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Veronica Richter Dreeson
Fictional Character
1632 series
POD: May, 1631
Appearance(s): 1632;
1633;
Ring of Fire;
1634: The Bavarian Crisis;
1635: The Dreeson Incident
Type of Appearance: Direct
Nationality: Germany
Date of Birth: 1575
Occupation: Politician
Spouse: Johann Stephan Richter (first husband, d. 1618)
Henry Dreeson (second husband, d. 1635)

Veronica "Ronnie" Richter Dreeson was the widowed grandmother of Gretchen, Hans, and Annalise Richter. Like her grandchildren, Veronica Richter was a forced camp-follower at the time Grantville arrived in 1631. She and her family were rescued at the Battle of the Crapper, after which she relocated to Grantville. While not quite the political firebrand her granddaughter Gretchen eventually became, Veronica was nonetheless a formidable woman in her own right. She wore a pair of false teeth made by Dr. Henry Sims, while he still had the necessary supplies. As she refused to pay in installments, she earned the money to pay for them by providing paid child care. This led her to found primary schools within Grantville and the United States of Europe. She married Grantville Mayor Henry Dreeson in 1632. While preparing for the wedding, she noted that, before the Bavarians had imposed Catholicism on the Upper Palatinate, she had gone back and forth between Calvinism and Lutheranism. She continued to resent the Bavarians for having imposed Catholicism, though she considered herself too old to change yet again.

In 1634, she decided to make a trip to the Upper Palatinate, in an attempt to settle her first husband's estate. She was accompanied by Mary Simpson, who hoped to persuade Ernst of Saxe-Weimar to support a normal school for training teachers. They were abducted from her hometown of Grafenwöhr and taken to Bavaria, a series of events that helped trigger the so-called "Bavarian Crisis".

On March 4, 1635, her second husband was assassinated by Huguenot fanatic Mathurin Brillard. Vincenz Weitz attempted to discredit her by painting her as anti-Semitic because she, unlike Inez Wiley, had not been standing on the steps of Grantville's synagogue while it was being attacked. In fact, one effect of her travels with Mary Ward was that she had started attending Mass at St. Mary's, and had been there when the attack started. The church's walls had muffled the noise of the attack and fight so much that the people inside had been unaware of it, and it had ended before the service was over.


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