Johannes Nicolaus Jessen, called Nick, was the son of Andreas (Andrew) Jessen (1860-1935) and Maria Jurgensen (1863-1955). He was born in Schleswig-Holstein, along with his brother, Jurgen (George) Ausmus Jessen (1885-1962). The family emigrated from Germany in 1895, farming near Paullina, west of Calumet in O’Brien County. A third son, Friederich Wilhelm, was born in 1902, but he died in infancy.
Like many other families of Calumet German Band members, the Jessens would have spoken Plattdeutsch (Low German) as their native language, as discussed in “The Cultural Milieu” section, and they were deeply involved in the life of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church in Calumet.
Nick Jessen worked on the family farm as a young man and on 13 February 1912 married Rosa Margaretha Thoms (1891-1984) in Cherokee (Cherokee County). Rosa had been born in Iowa, but her parents (Fritz Johann Christ Thoms, 1859-1949; Elise Maria Christine Friedrichsen, 1856-1936) also had emigrated from Schleswig-Holstein.
Sadly, in the early years of Nick and Rosa’s marriage, they had a baby girl who died within just a few days of birth. The couple had no surviving children.
After a brief period of farming on his own, near the towns of Sutherland, Larrabee (in Cherokee County), and Calumet, Nick Jessen spent the remainder of his adult life as the proprietor of beer and billiards halls, in Sutherland, then Sioux Rapids (Buena Vista County), and then back in Calumet. In the midst of operating successive pool halls in several towns, Jessen also owned and operated various retail establishments. A 20 December 1917 advertisement in The Sutherland Courier promotes “Holiday Cigars” from the Jessen store in Sutherland.
And in 1918 he purchased a confectionery store in Paullina. Jessen’s pool hall in Calumet, an operation of much longer duration, opened for business in 1922.
The ownership of beer and billiards parlors seemed to carry with it the implicit motivation to expand beyond beer sales into other, related, perhaps not altogether legal entertainment. A news item from The Sutherland Courier, on 2 May 1935, reads as follows:
Sheriff Edw Leemkull was ordered by the court to destroy the following gambling machines which the sheriff seized from John Schneider of Moneta, Hans Wiese of Moneta, Mrs. Edminster of Calumet, Clarence Horstman of Calumet and Nick Jessen of Calumet, to-wit, one push ball machine, one dice machine, one slot machine, one rebound machine, one push ball machine and one duces [sic] wild machine.
Nick Jessen was by all accounts a jovial man who enjoyed sports and was both well known and well loved in the region (perhaps in the manner of saloonkeepers everywhere), but he came to suffer from ill health. Local newspaper items as early as 1923 repeatedly report Jessen as “on the sick list,” then recovering before falling ill again. Yet Nick and Rosa celebrated a festive silver wedding anniversary at the Liberty Township hall (the German Hall) in February 1937. A newspaper item reported that music for the dancing “was furnished by Jessen’s orchestra,” indicating that he had maintained at least some association with music since his youthful membership in the Calumet German Band.
But several related illnesses eventually took their toll, and Jessen died at the early age of 48 of multiple causes (among them pancreatic abscesses, chronic cholecystitis, and chronic bronchial asthma). Because he and Rosa had no surviving children and his brother Jurgen did not marry, there are no descendants in this Jessen family.
Upon Nick’s death, Rosa married Richard Julius Wiese (1893-1974), himself a widower, in November 1941, and they farmed near the town of Holstein (Ida County) before retiring to Paullina. Rosa lived to be 93 years of age.
Nick and Rosa are buried in Liberty Cemetery near Calumet.
Subscribers to Ancestry.com may wish to further explore some family connections of Nick Jessen by accessing an Ancestry profile page (within the context of a “Mugge Family Tree”).
Connection to Other Band Members
Beginning with a marriage two years before this photo, Nick Jessen came to be related by a chain of marriages and sibling connections to band member Henry Jacob Lorenzen (1890-1976).
Nick’s wife Rosa Thoms was a sister of Elizabeth Anna Thoms (1888-1985), who married Johanne Asmus “John” Jurgensen (1887-1958) in January 1910. John Jurgensen’s older brother was Fred Henry Jurgensen (1884-1966), who in 1907 had married Dora Emline Maria Lorenzen (1888-1940), an older sister of Nick’s bandmate Henry Lorenzen.
A schematic, available here, more easily shows this chain of relationships.
In addition, Nick Jessen was a first cousin (by marriage) to bandmate Henry Friedrichsen (1889-1937). Rosa Thoms’s mother, Elise Friedrichsen (1856-1938), was a sister of Wilhelm Friedrichsen (1858-1936), who was Henry Friedrichsen’s father. The parents of Elise and Wilhelm Friedrichsen were Hermann Christian Friedrichsen (1820-1897) and Elise Christiana Jacobsen (b. about 1828). This relationship can be seen on a schematic, available here.
