USA > Iowa > Jackson County > History of Jackson County, Iowa; Volume I > Part 81
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
sojourned long in Illinois. A. J. Phillips' father came from La Porte, Indiana, and built a log cabin between the forks in 1837. There was also a settler near the present site of Maquoketa, in 1837, one Alfonzo Gowan, of Warren county, New York. He was the pioneer blacksmith and soon removed to Scotch Grove, Jones county, but had something to do with determining the choice of location by two who came the next spring and who did become permanent inhabitants. This brings us to the consideration of the principal theme of this paper, the for- mation of colonies by the old pioneers. Earliest in date was what may be called
LAKE GEORGE COLONY.
Lake George, in eastern New York, lies in a trough like depression of the Adirondack Mountains, trending nearly north and south, is thirty-six miles long, and is contained in both Warren and Essex counties. Our oldest and largest colony of pioneers consists of two groups, one from Warren county and the other from Essex; but since they had a common origin and had, to some extent, intermingled before emigration, we will consider them one body and give them the name of the beautiful sheet of water, near whose shores nestled the eastern homes of both groups. It will be noted that these people were mostly wholly, a New England community. They had come largely from Vermont, with an earlier origin in Massachusetts, and also from New Hampshire, Massachu- setts, and Connecticut, passed around the south end of Lake Champlain, and spread out along its western shore, soon after the Revolutionary war, while all that region was still a wilderness. The Goodenow family, one ancestor of which traced descent direct from Peregrine White, the first white child born in Ply- mouth, removed from Windsor county, Vermont, to Queensbury, Warren county, New York, on the west shore of Lake George, in 1820. The oldest son, John E., was then a lad of eight years, and he grew up to young manhood in what was essentially a pioneer home. After some experience in boating on the Hudson and on Champlain Canal and Lake, he became employed as a clerk in the village of Moriah, which lies near Lake Champlain, in the central part of Essex county. One of the effects of the "panic year" of 1837 was to direct the minds of many young men in the east to the possibility of bettering their fortunes by removal to the unsettled lands of the west. One of this number was John E. Goodenow, who, by some influence, was attracted by the prospects of the recently opened "Black Hawk Purchase" across the Mississippi, in what was then a part of the Territory of Wisconsin. He was encouraged by his employer, Mr. Parmenter, who shared in the purchase of the stock of goods to be taken for sale and to be exchanged for land in the new country. Accompanied by a young friend, Lyman Bates, Mr. Goodenow started in January, 1838, with a four horse team and wagon, for the long trip. The route lay through what was then the small village of Chicago. They crossed the Missisippi on the ice, March 10th, from Savanna, then a hamlet of four houses, to Carrollport (now Sabula) where Dr. Enoch A. Wood, Charles Swan and William H. Brown had laid out a town during the previous year ; and after serious delay by flooded streams, arrived at the forks of the Maquoketa, March 19, 1838. Here they concluded to make their homes and here they both lived to old age, Mr. Goodenow dying last, on Septem- ber 3, 1902, in the ninety-first year of his age. In 1839 he had returned to his father's home in Warren county and married a playmate of his boyhood, Miss Eliza Wright, of Bolton, a village on the west shore of Lake George. Thus it may be said that John E. Goodenow originated the streams of emigration that came here from Warren county, with Bolton and Queensbury as centers, and from Essex county with Moriah as a center. From Warren we have the Goode- now Bros .; Ben Hansen, 1838; the Wrights, Thomas, 1839, and his father, Thomas M., and brothers, Alfred and Samuel, 1840; Amasa Nims, 1839; Isaiah Griffin, 1840; David and William Bentley, 1841; Sidney D. Tubbs, 1843; H. B. Griffin, 1846; all representatives of large families. Then followed the Taylors,
From a pen drawing MRS. JOHN E. GOODENOW When a young lady
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
Lockwoods, Jenkins, Hubbells, Chapmans, and others whose names we have not been able to gather. From Essex county, came Jason Pangborn, 1838; Alvin Fairbrother, 1838; William Y. Earle, 1840; the Cranes (S. N. 1845) ; D. N. Fletcher, 1856; T. A. N. Walker, Ira Towner, 1854; Louis M. Wood, 1855; Harry Farr, W. D. Haven, and others. These families are all represented by descendants still living here. Some of them very numerous.
OTHER NEW YORK EMIGRANTS.
Shade Burleson, the famous old pioneer landlord of the "Buckhorn Tavern," though born in Vermont, had lived in Waterford, Saratoga county, New York, for ten years, before coming west in 1836. His objective point was Galena, buť after living there through the first winter he came to Jackson county, in April, 1837, and made the claim in South Fork township, on which he lived until his death in 1883.
