Claude Earl Bucher

Claude Earl Bucher, eldest of the seven children of Mary Lincoln “Tinty” Martin and Elwood Byron Bucher, was born 14 February 1883 in Martintown, Green County, WI, the village founded by his maternal grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. He spent his early childhood there, attending Martin School along with a large number of other grandchildren of Nathaniel and Hannah including his younger sisters Arley, Rose, and Blanche. He had little chance to get to know his other three siblings. Two consisted of a set of twins that died in the early 1890s. The other was the baby of the family, his brother Ralph, who was seventeen years Claude’s junior and therefore did not really share an upbringing with him. (Nor did Claude and Ralph get to know each other as adults, because Claude was dead before Ralph was fully grown.) Martintown would continue to loom large in Claude’s existence throughout his youth. He could, however, also be said to be a native of Winslow, Stephenson County, IL, the small town a mile south of Martintown to which the Buchers moved during the 1890s. Claude attended Winslow High School.

(Claude is surely among the pupils shown in the mid-1890s photograph of Martin School featured on the page of this website that deals with the village history, though unfortunately he is not specifically identified. Click here to go to that page. Scroll down several images to see the portrait of the class.)

Claude came of age amid kinfolk who thrived as merchants. This was true both on the Bucher side and the Martin side of his heritage. So it was only natural that Claude decide to aim for a career as something other than a farmer or a craftsman. He headed off to business school. Departing in his late teens, Claude attended Dixon Business College in Dixon, Lee County, IL, about forty miles to the south of Martintown and quite close to his father’s birthplace of Amboy.

Graduating in 1902, Claude spent an interval back home, during which time a romance deepened between him and Ethel Wales, daughter of Adam J. Wales and Harriett Jerusha Diveley, She had been born 15 December 1885 in rural Stephenson County in Waddams Township near the village of McConnell. Ethel and Claude were well-matched in the sense that they were equally well-rooted in the history of the local area. Ethel’s great-grandparents Isaac Diveley and Elvira Graves had been original settlers of Waddams Township, arriving in 1837 and founding their homestead a few miles southeast of the spot where Winslow would eventually spring up. Ethel’s mother Hattie had been raised on that homestead, which had been inheritd by her father, William Diveley, the eldest of Isaac and Elvira’s children. By the time Ethel came of age the area was replete with extended family members. William had been one of seven children, and he and his wife Mary Hulbert had produced thirteen of their own, of whom Hattie was the thirdborn. Oddly enough Ethel had not spent all of her childhood in the county. For several years from the late 1880s to the mid-1890s Adam and Hattie had attempted to establish a homestead in Yuma County, CO between the small communities of Wray and Vernon. Three of Ethel’s five younger siblings had been born during this sojourn, but the family had said farewell to Colorado and returned to Stephenson County by her early teens, making a new life on a farm in Winslow Township. After graduating from Winslow High School, Ethel had taught at one-room rural schools -- just as Claude’s sister Blanche was on the verge of doing. Ethel’s career as an educator was somewhat brief, however, as she and Claude were wed 4 July 1906, when she was only twenty years old, whereupon she became a housewife. The wedding took place in Eureka, Woodford County, IL.

Claude and Ethel’s union would eventually result in four children. The first was Earl, who arrived on the scene in the summer of 1908. Though Earl was born on the Wales farm in Winslow Township, the home he would know for the first few years of his life was in Evanston, Cook County, IL, because by his infancy his father had reassessed his career plans and had set out to become a doctor. While Claude took his classes at Northwestern University, he and Ethel and their baby boy made do with a temporary haven, a student housing situation in a manner of speaking. They shared a dwelling with Ethel’s cousin Mary Constance Blair, daughter of William Diveley’s sister Emily Frances Diveley. Mary was also a student and would go on to remain in the Northwestern University neighborhood for many years. One family account say that Mary eventually became a professor at the university, though no independent documentation has been found to confirm this. What is certain is that Mary was a colorful figure, a lifelong spinster who co-habitated long-term with Helen Lester, a dressmaker eight years her senior, and then retired to Nora, IL where she shared her home with a horde of cats. Mary’s presence in Evanston with the Buchers provided Ethel with a sense of the familiar; Ethel was known for having an appreciation for family bonds. Mary Blair could be said to be a double connection, as she was also Claude’s shirt-tail cousin. Mary’s aunt Addie Blair had been the first wife of Claude’s great uncle John S. Strader.

