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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The light in the room had changed.
Elias Baron Gerber had been watching the light all morning — the way it came through the curtains of his daughter’s bedroom on Main Street, the way it moved across the ceiling as the hours turned, the way it told him, as surely as any clock, that the day was going. He was eighty-four years old and the left foot had been fighting him for weeks and he understood, with the practical clarity of a man who had spent sixty years measuring things, that the fight was almost done.
He had measured a great deal in his life. Property lines and section corners and creek beds. The distance from a man’s ambition to what the land would give him. The space between loss and the next morning’s work.
He thought about the survey chains laid across Noble County ground, cold iron in his hands on a February morning in 1858. He thought about the Missouri River bluff in Nebraska, the smell of prairie mud and possibility, the town that was nothing but stakes and lines and a young man’s conviction that here, right here, a city would grow.
He thought about Jacob.
He always thought about Jacob.
The room smelled of camphor and clean linen and the faint sweetness of the apple trees in the yard. Somewhere downstairs his daughter was moving about, and the sound of it — the quiet industry of a woman keeping a house — was the most ordinary thing in the world, and he loved it with an intensity that surprised him.
I am going to die in this room, he thought, with no particular distress. And that is all right. I have done enough.
The light moved on the ceiling.
He closed his eyes, and Indiana opened around him like a book.
The table had twelve chairs and they were never quite all filled at the same time, because twelve children in a house of that size meant that someone was always coming in from the barn or going out to the woodpile or sitting in the corner in disgrace, but the chairs were there and the table was long and when David Gerber bowed his head and folded his hands and waited for the noise to subside, they all understood that the noise would have to subside before the blessing would be spoken, and eventually — always eventually — it did.
David was a Pennsylvania German in the root sense: his people had come out of the Reformed church tradition and settled in Ohio with the same quiet stubbornness that other men put into loud convictions, and the farm in Canton Township, Stark County, was as good an expression of that character as you could find. The soil was black and heavy and rewarded work the way the God of the Reformed tradition rewarded it — proportionally, without sentiment, with no credit extended for wishing.
Susanna Buechtel Gerber was, if anything, more German than David. She was small and practical and could hold twelve children’s names in her head simultaneously, which was its own form of genius, and she ran the household the way a good surveyor runs a transit — with perfect attention to the instrument and no patience for error.
The oldest was Elias Baron, who by the time he was old enough to be abbreviated had become EB to everyone including himself. He was a reader and a measurer, the kind of boy who counted fence posts on the way to school and looked at a map the way other boys looked at a baseball field — as an invitation, a challenge, a place where something could be done.
He was nine years older than Jacob, which put them at different ends of the family. By the time Jacob was learning his letters, EB was already teaching other children theirs, standing in front of a one-room schoolhouse in Stark County with a wooden pointer and a patience that surprised people who hadn’t seen it before. He had the Gerber steadiness in him, the same quality that made David wait for the table to quiet before he spoke the blessing — the understanding that things happened in their proper order, and that rushing them did not make them happen faster.
What EB wanted, and had wanted since he could articulate want, was to go somewhere and build something.
Indiana was the first step.
In 1855, David Gerber loaded everything the family owned onto wagons and drove west. He had reasons, as practical men always have reasons — better land prices, room to spread, the simple arithmetic of twelve children on a farm that had already given everything it intended to give. The family settled in Eden Township, La Grange County, on the Indiana side of the Ohio border, on rolling ground with black soil and hawthorn trees thick on the ridges.
EB was twenty-four that year. He helped unload the wagons and helped his father assess the land and helped his brothers build the first rough structures that would become a proper farm. He did all of this efficiently and without complaint, because that was what was required.
And then he went to Nebraska.
The Missouri River in September ran brown and wide and purposeful, as if it knew exactly where it was going and had no patience for scenery. EB stood on the bluff above it with a transit and a chain and a young man’s absolute conviction that the ground under his feet was going to become something.
