War, Farms, and a Railroad Curse: Rememberings of One of Mayville’s Oldest Families

The following is a brief recounting of the Kahlhamer family of Mayville drafted from archives from The Mayville News and Dodge County Pionier, “History of the Andersonville Prison” by the National Parks Service, and interviews with an anonymous Kahlhamer family member. Per request, names of living relatives have been omitted from the article.

History is seldom merely the chronicle of the famous or the infamous; more often, it is written in the quiet endurance of a single lineage. For ten generations, the Kahlhamer name has resonated through the fertile rows of farm fields, remained engraved into the commemorative stained glass of churches, and was carried across the blood-soaked soil of the Civil War.

The Kahlhamer family’s 174-year presence in Mayville began in 1852, when Jacob Kahlhamer and his family immigrated to the area from Germany. Jacob Kahlhamer and his wife had four children who were born in Germany, with several more born later in Wisconsin.

When the Civil War began in 1861, two of Jacob’s older sons, Jacob Jr. and Joseph, entered the Union Army. A year into the war, Jacob Jr. was injured in battle and honorably discharged. However, that didn’t keep him away from the battlefield for long. In 1863, he reenlisted, serving as a sergeant until the war ended in 1865. Jacob Jr. was present at Appomattox when the Confederacy surrendered.

After the war, Jacob Jr. returned to the Mayville area. Due to the injuries he sustained on the battlefield, Jacob Jr. never married. He instead devoted his life to working different jobs and contributing to a Catholic church in St. Kilian, where the stained glass window he donated still remains.

Unlike his brother, Joseph Kahlhamer was unable to return to a normal, civilian life. During the war, Joseph was held for roughly one year as a prisoner-of-war (POW) in the infamous Andersonville Prison, also known as Camp Sumter. According to the National Parks Service, nearly 13,000 of the 45,000 soldiers held there died from “disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure” during the prison’s 14-month operation. Joseph’s imprisonment “ruined his health,” and he spent much of his life after the war in hospitals. While living in a senior military home in Milwaukee, Joseph collected a monthly pension of $24 until roughly 1912 after which no renewal documentation has been found. All existing copies of the pension paperwork were written by the same non-German, English-speaking officer who misspelled Kahlhamer as “Kohlhamer.”

While injuries impacted the post-war lives of Jacob Jr. and Joseph, another occupational ailment began to plague the Kahlhamer family during its second generation in America: a railroad curse.

It was on Jacob’s son, Michael, that the family’s curse first fell. Michael started his career working for the furnace in Mayville, hauling ore in a horse or mule-drawn buggy from the mines in Iron Ridge with his business partner Joe Fluerry. In 1877, Michael and Fluerry were forced to close their business when the railroad began hauling the ore.

Michael switched to farming near LeRoy. The LeRoy property became known in local newspapers as the M. Kahlhamer farm and even was the site of a wolf hunt in 1905, but the Kahlhamer family never fully left Mayville. In 1891, Michael’s wife, Margaret, had a house built on present-day German Street, which stayed in the family until 1970. Margaret passed the house down to her daughters, including Katherine and Agnes who followed their mother’s advice not to marry and instead entered the workforce as a nurse and housemaid respectively.

Before she passed the house down to her daughters, Margaret had originally built the house so her children could obtain a good education in the Mayville schools. For roughly 50 years, there was always at least one Kahlhamer attending Mayville High School.

This high school education helped lead two of Michael’s younger sons to careers in business. Louis opened a hardware store in southwestern Illinois that has survived to this day, growing into a large business.

Alphonse Kahlhamer (occasionally spelt as “Alphons” in some documents) also found success out of the state, working in Detroit as Henry Ford’s private secretary for Ford Motor Company until 1932. During the Great Depression, Ford laid off the single men, including Alphonse. After being laid off, Alphonse returned to Mayville, never to work again, though the habits he acquired working for Ford never left him. For the rest of his life, Alphonse always wore a suit, even on his daily afternoon walks through the city.

Beyond business, the predominant career within the Kahlhamer family during its third generation was farming. Michael’s older sons Frank and John became farmers in the Mayville area. Frank owned a farm in Oak Center, and John one in Mayville near present-day Highway 33.

Varying from many of his brothers, Robert Kahlhamer, who changed his name to Rupert, first pursued a different career than caring for crops or building a business. After marrying Amelia Wittman in 1898, Rupert moved his family to Idaho to carry mail by horse in 1902. Unfortunately for Rupert, his father Michael’s railroad curse followed him west, and he lost his position when the railroad began carrying mail in the state.

After losing his job, the farm fields called Rupert and his family to Minnesota, where Amelia’s brothers had moved and become successful grain farmers. Working with his brothers-in-law, Rupert saw the business extended into Idaho and Oregon before migrating back to Mayville later in life.

One may think the railroad’s haunting occupational curse on the Kahlhamer family would have been lifted after Rupert’s generation when railroads became fully integrated into the country, but that was not to be. Instead, it took a new form two generations later. In 1970, a branch of the railroad in Mayville was abandoned, temporarily cutting supply deliveries to a business owned by one of Rupert’s grandsons. The business survived, pivoting to relying on trucks for supply deliveries. The business continues to thrive today, and at the time of this article, the Kahlhamer railroad curse has not reappeared to bring occupational hardship to the extended family’s many members.

Within the five generations of varying relations that live today, members of the Kahlhamer family serve Mayville, other local communities, and the country as police chiefs, judges, newspaper editors, nurses, patent-holders, part-time crop circle investigators, and respected artists. The Kahlhamers have carried on Jacob Jr.’s generous spirit, with some receiving various service awards for contributions to local churches and international supply drives. Though “no one became famous, and no one became infamous,” their 174-year history lives on–etched into ore and the soil of battlefields and farms, recorded in high school yearbooks, and in the stories of suited walks through Mayville streets, where the Kahlhamer family continues on.