- "Chronicles" is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

(beaming music) - This is WQLN.

(touching piano music) - Grandfather had a tremendous desire to do philanthropy in a quiet way.

- His response was "I will absolutely not sell this property to you."

- But again, devastating for Mr. Behrend.

- I always come back to the fact that this was a gift, and without the generosity of Mary Behrend, we wouldn't exist.

(touching piano music continues) (touching music) - Deep in the heart of the Prussian pine forests, a family was building the company that would become the so-called best-known name in paper.

Before Penn State, the name Behrend was synonymous with Hammermill.

Their family tree traces the rags-to-riches lineage of Erie's paper royalty.

(touching music continues) (music fades) (wistful music) - Bernhard Behrend resided in the town of K öslin in Pomerania in Northern Germany, a city perhaps the size of Erie.

He was in the paper business and had a paper mill, but beginning in the late 1860s, in their association with soon-to-be Chancellor Bismarck of the German Empire, he was a major investor in the Varziner Papierfabrik.

When it became a joint-stock company after 15 or 20 years, there were other investors, including the kaiser and future chancellors or other political leaders.

It was the largest employer in that part of Germany, so I think Bismarck did well with his investments and with his association with the Behrends.

- The Behrends were set for a successful business opportunity.

George and Moritz Behrend, two of Bernhard's children, were ready to take on the next phase of entrepreneurship.

- Moritz Behrend was an experienced businessman.

He and his father had operated a paper mill in the town of K öslin, so eventually, though Moritz and George had grown up in K öslin, their families moved to Hammerm ühle, this little rural spot which is hard to find on a map and had no stores, no church, a one-room schoolhouse, bleak winters, and not much in the way of human conveniences.

The Behrend brothers took the lead and began establishing mills on the Wipper River, which runs through the Behrend estate.

It's a stream, maybe about the size of French Creek, in a very rural and relatively poor area of Germany.

- Over the next few years, George Behrend would make some poor financial decisions, leaving him bankrupt and Moritz in full control of the Varziner Paper Manufacturing Company mills.

Moritz and Rebecca raised their seven children in Hammerm ühle, alongside the churning machines.

Four of these children would find their way to the US in later years.

We aren't quite there yet though.

While Hammerm ühle was a small village, the Behrends could afford to bring in tutors and send their sons to well-regarded universities while also teaching them the ways of the family business.

(contemplative music) - There were three brothers.

Grandfather was one, Otto was another, and there was a third one by the name of Bernhard Behrend.

Back in a time when you could tell your children what to study in college and they had to do it, Grandfather was told he had to study mechanical and civil engineering.

Otto was told he had to study chemical engineering, and Bernhard Behrend was told he had to study mathematics and eventually physics, but they had not the control over what they were supposed to study.

When they were offered the chance to go to Berlin to study at the Royal Polytechnic in Charlottenburg in E. R.'s case or to study chemistry at another institution, in Otto's case, I'm sure that they were overjoyed.

The Behrend brothers, you know, made a great transition from rural Pomerania to coming to a developing small urban center like Erie and made the most of it.

- New opportunities, though, weren't the only reason (somber music) to leave.

- The Behrend family were originally Jewish.

Moritz Behrend was reportedly advised, given the high levels of antisemitism in Europe and Germany at that time, that it would be advisable for him to convert to Christianity.

His idea was that it would be a good thing if his sons, if the younger generation of his family, had somewhere else to go.

Hammermill was both a very successful business venture, investing in a developing country, the United States of America, and a way out of Central Europe.

(somber music continues) - Ernst Behrend, as the oldest son, was sent to the US first.

He found work at other paper manufacturers and used the travels he made for them to scout for a location for his own family's business.

He was followed by his younger brothers, Otto and Bernhard; his sister, Henriette; and his parents to his choice city, Erie, Pennsylvania.

Bernhard, however, didn't stay long.

- Bernhard was a few years younger than Otto.

He marched to a somewhat different drummer apparently and was also very science-oriented as all of the brothers were.

(brooding music) - You know, the Behrend brother that I find the most interesting actually is Bernhard.

He, like myself, is an electrical engineer.

He had some really interesting connections in his world.

He was connected with both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, and there're some really interesting stories around that.