The town was called Omaha City, and it existed at that moment primarily in the minds of the men who had staked it. There were promises and there were surveys and there were speculators who had made the trip from the east for reasons that varied between genuine vision and pure gambling, and EB — who had brought his carpenter’s skills and his engineering knowledge and his schoolteacher’s eye for measurement — found himself at the center of it.
He drew the lines.
That was the work: taking a bluff above a river and deciding where the streets would go, where the lots would fall, how the blocks would be arranged so that the thing that grew here would be a city and not a muddle. He worked from dawn to dark with the kind of concentrated attention that shut out hunger and cold and the persistent uncertainty about whether any of it would come to anything.
Standing on that bluff in the October wind, transit leveled, the Missouri curving away below him to the south, EB allowed himself to think about what this meant. A city. He was drawing the bones of a city. Twenty years from now — fifty years from now — people would live in houses on the streets he was laying out, and they would have no idea that a twenty-four-year-old from Stark County, Ohio, had stood here in the mud and decided where their front doors would face.
He thought about that for a long time. He was still thinking about it eight months later when he packed up his tools and went home.
Indiana still needed building.
He taught school first, because that was what the frontier needed from an educated man before it needed anything else. Eden Chapel on the Hawpatch, a one-room schoolhouse in La Grange County, with farm children who smelled of the barn and had hands already calloused from work and needed to know their arithmetic and their reading before any of the rest of it could matter.
Then the first schoolhouse in Ligonier itself — the old red schoolhouse, as it would be remembered — and EB standing at the front of it with the same wooden pointer and the same steady patience, watching the children of Noble County learn to read the world.
He was also building, because a man with carpenter’s tools and engineering knowledge in a growing town in 1856 was not a man who sat still. He put his hand to the first Methodist Episcopal Church in Ligonier, helping to raise the walls and frame the roof of a structure that became part of the permanent edifice — a building that would stand long after the men who built it were gone, which was the point of building, when you thought about it.
In October of 1857, he married Mary Moses of Perry Township.
She was a steady woman, practical in the Gerber tradition, and if she found it remarkable to be married to a man who taught school and built churches and surveyed county lines and was already making plans for a hardware store, she gave no particular sign of it. They set up housekeeping in Ligonier and they worked. That was what you did. You worked and you built and you trusted that the work and the building would amount to something, because the alternative was to stop, and stopping was not in the vocabulary.
The children came: Owen Franklin, whom everyone called O.F., and Delta and Minnie and Dwight — four children who survived, which in that era was something to be grateful for and not taken for granted.
In 1858 the voters of Noble County elected him County Surveyor, and he held the office until 1865, and in those seven years he came to know every section line and creek bed and property corner in the county the way a good surveyor knows his ground — not as data but as fact, as ground truth, as the world as it actually was. He published maps of Noble County and the adjoining counties from 1864 to 1867, careful work that towns grew on, that deeds depended on, that gave the land its legal shape.
He loved the survey work in a way he could not entirely explain. There was something about taking a piece of ground — wild, contested, undefined — and measuring it into certainty that satisfied him at a level deeper than commerce. The land was real. The measurements were true. Everything that came after — the deeds, the farms, the towns, the roads — rested on the accuracy of the lines he had drawn.
The war came in the spring of 1861, the way bad weather comes — not as a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention, but still somehow shocking when it arrived.
Jacob went.
EB stood on the porch of the farmhouse and watched his younger brother walk down the road in the late summer light and felt something move through his chest that he did not have a name for. Jacob was twenty-one, the age at which young men believe the arithmetic of their lives runs only in one direction, and he carried himself with the particular confidence of a man who has decided that a thing is necessary and has acted on that decision.
He turned at the bend in the road and raised his hand.
EB raised his in return.
That was the last time he saw Jacob whole and living.
He went back to work. There was nothing else to do. The county still needed surveying. The maps still needed publishing. The hardware store was taking shape in his mind, the kind of enterprise a town needed if it was going to be a town and not just a collection of farms. You kept building because the building was the answer to everything that couldn’t be fixed — the only answer that mattered, the only one that honored the people who were depending on you.
