Remembrance

Parantzem Amiryan Haroian

A SEAMSTRESS FROM YEREVAN

Research by Norma V. Asadorian

Parantzem Amiryan was fifteen years on that cold afternoon day in December of 1916.  Yet, there she was sitting in a café in Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, drinking hot chocolate with an Armenian man from America.   He was thirty years old and seeking an Armenian wife to take back with him to his home in Granite City, Illinois, in the United States of America.   In Armenia, drinking hot chocolate in a cafe was an acceptable way for a man to court a young woman in those days.   Parantzem was shy, having not yet seen much of the world, and her hair was cut short like a boy’s cut, due to her recent bout with fever.   She was self-conscious about her hair being so short, but it was thought that long hair sapped one’s strength when one was sick, and, so, her hair had been cut. She lived with her sister, who ran the boarding house where the man was staying.   When she was younger, she attended school in Yerevan, but only to the eighth grade.  Then, she had been apprenticed to become a seamstress, to learn how to sew.    She became very skilled, able to ply a needle artfully and to use a sewing machine, and she even had been trained how to use furs to make fur coats and hats.   With her sister running the boarding house, her sewing skills and strong back were needed to help there.   Every day, she went with her sister and brother to the market to get food supplies for cooking the meals at the boarding house.  She helped do all the chores running a business like a boarding house entailed.  Her days were very busy.

The young man from America was Arsen Haroian.  Along with other working bachelor immigrant men, he and his younger brother, Nishan lived in a boarding house in Granite City, where they both worked as coremakers in the local Commonwealth Steel Mill.  Arsen had come to Yerevan because of what was happening to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey) where his village of Sakatsor was located.  

It was world news that when the Young Turks had come to power in what would become the country of Turkey, they began a systematic brutal program to annihilate all the Armenians in the Armenian region of the Ottoman Empire.  In historical writings after World War I, this event would be called the first genocide of the twentieth century and would give rise to the word “genocide.” It is a word that would pepper the history of the twentieth century as maniacal political leaders repeatedly used this “first genocide” as a model to eliminate other ethnic groups, nationalities, cultural groups, and religious people throughout the world during that century of violence.  

Some Armenians who had been able to escape the destruction in the Ottoman Empire fled to Yerevan and were languishing there in the capital, desperately clinging to the hope of finding lost relatives.  So, too, Arsen Haroian came to Yerevan from America, hoping to find his relatives and rescue them. They were not among the many refugees in Yerevan, so he planned to go into the province of Erzerum where his village was located to bring them to safety.  But his plans changed when the other Armenian men who befriended him in Yerevan told him that the devastation and murders in Erzerum province were intense and that everyone in his village of Sakatsor was murdered.  They told him that if he returned to Sakatsor, the Turks would kill him, too. 

Disappointed, and with a heavy heart aching for his missing family, he determined instead to find a suitable Armenian woman to marry and take back to America with him.  After all, in December of 1916, he was already thirty years old, he had a job in America, and it was time for him to start a family.   This was his one chance to marry a girl from Armenia. 

In those days, in the “Old Country,” it was common practice for men to establish themselves with a job or a business before marrying, so many men did not marry until they were in their late twenties or early thirties.  Then, they married young women, often in their mid to late teens, with the intention to start a family and establish a home.  Parents wanted to assure their daughters would be adequately cared for financially, so this was the acceptable usual practice in traditional Armenian households.   In those long-ago days, it was Armenian custom that marriages commonly were arranged by the parents with approval from the Armenian Orthodox priest.  

So, with his rescue plan set aside, Arsen went to the local priest and asked him if he could introduce him to several suitable young women who might be open to marrying and immigrating to America.   For one week, he was introduced to one prospect after another.  Each day, he would meet a young woman and her mother at the café for hot chocolate, and each night he would pray and ponder if this woman was the right one.   Family lore relates that each night, as he lay sleeping, his mother’s spirit came to him in a dream, and, each time, she told him this girl was not the one for him to marry and he should continue his search.   This went on for a full week.  As the days passed, disheartened, he thought he would have to return to America alone.

Then, one day, while he was sitting in the courtyard of the boarding house, talking to his new Armenian friends and sipping thick, brown Armenian coffee, Parantzem, her sister, and her brother came home from their daily trip to the market.  Arsen asked the other men about the girl with the short hair.  They told him it was the sister of the woman who ran the boarding house.   His interest was piqued.  He wondered why he had not noticed her before.   She had kind, brown eyes, a slim body, a strong jaw, and seemed rather shy.  Her dark hair was very short, like a boy’s cut, which was unusual, as most women in those days had long tresses.   He decided to ask her sister if he could speak with her.   She agreed, and when he did, he liked the young woman’s shy and quiet way, and ventured further to ask if she would join him for a hot chocolate at the café on the following day.  She agreed.   That night he had another dream, and, this time, his mother’s spirit told him gently this girl was the one.

