Albert Bertolet
Albert Bertolet's signature, 1871 (SCSU Archives)
50th Pennsylvania Infantry, Beaufort, South Carolina, February 1862 (Library of Congress)
50th Pennsylvania Infantry, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1865 (Library of Congress)
Albert Bertolet headstone, Richardson Family Cemetery, Santa Paula, California (Find A Grave)
Albert Bertolet, who also went by Alfred, was born January 3, 1847 to Samuel Griesemer Bertolet, a well-off iron manufacturer, and Lydia DeTurk Guldin. At 14 years old, Albert was described as 5’4” with a dark complexion, dark hair, and hazel eyes. The eighth of 10 children, Albert grew up at their family home in Reading, Pennsylvania. His mother passed away when he was only 12. On September 1, 1861, he enlisted as an infantryman in the Union Army at age 14, and his older brother Henry enlisted two weeks later.
Claiming to be 20 years old, Albert mustered in as a private on November 1. Serving in Companies B and C of the 50th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment, he fought at several of the Civil War's major battles, including Bull Run, Antietam, Vicksburg, and the Appomattox Campaign. He reenlisted on January 1, 1864, one month before his father’s death in Reading. Albert was discharged July 3, 1865 and mustered out July 30, having served for the duration of the war. No longer able to work as a laborer due to injuries received in the war, he and several other wounded veterans attended Pennsylvania’s Keystone Normal School (known today as Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in hopes of becoming teachers.
Albert likely came to St. Cloud in early 1871, just in time to complete coursework enabling him to teach in Minnesota and graduate with the Third State Normal School’s first class on June 30, 1871. He is the first military veteran to graduate from St. Cloud State. In addition, Albert was the only person of the 15 who did not attend the first day of classes held at the school on September 15, 1869. Albert was the first graduate to present a culminating essay, “Value of Education.”
Initially keeping ties to Pennsylvania, Albert helped lead a committee on Pennsylvania teachers’ certificates in Northampton County on December 16, 1871. By August 1872, however, he was working at the village school in Pine Island, Minnesota, where he was principal during the 1872-1873 school year. By December 1873, he had left Pine Island to teach at Oronoco, where local media referred to him as “Professor Albert Bertolet.” A leader among local teachers, he helped direct teachers’ institutes at Cannon Falls and Wasioja, Minnesota in September and October 1873 and chaired a committee advocating for professional teacher training at normal schools in April 1874. At the Cannon Falls institute, he worked alongside Lyman West Denton, a teacher from Pine Island. On September 1, 1874, Albert married Lyman's sister, Mary Louise, in Winona. The couple lived in Pine Island, and Albert continued to teach in the area, receiving a new state certificate on October 6, 1874.
By 1875, Albert and Mary were preparing to move to California and arrived in time for him to register to vote in Castorin on May 27, 1876. Albert taught first grade in California before his death on August 24, 1878 in Santa Paula, and buried in the private Richardson Family Cemetery.
By 1880, Mary had returned to Minnesota to live with her parents in Minneapolis, where she attended the University of Minnesota and followed Albert and Lyman into teaching. Remarrying, she moved with her new husband, John J. Burrows, to South Dakota and, later, Chicago and California. After John's death on September 9, 1925, she applied to receive Albert's Civil War pension as his widow now living in South Dakota. Mary later moved in with her Burrows in-laws in Kansas, where she lived until the early 1940s. She passed away on February 15, 1943 and was buried in Cleveland, Ohio.