Ernest Brown Hastings

Ernest Brown Hastings, sixth of the eight children of Mary Lena Brown and Frank Opal Hastings, was born 20 September 1907 in Dilly, Vernon County, WI during an interval of about a year when the family resided in Dilly. They had come to be based there because Frank Hastings had been assigned to the area by his employer, Illinois Central Railroad. In Ernest’s infancy, the household was reestablished in Martintown, Green County, WI, the village founded by Lena’s grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. They returned not to the home that Lena had grown up in on the banks of the Pecatonica River next to the landmark mills, but south across the river where the majority of the village’s denizens maintained their homes. Ernest went on to spend the rest of his childhood as a Martintown resident. He attended Winslow High School, located a mile south of Martintown in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. As one might expect, his nickname was Ernie, but most people knew this was short for Ernest, unlike his brothers Leland and Fred, whose nicknames of Hap and Fritz became so affixed to them some acquaintances weren’t sure what their formal names were.

(A photograph of Ernest as one of the male pupils of Martin School in 1919 can be seen on the History-of-Martintown page of this website. Click here to go right to that page. You will need to scroll down to see the image of the schoolboys, whose members include his second cousins Dwight and Estel Buss.)

Ernest treated his parents’ home as his base well into his twenties. He didn’t always spend his days and nights there, as will be explained below, but their home continued to be where his mail was delivered and where he kept his non-travel possessions. In 1933, Frank O. Hastings’s final career situation with Illinois Central triggered a move in 1933 to Rockford, Winnebago County, IL. Ernest -- along with his younger sisters Mary and Anna -- made the transition along with Mom & Dad. There was plenty of precedent across the nation for grown children to remain with their parents to this degree. With the Great Depression in full swing, lots of young adults simply could not afford a place of their own. Ernest did not clear himself and his things out until his marriage in 1936 (the year before his parents moved back to Martintown).

The photograph at right shows Frank Hastings with his five sons in 1912 as they pose with the handcar and tools he used in his section gang work. This image remained a favorite within the family throughout the lifetimes of all of the boys. Prior to appearing here on this webpage, it was published at least three times: in the 7 November 1965 edition of the Rockford Morning Star, in 1990 in Our Part of America, Browntown-Cadiz-Jordan, a commemorative edition issued by the Centennial Committee of the Citizens of Cadiz Township, Green County, WI, printed by New Life Press of Monroe, WI, and in 1991 in Early History of Winslow, Illinois by Harold Fowler. Ernest is the youngest boy, the one in the very center.

Ernest’s bride was Ellen Martha Bertha Fiebranz. The wedding occurred 4 April 1936 in Belvidere, Boone County, IL. (The couple are shown below in 1938.) Born 21 April 1915 on a farm in Riley Township, McHenry County, IL near the small town of Marengo, Ellen had been raised from an early age in Belvidere. She was a daughter of Pauline M. Lucht and Albert Fiebranz, both of whom had immigrated to the United States from Germany during their early childhoods. Albert had passed away when Ellen was only five years old, not long after he had ceased dairy farming and gone to work in a factory in Belvidere. As the baby of the family and having had no other parent for most of her upbringing, Ellen maintained a particularly close bond with her mother even in adulthood. Partly as a consequence of that bond, rather than pull Ellen away to a fresh address, Ernest simply moved in with her in Belvidere at 333 West Menominee Street. The couple would treat this home as their base throughout their marriage. However, in the mid-1940s, the pair had another home in Elmhurst, IL, just west of Chicago. They returned to Belvidere by no later than 1951, allowing Ellen to care for her mother in her final years. Pauline Lucht Fiebranz died in 1955. As near as can be determined, 333 West Menominee was still Ernest and Ellen’s place of residence when Ellen passed away decades later.

The year after the wedding, Ellen became pregnant. Unfortunately the baby, Larry Roger Hastings, was born dead 20 November 1937. (Genealogical notes written by Ernest’s aunt Lulu Fay Brown Seay have the stillborn infant’s name as Richard Lawrence Hastings, but this appears to be an error.) Apparently Ernest and Ellen faced a similarly tragic outcome should there be other pregnancies. The final word from the doctors may have come down in the wake of surgery Ellen underwent in February, 1939 at a Rockford hospital. Not content to go through life as a childless couple, Ernest and Ellen adopted a son in early 1941. The infant was only weeks old at the time. The couple gave the baby the name William Lee Hastings.

