KALONA

Cousins Julie Zahs and Locke Peterseim couldn’t have more perfect backgrounds for creating a Founding Families exhibit at the Kalona Historical Village.

Julie has experience putting together collected treasures and keepsakes in a visually interesting way, as she demonstrated last year with her Hills Bank exhibit centering on her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands. Locke is a professional writer who is adept at finding a narrative and engaging readers through words.

Together, with the aid of Locke’s mom and Julie’s aunt, Jan Peterseim, the pair combined their skills and talents to create an exhibit, new this year, featuring the Rollie and Barb Peterseim family.

The process took months, but the result was worth their efforts, not only for the public viewing the exhibit, but for the cousins personally as well.

Most in the Kalona area are acquainted with the Peterseim family, primarily thanks to the Peterseim Funeral Home, which has served them since 1917 when it was established by Rollie and Barb, Julie and Locke’s grandparents. Now, generations of Peterseims have run the funeral home and been active in the community; Short and Jan purchased the business in 1963, and their daughter Meg has run the business since 1994.

But what was interesting to Julie and Locke was everything they didn’t know.

When Julie began assembling memorabilia to include in the exhibit, she found, amusingly, that most of what had been saved from the past century was funeral ephemera.

“I had lots of people’s funeral cards and things,” she said. “I just had a lot of stuff on funerals.”

A box of family photos borrowed from an aunt helped, but Julie didn’t find that sufficient, so she started searching the newspaper archives of The Kalona News. That turned out to be fruitful.

“I had so much fun going through the archives and finding information,” she said.

As Grandpa Rollie was a business owner, The Kalona News seemingly tracked his every move.

“I found that Grandpa owned a café,” Julie said, for example. “I found out he had an open house for his new café, and he served free ice cream and brought in an orchestra from the University [of Iowa].”

Less information could be found on Grandma Barb, but Julie did uncover some intriguing bits of her past; her family made medicinal whisky in Europe, for example, and when the next generation made a great quantity of it here in America, “they got kicked out of the Mennonite Church,” Julie said.

Locke arranged the photos, newspaper clippings, and other memorabilia in close to chronological order for the Historical Village exhibit. He spent his holidays picking the brains of relatives, trying to figure out just what the family story was so that he could provide historical context for the things viewers would be looking at.

It turned out he had his work cut out for him separating fact from family lore.

“We’re all just amateur historians,” he said. “A lot of times we were finding things that I thought, or that they thought – you know, we’d always heard these stories – and then you find stuff and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, that’s not exactly what happened, or when it happened, or who it happened to.’”

One area of contention surrounded the details of Rollie’s adoption as a young child by a Beachy Amish couple. Possibly. Or they may have been Mennonite. Maybe.

Even Rollie’s name is spelled inconsistently on documents. Rolla? Rollin? Petersheim? Peterseim? There are family stories there too, about typos and Americanized spellings.

“And then there’s this whole family lore about the fire,” Locke said.

In 1920, Rollie’s barbershop was in the Chicago building in downtown Kalona, and he also kept equipment stored there, including caskets in the upper level, “which makes no sense.”

“My dad always told the story that when it burned at night in January, people came and stood and watched, because that’s what you did. An old German guy was standing across the street, and as the top of the building burned and the caskets caught on fire, there were all these burning caskets falling. And this old German guy is like, ‘God in heaven, it’s Hades,’” he recounts.

In the end, there is much to learn and discover from this exhibit, even if you thought you knew this family.

The Rollie and Barb Peterseim Founding Families exhibit is located in the Visitors Center at the Kalona Historical Village, 715 D Avenue, Kalona. Hours are Monday – Saturday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Peterseim exhibit will be on display through the end of 2024.