Annie Aurelia Berger
Annie Aurelia Berger 1909-1999
Annie Schwartz was born January 31, 1909, the daughter of Joseph and Sophie (Loika) Schwartz. Annie attended Moravia High School, In the days when Albert and Annie were courting, Albert and George Hrnčiř (the boyfriend of Annie’s sister Louise) were well aware of the Saturday baking done for the Schwartz Sunday feast of kolaches and other desserts and together would come to the home to court the young girls.
First home: St. John, Texas
Albert and Annie married in 1928, when he was 23 and she was 19. For eight years, they lived in their first home, a small farm they rented from Albert’s dad near St. John, using a horse and plow to grow cotton and corn. Virgin Ann and Eugene were born while they lived there.
Second home
Days before Virgin Ann’s sixth birthday in October 1936, the family moved 300 miles away to West Texas, following the migration of six of Annie’s siblings, who began arriving in 1925.
For two years, the young Berger family lived in the house of Annie’s Uncle Dick Loika, three miles west of Wall. This house was torn down to make more farmland.
The Joseph Schwartz house on Schwartz Road
In 1938 they moved two miles west to a house belonging to Annie’s father, Joseph Schwartz. Joseph had purchased the land in the Fairview area near Wall in September 1925, and it had been the home of Annie’s brother Otto and his wife Martha Schwartz since December 1926. Otto and Martha moved just west to their new farm and a Sears kit house.
Albert and Annie lived on that farm for eight years before buying it in 1946. Albert cultivated cotton and maize crops, as well as pecan trees. Animals on the farm included horses, cows, hogs, turkeys, guineas, pheasants, chukars, peacocks, rabbits, chickens, ring-necked doves, dogs and cats.
The Berger homeplace on Schwartz Road
In 1946. In 1960, they built a modern one-story cream-colored brick stone house to replace the original wood clapboard house and lived in it through their retirement years. By 1956, when the ground was too dry to grow abundant crops, the family went into the egg business, with 2,000 laying hens. Albert was meticulous about his lawn. His biggest pleasure was “to keep everything in tip-top shape. He is known for having the best kept place in Tom Green County. Annie tended her summer flowers that included zinnias on the west side of the long driveway, every shade of red, as well as a large vegetable garden with squash, beans, okra and tomatoes and a fig tree on the north side of a chicken house. A stroke in 1975 made it necessary for 70-year-old Albert to retire from farming. He had a second stroke in 1988. Albert died March 8, 1993, at the age of 87. Annie, who had always enjoyed hard and steady work as a farm housewife, lived on the farm until 1996, when she moved to a nursing home in San Angelo. Annie died on April 24, 1999, at the age of 90. At that time, her grandson Carl Block had acquired the farm that he now calls his home. Carl has built a new brick home on the exact location of that bungalow house.
