Emil Sundbery; Upsala, Sweden, then Assumption Parish, Louisiana Submitted by Mike Miller ********************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ********************************************** Emil Sundbery began his career as a laborer in the lumber woods and camps in Michigan and Wisconsin, and made for himself the resources that have enabled him to extend his operations into the southern timber district. For a number of years he has been one of the larger individual lumber manufacturers of Louisiana. His home is at Napoleonville, and he is also a bank president, owner of extensive plantations, and a former member of the Louisiana Senate. He was born at Upsala, Sweden, January 17, 1859. His father, Olaf Sundbery, who spent all his life in the vicinity of Upsala, was born in 1817 and died in 1899. He was a lumber manufacturer and timberman, and held a number of offices in his community, being chairman of the parish council for just fifty years. He was a Lutheran, and received military training during his early manhood. His wife, Caroline Thornmark, was born in Upsala, Sweden, in 1818, and died in l891. The oldest of their children was William, who followed the sea as a sailor and died at Los Angeles, California, in 1904. Knut, the second son, lives in Bohuslan, Sweden, and has recently retired after twenty-five years of service as a government physician. Oscar is a fruit grower near Vancouver, Washington. Emil Sundbery, the youngest child of his parents, attended public schools at Upsala, finishing the fifth grade in high school, and in 1879, as a young man of twenty, came to the United States. He worked in the woods and saw mills around Big Rapids, Michigan, for a time, spent two years in lumber yards in Chicago, and in Northern Wisconsin made his first start as a manufacturer of lumber at Abottsford. He also was a wholesale dealer in lumber there for two years. In 1891 he organized the Morehouse Lumber Company in Morehouse Parish. Louisiana, acting as its general manager until 1899, and then established at Cairo, Illinois, a lumber yard under time firm name of Dodge and Sundbery, and at the same time operated an Atchafalaya River sawmill in Louisiana. His next operation was the purchase of a large area of standing timber in the Parish of Assumption, and for manufacturing purposes he organized the Napoleon Cypress Company, of which he was president. The company's mills burned in 1915, and since then the remainder of the timber has been sawed in neighboring mills. The Louisiana Cooperative Company of Plaquemine was another business in which Mr. Sundbery was heavily interested, and he was its president until he sold out in 1921. The Houma Cypress Company at Houma, of which he is president, is a business now in process or liquidation. Mr. Sundbery is president of the New Deemer Manufacturing Company, Inc., manufacturing pine and hardwood lumber on an extensive scale at Deemer. Mr. Sundbery for twelve years has been president of the Bank of Napoleonville. His property interests are very extensive, including a tine home a mile north of Napoleonville. He owns the Rosedale plantation, two and one-half miles south of Napoleonville, a total of 2,240 acres, with 900 acres under cultivation. He is also owner of the Himalaya group of plantations comprising 6,667 acres, 2,600 acres being under cultivation. A large sugar refinery is maintained to serve this group of plantations. Mr. Sundbery was a member of the State Senate of Louisiana from 1912 to 1916, representing the Tenth District, the parishes of Assumption, La Fourche and Terrebonne. He was member at large from the Third Congressional District in the Constitutional Convention held in 1921. Mr. Sundbery represents Assumption Parish as a member of the State Central Democratic Committee. During the World war he was food administrator for Assumption Parish, had charge of the War Savings campaigns in that parish and also was chairman of two of the Red Cross campaigns and assisted to the full extent of his personal service and means in prosecuting the war. He married at Mannville, Wisconsin, December 27, 1888, Miss Mary E. Cook, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Albert H. Cook, Wisconsin farmers. The only son of Mr. Sundbery is Oscar C., a well known business man at Houma, whose career is sketched elsewhere. The second child, Edwin, died when one year old. The daughter, Edith B., is the wife of Dr. Thomas M. Terry, a dentist with home at 366 Walnut Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. NOTE: The referenced source contains a black and white photograph of the subject with his/her autograph. A History of Louisiana, (vol. 2), pp. 275-276, by Henry E. Chambers. Published by The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, 1925.