We begin tracing the story of Voss Electric’s historical background in Germany, where A.M. Voss, the father of Voss Electric’s founder, Henry Voss, was born in Prohn, a little village near Stralsund, on the Baltic Sea’s south shore, just east of Denmark.

The Voss family immigrates to America from Prohn, Germany, in August, 1882. Wilhelm Carl Joachim Voss, city postmaster and baker, along with his wife Johanna (Carolina) and four young children, Ewald (Adolph) Wilhelm Max (A.M.), Herman (H.E.), Emma, and Mattie, left Germany in the middle of the night to come to America. The ocean voyage on the freighter Wieland took almost two weeks. A.M. Voss, Henry Voss’s father and Mike Voss’s beloved "Grandpa Max, was 6 years old when he came to the U.S.A. A.M. Voss (1876-1971) who lived to the age of 95, is key to Voss Lighting’s history because 1) he ran Voss Electric during WWII; 2) he became a Christian at age 85.

The Voss Family came to America because, as A.M. Voss wrote in his own life story, "America was the great country of promise and freedom," and also to be able to escape the tyranny of Kaiser Wilhelm’s edict that at age 16, all German boys must join the army so Germany could go and "conquer the world." I share all of this in our historical record, lest we forget why so many gave up so much to experience America’s freedom.

Picture of the Voss family in Prohn, Germany, in June, 1882.

On August 26, 1882, the Voss family, having passed by the Statue of Liberty, were processed through Ellis Island, New York, as legal, sponsored immigrants to America. They were properly "sponsored" to move westward to Nebraska by Uncle Karl Fisher and four Aunts, who earlier immigrated from Germany to Wisconsin – then to Nebraska.

Picture of Henry Voss at America’s "Statue of Liberty" in the 1980’s.

A.M. Voss wrote, "We traveled by rail to Kearney, Nebraska, arriving September 2, 1882. Uncle Fisher picked us up in an old lumber wagon, drawn by two slow work horses. Herman, Emma, and I all rode in the rear of the hay-filled old wagon. Uncle Fisher had thoughtfully put in a large ripe watermelon, which we ’kids’ finished before we arrived at Uncle’s home on the banks of the Wood River. There was no real road, just a trail through tall waving native grass or wild hay, called ’blue stem.’" The Voss family traveled 12 miles north to Amherst, a city in western Nebraska’s sandhills, living in a relatives’ sod house.

After farming for awhile, they bought a 160 acre farm for $1,000, "just about all we had." These pioneering immigrants new farm consisted of "a sod house, a sod stable, two old horses, two cows, an old lumber wagon, a cultivator, a harrow, a walking plow, and a 50 acre field of unhusked corn. We were afraid, especially mother, of the Indians, and so we wanted to be near our relatives. Our sod house was warm, but the roof was covered with dirt which leaked badly after heavy rains. There was just a dirt floor."

"There was so much snow and wind that winter all the draws were filled, so the area appeared leveled. It took us almost a whole day to go to our sod stable to feed the stock. In due time, our father built a frame granary and corn crib. Thus, in true pioneer fashion, we lived happily in 'Grand old Nebraska’ with the coyotes, jack rabbits, skunks, badgers, wild ducks, muskrats, beaver, and thousands of prairie chickens. Wild geese came every morning and evening from the Platte River just 12 miles south to feed in our fields which, I believe, started a zeal to hunt in me which lasted throughout my whole life.

We seemed to enjoy the boundless freedom and great open spaces of Nebraska’s semi-wilderness and the vast and fertile prairies with their occassional frightening and leaping fires. Father fashioned a pin into a fishhook, and with a cotton string as a line we fished in the clear and gurgling spring water of Wood River for bullheads and other fish. We boys, roaming the prairies, found buffalo horns, skulls, chips, and some well preserved skeltons, just as the Indians and white buffalo hunters had left them.

