| Photos taken at Kehler, Pennsylvania (Schuylkill Co.) Fall 2001 |  |
| The red building on the left was once the general store. The blue-gray house further down is where Albert Stehr lives. |
| Photos taken at Kehler, Pennsylvania (Schuylkill Co.) Fall 2001 | |
| The red building on the left was once the general store. The blue-gray house further down is where Albert Stehr lives. |
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| "Another adventure while we were staying at Barbara’s sister Katie’s house in Bethlehem, PA, was locating and driving out to what’s marked on the map as “Kehler, Pennsylvania.” It’s at the western tip of Schuylkill County, in a valley defined by steep mountain ridges. There is no sign; we just drove to what looked like the right hamlet, according to the survey map by which Barbara was navigating. First we went around to the back of one of the three houses and knocked. The young man who answered didn’t seem to know he was living in “Kehler,” so we asked if there weren’t some older person around who might know something of the history of the place. He steered us to Albert, across the street. I knocked on Albert’s front door. No answer. Then I walked around to the back, went up the wooden stairs, waded through a few cats and dogs, and knocked on that door. No answer. Finally, after rapping on a window, I made a dog bark inside the house, and that got Albert’s attention. |
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x x We talked for a while, and Albert was very friendly. I explained that we were looking for “Kehler, Pennsylvania” and he said, “Well, … I guess this must be it.” He took us around to the front of the house, and there, in the stained glass window above the door, you can read: “C. R. KEHLER.” He said he hadn’t lived in the house all that long, or even in that part of Pennsylvania, but that at one point he and his wife were ripping out some old wallpaper upstairs and they came across the name “Calvin Kehler.” I eventually said that I was a Kehler myself, to which he replied that his grandmother was also a Kehler: Maisy Kehler. So we guessed we were distant cousins. |
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| The most amusing story he told was that some people had come to the
house years before saying they had an old, locked strongbox, and that according
to family lore, the combination was written in the front closet of Calvin
Kehler’s house. Could they come in and look for it… They did, but the combination
had apparently disappeared.
So… how did the place get to be called “Kehler”? Well, back in Dillingersville, south of Allentown, where the Kehlers and the Dillingers (the two family names on our 1788 birth certificate) lived side by side, both ancestors having come across from Germany on the same ship in 1728, there also lived some Heplers, who had come to the new world 20 years later. A certain Casper Hepler, son of the man who came over in 1748, moved to a new valley in 1795, and apparently a Kehler or two did the same, and they ended up on adjoining lands. A few years later, two Kehler sons, George and Johannes Phillip, married two Hepler daughters, Catherine and Susanna. We are NOT, it seems, descended from these Kehler branches. I have yet to determine the exact relationship of George and Johannes Phillip to the Kehler clan in Dillingersville. |
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The cemetery at Kehler, Pennsylvania |
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| “Hepler, Pennsylvania” is also on the survey map, to the west of “Kehler.”
The current postal address for Kehler is “Pitman, PA.” The old, German
name for “Kehler, PA” as Albert pronounced it, sounded something like Kalbestädtl
(Calf town), since there was a big slaughterhouse there, and all the
neighbouring farmers used to drive their cattle overland for slaughtering
to a place across the road from Albert’s house.
I mentioned to Albert that the Kehlers and the Heplers had both come from Dillingersville. He nodded and said I should take a look at the book written by Avice Morgan [Avice Hepler Morgan], all about the Heplers, since it had a lot of Kehlers in it too. Then he said maybe he could find it somewhere inside the house. When he re-emerged ten minutes later, he was carrying a large-format book, about a thousand pages in length, and he said: “Here, you can have it; just get it back to me when you’re finished with it.” That evening back in Bethlehem, I looked at it and found many, many pages on the descendants of those two Kehler-Hepler unions. Just counting those who retained the surname “Kehler,” there were almost 200!" |