Henry Scheele

Henry Scheele was born on October 20, 1880 in Visselhovede, Germany and came to America with his parents when he was eleven years old.

He was a grain farmer for fifty-eight years. When Henry was eighteen years old, he was working on the rail­road in 1887. The railroad was being built along the Paulding County reser­voir when a mysterious dynamiting of the huge dam occurred. Henry re­called in later years that the state mili­tia was called in from Toledo to squelch mass warfare among the farmers, following the dynamiting of the dam. The dam had served as a "leer for the Wabash Canal, which linked the Ohio and Erie Canal at Junction, Ohio.

Scheele said that the canals served as a cheap means of getting logs from Cecil to Defiance and the farmers re­sented the loss of good timber from the area. The area around the reservoir was 'wild country' at that time. During the 1880's, Henry Scheele helped raft logs from the cutting site to Defiance.

An ox roast was held in Antwerp in celebration of the dam blowing and a state militiaman committed suicide in a fit of hysteria.

Henry Scheele was the father of six sons and four daughters. He bought a farm several miles west of Holgate, Ohio, in 1889 and moved to Holgate when he retired in 1947. The Scheele children included the following:

Floyd, Paul, Albert, Arnold, Carl, Henry Jr., Mrs. Erna Kaehr, Mrs. Helen Markey, Mrs. Clara Fritz, and Mrs. Alma Franz.