Life of Father Hecker | Page 7

up
to some small traffic, claim exclusive right of possession. The

sidewalks are crowded with the stalls of a yet more petty trade; the
neighborhood is full of unpleasant sights, unwholesome odors, and
revolting sounds.
But the Hester Street of seventy years ago and more was another matter.
When a canal flowed through Canal Street, and tall trees growing on
either side of it sheltered the solid and roomy houses of retired
merchants and professional men, Hester Street was a long way up town.
Seven years before the subject of the present biography was born, that
elegantly proportioned structure, the City Hall, which had then been
nine years a-building, was finished in material much less expensive
than had been intended when it was begun. Marble was very dear,
reasoned the thrifty and far-sighted City Fathers of the day, and as the
population of New York were never likely to settle to any extent above
Chambers Street, the rear of the hall would be seen so seldom that this
economy would not be noticeable. What is now Fourteenth Street was
then a place given over to market-gardens. Rutgers Street, Rutgers
Place, Henry Street, were fashionable localities, and the adjacent
quarter, now so malodorous and disreputable, was eminently
respectable. Freund's daughters, as they left the parental roof for
modest houses of his gift close by, no doubt had reason to consider
themselves abundantly fortunate in their surroundings.
One of these daughters, Caroline Sophia Susanna Henrietta Wilhelmina,
born in Elberfeld on the 2d of March, 1796, was still a babe in arms at
the time of the family emigration. She was a tall, fair, handsome girl,
not long past her fifteenth birthday when she became a wife. Her
husband, John Hecker, was nearly twice her age, having been born in
Wetzlar, Prussia, May 7, 1782. He was the son of another John Hecker,
a brewer by trade, who married the daughter of a Colonel Schmidt.
Both parents were natives of Wetzlar. Their son learned the business of
a machinist and brass-founder, and emigrated to America in 1800. He
was married to Caroline Freund in the Old Dutch Church in the Swamp,
July 21, 1811. He died in New York, in the house of his eldest son, July
10, 1860.
Events proved John Hecker to have been equally fortunate and

sagacious in his choice of a wife. At the time of their marriage he was
thrifty and well-to-do. At one period he owned a flourishing
brass-foundry in Hester Street, and during his early married life his
prosperity was uninterrupted. But before many years had passed his
business declined, and from one cause and another he never succeeded
in re-establishing it. This misfortune, occurring while even the eldest of
the sons was still a lad, might easily have proved irreparable in more
senses than one. But the very fact that the ordinary gates to learning
were so soon closed against these children caused the natural tendency
they had toward knowledge to impel them all the more strongly in that
shorter road to practical wisdom which leads through labor and
experience. The Hecker brothers were all hard at work while still mere
children, and before John, the eldest, had attained to legal manhood,
they had fixed the solid foundations of an enduring prosperity, and all
need of further exertion on the part of their parents was over for ever.
Isaac Thomas Hecker, the third son and youngest child of this couple,
was born in New York at a house in Christie Street, between Grand and
Hester, December 18, 1819, when his mother was not yet twenty-four.
He survived her by twelve years only, she dying at the residence of her
eldest son's widow in 1876, in the full possession of faculties which
must have been of no common order. From her, and through her from
Engel Freund, who was what is called "a character," Father Hecker
seems to have derived many of his life-long peculiarities. "I never knew
a son so like his mother," writes to us one who had an intimate
acquaintance with both of them for more than forty years. She adds:
"Mrs. Hecker was a woman of great energy of character and strong
religious nature. Her son, Father Hecker, inherited both of these traits,
and there was the warmest sympathy between them. He was her
youngest son, her baby, she called him, but with all her tender love she
had a holy veneration for his character as priest.
"She deeply sympathized with him through the trials and anxieties that
were his in his search after truth, and when his heart found rest, and the
aspirations of his soul were answered in the Holy Catholic Church, her
noble heart accepted for him what she could not see for herself. She

said to a lady who spoke to