Patroness

Mill owner’s wife Emilie Kreidl o.s. Reuter (1852-1903)

Emilie Anna Caroline Reuter was born at 6 a.m. on August 12, 1852 in Pavlovsky, Ingria, south of the city of St. Petersburg, on the banks of the Slavyanka River. Emilie was baptized on 20.9.1852 as a member of the Lutheran, German-speaking parish in Pavlovsk. Emilie's father was Wenceslaus Hermann Reuter, a master baker, and her mother was Dorothea Emilie Klauss. Emilie spent her childhood in Ingria, where there was a large Finnish-speaking population, several imperial palaces and the Krasnoye Selo or Kraassela area, where large military exercises were organized.

Emilie Reuter's home language was apparently German, but she heard several languages spoken in her childhood and probably understood and knew Finnish as well. Emilie had several sisters and brothers. In 1868, when Emilie was 16 years old, the father of the family died. There is no exact information about Emilie's events in the following years.

In 1714, Tsar Peter I had founded a paper mill on the Tuutari River, and the settlement of Kraassela had formed around it. The Krasnoye Selo paper mill was the first in the region, but not the only one. At the end of the 1800s, there were several paper mills in Ingria, where people from Germany, Austria and Finland sought work. It is not known how and when Gottlieb Kreidl and Emelie Reuter first met. Before coming to Kuusankoski, Kreidl worked as a property manager at the Slavyanka paper mill in Ingria. From there, he came to Kuusankoski as a technical director in 1874. It is possible that they would have already met each other when Kreidl was in Slavyanka. According to the population registers, Kreidl lived in Kuusankoski alone with his servant, like he did in 1882 in his first year in Verla

The first record of Emilie and Gottlieb as a married couple dates back to October 1884. In the book of births of the Pirkkala parish, Engineer Gottlieb Kreidl and his wife Emilia as well as Engineer Gustaa Duncker and Miss Olga Sandholm, are listed as godparents of Herman August Kronholm's and his wife’s Matilda Mariana Salin’s son Akseli Hugo, who was baptized in Jaala. 

Based on his place of birth, Kreidl may have been Roman Catholic by religion. There are no entries about him in Finnish church records. No records of the marriage have been found in Austria or in Emilie's home parish in Ingria or St. Petersburg. Gottlieb Kreidl's estate inventory lists his belongings in great detail. It mentions the marriage certificate and Emilie Kreidl's baptism and death certificates. They had been married, but when and where remains unclear.

Hannu Pukkila, who writes about people and things related to Verla