The story
Origins
The name is German and belongs to Hesse. In America it belongs mainly to Missouri.
The surname Wahlig is one the dictionaries call “unexplained.” The graves that carry it in Germany cluster along the Rhine-Main corridor, from Frankfurt through Darmstadt to Bensheim on the Bergstrasse, and the family's given names, Philipp, Franz, Georg, Josef, run Catholic. Which village the family left has not yet been found.
In 1840 Franz Wahlig and his five-year-old son Philip arrived in St. Louis. They came the way most German families reached Missouri before the railroads: by ship to New Orleans, then by river boat up the Mississippi. St. Louis had perhaps six thousand Germans by then, and the hills south-west of the city, between the Gravois road and the Meramec River, were filling with families like theirs: the Rotts, who gave their name to a road and a school; the Bosts, the Eimes, the Koehlers and the Fredericks.
The family's first land appears on Hutawa's county atlas of 1862: “Th. Wahlig, 59.15 ac.” on the east side of Rott Road, just below Martin Rott's farm at Watson Road. The engraved initial is almost certainly a mistake for “Ph.” In the same years Philip's sons were born, George in 1862 and Gustave in 1863, and in 1865 the neighbourhood raised a one-room school of white oak logs on Watson Road. Gus Wahlig remembered helping with the logs. The oldest Wahlig grave at St. Peter's in Kirkwood dates from that year too: Margareth, aged 32, who may have been the boys' mother.
The farm
By 1900 the Wahligs were established on Watson Road, “just east of Bost's” and “close to Rott School,” where George Wahlig sat on the school board. Around the time of the 1904 World's Fair the family built the white frame house on the south side of the road that would be home for a century. The 1909 plat book draws the two brothers' farms on either side of Watson Road: George's forty acres on the south, with the dairy, and Gus's twenty-nine on the north.
George's son Charles married the girl from the next farm, Margaret Bost, who had sat in the same Rott School classroom in the autumn of 1900. Under Charles the dairy became the Wahlig Dairy Co., with bottles of its own: “Wahlig Dairy Farm, Kirkwood, Mo.,” one of them with the slogan “No One Outgrows Milk.” His sons Carwin and William registered the name with the state in 1948, and the 1950 census found three generations in the farmhouse, with William, home from the Coast Guard, listed as “Dairyman, dairy, own business.”
The town
Kirkwood was never the farm's town in the legal sense. The city, laid out in 1853 as the first planned railroad suburb west of the Mississippi, lay two miles to the north-west; the farm sat in unincorporated Bonhomme Township, and its mail came by rural route from the Kirkwood post office. But Kirkwood was where the family went to church and to be buried, where cousins moved for foundry and telephone work, and whose name the dairy printed on its bottles.
The ground shifted after the Second World War. Route 66 had come down Watson Road in 1932. St. Louis County grew from 274,000 people in 1940 to 704,000 in 1960, and in the words of one local history, “subdivision after subdivision began to replace the truck farms.” Dairies closed under the weight of feed costs, regulations and taxes; one new subdivision's covenant barred them outright. When word leaked in 1957 that Kirkwood and Crestwood meant to annex the farm district, its families incorporated a city of their own, Sunset Hills, and the Wahlig farm's address changed for the first time in a century.
Today
William and Rose stayed. They raised their family in the farmhouse, consolidated the home place into a single lot in 2006, and placed it in trust. William died in 2007 and Rose in 2021; they share a grave at Jefferson Barracks. In 2019 the land passed to their son Dennis and his wife Lori: 1.73 acres of the forty that George Wahlig farmed in 1909, still in the family after more than a hundred years.
A cousin branch descended from Gus holds the corner at Rott Road through Wahlig Properties, and it was one of them, Tim Wahlig, who told the family's story to the Sunset Hills Historical Society in 2018, in the city hall built on what had been their neighbours' fields.
What we don't know yet
A family history is only as good as its gaps are honest. These are the open questions, in rough order of how much they would change the story:
- The village in Hesse the family left, and the ship that carried Franz and Philip to New Orleans in 1840.
- Philip's wife and his death, and whether the Margareth buried in 1865 was his wife.
- The deeds between 1862 and 1904 that explain why the first Wahlig tract carries the Schmitt name on the 1878 atlas.
- How many acres the dairy worked at its height, and when it sold its last bottle.
- The full text of Charles's 1953 obituary and William's 2007 obituary, which name all their children.
- Photographs. No picture of the farm, the herd, the trucks or the family has yet been found in a public collection. The family's own albums are the place to look.