Author: Ron Guenther

Big Don, I will start out tonight with the family history.  You can ask questions.  Be sure that Mary gets a copy of this as she wanted it.  Do you have her email address?  If not, I will ask her for it.  So, at any rate, here goes.  I will start with pop’s side of the family.

The Guenther family left Germany.  They were from the Sauerland and continued to have contact with the relatives there until at least 1927.  The father’s name was Charles Philip and the mother’s name was Mary Emmel.  They arrived here in this country in 1866, just after the Civil War and settled in Freeport, Illinois.  They spelled their name at that time Gunther, but our grandfather was told that there were two little dots over the u, the Umlaut, and an alternative way to spell u Umlaut is ue and so as an adult, he spelled the name Guenther.  There were ten children in the family, seven boys and three sisters.  Two of the sisters, Elisabeth and Molly, ended up living in the Spokane area in Washington.  At any rate, they bought a farm just outside the town of Freeport.  They said that it was the coldest place on earth, for sure, colder than anything they had seen in Germany.  There was another problem with the place, too.  It was haunted.  It seemed that a tinker had come to the place, had been lured into the house, murdered, and all his money and goods were stolen.  Well, often when the children were playing outside, they would see a tinker pull up beside the house and the door would open and he would go inside.  They would run into the house and ask their mother where the tinker was and she would say there was no tinker and sure enough, there was no tinker.  At night, the bedrooms were all upstairs, they would hear a scream and running and then clunk, clunk, clunk as something bounced down the stairs.  Our own mother said that was just rats, but pop was certain it was some poltergeist out there.  Even Aunt Berchion thought there was something a little strange, unworldly.  Well, nobody wanted a haunted house and the folks wanted to move, so they burned down the house, sold the property, and moved to the small town of LaPorte City, Iowa, just outside of Waterloo, Iowa.  There they had a farm, a large and prosperous farm and there it was that our grandfather grew up.  He was the youngest of the ten children, his name was Samuel Emmel and since he was the youngest, he was supposed to take care of the old folks and then inherit the farm.  The rest of the children as they got older, gradually moved away, one of the sons moved to Denver where he became a judge, the family did not seem to be very close and so contact was gradually lost.  Grandpa had a chance to go to West Point but turned it down, winters he participated in a curling league and according to our father was world class, but according to our father, everything his father did was world class.  Summers, he worked the farm.  He had his eye, though, on a neighbor girl, Alice Stead, who was the youngest of her family.

When my father grew up there in Iowa, he knew the two older brothers, George and Arch Stead.  It seems to me there was a fourth brother, but nobody ever said anything about him.  He left the area quite early and went to Texas is my recollection.  At any rate, he does not enter into this story, even assuming he existed.  Alice’s father was from England and he had come first to Ohio where he met and married a young girl whose last name was Duke.  They moved to LaPorte City and got a farm there.  It was a nice farm but not nearly as large and prosperous as the Guenther farm.  Since Alice was the youngest it was up to her to take care of the old folks until they died.  Until that time, she was not supposed to marry. The upshot of all that was, Samuel and Alice did not marry until quite late, he was thirty three and she was twenty nice.  The Guenthers and Steads were very friendly and eventually, grandpa and the two Stead boys went into the brick making business which was an enormous help to them.  Uncle Arch married a close friend of Alice, our Aunt Dee.<br><br>The area where the Guenthers settled was a German area and so they grew up speaking German and feeling very German.  Actually, the English royal family was German at the time, it was called the House of Hannover and then during the first world war, changed it quickly to the House of Windsor.

To be continued