And he was a great inventor and left a tremendous legacy, and I think, frankly, he was the black sheep of the family.

- Electricity was the new thing in the 1880s when he was a teenager.

Ultimately, he was a professor at MIT.

Electrical engineering, that was his life for the most part, and he was quite noted in his field at that time.

- He was one of the people back in the 1800s and early 1900s who studied something known as the induction motor, and I'll try to put it a little bit in layman's terms, what is an induction motor?

So, an induction motor uses AC power, versus DC, meaning the current alternates as a function of time, and it allowed a lot of advantages that you wouldn't otherwise have, and that's why it's still popular today.

- Another development of Bernhard's was the circle diagram.

- What's important about the circle diagram for an induction motor is that it was created by Bernhard Behrend, and it's still in use by engineers to this day.

That's a pretty strong testament as to the importance of his work, but very briefly, what it does is it allows you to very quickly diagram out the efficiency and power and how well your induction motor is working, and that's why it's such a valuable tool for engineers to use.

He did a lot of the work, though, to make them a reality; a practical reality is what Bernhard did; and worked for industry, developing a number of induction motors that were put into practice.

One of the modern marvels of the world is that, through electrical engineering, through engineering at large, we have brought electrical-power generation to the entire world.

- Bernhard Behrend married Margaret Plummer Chase, a Massachusetts native, in 1926, but the pair would have no children.

In addition to MIT, Bernhard lectured at Stanford and McGill Universities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a member of a variety of professional electrical engineering organizations.

Bernhard's electrical engineering prowess was sought after throughout his life from the likes of the Pacific Electric Company, Carnegie Steel Corporation, United States Steel Corporation, Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing, the Brooklyn Edison Company, and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, to name but a few.

Bernhard's older brother Otto was also committed to science.

- Dr. Otto was a real dedicated workaholic.

As you can imagine, he was known as a little quiet and shy and sort of under the radar, and we know that he was married briefly to a local woman, Marie Miller, who was a local musician and harpist, but the marriage didn't last long, and there was no children.

- Having worked in the foundation field, I know it's very important whether a person of means has heirs or has the freedom to be oriented toward the greater community's needs.

Hammermill would not have been what it became without parents Ernst Richard Behrend, but the scientific acumen that was elaborated in that company owed a great deal to the quieter Behrend, to Otto Behrend, and made Hammermill in Erie special for the community and for the industry because, even though the Behrends were involved in the business of cutting down trees, the Behrends also were interested in planting trees.

The Hammermill campus, even today, the property has a large number of trees that were planted there from different species either by Ernst Behrend or Otto Behrend.

- About 20 years after they founded Hammermill Paper Company, Otto bought this tract of land; it was about 110 acres; that was called Asbury Farm, and he maintained it as not only a working farm.

And they had dairy cows, and you know, they planted orchards and fruit orchards.

But he also reforested some of it, so he really was a great outdoorsman.

So, he used this property, really, as sort of a weekend retreat.

It was not his main residence, and he used it as a little escape from downtown and from the paper mill, come out and walk the trails with his dogs.

And he remained close with his sister, who did live in Erie, so as far as we can tell, his family life was centered on his brothers and sisters.

- Their sister, Henriette, otherwise known as Miss Ettie, grew up at Hammerm ühle and then, like her brothers, emigrated to the States with her husband William Brust, who was a financial official with the company for many years.

And the Brusts lived in the house on the Hammermill property next to the Behrend House, a little closer to East Lake Road than where the pulp and paper mill superintendents lived.

- Of course, one can't forget the oldest brother.

- Ernst Richard Behrend was a renaissance man.

He was a mechanical engineer by training.

He had been an officer in the Prussian Army, but he also was a good businessman, and that presumably is something that he learned from his father.

He didn't go to the Harvard Business School or its equivalent in Germany, but he knew something about how to make money and also how to motivate people.

And so he had it all.

- Grandfather had a tremendous desire to do philanthropy in a quiet way.

That was the way Grandfather did things.

He'd set up scholarships, took care of medical needs, helped repair wrecked cars, things of that nature, and it was indicative of his desire to be able to offer his good production from the Hammermill plant throughout the community.

- While Ernst was building his paper company, something else caught his eye.

