Colorful Characters: Hans Peter Bertelsen

I’m sure you’ve heard of the poem “The Barefoot Boy” by John Greenleaf Whittier. It starts out:

BLESSINGS on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lip, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face,
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
From my heart I give thee joy,—
I was once a barefoot boy!

So, what’s that have to do with Hans Peter Bertelsen? Well, supposedly, Hans was the inspiration for the poem.

The story is that Whittier was visiting Sheffield, Illinois when he saw Hans working, barefoot, and that ended up being the inspiration for the poem. One source says Hans was hitching up horses to a wagon for his family to go to church.

Hans Bertelsen later went on to become a well-known Lutheran minister.

Here we have a picture of him on his 84^th birthday:

Hans Peter Bertelsen

I think that is pretty much a posed shot, because he sure doesn’t look much like a minister there. It’s pretty obvious that he was posing like that in remembrance of his being the inspiration for the poem. In fact, here’s another shot of him looking much more like a minister (and, unfortunately, shod):

Hans Peter Bertelsen, circa 1930

By they way, in researching this I was reminded how one always has to be careful taking a lot of this stuff at face value. I found one book that said John Greenleaf Whittier was inspired to write the poem when visiting Sheffield in 1869. Good trick, since the poem appeared in “The Panorama and Other Poems” in 1856. Another source says he was 18 years old when Whittier saw him, which sure seems awfully old for a “barefoot boy”. However, since Hans was 84 in 1930, he would have been around 9 in 1855, around the time the poem was written, which seems much more likely.