First-Generation Daflers, Part 4: Wesley Webster Dafler

This is the fourth in a series of deep-dive studies into each of the eleven children of John Wolfgang and Catherine Dafler.

Wesley Webster Dafler was the most well-documented Dafler of his family of birth and achieved what could be judged as the highest level of career success. Like his brother John, he leveraged early experiences in agriculture into the experience, network, and capital for a lucrative business of his own. He also was a strong supporter of his siblings, and benefited from their support as well. And due to his efforts, we have first-hand knowledge of many of the elements of the Dafler family history that would otherwise be lost to us.

Wesley was born on August 24, 1863, in Carroll County, Maryland. In what has become a familiar pattern, we have little in direct records of Wesley's early life. As was the case for his siblings like Melchior, we must rely on family records as the only information regarding his birthdate as no government records were taken and no church records regarding his birth or baptism have yet been found.

We face some conflicting evidence in terms of his birth name. It is quite clear from every record that Wesley generated that he referred to himself as "Wesley W. Dafler", and by adulthood that was certainly the way he preferred to be addressed. However, there are two outliers; both of which were not under Wesley's direct control. The most notable piece of evidence is in the probate documents from the death of his father John in 1887. A list of beneficiaries of John Wolfgang's estate was prepared by his third son, Christian Wolfgang, as part of the probate process. Each of John's living children is listed, but Wesley Webster Dafler does not appear on the list. Instead, we see a son with a name that appears in no other place:

Probate form listing all potential next of kin.

Why the difference here? I do not believe there is a missing son named Electious and that Wesley Webster was forgotten in the will. There are no other records that support that claim. Wesley certainly maintained warm relationships with his family (as he later was the steward of the family's story) and the idea that he would not have been mentioned in the will is hard to swallow. My working theory (nothing more than my best guess from the data I have) is that Electious may very well have been his birth name. Perhaps there was an "Electious Wesley" that was influential in John and Catherine's life - that would fit the pattern they used in naming their previous children, though I haven't found a likely connection in Carroll County records. By the time he could talk, someone (probably young Electious himself) found the name unwieldy, awkward, or otherwise problematic, and so he resorted to his middle name. By the time of the 1870 census, he was a six-year old listed as "Wesley E. Dafler", which would be consistent with this kind of name-change theory. But when the will came to probate, the family would have felt it necessary to use the name that appeared in the will or in the documents that gave legal provenance to the kinship relationship - hence, Wesley would have to be called Electious for one last time. To avoid confusion, I'll continue to use the most common appellation we see in the various records - Wesley Webster.

One of those key records that we have for Wesley's life is an entry in the 1919 book "Indiana and Indianans: A History of Aboriginal and Territorial Indiana and the Century of Statehood". These books were commonly compiled from self-submitted biographical notes and sold almost as vanity projects. (If you received an invitation to submit information regarding yourself or your child to "Who's Who in American High School Students" back in the 1990s, that's probably similar to the kind of book we're discussing here.) From this book, we get a pretty good sense of Wesley's life history to the age of 55.

From census records we are reasonably sure that Wesley moved with the majority of his family to Montgomery County, Ohio, in 1867, when he was four years old. Wesley started in agricultural work at age 9. In a pattern we see elsewhere in his family, Wesley was sent to work for other farm families in return for food, clothes and lodgings. By twelve, he was paid $6 per month for his farming services; by his seventeenth birthday he had received at least some intermittent schooling and had made $8 monthly for his farming work for the past three years.

During the harvest of 1881, the eighteen-year-old Wesley joined a threshing team - and this became the foundation of the rest of his career. Threshing machines at this time were not owned by each farmer. Instead, when harvest time came, a threshing team would operate the thresher at many different farms. The farmer would do the initial cutting of the grain. Once the wheat was dry, the thresher team would be responsible for the transport of the expensive steam engine and the thresher to the farm. While the threshing team ran the thresher to remove the grains of wheat from the wheat plant, the farmer (and often his extended family and neighbors) would handle the grain as well as the wheat straw that was ejected from the thresher.. (The women would be busy making the threshing-day meals - big spreads of simple, filling foods, along with harvest-time pies.) By 1883, Wesley was threshing in Kansas - a year before his older brother John traveled to Kansas with his brothers-in-law to invest in real estate near Council Grove. Wesley returned to Ohio in 1886 and threshed for four more seasons.

