First-Generation Daflers, Part 6: Lewis Phillip Dafler
- Wes Dafler
- Dec 15, 2025
- 7 min read
This is the sixth in a series of deep-dive studies into each of the eleven children of John Wolfgang and Catherine Dafler.
Lewis Phillip Dafler was born on March 4th, 1853, the fourth son and fifth child of John and Catherine Dafler. Once again, no records can be found of his birth, baptism, or any elements of his early life in Maryland except for his appearance in the 1860 census. He may have been named after a neighbor of the Dafler family. We also have no record of when he moved from Maryland to Ohio, but due to his age (14 in 1867), I believe he traveled to Ohio when his parents did and not as part of the earlier contingent led by his older brothers.
By 1870, the seventeen-year-old Lewis was helping his father with the farm and attending school. When the census taker visited, Lewis lived with four siblings (the youngest child, Upton, would be born two months later) and two children of his brother John: his 3-year old nephew John Henry and his 2-year-old niece Sarah. These children were cared for by their grandparents after their mother died; John couldn't work the farm and mind two toddlers simultaneously. Just a few farms to the west, a young girl was growing up with her father and stepmother. I don't know if they met in school, in church, or in the general store in Johnsville, but the result was the same: Lewis married Martha Alice Stockslager on Dec. 20, 1877 in Slifer's Evangelical Lutheran Church near Farmersville. It was a double wedding; Caleb Gilbert married Alice's sister Catherine the very same day.
Lewis initially began farming in Montgomery County as a tenant farmer, working Charles Deam's land just to the east of his father-in-law's farm. His first children were born there - Maude in 1879; Lawrence in 1881. Lewis farmed this land in conjunction with other tenants; crops included oats, barley and wheat. In 1882, Charles Deam sold this farm to new owners, and made a deal to sell the straw associated with the currently growing crops to the new owners. Somewhere along the line, the tenants didn't get the message - and ended up in court when they didn't hand over the straw. A jury of their peers said the new owners had a right to the straw, but the jury also didn't think the straw was worth the $250 the new owners demanded and awarded just $4 instead.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Lewis left Ohio the following year. Tenant farming is challenging and he was not growing wealth. He'd been entangled in a court case that, regardless of the merits, demonstrated to him the powerlessness he had to control the fruits of his labors until he owned the land he worked. In 1883, a party departed from Ohio to work the fertile soil of Kansas. The party included John Earhart Dafler, the Lewis Dafler family, Lewis's younger brother Wesley Webster, and several of John Earhart's in-laws from the Kilmer family. Lewis bought a 60-acre farm south of Navarre, Kansas,
Of all the places to farm - why Kansas? Why would John take his brothers and brothers-in-law across the country for a farm? First, let's compare the Kansas farm to Lewis's father's farm in Johnsville.
John Wolfgang owned a 5-acre farm, which appraised for $1200 after his death in 1887. Five acres is on the lower end of sufficient for feeding a milk cow and maybe some chickens or hogs for meat, plus the various vegetable and grain crops with which to feed your family. Very little opportunity would exist for a cash crop on that size of property after the family's food production was accounted for. And there's no guarantee that a farm would even be for sale in the area. This plat map from 1875 shows a fully-owned grid in this part of Montgomery County - representative of all of Montgomery County's townships:
In Kansas, Lewis bought 60 acres of farmland in 1883. For $637.50 - about half the assessed value of his father's farm - he got twelve times the productive land area. With this acreage, Lewis could be both self-sufficient and grow cash crops. The income would allow him to be comfortably middle class of his neighbors, though he didn't have children old enough to help with the harvest and would have had to hire help at peak times. The drawback: he was many miles from family and major cities.
The second factor: this real estate transaction was just one deal in a greater land boom. The 1862 Homestead Act had given a clear and inexpensive path to landownership for the price of five years' labor. Twenty years later, the frontier of Kansas had been somewhat subdued. A second generation of settlement took hold in the 1880s. The promise of cheap land, funded by easy credit, was a strong inducement. As I read summaries of this era, I see parallels with the early-2000s real-estate boom fueled by house-flippers and easy credit.
