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Waconia.  952-442-2956

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Victoria * 952-443-2582

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952-448-4580

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City of Victoria  952-443-2771
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A Christmas Gift from Sue@VictoriaGazette.com

Dedicated to the sunshine of truth,

the moonshine of meeting deadlines,

and the starshine of Victoria.

8661 Deer Run Dr. * Victoria

952-443-2351

The Victoria GAZETTE

Victoria’s Corner Bar.  Nightly Specials and Menus.  952-443-9944

by Sue Orsen

         The next time you visit www.VictoriaGazette.com, you will find a Christmas tree on the Home Page and a present under the tree.  The tree is shimmering with colorful lights and the present is perfectly wrapped in red Christmas paper and tied with green ribbon.  It's a Christmas gift to you from me.  When you click on the present, it will open.  Merry Christmas.  I simply love it, and I hope you will too.

***

         More than once, I've been asked to write a book on the history of Victoria.  My standard reply has been, "I've written it."  One thing I don't like to do is repeat myself.  A better reply would have been, "I'm writing it."  As this Centennial Year 2015 draws to a close, I want to disclose that I have finished the first 36 volumes.

         The history that I have written of Victoria is not bound in leather.  It is bound with 36 years of heart and soul, toil and tears, life and love.  It is bound with emotion and good will.  And I hope to make it  available to you, all of it, every single issue of the Victoria Gazette, every page in every volume from 1979 to the present.

         It has been a monumental and tedious task, but my large-page scanner performed superbly as I fed it on a regular basis, one page at a time, over these last four years.  I began scanning my Gazettes in the summer of 2011.  I finished scanning the final issue in the summer of 2015. 

         I didn't begin with an end date.  I just began.  Outside of my family and home, the Gazette has been my life's work and I knew it was becoming an incomparable history of Victoria and its people.

         If each volume of the Victoria Gazette contains an average of 500 pages, that translates to an estimated 20,000 pages of material that document the 165-year history.  This includes a history of the city, its people, its businesses, organizations, and churches, mainly through firsthand stories.  It is a continuing history, a living history.

         As many of you know, Victoria was first "discovered," first settled, by the brothers Michael and Carl Diethelm in 1851 and 1852, respectively.  What transpired since those earliest years has been told through the pages of the Victoria Gazette, through the stories of people intimately connected to the early and earliest families. 

         I personally interviewed Victoria residents who were born before 1900.  For example, I interviewed John Schneider who was born in 1890, Hank Fossum who was born in 1894, and Ben Diethelm and Hilda Wartman who were each born in 1898.

         I personally interviewed dozens of other Victoria residents born between 1900 and 1905 (Henry Williams, Pauline Kochs, Ida Plocher, Vernice Heutmaker, Irwin Holtmeier, Math Hartmann, Regina Kerber, George Schmieg, Hank Gregory, Dorothy Schmieg, and Elmer Krey, for example).  I did a story on Oleda Gregory and Rosella Schmidt, each born in 1906, and Wilbur Krey, born in 1907.

         I visited with these residents, and many others not listed above, who were born before Victoria was incorporated in 1915.  I sat in their homes and they told me their stories and the stories of their parents, their children, the town, and their life, and I wrote it all down and published it in the very next issue of the Victoria Gazette along with several of their family's personal photographs.  Those stories, and scores of others over the years, tell the history of Victoria through the generations, from the beginning.

 

The rest of this feature story can be found in the paper edition.

December 2015