One House’s Story: The Maurer Family

This house’s story is connected to the son of a prominent Tuscarawas County German immigrant who’s work impacted the New Philadelphia school system and countless late 19th and early 20th century New Philadelphia students.

The parents of Jacob Maurer (1824-1901) immigrated, along with their six other children, to Tuscarawas County around 1840. The family of farmers settled in Wayne Township where they acquired land and raised their family. Jacob’s father died in 1854 and Jacob became the principal farmer in the family, using his siblings and hired hands to help work the family farm. Jacob married Margaret Baad (1837-1918), the daughter of a merchant, and the couple acquired a farm in Lawrence Township, Tuscarawas County.

Jacob partnered with his father-in-law and opened a general store in Bolivar while still working his substantial farm in Lawrence Township along the Zoar Road. Jacob and Margaret raised a large family on their farm and among them was a son born in 1862 named George Conrad Maurer (1862-1957). George worked as a clerk in the store in Bolivar before attending the College of Wooster where he graduated in 1890 and became a school teacher and superintendent of the Loudonville Public Schools. While working there, he married a Wooster school teacher named Georgia Pocock (1866-1950).

Three years after his marriage George Maurer was offered the position of Superintendent of the schools in New Philadelphia, Ohio. Maurer took over a school system that in 1893 employed 26 teachers in three schools in the city. Initially he, Georgia, and their infant son settled into a rented home on East High Street where they lived for a little over a year-and-a-half. The Maurers purchased a newly built home, built by the property’s previous owner, on West Ray Street in 1895. It was here that the Maurers lived during the duration of George’s tenure with the New Philadelphia Schools.

The house the Maurers purchased was a large home built in the early 1890s and in the very popular and decorative Queen Anne style of architecture. The numerous gables, the decorative pediment over the porch entrance and in the gable end eaves, and the prominent tower feature were all very typical features of the style. A little over ten years after acquiring the home it was photographed for the 1908 Combined Atlas of Tuscarawas County, along with a biography of George Maurer and his ancestors. Though modernized and neutered of some of its decorative features, the house’s general appearance remains the same as it did in 1908.

George and Georgia Maurer raised their son, and only child, in their home on West Ray Street until he graduated from New Philadelphia’s school system. During his tenure as New Philadelphia’s School Superintendent, George continued to pursue his own education while also teaching courses at the College of Wooster. George Maurer’s regular travels to the town, and the college, where he received his education eventually resulted in him being offered the job of Superintendent of Schools for Wooster. George accepted the position in August 1912.

Since George became Superintendent of Schools for New Philadelphia, the school district had dramatically expanded. The district, by 1912, had twice as many teachers as it had in 1893 and had added two more school buildings. George and Georgia sold their house on West Ray Street in the summer of 1913 for $5,600 (around $173,000 today) and moved permanently to Wooster and lived the remainder of their lives there. Georgia died in 1950 and George, at the age of 94, died in 1957. They are both buried in Wooster Cemetery in Wooster, Ohio.

© Noel B. Poirier, 2023.