Anton Kraabel
Anton T. Kraabel was a North Dakota Republican Party politician who served as the ninth and 11th lieutenant governor of North Dakota under Governors L. B. Hanna and Lynn Frazier respectively.
Kraabel also served in the North Dakota House from 1903 to 1904 and in the North Dakota Senate from 1905 to 1908. He was the grandfather of American scholar A. Thomas Kraabel.
Early life
Anton T. Kraabel was born in 1862 in Øyer Municipality which is located in the Gudbrandsdal valley in Oppland county, Norway. When Kraabel was four years old, his family including his parents, two brothers and three sisters emigrated to the United States and settled near Coon Valley in southwestern Wisconsin. Two sisters were born to the family afterwards. At the age of sixteen, Kraabel started supporting himself by working on farms and in a sawmill. He later moved to North Dakota where he worked as a peddler, as a hotel manager and a lumber yard manager.Eventually, he settled in Clifford, North Dakota and began his career as a manager of a general store. He married Maren Oline Oswald in 1892, and they had seven children; three girls and four boys. In 1899, along with several others, he started the Clifford Bank.