USA > Iowa > Story County > History of Story County, Iowa: A Record of Settlement, Organization. > Part 30
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Schoonover, after retiring from the paper went into the army, returned home in broken health, was elected county recorder and died within three months afterwards. Thrall went to Kansas, and was not much heard from in this part of the country afterwards. He appears to have stayed out of the newspaper business when he was out, and to have gone to farming under conditions that were hard. About the only further knowl- edge of a definite order that we have of him is contained in a letter of his, dated at Elizabethtown, Anderson County, Kansas, June 10, 1869, in which letter he wrote McCall and Thompson of Nevada that "Southern Kansas did not raise enought to bread its inhabitants last season, and nearly everyone in buying corn and flour, wagoned from the Missouri river. Corn is very scarce at $1.50 per bushel. Corn is used here for bread in about the same proportion that wheat is in Iowa. How would you like to live on the change? I am getting used to it. The drouth was the cause of the failure. I rather think that there is a failure on 9/10 of the farms two years out of three here in Kansas. Where I live, we have had better luck than some other neighborhoods, judging from the way they come and beg for corn. I have to buy my corn with the rest. Stock raising pays here. Money will readily bring 20% interest. I have known parties to fail to get it at above rate that could give good security for the investment, with interest payable every six months."
Mr. Brainard still lives at Boone, where for many years, he published the Boone Standard, and is now curator of the Ericson library. So far as we know or have any reason to believe, he is the only newspaper man who ever undertook to call a newspaper by the name of "Ægis." He still
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keeps in touch with the paper which he once published, and once, in later years, when the origin of the name came up for information and inquiry, he furnished the following explanation: "See Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 'Ægis-The shield of Jupiter, made by Vulcan, was so called and sympolizes divine protection. The shield of Minerva was called an Ægis; also Jupiter was covered with the skin of the goat, Amal- thaea, and the Greek for goat is in the genitive case, Aigos. The Ægis made by Vulcan was of brass. I throw my Ægis over you, I give you my protection. It was war times, and something military was considered de- sirable, hence the name of the paper.'-John M. Brainard." Outside of the employment of the word by Mr. Brainard, the one familiar use of it is by Langdon Drake in his apostrophe to the American Flag, wherein, after he had had Freedom Personified, "Tearing the Azure Robe of Night; Set- ting the Stars of Glory there, and Striping the pure Celestial Light with Streakings of the Morning Light," he relates as to Freedom further "Then from his mansion in the sun, She called her Ægis bearer down, And gave into his trusty hand, This Banner of a Chosen Land."
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The Ægis, under Mr. Brainard was all right on war questions and other matters but the troubles he appears to have had must have been serious. In one place, it is recorded that the Ægis was made the official paper for the publication of the board of supervisors for the compensation of $75 for the year, which does not appear like very large compensation. Again in the fall of 1864, he had an attack of typhoid fever, and after he, as a sick man, had struggled with the paper for a while, and the boys in the office had struggled with it still further, it was suspended for about two months, until the editor was again really able to take charge. All of this time it is evident that the fluctuations in the cost of print paper and the general difficulty of making collections made serious trouble. The price of the paper fluctuated with the general conditions of the market from $2 to $3 per year; and when the financial situation became especially strenuous, it was announced that the paper would not be sent excepting to subscribers who should have paid in advance. Along about the end of the war, also there developed, what is among a good many newspaper men, a standing proposition, to-wit: a movement to take the tariff off of print paper. The Chicago Tribune then, as now, was an apostle of this method of tariff adjustment, but somehow or other it does not appear that the adjustment was ever made in such a way as to make easy the matter of publishing newspapers. Of the general conditions of things in Story County in war time, and of the circumstance of his coming here, with some of the more significant incidents, Mr. Brainard has, at the solicitation of the editor, furnished the following brief review :
"At the outbreak of the Civil war in 1861, I had invested the profits of two tax-lists, received the year before, in a little stock of merchandise at Clear Lake, Cerro Gordo County, and was getting along swimmingly. With the firing on Sumter, the men of that community arose like the grain-field
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before the winds, as they did all over the land, and the legislature met and passed an act forbidding suits for collection against the volunteers. So it was only a matter of time until the sheriff took possession of my stock ! As I had never refused goods to any family of a soldier, and as but few of them were able to pay, I was out of business in less than two years. In the early autumn of 1863 I had found a chance to earn a living by the purchase of Mr. George Schoonover's Nevada 'Reveille' and moving down from Clear Lake, I took up its publication in 'The Alderman Block.'
