When I was a kid Mom would always talk about the “Brigham Emkey” place. Or maybe it was “Brigham Empty”. Or “Bring ‘Em Empty”? She said it all as one word, like “BrighamEmpty”, and it was hard to tell. But the BrighamEmkey Place was where Mom lived as a little girl, and she told a lot of stories about it. But I could never figure out the name.

What is she saying?

I knew where it was, though. It was out west of West Point on the highway. A gravel road crossed the highway, and if you went north you got to Uncle Albert’s. If you went south, you went up a steep hill to the BringEmEmpty Place. Or you would have, if it were still there. It was just pasture when I was a kid.

And so I got along, blissfully ignorant of the place’s actual name, for some decades. Until after Mom passed away, in fact. And then we made the discovery.

Mom’s memoirs

As we went through Mom’s papers, we found a notebook full of her handwritten memoirs. She told of her life as a young girl on the Bruegenhempke Place. And we finally knew the name, and how to spell it.

Michelle and I later compiled Mom’s memoirs into a booklet with maps and photos showing the places and people she wrote about. Here’s a map, showing the Bruegenhempke Place.

Source: Standard Atlas of Lee County, Iowa, published in 1916 by Geo. A. Ogle & Co., Publishers & Engravers, of Chicago, Illinois
Area 1 (in turquoise) is the Bruegenhempke place (owned here by Gerhardt, Lizzie’s father). Area 2 is Gerhardt’s home. Area 3 is Isadore Link’s, the father of WJ.

Still, the pronunciation has me a bit baffled. To my limited understanding of German, the word should sound more like “brew-gun-hemp-key”. The thing is, the rules I learned were for High German, but the language Grandma’s parents spoke was Low German, so whatever Mom picked up as a child would have been Low German too.

Louise and Georgina on the Bruegenhempke Place, 1923

I have no idea if the pronunciation is different between the two, of course. On the other hand, I have no idea whether the Bruegenhempke’s were German at all. They might have been Dutch or Belgian or something. Or even English – my own surname sounds quite German, but my father’s ancestors were from England.

As to why the farm was called that, I don’t know. I suspect that Bruegenhemke was the original settler, or perhaps simply the prior owner. West Point was the sort of place where you might get directions akin to “turn left where the big oak used to stand, and then right where the barn burned down last winter”. Memories were long, and once a place had a name it tended to stick.

WJ, Lizzie, Louise and Georgina in 1925. Not sure this was at the Bruegenhempke place, but it looks like it might be.

The family moved into town around 1926. Ownership of the Bruegenhempke place passed out of the family’s hands during the Great Depression.