From Proud Heritage, Volume I by DCPA, currently out of print.
Christian Moser was born February 25, 1845 in Lananau, Bern, Switzerland, died September 22, 1893 in Dallas, Texas; he married Anna Buhrer, who was born April 3, 1857 in Zurich, Switzerland and died January 22, 1938 in Dallas, Texas.
Christian, called “Chris”, came to Dallas, Texas, in 1874 financially broke as the result of failure of his cheese business in his native Switzerland. For a time he worked in a quarry near Chalk Hill and later at several milk dairies while he saved to purchase his own cows to start his Moser Dairy.
In the Spring of 1879, Anna, age 22, her mother, Anna Scherer Buhrer, and her brother, Jacob, came to Dallas from Ellenboro West Virginia, to which place John Buhrer, Sr., her father, had come from Switzerland in 1865.
In 1879 Chris, now 34, had prospered in his dairy business, and was looking for a wife. He met Anna. (Family tradition does not account for how or where they met, but the Swiss colony was a close-knit one – most likely it was at the German Evangelical Lutheran Church to which they both belong ed.) They were married in the Fall of 1879.
“Old Timers”, customers of Chris’ milk route, enjoyed telling how he told them of a surprise he had for them that he would bring the next day. It was, of course, his new bride, Anna. According to their story, she was dressed in her “Sunday Best” and had a cute little hat.
To the marriage six children were born: 1) August Charles (1880), who married Catherine Eidt; 2) Freda (1883), who married August Mueller; 3) Christopher Otto (1885), who married Norma Nagle; 4) Matilda (1887), who married John Griffin; 5) Ernest Frank (1890), who married Thelma Parmeter; and 6) Huldah (1893), who married Adelbert Bleibler.
Two times before his death at age 48 Chris Moser took his family back to the “old country”. It is recounted in family gatherings how, on the first visit, he and Anna gave a dinner for the creditors of Chris’ failed cheese business. Under the napkin of each place was a check in full payment of his debt.
Anna was left at age 36 a widow with six young children. By then the dairy was on 37 acres of land owned at the corner of Henderson and. Ross Avenues, as we now know the location – then, in 1893 it was outside the city limits of Dallas. Anna was thrifty, a good manager, and had much good advice from her attorney. Anna Moser believed in higher education for her children. She sent her sons to The A & M College of Texas, and her daughters to the St. Mary’s College located at Ross and Garrett Avenues.
In 1910, because the City of Dallas had grown out to the land, she subdivided the land into residential lots and called it Moser’s Ross Avenue Addition. After her death in 1938, at age 81, the homestead was sold to the Merchants State Bank for the erection of it’s large bank and office building.
By A. C. Moser, Jr., grandson, Dallas