 Dressed in his brown suit, his dark hair parted in the middle and combed neatly, and his magnificent handle-bar mustache combed and swept appropriately up at the corners of his mouth, he met her the next day at the café for hot chocolate.  His time in Armenia was quickly coming to an end and he would have to return to America.  He was determined that if they had a favorable conversation today, he would ask her to marry him and go to America with him.  

Parantzem met him at the café, and they talked for a long time.  She spoke quietly and had good manners.  He could tell that she had some education, more than he did, since he had only been able to go to school to the third grade, and then had begun working on his father’s farm.   He was impressed that she had been trained as a seamstress.   That would come in handy for sewing clothes for the children he hoped to have, and for making curtains and quilts for the house he planned to buy in America.   He knew she was a hard worker because he had seen her working at the boarding house every day he was there.   He liked her.   He told her his story about why he had come to Yerevan.   Encouraged by her attentive listening and compassionate sympathy for his story, he dared to risk seeming forward and decided to lay out his proposition.   He told her he was not a rich man, but that he did have a job working as a coremaker in a steel mill in Granite City.   He said it was steady work and he would be able to provide for her.   He told her he was an honest man, a hard-working man, and that if she would consider marrying him and return to America with him, he would be honored.   She said she would have to discuss his proposal with her sister and that she would let him know the next day.

Parantzem was young and shy, but she was also brave, bold, and daring.  She was intrigued by this serious Armenian man and was captivated with the prospect of being able to immigrate to America where so many Armenian men had gone to find work.  Through the immigrant grapevine of letters sent back to relatives in Armenia, everyone knew that America was seeking thousands of workers for the many factories which were fueling its burgeoning industrial expansion.  If one was willing to work hard, America was a land of plenty.   It was a place where people could see remarkable things and experience life in a country where people were coming from all over the world to make new lives for themselves.   She was excited that he wanted to marry her and excited about going to America.  Yes, she decided.  She would marry him.  

The next day Parantzem told him that her sister consented to her marrying him.  Arsen was elated.   He arranged with the Armenian Orthodox priest to be married in the church immediately, and he invited his new friends to come to the ceremony as witnesses.   They were married on December 21, 1916, in Yerevan, and left for America via France and Norway.  In January of 1917, they boarded a ship sailing out of Christiana (Oslo), Norway, bound for Ellis Island, in New York City. 

Like many other immigrants bound for America, Parantzem and Arsen bought passage in the ship’s steerage level.  Packed into an area meant for cargo, with no privacy, hundreds of other immigrants, and little accommodation for travel, they embarked on a journey full of hope for both of them.   When the other immigrant passengers sailing with them learned that they were newlyweds, the women retrieved tablecloths, sheets, and blankets from their luggage and strung up a makeshift cloth cubicle for Parantzem and Arsen to have some measure of marital privacy.  On that voyage, their first son, Vasken, was conceived, and nine months later was born on September 15, 1917.

When they finally arrived at New York City, Parantzem and Arsen began another long trek by train to reach Granite City, Illinois.  First, they took a train from New York City to visit Haroian relatives who had settled in Watervliet, New York.  Before coming to Granite City, Arsen had contemplated buying a farm and settling in Watervliet, but news of work in Granite City drew him there.   After leaving Watervliet, Parantzem and Arsen traveled by train to Chicago, and from there to Granite City, which was an active railroad terminal, with nine of the seventeen major trunks leading to St. Louis passing through Granite City, and numerous tracks serving the many industrial factories along both sides of the railroad tracks in town.  

Granite City was a relatively new town, officially incorporated in 1896, and built around the steel and graniteware industries established there by the Niedringhaus brothers.  Flamboyant advertisements trumpeting the need for thousands of workers at factories, such as Granite City Steel, American Steel, Commonwealth Steel, the National Enameling and Stamping Company producing graniteware, and other factories which developed on both sides of the railroad tracks initially attracted immigrants from Germany, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.  Soon after, ethnic Hungarians, Bulgarians, Poles, Armenians, Macedonians, Croatians, Slovenians, and Italians also flocked to Granite City for the jobs available there.   Later, many immigrants from Mexico also were enticed to Granite City by the employment opportunities.

According to “National Enameling & Stamping Company:  A Brief History” provided by the Six Mile Regional Library, there was a congenial working relationship between the Niedringhaus brothers and the unions which developed in the Granite City industries, leading to progressive practices which benefitted the workers.   In the steel industry, workers and management agreed to an eight-hour workday in order to establish additional shifts for more people to have jobs.   At Commonwealth Steel, the factory provided a cafeteria with inexpensive meals and nursing care for injured workers.  In what would become the Lincoln Place neighborhood, management at Commonwealth Steel even provided the money and materials, and the immigrant residents of the neighborhood provided the labor to build a community center, offering the immigrants English language classes, hygiene advice, nutrition lessons, and naturalization classes for the adults, and for the children various sports, scout troops, sewing instruction, woodworking education, and dramatic productions put on by the children.   The Niedringhaus brothers also built for the city a municipal sewer system, a levee, a water system, and a gas plant, and donated land for a hospital, a Y. M. C. A., schools, and churches, as well as civic buildings, which all contributed to the development of the town and better living conditions for residents.   Unlike many other industrial towns in the late 1800s and early 1900s which became company towns dominated by a single company and with industrial workers impoverished, beholden to the company store and living in company-owned shacks, Granite City developed in a different way.  The Niedringhaus brothers sold the land not needed for their industries and built inexpensive, affordable brick houses and frame houses, and made them available for sale to their workers in what would become the neighborhoods of downtown Granite City east of the railroad tracks and the Lincoln Place neighborhood west of the railroad tracks.  With their employment in the Granite City factories backing them, workers were able to become homeowners, obtaining their own loans from the local banks, such as Granite City Trust and Savings, which was owned by an immigrant.  

