A Remnant of Jews in Tama County, Iowa

Michael J. Bell, in “True Israelites of America” (Annals of Iowa 53, 2, Spring 1994), comments that well into the 1850s almost all the permanent Jewish settlers in Iowa were peddlers who traveled through the state:  “Those early Jews who came to Iowa were among the first generation of American entrepreneurs.  For the young Jewish businessman, a small store in the right community offered the opportunity for a Jewish immigrant to link himself to the rising prosperity of 19^th-century American and to develop a sense (however limited) of individual power and independence.”

In addition to Louis, A.I., and Zachariah Solomon, at least two other Sime men followed this path to integration if not prosperity.  Louis joined his sons, Max and Simon, in Des Moines in 1889 for two years where they operated “Sime Bros Clothing and gents furnishing goods” in the city center.  

Max Sime

In October 1892, the two brothers opened yet another store in Denison, Iowa, in the southwest corner of the state, which they ran for eight years.  Shortly after they opened their store, prairie fires – a frequent occurrence – swept the nearby countryside.  In an act of charity, the Simes donated clothing to the victims; in 1893, they donated 5 percent “of All Cash Sales” in December “to be distributed among the deserving poor and needy in Denison Township.”

Simon Sime

Max especially became active in the life of the town.  He was an officer in the local whist chapter (a popular card game that had a national organization) and a charter member both of the Order of the Eastern Star and the International Order of Odd Fellows. His wife and daughter also were founders of the Order of Eastern Star.  The brothers had a float in Denison’s July 4^th parade.

In March 1900, Max became a member of Denison’s city council, but in May of the same year the business failed and the brothers declared bankruptcy.  Both brothers ended up in the clothing business – working for others – in Chicago, where they both died, Simon in 1932 and Max in 1945, after being struck and killed by an automobile.

The only early Sime settler who prospered in Iowa was my great-grandfather, Abraham Isaac Sime (“A.I.”). After working in his brother Louis’s business and moving around like his brothers and cousins from one small Iowa town to another, he established Sime’s Clothing Store in 1896 in Toledo, at the corner of Broadway and High Streets, where Louis had originally had his store on the main square.   

608 Broadway

He and his wife owned a big white house at 608 Broadway, and they had three sons and a daughter.  A.I. was active in many civic organizations, and when he died of tuberculosis in 1923, his obituary was the lead story on the front page of the Toledo Chronicle.

Hyman, 2nd from left, at Northwestern

His oldest son, Hyman – my grandfather – left Toledo to study pharmacy at Northwestern University and received a PhG (pharmaceutical graduate) in 1904.   

With his first paycheck, Hyman bought his parents a Tiffany lamp to hang over their dining room table.  He worked as a pharmacist in Dayton and Clutier, Iowa, as well as Wayne, Nebraska, before settling in Chicago, where he married my grandmother, Mary Drapekin, in 1913.  By 1918, he had his own drugstore, which he maintained till the Depression when – family legend has it – he gave away too many medications to people who never paid for them.  From then on, he was a druggist in someone else’s store.

Sampson Sime

The second son, Sampson, went to Iowa State University and became a civil engineer, settling eventually in Kansas City.

A.I. and Lena’s only daughter was “Little Sarah,” who started working in a Toledo bank in 1916 and retired in 1965 from her position as assistant cashier of the State Bank of Toledo; it was clear to all of us that she ran the bank!  Sarah lived with her youngest brother Zelic in the big family house on Broadway.  In 1921, Zelic became a partner in his father’s business and ran it until his death in 1949.  Sarah sold the business in 1962 and died in 1972 in a nursing home in Gladbrook, 20 miles away.

Sarah and Zelic

When I was a little girl in Chicago and St. Paul, we would take a summer driving trip to Toledo.  The Sime house was on a double lot, and Aunt Sarah, who collected rain water in a barrel to wash her waist-length hair, grew all kinds of vegetables.  When we would arrive, there were always many rituals.  First, she would call the operator on the crank telephone in the kitchen so the news could be relayed to others in town.  Then we would go into the vegetable garden and pick peas to shell.  Then I would go up Broadway to visit Sarah’s best friend, Estelle Born, and pick up a little red wagon she would lend me.  In the evenings we would go to band concerts on the Courthouse Square, and when we got back in the dark, we would go into the garden to listen to the corn grow.

On a “roots road trip” we took about three years ago, my husband and I drove across Iowa, beginning in Denison, and followed Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway, which runs through the center of the state, to Toledo.  The countryside is still beautiful, with rolling hills and fertile fields. 

Sime's Corner, Toledo Iowa

The towns, not so quaint.  Town squares and downtowns are full of empty storefronts, many of which were remodeled in the 1970s and 1980s with unattractive siding (like A.I. and Zelic’s store, now an insurance office).

Iowa is still drawing new immigrants, just as it did 140 years ago.  A.G. Sulzberger wrote in the New York Times (November 14, 2011) on the front page about towns in Kansas where “Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many place.” 