He kept building.
He listened for letters.
He was in the back of the store when it came.
He had known something was wrong since summer.
Jacob’s letters had stopped in July. EB had been running the arithmetic in the back of his mind even while he was doing everything else — surveying property lines, managing the hardware business, attending lodge meetings, being EB — the arithmetic of a man who has sent someone off to war and is counting the weeks since the last word came. Jacob was not the kind of man who stopped writing unless something had stopped him. The things that stopped soldiers from writing were a short list, and EB had been working through it since August, one entry at a time, arriving at the bottom of it with the particular dread of a man who has checked every other possibility and found them all foreclosed.
He read the letter standing among the stoves and the plow blades and the agricultural implements, in the smell of iron and oil that had become the smell of his working life.
Jacob J. Gerber. Private. Company C. 30th Indiana Volunteer Infantry. Died at Andersonville Prison, Georgia. September 3rd, 1864.
Twenty-four years old. Two years of fighting — Perryville, Stones River, the hard country of the Western Theater — and then taken prisoner at Chickamauga and carried south to that Georgia stockade where men had been dying by the thousands all through the summer, dying of disease and starvation and the particular cruelty of a war that had gone on too long and had stopped distinguishing between the men who fought it and the men who were merely caught in its machinery.
He had died the day after Atlanta fell.
EB walked to the front of the store.
He turned the sign to CLOSED.
He sat down behind the counter with his hands flat on the wood and looked at the afternoon light coming through the window and thought about a boy at a farmhouse table in Canton Township, Ohio, crowded in among eleven other children while their father waited for them to settle, the bread smell coming from the kitchen, the noise and the press and the life of a large family in a small house. He thought about Jacob on the road, the raised hand at the bend in the afternoon light. He thought about the lines he had drawn on the bluff above the Missouri, and the maps he had made of Noble County, and the church he had helped build, and the school he had taught in — all the things he had spent his life building — and he understood, with the clarity that comes only at moments of genuine loss, that everything he had built was, in some way, for the people he loved, and that one of those people was in the ground at Andersonville, Georgia, at the age of twenty-four, and that there was nothing to be done about it.
He sat behind the counter until the light changed in the windows.
Then he stood up.
He turned the sign back to OPEN.
He went back to work.
There was nothing else to do that honored Jacob as much as that.
He built a business the way he had built everything else — steadily, thoroughly, with an eye toward what the town would need next.
In January of 1869, he purchased the interest of Mr. Wadsworth in the firm of Wadsworth and Parker Hardware, and a year later bought out Parker as well, making himself sole proprietor of the whole establishment. The store carried a full line of hardware, stoves, tinware, and agricultural implements — everything a farmer, a builder, or a housewife in Noble County could need under one roof.
This was not a small-town hobby. In a place like Ligonier in the years after the war, the hardware store was the beating heart of the local economy — the place where every nail driven into a new barn came from, where every plow blade that turned the spring soil had been purchased, where every stove that kept a family warm through an Indiana winter had passed through someone’s hands on the way to its home. EB ran it the way he did everything: progressively, which in Noble County in the 1870s meant that he was already thinking about the next thing while he was doing the present thing.
In 1871 he joined with Treash and Kirchbaum to establish a foundry in Ligonier, because a town that could make things was a town that did not depend on outside supply for the things it needed. The foundry converted to a carriage manufactory by 1880, following the market the way a good businessman follows the market. In 1874 he and Carlton Jones started a handle factory, because handles were something people always needed and the raw materials were nearby and the logic was straightforward.
In the spring of 1866, his sister Christiana married Isaac William King.
Isaac was a good man — EB had always said so, had said it to Jacob in the last conversation they’d had before Jacob went off to fight, had meant it then and meant it more now, watching Isaac stand at the front of the church with the slight limp from the old injury on his right foot that three years of hard marching and the punishment of Missionary Ridge had compounded into something permanent. Isaac did not complain about the limp. He was the kind of man who had been tested in the fire and had come back steadier for it, which was what you wanted in a man who was going to stand beside your sister for the rest of her life.
