The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood

In the 1840s and 1850s, thousands of German families left Europe for a new life in America. Hundreds of these immigrants eventually settled in the Dubois County community of Jasper, Indiana, the county seat. Surrounding the town were dense hardwood forests that provided the raw materials for craftsmen to begin the furniture-making firms for which the area became well known. Two of the German families that put down roots in the Jasper area, the Schmitts and the Krapfs, produced a son who today remembers those days of close ties to family and the land. The Ripest Moments is a prose memoir by noted Indiana poet and essayist Norbert Krapf of his childhood and growing up in Jasper.