Wilhelm Schimmel, regarded today as one of America's most famous folk carvers, was a colorful itinerant who roamed throughout the Cumberland Valley region of Pennsylvania in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He likely immigrated to America from the Hesse-Darmstadt region of Germany shortly after the American Civil War.
Little is known about exactly when and why he came to Cumberland County, although he was a non-naturalized citizen in the county by 1869. On Friday, May 7, 1869, the German "image maker," as he was described in the Carlisle American Volunteer, walked into the lumberyard office of Delancey & Shrom in the borough of Carlisle. Likely intoxicated and entirely covered in mud, he proceeded to dismantle furniture while overturning the office's burning stove. Upon being forced to leave the office, he began throwing stones at the owners and at the building until three men with stones of their own subdued him. Soon afterward, Officer San no took Schimmel to Fort Thompson. At an August 23rd court appearance, Schimmel entered a guilty plea to assault and battery, and a one-year jail sentence followed. This incident was not the sole occasion Wilhelm Schimmel found himself arrested and jailed because of rowdy behavior. An 1883 Carlisle Sentinel report offers details of various such incidents. It reads, "For years he has migrated among the farmers, working occasionally, but more generally selling in towns carvings of dogs and birds, toothpicks and other novelties made by his own hand." The article goes on to outline his somewhat "charmed life, " having survived countless fights, railroad accidents, and encounters with the law.
Schimmel was a figure of many colorful legends that passed down through generations along with many of his carvings. We know of him by several reported names- Wilhelm, William, Heinrich, Henry, Jacob, and John. One common reference used by many in the period was that of "Old Schimmel." Over the course of at least 21 years, from 1869 to 1890, the year he died, Schimmel stayed with families mostly of German descent. He moved from farm to farm, seldom wandering far outside the county seat of Carlisle. He would carve mostly animals, many for the children of his hosts, in exchange for room and board. He established bonds with various families, visiting them repeatedly. Many of them lived along the winding Conodoguinet Creek.
One such German family was the Hensels of Newburg, Hopewell Township, Cumberland County. They would often house tramps in a summer-kitchen loft coined the "bummer room" in exchange for day labor. In his History of Cumberland and Adams County, Warner Beers states, "Many poor people of Hopewell have cause to remember their (the Hensels') many acts of kindness." According to Alice Hensel, on several occasions during the 1880s Schimmel stayed in their "bummer room" for several days to a week at a time.
Charles Hoffman traveled by buggy practicing medicine in Hopewell Township in the 1870s and 1880s. According to Hoffman's grandson, Schimmel often used the elder Hoffman for transportation to the Hensel farm. As described in a letter written by Melva Hensel in 1971, during one stay at their farm Schimmel carved a spread-wing eagle for her father, John Hensel, Jr. One night while teasing young John, then age four or five, Schimmel said to him, "If you kiss the hired girl, I will make you something." The young boy proceeded to climb onto the girl's lap and gave her a kiss. Schimmel kept his promise by carving the eagle for him. John Hensel, Jr. was born in 1879, which establishes the creation date of the eagle around 1884. The letter goes on to state that Schimmel would make a fire in the summer kitchen fireplace and sleep in the "bummer room" loft on a chaff tick and cornhusk pillow.
For nearly half a century until his death on January 2 at the age of 85 Milton Embick Flower was the best informed, most authoritative, and most widely known historian of Carlisle and Cumberland County. He was the author of books, monographs, and catalogues that recorded and interpreted the past of this area, and, in the words of one of his successors as president of the Cumberland County Historical Society...