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A Postcard to Zang's Hotel, Creede

A German picture postcard addressed to Mrs. Lizzie Zang at Zang's Hotel in Creede, sent from the village of Hostenbach in the Saar region of Germany. It is not addressed to anyone in the family, yet it was kept, and it turned up among the family papers of Shannon's mother. Family account holds that Anna Maud Woodruff ("Grandma Lane") worked at Zang's Hotel, the building now known as the Creede Hotel, and that Caroline, later the wife of Anna Maud's son John Franklin "Frank" Davis, worked there when she met him. Neither account is yet documented. The card may be the first physical thread tying the family to the hotel.

Address side of a German postcard. At left, four lines of faded pencil handwriting in old German script run sideways. At right, the address reads An Mrs. Lizzie Zang, Zangs Hotel, Creede Box 466, Colorado, Nord Amerika. A 10-pfennig Deutsches Reich Germania stamp at upper right is cancelled by a circular postmark whose date is largely obscured. The upper right corner of the card is torn away. — Address side, postmarked (probably) Hostenbach, Saar, date obscured; addressed to Mrs. Lizzie Zang, Zang's Hotel, Creede, Colorado. Found among the family papers of Shannon's mother.

Transcript

Postmark: A circular German cancel, mostly covering the stamp. The town name is only partly legible, but the visible letters are consistent with HOSTENBACH, the village pictured on the front. The date line is obscured; the final digits may read "14," but that reading is not secure. "3–4 N." below it is the collection hour (3 to 4 in the afternoon, Nachmittag).

Stamp: 10 pfennig, Germania design, inscribed DEUTSCHES REICH.

Addressed to:
An
Mrs. Lizzie Zang
Zangs Hotel
Creede Box 466
Colorado
Nord Amerika

Message (written sideways in pencil, in old German script; a working reading, since the pencil is faded and several letters are uncertain):

Herzliche Grüße aus unserem neuen Heim senden Dir Michel nebst Frau und Kinder.

Translation:

Warm greetings from our new home, from Michel, with wife and children.

Printed on the address side: "175516 S. Reinartz, Völklingen," the publisher's number and name. Völklingen is a few miles from Hostenbach.

Black-and-white photograph postcard of a large, newly built two-and-a-half-story inn with a steep tiled roof, dormers, and arched ground-floor windows. Lettering across the facade reads Gasthaus Michel Beck Gasthaus. A man and a small child stand by the arched front door. The printed heading reads Gruß aus Hostenbach (Saar), Gasthaus Mich. Beck. Dark water stains mark the upper left of the image. — Front: "[G]ruß aus Hostenbach (Saar). Gasthaus Mich. Beck." (Greetings from Hostenbach, Saar. Michel Beck's inn.)

Reading the Card

"Zang," not "Fang." The first letter of both "Zang" and "Zangs" looks like an F or a J to an American eye. That is how a German writer of this period formed a capital Z: a looped stroke that drops below the line. The capital F in "Frau" on the message side has a different shape, so it is not an F. The spelling also matches the hotel's documented name.

Who wrote it. The front shows a new building with "Gasthaus Michel Beck" painted across it, and the message is signed "Michel," sending greetings from "our new home" with his wife and children. The natural reading is that the innkeeper Michel Beck mailed a card of his own new inn. He addressed Mrs. Zang as "Dir," the familiar form of "you," which Germans reserved for family and close friends. This was not a business contact. A Gasthaus Beck still operates in Hostenbach, now part of the municipality of Wadgassen in the Saarland; whether it is the same family and building has not been checked.

When it was sent. The date is hidden under the stamp, so the card has to be dated from other evidence. The Saar region was separated from Germany in 1920 and soon issued stamps of its own, so a "Deutsches Reich" stamp mailed from Hostenbach points to a date before about 1920. The card calls her "Mrs. Lizzie Zang" at Zang's Hotel, and the hotel's proprietor, John Zang, died in June 1911 (see below). If the card reached her as his widow, running the hotel herself, it likely dates between 1911 and about 1920. That is an inference, not a reading of the postmark.

Lizzie Zang and Zang's Hotel

Zang's Hotel stood on Creede's Main Street during the silver boom of the early 1890s and survives today as the Creede Hotel. Published histories disagree about who built it: one credits Philip Zang of Denver's Zang Brewing Company, and a local history post names "Denverite John Zang." The two may be related, with one investing and the other operating the hotel, but that has not been established.

A Find a Grave memorial for John Zang (1855–1911), buried in Riverside Cemetery, Denver, identifies him as the proprietor of the Zang Hotel in Creede and names his wife as Elizabeth Orthen (1859–1931). "Lizzie" is the usual nickname for Elizabeth, which makes her almost certainly the Mrs. Lizzie Zang of this card. According to the newspaper accounts summarized on the memorial (Rocky Mountain News, 12–13 June 1911), John Zang was shot and killed in Creede on 11 June 1911 by a Mrs. Michael Le Fevre, who said he had forced his way into her home and assaulted her; a coroner's jury ruled that she acted in self-defense. Find a Grave is a compiled source, and these details should be confirmed against the original 1911 newspapers.

Why the Family Kept It

Two possibilities are worth weighing. Neither is proven.

Grandma Lane's work at the hotel. Family account holds that Anna Maud worked at Zang's Hotel. Her own grandson John Jackson wrote that after her divorce she "ran the Walsh Hotel as a boarding house" (see "Mom Jo and Grandma Lane"), but he does not mention Zang's. Anna Maud came to Creede between 1915 and 1918 (the sources disagree), well within Lizzie Zang's lifetime, so the timing works. A card like this could have come home with an employee, been handed on as a keepsake or stamp, or been left behind in hotel papers that passed through family hands.

The Orthen name. Lizzie Zang was born an Orthen. This site already records a later Creede Orthen: Sheriff Bill (William) Orthen of Mineral County, under whom John Jackson's father, William Thomas "Billy" Jackson, served as undersheriff for several years (see the Name Index). If Lizzie and the sheriff were related, the card could have reached the family through the Jackson side as well. So far that possibility rests only on a shared surname in a small town.

Open Questions

Did Anna Maud Woodruff work at Zang's Hotel, and when? Creede Candle items, the 1920 census, or a Creede directory could place her there.
Did Caroline Davis work at Zang's Hotel before her marriage to Frank Davis? Polly Davis's letter to Terry and Bev, which recounts her parents' marriage, may say where they met.
Can the June 1911 newspaper accounts of John Zang's death be located directly (Creede Candle; Rocky Mountain News) to confirm the Find a Grave summary and Lizzie's identity as his widow?
Who ran Zang's Hotel after 1911, and when did it become the Creede Hotel?
What was Lizzie Zang's connection to Michel Beck of Hostenbach? Was she, or the Orthen family, from the Saar?
Was Elizabeth Orthen Zang related to Sheriff William Orthen of Mineral County?
Can the postmark date be read from the original card under raking light or magnification?

Sources for the hotel's history: Find a Grave memorial 32400230, John Zang (1855–1911); SAH Archipedia, "Creede Hotel"; The Creede Hotel, "History of Creede"; Denver Public Library Digital Collections, "Zang's Hotel as it looked after it was first erected."