At a party one evening in town, he was seated next to a beautiful young woman.

Little did he know, that wasn't luck.

When asked by whom she'd like to sit, Mary chose "the paper man", who seemed the nicest of the attendees.

- Ernst did not meet Mary until the early 1900s, and I think it was in 1907 that they were married.

Mary came from Rhode Island, and she was visiting Erie and met Ernst at a social event.

So then they had their two children, Warren and Harriet.

- Behind me is a portrait of Grandmother; it was done by a very famous painter; that Mother had done, and I think Grandmother's reaction to it was neutral.

She spent a lot of time talking to me, about art in particular, so her interest in collection of items of art, and you can see some of them here in this room, was stupendous.

She can only be described as an eclectic collector.

There was no particular theme.

She saw something, and she liked it.

- Right behind us, we have Mary Behrend's Studio Theater.

She was an artist, and it was very near and dear to her heart.

In fact, you see some of her paintings right here in Glenhill Farmhouse, but her studio serves as a small theater for our students here on campus and is in use till this day.

- The Behrend family, they had the interests of a typical German American middle-class family.

(idyllic music continues) - While passionate about their hobbies, the family also valued learning.

Knowledge was opportunity.

It was growth.

Education became a priority not just for Ernst and Mary to provide for their own children but to the community as well.

- The Behrends created a small school, for their children and the children of some other senior managers, in Mr. Behrend's garage, so I guess the automobiles were on one side and the classroom was on the other side.

The building is still there, behind the former Hammermill administration building.

The Behrend School operated for a number of years until Moritz -Warren Moritz- and Harriet were old enough to go to schools either locally or eventually to preparatory schools out of town.

- As their kids started to grow up and move out to boarding schools, Ernst and Mary started looking for a place to stay outside of the city to enjoy the countryside.

- So they purchased several different plots of land in the 1920s, and they actually had quite grandiose plans to create this very large home here.

They hired a famous architect from Philadelphia, named Brognard Okie.

Then the reality of the Great Depression hit, and they had to change their plans.

And what they did was they took a small farmhouse that was here that still exists in the center of this building.

And then they expanded it quite significantly to create the Glenhill Farmhouse that we are in here today, and that happened in the early 1930s.

- Grandmother loved this place because she was able to do a lot of gardening and bringing exotic trees here.

She went to numerous nurseries to find trees that would grow here and yet enhance the property.

It was an escape from having to live on the grounds of the Hammermill Paper Company in Erie, because it was so dusty they had to clean the house completely two or three times a day.

- Warren Moritz was away at Deerfield Academy, and his parents were beginning to spend the year-end Christmas holidays in the South.

Warren would come home on holidays to see his parents, and on one occasion, he drove South, and while on that trip, he was involved in an auto accident.

Swerved to avoid a school bus that come out in front of him, went in the ditch, and was killed.

- The Behrends memorialized their son with a stone cross, placed first near the sight of his death and later moved to the family mausoleum in Wintergreen Gorge Cemetery.

- Devastating for Mr. Behrend, only a few years later, his younger brother Bernard committed suicide.

And so those two personal losses, combined with the challenges of the Great Depression, was a great weight on him.

It was about that time or a bit before perhaps that Ernst Behrend, you know, began to spend most of his time out here at Glenhill.

He withdrew largely from the day-to-day management of the company and was more in the background of things until the end of his life in 1940.

- In the years after Ernst and Bernhard's death, Otto started planning for the future.

- In the early '50s, Millcreek Township School District approached him about potentially selling some acreage to them so that they could build a new school, and his response was "I will absolutely not sell this property to you.

I will give you the property."

He donated; it was about 10 acres; to Millcreek Township School District while he was still alive, down to the point where he said, "This is not costing the district a dime, nothing in real estate taxes or transfer taxes."

He covered every penny of it so they could build Asbury Elementary.

The words that were actually used in Otto's will that says he wanted this property to be used as a haven for education and recreation.

After that transaction, the board chair, at the time, of the Millcreek Township School District was a man by the name of William Conner, and he started working with Otto and having discussions with Otto about what would happen to the rest of his property upon his death.

