Reisert
Frederick Reisert was born 1826 in Hesse-Kassel, the son of a master butcher. At age 18, as an apprentice butcher, he emigrated to New York alone. He settled in Kleindeutschland, the large German speaking neighborhood of lower Manhattan. He established his own butcher shop there around 1847. Soon thereafter, he married Margaretha Knoblauch and they had two sons, Joseph and Frederick.
Around 1850, Frederick appears to start speculating in properties in the Fosters Meadow area. In 1854, he moves his family to a property he purchased, an 80-acre farm “near the road to Watt’s mill”. There they had two more children, Amelia and Emil. In 1859 Margaretha dies and Frederick is left trying to run a farm with four children under the age of seven. He quickly marries Catharina Schmidt from Brooklyn. They eventually have three children: Maria Magdalena, Elizabeth and William. But during that time, he enlisted in the 10th US Infantry, Company C, a unit that saw active combat but he finished his two-year commitment in 1863, two weeks before his unit was sent to Gettysburg.
Four of Frederick’s children married into local farm families: Reising, Richter, March and Dubon. When he died in 1873, his widow Catharina, who inherited the farm and all other assets, took her three children back to Brooklyn leaving her step-children to fend for themselves. Frederick the son rented and operated the farm until he was finally able to purchase it in 1883. He and his sons farmed there until it was sold in the mid-1920s. Curtiss Airfield was built on what was once the Reisert farm. Today it is the site of Green Acres Mall.
Submitted by Paul Hoffman
written by Elvon L. Howe