WILLIAM H. GEHRMANN

THE GEHRMANN FAMILY

Subject: HELEN GEHRMANN and WILLIAM H. GEHRMANN, (Front Row), JOHN HARRY GEHRMANN and WILLIAM C. GEHRMANN (Back Row).Group portrait of a family of four. The parents are seated in front of two teen or young adult boys. All are wearing dark clothing. The father has on eyeglasses and is wearing a bow tie. Location Depicted: Davenport, Scott County, Iowa
Source: From the Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive (http://www.umvphotoarchive.org/)

The biography below was from the following "Volume 2 History of Davenport and Scott County" by Harry E. Downer - S. J. Clarke Publishing Co. 1910 Chicago

WILLIAM H. GEHRMANN, starting in business life in America at a salary of eight dollars per month, rose to become the vice president and general manager of the Kohrs Packing Company of Davenport, in which connection he was active in the control of one of the leading enterprises of the city. His business affairs were so carefully managed that success placed him in a prominent position among Davenport's representative men. William Gehrmann was educated in the private schools of his native town of Uetersen Germany and afterward learned bookkeeping, which he followed for two years. In 1875, when a youth of seventeen years, he sailed for America, making the voyage alone as a passenger on the steamship Schiller. This was the last complete trip which the steamship Schiller made, as she was lost at sea on her return trip, being wrecked on the Needles off the English coast. Mr. Gehrmann landed at New York City and soon afterward started for the Midwest, going to St. Louis, Missouri, where he secured a place in a grocery store at a salary of eight dollars per month. He afterward was employed in a wholesale grocery house of that city, with which he was connected until 1879, when he went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and entered the training school of the Truners Academy for the training of teachers of gymnastics. Following his graduation in 1880 he returned to St. Louis and accepted a position as teacher in the gymnasium of the Toensfeldt Institute and St. Louis Turn Verein. There he continued until the spring of 1887, when he went to Walkerville, Montana, and with the capital he had saved from his earnings engaged in the butchering business on his own account. In this undertaking he prospered but in 1895 he sought a broader field of labor in Anaconda, Montana, where he organized the Montana Meat Company in connection with Marcus Daly and Conrad Kohrs. In 1898, however, he sold out his interest to his partners and came to Davenport, where he assumed the management of the interests of the Kohrs Packing Company, which had been established in 1874 by Henry Kohrs. He became the vice president and general manager of what, in its day was one of the extensive business concerns of the city, employing about one hundred people. The output of the Kohrs Packing Plant was known throughout Iowa, Illinois and Missouri and all points in the south. They did their own killing, dressing and packing and the establishment was under government inspection. Everything was conducted with the strictest regard to sanitation and the excellence of the products insures a continuance of a liberal and growing patronage.1

References

1. "From Vol 2 History of Davenport and Scott County" by Harry E. Downer - S. J. Clarke Publishing Co. 1910 Chicago


Children of William H. Gehrmann and Helen (nee Kohrs) Gehrmann

WILLIAM CONRAD GEHRMANN (1889-1965)
JOHN HENRY GEHRMANN (1892-1985)