Otto ended up amending his will that the farm would be given to Millcreek Township School District, and from 1957, Asbury Woods remained owned by the Millcreek Township School District, but in 2016, the nonprofit Asbury Woods Partnership was able to raise money and purchase the entire property and all the buildings from Millcreek Township School District.

So since 2016, Asbury Woods has been a independent nonprofit.

One of our largest donors in Asbury Woods history since Dr. Otto Behrend is actually the son of William Conner, Andy Conner, so it's officially known as the Andrew J. Conner Nature Center in his honor.

Andy told me, "You know, being able to make this cash donation to Asbury Woods, I feel like it's one of the luckiest days of my life."

He said, "Because I remember my father coming home and talking about this amendment to his will that Dr. Behrend had made," and at this time, he remembers his dad saying that the crown jewel of Erie County is now preserved and people'd be able to use this property for generations to come thanks to Otto's generosity.

You know, that came full circle and inspired Andy Conner's generosity, so I just think it's a really wonderful story that comes full circle and the intertwining of these two families and what they've done to preserve this space for the community.

- Ernst and Mary's country home also had an educational legacy.

- The founding of Penn State Behrend is a great story.

We were started in 1948, but Penn State's history in Erie, Pennsylvania, go back to the 1920s when they had a number of different locations.

In the 1940s, they were looking to create a permanent campus here in Erie, and they approached Mary Behrend in 1948 and asked her if they could purchase the property.

She thought about it for only a few days.

And then she came back, and she talked to her daughter, Harriet, and they decided, no, they wouldn't take money for the property but, instead, they would donate it to the university in honor of her husband, Ernst, who was very closely connected to the Erie community and to higher education.

There are a few things that come to mind when you think about the Behrend family.

One is certainly innovation, technology, trying to push the boundaries.

Think that very much lives in what's going on at Penn State Behrend, what has been in our DNA.

But then the other part of the story is that the Behrend family was known for their generosity and care for the community and involvement for the community, and that defines who this institution is today.

So I always come back to the fact that this was a gift, and without the generosity of Mary Behrend, we wouldn't exist, and that's really important to us, to honor that.

(tender music continues) ♪ Ooh, ah, oh - It's evident here in the growth of Penn State Behrend, the fact that every faculty member and many of the students I speak to talk about the superior attraction of the property and the quality of the education, so I think that that's indicative of what has been produced here through the generosity of the Hammermill Paper Company and the gift of this property.

(tender music continues) - Yeah, there's another story that I think of that is really relevant.

The oldest tradition that we have here on campus started in 1948, and we've held it every single year since then, and that is the Hanging of the Greens.

- In memory of Warren, during the Christmas season, Mary took to decorating the family mausoleum.

- Mary loved decorating for Christmas, and she always made these Christmas wreaths, and for many years, we would hang a wreath that was made by Mary herself.

We still do this every year.

We meet with our students in the Behrend family mausoleum, and we sing Christmas songs, and we hang a wreath in honor of the Behrend family.

♪ Come adore on bended ♪ Come adore on bended - Deriving from a small village, what was then Northern Germany, in kinda the classic American fashion, there was this sense of loyalty and continuity to something bigger than yourself that was probably unusual (huffs) for an industry where the work is characterized by being hot, dirty, and dangerous.

And having worked summers in the mill, I can testify to that personally.

(glowing music continues) Business was more than making money, and that was an important legacy that long outlived the Behrends.

- The full story of Grandfather's philanthropy is not fully known, because he wanted it very quietly.

He did not want to be known as a person that did large grants to families, institutions, and other organizations.

Grandmother had a tremendous, long list of donations she would make to charities, and I think that followed in our lives, because we are very proud of the fact that we continue to help nonprofits.

- You know, I grew up knowing the Behrend name.

I was just miles away from the campus, and you know, I really didn't know the story of Otto Behrend, the brother who had also an amazing and beautiful farm on the west side of Erie.

And look at the impact that that family has had across Erie County and especially from an educational standpoint for our youth in Erie County.

- I think it really is an important story about thinking about the future and really trying to build that future and understanding that, well, at times, things may seem like we're in a difficult time, whatever that may be, but there really is a brighter future out there if we keep striving for it.

(glowing music continues) - "Chronicles" is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

(beaming music) - We question and learn.

(music fades)