"The county officers then were E. G. Day, clerk of the court and of the board of supervisors; T. J. Ross, county treasurer and recorder; L. Q. Hoggatt, sheriff; E. C. Evans, county judge; and a board of supervisors composed of one member from each of the eleven townships in Story County.
"The wooden court house, standing where now is the Lockridge home- stead, burned down on the night of December 31, 1863, and what furniture and records escaped the flames were removed to the room in the Alderman block adjoining the printing office, until such time as the burned building could be replaced, which was during the ensuing summer season. In the spring or early summer of 1864, Capt. T. C. McCall, quartermaster of Col. John Scott's Thirty-second regiment, asked Mr. Day to come to the front as his assistant and the county board insisted that I assume his duties at home. This I did reluctantly; but the position brought me into frequent contact with the people of Story County. One of my duties was the dis- tribution of the money raised for the assistance of the wives and children of soldiers at the front-'War Widows' was the popular term for them, though in fact but few of them were widows. Taxes were payable twice a year, and I presume the strict application of the law would have been to turn over the same as soon as reported 'collected.' But it was soon discovered that such payments were almost invariably expended and then for the ensuing six months very often 'the wolf was at the door.' So, Treasurer Ross and myself arranged a program by which the semi-annual collections were doled out each month, with a reservation for a larger amount in the fall, when the children would need new shoes, school books and other articles incident to the coming cold season. That arrangement was somewhat nullified by the women giving orders to the merchants, and resulting in bare toes when the mother was unable to resist the temptation of 'crimson calico.' This was met at the court house by 'an order in council,' refusing to recognize such drafts against the treasury, and after- wards the dealer found he must carry the same until the woman saw fit to liquidate her debt, which she would usually take ample time to do. All such decisions at the court house may not have had the warrant of the statutes, but they saved a great deal of suffering.
"The railway reached Nevada in 1864, it being the practice then to build only some thirty miles each season-in 1865 it reached Boone and the next year Jefferson. In that year I made my first trip upon a railway
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in Iowa, going to visit my parents at Beloit, Wis. The delight of skim- ming over the country in a few hours, was in deep contrast with the old days of the lumbering stage-coach or the mud-wagon. In this kaleidescope I recall vividly the scenes along the way: women driving the plow or the reaper, or binding the grain. Hard work, but it was one of their many contributions to the work of carrying on the war, and eventually putting down the rebellion. I met last summer, one of those Story County women at the college celebration on the campus near Ames, and I reverently lifted my hat to her in memory of the old struggles and the old cheerfulness.
"We shall never know the unwritten work of these loyal, glorious women ! How they wrote encouraging letters to their husbands, brothers, sweet- hearts at the front. The moral value of such encouragement will never be fully known and can only be imagined. All the older people recall (and the younger ones can read it in history,) how often the Union armies met disaster in the first battles of the great war. But their wives at home, though cast down, never became despondent and the streams of encourage- ment by letter did not cease. Let me recall a frequent scene. At Clear Lake the mail came from Cedar Falls, at first semi-weekly, afterwards daily. The postoffice was at 'the store,' and the mail route extended some eighteen miles farther towards the north, and was carried by team. One daily paper, the Dubuque Times, went to a frontier printing office north of us, and while the mail was being 'changed' I would draw the paper from its wrapper, and running a practiced eye over the headings, I was able to cull the cream of the news. All the women, and many of the men, gathered in to get the news. When there had been a battle I would read the names of the fallen, and often a poor woman, with her little ones clinging to her skirts, would sink to the floor in moaning and tears, when the loved one was so listed!
