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Maybe the chest in my office did make that first voyage with my grandfather, but perhaps it came later. F.H. made three round trips to Denmark and back after he settled in Michigan, once to find a likely bride, Christine Sandberg, then to bring her to the U.S., and finally, after their five children were born, to give his wife one last look at home. One of the hazy bits in his story is how, before he emigrated, he knew of a tiny, unincorporated farm hamlet called Ellsworth (after Colonel Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth, the first Union officer killed in the Civil War). There were a few Dutch families in this rolling, forested country at the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula, but no Danes who might have written to say there were lumberjack jobs in the woods for a sturdy young man who didn't speak much English.
At any rate, the teenage and penniless F.H. found his way to Ellsworth and prospered there, somehow buying and selling farms and houses, building and operating a three-story hotel called the Orient, a shingle mill, a hardware store and a waterworks, and donating land for a station when the railroad came through in '92. That was the year he and two other men paid a surveyor to plot out the town. That year -- and any other, according to a town history -- he was good for a suit of clothes, or a railroad ticket, or the rent money, when someone was down on his luck. After the Depression, my father told me, F.H. made no effort to collect debts. He had never been much good at retrieving his money, which was odd for a man who in one lifetime used up all his family's financial-brilliance genes for several generations to come. While he was still a boy learning English in Michigan, he lent money he had saved for college to a friend -- a Yankee, the town history reports -- who skipped town. No matter; he went on lending and giving away money, and there wasn't much left when he died.
Big frog, small pond; an even smaller pond today, with fewer than 400 residents. I look around for the train station, but it's not there. No tracks, either; they were ripped up "Oh, quite a few years ago now." A big prosperous food-canning factory that my grandfather and some other townsmen started in the '20s petered out, I learn, in the early '70s. A steel- fabricating plant operated there for a few years, then went belly up, and now a toxic-waste cleanup putters along in a clutter of rusted metal. Ellsworth Lake is still where it was when my father and I would shove off at first light in a borrowed rowboat, seats slicked by dew, to fish for perch and crappies with bamboo poles and worms. Now a friendly fellow who is launching a $15,000 bass boat, complete with electronic fish-finder, says the water is a funny color near the dead steel factory. But Ellsworth's houses and churches are painted, and yards are mowed. The surrounding dairy farms seem prosperous, though fewer farmers run bigger spreads and here and there old farmhouses sag blind and empty. A girls' softball team looks sharp in maroon uniforms as the players warm up for a game.