We lived in that 'Old Soddy’ for eight years. Then our mother began urging our father to build us a new home, and that on a hill at about the center of our land. Still being very short of money, our father contrived in his usual ingenious way to build us a house on a slight slope roughly one third dugout, one third sod, and one third wood frame."

Adolph Max or "A.M." Voss graduated from Kearney High School, where he played center on the football team. Since every child was needed to help the Voss family "make it’ in those harsh early days, only one son could be spared for further schooling.

"Max" Voss, being good at math and science, was the son chosen to go to the University of Nebraska, tuition free, with a $5.00 registration fee. He rented a room for $5.00 a month, the address being 1260 Vine Street, where the current football stadium is. A.M. Voss played football for seven years, legal back then, being coached by "hurry up Yost" and coach Foster. In 1901 he was given Athletic Life Pass #3 by N.U.’s Letterman’s Club.

1901 picture of Adolph Max (A.M.) Voss, University of Nebraska football player, 1898-1905.

After earning his M.A. degree, A.M. Voss was made Nebraska State Superintendent of Public Instruction. On December 24, 1908, A.M. Voss married Ethel Stokes, whose family had immigrated from England to Sargent, Nebraska, where Ethel was born in 1884. A.M. wrote that Ethel Stokes (1884-1966) also "lived in a sod house on a ranch two miles south of Sargent, Nebraska, in real pioneer fashion." The Voss’s lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, raising seven children; Don, Bob, Norm, Henry, Mildred, Rich, and Virginia.

Henry Voss’s brothers and sisters: left to right: Virginia, Richard, Mildred, Henry, Norm, Bob, Don.

Henry Herman ("H.H.") or "Hank" Voss, the young man God later raised up to become the founder of Voss Electric Company in 1939, was born like his brothers in the Voss family home at 2741 Randolph Street in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 24, 1915. As a young boy, Henry Voss grew up in Lincoln Nebraska, spending his youth working a lot in his father’s big and well-groomed garden as a Lincoln Journal paperboy and delivering groceries in a red wagon from the Basket Store (now Ideal Grocery) – earning five cents per delivery. He also was a caddy at Antelope Golf Course (now Chet Ager).

In his faculty job for the University of Nebraska’s Extension Division, A.M. Voss traveled around Western Nebraska certifying each public school. After his contract job as Inspector of Schools ended in 1913, he taught high school at Sargent for $60 a month, and then Overton. He taught at Nebraska Business College at St. Paul for $70 a month. Later on he worked at Pauley Lumber, then for years in SALES as a "traveling salesman" in a Ford Model T, selling textbooks for World Books and Compton’s – to those school libraries which had to have the newest World Books to keep certified. Because his father’s territory was Nebraska and North and South Dakota, Henry Voss said his father was gone from home three out of four weeks, so his mother did most of the raising of the kids. Yes, back then the father did "whatever it took" to be the provider for the family.

As Henry was growing up, his father bought three Western Nebraska sandhills farms in Kimball, Dix, and Bushnell. In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, Henry, Norm, and Don worked on these farms alongside their father, growing and hoeing wheat, potatoes, and white beans. The Voss men would drive a Model T pulling a trailer to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to sell their produce, getting $1.00 for a 100 lb. sack of potatoes. While they lived on those dusty, sandy farms, they "only ate what they grew or shot!" While A.M. Voss and his boys Don, Norm, and Henry lived in a makeshift wooden "shanty" on their Kimball quarter-section, they didn’t have a well. So they got water a half mile away from their neighbors "the McClanahan’s," trading wild game they shot (pheasants, grouse, rabbits, deer, antelope) for water. Henry’s son Mike Voss still has that old 1880’s well-worn Spencer shotgun. They took their "Saturday night baths" in an irrigation canal.

Picture of "shanty" where A.M. Voss and his boys lived in the 30’s & 40’s.

When the State of Minnesota was added to Henry’s father’s sales territory, the Voss family temporarily moved up to Minneapolis, Minnesota, renting out their Lincoln home, until the economy would hopefully improve. So while living there in Minneapolis with his family, Henry Voss attended Jefferson Junior High and West High School.

