Stories & Tales of the Michaelis Family

Joseph Martin Michaelis
by Fred Richter

My grandfather, Joseph Marten Michaelis born Aug. 31, 1870 in Newbury, Kansas was the first white child born in the county and attended school on an Indian Reservation. He moved to Indianapolis at the age of 17 to work as a carpenter for his brother. It was a time when Carrie Nation and her band of women, advocates of prohibition, were tearing up saloons all over the country with their axes. Barb-wire fences going up, blocking the grazing lands and watering holes from the cattlemen. Law and order was coming, the country was becoming civilized. During the depression in 1893 he went to Asheville, North Carolina to work as a finish carpenter on the Biltmore Mansion. Returning to Indianapolis he married Therese Stich April 30, 1901 where they had three children. He owned The Elm Saloon across from the City Market on Delaware which he sold to the Wheeler Mission in 1916, and one at Madison and Lincoln which was sold to his bartenders when Prohibition came in. They ran it as a "Speak Easy" until they were arrested for bootlegging. Therese died October 20, 1909, in 1910 Joseph married Margaret Lawler, his housekeeper and an immigrant from Ireland. Margaret died December 13, 1948. Joseph died March 19, 1952. They are buried in St. Joseph's Cemetery in Indianapolis.