John Shaw, another of the earliest pioneers, was a native of Massachusetts, but removed to Otsego county, New York, when a young man. He went to Dubuque in 1838 or 1839, and engaged in business for a year, then removed to Bellevue; but, in 1842, came to this place and settled upon the quarter section he had bought a few years before, which forms an important part of our town site.
From the west slope of the Adirondacks, St. Lawrence, Jefferson, and Lewis counties, many families came who are connected by so many ties of relationship and acquaintance that they may be grouped as a colony. These were the Moul- tens, Rich, Ingalls, Decker, Henry Smith, Fox, Dr. A. S. Hodge, and, after the war, Hon. G. L. Johnson, H. E. Smith, Dr. Derby and others. A. J. Riggs and brothers came from Wayne county, about 1837; Hon. Pierce Mitchell, from Delaware county in 1847 (but he had taught school in Kentucky a few years and came here directly from that state), and the Pattersons from Cortland county in 1853. From western New York we have a goodly number of settlers, among whom may be named, from Chautauqua county, Dr. Daniel Rhodes, about 1840; Nathanial Butterworth (born in Massachusetts), 1838; Russell Perham, Vermonter, 1849; Calvin E. Northup, and S. S. Germond, about 1853, and others. Schuyler L. Eddy, also a native of Vermont, had lived in Livingstone county fifteen years before he came to Maquoketa, in 1853. He was one of our town site owners. Job Reynolds came here from Niagara county, but was born in Washington county, as was also Harvey Reid, who came to Jackson county in 1865 from Racine county, Wisconsin, whither his father had removed in 1844. A very early settler, represented here in the person of his granddaughter, Mrs. James W. Ellis, was John Forbes, of Cortland county, who made a home in what is now Bellevue, in 1834. Rev. C. E. Brown, 1847 (uncle of Mrs. Julia B. Dunham), and J. O. DeGrush were from Little Falls, Herkimer county ; Hiram Barnes, 1855, from near Elmira.
NEW ENGLAND CONTINGENT.
It will have been noted that a large proportion of the New York pioneers were born in Vermont. Direct from that state, came Truman Nickerson, Sr., 1842; D. C. Clary, 1847; Hiram B. French, 1847; Lyman Ballard, 1848; Dexter Field, W. B. Sutherland, and Abner Reeve, 1853; S. A. Shattuck and Major Walter Doe, 1854; Wm. C. Boardman, 1856; and later O. W. Joiner, the Shrig- leys, and others. Isaiah K. Crane, 1855, came here from New Hampshire, which was the home of the ancestors of the New York Cranes, already mentioned. Hon. L. B. Dunham was born in Connecticut, but had lived in Pennsylvania for twenty years before coming here, in 1856.
CANADA COLONY.
The origin of the really extensive colony from upper Canada (now Province of Ontario) is closely connected with a little known episode of history-the
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
revolt of the reformers of Canada, under William Lyon Mackenzie, against the British government, in 1837 and 1838. When Mackenzie made his escape, after the utter rout of his half armed force, near Toronto, December 7, 1837, he made his way, partly on foot and partly on horseback, around the head of Lake Ontario, heading toward the Niagara River, where he had many friends, acquired during his former residence at Queenstown, in that locality. Near St. Catharines he fell in with one of his friends, Samuel Chandler, a wagon maker, living at St. Johns on the Welland Canal. Chandler thereupon offered to accompany him and assist him to escape. They proceeded, first, to the farm of John Wilson, in Crowland township, about ten miles from the Niagara, where they found Wilson's sons-in-law, William Current and Mahlon Brook- field. The former was also an old friend of Mackenzie's, and an ardent es- pouser of his cause, He, too, volunteered to aid in the escape of their imperiled leader. Leaving their saddle horses with Wilson, Mackenzie, Chandler and Current, drove a two horse sleigh to Samuel McAfees, on the river, of whom they borrowed a boat, and Chandler went with Mackenzie to Buffalo, while Mr. Current returned home. In consequence of this action and their subse- quent identification with the revolutionary government formed on Navy Is- land, Mr. Current, Mr. Chandler and Thos. Darling, of St. Cartharines, among others, were forced to take refuge in New York State for several weeks.