"Too often our armies were worsted; but not always. In Nevada, when the news of the capture of Richmond came, business was suspended. All the store boxes not under lock and key were gathered on the South square, and the night was spent in rejoicing. In company with Parson Reid, I watched it until 'long after the wee, sma' hours,' and it is betraying no secrets to say that very few of the citizens failed to 'quaff a bumper' to the boys in blue and the final success of the war. I remarked to my com- panion that 'the boys were getting pretty full,' but he was in sympathy with the occasion and replied that 'There was a suspension of the rules by common consent !' I can yet recall some of 'the rejoicers,' but it would be invidious to mention them. The 'North and South sides' were a bone of contention for some time. The first business portion of Nevada was along the north street on the South square, with an overflow of the Mike Ross hotel and the Sinclair store, respectively, at the west and east ends of the street. Finally, after the arrival of the railway, the Welton house was moved to the north side, then the printing office, Briggs built the first
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modern store room for his drugs, and soon there was a race for who would be in the swim. Some little feeling appeared, but soon all were glad.
"By the joint efforts of J. L. Dana, who secured the purchase of the lands for the Agricultural college, James Hawthorne and John A. Hull, who got the necessary appropriations in the legislature, that magnificent enter- prise, the greatest in the state as I believe, was made permanent. And yet there is one incident which has never been published, in connection with the college. After the foundations of the main building were some two feet above ground the war came on, and the energies of the state were directed to the raising and equipment of troops, and the college walls stood still. I was at the time clerk of the board of supervisors, and one day in April, during their session, Mr. Dana came to me and said that unless the $10,000 in Story County bonds in aid of the college were re- newed by act of the supervisors, they would be uncollectable because the work had not progressed according to contract when the bonds were voted, and would I contrive to have such extension made by the board. I accord- ingly prepared a resolution in writing, making such extension but withheld it for a fitting opportunity. When the more important business had been completed, along in the afternoon, the members were preparing to ad- journ, some were putting on their coats, and corn-planting weather was beckoning them through the windows, and the question was asked, 'Is that all, Mr. Clerk?' and the reply was, 'yes;' but before any one had left the room, I cried: 'Hold on-one little thing more; there is a small formality in connection with the college bonds which the authorities would like to have made,' and drawing my slip from the desk rapidly, hurried over its text. Some one asked: 'Is it all right, Mr. Clerk?' and received an affirma- tive, of course. They voted it without further examination and saved the college to Story County. A legislature would convene in the fall; the farmers were in danger of thinking that the state would not desert the college location; but there was danger of some other county discovering the situation, tendering payment for the work done and despoiling Story of her proudest monument.
"J. M. B."
Along about this time, "Linkensale," who was a popular writer in this part of the country, had apparently come up from Des Moines to Nevada for the purpose of taking the cars to go to Washington, and he wrote, to the Iowa State Register, of Nevada as follows: "Nevada is also a good place, and is remarkable for its handsome women, of which elegant objects I saw more during my brief stay of four hours than I ever saw in a town of its size during the whole course of my life. Brainard gets up a fine Union paper. Col. John Scott was busy on a fine new house. Hoggatt was sky-larking around as usual, and the republicans on the qui vive generally. It is a first rate town to go to and will be a good deal better after a year or two."
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The burning of the old court house in the early hours of the year 1864 was the reasonable consequence of excessive fires being kept up from ne- cessity in a time of very extreme cold. It was an awful time so far as the weather was concerned, a cold wave of very exceptional severity hav- ing swept all over the western country and far into the south. Soldiers in the field, who were without protection suitable to extreme cold weather, suffered intensely, while in the new country to the northwest, where the wind had full sweep, great numbers of men, who were caught away from shelter, perished. How the conditions of that day were impressed on the minds of men was illustrated on the first day of the present year, when one old soldier asked another where he was 47 years ago that day, and was instantly answered, "At St. Louis," with an account of the struggle there with the cold. To have a fire start in such a time in a country village was simply to raise the question as to how far it would extend, and Ne- vada was very fortunate in that the burning court house did not, in fact, set other buildings afire. It was not a very great court house, but it was the first building erected for that purpose in the county. It had cost $1,500 in the first year or so of the county's existence and was considered ap- parently. a very good building for the purpose. In the midst of the war, there seems to have been little disposition to take advantage of the destruc- tion of the old court house as a reason for building a new and elaborate and costly one in its place; but, of course, something had to be done, and what was done by the board of supervisors was to use again the old foundation and to contract for the erection thereon of a new building of the same dimensions as the old one. This arrangement was reducing the cost of replacement to a minimum; and, in this way, there were accomplished, results which moved the Ægis in the November following to remark that "the board made a ten-strike in getting that job done at the price of $2,000. We venture to say $1,500 more would be necessary to secure the con- struction of such a building now."
