Hans Jurgen Ehlers was born around 1826 in the Duchy of Holstein. It might have been the lure of gold that brought him to the United States, for he became a naturalized citizen on September 20, 1860, in Yreka, California.
The 1870 federal census of Yreka shows him engaged in mining and living with a woman named Olive. How Ehlers’ relationship with Olive ended is not known but, on November 30, 1879, he married Elizabeth Gorrsen in San Francisco.
Initially, Ehlers was a Methodist, but eventually he became affiliated with the Presbyterian church. Ehlers seems not to have been a particularly successful (or devoted?) minister of the Gospel, as he apparently held other jobs during his lifetime.
In 1880, Ehlers was recorded as preaching in Florence, Arizona. By 1886, he was living in Yuma, Arizona, where he served for a time as a chaplain at the territorial penitentiary there.
The Ehlers family moved to Phoenix in October, 1889. In 1890, he was elected one of several school trustees in Maricopa County.
On December 12, 1893, Ehlers filed final proof on a homestead. On July 7, 1896, the Ehlerses’ seven-year-old son, Joseph William, accidentally shot himself with a rifle. A doctor was summoned, but the boy died before he arrived. Little Joseph was probably buried in City Loosley Cemetery, it being the closest. Shortly thereafter, Ehlers and his wife quitclaimed their homestead to E. Irvine and moved into Phoenix.
The Ehlerses’ oldest son Henry was a rebellious youth. By age 16, he had been involved in numerous petty thefts before being convicted of second-degree burglary. On November 20, 1898, he was sentenced to two years in the territorial prison at Yuma. Discharged at the end of his sentence, he evidently had not learned his lesson. He and an accomplice were believed to have robbed the New River and Goddard stage stations only a short time later. Ehlers then fled to California. He is said to have committed suicide in 1902 after murdering his wife.
Rev. Ehlers was about 76 when he died in Phoenix of pneumonia. He was buried in Rosedale Cemetery, although there is no grave marker. No probate record has been found, so perhaps he had little to leave. Not long thereafter, his widow Elizabeth took their remaining two children and relocated to California.
by Patricia G. and Donna Carr
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