MAC honors former gardener Lindheimer after letters discovered in Windsor Avenue home
CAPE MAY — The Walter Lindheimer Garden at the Emlen Physick Estate opened with a small crowd of revelers on Sept. 19. Some of the attendees were clutching a children’s book, the creation of historian Ben Ridings of Cape May MAC (Museums + Arts + Culture).
In the pages of this strangely sweet little tome, a lost world emerged featuring those usually forgotten by historical accounts, whose names all too often appear as side characters to the plot — if they appear at all.
For one family that still celebrates its roots on this island, however, the name Walter Lindheimer summons a tale of hard beginnings and brotherly affection, endless work and long journeys.
Lindheimer worked for Dr. Emlen Physick as a gardener back in the 1880s, the job like a fledgling flight from his family home in West Cape May. His next jump would take him out of their lives forever, or so it seemed to his younger brother Frank.
When digging through the attic of an old home, one might expect to encounter a few small surprises. For Patti Jo Kiraly and her daughter Katie, the attic of their family home held history in stacks and piles left behind by the women who’d kept the place going while their children and grandchildren scattered all over the country.
The house on Windsor Avenue became a place for summer visits and holiday sprees; it was rented out sometimes, but it stayed in the line from mother to daughter.
“I’m the sixth steward of this house,” Kiraly said after the garden ceremony. “My daughter will be the seventh. It’s been mainly women keeping the place, so the names keep changing. My family settled in Cape May in the 1860s and over the next 30-40 years they lived in West Cape May. They had a farm, took in boarders, the father made furniture; just German immigrants trying to make a living. They had six kids, the first three were born in Philadelphia, but Walter and Frank (and their sister) were born in Cape May.”
Patti Jo is a born storyteller, and this history has been part of her life since childhood, although she never expected it to bloom into new life in quite the way it has in the past few years.
She said that by the 1880 census, Lindheimer was already noted as living on the Physick Estate, in the gardener’s cottage that is now part of the Cape May Tennis Club.
“He worked for Dr. Physick until around 1883 or 1885,” then he moved to Connecticut. The two branches of the Lindheimer family lost communication some time in the 1940s.
Then came the day Patti and her daughter Katie decided to finally start looking through all those piles in the attic.
“Well, there were letters, documents, a mortgage request signed by Gen. Sewell, deeds — it was easier to keep them than to go through them, so everything was there. There were old school books, it was a time capsule for that period.
“They were all working through that Victorian boom, you know, when people were rebuilding after the big fire. They were hustling to make money. There was so much information in the attic, amazing amounts of stuff. In those papers were correspondence between the two brothers: Walter and Frank.”
She added: “It’s kind of a love story”.
It’s a love story that weaves between the price of a hog, the lessons of leaving the chicken coop open and the constant pull of work from sunrise to sunset with limited means and back-breaking tasks to fulfill, but the brothers trusted each other enough to be shockingly honest about it all.
In one letter, Walter describes an argument with his employer, Dr. Physick, that had him threatening to leave, though by the end of the letter he seems content to learn bricklaying as a means to pull himself out of the life of a gardener.
“Content” is not a word one might associate with young Walter, however. Like so many young people since, he was already champing at the bit to get out of Cape May and see more of the world. He was barely in his 20s, and too busy to walk home for a visit, so all his hopes and frustrations went into his letters to his younger brother Frank.
Yes, Frank Lindheimer, the great-great-great grandfather of Patti Jo Kiraly, who found Walter’s letters in the attic, but not Frank’s. Those crucial responses were all waiting up in Connecticut, with the family she’d never met.
The two women split the tasks before them: Katie went into detective mode, finding out everything she could about Walter’s work at the estate, while Patti Jo finally tracked down her missing kin.
The Connecticut branch of the Lindheimer family was happy to be found, and started making plans to visit the Cape May house. (Of all six Lindheimer children, Walter was the only one to leave Cape May, though the next generation began spreading out.)
And, shockingly, they still had the letters the Cape May contingent had sent all those years ago. Those early letters between Frank and Walter now fit together to describe another side of the Cape May story. It was that correspondence the two women presented to MAC, offering some much-needed working-class history to the legacy of the Physick Estate.
“It’s always been a point of pride that we were connected with the estate,” Patti said, “but we never knew the link. Then we presented it all to the Physick Estate, and they had never had a person they knew of that worked there.”
Thanks to this breakthrough, MAC produced a fourth in its series of children’s books written by Ridings and illustrated by Steven Olzewski. This chapter in the unfolding life of a cartoon Dr. Physick called “Dr. Physick: Lend A Helping Hand” follows his dog Daisy as she attempts to help the staff at the house, including a handsome young man named Walter, the gardener of the estate, and incidentally the grower of a powerful mustache.
A photograph of Walter at around the time of his employment there shows him sporting similarly epic whiskers, and he’s much handsomer than your average Ancestry find.
The flower-loving Walter in the books is a departure from the young-man-in-a-hurry we meet in his letters to Frank. Perhaps it was only to Frank he could really confess the scale of his ambition.
Some of that ambition must have spread through the genes or the ether to his fourth-great-niece Patti Jo, because she soon decided to pursue a more physically present reminder in the very gardens in which Walter had toiled.
MAC was in fundraising mode to repair the struggling HVAC, and according to Patti Jo: “I had a little extra.” Yes, the descendant of a first-generation American teenager who made $20 as a gardener donated to help save the place, something that would no doubt please Walter if he knew it.
“It means so much to our family to have the physical reminder,” Kiraly said.
The garden contains two very pretty iron benches, a trickling fountain and a plaque describing Walter. Truly the Lindheimers were part of the fabric of this island for generations. Now there is a marker of the family that worked so hard building quite a large portion of the place, not just those whose names went on the deeds and tend to be remembered better.
As for Patti Jo and Katie, now that they’ve joyfully opened the new garden commemorating their fourth (and fifth) great uncle, they’re heading up to Connecticut to spend time with his descendants, bringing a copy of the children’s book with them.
As the grandchildren of Frank and Walter are reunited, Patti Jo and Katie are confident there are even more treasures in the attic. Frank, you see, eventually got into printing, leaving samples of dance cards and ball invitations and a whole social whirl of the era up in that attic.
That is, when Frank Lindheimer wasn’t too busy printing copies of the Cape May Star, the newspaper that later became the Star and Wave.
By VICTORIA RECTOR/For the Star and Wave
