Rocky Cape Christian Community

On lined notebook paper, Anna Weber painted this picture for her severely handicapped niece, Maria Weber, of West Montrose, Ontario, Canada, on 21 June, 1882.

Many visitors to our house stop to look at an old picture, with an inscription much like this, that hangs on the wall beside our front door. "Who was Anna Weber?" they ask.
 
"Anna Weber was my grandmother's aunt," I tell them. But there is more to the story.   
 
Born in the Weberthal district of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1814, it did not take Anna's parents -- Johannes and Katherina (Gehman) Weber -- long to notice that she was an unusual child. She grew slowly and did not learn as easily as the rest. Her interests seemed to wander and she developed unique pastimes on her own. In the words of my great-aunts she was always "a bissl gspassich" (a little odd) or "sonderbar" (unusual).
 
The year Anna turned eleven and her brother Johnny was seven, the Johannes and Peter Weber families packed all their belongings into horse-drawn wagons and set out through the wilderness to Upper Canada. The thousand km trip took them across the Susquehanna River, over the Allegheny Mountains, and brought them, after several weeks' travel on a rough trail, to the Niagara, just above the falls. Looking nearly 2 km across the fast flowing water little Johnny exclaimed, "Ich geh vesauffe, geb mich a Stück Speckbrot! (I'm going to drown. Give me a piece of bread with lard)," -- a story that followed him the rest of his life -- but the grown-ups loaded the chassis and wheels into the wagon boxes, tied the horses to the back, and with many prayers to God for their protection steered the strange craft kitty-corner across the river to a new land.  
 
In Canada, while her family struggled to build a new home in the wilderness, Anna helped in what she could. But her health deteriorated and suffering from dropsy she found it constantly harder to get around. Her mother tried to teach her to knit but it never came to much. What she liked better was to draw pictures and make stuffed animals (a dog, a squirrel holding a nut) to cheer the little children that spent time with her.
 
The Mennonite community in the Grand River Valley (land purchased from the Iroquois) chose Johannes Weber to be their minister, and as such he and his family were expected to be models of godliness and order. It did not please Anna's parents to see her "wasting her time" drawing pictures when she could be hooking rugs, sewing, or doing other useful work. Particularly since her pictures looked just as "gspassich" to them as Anna herself.  Her dogs and horses came in remarkable colours. Her trees looked like giant flowers, and her rabbits had feet like birds. Anna could not read or write well, and she wrote many of her letters backwards.  

 
Yet, after her parents both died, Anna found ways and means to paint the things she liked. Shifted from place to place among relatives, she scalded rose leaves, irises, and other flowers to make her colours. From onion peelings she made the colour brown, from saffron she made yellow, and her blue came from bluing chunks the women used in their laundry. Only rarely did she get black ink from the store, and used it sparingly.
 
Paper was more of a problem. Anna did her painting on business receipts (as in this picture of the dogs), on wrapping paper, or on lined notebook sheets. She made her lines with a quill and painted with a tuft of horsehair tied to a stick.
 
Many of the adults that took care of Anna saw her as a difficult responsibility. Pretty hard to get on with. The only adult Anna ever painted a picture for was Maria Weber, her brother Johnny's crippled daughter. But the children from far and wide loved nothing better than to come and see her after school, on Sunday afternoons, or whenever their mothers let them to go.
 
Invariably, the children got little gifts from Anna -- if not a picture, then a small woven mat to set under a cup, or a paper cutting. Anna loved nothing better than to talk with the children, or to watch animals. One winter day, while staying at my great-grandparents' house she was watching the flies crawling about on the window. A large spider in one corner was catching them one by one. Finally she exclaimed in distress, "Selle wüscht Spinn hott de letscht Muck gfrosse!" (that evil spider gobbled up the last fly). She always felt sorry for the little things, my great aunts said.
 
As Anna grew older she became quite paralysed and did her paintings lying flat on her back in bed, with severely crippled fingers. She was in much pain, until the night someone gave her a dose of a wrong medicine by mistake and she died in her sleep in October, 1888.

 
The house where Anna Weber stayed with Daniel and Augusta Weber, north of Jakobstettl (St. Jacobs), Ontario. My mother grew up in this house and my uncle Manoah Martin now lives there with his family. The giant oak tree shading the yard was already this size in Anna Weber's time.
 
* * * * *
 
In the record book of Martins Meetinghouse (now surrounded by the city of Waterloo, Ontario) where Anna Weber is buried, she is noted as having been "Schwachsinnig" (of a weak mind).
 
Maybe she was. But in the evenings, after Gebetsstund (daily prayers) at our house, when I lift our little Australian girls to see the old picture on the wall, and I watch the delight on their faces as they point out the birds and the rabbits with funny claws, I know that Anna Weber with her home-made paints and scrap paper did not live in vain.
 
A host of children that got her paintings treasured them as long as they lived. Stuck in family Bibles and dresser drawers throughout the Grand River Valley, they have gotten passed on from generation to generation. A boyhood friend of mine, Reg Good, even wrote a book about her, Anna's Art, published in 1976.  

 
In spite of her handicap, Anna learned how to be truly happy. Her happiness came from passing it on to others.
 
Peter
 
P.S. While Anna's paintings follow the general style of artwork common in my south German background, it was highly original in its own way. All her drawings were exactly symmetrical.
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au