Part 1 S. P. Schlafer
My great-great-grandfather Simon Peter Schlafer was born of immigrated Bavarian parents in 1850. His father worked on the Erie Canal after arriving in this country. Later his dad, Jacob, bought a 160 acre farm in Germantown and with additional purchases the estate grew to 240 acres. If that wasn't enough to use up the daylight hours, Jacob was also involved in a sawmill operation with several local partners.
Simon was the ninth of ten children. You need a lot of people to run a farm of that size. And, so, farming it was until he was 26 years old. Then he met Sarah Leister, a 19-year old beauty from the Granville/Germantown area.
What happened after that? Stay tuned and from time to time what happened will follow. If you really can't sleep waiting, perhaps you might Google flour mills or the such.
