Johann Michael Wildermuth

He was the Wildermuth who left.

He was born 23 August 1830 in Großaspach (Grossaspach), in the Backnang district of Württemberg, Germany — one of the small Neckar-valley wine villages, ten kilometers from Rielingshausen where his great-great-great-grandfather Andreus the Gartner had tended the vineyards eighty years earlier. The Wildermuths had been in this part of Württemberg by the time he was born for at least six documented generations running back to Johannes Wildermuth in 1650.

His parents were Johann Christian Wildermuth (b. 1794, Großaspach) and Maria Margaretha (Schmidgall) Wildermuth (b. 1789) — and through his mother the line also reaches back into the Schmidgall and Landai families of the Aspach villages. The documented descent to him runs, unbroken, from Johannes Wildermuth (1682) → Johann Adam (1720) → Andreas Adam (1745) → Adam (1768) → Johann Christian (1794) → Johann Michael — the six generations this page’s “at least six documented generations” refers to.

He sailed in 1847, age sixteen — per his own sworn statement six years later in Philadelphia.

What the 1853 naturalization petition records

The single most consequential document this archive holds on his emigration is his 1 November 1853 Philadelphia naturalization petition — a primary-source document Robert Earl Wildermuth had been researching for decades. The petition, filed in the County of Philadelphia Court of Quarter Sessions before the Honorable Oswald Thompson, settles several facts in his own words:

Year of arrival: 1847 (his own sworn statement)
Port of arrival: New York
Age at arrival: under eighteen — fitting the 23 August 1830 birth date for a 16-year-old landing in 1847
Subject of: the Grand Duke of Wirtemberg (renounced under oath)
Pennsylvania residence: at least one year before November 1853 — meaning he had spent some of his early American years in Pennsylvania before the Ohio move
American name: “John M. Wildermuth” — already in use as his everyday formal identity by 1853
Witness: Michael Dreher, a citizen of the United States — a fellow German emigrant who attested to having known Johann Michael long enough to vouch for his good character

The petition was a declaration of intent and oath under the Naturalization Act of 1795 / 1802, which allowed minors who had arrived in the U.S. under eighteen to naturalize after five years of residence (three of which had to be after the age of majority). The 1853 petition was filed when Johann Michael was 23 — six years after his 1847 arrival, three years after his majority.

What it would have meant to leave

To be sixteen in Württemberg in 1847 was to have grown up inside a particular set of pressures: a population that had recovered from the Napoleonic wars and was now larger than the available farmland could comfortably feed; an agricultural economy that depended on dwindling new vineyard land in already-tight valleys; an inheritance system (partible inheritance under Württemberg customary law) that split holdings smaller and smaller; and a German political world about to convulse in the revolutions of 1848 / 49. He left a year before those revolutions broke, a year before the failed revolutions sent the much larger wave of Forty-Eighter German political refugees to America. He was an economic emigrant, not a political one.

The journey he made — Grossaspach across to the Atlantic coast (probably Bremen or Hamburg, the two main embarkation ports for German emigrants of that era), six to eight weeks across the Atlantic in steerage, arrival in New York on a date in 1847 that the surviving New York passenger arrival manifests should still record — would have been the great event of his life. He arrived with a family from a neighboring German region, the Rossars of Baden — William Rossar, a shoemaker, and his wife Frederika of Württemberg. Robert Earl’s 1990 research suggested Frederika may have been Johann Michael’s sister, in which case the Rossar journey was an extended-family undertaking: a married older sister, her husband, and the teenage younger brother.

What a crossing like his was. For a sixteen-year-old from the Neckar valley in 1847, the journey began overland: down through the German states to a seaport. Most emigrants from Württemberg and the neighboring southwest German lands went in that decade by way of Le Havre — reachable by the new railways and cheaper to sail from — or through Bremen, whose packet line to New York had run since 1826. The ship itself was a cargo sailing vessel fitted for steerage, often carrying three hundred or more passengers berthed on rough plank platforms in the ‘tween-deck, and the westbound passage took six to eight weeks. Landing in New York in 1847 meant something John Eesley’s 1856 arrival would not: there was no immigrant reception depot yet — Castle Garden opened only in 1855 — so emigrants came ashore directly onto the crowded South Street wharves, into the crush of boardinghouse “runners” and baggage-men who preyed on newcomers with no English. The disorder that greeted Johann Michael at the docks was exactly what Castle Garden would later be built to end.

