John T. Carstensen

JOHN THEODORE CARSTENSEN has for many years rendered a valuable service to the cause of education and the City of Clinton. He is business manager and secretary of the public schools of that city.

Mr. Carstensen was born in Germany, January 2, 1870. His parents, Carsen and Marie Louise (Hansen) Carstensen, arrived in New York in 1881 and the following year settled at Clinton, Iowa. Their son Jacob, now living in British Columbia, made several prospecting trips to the gold fields of Alaska, and his partner on those ventures was a Mr. Sankey, a nephew of the famous Sankey of Moody and Sankey, evangelists and hymn writers. Two other sons of the family, Ernest and Henry J., are both deceased. The two daughters are Lena, wife of Julius Weise, of Alberta, Canada, and Katherine, Mrs. Charles Kohler, of Clinton.

John Theodore Carstensen attended school in Germany an din Clinton and pursued technical and advance courses in the University of Illinois at Rubana and the University of Chicago. Mr. Carstensen at an early age began mastering the wood-working trade. When he was sixteen years of age he entered the shops of the Curtis Brothers at Clinton, and except for two years was with that organization until 1903. Mr. Carstensen in 1903 was elected a member of the State Legislature, serving in the Thirtieth and Thirty-first General Assemblies.

In 1906 he was chosen manual training teacher of the Clinton schools, and it was largely under his able direction that the manual training course was developed as an integral part of the educational system. He continued as director of the manual training for fifteen years. In 1923 he became business manager of the Clinton schools and has held that office for the past six years. In 1927 he was also elected secretary of the school board, and has combined that work with is office as business manager since the death of the former secretary of the board. Mr. Carstensen for the past eight years has also been president of the Clinton Public Library board.

He is a thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason, and a member of the German Benevolent and Educational Society.

He married, in 1897, Miss Mattie Scharnweber. She died in 1903 and later he married her sister, Anna Scharnweber. Mrs. Carstensen is a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Scharnweber, the latter now deceased. Her father, now eighty-five years of age, was for many years a millwright with the firm of C. Lamb & Son at Clinton.