Upon arriving at the quaint train station alongside the tracks in Granite City, Parantzem and Arsen headed west.  They walked down into the little hollow known at the time as “Hungary Hollow,” for the many Hungarian immigrants who had first settled there “over the tracks.” The immigrant neighborhood, which would later be renamed Lincoln Place, was comprised of four streets from north to south by seven streets east to west, all of the latter named after trees.   The newlyweds rented a small house, and as their little family grew, eventually rented another at the corner of Maple Street and Pacific Avenue (later renamed Niedringhaus Avenue).  After the arrival of their third and fourth babies, twins born in 1922, Arsen and his brother Nishan together bought a large brick house across the street from the Lincoln Place Community Center.  There Arsen and Parantzem established a home with their four children, soon after adding a fifth child to their growing family, along with Arsen’s brother Nishan, his wife and their four children, and an unmarried Haroian cousin.  The men all worked at the Commonwealth Steel factory.  Along with the house, the lot next to it also had been purchased, and the men turned that into a small urban farm, planting vegetables and raising chickens to feed the extended family.  Parantzem and her sister-in-law Khassig, also a trained seamstress, sewed and mended clothing for the children and the adults in the household, and they made curtains for the many windows in the big house. 

Using empty sacks from hundred-pound bags of flour and sugar they purchased during the Depression and stored in the walk-in-attic of the house, Parantzem sewed creative costumes for the children at Halloween time.  These costumes were used by her children, and then passed down and used for decades more by her grandchildren.   When all her daily chores were done, late into the night, she would sew cotton pillowcases and handkerchiefs, decorated with hand-sewn cross-stitching and elaborate lacy crocheted edging.  These were all meant for daily use, with some of the more exquisitely embellished ones being given away as gifts to relatives and friends.   Socks were darned and colorful afghans were knitted.   Parantzem became known in the neighborhood for the beautiful cotton quilts she sewed on her pedal-driven Singer sewing machine and for the hand-made warm woolen quilts which she fashioned by hand-carding the wool and hand-tying each stitch of the overlying cloth.  Because of the extensive handwork involved in making the quilts, they were treasured by those who received them as wedding gifts or upon arrival of a new baby.   In order to earn a little bit of income, Parantzem also took in washing, ironing, mending, and alterations from bachelors in the neighborhood.  The sewing skills she learned as a young woman growing up in Armenia and her work at her sister’s boarding house in her early years carried her through a lifetime of work as a wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.   While Parantzem was not famous, she did lead a remarkable life.  Her bravery in immigrating to America and establishing a family whose offspring included business leaders, craftsmen, teachers, scientists, artists, world travelers, military officers, historians, and environmentalists could be the story of immigrants to this nation from any period of time.   Like Parantzem, they are the fabric from which the history of America is woven.  She was an ordinary person whose courage, hard work, resilience, and persistence created a rewarding life and left a lasting legacy through her many descendants.  

Sources:

75th Year Celebration of the City of Granite City, Illinois, Granite City, IL, 1971.

DeChenne, David L.  Labor and Immigration in a Southern Illinois Mill Town, 1890-1937.  Ph. D. Dissertation, Illinois State University, 1989.

Engelke, Georgia et al.  Granite City A Pictorial History.  St. Louis, Missouri: G. Bradley Publishing, Inc., 1995.

Family history as told to the author Norma Asadorian by her mother Varsenig “Vee” Haroian Throne and her grandmother Parantzem Amiryan Haroian.

Six Mile Regional Library. “Six Miles of Local History” website, “National Enameling & Stamping Company A Brief History,” history.smrld.org/, accessed March 22, 2021.

Author Bio: Norma Asadorian is the founder and President of the Lincoln Place Heritage Association, a not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to preserve the history and cultural heritage of the immigrants who settled in the historic Lincoln Place neighborhood in Granite City, Illinois.   With degrees in history and a career in teaching a variety of secondary school social studies courses, she was inspired to relate “A Seamstress from Yerevan” by the history of her Armenian grandparents who immigrated to America in the early 1900s.  Their story in Lincoln Place is the story of the American dream, and reflects similar stories of the history and rich cultures of other immigrants who left their homelands, and through their hard work and determination made it possible for their descendants to have access to unlimited opportunity in this nation.