The northern reaches of Spokane County — the small farming communities of Milan, Elk, Deer Park, and Chattaroy, set among pine-covered hills and the Wild Rose Prairie country — form the ground on which two family lines came together in the marriage of Herman Carl Daubel and Thressa Lillian Strong. Both were born and raised within a few miles of each other in eastern Washington, and both spent nearly the whole of their lives there. Their union brought together the Daubel family, who had cleared their farms out of heavy timber at the turn of the century, and the Strong family of the Deer Park and Riverside country.
The Daubel Family at Milan
The Daubel family traced its roots to Bonfeld in Württemberg, Germany, and came to America in search of its freedoms. In 1898 Charles Daubel arrived in the Milan area of Spokane County together with his family, coming by way of Hannover, Kansas.
Charles married Maria "Mary" Anna Rudolph and raised eleven children — six girls and five boys — on that hard-won land. There was no doctor near at hand, and a neighbor, Mrs. Staley, served as midwife for every one of the births. It was a mark of family pride that all eleven brothers and sisters were still living in 1971.
Herman Carl Daubel
The eldest of Charles and Mary’s eleven children was Herman Carl Daubel, born 18 May 1903 in Milan. He grew up in a raw, forested world he recalled vividly in later years. Shopping meant driving a horse into Milan, and whatever could not be found there required a train ride into Spokane. His first schooling took place at the Muhle School, which stood across the road from the Henry Hoener place; on some days there was no recess at all, because cougars came close enough to make it unsafe to let the children outside. He later attended the Deer Creek School, walking three miles each way. When the younger Daubel children finished their education at Milan, it was Herman who drove the team that gathered up the neighborhood children and carried them along — earning fifteen dollars a month for the task, and running, as he liked to say, the area's first school bus.
Work came early and stayed with him. He hired out first for the Spokane Lumber Company at Milan, then for Edwards and Bradford at Elk, and continued in the woods until 1930, when he left the area for a few years to work on a farm on the coast. During this time he spent a stretch in Olympia, in Thurston County, working for his uncle Philip; when Philip died, Herman moved back home to the Chattaroy country that had shaped him. A quiet man by all accounts, he had by then run the full course of the region's livelihoods as farmer and logger.
Thressa Lillian Strong
Thressa Lillian Strong was born 10 August 1915 in Deer Park, in Spokane County, the daughter of William “Will” Strong and Josephine Lillian Spence — her middle name a quiet echo of her mother's. By 1920, and again in 1930, her family was living in Riverside, in Stevens County, a rural community of small farms, timber, and hard work. Thressa attended Deer Park High School, coming of age in the years when the Great Depression fell hard on the farming families of the inland Northwest.
It was through her father that she met the man she would marry. Herman was working for Will Strong when the two became acquainted; he was somewhat older than she, and their courtship grew out of the everyday world of farm labor and family life.
Marriage and Family
Herman came home to marry Thressa on 6 November 1937 in Spokane, she being twenty-two years old and he thirty-four. He worked in the woods for a while and farmed, and while still farming took up work at the Aluminum Plant of America at Mead as a heavy-duty man. When operations passed to Kaiser Aluminum, he stayed on there for fifteen years — a life that bridged two eras, from the hand-cleared homestead of his boyhood to the industrial wage work of the mid-century Northwest.
The family's life in the Elk years was shaped by sudden decisions. For a time they lived with Uncle Louie, until one day Herman spoke with him, came back out, and announced simply that they were moving, and the family relocated into Ludwig's home. In 1940 Herman and Thressa were living near Elk; by 1950 they had settled in Chattaroy, and it was Chattaroy that anchored the family for decades to come.
Their marriage was blessed with three girls and three boys. The eldest was Verla Doreen Daubel, born 16 May 1938 in Spokane, who married Donald Dean Hayes on 23 June 1956 and lived for a time in Plummer, Idaho, just across the state line. Charlotte Anne Daubel was born 28 November 1939 in Elk — then a bustling town served by a railroad — where she attended school before going on to Riverside High School; on 6 July 1957 she married Vern Robert Petrie, and their story belongs to the chapter that follows. Harold Herman Daubel, known as Bud, was born 2 December 1940 in Deer Park, married Karen L. Roberts on 14 September 1968, and lived his life in Chattaroy, where he died on 11 February 2024 in Spokane. Dorothy Gay Daubel was born 17 June 1942 in Deer Park, married Bruce H. King on 17 September 1960, and made her home in Chattaroy. Larry Dale Daubel was born 26 October 1945 in Spokane, married Marlene K. Malek on 20 May 1972, and divided his years between Deer Park and Chattaroy. The youngest, Delbert Earl Daubel, was born 23 August 1952 in Spokane, married Susan Dawn Kluver on 15 April 1978, lived in Chattaroy, and died on 21 February 2020 in Spokane.
Later Years
By 1971, when Herman was profiled in a local Senior Citizen Spotlight, the household had grown into a wide family circle of six children and thirteen grandchildren, and that Christmas all of them came home. His pleasures in retirement were plain and companionable — he and Thressa attended the Deer Park Auction Sale and went fishing, and he kept his hand in the land by raising a few calves and pigs. The boy who had once driven a horse into Milan for the family shopping had, by the end of his working life, put in fifteen years at an aluminum plant, a quiet measure of how thoroughly the world of his childhood had given way.
Herman died of a heart attack on 12 January 1977 in Chattaroy, in the same corner of Spokane County where he had been born nearly seventy-four years earlier, and was buried in Spokane. Thressa outlived him by a quarter of a century, dying on 17 April 2002 in Mead, and was likewise buried in Spokane.
Across three generations the family had stayed rooted in the northern reaches of Spokane County — in Milan, Elk, Deer Park, and above all Chattaroy — never straying far from the land the Daubel brothers had cleared from heavy timber at the turn of the century. From this settled country the next thread of the story leads outward, through Charlotte's marriage to Vern Robert Petrie.