USA > Iowa > Washington County > History of Washington County, Iowa from the first white settlements to 1908. Also biographical sketches of some prominent citizens of the county, Vol. I > Part 28
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The best properties to own in the early 'Los and '50s, if big stories may be credited. were saw and grist mills. Several men assert that John Coppock paid his partner, Tommy Tucker, twenty thousand dollars in gold for his half interest in their last big mill, built in '57-8, and that Ben McCoy and some one from Brighton offered Mr. Coppock sixty-five thousand dollars for his mill on Skunk river. But the son, Wm. Coppock, says the stories are preposterous, and he does not believe the kindred story that Allen of Brighton was offered forty thousand dollars for his mill. I cite the yarns on both sides and don't pretend to say that the fables are true. Sound sort o' Munchausen- ish, eh? But mills were paying things in the building and wheat-growing
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periods. People came from near Iowa City, Oskaloosa, Fairfield and Mount Pleasant to get grinding done at Coppock's and he ran day and night, and did not work exactly and solely for his health, it may be fairly presumed. But, speaking of Tommy Tucker, he did sell out and invested in dry goods in Way- land and a grist mill, and also a saloon on the north side of our square, it is affirmed-it was no discredit in those times-he would not do it now, even if allowed to do so. He was a mighty hunter, and kept hounds. The Oskaloosa branch of the Burlington road now runs over the site of the Williams creek mill.
The grist mill business was lively and lucrative in early days. John Park's father came here in '41, and from '42 to the wet season of '47 all had fine wheat crops. Excess of water checked that industry. However, the habit of sowing wheat continued till '55, when weevil took the cereal. Ever after, it was a losing crop ; we did not grow enough wheat to bread our people, and do not now. Bugs-drat bugs! As Josh Billings said sagely sixty years ago, "I hate a fli. Darn a fli!" John Coppock read the ominous writing on the wall, but tried to preserve his Diana of the Ephesians, and in the stress he paid Henry Davis two dollars and ninety cents per bushel for wheat. Lafe Stout held his wheat for three dollars and twenty-five cents, held and kept on holding, and finally sold for sixty cents a bushel, long before the days of Patten, the wheat cornerer. In '47 and '55 folks imported flour, and it was a staple in groceries as it is now, whether "knighthood was in flower" then as now, or not. . Mills depreciated, and now millers are content to grind a little meal, buckwheat, feed, etc. As to land values, Park says in '45-7 it sold at ten dollars per acre ; by '54 it was up to twenty-five dollars, and stood under thirty-five dollars many years after the war. When Loughridge got fifty dollars, fariners sat up and took notice, and when Smeltzer touched seventy dollars, they simply said "Gosh" in their bewilderment, and felt soda water tickles all through 'em.
Washington Manufacturing Co .- In 1902 Charles Parkinson made wagon boxes and shoveling boards in the pipe organ factory, and later manufactured gloves and mitts, but gave it up in labor discouragements. In 1905 Frank Stewart organized the above named company with an authorized capital of twenty-five thousand dollars, and eighteen thousand dollars paid up, Win. Smouse, president ; Wm. A. Cook, vice ; C. M. Keck, secretary ; Mr. Stewart, treasurer and manager. They make wagon boxes, shoveling boards, barn floor scrapers, six to eight thousand boxes per year, employing ten to fifteen hands the season through. The total business runs to thirty thousand dollars a year. The work is done in a one-story brick building seventy-five by one hundred feet. Another, though entirely separate business, the most novel in
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town, is run on the same grounds. The American Pearl Button Co. had done a large business in Muscatine for six years, and Mr. Stewart and Mr. Fred Giesler brought the machinery into the pipe organ building in 1908. A new company was organized, with one hundred thousand dollars authorized capital, and forty thousand paid in. Mr. Stewart owns one-third of the stock, and the Gieslers, father Fred and son Frank, Win. Smouse, C. H. Keck and others are stock-holders. The force of seventy-five to one hundred hands turns out an annual product worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Frank Stewart is president and manager : Fred Giesler, vice ; C. H. Keck, treasurer ; H. A. Pauls, secretary.
The supply of shells is ample, and sweet water mussels are shipped in by car loads from the Illinois, Mississippi, Arkansas, Red, White, Wabash, Ohio rivers, and, indecd, from all rivers except the Missouri. The pearl button business in the west was started fifteen years ago by a German, Mr. Doepful, in Muscatine, cutting shells by hand, as in the fatherland. The Barry Mann- facturing Co. there, contractors who built our county infirmary, invented automatic machinery to cut the shells, which process cheapened buttons sev- enty-five per cent. The tariff on the buttons is thirty-five per cent ad valorem.
What should we do. could we do, without Elmer Keck's green houses ? He and his wife have been capable professors in the chair of esthetics, and have immensely stimulated the popular sense of beauty.
Two excellent hospitals, established in the last two or three years .- what would the pioneers have thought of them? Skilful surgeons, trained nurses. where sickness is robbed of so much of its terror and suffering.
Is it logical and chronological to follow that item with this about two cemeteries? The old city burying ground, laid out by Jonathan Wilson, is populous, notwithstanding many of its graves yielded up their dead at that sort of resurrection when Elm Grove, the beautiful, opened its ample Abraham's bosom of earth as a new plantation of the bodies of those whom folks had loved and lost. Elm Grove is beautiful for situation ; the prospects are superb. Sleep will be sweet in the warm soil of that elevated plateau. And then there is so much beauty in stone, and trec, and green sod, and tombs, and martial circle, and receiving vault-it is well to invest the sad ending of life's tragedy with such good taste and exquisite beauty.
