The Dreutzer family settled in Sturgeon Bay, Door County, in 1873. Prior to that time, Olaf E. Dreutzer, who had emigrated from Sweden in 1842, lived in Racine, Milwaukee, and Waupaca counties. Olaf Dreutzer was the son of Commodore O. M. Dreutzer, commander-in-chief of the pilots navigating the western coast of Sweden. Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, on January 27, 1816, the younger Dreutzer entered the Swedish navy at an early age. At seventeen he sailed to New York during a leave of absence, and in 1834 he made several voyages in a brig to New Bedford, Massachusetts. At Charleston, South Carolina, he volunteered for service in the Second Seminole War (1835) and spent four months on active duty on the St. Johns River and elsewhere in Florida, before returning to Sweden to enter the naval academy at Cariskroma. Graduating as a lieutenant, he was placed in command of five pilot stations on the coast. In 1840 he married Nellie Uppling, and two years later resigned from the navy and immigrated to Boston. Although almost immediately offered command of a brig, he elected to go west.
Although he bought land in Racine County, Wisconsin, he farmed it only one year, and in 1843 apprenticed himself in the Milwaukee law office of Judge James Holliday (1818-1851). In 1854 Dreutzer opened an office to practice law in Waupaca County, and in subsequent years, was elected to the offices of county treasurer, register of deeds, and county judge. In 1859 Republican Governor Alexander Randall appointed Dreutzer to his staff as a colonel in the militia, and in 1861 raised him to the rank of brigadier general. From 1862 to 1867, Dreutzer served as United States Consul to Bergen, Norway. While there he translated into English many Scandinavian records relating to America's discovery by Norsemen. In 1873 Dreutzer moved his law practice from Waupaca to Sturgeon Bay, and his family joined him in the spring of 1874. Also in that year, he began his first of several terms as district attorney of Door County. Nellie Uppling Dreutzer died on September 20, 1887, and in 1894, Olaf Dreutzer moved to Frankfort, Tennessee, where he died on January 4, 1900.
Of Olaf Dreutzer's fourteen children, seven survived him, but the family of only one, Yngre Viking Dreutzer, is represented in this collection. Yngre Dreutzer, an attorney-at-law and Door County district attorney, was born in Waupaca on November 9, 1857, and moved at seventeen (1874) with his parents to Sturgeon Bay. He was a graduate of Lawrence College, and was admitted to the bar in 1881. Associated with his father in the practice of law until 1891 when Olaf Dreutzer retired from the firm, Yngre Dreutzer was city attorney in Sturgeon Bay for seven terms, and district attorney of Door County from 1890 until his death at the age of 49 in Chicago on January 2, 1907.
In 1880 Yngre Dreutzer married Elizabeth Marie Hanson (1860-1954), daughter of Jacob and Susan Hanson of Sevastopol Township, Door County. Elizabeth Dreutzer was to develop an active interest in the woman's suffrage movement in Wisconsin. Of their four children, Elsie (1883-1888) died in early childhood. Carl E.M. Dreutzer (1884-1958) attended the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis (1905-1907) and the University of Wisconsin Law School (1907-1909), and practiced law in Green Bay and Chicago. He married Marrietta B. Smith (d. 1950) in 1909, and Jessie DeBoth (d. 1959) in 1954. Cedric B. Dreutzer (1889-1967) attended the University of Wisconsin for two years and spent his adult life on the home farm as a cherry and apple grower. He married Hazel D. Johnston in 1937. Genevieve Dreutzer (1891-1975) graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1914, and in that same year married Carl Wernicke (d. 1928). About 1932 she became a special agent for the Equitable Life Assurance Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, and served in that capacity for thirty years. There are no papers in the collection pertaining to succeeding generations of the family.