All of Frank Hastings’s boys did some section-gang labor for Illinois Central Railroad for at least a small portion of their working lives, but Ernest was the only one to become a chip off the old block and stick with the company from youth to retirement. His situation wasn’t quite like his father’s, though. Frank’s career stretched over the period when railroads dominated shipping and commerce in the United States and still commanded a major chunk of long-distance passenger traffic. Ernest’s tenure coincided with the prolonged, relentless decline of the industry. Fortunately Ernest started early enough that his personal job status remained secure. He began at age seventeen. Soon he was regarded as such an essential employee that he was issued his own private-residence train car. Even in the later years of cutbacks, he had enough seniority to keep this perquisite. The 9'x40' bunk car, a red-caboose style equipped with running water, a “red-hot” coal-fired stove, and in later years with a refrigerator and television, was in a very real sense his main place of residence for over forty years (beginning during the time when he officially still lived at home with his parents). That is to say, he stayed at or near his job locales, sometimes literally no more than a one-minute walk away, at other times a mile or two away wherever there was a siding where the bunk car could be parked. He came home to Belvidere on the weekends. Sometimes Ellen visited him in his car during the week. She made a regular habit of doing so when they were newlyweds, and then did so quite a bit in the 1940s when their son was small. Young Bill Hastings viewed the overnight stays as an adventure. He and his mother would stand in the open doorway of the car and wave to passing trains as they went by. Engineers on those trains would toot their horns in response. Otherwise Ellen and Bill stayed home in Belvidere with her mother for company. By the time Ernest became a married man, his assignments were seldom more than a hundred miles away, usually somewhere between Chicago and Freeport -- they had been as far off as Sioux City, IA and Clinton, IL during the first dozen years of his career -- but it was far better to have a brief commute by foot or by handcar than to have to put up with a long one every morning and evening by automobile. His bosses in the company obviously thought so, too. In a 1965 newspaper profile of Ernest and his career in the Rockford Morning Star, Ellen was quoted as saying, with a laugh, “I don’t mind this set-up at all. In fact, it’s one sure way to have a happy marriage.”

When Ernest went to sleep in his bunk at night parked on a siding, trains would often roar past only a few feet away from his head. He got so used to the noise it ceased to wake him up.

Ernest was a heavy equipment operator, or as he reported in the 1940 census, a “ditches engineer,” involved in grading and civil engineering maintenance projects. He was especially busy after every flood. Eventually he advanced to section foreman like his father. At the forty-year mark of his career (in 1965, when he was fifty-seven years old), he was awarded a pass good for free rail travel anywhere in the United States for himself and Ellen. In the Rockford Morning Star profile, he remarked that he had made almost no use of similar but smaller-scale privileges granted him in earlier years. It would seem that with all that time spent moving about, he appreciated being able to just stay home during his weekends and vacations. He loved working in his flower garden at 333 W. Menominee. He was a member of the Belvidere Men’s Garden Club and won prizes for some of his blooms in that organization’s competitions. Ellen shared this passion and likewise collected blue ribbons at flower shows.

In the mid-1950s, Ellen’s mother passed away. By this point, Bill was in high school. With less to tie her to household responsibilities, Ellen got a job as a clerk at the local Woolworth’s. Later she became a waitress at the local The Huddle restaurant. By the end of the decade, Bill was grown. Ellen and Ernest began a new chapter of their relationship.

This photograph was taken during a gathering of the Hastings clan in the late 1920s, possibly to commemorate the early June birthday of Ernest’s grandmother Barbara Ann Spece Hastings at her home near Browntown. The date was no later than 1928 because Ann, who is the elderly woman shown second from the right in the back row, passed away 9 September 1928. The younger people in this view, with one exception, are grandchildren of Ann. Ernest is the strapping young man in the center, back row. The two young ladies bracketting him are his cousins Leah Merle Hastings and Elma Grace Hastings. On the far right, also in the back row, is his sister Ethel Ruth Hastings Parsons. In the front row, left to right, are Barbara Anna Hastings, Frederick Cullen “Fritz” Hastings, James Lawrence Hastings, Helen Curtis, Ethel Dale, Marie Curtis Disch, Mary Hilda Hastings, and a boy not positively identified, but probably Marie’s son Curtis William Disch.

Finally, in 1972, Ernest retired. He and Ellen had a half-dozen further years together before she passed away in 16 May 1978 at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Belvidere only sixty-three years of age. Precisely six years later, on 16 May 1984, Ernest wed long-time Belvidere resident Lillian Ann Schwedersky, daughter of John Schwedersky and Louise Juhnke. Lillian, born 5 May 1911 in Chicago, Cook County, IL, was Ernest’s contemporary, i.e. theirs was union of two individuals entering the twilight phase of their lives. Lillian had been wed in her young adulthood to Ralph E. Knox and later had been the wife of Earl Wilbert Luce. Four boys had resulted from the first marriage, but by the time of the 1984 wedding, two of Lillian’s sons were deceased and the surviving pair were middle-aged, so Ernest did not spend any time helping rear his step-offspring. He did, however, become a grandpa figure in the lives of Lillian’s younger descendants, who came to number in the dozens. Like Ellen, Lillian had at one point been employed by The Huddle restaurant chain. It was one of many employers she had over the course of her life; others included Gossard Corset, Mid-West Bottle Cap, Highland Hospital, and Casa Mia restaurant.

Ernest and Lillian shared nearly twenty years together. They remained in Belvidere -- though not in the same home Ernest had shared with Ellen. Ernest breathed his last Thursday, 21 February 2002 at St. Anthony Medical Center in Rockford. In a demonstration of the longevity exhibited by many of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader, he had reached the impressive age of ninety-four. His funeral was held two days later at Immanuel Lutheran Church, Reverend Allan R. Buss officiating. Lillian survived Ernest, expiring 11 April 2004 at nearly ninety-three. The graves of both spouses can be found at Belvidere Cemetery.

Arranged youngest to eldest, the five sons of Frank Opal Hastings with their father, in an image from the late 1930s. From left to right, Ernest Brown Hastings, Frederick Cullen Hastings, James Lawrence Hastings, Leland Francis “Hap” Hastings, John Cecil Hastings, Frank Opal Hastings.

Descendants of Ernest Brown Hastings with Ellen Martha Bertha Fiebranz

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