Finally - this particular corner of Kansas was not selected at random. Dr. P. R. Wrightsman - doctor, land agent, farmer, conscientious objector, and preacher in the Church of the Brethren - moved to Dickinson County, Kansas around 1880. In 1887 he would found the town of Navarre; he established its Brethren church in 1889. Dr. Wrightsman's history is fascinating. Born in Virginia in 1834, he successfully petitioned the Confederate Congress to exempt the Brethren from military service. After the war, he studied medicine at the Eclectic Medicine College in Cincinnati (the same institution that educated Rosanna Kepler's husband Andrew), graduating in 1868. He spent the next three years in Dayton, Ohio, then to South Bend, Indiana (see "Holsinger's History of the Tunkers and the Brethren Church", pp. 406-410, for his biography and even more amazing evangelistic tales). P. R. Wrightsman connects to the Dafler story through his younger brother John B. Wrightsman. John preached in the Preble and Montgomery County area and married Elizabeth Kilmer. When John Wrightsman died in 1869, his widow Elizabeth met the widower John Earhart Dafler and married him in 1870. It seems clear that through this family and congregational connection, John E. and Elizabeth Kilmer Dafler kept in touch with P. R. Wrightsman, and they shared his offers to help establish Midwestern settlers in Kansas with both their Dafler and Kilmer relatives.
Kansas posed significant challenges to all of its new residents - principally in the form of severe weather in magnitudes not seen in Ohio. Dust storms sprang up, seemingly at random, and whipped the landscape. The spring dust storm season in 1884 was moderate, and 1885 was a wet year with few storms and good crop yields. Fortunes turned in 1886. After snowstorms in January, the precipitation stopped and much of Kansas was in drought conditions by July. Wesley Webster worked the 1886 harvest and returned to Ohio afterwards, in search of more clement climes. By 1887 the drought had ended the 1880 land boom and dust storms were so severe that the light of the rising sun didn't illuminate the sky until two hours after dawn. Cattle and crop losses alike were severe.
Lewis and his family survived these difficult conditions, and even welcomed two more children to the family in 1885 and 1888, but 1891 marked the end of their Kansas expedition. The farm sold for $1200 in May - nearly doubling their original investment - and the Daflers sold their remaining household goods that fall. Advertisements for the sale offered two horses, four "good milk cows", and 18 pigs, along with the farm implements for horse-drawn agriculture. From the house, Alice offered nearly everything - stoves, chairs, carpet, clock, pots, pans, and even the kitchen sink. By December 1891 the Lewis Dafler family - the last of the Daflers in the Kansas expedition - departed for Ohio. Their final two daughters arrived after their return to Ohio, born in 1893 and 1895.
Lewis and his family were reestablished as tenant farmers in the 1900 census. They ended up not far from their last farmstead, just north of the pike in Perry Township. By 1912 they moved to the corner of Maple Street on the south side of Main Street in New Lebanon and Lewis continued farming nearby.
Lewis and Alice had seven children:
Maude (1879-1976). Maude married Charles Kreitzer, a local farmer and carpenter, in 1901; they had two children.
Lawrence (1881-1946). Lawrence worked in the shipping and railway industry and lived his adult life near Spokane, WA. There he married Anna Lindgren, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, in 1913. They had no children. Lawrence drowned in the Spokane River in 1946; the authorities believed it to be a case of suicide.
Harvey (1883-1976). Harvey lived in the New Lebanon area for most of his life and worshipped in the New Lebanon Church of the Brethren. He and his wife Naomi (or "Oma") had two daughters; they also served as foster parents to twin boys. Their daughter Mary Alice served in several roles at Ashland College, including Dean of Women and Registrar.
Howard (1885-1972) lived in New Lebanon as well. He never married nor had children.
Sadie (1888-1979) married Clyde Snyder in 1914. They had one daughter, Hazel, who died in 1960 at the age of 41. Sadie and Clyde lived a modest life - she often cooked in restaurants or schools; he worked in construction.
Mae (1893-1985) and Alda (1895-1992) will be subjects of our next blog post.
On December 24th, 1927, Lewis and Alice celebrated their golden wedding anniversary at a lavish party near West Alexandria. Just like their wedding, the anniversary was a double celebration as Caleb and Catherine Gilbert joined them for the celebration.
Alice died on August 17, 1929 - a few months after John Earhart Dafler died. Lewis was reportedly despondent after her death, and by October he had fallen ill as well. On October 11th, 1929, the seventy-six years of endurance in the face of weather, the backbreaking labor of agriculture, the whims of petty landowners, and the ravages of age, illness and death added up to a burden he could no longer bear. Lewis Phillip Dafler left a legacy that spoke to the importance of believing in yourself and boldly taking a chance - attributes that have come up often in our family history and strengths I believe present-day Daflers inherited as a result.
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