Charles Shuler Sr.
Interview by John Hauberg
Jan. 10, 1937, Davenport, Iowa
I was born in 1856 in Rock Island and when I was six months old my folks
moved to Rapids City, Ill. My father was a cooper by trade, making barrels. There was such wonderful timber around
Rapids City. There was no saw mill there to cut the lumber for them there. They cut small trees for hoops÷saplings
as large as three fingers or so, and sold the barrels in Hampton where they butchered pigs, and in Rock Island
for the distillery. They put the whiskey in barrels and let it age, to improve it.
Father died when I was nine years and I was the oldest of five
children. My brother John was the youngest and was 14 months old when father died. There were three sisters in
between. The war closed July 5th and father died of sickness July 15th. He was in the army. He did not die of a
wound but of sickness.
Interviewed later at Keator Mill 2-17-1945:
When I was ten years old I went to work in the sawmill in Rapids
City and worked there two years. At first they sawed only hardwoods that they cut around Rapids City, but while
I worked there they began to get soft pine. Then in the winter, when they couldn't work, they moved the sawmill
to Rock Island, on 24th Street, next to the river, where the viaduct is now. The mill was east of the viaduct.
The reason for moving was that there was a better chance to sell the lumber in Rock Island than at Rapids City.
I worked two years in the sawmill after they moved.
While I was working in Rock Island, three other men from Rapids
City worked there, too, and on Saturday afternoons we walked to Rapids City and Sunday P.M. we walked back to Rock
Island. One fellow, his name was Hennegan. He had bad feet, but he walked from Rock Island to Rapids City and back.
Gilchrist never owned farms. He bought coal rights. He never drilled
first to see what was under the ground to find out if the coal was good. He had $4,000.00 and he put down a shaft
and got to the first vein and it was only one foot thick He went 20 feet lower and found the regular vein and had
a good coal mine. He mined only 40 acres and the coal was all gone. I sold him the ten acres that my father had.
I sold him the coal right at $300.00 an acre and got $3,000.00 for my mother. Only seven acres and coal on it.
The upper end had no coal on it. The vein just run to nothing. If I'd have been older, I'd have sold the land,
too, to Mr. Gilchrist. He lived near it.
You know, I married Gilchrist's daughter, Jennie.
We opened another mine on Wainwright's land, but he made nothing.
He built a railroad to it but the coal was no good. Then Mr. Gilchrist got interested in coal in Iowa about half
way between here and Des Moines.
Rapids City was a big town at one time. Must have been 1,000 people
there at one time. When telephones began, another kid and I got a rope and stretched it across the town and had
tin cans and tried to talk to each other, but we couldn't hear. It should have been a wire.
Yes, we had Negroes in Rapids City. We had strikes twice. I brought
100 Negroes from Louisiana myself. We had a strike. Had two strikes one about seven years after the mine was opened.
Both the Gilchrist and the other mine had strikes and I got the Negroes. They put the Negroes in one mine and whites
in the other. They shot one Negro, but the man didn't know he had shot a Negro. He shot through a door and it hit
a Negro and killed him. They had a trial about it in Rock Island. Rettig's folks saved the man who did the shooting.
They showed that the man was at the saloon at the time the shooting was done. It was the darndest thing.
When I was a boy the railroad went only as far as Port Byron and
Mart Rettig. Rettig had charge of the engine and when the road was built farther on north he lost his job and he
started a saloon in Rapids City and it is still there.
I've been in every state but two little ones in the East. I can't
remember them now. Have been in the Old Country three times to my wife's old home in Scotland and my father's old
home in Germany and we were in Italy 3 months.
My father was born in Germany. My mother was born there, too. He
came over first and then she came over and they were married here in Rock Island. Her name was Mary Ann Houck,
born Feb. 8, 1827 and she died Dec. 31st, 1904. They were from Hauenstein in southern Germany.
My mother is buried in Rapids City. We tried to find my father's
grave in the south, but couldn't find it. We were Catholics, but mighty poor Catholics. We children were all baptized
in the Catholic church, but my religion isn't anything. I've read the Bible through 4 or 5 times and there isn't
a true thing in it. They didn't know conditions then. The Bible says the earth is flat. Now we know it is round.
When HE made the sun that was the fourth day. According to that he must have worked in the dark the first three
days.
The railroads built in Rapids City were standard gauge and there
was a place down by the river where we had barges and we sold coal to the steamboats. I used to haul those cars
down there and going under the railroad bridge we had to stoop down. See this scar (a dark blue scar on top of
head). One time a girl threw me an apple and I tried to catch it. I didnât stoop fast enough and my head
hit the bridge. I was unconscious a whole day. When I came to, my wife was sitting by the bed crying and holding
the oldest child, Hugh. She thought I was dying. I laughed and said, "I'll be all right."
No, there was no flour mill then, till afterward after the sawmill
was moved to Rock Island. They operated the sawmill about 3 or 4 years for the natural local timber and when I
was 9 or 10 they began to use the soft lumber that came down the river. There was no sawmill in Rapids City when
father first went there.
There were three or four other men doing the same as father, making
barrels cooper work, at Rapids City. After they moved the sawmill they turned the place into a grist mill. Where
Mart Rettig's saloon is was all lumber piles and they couldn't sell it as well as in Rock Island.
My mother used to go out and help father. They had a cross-cut
saw and she would take one end of the saw. After they sawed off a length they'd split the block into staves.
We had steamboats to haul the coal to LeClaire and to Princeton.
We had a steamboat here and were hauling people up and down. It was named Jennie Gilchrist after my wife.
note:
Charlie Shuler is a great uncle of my husband. For some reason they changed their name. Some tombstones show one
name, some the other. Charlie became a millionaire.
Submitted by Mary Lou Schaechter
John Hauberg Interviews can be found in the vertical file at the Rock Island County Historical Society in Moline.
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