Again the Swabians swore last Saturday evening when rain started to come down heavily. Yesterday morning bright and early the first Cannstadter public festival in Chicago began. The festival is still a new thing here, but has already in the old fatherland a string of sixty ancestors, and is also as "blueblooded" as could be desired. Its creator was King William who in 1818, for the first time, introduced in Cannstadt on the Neckar (river) an agricultural exhibition combined with a public festival.

Here in America, Cannstadter public festivals existed only in New York and Philadelphia. Chicago steps in today as the third city.

Yesterday morning the procession assembled at the Haymarket Square and went from there to Ogden's Grove. About five thousand people were assembled.

At four o'clock Mr. Demmler introduced Mr. William Rapp, who said, - "Rugged are you Swabians, awkward, stubborn, stiff-necked, but there does not exist a warmer hearted people, and not a more beautiful and lovelier land than yours." Such expressions I have heard quite often from North Germans, who, as American citizens have visited and seen the Swabian people.

Let us look back gratefully to our old Swabian ancestors. Natives of the Palatinate and the Swabians were the first Germans who jointly in great numbers migrated to America and maintained their German nationality. They did this expecially in the first decades of the last century, to evade the oppression of their native princes and the misery caused by the French conquering Army. They originated the Palatinate and Swabian settlements in New York and in Pennsylvania, and their descendants have remained German until this very day.

Among these Palatinate and Swabian immigrants at the beginning of the last century none were greater or more powerful than the Swabian, Johann Konrad 3Weiser, formerly the Mayor of Grossaspach, Wurtemberg (Germany). Bravely he fought with his immigrant German fellowmen against the English greed for land. He led them stubbornly from the Hudson to the Schoharic and Mohawk, where Palatinate and Swabian diligence created a great garden out of the wilderness. Fearing neither prison nor violence, Weiser travelled from New York to London to represent the rights of his German-American fellowmen before the King. The energy of his last years he devoted to Germanism in Pennsylvania, where he died, well advanced in years and highly honored in the German Berks district.

Worthy of his father was Weiser's son, Konrad, born in Swabia. He was not as strong a man as his father, but finer and well-groomed, being the most profound and honest judge of Indiana....

The true German blood of these descendants of South German immigrants flowed during the American War for Independence through the Palatinate hero, Herckheimer near Oriskany, and in many other battles.....