One House’s Story: The Seibold Family

This house was constructed by one of the county’s most significant business families of the late 1800s and early 1900s. While the family’s patriarch is perhaps best known, this house was the residence of one of his sons for nearly fifty years.

A note about addresses: House numbers and street names often change over time.

Much has been written about German immigrant and founder of the New Philadelphia Brewing Company Michael Seibold (1849-1934), so I will only touch on some details. Born and trained as a brewer in Germany, Michael immigrated to the United States in 1867 and travelled to Cincinnati, Ohio where he started working in his profession. He travelled through neighboring states before working at a brewery in Warsaw, Illinois in the early 1870s. There he met and married Margaret A. Cardoll (1839-1915) in 1871. After reading about a brewery for sale in New Philadelphia, he and a partner still in Germany, purchased the brewery in 1876.

Michael and Margaret moved with their young children to New Philadelphia shortly afterwards and settled on the southside, just across the river and canal from the brewery. The family included four children by the time the 1880 census was taken, and among those children was one son named John A. Seibold (1879-1954). As his father grew the brewery business and undertook other entrepreneurial endeavors, John and his brothers assisted him and in 1892 John attended New Philadelphia Business College. John, once he completed his education, then began overseeing the brewery’s bottling department.

John married Roseltha Shrier (1882-1913) in the summer of 1903 and the couple welcomed a daughter into their family a year later. John’s father sold him two lots directly across the street from the Seibold house on the Southside on South Broadway shortly after. There were already two small houses on those lots, rental properties owned by John’s father, but John decided to construct a new home on the northernmost of the two lots on the corner of South Broadway and Howe Streets. The new home was to be larger and built in one of the latest architectural styles of the day.

The house that John had built for his new family was built in the very popular Colonial Revival style, sometimes called the “classic box”, that dominated the early 1900s. The wood-framed house was designed with a hipped roof, hipped dormer windows, a full-width porch which would have had classical columns as support, and a flat peak which may have been decorated with railing. Likely the home’s exterior decoration at the time it was built was more elaborate than the house’s current, modern appearance. Shortly after John’s family moved in, the New Philadelphia Brewing Company merged with other regional breweries to become the Stark-Tuscarawas Breweries Company.

After the merger, Michael Seibold essentially retired from the brewing business but John continued on with the new company. Tragedy struck the Seibold family when Roseltha Siebold died in the summer of 1913 from complications related to kidney and bladder stones at the age of 31. Shortly after the death of his wife, John relocated for several years to Massillon, Ohio where he oversaw the bottling department of the brewery there. John remarried in 1`916 to Edith Hearning (1892-1976) and the couple resided in Masillion until, 10 years later, John and his brother purchased all the holdings of the Stark-Tuscarawas Breweries Company’s southside New Philadelphia brewery. John returned to the house on South Broadway and the brothers reopened the brewery as Seibold Products Company and produced mostly soft drinks during the last few years of prohibition.

Other commercial and entrepreneurial endeavors occupied much of the family’s time, energy and resources during the early 1930s and, in 1933, the Seibolds sold the brewery. Michael Siebold died a year later and was lauded in the newspaper as one of the community’s greatest businessmen. John and his family continued to live in their South Broadway home, now with two more children from his second marriage until his death in 1951. Afterwards, the home was sold by his widow to John’s brother Henry Seibold (1876-1955). Edith Seibold lived 25 years longer than her husband, passing away in April 1976.

© Noel B. Poirier, 2023.