Rosa Cluss nee Schmidt
Family Stories
In 1852, Cluss first referred in his letters to a spirited, beautiful sixteen-year-old girl from Maryland. Cluss met Rosa Schmidt and her parents at a political meeting in Baltimore. Jacob Schmidt, a teacher at Baltimore's free-thinking Zion Church school, and his wife Elisabetha, had immigrated from the Bavarian Palatinate (today part of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate) in the 1830s. While they held liberal views about religion and government, they disagreed with communist ideology. Thus Adolf and Rosa did not get off to a good start. Cluss joked, "The young girl has been rude to me wherever she could, and the old man wants me beaten up in case I enter their house. Of course, I used this for bad jokes, which intensified their anger." As his attachment to communism waned in the following years, a friendship with Rosa deepened. In 1859, Adolf Cluss married Rosa Schmidt at Baltimore's Zion Lutheran Church. The couple then embarked on a wedding trip to Europe. They lived for the next thirty-five years in a modest row house on Second Street in northwest Washington, where they raised seven children.
The Cluss family life was marked by tragedies. In 1876, their three-year-old son Robert passed away. In 1886, their son, Adolph, age twenty-three, a clerk working for Cluss, died of typhoid fever. Between 1893 and 1894 two other sons and his wife died. Seventeen-year-old Richard was a victim of tuberculosis in April 1893 and a year later, Cluss's wife, Rosa, succumbed to a lengthy respiratory illness. Six months later, typhoid fever claimed twenty-nine-year-old son, Carl, a pharmacist. Following those tragedies, Cluss and two daughters, Flora and Anita, moved to the home of his oldest daughter and her husband, Lillian and William Daw, above Daw's pharmacy at Twenty-third and H streets, NW. Cluss died two weeks after his 80th birthday in 1905, having outlived four sons, his wife, and all but one of his seven brothers and sisters.
The Descendants of Adolf Cluss (external link)
