Excerpt from Enduring Courage by John F. Ross, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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One late night in 1881, an attractive young woman with a shock of tied-back red hair and dark circles under her blue eyes stepped off a train at Columbus’s Union Station. The shadowy figures of workmen in the yard made her nervous, so she hurried into the grand brick and stone terminal, which sprouted two tall mansard-roofed towers along with arched portals and windows with elaborately carved stone lintels. Still unsteady from her recent Atlantic crossing, she walked into the immense waiting room. Certainly she had visualized this moment, her imagination providing far more sustenance across the Atlantic than the small wheel of cheese she had hidden in the folds of her long dress. The only powerful relic of her former life was a black leather-bound family Bible.

That she was alone and spoke no English did not slow her determined stride across the platform to find the stationmaster. He did not understand the words that tumbled out of her mouth, which only grew more insistent under his blank stare. Her eyes welled up. She pulled out a letter and held it out to him. Recognizing that it was written in German, he sent an employee running off into the dark. Her brother’s letter made it plain that she must leave the stubborn, infertile mountain slopes of the Swiss canton of Basel-Landschaft. He offered brief words of encouragement, but the enclosed money for her passage—earned so quickly in America!—spoke more than anything else to this new land’s possibilities.

A German-speaking man, who she learned was the sheriff, came to the station and took her to the farm where her brother worked. When they finally met, she cried so hard that they thought she wanted to go home. No, she explained, no. So she set to farm chores, eventually finding her way to a factory job.

The United States was indeed a world apart from the farmhouse into which two Swiss families had been crammed. The sixth of ten children born to a poor ribbon maker, Lizzie had inherited a fiery disposition that often brought her trouble. As one of the youngest girls, she had to wind thread onto the little bobbins that her older sisters used on the loom. Bored to distraction, she tied knots in the thread. Her angry father shut her for hours in a cramped storage closet.

When her best friend—a similarly redheaded sprite named Louisa—died at age thirteen, Louisa’s father came to ask Elizabeth’s whether she might come to live with them; it was not uncommon to farm a daughter out. Eavesdropping from behind a door, she heard her father say, “She is no good around here, she may go.”

Lizzie could not—or pretended not to—understand her mother’s tears nor her father’s stern looks when he delivered the news. “I only saw adventure ahead,” she later remembered, with the positive spin on past events that decades later would shape her son’s own recollections. She had spent four years in her new home when her brother’s letter arrived.

Lizzie joined hundreds of thousands of Germanic immigrants who had come to the United States in the wake of several mid-nineteenth-century revolutions. Railroad lines and canals provided cheap transport for those seeking a new start in the American heartland. Most of the newest and poorest German-speaking immigrants to Columbus settled in the German Village, which arose south of a deep, spring-fed ravine that cut the neighborhood off from the more established parts of town. Cheap land and access to water had already attracted the noxious tanneries, which supplied leather products to the booming buggy-making industry. The most successful immigrants raised one-and-a-half-story brick houses, like those in Europe, on solid limestone foundations with gables facing the street, their faces decorated with stone lintels and tall windows. The poorer arrivals crowded into tenements that sprouted like weeds between hulking factories that crowded the Scioto’s filthy banks. By 1890, Columbus boasted, in iron processing alone, thirteen foundries, two ironworks, a steel-rail mill, a rolling mill, and twelve galvanized-iron works.

Excerpted from Enduring Courage by John F Ross. Copyright © 2014 by John F Ross. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.