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User:Evansknight/sandbox/Gustav Willius

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Gustav Otto Conrad Willius (25 November 1831 – 24 September 1924) was a German-American immigrant, who, along with his brother Ferdinand Willius, held a prominent position in the early years of the state of Minnesota. His is most well known for his role as a banker in Saint Paul. [1]

Family and early life

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Gustav Otto Conrad Willius was the fourth and youngest child of the Bremen wine merchant Friedrich Willius (20 March 1783 – 12 May 1838) and his wife Johanna Dorothea Doris Charlotte Niemann (15 September 1793 – 16 February 1832).

His siblings were

  • Conradine Louise (7 May 1821 – 20 May 1839),
  • Johanna Wilhelmina (23 March 1824 – 20 June 1839) and
  • Johann Wilhelm Ferdinand Willius (16 February 1830 – 7 November 1916).

Friedrich Willius was the son of the merchant Conrad Willius (10 October 1745 – 27 October 1825) and his wife Anna Martha (née Pfeiffer; 10 June 1753 – 2 March 1806), and was originally from Kassel. He relocated to Bremen in the 1820s prior to starting his family. Through his mother, Friedrich was the nephew of the theologian and preacher Johann Jakob Pfeiffer, and his cousins included Burkhard Wilhelm Pfeiffer, Franz Georg Pfeiffer and Carl Jonas Pfeiffer. Dorothea's parents were Gottlieb Niemann (10 September 1750 - 1849), a native of Minden and a merchant specializing in importing goods from the Netherlands, and Dorothea Tietzel (or Tietzeln).

Gustav's mother Doris died less than three months after his birth, and this loss left his father inconsolable, to the extent that Gustav later remarked how he never got to know his father, and felt as though his father blamed him for his mother's untimely death. Friedrich Willius died in 1838, when Gustav was only 6 years old, and an epidemic of scarlet fever took both of his older sisters in the following year, so by 1839, Gustav and Ferdinand were the only members of their immediate family left alive. The boys' uncle Carl Knippenberg, husband of their mother's elder sister Friedericke, was charged with arranging for their care; due to Friedrich's ineptitude in business and sudden death, that involved selling their house and assets in order to provide for their education. To supplement their meager inheritance, their paternal uncle Conrad Willius and their maternal uncle Dietrich Niemann also provided them with funds to ensure they completed their education and had some small money to help them start their careers. The boys were eventually enrolled in the Educational Institute of Lehe, which was effectively a posh orphanage. The building that once housed the school is now the Landhaus Louisenthal in Bremerhaven.

America and banking career

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Personal life

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On 17 September 1872, Gustav married Emma Klausmeyer in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was the daughter of Wilhelm Klausmeyer (1817 – 24 November 1893) and Emilie Strobel (1826 – 1863), both immigrants from Bavaria. Wilhelm Klausmeyer was a choir director, a pianist, and an early member of the board of directors of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.[2] Emma's brother Alfred Klausmeyer was the founder of the Anchor Buggy company, an early American manufacturer of automobiles.[3]

References

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  • Gerland, Otto (2 May 1894). "Geschichte der Familie Dithmar". Hessenland. Kassel: Friedr. Scheel. p. 117. About his son-in-law Willius, No. 2778 of the Hessian morning newspaper of August 19, 1867 contains the following obituary from the author of these lines: A few days ago the retired lieutenant colonel died here. D. Konrad Willius, 75 years old, a man who has always distinguished himself both through his military ability and through the noble qualities of his character. No roses bloomed for him in Kurhessen either. Son of a merchant in Kassel, where he initially worked in the forestry sector, it was only the Westphalian draft that brought him into a military career when he was drafted into the Chasseur-Carabiniers in 1813. Before he could take the field, however, the Westphalian throne fell and so Willius first marched against France as a trained hunter from the Electorate of Hesse. In 1815 he was the first on the ramparts of this fortified place during the storming of Charlesville and received the Hessian Order of the Iron Helmet and a Prussian silver medal for this heroic deed, which was also glorified by Oynhausen in his pictorial depiction from the history of the Hessian Jäger Battalion was intended for the decoration of non-commissioned officers and soldiers in the field and which he continued to wear with pride when he was subsequently appointed an officer and now had the right to exchange the medal for the Service Cross intended for officers. Although he later proved to be a capable officer, especially when he took on the position of divisional adjutant, he was appointed commander of the Kassel fort at the beginning of the 1940s, which meant that he was completely alienated from active military service, but he did find the opportunity to ease the suffering of the prisoners in prison for the political prisoners from the Jordan Trials and later under the second Haffenpflug Ministry so that all those unfortunate people always gratefully acknowledged him and his truly humane nature. When in 1848, after Lieutenant Weber's arrest, the fort appeared to be under attack from the population, he was prepared to maintain the place entrusted to him with weapons in hand; But he was just as loyal to the Constitution he had sworn to and signed his resignation in October 1850, even though illness confined him to his bed. In 1863 he celebrated his fiftieth anniversary in service and then retired. With the great change in our circumstances, the memory of our own heroes and men of honor will not disappear.

https://archive.org/details/recordofclassof100pard/page/84/mode/2up?q=Willius - lewis ludlam dunbar, yale graduate, moved to germany

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  1. ^ Donovan, Frank Pierce, and Cushing F. Wright. The First Through A Century 1853 - 1953: A History Of The First National Bank of Saint Paul. Pub. for the First National Bank of Saint Paul by Ithaca Press, 1954.
  2. ^ Burgheim, Max (1888). Cincinnati in Wort und Bild. Cincinnati: M. & R. Burgheim.
  3. ^ Hischak, Thomas S. (2019). 1927:A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the Jazz Age's Greatest Year. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 67.
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