EB stood at the front of the church in his good suit and watched his sister walk down the aisle and did not let his face say what the day cost him — the joy of it and the grief inside the joy, Christiana finally settled and safe with a good man, and the brother who should have been here to see it standing in the empty space beside him. Jacob would have wept. Jacob would have been undone completely and then made some joke about it to cover the evidence, and then wept again, and nobody would have minded.
EB kept his face steady. That was his job. He had always been the one who kept his face steady so the others could feel what they needed to feel. He was good at it. He had been practicing for a long time.
Benjamin died in 1881.
This one he had not anticipated — which was, he supposed, the difference between war and ordinary life. War you could prepare for, in the sense that you knew it was happening and you understood the arithmetic and you held your breath and waited for the letter. Benjamin drowned in the reservoir at Rome City on the fifth of June, along with his wife, who had been née Maxwell and had married him only three years before. Both of them gone. Benjamin was the tin man, the youngest of the family, the one who had run the tin department in EB’s own hardware store, who had come to work for his brother and whom EB had known every day of his working life for years.
He buried a brother who had died in a Georgia prison camp and another who had drowned in an Indiana lake, and he kept building.
Not because he was cold. Anyone who thought EB Gerber cold had not spent enough time watching his hands on the counter of the hardware store when a neighbor’s boy came in needing something he could barely afford, or watching him at the Masonic lodge when a member fell on hard times and needed help in the way that men of that era asked for help — indirectly, obliquely, in the particular language of fraternal obligation. He was not cold. He was simply a man who understood that the work was the answer, that you honored the dead by refusing to let their loss stop the living, that stopping was the one thing a man of his temperament could not do and retain the shape of himself.
He kept building.
He had served in nearly every civic office Ligonier had to offer, and then some.
Eden Township Trustee in 1856, when he was barely twenty-five. First Assessor of Ligonier after its incorporation. City Councilman for several terms. City Clerk. President of the City Council. School Trustee on the board that gave Ligonier its high school and its first proper high school building — something EB felt more strongly about than most people knew, because he had stood in that old red schoolhouse and taught the children of Noble County their letters, and he understood what a good school meant to the next generation in a way that men who hadn’t taught school sometimes didn’t.
The Masonic lodge was his particular pleasure — Knight Templar, Worshipful Master of Ligonier Lodge No. 185, F. & A.M., many times over. He belonged to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, to Apollo Commandery No. 19 of Kendallville. He attended lodge meetings the way other men attended church — with genuine feeling, with the sense that something important was being done, that the old obligations between men still mattered in an age that was moving fast and forgetting things.
In the fall of 1882, the voters of Elkhart, Noble, and DeKalb counties sent him to Indianapolis.
He was fifty-one years old and had lived in Noble County for twenty-seven years and had surveyed its ground and built its hardware stores and helped establish its foundries and raised four children and buried two brothers and watched his town grow from a frontier settlement into a place with streets and ordinances and a high school. He went to the General Assembly with the calm attention of a man who has spent fifty years paying close attention to what things cost and what they were worth.
He became an advocate for good roads.
This was not as modest a cause as it might sound. Indiana in the 1880s was a state where mud could swallow a wagon to its axles for half the year, where the distance between a farmer and his market was measured not in miles but in hours of misery on roads that became impassable in wet weather and barely tolerable in dry. Good roads meant commerce. Good roads meant that the farmer in Eden Township could get his corn to market in Ligonier without losing a day and a wagon wheel. EB knew this the way a surveyor knows it — in the bone, in the body, in the memory of a thousand mornings walking section lines through mud that grabbed at his boots.
He went back to Indianapolis in 1901. He was seventy years old, and he had not lost the appetite for improvement. He sat in the Assembly and he authored the first bill in the state of Indiana providing for voting machines.