The Marietta shoemaker

By the 1860 census he was twenty-nine and recorded as John M. Wildermuth, age 29, a shoemaker from Wuerttemburg, Germany, living in the household of William Rossar (38, shoemaker, Baden) and Frederika Rossar (Württemberg). The two men were working the shoe trade together. To be a small-town shoemaker in mid-19th-century Marietta was a trade with steady demand. Pre-factory shoes were custom-made, the leather worked over wooden lasts to fit each customer’s feet, the soles hand-stitched in waxed thread. His customers were river boatmen, dock workers, hill-country farmers, and Marietta’s merchants and ministers.

The marriage to Catharina Boeshar

He married Catharina Boeshar of Breitenbach, Pfalz, Bavaria (b. 15 June 1840) around 1862 in Washington County, Ohio — per the @F57@ family record marriage of 7 September 1862. She was ten years younger and had come from a Pfalz village 250 miles north of his Württemberg one; they had converged in Marietta in the small German-speaking immigrant community that had formed there.

They raised three documented sons in Marietta:

John Charles Wildermuth (b. September 1865) — the eldest. The “John Wildermuth” Robert Earl’s 1990 Heritage referred to as his grandfather — though Dale’s tree settles that as a memory error; John Charles was Robert Earl’s great-uncle, brother of his actual grandfather William Clifford.
William Clifford Wildermuth (b. 17 September 1866) — the middle son. Robert Earl Wildermuth’s actual paternal grandfather through Earl Adam, settled in Dale’s tree (June 2026). The patriarch of the c. 1896 family group portrait.
Edward Frederick Wildermuth (b. 17 February 1873) — the youngest, who lived to 91, dying at Marietta in 1964.

The death and the burial

He died in Marietta on 7 February 1903 at age 72, and was buried at Oak Grove Cemetery, Marietta. His widow Catharina lived another thirty years before being buried near him in 1933. The Oak Grove Cemetery in Marietta is where the early Wildermuth generation of the family is buried.

Is there a picture of him?

For a time this archive floated the possibility that the older mustachioed man at the back-left of the c. 1896 William Clifford Wildermuth family group portrait might be Johann Michael himself, age 66. That identification has been withdrawn. The typed caption card that accompanies the photograph — and Chuck’s 2026 reading of it — identify that man as his son William Clifford Wildermuth, and Johann Michael is not believed to be in the picture at all. (His wife Catharina Boeshar very likely is — the grandmother holding the youngest child at the back — but he is not.)

So the archive still holds no confirmed image of Johann Michael Wildermuth. Robert Earl’s lament from his 1989 research stands unanswered:

“Someday, time permitting, perhaps I can check through the ship arrivals in New York City to find the ship and its port of debarkation in Germany. Sometimes ship’s passenger lists give a physical description of the passenger. That would be interesting for I have no picture of Johann.”

What is settled is the documentary record, not the visual one: the 1853 Philadelphia naturalization petition fixes his emigration in his own sworn words — but his face is still unrecorded.

Robert Earl’s 1989 sketch

Robert Earl wrote a one-page sketch of Johann Michael as part of his 1989 “Little Histories” project — the same project that produced the chapters on Catharina Boeshar, Johann Christian, and the deeper Schmidgall-Landai-Werner-Phillipp Württemberg ancestors. The Johann Michael sketch carries the same factual spine as this page but in Robert Earl’s own voice and as he understood it three years before publishing the 1990 Heritage. Read it at Robert Earl Wildermuth’s “Little Histories” — Johann (John) Michael Wildermuth section.

Sources: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — John Michael Wildermuth (9S57-FW4); Johann Michael Wildermuth’s 1853 Philadelphia Naturalization Petition; The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage by Robert Earl Wildermuth, 1990; c. 1896 William Clifford Wildermuth family group portrait; Robert Earl Wildermuth’s “Little Histories”. Voyage context: 19th-century German emigration via Le Havre and Bremen, and the pre-1855 New York wharves (before the Castle Garden depot) — general emigration history.