What did Dick Dibble own and when did he own it?
The information collected so far doesn't allow for precision. At some future date, a review of deed transfers and other records in Goodhue County may provide better answers. In the meantime, the narrative is based on the following:
Dick's grandson Richard reports that "Dick did very well by selling meat to the Army during WWI and prior - which started him on the way of buying buildings in downtown Cannon Falls and later a farm to raise his own meat (without middlemen)...[Dick's wife] Bertha had a sister, Eve, and Eve's husband Ed [Wilson] was the local barber. I remember Dick setting him up in one of his buildings [in] downtown Cannon Falls, rent free."
From Cannon Falls - Remembered, published by the Dakota County Geneological Society: "Mr. E. [Eli Ellsworth, the grandfather of Dan Dibble's wife Isabelle Sanders] ... erected a frame store building on the north side of Mill St. seventy by sixty feet, two stories in height with one story for a living house. The site of this building is now occupied by the R. Dibble, Aug. Eklof and O. F. Peters block."
The Chronicles of Cannon Falls (1976) states that the Cannon Falls post office was located in the "Dibble Block" on Mill St. "(now Lampert Storage)" from 1915 to about 1925.
In 1886, the Cannon Falls Beacon reported that Tanner & Dibble occupied a 2-story frame building.
Heidi Holmes-Helgren, of the Cannon Falls Museum, reports, "I have a book called Roots and Wings... On page 138 the picture on the top right has a street scene from the late 1880's. It shows the names of the businesses but the one that you would be interested in is the saloon next to Scofield Drug store. This was owned by Kowitz's and later by the Dibbles for their meat store."
Let's start with this photo. (It appears on Page 6 of this site--"Big Farms, Little Towns on the Prairie"--as "West side of 4th. St. looking north from Main St. Cannon Falls, late 1800s".) The caption in Roots and Wings indicates that Dibble Bros. Butcher Shop stood about 4 buildings south of Mill St. Ms. Helgren, who says that Roots and Wings contains several inaccuracies, puts Dick's shop 5 buildings further south. None of the buildings in the photo is a 2-story frame building like that described in the Beacon. The more northerly candidate is brick and has only one story. Depending on how many windows each store had, the shop next to Scofield Drugs would also be brick and have either one or two stories. Of course, Dick's shop probably burned in the 1887 fire. No doubt he would have rebuilt using brick just as all the other merchants on the street did, but would he have downsized from two stories to one?
Earlier photos of the same block (including one displayed on Page 6 of this site and captioned, "Some of Cannon Falls' earliest businesses") show several frame buildings, and one, taken no later than 1878, shows part of a 2-story frame building north of Scofield's where Ms. Helgren puts the shop. This may later have been the site of Dibble and Tanner, but that building probably burned in the 1884 fire as well as its successor in 1887. The fires, of course, complicate things significantly; while many of the businesses on Fourth St. were rebuilt, they may well have occupied quite different "footprints" than they did before they burned.
If Ms. Helgren's statement that the Dibble Bros. shop originally housed Kowitz's saloon is correct, then the location occupied by Dibble Bros. in 1889 and thereafter would most likely not be the Geering shop that Dibble and Tanner bought in 1882. Geering had already been there for a few years, and Kowitz, who started his brewery in 1876, would most likely have started his saloon a few years later, after Geering's shop opened.
There are two saloons in the photo described by Ms. Helgren. One, whose owner is not identified by the caption, is north of Scofield's; the other, just north of the building the caption calls Dibble Bros., is said to belong to Ole Olson. That designation, however, may be just as erroneous as anything else in the book.
A photo that Roots and Wings says is from "the early 1900's" (on Page 8 of this site--"Between Two Wars"--as "West side of 4th. St. looking north from Main St. Cannon Falls, early 1900s") shows a barber pole outside the building that the late 1800s photo's Roots and Wings caption seems to indicate held Dibble Bros. This may have been Ed Wilson's barbershop, and if so, it lends creedence to the more northerly site as being a building Dick owned. And there is a photo from the 1930s (on Page 8 of this site, as "West side of 4th. St. looking south, Cannon Falls, 1930s") in which a shop about one door south of where the barber shop was in the early 1900s displays a sign that says "Quality Meats". This might be Dick's shop, though by then Dick may not have been running it.
