Barbara Ehrsam
Barbara Ehrsam |
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Born Barbara Senn in 1840 in Switzerland, she came with her family as a small child to Kansas. She married Joseph Hilty, also native Swiss, in 1850. They had two children. After serving in the American Civil War, in 1869 he fell from a wagon and died. He was drunk at the time. The next year, Barbara and her brother Michael. moved to Louden's Falls where their sister, Elizabeth Hoffman, and her husband had settled. Hoffman had built a mill on the Smokey Hill River in expectation of the countryside producing grain. The town of Enterprise, Kansas grew up around the mill. The machinist who forged the machinery for the mill, Jacob Ehrsam, also a Swiss immigrant, soon married Barbara Hilty. They had six children.
In a December issue of the Leavenworth Conservative Times appeared the first news article about the Bábí/Bahá’í Faith in Kansas. Leavenworth was not far from where Barbara lived at the time and she may have read that article. When her first daughter, Josephine Hilty, desired more musical training than available in Kansas at the time, she traveled to Chicago. There, according to the Enterprise newspaper, she attended the Bahá’í classes.
Josephine wrote home to her mother about the classes, and Barbara invited the teacher to Enterprise in the summer of 1897. This resulted in the first Bahá’í community in Kansas and the second in the United States and all of the Western hemisphere. Barbara maintained an interest in the Faith the rest of her life, though details of that interest are sparse. She died in 1924. Her last documented connection was a contribution toward construction of the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, IL in 1917.
The Bahá’í classes in Enterprise in 1897 created a flurry of newspaper articles and indirect references to the Faith in newspapers all across Kansas that summer. Over two hundred have been found. Half of these consisted of a quip used in a column of general news, "Abilene runs to baseball, Enterprise runs to religion." Very few readers would have known that it meant.
See also[edit]
- Barbara Senn Hilty Ehrsam - bahai-library.com
- Barbara Senn Hilty Ehrsam - bahaichronicles.org
