On a Friday afternoon in February 1853, David Rothen fell ill while teaching school in the Swiss Settlement area between Bluffton and Pandora, dismissed his pupils early and headed to his nearby home.
The following Monday, according to a December 1995 story in the Bluffton News, his daughter, Jane, rode a white horse to the school to announce there would be no more classes until further notice because her father was seriously ill with typhoid fever, which was raging through the settlement at the time.
Rothen, his wife and three of his children were all stricken with the disease, which, the Bluffton News noted, was said to have wiped out a third of the settlement.
“Two of the daughters who did not get sick took care of them,” the newspaper wrote. “All got well again, except the father, David, who, after being afflicted for six weeks, died on March 23, 1853.”
And that might have been that. The 47-year-old Rothen might have been forgotten by all but a few, his time on Earth marked only by a headstone in Clymer Cemetery near Mt. Cory, except that, near the end of the 19th century, some of Rothen’s former pupils from a half-century earlier recalled two New Year’s songs he had composed while he was their teacher, according to the newspaper.
Those two songs — “New Year’s Welcome” and “Tune in Song” — became a central part of a unique tradition of New Year’s caroling in the Bluffton/Pandora area.
Rothen was born in Switzerland in 1805.
“As a shepherd boy he cared for the flocks of his father and neighbors, going up into the mountains in the spring of the year with flocks and staying there until the approaching snows of winter drove them to the foothills and home,” according to a June 1945 article written by C.D. Steiner for the Putnam County Historical Society.
After learning the tailor’s trade and “saving all he could,” he was able to go away to school, where he learned to read, write and speak in German, English and French, Steiner wrote, adding that he eventually became an instructor in a Swiss school.
However, after hearing “glowing accounts” of life in America “where there was freedom of worship and a great need for teachers and preachers,” Rothen decided to emigrate. Before leaving he married Barbara Hartmetz, who was from Germany. In 1832, Rothen and his wife left for America.
“Embarking at Hamburg from whence a large number of Swiss and Germans made their passage to America,” Steiner wrote, “he landed In New York City. From there he made his way to Buffalo and from there to Richland County, Ohio.”
After living there a few years he and his family, which by then included two daughters, returned to Buffalo and then back to Perrysburg, Ohio.
“There he hired a man to take the entire family through the Black Swamp to Riley Township, Putnam County, Ohio” around 1835, according to Steiner.
Rothen claimed 160 acres of land in Riley Township “upon which he built a log cabin largely with his own hands, using a quilt for a door the first winter,” Steiner wrote. “For a few years they lived in the deep woods but gradually he kept clearing the land and thus was able to raise crops, especially corn and a garden.”
Soon, Rothen interested neighboring settlers in building a schoolhouse, where he taught for several years.
“His next venture in teaching,” Steiner wrote, “was in a building located about a mile south of what was known in Riley Township as ‘Beech Tree School.’ It really was a schoolhouse and church combined.”
Steiner described Rothen as “much more of an idealist than a realist,” who engaged in farming “more for the purpose of having food for his family and a home than a source of income.” He did “considerable traveling for the American tract society, distributing and selling Christian literature and Bibles” as far south as Cincinnati, Steiner noted.
“What he liked possibly best of all was to write religious poetry and compose fitting tunes for his poems,” Steiner wrote.
It was two of those tunes his former pupils remembered. Although none of the former pupils could remember the tunes being written down, they did recall that Rothen had taught them the songs “and that he accompanied them to various Swiss Settlement homes to delight them with their singing of these and other hymns on New Year’s Eve,” according to the story.
Eventually the students recreated from memory the two songs, which were then printed on “heavy card stock,” the Bluffton News wrote. “It soon became a popular thing for young people from each of the churches of Swiss background to spend New Year’s Eve caroling at each home,” the newspaper wrote.
A January 1946 story in the Bluffton News described the tradition.
“Although the singing of Christmas carols is almost universal, the custom of heralding the New Year with songs is rare. Bluffton’s New Year serenading is the survival of an ancient Swiss custom brought here by the first settlers of that nationality nearly a century ago and is one of the few pioneer traditions that have held their own against the encroachments of modern life. The songs — there are only two of them — are the same ones that have been sung all through the many years, as young people, and older ones too, have greeted the passing of the year in song,” the newspaper wrote.
“Singing these quaint old-world songs, bands of carolers since that time each New Year’s Eve trudge the streets of town and highways of the countryside. However, their rounds are not aimlessly made,” the newspaper wrote. “The route is well defined and carefully planned in advance. A light in the window is the signal that beckons the carolers, and after the singing a warm welcome is provided inside the house. Cookies, cakes and other goodies are heaped high on the table to reward the singers.”
Older serenaders, according to the 1946 story, recalled an elderly Swiss cobbler who lived alone and cherished the annual visit of the carolers.
“With no feminine hands in his kitchen to provide the customary outlay of baked goods, he substituted a large bowl filled with nickels as his contribution to the singers,” the Bluffton News wrote.
The tradition “waned and nearly disappeared during the 1940s,” Fred Steiner wrote in a story posted on the Blufftonicon.com website in December 2020.
“Today,” he noted, “the Swiss Community Historical Society is the caroling caretaker.”
Like many events, however, the New Year’s caroling was canceled last year and again this year because of COVID-19 concerns.
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