Charles Lee Blunt

BLUNT FREEMAN

Posted By: Connie Swearingen (email)
Date: 4/18/2010 at 23:13:51

Woodbury County History 1984

Charles Lee and Julia Freeman Blunt
By Ruth Countermine Blunt

My husband, Freeman Lee Blunt, age 78, was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, of a dentist father, Charles Lee Blunt (University of Michigan College of Dentistry, 1892), whose first practice was in Sioux City. But just as Dr C L Blunt ‘got going’, the Panic of ’93 struck and he had to carry his bag of instruments plus a pump-it-yourself foot-engine to visit small towns in the area of Sioux City to operate on patients in hotel rocking chairs. He survived, but when a chance to practice in Yankton, South Dakota, came, he took it, although missing the social life of Sioux City. Sioux City was the metropolis to which citizens of Elk Point and Yankton, South Dakota, gravitated for shopping and entertainment. Dr ‘C L’(Blunt) years later took his young granddaughters and their parents to a performance of ‘The Merry Widow’ in Minneapolis. It entranced them, but grandfather said, ‘Ah, but you should have heard Fritzi Scheff in that role, in Sioux City in the ‘90’s!

Dr C L Blunt met his future wife, Julia Freeman, in Elk Point, South Dakota, where her father, Charles H Freeman, and uncle, George R Freeman, divided the business of that small town. George was in banking and Charles was in general merchandise and the feed-wagon business (with oxen and horses for sale). Trains were still going west in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s and George R Freeman was ready to outfit them. Julia, daughter of C H Freeman, was an accomplished pianist and kept up her music all her life, giving pleasure to many. The father of the Freeman brothers (the Rev Mr. George Freeman) was a circuit riding Baptist minister with Dakota Territory as his province in which to establish Baptist churches. He established many and when the Union Pacific was complete, he followed the railroad, starting churches. The Rev Mr. George Freeman was also a friend of the Sioux Indians, and we have items given him by chiefs. In spite of their ‘uprising’, I am glad that the name of Sioux endures in the city of my birth. I am glad that Sioux City is Sioux City.