Of the towns in Iowa where Simes and Solomons lived, Denison in particular reflects a similar influx; the 2010 census counted 42.1% of the population as Hispanic. Denison is home to three major animal-processing plants:  beef, chicken, and pigs’ blood.  The stores on its main street, where the Sime brothers sold men’s clothing, now feature dresses for La Quinceañera.  Fine old Victorian-era homes shelter multiple tenants. 

1994

2009

The only visible remnant of the Sime family of central Iowa is an old barn with a fading sign just a few miles outside of Toledo.

The Simes and Solomons of Central Iowa

Driving across central Iowa, it’s easy to imagine the countryside when Louis Sime opened his men’s clothing store on the town square of Toledo, Iowa, on April 10, 1877. 

Tama County had been in existence for 34 years.  Toledo, the county seat, had been founded in 1853, and the stately county courthouse (now listed on the National Register of Historic Sites) in the center of the town square had been completed in 1866.

The land surrounding the two towns was richly agricultural.  An 1875 history of the county lists wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, cabbage, timber, and meadows:  “The various tame grasses grow in Tama soil as if by magic.  There is but little labor needed in raising it and the remuneration is good.”

Many of Iowa’s early settlers were drawn by the railroads, whose representatives went to Bohemia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire offering an acre of land to hard workers who would come to build the railroad.

Clearly, the farmers and the railroadmen needed clothes.  The Simes and the Solomons, two intertwined Jewish families that lived in the twin towns of Toledo and Tama City, arrived to meet their needs.

Louis Sime and his wife, Deborah (Dora) Levinson had come to central Iowa most recently from Wisconsin, where all five of his children had been born.  His partner in the Toledo business was Zachariah Solomon.   Louis was 37; Zach only 23.  Zachariah Solomon’s younger brother, George, was married to Louis’s younger sister, known in the family as “Big Sarah.”

In addition to Sarah, Louis had two other siblings, Leah and Abraham I. (“A.I.”), my great-grandfather.  When Leah died in childbirth after the birth of her second daughter in New York, her older daughter Sarah (Sadie) went to live with A.I. in Toledo; the new baby, Rachel, was placed in a New York orphan asylum but eventually she, too, moved in with her mother’s family in Toledo.  Both left in their teens for Chicago, where they met husbands and remained.

Rachel (Rae) and Sarah (Sadie) Goldstein

A.I. followed Louis from Milwaukee to Iowa, becoming a clerk in the establishment of Sime & Solomon when it opened.  Two years later, in 1879, Zachariah Solomon went into business for himself in Tama City, and remained a clothing merchant there till 1914, when his business failed.  He moved to Chicago, where he worked as a clothing salesman at The Fair, and died in 1922. 

Louis had even less success in the clothing business . . . or perhaps he had trouble staying in one place.  In 1881, he had relocated to Gladbrook,and in 1885, he was back on the High Street in Toledo.  He subsequently lived in Belle Plaine, Des Moines, De Witt, and Denison before he moved to Chicago, where he was working as a “laborer” in the clothing business in 1900.

In Toledo in July 1882, when George Solomon married “Big Sarah,” A.I. married his childhood sweetheart, Lena, from “Lebova”:   probably Liubavas, Lithuania, based on other information.  This is when facts get tangled.  Their marriage certificate says her name was Ziman, but her husband’s obituary says her maiden name was Jeruslinsky, and her own obituary says her maiden name was Vatelsky.  Leah’s first husband had the last name Simon, and when A.I. and Hyman and Leah’s father died, their mother also married a man whose last name was Simon.  A.I. had a half-brother, Morris Simon, who was killed in “the Moro insurgency” in 1905 in the Philippines. The coincidences are too great to be coincidences; the families must have known each other and been interwoven in the towns they left behind.

Lena Ziman had arrived about a year before her marriage with – family legend has it – a tag around her neck that said “Toledo, Iowa.”  In fact, the records of the ship she took from Hamburg, the Uranus, note that her destination is “Toledo,” and she was already listed as “Lena Sime.”  Nevertheless, they were officially married a year later by Rabbi David Davidson, a Reform rabbi serving Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in Des Moines, Iowa.

A.I. and Lena Sime ca. 1922

I remember stories of trips to Des Moines for kosher meat, but how my grandfather’s family lived a Jewish life in Toledo never really entered my childhood consciousness.  Simon Glazer, in The Jews of Iowa (1904), divided the Jews of Des Moines into eastsiders, mostly Orthodox, who came from the Suwalki region – where I believe the Simes came from – and westsiders, mostly Reform, who established B’nai Jeshurun.  Among their family photos was a “rabbi card” of Rav Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor of Kovna obviously copied by a Des Moines photographer.

Nevertheless, when the Simes and Solomons needed a life-cycle event, from a wedding to a funeral, they sought out Reform synagogues and Reform rabbis.

To be continued . . .