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by Sue Orsen The Victoria Gazette Prior to this May 2015 issue of the Victoria Gazette, there existed nowhere a list of the mayors of the City of Victoria, much less the years that they served, and most certainly not photographs of them en masse. It is quite a continuing collective centennial journey. The demise of people and memories and lack of complete records in any one location made it difficult. Some records from the early days are simply missing. Thankfully, there is at least a small stash of documents at the Victoria City Hall that are navigable for the stalwart soul. I starting paging through them in mid April. It turned out that the best source of information is the Library and Archives at the Minnesota Historical Society, which I only came to visit at the very end, on May 1st. Do you want to know the whole story? It was not as bad as looking for needles in a haystack. It was more like looking for fishhooks hiding in many different tackle boxes and I couldn't even find the tackle boxes to start with. *** Initially, I was only seeking to compile a list of names. Who were the mayors of Victoria over these past 100 years? A simple list, that was all. In speaking to lifetime and longtime residents, I never encountered one who was able to answer the question, "Who was the first Mayor of Victoria?" There was mention of only some of the early names and definitely not accurate dates nor chronology. Such are the ravages of time. I already knew the names and had personal photos of mayors from 1970 and forward. Mayor Jerome Aretz was my introduction to Victoria in 1971 even before we began digging the foundation for our new home that fall. Where to start in my quest for the complete and accurate list of the earliest names? Google, of course. But something has to be written or compiled and scanned and published online before it can be googled. In other words, Google isn't magic. It depends on real live people doing homework and writing historical feature stories and making information available. So I contacted Jennie Kretsch, Victoria City Clerk. She said the earliest available council minutes only begin in the late 1960's, so she suggested I check the city ordinances, which date back to 1916, shortly after Victoria's incorporation in December 1915. Ordinances are signed by mayors and clerks and so I'd surely get the names. That I did! (Or so I thought.) Victoria ordinances dated from 1916 into the 1970's are contained in two large three-holed binder books along with frail and yellowed newspaper clippings of the ordinances as published in the Chaska or Waconia newspapers. The binder books were helpful to me in putting together the first pieces of the puzzle. I got the names of early Victoria mayors and the order in which they served. I thought I found them all. I was pleased, but then my mission expanded because I now wanted to know which years each of them served as mayor and things weren't matching up just exactly right. There were some years in which no ordinances were passed and therefore I couldn't know with certainty who was the mayor during such years. For example, Ordinance #7 was signed in 1935 by President J. A. Diethelm while Ordinance #8 was signed on January 21st, 1937, by President Wm Braunworth. That means no city ordinance was passed in the year 1936 and I could only guess who was mayor that year, either Mr. Diethelm or Mr. Braunworth. Best guess was the former, since Bill's son Lloyd said more than once -- in past issues of the Gazette -- that his dad was mayor for 14 years. I also encountered two Ordinance #18's -- the first signed by President Wm Braunworth on June 27th, 1949. The second #18 was signed by Mayor Ben Wartman on December 13th, 1956. In other words, I couldn't determine -- at least not from the ordinances -- how to divvy up the years 1950-1954 between Mayor Braunworth and Mayor Wartman. Another problem was with the year 1966 when two ordinances were signed by "Acting Mayor Dave Kocka." Who, in fact, was the elected mayor that year? The answer was not in the ordinances. *** I was saddened to learn that some old records of the city, mostly maps, not minutes, were destroyed by water, mold, and mildew after they were moved to the basement of the Acorn House. It was around 2001 that Park and Recreation offices were moved there to relieve congestion at City Hall on Rose Street. The Acorn House was demolished in 2008 to make way for a second sheet of ice at the Victoria Recreation Center. Jennie Kretsch retrieved what was salvageable for safekeeping, including old plat books, similarly bound in three-ring binders.
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May 2015 |
