Willard Jesmer is the young son of Louis. He is the nephew of my g-grandfather, Nelson A. Jesmer.
Willard Jesmer is the young son of Louis. He is the nephew of my g-grandfather, Nelson A. Jesmer. He died at the age of six, when a ditch caved in on him and his friend.
Link to the Jesmer family history page
Link to Joseph A. Jesmer page (Louis’ parents) How the Jesmers came to Minnesota
Link to pictures of Princeton MN in Louis’ day Hx of Greenbush township where Louis grew up
http://www.unioneagle.com/2006/june/14graceterry.html
Chapter from a book. Chapter called “Tragedy on Depot Street”.
The setting for the chapter was Depot Street, now First Street. The time was the afternoon of July 19, 1915.
…two boys, Otis Barrett, seven, and Willard Jesmer, six, had been out on the streets playing a popular children’s game of the era. It was to push a hoop along the ground using a stick.
The boys became intrigued at one point with a trench that had been dug for a new sewer line on Depot Street. Louis Jesmer, father of Willard, had told the boys in the afternoon when he saw them near the excavation site to go home.
Both sets of parents became worried after the supper hour passed and the boys had not come home, and began searching. The search was concentrated at first near a railroad bridge because the boys had been seen there earlier and someone thought they might have drowned.
By about 10 p.m. the fire department was called to help search. ‘The fire whistle was blown and most of the townspeople turned out to join in the search,’ Terry wrote.
The hunting continued all night and then at 2:30 a.m. two hoops were found in the excavation area on Depot Street. At 8 a.m. the lifeless bodies of the two missing boys were pulled out from under about four feet of sand in the ditch.
The irony of it, said Terry, is that the Princeton Union had carried a story just the week before about the dangers of these trenches. The story told of heavy planks having been used to prevent cave-ins, yet one man barely escaped being buried alive in one of the trenches when a plank gave way. It took a half an hour for men to extricate him to safety.
Willard was not on the 1910 census. Was he a second adopted child, with Morton?
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mercierhedlund/pafn192.htm#5787
1MNHS, Death Certificate Index, MN, certid# 1915-MN-007739.
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