In June, 1838, a force was organized on the American side, commanded by Colonel James Moreau, an American, Samuel Chandler and Benjamin Wait. They crossed the river at Navy Island, formed a rendezvous in the woods near John Wilson's farm, where they received assistance from his two oldest sons, Anson H. and Jesse, fought an indecisive and bloodless skirmish at Overholt's Tavern, in the Short Hills, and then dispersed. The three officers named and about twenty others were captured by the British, tried, and found guilty of treason. Moreau was promptly executed. The sentences were commuted to imprisonment, in the cases of all the others except Chandler, Wait and two more, who were sentenced to be hanged in two weeks. As a desperate hope, the young wife of Wait, and Chandler's daughter, Sarah, a girl of eighteen, went alone to Quebec, seven hundred miles distant, to intercede with the Earl of Durham, governor general for pardon. 'A respite was granted, but so long and tedious was the journey that it came only half an hour before the execution was to take place. The sentence was finally commuted to banishment for life to Van Dieman's Land, but both Wait and Chandler escaped on a Yankee whaling ves- sel, after four years' servitude.
The collapse of this movement and the fate of its participants alarmed its sympathizers, at Crowland, so William Current, his brothers, Mark and Joseph, and his brothers-in-law, Jesse and Anson Wilson and Mahlon Brookfield, Ira Stimpson, and Brookfield's two brothers, made a quick movement across the Niagara River. Their first halt was in Michigan; Anson Wilson, at Kalamazoo; Stimpson, at Port Huron; and the rest of the party, at Niles. In the spring of 1839, the three Current brothers and the two Wilson brothers, concluded to venture further west, and the much vaunted "Black Hawk Purchase" whetted their curiosity and enthusiasm. The trip was made on foot, their baggage being carried on a led horse. They came through Chicago, crossed the Mississippi, at Savanna, and then began to look for something good. They thought they had found it when they met John E. Goodenow at the Forks. Anson Wilson found a government eighty open for entry, and he lived upon it until his death, Feb- ruary, 1907. William Current bought a claim of Jason Pangborn within our present city limits. The other Current boys and Jesse Wilson, returned to Canada, the same summer, but came back here later. Jesse married Sarah Chandler, the heroine of the Quebec trip, and they made their home here again in 1841. He and his brother, Anson, each attained the age of ninety-two years and were the oldest pioneers at the time of their death, who came here as grown men. "General" Samuel Chandler, in 1843, after his escape from Van Die-
MRS. JOHN E. GOODENOW
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man's Land joined his daughter here with the rest of his family of ten chil- dren. And thus was the Canada colony started. Ebenezer Wilcox, who settled in Monmouth, in 1839, was another refugee. He had been in the contingent from London district, in Mackenzie's force, at Toronto, was taken prisoner, and lay in jail ten months, but was finally pardoned. He had been preceded in the same neighborhood by Calvin Teeple, 1837, who had also been a neighbor in Canada.
Another very early Canadian pioneer was Hon. William Morden, who ac- quired his land at Fulton in 1836. He came from near Toronto, but lived near Sandusky, Ohio, for ten years before coming to the west. His brother, Gil- bert F. Morden was one of the Mackenzie insurgents, at Toronto, was taken prisoner, but escaped six months later from Fort Henry, at Kingston, with six- teen others. Thomas Darling was permitted to return to Canada, but he too, emigrated to Iowa, in 1851, and settled first at Maquoketa, but removed a year later to Sabula, where his brother Samuel had located. We did not find that any others who came here were positively implicated in the Patriot war; but, from the same part of Canada, we have received I. K. Millard, 1850; (father of United States Senator Millard, of Nebraska, and son of Mrs. A. J. House, of this city) ; Benjamin Spencer, 1854; Daniel T. Farr, 1853; Albert Haner, 1855; Judge A. J. House, and brothers ; and others. Aaron Truax and W. C. Moffatt, 1855, were Lower Canada people, but the latter came here after several years' residence at Belvidere, Illinois. Nearly all of these whom we have called Cana- dians had an earlier American origin. Chandler was born in Massachusetts; the elder Wilson and Millard, in New Jersey ; Wilcox's parents, in New York and Connecticut; Farr, in New York, and probably others have a similar his- tory. Most of them, too, were of Revolutionary ancestry. Another considerable colony of American Canadians, from the same localities, settled around Sabula.
THE VIRGINIA COLONY.
