Charles H. Kohlrausch

Charles Harvey Kohlrausch Jr. (1848-1912) was a chemical manufacturer at North Billerica and for more than a decade the moderator of Billerica's town meetings. He was born on August 6, 1848, in Lowell, and grew up with the Talbot works at North Billerica: the magazine Billerica recorded in 1913 that the father of the Kohlrausch brothers had been the dyer at C. P. Talbot's dyewood mill, where the manufacture of chemicals was added in 1849. He entered the Howe School in 1862. He married in 1885, and his widow, Lillian V. Kohlrausch, survived him.

When the Talbots sold their chemical business in 1884, it passed to the Talbot Dyewood and Chemical Company, whose members were Joseph D. Gould, president, Charles H. Kohlrausch, James Preston and Governor Thomas Talbot. Kohlrausch later became its president and managed the North Billerica plant, which made sulphuric, muriatic and nitric acids, muriate of tin, sal soda, extract of indigo, nitrate of iron and blue vitriol and employed fifteen to twenty men until the business was given up in 1909. A fire at the works on June 9, 1900, took the firemen seven hours to put out. He was a founder and the first Worshipful Master of the Thomas Talbot Lodge of Masons, organized in 1888, and he wrote down his reminiscences of old North Billerica, which later historians have used to date its buildings.

His town service began on the School Committee in 1885 and 1886 and again from 1888 to 1891; he was also auditor in 1886 and chief of the Board of Fire Engineers from 1888 to 1891, and he represented the district in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1892 and 1893. He was one of the first three commissioners of the Town Hall Sinking Fund in 1894, and in 1896 town meeting chose him with Frederic S. Clark and J. Nelson Parker to investigate a water supply for the town; he then served as a Water Commissioner from 1897 to 1907. He was elected to the Select Board in 1900, when the board chose him chairman in place of the retiring John E. Rowell, and he stayed until 1906, serving alongside John A. Richardson. From 1899 through 1911 he was the town's moderator, and he was remembered as one of the best parliamentarians in Middlesex County.

Kohlrausch died on April 9, 1912, at the age of 63. That July the town accepted from his widow a granite drinking fountain with a bronze lion's head, placed at the northerly end of the Common and inscribed "Presented to the Town of Billerica in memory of Charles H. Kohlrausch"; the vote recorded the town's "gratification in having a lasting memorial of a man who was so long and ably identified with its affairs." A committee of Herbert A. King, Charles H. Williams and Thomas F. Sheridan drafted resolutions on his long and faithful service, read at the annual meeting of 1913, and at that meeting the town also accepted from Mrs. Kohlrausch about six acres on the west side of Colson Street as the Charles H. Kohlrausch, Jr. Playground.

References

1. Deaths recorded in 1912, Town Report 1913
2. Town Meeting, July 1912: Kohlrausch memorial fountain and resolutions (Town Report 1913)
3. Catalogue of Howe High School, 1897, pupils admitted 1862
4. 'Billerica' magazine, March 1913 (Talbot Dyewood and Chemical Works)
5. Town Meeting 1896, committee on a water supply (Town Report 1897)
6. Report of the Selectmen, 1901 (organization of the Board, April 1900)
7. Wikipedia, 1892 Massachusetts legislature
8. Thomas Talbot Lodge, Key Figures in Thomas Talbot History