses. That evening a reception and dance were held at the Helbig residence on Manhattan avenue, doubling as a celebration of Robert's birthday. Family rumor, gently preserved, held that his second wife "was mean." The Helbig home in these years was a place where others found shelter as well; in June 1902 a "health seeker," Mrs. Cora M. Fisch, died there, where she had been living with her husband and son. ## Northward to the Minnesota Woods The family's move north followed the marriage of Robert's daughter **Gertrude Marie Helbig**. On 2 April 1902, after two banns were published, Gertrude married **John Petri**—recorded as John Pitry, the surname more properly Petri—of Buena Vista, Minnesota, at the Santa Fe cathedral, with her brother Fred standing as witness. Gertrude afterward moved north to Beltrami County in Minnesota. Her own story, with its sorrows and remarkable length of days, belongs to a later chapter. Robert followed his daughter to Minnesota, and by 1905 he was living in Liberty Township, Beltrami County. His misfortunes did not end with the move. That November, working as a woodsman at the Olson camp near Dawson City, he was struck in the back of the neck by a butcher knife hurled by a fellow lumberjack who, without provocation, emerged from the kitchen as Robert gathered dishes in the dining room. The wound was ugly but not fatal; the assailant fled and was captured after a chase in which several shots were fired, and Robert was treated at St. Anthony's hospital. For all these hardships, Robert became a valued and well-loved fixture of his rural community—"always doing work of some kind," as one account put it, "much of it for his neighbors." He helped build the roads of Liberty Township, laying the corduroy on the Long Lake road that was still there when the road was later reworked. He was among the neighbors who helped move a house for George Elliot, rolling it over logs and across a stream with the aid of a stump puller; as the house crossed the creek, "old Mr. Helbig fell in," was hauled out by his shirt collar, and, undeterred, "kept on helping wherever he could." He kept a garden and planted flowers around his house on the south shore of Long Lake, favoring _Sweet William_, which bloomed year after year long after the house was gone. He lived at times in his son Fred's house there; when it burned, he rebuilt it. At a community gathering in April 1918 he entertained the neighbors by singing "America" and "Silent Night" in both German and English. That same October his home was destroyed by fire and Robert himself was seriously burned, rushed to Dr. Neal, who dressed his wounds and saw him through to recovery. His granddaughters visited him in the country and boated on Long Lake with a neighbor girl, Edith Hayes. Once, returning home late through the woods around the west end of Long Lake after visiting his daughter Frances Sundh, he lost his way in the cold and dark until someone heard him calling and brought him safely home. As Robert grew frail and could no longer live alone, his daughters took him into their homes in turn. In his final year he was bedridden, needing the bandages on his legs regularly changed, and a granddaughter, then thirteen—remembered as Clara—stayed home from school for a year to nurse him. She was bringing him soup for his lunch when she entered his room and found him dead. Robert Helbig died on 17 December 1937 in Liberty, at the age of eighty-seven, while living with his daughter Maria Klasen. Herman Klasen reported his death to the clerk of Liberty Township, and Robert was buried in Bemidji. ## The Children in Minnesota Robert's surviving children built their lives across northern Minnesota and beyond. Albert Fred Helbig—the Fred who witnessed Gertrude's wedding and whose Long Lake house sheltered his father—was born 13 February 1885 in New Mexico and made his life largely in Bemidji, where he died on 6 December 1962. Marie “Mary” Hedwig Helbig, born 21 September 1890 in Santa Fe, lived in Liberty and elsewhere in Minnesota, with time spent in Hutchinson, Kansas, and died on 4 August 1953 in Long Prairie, Todd County. Frances Kathryn Helbig, born 10 January 1896 in Santa Fe, was the daughter Robert knew as Frances Sundh, whose home he was returning from the night he became lost in the woods; she lived in Liberty and later in Bear, Adams County, Idaho, and died on 26 June 1963 in Bemidji. From a baker's household in baroque Dresden, the Helbigs had crossed to an adobe oven in the New Mexico desert and come to rest at last in the pine woods and lakeshores of Beltrami County, where Robert's _Sweet William_ went on blooming for years in the spot his house had stood.