There seems to be an innate tendency in human migration to follow, in seek- ing a new home, the same parallel of latitude in which the old one lay. The presence, therefore, in north central Iowa of a considerable body of settlers who came from a southern community, over two degrees farther south, naturally arouses curiosity. The Valley of Virginia, more generally known as the Shen- andoah Valley, is a broad expanse bounded by the Blue Ridge on the east, and the Kittatinny Range of the main Alleghenies on the west. It is drained by the Shenandoah River and tributaries, the main river uniting with the Potomac at Harper's Ferry. The fourth county up the valley is Rockingham, a large county, having an area equal to twenty-four western townships, stretching entirely across the valley from Blue Ridge to Kittatinny. It contains the head streams of the North Fork of the Shenandoah and, in its eastern portion, is traversed by the South Fork, coming from the adjoining county, Augusta. Across the moun- tains, to the west, is Pendleton county, now a part of the new state of West Virginia. Next north of Rockingham, is Shenandoah county, of which Wood- stock is the county seat. Harrisonburg is the county seat of Rockingham; Frank- lin of Pendleton; and Staunton of Augusta; Rockingham was almost the limit of operations in the valley during the Civl war. The battles of Cross Keys and Port Republic took place along its eastern border. Banks occupied Har- risonburg for a time; and Sheridan, after the defeat of Early, advanced as far as Staunton. Fremont, Sigel, and Hunter, at different times, made their head- quarters at Franklin, in Pendleton. These counties are all within the limestone regions of the Appalachians and the soil is very fertile.
Early in the summer of 1845, three young lawyers of the locality just de- scribed, resolved to try their luck in the rapidly developing Territory of Iowa. They were Ben M. Samuels, of Shenandoah county; John J. Dyer, of Pendle- ton, who had married Samuels' sister, and William Y. Lovell, of Front Royal, Warren county (also in the valley). Samuels and Lovell located in Dubuque, where both became noted lawyers, and the former also acquired fame in poli-
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tics, being a member of the first state legislature and afterward a democratic candidate for governor. Dyer felt that an inviting field for a career in his pro- fession lay in the recently established county seat of Jackson county. So he went to Andrew, bought a block of land there (block 46) of Briggs and Francis, and also bought several tracts of land in the county. He was then thirty-six years old, and had acquired a good reputation as lawyer in his native state, and had also gained some ardent and influential friends there. Among these was Judge Isaac Samuels Pennybacker, a brother-in-law and also a relative of his wife, who was a native of Shenandoah county, but had for some years, been resid- ing at Harrisonburg. In 1845, he was elected by the Virginia legislature one of the United States senators from that state, and took his seat in the first congress that convened after James K. Polk was inaugurated. Tradition says that he went to the president and told him that he would ask only one favor that term, and that was that his friend John J. Dyer, be appointed federal judge of the district to be formed by the State of Iowa, being just then (December, 1846) admitted to the Union. Polk replied that that was getting off cheap, and made the appointment. Thus appears a fact that has attracted little attention, that Jackson county not only had the honor of supplying the first governor of Iowa, but also the first federal judge. The two facts are likewise dependent on each other. When the first democratic state convention met, in September, 1846, to nominate officers to set the new state machinery in motion, it was agreed that Jackson county should have the privilege of presenting the nominee for governor, in recognition of the fact that it had given the largest majority for the con- stitution in proportion to number of votes cast of any county, and was there- fore styled "the banner county of democracy." This was with the exception that John J. Dyer would be the nominee presented. But he had already had an in- timation that his appointment as judge was certain, and he, therefore, proposed the name of his neighbor, Ansel Briggs, for governor, and that nomination was made. Whether the story of Senator Pennybacker's pledge to President Polk be true or not, it is probable that he never did ask another favor, because he did not serve through that session of congress. His life closed January 12, 1847. Judge Dyer had spent that winter at his old home, his commission as judge was finally issued in March, 1847, and he came to Iowa and held his first term of court at Iowa City. the state capital, in July. He then returned to Virginia for his family, which had remained there. During these visits, he had painted the glories of his Iowa home so vividly to an old schoolmate, Captain Wm. K. Keister, of Rockingham county, that that gentleman disposed of his Virginia farm and prepared to accompany the judge on his return. Keister's nephew, George W. Bowman, was just married and he, too, with his young wife, concluded to try his fortunes in the northern state. They landed at Bellevue in October, 1847. Keister bought a claim six miles west of Bellevue, which his son still owns; Bowman rented a house in Andrew, until spring, and then bought a farm in the south part of Perry township; and Dyer took up his residence in Dubuque, where he had lived an honored, useful life until in the summer of 1855, while on a visit to his old home in Virginia, he was taken sick and died, on the 14th of September, 1855. He was buried at Woodstock. Thus was begun our Virginia colony. George Bowman's brother, Jacob K., came here in 1849, and his father, Jacob, with the younger sons, Ben F., Stephen H., and William, in 1851. In 1852, they were followed by an old neighbor, Eugene Anderson, with his sons, George H. and David H., his brother Harvey and his son-in-law. A. L. Dyer. Afterward, came Anderson's brothers-in-law, Addison Hiner, 1855; Wallace Dunlap, 1858; and Eben Phillips, whose brother, William Phillips, and sons also joined the colony after the war. S. O. H. Trumbo, J. A. and William Bodkin, J. S. Dice, and brothers, were from Pendleton county. The Bodkins, Dice, John Devier and Dr. W. H. Davies, all of whom came here after the war, and served as Confederate soldiers.
