Theodore
Interview with
Theodore M.
Years
Q .. Ted, let's begin by talking about your family and your upbringing, the schools
you went to as a boy. Tell me about your parents, for one thing. What did your
father do, where did your parents come from?
A Well, I can do you one better than that. My grandfather was born in
Hesse-Darmstadt in Germany in 1841. His grandfather had been a Hessian
soldier in the service of King George III in the Revolutionary War. We don't
know anything about his service, but I have been told that he came back to
Germany full of stories about what a wonderful place America was, that it was
a great place to live.
His grandson, my grandfather, Henry J. Schad-they pronounced it in
Germany, although it is spelled S-c-h-a-d-was sent over, or was allowed to
come over, to the United States when he was a teenager. His mother did not
want him to be conscripted into the Hessian Army because this was before
and the Hessians were still putting out mercenaries anywhere in the
world that would pay for them. So he came over as a teenager to avoid being
conscripted in the Hessian Army.
That was in the
and before he got the chance to marry or do anything,
he was drafted into the Union Army in what we, of course, call the Civil War
and the Southerners would call the War of Northern Aggression. He lived in
Baltimore. Baltimore really had Southern leanings and the first little skirmish,
outside of Fort Sumter, was when the Massachusetts militia marched from one
station to another in Baltimore and they were stoned by the populace.
This manuscript is an edited version of an oral history interview conducted by Dr. Martin A. Reuss
in Arlington, Virginia, on February 27 and 28, 1989. The original tapes and unedited transcript are in
the Research Collections, Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,
Virginia.
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