The Immigrant Years of the Smeds Family

Most of the photographs on this website are portrait-type images of the individuals who make up the family. This page is dedicated to a different sort of picture. Here you will get to see what sort of venues and workplaces members of the Smeds clan were immersed in during the period when the six children of Herman Smeds were sequentially departing Finland, and the ten or so years afterward as they struggled to become established as Americans. At the moment there are only three pictures here. Consider these to be placeholders. Eventually this page will consist of a gallery of at least twenty images. When completed, the gallery will provide glimpses of three milieus that played essential roles in the history of the family. These three places are 1) San Francisco California, where Jack Smeds, the pioneer of the six children, worked as a silversmith at Shreve and Company, 2) the redwood timber country near Eureka, CA, where five of the six children initially settled, and 3) the farms north of Reedley, CA where William Smeds, along with his father Herman, began living in 1907, and where William, Jack, and their sister Amanda Strom would permanently settle by 1915.

Having trained with a goldsmith in Jakobstad, Finland as a teenager, Jack Smeds was able to parlay his knowlege of the trade into a job at Shreve and Company Jewellers. Shreve and Company was a large, well-established firm. It had been founded during the Gold Rush and it still exists today in its building at Union Square in downtown San Francisco. It is not entirely clear what year Jack came to work there, but it was no later than 1904. During some of his tenure his main job was making silverware, but he had the chance to produce a wide variety of items. A grandson still owns a pendant he made. Another item preserved over the years was a spoon that was nearly the only intact (if somewhat charred) possession pulled from the wreckage of the family home after the 1906 earthquake and Great San Francisco Fire destroyed the dwelling. Shown here is a room full of Shreve and Company employees in 1904. Jack is on the right, fourth person up from the bottom of the image.

A major employer of immigrant labor in northern California at the time of their arrival of the Smeds clan was the timber industry of the redwood forests of Humboldt County. Jack Smeds came to the Eureka and/or Eel River area at about age twenty. It was a number of years before his trade skills allowed him to escape to a better-paying situation as a San Francisco jeweller. Other men of the family also worked the redwoods, including William Smeds, Axel Smeds, Fred Malm (husband of Augusta Smeds), and especially Charles Strom, husband of Amanda Smeds. The photo above may have originated with Charlie and been in his possession for many years. The photo was given by his daughter Karin Strom to a younger cousin in the 1960s, because she felt that the younger cousin, who was then working for the U.S. Forest Service, might be the individual who might best appreciate owning it. However, it is not certain that Karin obtained the photo from her father -- it may have come from a collection of historical photographs having nothing specific to do with the Smeds family. That mystery aside, the scene shows the sort of work environment that would have been familiar to Jack, William, Axel, Fred, and Charlie. The mechanical device you see was known as a “Steam Donkey,” an engine used to pull logs out of the forest. It is known that the first job Jack Smeds had after he arrived in California was hauling water to supply Steam Donkies such as this. This may, in fact, be the very Steam Donkey he was responsible for refilling.

Here are Jack and Annie Smeds in the vineyard of their first farm. Jack purchased this property north of Reedley, Fresno County, CA some time between 1904 and 1907, but he and his wife and kids did not reside upon it until 1915. This photograph therefore probably captures a moment in the late 1910s or early 1920s. However, the photo is undated, and could represent a visit made pre-1915 so that they could be personally involved in harvesting the crop. You see them having interrupted the process of laying ripe grapes on raisin trays to take a coffee break. On the left is Annie. On the right (reclining) is Jack. In the center is a neighbor and his young son. If you look closely in the center below the neighbor’s elbow, you may see the grapes on the trays filled earlier that morning. Having coffee out in the field, as opposed to going back to the house, was a tradition in the family that was copied by the next generation of Smedses as they farmed this and nearby acreage, particularly on frigid mornings during the winter pruning season.