P.MITCI
TO
IMMIGRANTS CROSSING MAIN ON PLATTE STREET, 1865
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
Besides the Virginians, there were a few individuals among the early set- tlers from the south, but not enough from one locality to be called a colony. Several, who were Kentucky born, came from Indiana. George Cubbage, Mrs. Alex. Organ's grandfather, was born in Dover, Delaware. He was one of the early pioneers of Galena, and in the winter of 1833-34 taught the first school ever opened in Dubuque. His two sons, William and George, came to Spring Brook, Jackson county, from Galena, in 1846.
David Sears, of a New England family that traced descent from the May- flower pilgrims, was born in Delaware county, New York, removed to western Pennsylvania when a young man, and from there to Covington, Kentucky, where he did a large business in a mercantile way. He visited this locality in 1844, remaining one year, and removed his family here in 1847, bringing a stock of goods and establishing the largest store of the day here. He was accompanied by a young New York school teacher, Pierce Mitchel, who became a partner after a year's service as clerk. Dr. P. L. Lake, an Ohio man, was also a southern school teacher and came here in 1849 from Huntsville, Alabama. D. A. Fletcher spent several years teaching in middle Tennessee, and Mrs. Fletcher is a native of that state. Captain W. Scott Belden, 1857, a New Yorker, also taught school in Kentucky four years, and came here from that state.
But a typical southerner, of the homicidal sort, was that notorious Absalom Montgomery. He was born in east Tennessee, removed to Memphis when quite a young man, and from there to Terre Haute, Indiana. He came to Galena in the early '30s, and finally to this locality in 1837. Though wild and reckless, he was energetic and companionable, and therefore, quite popular among the sturdy pioneers of the day. His shooting of Brown (1852) was a characteristic way of settling a dispute. After his final acquittal in the Delhi court where the case was taken on a change of venue, he returned to Terre Haute, and died there.
PENNSYLVANIA COLONIES.
Maquoketa and vicinity are indebted to Pennsylvania for two large and distinct colonies; one, from the extreme western border of that state, and the other near its eastern boundary; and the two had distinct ethnological, as well as geographical origins. The western Pennsylvania colony was rather of An- drew, than of Maquoketa; although this city has received accessions from it all along the years, from our earliest days. They are nearly all of Scotch-Irish origin and Presbyterian faith, the United Presbyterian church, at Andrew, de- riving a great majority of its membership from that Pennsylvania emigration. Mercer county, nearly west of Pittsburg and bordering on Ohio, was the home of most of these people but the adjacent counties of Lawrence, Butler, Venango, and Beaver, likewise yielded quotas, and those from the adjoining county of Trum- bull, in Ohio, may also be said to be of the same colony. Our researches have not disclosed just how this colony originated, and its members are two numerous for complete enumeration, but we will mention other names most accessible : Milton Goddard, of Trumbull county, Ohio, arrived in 1854. Then, from Mer- cer county, Pennsylvania, we have James, Henry and Robert Thompson, 1844. William King, 1846; Dr. James McMeans, 1847; James McNabb and Joseph Hunter, 1848; Thos. Sweezy, 1849; James W. Scott, 1850; Richard Elwood, 1851; Robert Brady, 1852; Alex. Organ's father, 1852; J. M. Fitzgerald and John Downing, Sr., 1853; Jas. H. Waugh, Ralph N. Hunter, 1854; George Ham- ilton and Levi Keck, 1855; William R. Gibson, 1852, was from Butler county ; B. F. Thomas' father, 1850, from Erie; and Dr. George Murray and James Ripple, 1855, from Lawrence. Also from western Pennsylvania were Dr. Otto von Shrader, 1856, born in Germany, and Hon. L. B. Dunham, 1856, born in Connecticut, who came here from Brookfield, Jefferson county.
The contrasting colony that we mentioned is made up of the Pennsylvania Germans from Berks, Schuylkill, Lebanon and Lancaster counties. We are not
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