Earlier in our narrative Kowitz's saloon is described as being next door to, and possibly in the same building with, Dick's shop. The above evidence neither decisively rules out that possibility nor definitively supports it. However, one could speculate that Dick's holdings first expanded after his father-in-law Ferdinand Kowitz's death in 1897. Kowitz's eldest son, Ferdinand Jr., was already dead and his other sons, George, aged 17 or 18, and Herman, 15 or 16, were too young to take on a business. His oldest daughter was Bertha, Dick's wife. Ferdinand may have left the saloon to Bertha and/or Dick, it being as close as next door to Dick's shop. Of course, Dick may have owned other buildings on Fourth Street, perhaps including any between his shop and the Kowitz saloon; we just don't know.
With income from the butcher shop and a tenant next door or down the street, Dick probably bought into Mill Street next. The precise location or extent of his holdings there aren't clear either, but they were on the north side of the street between the Little Cannon River bridge and the First National Bank (which occupied the site of the early Ellsworth House hotel). This distance is perhaps a bit longer than most Cannon Falls city blocks. A photo from around 1920 (judging from the cars) shows a building with a sign on its roof that says "Lampert [unreadable]" on Mill St. just east of the bridge. This area was just a few doors north and around the corner from the butcher shop. We can comfortably assume that Dick owned this property by 1915, when the Post Office was moved there, but he may have bought it well before then.
It was probably well after he bought the Mill St. "block" that Dick acquired the cattle farm southeast of town on Spring Garden Road, and perhaps as late as after the end of World War I, as his namesake suggests.
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Where and when did Archie Dibble serve?
The only record we have for Archie's military service is his Honorable Discharge paper. This document reports simply that he was wounded on October 3, 1918 and that the last unit he was assigned to was Company A, 7th. US Engineers. Our narrative assumes this was the only unit he served with, but that could be wrong.
If it's not, then a larger problem is presented by the date of his wounding. The 7th. Engineers were attached to the 5th. Division. The 5th. was involved in both the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. However, several sources concur that the 5th. Division was taken off the line after St. Mihiel, on September 16 or 17, and did not return to the front until October 11 or 12, when it joined the post-Argonne phase of the offensive. If all this information is correct, then Archie would not have been wounded in combat. However, he received a Purple Heart medal, which can only be awarded for an injury caused by enemy action.
There are a few possible solutions to this puzzle. The Meuse-Argonne campaign began on September 26, and Pershing's forces began drawing on their reserves almost immediately. While the 5th. Division is not recorded as being part of the designated reserve contingent for that operation, it may be that men were drawn from it anyway, and Archie could have been one of them. A second possibility is that Archie's unit, while not on the front line, may not have been moved very far back while it waited for reinforcements and provisions. A stray bullet, or more likely an artillery bombardment shell, might have found its way to him behind the lines. It may also be that an error was made on Archie's discharge papers. Suppose the wrong month was entered and the wound occurred on November 3. Archie's unit, the 7th. Engineers, was definitely in combat then, having just built a bridge across the Meuse River and crossed to the east bank where withering German fire pinned them and several brigades of infantry down for a full day.
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Where did Herman Kowitz die?
Herman's obituary, probably in the Cannon Falls Beacon, says he died at Forsythe, MT, which is about 90 miles east of Great Falls. The less-reliable Roots and Wings says he was shot in Hysham, MT, some 60 miles northeast of Billings. While it's certainly possible that he was shot in one town and died in another, these two towns are a good 100 miles apart, and there were no medivac helicopters, and probably not even a motor ambulance, to take him from one to the other. In short, we don't really know where this happened.
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