The Bruno and Lydia Kissau House is a one-story wood-frame dwelling built in the Craftsman Architectural style in 1924 (In Jan. 2012 we got into the attic and found the chimney with the date 1923 written on it). The house address corresponds to Lot 47 of the city's Downtown Addition. Its original owners numbered among the hundreds of "Germans from Russia"-German-speaking Russians-who emigrated from the area in the early 20th century.
The original occupants of the house were a young couple, Bruno & Lydia Kissau, and their daughters Elsie & Nancy. Bruno & Lydia married in the Old Country on January 6, 1921, and emigrated to the America a year later. Bruno worked as a professional carpenter for the Max Stock Construction Company of St. Joseph, a large firm that built houses and commercial buildings of all sizes. Bruno may well have helped build the house he bought on Guernsey Ct. according to later newspaper accounts, his work included the Whitcomb Hotel in St. Joseph and the Fidelity Building in Benton Harbor. The 1930 federal census reported that the Kissau household also included Bruno's younger sister, Hulda, who also emigrated to America in 1922.
The Kissau's owned the house until about 1937, when they sold it to the family of William H. and Hazel L. Caugherty and moved to a house on Michigan Ave. in St, Joseph. The next owners worked for what was then the Nineteen Hundred Corporation and became Whirlpool. William Caugherty was born in Chicago in 1887. He attended Northwestern University, moved to Benton Harbor in 1913 and married Hazel Brandt of Hesperia, MI on March 14 of the following year.
Caugherty worked for the Whirlpool Corporation until 1942. William and Hazel had three children; Henry, Roland & Wilma. In 1942 they moved to Detroit, Michigan.
This is where the information leaves off. My mother really likes researching genealogy so we may have to do some more research ourselves. I do know that the people I bought the house from, the Arthur Kaatz family, lived in the house for many years, possibly from the 1950s until I purchased the home in 2007.