8.  LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM IN MINNESOTA

After eleven years in Iowa, when Grandpa William was 19 years old, Erna was 6, and Emma was 4, the Fred Fust family moved to a Rock County, Minnesota farm in Denver Township near Hardwick in 1894.  Shortly after their move, news was received of the death of Marie's father, Johann Jochim Andreas Bunger, on February 5, 1895, in Clutier, Iowa.  Then on June 4, 1895, Marie gave birth to Ella Marie Fust.  Sadly, she died within her first year on March 26, 1896.

The Fust family of Fred, Marie, Willie, Erna, and Emma is listed in the 1900 Federal Census on June 7, 1900, on the farm near Hardwick, while Frieda is listed with her husband, John Piepgras, age 22, in Rose Dell Township, just west of Denver Township.  That's the year when Frieda, at age 21, was married on February 22 and Willie, age 25, married our Grandma Bertha Carl, age 22, on November 30 in Luverne, Minnesota.  I wonder if the siblings ever double-dated?!

Soon the Fred Fusts became grandparents when on November 30, William Fred Piepgras was born.  Then Marie Magdalena Fust was welcomed on February 2, 1902.  Nine more grandchildren followed that decade:  Mary S. Piepgras on May 7, 1903; Jacob George Fust on December 10, 1903; Rosa  Frieda on April 17, 1905; Elmer Peter Piepgras on March 13, 1906; Alfred Carl Fust on November 26, 1906; Huldah Emma Fust on February 14, 1909; George Fredrick Hoeck on December 7, 1909; and Alroy Detlof Piepgras on January 1, 1910, closing out those ten years with eleven grandchildren!

Did you notice the Hoeck baby in that list?  There was another wedding that decade when Emma Rosine Fust,  just shy of 18, married John Henry Hoeck, age  26, on February 27, 1908, and they welcomed their first child, George Fredrick, in late 1909.    

Fred and Marie Fust were living in the village of Hardwick along with their single daughter Erna and Marie's single brother, John Bunger.  The 1910 Census shows that Fred Fust owned both his farm and his Hardwick home "mortgage free".  They were living the American Dream -- a dream nearly impossible back in Mecklenburg, Germany.