Childhood
Lou Blonger was born in Swanton, Vermont, on May 13, 1849, the eighth of 13 children. His father, Simon Peter Belonger, was a stonemason born in Canada of French ancestry. His mother, Judith Kennedy, was raised in an orphanage in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland. The Belonger family migrated from Vermont to the lead mining village of Shullsburg, Wisconsin, when Lou was five years old. After his mother died in 1859, Lou lived with his older sister and her husband for a few years. Around this time Blonger began using a shortened version of the family name (omitting the first "e"), as most of his brothers did.
Blonger followed brothers Mike and Joe into the Union Army in 1864. Although he was still three days shy of his 15th birthday, Blonger was mustered in as a fifer at Warren, Illinois, and served a few weeks with Company B of the 142nd Illinois Regiment before suffering a leg injury at White Station, Tennessee. He spent the remainder of his 100-day enlistment recovering at the Marine Hospital in Chicago.
At the conclusion of the Civil War, Blonger reunited with his brother Sam, ten years his elder, who had spent the war years prospecting in Colorado and driving freight over the mountains in California and Nevada. Lou was living in Mount Carroll, Illinois, with a friend named William Livingston when Sam returned. While Sam courted and eventually married Livingston’s sister Ella, Lou attended high school. Later Sam sent his brother to study at Bryant & Stratton Business College in Chicago.
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