Place of Birth: (Gutt___), Germany
Age at Death: 76 years, 11 months, 5 days
Date of Death: July 18, 1898
Interment source:
Bay View Cemetery Association, Corpus Christi, Texas. Record of Interments
NO HEADSTONE
Background Information
John Ernest Petzel and his wife, the former Miss Marie Berg of Berlin, Germany, came to Galveston in 1853. They went over to Houston and looked around but did not like that location, so hearing of Corpus Christi, they cam down here and stayed to make their home.
Mr. Petzel was a wheelwright and blacksmith by trade and established himself here in that business on the location now occupied by Capt. Andy Anderson's boat works.
Mrs. William Petzel, the daughter–in-law of Ernest Pretzel, now 82 years of age, lives at Chapman ranch in the home of her son, Ronald. She tells some very interesting stories of her early childhood, when as little Josephine Hill she lived with her family on their sheep ranch on Matagorda peninsula.
She said that the Yankee gun boats standing in the gulf during the Civil War shelled the ranch and landed, setting to their corn cribs, pulled down their fences so that he cows could get in and eat the garden vegetables, arrested her father so he could not send word of their predicament to Corpus Christi and sunk their schooner, which was one of the deepest insults of all the children.
The officer, a Yankee general, sent his Negro servant into the house where only Mrs. Petzel and her children were and insisted that she let this servant, ...make his master's coffee at their fire place. During the time the soldiers were about the ranch, they would give the children paper greenback money. Mrs. Petzels eyes held a mischievous twinkle as she showed me how her sisters and brothers would accept the greenbacks and gingerly hold them by a corner over the coals in the fire place and watch them burn.
It is only natural that little children in a war area should resent the presence of the invaders, and when they would be sitting before the fire place of an evening, moulding bullets, they would spit on them and name them, saying: "you get a Yankee, you get a Yankee."
Source: Nueces County News (Biography of Josephine Hill Petzel), July 14, 1939
Research by: Msgr. Michael A. Howell
Transcription by: Geraldine D. McGloin, Nueces County Historical Commission