Frances, Julia, and Anna BURIL came to Michigan, along with their cousins, the KOZUMPLIKs, from 1907 through 1916 from rural Moravia near Veseli-nad-Moravou. Moravians, Bohemians and Silesianswere emancipated in the early 19th century, but failed to achieve economic prosperity during this era of Germanic rule. These nationalities made up a large fraction of the immigrants to the US in the later 1800s up until the beginning of World War I. Julia arrived first in 1907 along with neighbors and acquaintances, one of whom she married, Frank HORKEY. In this same 1910 household, Matus MATUSKA lived and worked as a beet weeder in the sugar beet fields of south central Michigan. He would marry Frances BURIL shortly after she arrives in 1911. Anna, my grandmother would arrive in the US in 1914 to live with her sister’s family and work on the farms around Owasso and Durand, Michigan.
After the timber industry cleared the land in Shiawassee County in the early 19th century, the thumb area of Michigan around Flint and Bay City became home to many small, family farms. Michigan, as a leading agricultural state, produced grains, soy beans, vegetables and sugar beets. Sugar beets had been introduced into Michigan’s agricultural mix in the early 1800s as America’s consumption of refined sugar cane grew rapidly. However, the fragmented sugar industry stagnated until 1898 when the Michigan Sugar company was formed by consolidating many of the small mills that existed in the thumb area of Michigan.
After 1900, when farmers cultivated more acres of sugar beets, they required an ever increasing work force of migrant labor to plant, weed and pick the crops. Sugar beet farming was labor intensive, requiring many long hours in the fields. Weeding during the summer, as captured by the 1910 census, was done by an army of newly arrived Moravians and Bohemians using short hoes. They labored in the hot, humid Michigan summers which were much like that their homelands. To obtain relief from the heat at night, they opened windows or slept on porches to take advantage of whatever breeze might blow. These immigrants first rented their frame and shingle houses which were heated only with fireplaces and cast iron stoves. The used outhouses and hauled water from the outdoor wells.
Dawn-to-dusk days produced the profits that they used to buy their first farms, as well as sending for more family members in the years preceding WWI. These immigrants changed their status from laborers to lease-hold farmers, and eventually to owners. One of their main goals was to own their own land, the ultimate measure of success in “The Old Country”. Their second goal was to educate their children who attended local schools when not working on the farms. Many of these children graduated from high school, the first, but not the last of their families to do so. In time, the second generation, born in the US, would attend college and move into white collar jobs, as their grandparents proudly looked on. This generation of immigrant beet weeders became the ancestors of many of today’s successful business people and educators.
