RACINE BELLE CITY OF THE LAKES AND RACINE COUNTY WISCONSIN-ILLUSTRATED

VOLUME II Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement

FANNY S. STONE Supervising Editor CHICAGO:
THE S. J. CLARKE PUBLISHING COMPANY 1916
Contributed by Diane Kaye


Norbert Grabher
Norbert Grabher, who was formerly identified with industrial interests in Racine for many years, is now living upon a farm of seventeen acres on section 37, Mount Pleasant township, where he has a fine home. He was born in Austria, November 9, 1855, and is a son of Jerome and Katrina Grabher. He attended the common schools to the age of twelve years and afterward worked upon the home farm and throughout the locality as a farm hand until about twenty-five years of age. It was in 1882 that he crossed the Atlantic, making his way to Philadelphia, and through the succeeding summer he was employed at farm labor near that city. He then made his way westward to Chicago, where he worked in a wholesale house for two years, after which he came to Racine and was employed in the chicory factory for a year and a half. He then went back to Chicago, where he held a position in a malt house for eight months, after which he again came to Racine and occupied a position in the chicory factory for six or seven months. Subsequently he spent a year with the J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company in the plow works and for eight or ten years was employed in the carriage shop. At the end of that time he bought seventeen acres of land and has occupied his farm continuously since 1906.

In November, 1887, occurred the marriage of Mr. Grabher and Miss Sophia Hansche, a daughter of Rudolph Hansche. They have become parents of five children: Benjamin F., living at home; Emily, who is the wife of Chris Nelson and has one child; Viola, who married Dave Sorensen, of Mount Pleasant and has two children; Flora and Ernie, both at home.

Mr. Grabher belongs to the Pentecostal church of Racine and he gives his political allegiance to the prohibition party, thus giving evidence of his stalwart support of the temperance cause, the work of which he has advocated both by precept and example. He is a self-made man who in the school of experience has learned many valuable lessons and who from the age of twelve years has depended entirely on his own resources. He has worked diligently and persistently and his close application to his business affairs has been the source of the substantial success which he now enjoys.