This second court house was sold with the half block on which it stood, when the present court house had been completed in 1877, and it was soon removed to a lot west of the Opera Hall block, where it stood for a number of years, and was at one time used for the Watchman print- ing office, but was ultimately torn down.
At the time the court house was burned, there was in the vault a con- siderable amount of money belonging to the county and also some belong- ing to the county treasurer, Mr. T. J. Ross. The currency came through the fire in a somewhat demoralized condition, but for the most part it was recognizable. The treasurer took the remnants in his grip sack to Wash- ington and presented them to the treasury department, where they were closely scrutinized, and, so far as possible, identified and redeemed by the department. The amount of such redemption was $7,770. This amount did not balance the sum that was in the safe at the time; but, ultimately the difference was prorated between the county and the treasurer and the
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state. There was considerable difficulty and delay about getting the state to bear its share of the loss, but, we understand, it was ultimately done. As is apt to be the case, however, where there is an undoubted loss which is to be borne by somebody, it never was entirely satisfactory to the various parties in interest that a larger share of the loss was not borne by some one else.
It was along about this time that there found its way into print an official report, which has, at least once been reprinted since, and which deserves here to be preserved for all time, as a part of the county record. It appears in the proceedings of the board of supervisors, and it illustrates how it is possible to make a record sometimes out of no material, but also why, for a considerable period in the earlier history of the county, there is found so little of an interesting nature to record as pertaining to the western part of the county. The record is of an official report from W. C. Shockley, well known as old Squire Shockley, of Washington Township, who held the office of justice of the peace for many years, and who found himself under obligation of law to make complete report of his doings in office. This he did as follows: "Washington Township, Story County, Iowa. I. W. C. Shockley, Justice of the Peace of Washington Township, Story County, Iowa, report as such Justice of the Peace, in accordance with Chapter 29 of the Acts of the Ninth General Assembly, that I have nothing to report. W. C. SHOCKLEY, J. P., Feb'y 16, 1864."
Another incident of the same period pertains to Jerry Marks and his horse. Jerry was a character in the pioneer community, lived on the Judge Mitchell place, had a family; and though he evidently had sympathy in time of trouble, was highly eccentric. He had been marshal of the day at the famous Fourth of July celebration on the college campus, in 1859, and on various other occasions it had been demonstrated that he was a useful citizen. So when he lost the horse on whose labors he largely depended for the support of his family, a paper was passed around, and by evening another horse stood at the unfortunate man's gate, a free gift to him from many of the citizens. Jerry was properly appreciative of this generosity; but it was not until some time afterwards that the extent to which he could be moved became apparent; for he was not readily moved, but was rough in manners and speech, had been a sailor in his early years and was a tyrant in his home. He was a non-believer in religion and in sundry other good things ; but one day, as he was coming home on a load of wood, there arose a prairie fire, which was driven by a whirlwind, and was for a long time a memorable incident of this locality. The whirling of fire came up on the west side of the creek and Jerry was not in immediate danger, but the whirlwind and the awful spectacle together made him think that the world was coming to its end, and the Judgment Day was upon him. Ac- cordingly, he got down on his knees on the load of wood and got to pray- ing. His measure of devotion, which had been so long in making its ap- pearance, ought to have been appreciated and commended; but, probably,
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he backslid too soon for him to get the proper credit from his fellows. He moved to Kansas afterwards, but returned and died on a farm in Story County.
