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Barber

Jelmar "Jack" Barber

Mrs. Mae Barber, born around 1923, was Jack's wife

The family owned the local tavern - Source Jean Bodenburg

The Barbers are mentioned in the Helen Greene 1954 History:
Barber, Mae. Luger Route, Phillips, WI, Interview, 1954
Mrs. Mae Barber was the cook at Helen Greene's school.
The first school in Lugerville was held upstairs in what is now Barber’s home. Lena (Bodenburg)
The Lumbering business attracted workers and their families to Lugerville, which made it grow. The Luger Brothers (Luger Company) built eight frame company houses in 1906 to house their mill worker families, and settlement of Lugerville began. Two of these original eight houses are still standing and being lived in.  These are the Jelmar Barber’s home, and Stadjuhar home. (Greene)

Excerpt from Helen Greene's paper, as relayed by Mae Barber:

Fostering the faithful Worshippers
Catholic services, held in one of the mill company’s houses, the Hall home, were held once a week. The father, or priest, usually came out to Lugerville on the return train from Phillips Saturday night. Pastors of the Protestant faith came out to Lugerville and held services in homes too. As the roads improved and the mode of transportation changed, people of the different faiths, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, or Four Square, took up their religious ties in the Phillips churches for the most part.
About eighteen years ago the Episcopalians held church services in the Lugerville School. Mrs. Mae Barber says she was confirmed fourteen years ago here. A minister from Park Falls, of this faith, and the bishop would hold these services quite regularly. In the spring of 1947, the Episcopal National Council of New York hired a deaconess and sent her to Lugerville as Deaconess and a service worker, under the Diocese of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Having a church in Lugerville had long been the dream of the small congregation, and when Deaconess Helen Hill came she kindled the dream, and Our Savior’s Episcopal Church came to be a reality. (Barber)
When Deaconess Hill came to Lugerville she had living quarters in the house now owned by Mrs. Rishel. She made the rooms she lived in cozy-looking and homelike, but when the snow and stormy blasts of the winter in Lugerville took over, she all but turned into an icicle. She had been reared in Massachusetts, near Arlington and Cambridge. Her dialect and figures of speech were as fascinating as her stories of travel and adventure as a deaconess. She was a woman of refinement and we thought she’d find life lonely, dull, drab, and boring in Lugerville. Not so! For her, the leadership of her congregation and attack on each new problem was life worth living. Enthusiasm abounded in Deaconess Hill. To me, it seemed everybody worked under her vivacious supervision with a faithful, desirous attempt to carry out her wishes for a church of the Episcopal faith in Lugerville.
In the fall of 1947 the building which had been the South Fork School of District No. 1, Town of Flambeau, and which had been closed for some time, was purchased from the school district by the Episcopal Church, National Council of New York. This building was moved during the winter of [1947] a distance of [about three] miles to its present location. The cost of moving was expensive, and the work and problems that had to be coped with were difficult along the narrow town road. Some (trees) had to be felled along the narrow road and when it reached “Dudas” Creek it had to be raised to get over the culvert. (Barber)
Reach Lugerville it did and was put on a foundation with (a) basement of cement blocks built by the Raske Brothers of Phillips, with half of their labor donated. Albin Grant and son, Alvin, and John Tuma remodeled the inside, making a sanctuary on the right side and an apartment for Deaconess Hill on the left. Mr. [Oscar] Malvich, a man of Catholic faith, donated the bulldozing of the ground for the basement. Through cooperative efforts of a group of people of the Episcopal faith and others the Episcopal Church was dedicated Our Savior Episcopal Church in 1948.

            Deaconess Hill served in Lugerville from 1947 to 1951, until she was transferred back East. This one church in Lugerville didn’t have services then except when the bishop came from Eau Claire during 1952. In 1953 a lay reader came from Eau Claire to conduct services. This October, 1954, Reverend H.B. Connell of Park Ridge, Illinois came to serve Park Falls, Wisconsin and the parish at Lugerville. (Barber)

 

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