Person:Herman Schmidt (1)

His father was a farmer in Prussia, he was one of five children, three sons and two daughters. At the age of nineteen he left Germany to come to the United States. Soon after his arrival in America, he located in Covington, Ky., where he resumed work as a carpenter, having done that work in Germany. Beginning with January of 1862, he was a government teamster throughout the Civil War, for six months hauling supplies from Lexington to the Cumberland Gap. In 1870 he entered upon his long and successful connection with the grocery trade in Covington. After about eighteen years he enlarged his interest to the wholesale trade and built up one of the largest stores of this kind in Covington. For several years he was one of the Directors of the Citizens National Bank, and in politics he allied with the Democratic Party, but not a partisan in local affairs. It is also thought that he worked on the building of the Suspension Bridge during it's construction.