the old hermit of the muck

At Thanksgiving this year, my mom's brothers started talking about an old man they often referred to as a hermit. John Felger was his name and here's his story....



John Felger came with his parents, immigrants from Germany, at about the turn of the last century. They bought a farm of about 80 acres in the mucklands of northeast Marshall County. Felger's father and my great-great grandfather helped clear the land for the B&O railroad, their farms abutting each other and the railroad locating across the south side of the acreage. The Felgers built a small 1 1/2 story home, making what little money they could off of mint farming-the only thing that grows in muck. John's father died while he was just a boy so he and his mother carried on the mint farming operation. Then his mother passed away, before John became of age.



Lehman Brothers was the main mint distillery in the area and they would "help" old farmers by providing easy credit (sound familiar?), and ultimately ended up with the mint farms. John Felger, barely a man, was put in a similar situation and soon found himself evicted from the homestead. Realizing that Lehman's was paying pittance for mint, my great granddad set up his own mint distillery on the muck corner of his farm and began paying out good prices to farmers who started bringing their mint to him. And he hired John Felger to run the distillery, providing living quarters attached to it until he built a small workers shack for John back on the muck next to the distillery.

Felger's little shack

And there John lived, all alone-way off the beaten path in a two room shack. A German bachelor mint farmer-a hermit. John was given to whiskey and, as my uncle put it, "left handed weed" that grew along the tracks near the edge of the muck. This infuriated my great-grandmother who was of the Christian Women's Temperance Society. My granddad made a promise to him that they'd always watch out for him. So, after great-granddad's death and the farm sold, my grandfather put the worker's shack on skids and moved it from the muck to the his share of the family farm, a stone's throw from the back of their home.



And there the old man continued to live, taken into town by my uncles on occasion. They'd take him grocery shopping where he'd have to test the brown mustard by taking off the cap and sticking his tongue down the jar to see if he'd like the brand-if not, he'd put it back on the shelf. And he'd never pass up the opportunity to take his cane and beat on the door of the corporate offices of Lehman Brothers in downtown Bremen....even spitting in that general direction. In 1969 my uncle remembered going back to Felger's shack to tell him to come watch the moon landing. Felger refused to go saying there was no way that was possible....just trickery.


I don't remember him. My grandfather turned his shack into a woodworking shop after John passed away and I can remember helping him on a couple of projects in the little two room palace where John spent many a long, long snowed in winters next to his pot-bellied stove.