Tulare County Biographies

MRS. IDA MARGARET KAEHLER

Transcribed by: Craig A Hahn

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm

 
     The highly esteemed woman whose name is above lives at No. 107 Hockett 
street, Porterville, Tulare county, Cal., and is a representative of an old 
German family. Ferdinand Rodler, her father, a native of the Fatherland, was 
born May 24, 1823, married in 1857 and came to the United States and devoted 
himself to the blacksmith trade. He was a fine mechanic, and being also a good 
business man, he prospered. He died at his home in Davenport, Iowa, March 10, 
1904, and his widow, formerly Johanna Louisa Paschke, is living there at the age 
of eighty-five years, having been born in March, 1828. Their daughter, Ida 
Margaret, was born in Davenport June 20, 1860, and when she became of school age 
entered the public schools of that city, in which she was a pupil until she was 
thirteen years old, when she was sent to Berlin, Germany, to finish her 
education. Returning to Iowa when she was sixteen years old, in 1878 she married 
N. M. Kaehler, and they had three children. Walter, the eldest, died young. 
Alfred, the second son, is living at Hobart, Ind., with his wife and two 
children. Ferdinand is a machinist at Porterville. 
 
     In 1884 Mr. and Mrs. Kaehler came to California and settled on White river, 
in Tulare county, where she lived six years. In 1890 she moved to Plano and in 
1902 from Plano to Porterville, which at that time was not a very promising 
village, having no railway facilities and few stores, its scanty population 
trading for the most part at Visalia. She now has a valuable and very attractive 
property, having built the house she occupies, and is concentrating her holdings 
in Porterville and vicinity, having sold her real estate at Plano. What she owns 
she has earned herself, owning unimproved property and an interest in the gas 
plant. Brought up in the Christian faith of her fathers, Mrs. Kaehler is 
devoutly religious, with faith in God and in her fellow men. She is firm in the 
belief that all people may become much better if they will learn the right and 
try to do it. 
 
SOURCE:  History of Tulare and Kings Counties, California with Biographical 
Sketches - Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company, 1913, Pp 496, 497