The Voss family finally purchased their first radio, which allowed them to listen to the "big bands" and "ball games." Then the Voss family moved back to Lincoln, Nebraska, when sales and commissions slowed just prior to the "Great Depression," which began in 1929. (The "Great Depression," forcing many Americans to worry about necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter, did not end in the United States until 1942, after the United States had finally and rightfully entered World War II.) A.M. Voss then opted to quit his educational publication sales job to farm his land in Western Nebraska – which proved to be a mistake, as a long Midwest drought brought the blowing dust of the "dust bowl" and poor crops, with the loose dirt literally piled up as high as the fenceposts.

Henry attended Lincoln High his senior year, being sports editor of the Yearbook. At the age of 18, just two weeks before Henry was to graduate from Lincoln High School, due to his family’s poor financial position, Henry had to join "Corp 763" of the "Civilian Conservation Corp" – or the "CCC" – which was a nationwide "public works" program which Congress established in 1933 as part of President Roosevelt’s "New Deal," employing thousands of young men in countrywide conservation projects.

In the "CCC," Henry served as a hospital medic and helped build roads and dams around Alma and Fremont Nebraska, getting $5 and three hot meals a day and a dry tent to sleep in, which was a good deal back then. Henry was learning the value of stewardship and faithful contentment with his condition, by using what God provided, meager or much.

Due to the country’s poor economy from the "dust bowl" and "depression," two of Henry’s brothers, Don and Norm, moved to Minneapolis to find jobs. Henry had to move up to Minneapolis to find work, thus leaving his father and mother, A.M. and Ethel Voss, back in Lincoln, Nebraska with the rest of their children. Henry and his beloved brother Norm Voss’s first bare apartment was above a grocery store, and it had no furniture. Later, as was commonly done back in the 1930’s, Henry and Norm lived together in the 2nd floor apartment of their older brother Don Voss and his wonderful wife Aldie.

Norm Voss drove a horse-drawn bread wagon, and Henry Voss, a horse-drawn milk wagon. They also worked in a steel foundry, getting "pitch black" every day from the heat and soot, while they made metal molds for the casting of heavy iron doors. Thus at the age of 19, Henry Voss was making thirty-five cents an hour, working ten hour days, in a blistering hot boiler factory in Minnesota! That job ended when the economy died. So there they were in America, working hard in Minneapolis when Henry’s brother Don Voss became a Christian, having by God’s grace been enabled to receive God’s salvation by repentantly believing in his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who died for him.

Soon Don Voss formed a basketball team to play in the Church gym, where Henry and Norm played ball. A Christian saxophonist held some evening concerts at that Church, attracting Henry and Norm to attend, at brother Don’s invitation. Norm brought his girlfriend DeVaughn to the first concert, but during the message Norm stomped out of Church, having been offended by the Biblical preaching of Hell. DeVaughn coaxed Norm and Henry to please come back to hear the music and preaching, and they did, thankfully! As Norm Voss says, "I knew that preacher couldn’t preach on Hell again!" To Norm and Henry Voss’s surprise, the preacher did speak on Hell – and how to be "saved" from sin.

At the end of the service Norm and his future wife DeVaughn went forward to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as God’s beloved Son who died on the cross to pay sin’s penalty for them and rose again to give salvation’s new life to all who by faith alone believe in Him. The next night, at 20 years of age, Henry Voss, by God’s sovereign grace, repentantly believed in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, cementing a "spiritual" family relationship between Norm, Don, and Henry Voss lasting the rest of their lives. These three brothers, believing Christ died, arose, and is coming again, knew there IS hope beyond this life.

These events back in 1935 completely changed the course of these three brothers’ lives – forever – because when Don, Norm, and Henry Voss got spiritually "saved" from sin – that began their careers as "Christian businessmen" – who now knew they were "just sinners saved by grace" – responsible to be faithful salesmen, "selling for their Savior."

