Samuel Meyer came to the US in the late 1800s to Minnesota and worked as a stonemason.  He was from Schleitheim, (Kanton  Schafhausen), a small village in NW Switzerland. The Meyer (Meier) family had a stone mine near the German border.  Stones cut  from this mine were used in building cathedrals at Basel and Freiburg, among others.   Johanna Eyink emigrated from Munster, North Germany in 1875 as a child of 5 or 6.  The family came to St Paul where she later  met and married Samuel Meyer.  Louise, Henry, and Sam were born in Minnesota, then the family started west.  Samuel got a job  laying firebrick in the copper mines in Montana.  Lawrence was born in Helena in 1905.  The family moved to Tacoma where  Samuel built stone structures and road walls at Mt Rainier, some of which still stand today, and worked on the state capitol  building in Olympia.  Around 1919 he and the sons purchased some land at South Bay and a farm in Delphi, near Olympia.   Meyer's Hatchery was the largest supplier of baby chicks west of the Mississippi in the '20s, supplying chicks to the Finns in the  Winlock area, which was to become the "egg capitol of the US".  Frank saw opportunity in the dairy business, and headed the farm  in that direction just before the poultry business waned.  Meyer's Guernsey Dairy marketed milk products to Olympia, and the  Delphi Dell line of stock became known world wide, as Frank showed cattle in the US and Canada, and the prize cows even got  one boat trip to England.  Delphi Dell guernseys became the foundation for many fine herds in the US.  In 1956  boxcar load went  to Dallas, Texas, with Frank's nephew Burt making the trip as herdsman.  As the brothers retired, Lawrence became sole owner,  and tried to pass it on to his sons.  No sale!  The sons had other plans, as did the oldest sister, so the farm sold to neighbor Tracy  Musgrove, and the equipment went at auction in 1970.

Nicholas Lorang was born in Luxembourg, and, at age 11, sent to a seminary in Reims.  He ran away to Paris with a friend, and  they then became cabin boys on a ship bound for Argentina.  Nick returned to Paris for the Paris Exposition, then shipped back to  Argentina, where his friend shot a man (in self-defense), so they were both deported, this time to Spain, and eventually Nick  came to New York.  He worked at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel until wanderlust took over and traveled to Minnesota, Montana,  Peace River in Canada.  While heading to the gold fields of Alaska, he got off in Spokane, and decided to homestead at Kahlotus  near the Snake River.
 John Shimek left Bohemia when he was 20 to escape conscription into the Prussian army, and ended up in Wisconsin. Mary Kozel had come to the US from Bohemia when she was 2 with her parents to Kewaunee, Wisconsin.  She grew up in a "little  Bohemia" and never learned to speak English.  When daughter Anna came to Kahlotus as a "school marm", she was immediatly  courted by the local beaus, Nick winning her hand and marrying her in 1914. Nick brought the largest Belgian horse to enter the US to that date with the purpose of breeding with the hardy horses of the  Palouse to get a breed that was large and could stand the heat (European horses could not).  He made enough in stud fees to pay  off his investment, as well a debt on the farm, but Konrad died of heat stroke in Hell's Canyon a few years later.  A couple of bad  crop years combined with Anna's hay fever forced them to sell and move west of the Cascades.  Oldest daughter, Marguerite,  trained to be a registered nurse and met Lawrence Meyer when he was her patient at St Peter's in Olympia.   They were married in  1940 and I was born in 1941.

Burt Meyer (recorder of this website)