# Avon, Stearns County, Minnesota For the Petri family, Avon was the first foothold in America — the place where a German-speaking immigrant couple and their sons paused before the land itself pulled them north. Mathias Petri, born in 1846 in the borderland of Luxembourg and Germany, was the first of his family to cross the Atlantic. He arrived in New York on the first of April, 1891, aboard the *Westernland*, a Red Star Line steamer running out of Antwerp. Traveling as a laborer with a handful of luggage, he came as part of a small party headed inland. He and his wife, Katherine Riel — born in Germany in 1848 — had come as a young couple to make a farm in a new country. They settled in Avon, a small town in Stearns County, south of St. Cloud in central Minnesota. By 1895, the whole household was rooted there. The Minnesota state census of that year records the family living together in Avon: Mathias and Katherine, and their sons Champy Peter, Victor M., and Edward. Avon in the 1890s was farm country, settled heavily by German Catholic immigrants — people much like the Petris, who spoke the same language, kept the same faith, and worked the same kind of land. For a family newly arrived from the Luxembourg and German border region, it was a place where they would not have felt entirely foreign. The parish records of the area were kept by priests and clerks who wrote names as they heard them, and the Petri name appears variously spelled — Petri, Petry, Pitry, Petrie — a reminder of a family still finding the shape of its name in a new tongue. The 1895 census marks a fixed point for all five of these people together. It is the last clear glimpse of the family as a single household in Avon. Edward, the second son, appears here and then vanishes from the record entirely — no further trace after this year. Victor would eventually move on to Ontario. Champy, the third son, would marry three times over the course of his life; he later farmed in Section 10 and raised two children, John William, born in 1915, and Catherine Mary, born in 1920. For Mathias himself, Avon was a beginning rather than an end. He and his son John did not stay. Together they walked the trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji and homesteaded farther north, in Section 6 of Liberty Township. Mathias lived out the rest of his life in the Bemidji area, suffering a stroke in 1921 that left him confined to a wheelchair, and dying in 1925. Katherine died in Bemidji in 1932. Avon, then, is where the American story of this family opens — the town where they first set down after the ocean crossing, the place named in the one census that holds them all together, before the northern woods drew the family apart and onward.