Wesley now began to leverage his experience as a thresher operator to more lucrative pursuits. He spent a few months in early 1886 as a salesman for Gaar, Scott & Co. - the same company that also employed John as a sales agent around this time. By 1891, at age 27, he left hands-on threshing and started work on threshing machine construction at the Gaar-Scott works in Richmond. However, a tragic workplace accident occurred in early 1893, which resulted in Wesley losing his left eye. Wesley turned to insurance - and family matters - for a while as a result. In January 1894, he was named as the prime complainant in the bigamy charges against his sister's apparent husband, Thomas Dillon. in 1895, he married Aletha Booker in Richmond, Indiana. The Booker family were committed Presbyterians; Wesley joined the Richmond United Presbyterian Church as well. Their first child, Hazel, was born in 1896.

His next big career step also occurred in 1896 with a return to Gaar-Scott, where he merged his agricultural and insurance experiences to become a traveling adjustor and collector. For the following five years he visited fifteen different states in the pursuit of his work. He took on roles of increasing responsibility for Gaar-Scott in the following years. By 1900 he was in sales; in 1901 he returned to the "home office" in Richmond and oversaw local sales for seventeen counties in Indiana and Ohio. He moved the family to Indianapolis in 1906 to lead the company's branch office there and remained with the company through their acquisition by Rumely.

The shutdown of Gaar, Scott & Co. left an opportunity for agricultural implement sales in Richmond, and Wesley partnered with another Gaar-Scott alum to found the Dafler-Moser Co. Wesley served as president and general manager of the company from its founding in 1915 until his death. The company sold a wide range of threshing machinery, farming implements, and agricultural supplies.

Artifacts from the Dafler-Moser Company. Note how the photo was chosen to conceal his missing left eye.

Wesley's home life was equally prosperous. He enjoyed over fifty years of marriage to Aletha, who was recognized as a "church mother" for her long years of service to her church. They had seven children:

• Hazel (1896-1997) married John Thorne in 1919; she worked as a librarian at the Morrisson-Reeves Library in Richmond.

• Anna (1899-1989) worked as a stenographer before marrying William Willson in 1923. She remained a lifelong resident of Richmond.

• George (1900-1978) moved to Chicago where he worked as a spring fitter. He married Ann Voss in 1925 and they had two children.

• Herschel (1902-2000) never married and worked for the Pennsylvania railroad. In 1940, he was a brakeman and considered the Hayes Hotel in Chicago his permanent address.

• Alice (1905-1999) also spent her entire life in Richmond. Like Anna before her, she worked as a stenographer as well as a secretary. She married Russell Robbins in 1929. They had two children.

• Robert (1911-2002) served in the Army during WWII, but his primary occupation was as an acclaimed organist. He never married.

• Richard (1916-2008) became an attorney - first in private practice, and later as a district attorney in California. He and his wife Dorothy had a single daughter.

Wesley died on October 18th, 1947 in Richmond, at the age of 84. He was walking home in the late evening hours, crossing Main Street at 7th to reach his nearby home. In the twilight, an oncoming motorist was dazzled by headlights of the traffic and didn't see Wesley in the crosswalk until it was too late to react. He died almost instantly as a result.

Wesley is one of the few Daflers who left us with a written legacy. His summary of the life of his parents, written in his own words, is the essential backbone of the Dafler family history as almost no official records exist of their activities before 1860. He concludes his story with this poem from Douglas Malloch, which, I believe, is his valediction of how the difficulties and troubles of his formative years gave him the strength to succeed as an adult:

Good Timber

The tree that never had to fight

For sun and sky and air and light,

That stood out in the open plain

And always got its share of rain,

Never became a forest king

But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil,

To gain and farm his patch of soil,

Who never had to win his share

Of sun and sky and light and air,

Never became a manly man

,But lived and died as he began.

Good timber does not grow in ease;

The stronger wind, the tougher trees;

The farther sky, the greater length;

The more the storm, the more the strength;

By sun and cold, by rain and snows

In tree or man good timber grows.

Where thickest stands the forest growth

We find the patriarchs of oak;

And they hold converse with the stars;

Their broken branches show the scars

Of many winds and much of strife—

Such is the common law of life.