The Petri family's American story begins in the borderlands of Germany and Luxembourg, in a corner of Europe where the surname itself would not sit still — Petri, Petry, Pitry, and eventually Petrie, as one clerk after another set down what he heard. From that shifting old-country ground the family carried its name across the Atlantic and westward across a continent, from a mining town in the Grand Duchy to the German Catholic farm country of central Minnesota and, finally, to the pine and lake country of the north. This chapter follows that passage and the immigrant generation who made it, leaving the fuller account of John Petri's own life and marriage for later.
Rumelange, the Iron Town Left Behind
In the summer of 1875, John Petri was born in Rumelange, a town tucked into the far south of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, in the canton of Esch-sur-Alzette. It was not a sleepy old village but a place caught in the middle of a dramatic transformation. Rumelange sits at the southernmost edge of Luxembourg, hard against the French border, in the iron-ore basin known as the Minett, named for the reddish, phosphorus-rich rock called minette that lay in seams beneath the wooded ridges. For centuries the land had supported a modest rural population who farmed thin soils. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the ground beneath their feet turned out to be one of the richest concentrations of iron ore in western Europe.
By the time John was born, the mines were remaking the town. New steelmaking methods, developed in these very years, could finally exploit the high-phosphorus ore that had once been considered nearly worthless, and the whole southern basin became an industrial engine almost overnight. Galleries and open workings cut into the hillsides, narrow-gauge rail lines threaded the valleys, and the population swelled with men drawn to the paydirt — Luxembourgers from the countryside alongside Germans, Italians, and others who came to swing picks and haul ore. Rumelange's rhythms were set by the shift whistle rather than the seasons, and its social life was shaped by the hazards and camaraderie of dangerous underground labor. Through it all the town remained overwhelmingly Catholic, its parish church the center of community life and its register the spine of ordinary existence, marking each family's births, marriages, and deaths.
This was a formative era for Luxembourg itself. The Grand Duchy had only recently secured its neutrality and independence, confirmed by the Treaty of London in 1867, and was still finding its footing between far larger neighbors. Because the minette basin straddled the French, German, and Luxembourgish frontiers, the fortunes of Rumelange were tied to markets and politics well beyond its own valley — the German customs union that determined where its iron could be sold, the unification of Germany in 1871, and the lingering tensions of the Franco-Prussian War.
For all the wealth in the ground, the boom did not guarantee a good life to the families who dug it out. Wages were modest, work was perilous, and a growing population meant real competition for jobs and living space. Across Luxembourg in these decades, tens of thousands chose to emigrate rather than stay, and the United States — with its promise of cheap land and open homesteads — was among the most common destinations. That was the current that carried the Petri family out of Rumelange in 1891, trading the iron hills of southern Luxembourg for the forests of the American Upper Midwest.
Mathias Petri and Katherine Riel, the Immigrants
The Petri story in America begins with Mathias Petri, born 13 February 1846 in the German lands near the Luxembourg frontier — quite possibly the Mathias Petry whose birth was recorded in Saarland a day earlier than the date carved on his gravestone, a small discrepancy not uncommon in households where birthdates were just family memories. It was a place of modest means, where a young man of working stock knew the rhythms of field and forge; when he crossed the ocean, he did so as a laborer.
Around 1875 he married Katherine Riel, born in Germany on 6 October 1848, the daughter of Phil Riel and Christen Mattheus. The Germany of her childhood was not yet a unified nation but a patchwork of kingdoms and principalities, and the middle decades of the century saw wave after wave of its people depart for the United States. Katherine and Mathias made the great decision together, remembered in the history of Liberty Township as emigrating "as a young couple."
Mathias was the first of the line to leave the old country. In the spring of 1891 he gathered his family and four pieces of luggage and boarded the Westernland, a Red Star Line ship running from Antwerp to New York. The passenger manifest listed him among seven travelers, all laborers, bound from Germany toward Albany, New York. They arrived on 1 April 1891, processed through the Barge Office at the tip of Manhattan — the immigrant depot that served the port in the years before Ellis Island opened its doors. Their eventual home lay far to the west.
A Foothold at Avon
The Petris first settled in Avon, a small town in Stearns County, Minnesota, south of St. Cloud in the rolling, lake-strewn country of the central part of the state. Here they appear in the Minnesota state census of 1895 — Mathias and Katherine with their sons John, Champy, Victor, and Edward. Stearns County in this era was one of the most thoroughly German settlements in all of Minnesota, and Avon shared fully in that character. The great migration that filled these townships had drawn Catholic families from the German states, from Luxembourg, and from the Rhineland and Saarland borderlands — precisely the region from which the Petris themselves had come. German was the language of the home, the store counter, and often the church, and for an immigrant couple who had arrived with little more than they could carry, Avon offered something precious: a community where their language was spoken, their faith practiced, and their customs shared.
The town owed its growth to the railroad. The Great Northern line running west from St. Cloud toward the Dakota country passed through Avon, and like countless small communities across the upper Midwest, the village existed largely because the rails did — a depot, a grain elevator, a general store, a church, and a clustering of frame houses along the tracks, a shipping point for the surrounding farm families. The economy ran on agriculture, and men of families like the Petris took up the work of farmers and laborers as the county shifted steadily from wheat toward dairying and diversified crops.
