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Submitted: 1/21/10 • Approved: 1/23/10 • Last Updated: 3/23/17 • R25684-G25684-S3
Gravestone transcription:
KOENIG
PETER
NOV. 17, 1860 - MAY 12, 1948
MARGARET H. WIFE OF PETER
JUNE 13, 1869 - MAY 2, 1936
MAGGIE KOENIG STOLTZ
DAUGHTER OF PETER & MAGDALENA
SEPT. 9, 1883 - FEB. 9, 1913
CLARENCE CLAYTON
SON OF PETER & MAGDALENA
AUG. 31, 1898 - FEB. 14, 1907
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Koenig family story:
Article from "Sterling Centennial Logan County Family History, 1884-1894" (edited) - The Peter Koenig Family - Peter Koenig was born in the village of Mildmay, Ontario, Canada November 17, 1860. Peter grew up speaking German as his parents Ludwig (Lewis) and Elizabeth Koenig had emigrated to Canada from Germany in the 1850s. Always ambitious, Peter apprenticed to a blacksmith at an early age and photos show his powerful chest and shoulders which developed from working the blacksmith bellows. By the time he was twenty, however, his lungs were being badly affected by the smoke of the blacksmith shop and he had to look for another occupation. His physical strength led him to become an apprentice stonemason. Most of the large homes were made of the native grey stone and his work was in great demand. Many of the homes he built in the 1880s are still occupied one hundred years later.
In 1882, he married Magdalena Heist and shortly afterward, purchased his father's farm. Peter's brother John had left Canada and had settled in Nebraska a few miles from the first homestead claim in the US. John asked his aging parents to return with him to Nebraska while he and his family were visiting Canada. When John, his wife and 13 children left in their covered wagon for their new home, the elder Koenigs went with them. Thus Peter purchased his father's farm which was the original Royal land grant. The grant had been filed under Lewis King, the Anglican version of Ludwig Koenig.
In only a few years the Westward Expansion bug bit Peter also and he and Henry Thurkhorn went to Nebraska to look for homestead land.
However, they had arrived too late and all of the land had been claimed. He was advised to look for land around the new town of Greeley, Colorado, but he found the same problem there. The only land available was across the Platte River in the sandhills several miles east of the new town of Sterling. Peter returned to Canada, loaded his belongings including a team of horses in a boxcar and he and his family moved to Colorado. By then, the family included three daughters, Maggie, Lydia, and Emma, and one son, baby Jacob Edward. One can only imagine Magdalena's thoughts as she recalled the plush woods of her Canadian home as she surveyed the endless dry prairie surrounding her new home at LeRoy. This was the third settlement of the area as the rainless summers had driven two earlier sets of homesteaders away.
Peter was businessman enough to realize that the only sure money to be made probably wouldn't be from farming, so he opened a general store.
The Evangelical Church was central in the lives of the Koenigs as it was in those of most of the settlers of German ancestry. Peter was able to put his earlier training as a stone mason to use when the new stone church was to be built.
Although all church services were conducted in German and Peter staunchly read his German Bible, Peter spoke English and he and his brother Will, who had joined the Colorado family, decided to change the pronunciation of the family name from "Kanig" to "Konig," thus making it sound more Anglicanized. The family in Nebraska and in Canada still use the German pronunciation.
Each year seemed to bring another child into the family. In the eleven years between 1889 and 1900, five boys and one girl were born. They were Elizabeth, Erwin Henry ("Fat"), Simon Peter ("Sib"), Elroy ("Short"), Clarence and Percy Malcolm ("Doc"). Then in 1905, Magdalena, expecting her eleventh child, suddenly died.
Left a widower with ten children, Peter returned to Canada to seek a wife and mother for his children. When he returned to Sterling, he brought his new wife, Margaret, Magdalena's younger sister, and her twin sons, Clinton and Clayton Astell.
In July, 1906, their first son, John Wesley, was born, and eighteen months later in January, 1908, Vergil was born.
In 1936, Margaret died and Peter remarried, he was never able to find another woman as kind as Magdalena and Margaret had been. He died May 12, 1948 leaving many descendants.
Contributed on 1/21/10
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Record #: 25684