• Norm Voss became a successful insurance salesmen, preaching the Gospel boldly.
• Don Voss worked for Brown and Bigelow for over forty years, faithfully serving in his Church as a coach, and being used to lead young people to faith in Jesus Christ.

And as we’ll now learn, Henry Voss began learning how to live as a "Christian" light bulb salesman, faithfully, though quietly, "putting in a good word or two for the Lord." These men were learning firsthand that … "the Bible and the Briefcase do go together."

The Voss boys grew up with their cousins, who came from Germany to Nebraska earlier. One relative whose life was especially significant to Henry Voss was his "uncle Herman" or H.E. Voss, who spent twenty years as a Church-planting missionary in China in the late 1800’s, before the "Boxer Rebellion," which was a bloody uprising in northern China in 1900, where 30,000 Chinese Catholics and 200 foreign Christian missionaries were slaughtered by anti-Western "Boxers" (practitioners of gymnastics and calisthenics) – who opposed any foreign influence in China. H.E. Voss escaped murder, by hastily fleeing down the Yangtzee River through Hunan Province on a "Sampam" or Chinese river boat.

So having first immigrated to America, H.E. Voss left again – to go become a pioneering Missionary near Kuling, China, preaching the Gospel and planting Churches, working with The Christian and Missionary Alliance, A.B. Simpson, and James Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. It was Hudson Taylor, English missionary to China, 1832-1905, who said, "God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supplies." After escaping China, "Uncle Herman" was an intinerant preacher to the ranchers of Western Nebraska for some years, and then retired to Lincoln in his 70’s, where he took art classes at the University of Nebraska, so that he could put his missionary memories on canvas.

Mike Voss has a large picture painted by H.E. Voss outside his office at Voss Lighting’s Corporate offices in Lincoln, Nebraska, which depicts his missionary work in China. It would be a privilege to have many of you come to Lincoln, Nebraska, and see that picture – and learn more about Who the Christian employees of Voss Lighting really work for – and why they try to work so hard for our many valued customers and vendors.

Yes, the sacrificial foreign missionary work of Herman Voss in China deeply impressed Henry, Don, and Norm Voss for the rest of their lives, motivating them to be faithful givers to sending out Christian missionaries all around the world. This example of faithful ministry in giving and living has deeply impressed Mike Voss’s life as well.

So A.M. Voss came to America and became a "pioneering farmer" in Western Nebraska. A.M. Voss’s brother Herman came to America, left for a time to become a "pioneering Missionary" in China, and then came back to Nebraska to continue serving Jesus Christ. Henry Herman Voss, in God’s sovereign plan, ended up a "pioneering salesman" in the lighting industry, and a successful distributor of premium quality light bulbs and tubes.

Thus, three sons of an immigrant, Henry, Norm, and Don Voss, became Missionaries To The Marketplace, selling so they could use their lives and resources sharing the Gospel. Later on in the 70’s, Henry and Norm helped build several Bible Churches up in Canada, financed in part by their older brother Don. They were successful businessmen, serving their Savior.

After God spiritually "saved" Henry Voss from sin, it seems Henry must have exhibited a transformed Christian character. The Pastor of that Minneapolis Church told Henry he should "go to Bible school to learn God’s Word better, and perhaps become a Pastor or Missionary," which is what many Christian young people did back in those "old days."

Of course Henry didn’t have the money to attend Bible School, so his Pastor called up Dr. W. B. Riley, President of Northwestern Bible School, and got Henry a scholarship so that he could attend in 1936 and 1937. I am still using his Bible School notebook, full of tests and fundamental Bible truths, which testifies to the seriousness of his new faith.

While attending Northwestern Bible School for two years, Henry was able to get enough credits from West High School, and received his high school diploma in January.

We’ve shared in Section II Voss Electric’s early background starting back in 1876, so you also can learn to appreciate what it took to originally found, and then faithfully grow, Voss Electric over so many turbulent years.