The mid-1890s were hard years across rural America. The Panic of 1893 had thrown the nation into a severe depression, collapsing banks, crippling railroads, and driving down the prices farmers received. Yet central Minnesota, with its diversifying farms, weathered the depression somewhat better than the single-crop wheat regions of the plains, and a German Catholic community built on thrift and mutual aid had reserves of resilience that carried it through lean years. For the Petris, though, Avon was never a final destination. It was a foothold, a place to gain footing before moving on to newer country as the frontier of settlement crept north toward the pine lands.
North to Liberty Township
In the late 1800s Mathias and his eldest son, John, struck out for the newly opening lands of Beltrami County, walking the trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji through the timber and lake country of the northern frontier. Both took up homesteads: Mathias and Katherine claimed land in Section 6 of Liberty Township, while John took ground near Long Lake.
Liberty Township sits in the north-central reach of Minnesota, in the transition zone where the great pineries give way to lake country and cutover farmland — a landscape of low glacial hills, boggy lowlands, tamarack swamp, and countless small lakes, Long Lake among them. When the first homesteaders arrived, they entered a country still largely covered in standing white pine. Roads, where they existed at all, were rough affairs; much of the low ground had to be crossed on corduroy — logs laid crosswise over swamp and muskeg — and men of this family helped lay that corduroy by hand on the Long Lake road. This was not a settled countryside but a place being wrestled into shape one clearing at a time.
The economy ran on two inseparable things: logging and homestead farming. A man cut timber in the winter, when frozen ground and snow made it possible to haul logs, and farmed the cleared land in the summer, combining it with trapping, hunting, and fishing to make a living stretch. Logging camps operated throughout the region, feeding woodsmen who lived rough in the bunkhouses, and falling timber was lethal work — a dropped tree could end a life in an instant. The township was never a town in the ordinary sense but a scattering of farmsteads knit together by shared labor, one-room schools like the Long Lake School, and gathering halls such as the Deer Lake Community Club. The population was heavily immigrant and largely Northern European, carrying surnames from Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Scandinavia; Catholic and Lutheran families lived side by side and helped each other move houses and search the woods for the lost. Nearby Bemidji, the county seat, gave the township a market town, a hospital, and the place where records were filed and the dead were buried.
The censuses trace the family's steadiness in this country — at Beltrami in 1900, in Liberty Township in 1905, again in 1910, and once more in 1920 — the rootedness of a family that had at last found the ground on which it meant to stay. In 1921 Mathias suffered a stroke that confined him to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. For a man who had crossed an ocean, walked the wilderness trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji, and broken new ground with his own hands, these final years brought a hard stillness. He died on 31 August 1925, at the age of seventy-nine, and was buried at Bemidji. Katherine outlived him, settling by 1930 into the town of Bemidji itself, where she spent her final years. She died in Beltrami County on 12 June 1932, in her eighty-fourth year, and was buried beside Mathias in the county she had helped to settle. From a birthplace in the German states to a grave in the northern reaches of Minnesota, her life had traced the long westward journey of her generation.
The Four Sons
Mathias and Katherine raised four sons, and the branches of the family spread outward from the homestead. John Petri, the eldest, was born 24 August 1875 in Rumelange — his birth certificate finally located in Europe after a long search. He came to America with his family in 1891 and grew into a man of some standing in Liberty Township. His life and marriage belong to a later chapter; here it is enough to note that he was the one from whom later generations of the family descend.
Edward Petri, the second son, was born about 1879 in Germany. He appears in the Minnesota state census of 1895 and lived for a time at Avon, but after that the trail goes cold. He died sometime after 1910, and the later course of his life remains uncertain — one open question being whether he may have gone by the name Edward Dubois.
Champy Peter Petri, the third son, was born 20 May 1888 in Belgium. A farmer by trade, he married three times over the course of his life. On 3 September 1914 he married Sarah Marie Malterud, a Minnesotan, and the couple settled in Section 10 of Liberty Township, where they had two children, John William, born in 1915, and Catherine Mary, born in 1920. Champy's path later crossed once more with his late brother's family: on 10 May 1946 he married Gertrude Marie Helbig, John's widow and, by then, twice widowed. The couple moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a few years before returning to Liberty Township, where Champy died 4 November 1962.
Victor M Petri, the fourth son, was born 16 July 1890 in Germany. Of the four brothers, he was the one who left Minnesota for the north: he married Clara B Roen on 16 November 1916 and eventually settled across the border in the Rainy River District of Ontario, where he died in 1964, at Chapple.
From Mathias and Katherine, the first of the line to cross the Atlantic, the family had by the close of this generation spread from the iron hills of Luxembourg to a homestead in Section 6 of Liberty Township, with sons rooted at Long Lake, drawn north into Ontario, and — in Edward's case — lost from the record altogether. The pine trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji had become the family's American ground, and it was there, near Long Lake, that John Petri's own household would take shape.