It was not a grand legacy. It was not the kind of thing that got a man’s name on a building or a street. It was a piece of legislation, dry and technical, providing for a mechanical system that would make the act of voting more accurate and less susceptible to the corruptions that had plagued Indiana elections for decades. But when you walked into a polling place and pulled a lever or pressed a button, the machinery that made that possible had, somewhere far back in its lineage, a bill that a seventy-year-old hardware man from Ligonier had written and argued for and passed.
He thought that was enough. He had never needed his name on things. He had always been more interested in the things themselves.
The light moved on the ceiling.
Elias Baron Gerber lay in his daughter’s bedroom on Main Street in Ligonier, Indiana, and let his life run through him like a survey chain through his hands — link by link, each one measured, each one true.
He had helped plat a city on the Nebraska prairie. He had surveyed and mapped Noble County. He had built a church and taught school and run a hardware store that supplied half the farms in the township and started a foundry and a carriage works and a handle factory. He had served in the state legislature twice and written a law. He had presided over the Masonic lodge and sat on the city council and served as school trustee and advocated for good roads and voting machines at a time when both were novel ideas.
He had buried Benjamin, who had drowned in a lake in summer with his young wife, and that loss had made no sense and never would.
He had buried Jacob.
Jacob he had carried for fifty years, the way you carry a loss that lodges in the deepest place — not as grief exactly, because grief was what you felt in the first years and then you learned to set it down. Not as regret, because there was nothing he could have done. As presence. Jacob’s absence had a shape that EB could feel even now, even at eighty-four, a shape like the empty space beside Christiana at the front of the church on the day she married Isaac King, a shape like the wind through the stockade walls at Andersonville that Jacob had felt and EB had only imagined, which was perhaps worse.
He had watched Christiana make a life with Isaac King, had watched their children and grandchildren grow up in Noble County with both the Gerber and the King names in them — the German steadiness and the Indiana grit and the particular quality of people who had come through hard things and stayed standing.
He had done enough.
He thought about the sign.
That was what he came back to, at the end — not the legislation, not the maps, not the hardware store or the Masonic lodge or the survey chains or the city on the Nebraska prairie. He came back to that afternoon in the autumn of 1864 when he had stood among the stoves and the plow blades and read about Jacob, and had walked to the front of the store, and had turned the sign to CLOSED, and had sat behind the counter with his hands flat on the wood until the light changed in the windows.
And then had stood up.
And turned the sign to OPEN.
And gone back to work.
Because what else was there? What else did a man have, in the face of loss that couldn’t be fixed, except the work? The work was the answer. The work was the thing you did that said: I am still here, and the living need what I have to give, and Jacob would have understood this because Jacob understood everything important without being told.
The light in the room had changed.
It was half past four in the afternoon.
Elias Baron Gerber died quietly, in his daughter’s house, on Main Street in Ligonier, Indiana, with the apple trees in the yard and the sound of his daughter moving about downstairs and eighty-four years of building behind him.
He left behind, as they said in the newspapers, many friends.
He left behind a city on a Missouri River bluff, whose streets still ran in the directions he had laid out.
He left behind a county he had measured to the inch.
He left behind a town that was, in ways that would never be fully accounted for, his.
He had been a man who built things. There was nothing more to say, and nothing more needed.
Author’s Note: Elias Baron Gerber (1831–1915) was the son of David and Susanna Buechtel Gerber of Stark County, Ohio. He is buried in Ligonier, Noble County, Indiana. His sister Christiana Lena Gerber married Isaac William King of the 88th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in 1866; their story is told in The Scar He Carried. His brother Jacob J. Gerber — Private, Company C, 30th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, Andersonville Number 9731 — is buried in Andersonville National Cemetery, Sumter County, Georgia; his story is told in Jacob. E.B.’s obituary called him a man “prominent in Ligonier affairs for over fifty years” whose “gentle disposition endeared him to all who knew him.” Primary sources include the biographical sketch published in Counties of Whitley and Noble, Indiana: Historical and Biographical and E.B.’s obituary from April 1915. The scenes, dialogue, and interior lives are imagined. The facts are documented.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
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