THE TOWNSEND MURDER.
On the 17th of October, 1864, a man who was hunting for prairie chick- ens or other game, had his attention drawn by something peculiar in a gully near the ford at the southwest part of Nevada, across West Indian creek, and, upon investigation, found a nearly but not quite completely buried body of a man. He at once gave the report and investigation followed. The body was exhumed, and was, without great difficulty, identified as that of one of two men who had come this way with a mover's outfit. Photo- graphs were also taken by Miss Hannah Bixby, now Mrs. R. H. Mitchell, and this assisted later in finding relatives of the deceased. He proved to be a man named Townsend, who had been in the far west, and was mak- ing his way back to the east side of the Mississippi. It appeared later that his companion was a man named McMullen, and that McMullen had killed and buried him at their camp by the ford. Thereupon McMullen took the outfit and drove on eastward, over to Illinois, where he sold the outfit making very little attempt at concealment; and, in fact, it appears that if he had buried his victim a little deeper, there might never have been sus- picion directed to him. The discovery of the body, however, followed so promptly upon the murder, that the matter was followed up, the team was easily traced along its route of travel, and the man found to whom Mc- Mullen had sold it. From then, McMullen was further traced and, in a very few weeks, brought back to Nevada for arraignment. There was concerning the actual circumstances of the murder, no information what- ever, save what McMullen himself told, and what could be inferred from the conditions and circumstances. According to McMullen's story, the two had come through together from Idaho. At Omaha, Townsend had laid in a supply of whisky which supply he replenished from time to time, and frequent disagreements resulted between them. Arriving at the ford in Nevada they went into camp, McMullen doing the work and taking his orders from Townsend, and the latter staying in the wagon, drinking and becoming quite intoxicated. After a time Townsend came out of the wagon and began abusing McMullen because he had not made a success of build- ing a fire; then Townsend pushed over McMullen, who was squatting in a position easily to be tipped over, and the latter happened to fall upon the ax, which he picked up and struck Townsend with. Townsend fell and McMullen walked away, and returning soon after found that Townsend was dead. Then he was uncertain what to do, but finally buried Townsend and went on. So far as could be judged from the other circumstances of the case, McMullen's story might be a true statement of the matter. He protested that he had never been in trouble before, and upon the whole he appears to have been able to evoke considerable sympathy. He had used
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a part of Townsend's money to pay off a mortgage on his farm in Illinois; but one could readily believe that if he had been on murder bent, he need not have come with Townsend from Idaho to Iowa, in order to find a fair opportunity for such crime. McMullen was taken to Cedar Rapids for trial and was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to the peni- tentiary for ten years. Like some other criminal matters that have hap- pened in the county, this was one that had nothing to do with the people who belonged here, excepting as they took notice of it, and endeavored to promote justice. Neither the murderer nor the murdered man had ever been in the county until the day of the murder, and the fatal quarrel which happened here might just as well have happened anywhere.
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CHAPTER XXV. HOME AFFAIRS IN WAR TIME-(CONTINUED).
THE RAILROAD.
The great local event of this period was the actual coming of the rail- road. The railroad convention at Cedar Rapids in 1859, had indeed led to the successful projection of the road through the central belt of Iowa counties, but that convention of course, did not determine the exact loca- tion of the road, nor make it certain that the road would pass through any particular town. Such towns as Marshalltown and Nevada, Boons- borough and Jefferson, naturally expected to get it, and, in the end, three of them did, but Boonsborough did not; and the fact of its failure is illus- trative of the conditions under which no town was actually sure of the railroad until the railroad actually came, or binding contracts for its loca- tion were signed. The management of the railroad surveyed its line through Nevada, but also surveyed a line two or three miles to the north- ward, where it is possible they might have been able to find a more favor- able route across the county ; but, whether the northern route was the better one or not, it served the purpose which railroad projectors, especially in the earlier days, never lost sight of, to-wit: of assisting in the collection of all available bonuses for the location.
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