The shared accommodations helped ease the financial burden, but Claude was obliged to hold down a job in addition to being a student. He is described in the 1910 census as an egg merchant. It was not until the summer of 1912, upon obtaining his medical degree, that he was able to begin earning money as a physician. By then, the family had grown -- second child Ray Bucher was a year old. The Wales family remained in greater Chicago for another year, though, because Claude needed to complete his internship. He was accepted on staff at Englewood Hospital.

To have become a doctor was an impressive achievement given his modest origins, and something of which to be justifiably proud. Sadly, his mother was unable to see him reach this distinction, as she had passed away of a burst appendix in 1902, but others of the elder generations were on-hand to congratulate him, including his father, his stepmother Laura Hart Martin Bucher, his grandmother Hannah, and his grandfather Jacob Bucher, though the latter was only barely able to do so before passing away during Claude’s internship year at Englewood. The next stage of achievement was to “become his own man.” Claude had an example to guide him. His older first cousin Blanche Martin’s husband John Colwell, after finishing his residency at Cook County Hospital, had set himself up in a small town in central Illinois where a young physician could find more than enough clients to support a private practice. Claude investigated his prospects and decided to establish a practice in Williamsville, Sangamon County, IL, near Springfield.

If fate had been kind, Williamsville would have loomed large in Claude’s story. He might well have spent decades there and become known as one of the community’s leading citizens. Things went well for the first couple of years. He and Ethel moved into their new home. With their future bright, they saw no need to hold back on having children at an accelerated pace. Daughter Mary was born at the beginning of 1915, and six months later Ethel was pregnant again. The family found a new church congregation, worship being a priority with Claude, who had earlier made sure to join congregations during his sojourns in Dixon and Evanston. They were settling in.

Then came the night of 4 October 1915. Claude received a request for a house call. Dedicated as he was and always ready for a chance to engender goodwill among his prospective clientele by demonstrating that he would extend himself where needed, he set out in his automobile. However, having worked all day and given the extra exhaustion of a baby at home, he was not at his most alert as he drove. Along the way he got into an accident in which his car overturned. (His obituary states it turned turtle -- this technically means flipping over frontwards like a somersault. This is probably not what the newspaper writer meant, but if the description is accurate, one can imagine the violence of the incident.) Claude was killed. His body was brought back to Winslow and was interred in Rock Lily Cemetery. His final child, Helen, was born more than five months after his death.

As a widow, Ethel took shelter with her parents, who were now living not on the Winslow Township farm, but back on Diveley land in Waddams Township. Though she had not yet turned thirty years old when Claude perished, she never remarried. Instead, she relied for help upon family members, first of all her parents and her other Wales/Diveley kin, but also her in-laws. Williamsville became a momentary chapter in her life, remembered more for the tragedy that had taken place there than as a home base. Her daughters would not even remember living there, the Waddams Township farm being the place they spent more years of their childhoods than any other spot.

In the mid-1920s, Ethel and her parents and kids moved to Freeport, the county seat. Though the relocation was soon colored by the gloomy omen of the death of Hattie Diveley Wales in early 1926, in most other ways the departure from the farm was embraced as the appropriate lifestyle change. Ethel had now come to the community where she would spend the rest of her long life.

For years, having found herself in a breadwinner situation, Ethel worked packaging powdered items from spices to medicines in their containers for W.T. Rawleigh Company, a huge Freeport-based wholesale/retail supplier of food, household goods, and pharmaceuticals. Somehow she successfully managed as a matriarch of her family group -- in the late 1920s, she even took in an additional responsibility. Her niece Evelyn Lois Claus, daughter of Claude’s late sister Blanche, did not want to accompany her father and stepmother and younger family members when they moved to southernmost Texas in the late 1920s, so the teenager sought shelter with Ethel until she could establish herself on her own.

One by one the Bucher kids grew up, married, and left home. Both Earl and Ray followed the example of their father and became doctors, studying in Chicago and then founding private practices elsewhere in Illinois. Adam Wales remained with his daughter in the home on Cottonwood Street until his death in 1943. After his demise, Ethel was on her own for a few years. Eventually she gave up her independence and joined her daughter Mary and son-in-law Myrl Maynard in their home on Stewart Street in Freeport, a reverse of the arrangement during the early years of Mary and Myrl’s marriage, when they had stayed with Ethel and her father on Cottonwood.

Ethel did not pass away until 13 August 1975 at nearly ninety years of age. Unfortunately that meant she outlived both sons, if only by a little. Her body was interred beside that of Claude in Rock Lily Cemetery.

Children of Claude Earl Bucher with Ethel Wales

Earl Clifford Bucher

Ray Elwood Bucher

Mary Alice Bucher

Helen Claudia Bucher

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