Fritz Fries

biography

FRITZ FRIES Was born June 9, 1830, at Tannersfeld, Governmental District of Coblenz, Rhine Province, Kingdom of Prussia. From his sixth to his eighth year he attended public school, then preparatory school, till he was ten years old when he entered Royal College in Wetzlar, in the same province. Having finished his studies there on the 21st of December, 1847, he entered the military service as volunteer. On the 3d of October, 1848, he deserted from Battery 37, 8th Brigade of Artillery, 8th Prussian army corps, and landed in New York the 30th of December the same year. Apprenticing himself to a baker in Williamsburg, Long Island, he served one year and accepted a situation as waiter on the steamer Prometheus, plying between New York and Chaqres, Isthmus of Panama. He made five trips and then became German and French tutor in an English family at Chaqres, remaining there till September, 1850. He then came to Pittsburg, arriving on Christmas of the same year, and lived alternately as waiter, clerk and private teacher. Here he married October 3d, 1862, a daughter of John Weaver, of Butler County. Left Pittsburg in July, 1863, “down the river,” and the next eight years were passed in various employments In Cincinnati, Louisville, St.Louis, Alton, and Jacksonville, Ill. At the breaking out of the war, Mr. Fries secured a sutlership in the 80th Illinois Volunteers. Then we find him in 1865 at the house of his father-in-law in Butler County. The next enterprise was to buy out a fashionable barber shop in Pittsburgh, which he carried on for four years and in the meantime editing and publishing a humorous German paper called The Barber Shop. In the spring of 1869 he sold out the shop and joined the staff of the Pittsburgh Volksblatt as local editor. Resigning this in 1874, he removed to Erie to engage in the book business but sudden illness compelled him to abandon the enterprise just as it was fairly begun, and again he returned to Butler County. In February, 1876, he once more sought Erie to resume the book business, and at the same time assisting on the editorial staff of the Lighthouse, a German daily. On the 20th of April, 1876, he established the Crawford County Post, the only German paper in the county. Of this he still remains editor and proprietor.

Directory of Crawford County, PA, 1879-80, page 236.