The Geo. H. Paul Co., dealing in Texas land on a colossal scale. large parties going in excursion trains, living in smoking, dining and sleeping cars, processions out-distancing oriental caravans for comfort, if not for pictur- esqueness-well. this is the local phenomenon of 1909. Elegant office furni- tures, retinues of high-salaried employees, outfits of splendid horses, harness. carriages, cavalcades-it is quite as fine and spirited as Chaucer's Canterbury
ABIJAHI SAVAGE Donor of Sunset Park
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
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Pilgrims en route, or the Crusades in Europe, in a smaller way. Washington is quite astonished, bewildered, and talks of millionaires as if the Arabian Nights had come again, with Aladdin's Lamp that somebody is vigorously rubbing.
Parks .- A city is not a city without them. We were lucky to be able to get the twelve acres in what was happily called "Sunset Park." It lies four or five blocks from the square, down West Washington street, just beyond Gospel Ridge and its big elms and pious habitants. It was lucky, too, that Abijah Savage had a heart in him as big as a generous ox's, for he gave three thousand dollars towards payment on that lovely real estate. It is de- lightful to see the merry, happy crowds come and go there, to picnic, prom- enade, lounge. ogle, flirt, and be joyous according to their moods. About eight acres are lawn-mowed weekly ; the trees already furnish ample shade ; the grass is velvet ; there is pure water, electric light ; in half a dozen years, with eare in cultivation, it will be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
By the way, reader, do you know that in all our civic history, with plenty of rich people. only two have left the public a benefaction, a man, Mr. Savage, and a woman, Mrs. Dr. Chileote? No, let's not use the ugly word "tight wads," but here we have been on the map ever since 1839, and all of two gifts to the eity! It is, indeed, a long time between drinks. But, cheer up! the Greeks are bound to come with splendid presents in their hands. This wee bouquet I wish to lay on the grave of Mrs. Chilcote and this one in the living hand of Mr. Savage.
Win. Smouse laid out Highland Park, a right pretty place, but it is quite a way out. The city is growing that way, and in time that will be a charming breathing space for a part of our population.
The public square, with its carpet of green, healthy trees, tame squirrels. fountains. music stand. comfortable iron seats, broad cement walks. circle of flowers set by Elmer Keck, the florist, electric light, is as pretty as the blue eyes of a baby. On hot nights many a young fellow sleeps on the grass, on a blanket, in that inclosure. Saturday nights the fine band plays there, and it is gala. Youth and beauty, maturity, families, lovers mcet there to hear the music, play, talk, court, enjoy, and promenaders saunter round on the sixteen foot cement walks, and jostle amusingly, while the wide brick pavement is thronged with vehicles. It is quite like the gala, festal nights in the plazas of the City of Mexico-innocent, decorous, picturesque abandon- ment to the gayeties of life in their most alluring forms and colors and spirit. City and county empty humanity into that green bowl of bright sensuous existence.
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It is a great convenience to have three such machine shops as Tom H. Mc- Clean's, Ed. Carris's and Elmer Mason's. Tom is an indispensable mechanic, and a very ingenious man. Carris invented and makes a one-match delivery box that has a great run, and he does a variety of job work.
Cal. Long, blacksmith, invented a wagon brake that brings him good re- turns. Geo. G. Rodman devised a photograph holder. a neat addition to our repertory of inventions. Geo. Black, blacksmith, improved on a machine for sharpening lawn-mowers, by which he puts on a razor edge that lasts. Mr. A. S. Meek hit on a window sash ventilator that stays put.
Daniel Wilde is probably our most resourceful and miscellaneous inventor -his brain is a hot-house for the' development of ideas. His grain-weigher scheme was his master-piece. a fruitful germ that makes for him a fine income, and is putting his son Walter to the fore as a capable business man in Peoria.
Charles Hebener and the Neiswangers are excellent marble-cutters, and have put out designs that are indeed works of art.
From small beginnings, W. S. Reister has built up a remarkably large trade in eggs and poultry.
Wooly Bros. have a big garage, and hustle the automobile trade. B. F. Dixon has a private garage to store the two machines he handles. The Bardens had one on North Marion avenue, but it is now used by Clyde Brown for car- riage refitting, painting, etc.
Frank Bell conducts successfully a very large carriage factory, and turns out admirable work in great variety.
Three elevators, Whiting's on the Rock Island. Chalmer's on the Mil- waukee, and H. A. Baxter's on the Burlington, suffice to handle the grain delivery.
Standard Oil has a large supply station here. Oil of the best quality now sells at fourteen cents per gallon, that thirty or forty years ago, was quoted at sixty and seventy cents. Thus glides the greased world away.
Indeed, we have about all that heart could wish, except, say, a public swim- ming pool, street cars, buggies run by that electric storage battery that Edison eternally promises but does not offer, and a federal building for post-office and other uses.
We have so many blessings, so common and matter-of-fact, we do not note or appreciate them, as, for instance, matches in place of steel, flint and punk ; ready-made yeasts. baking powders, ready-to-wear clothes for both sexes and all ages and sizes ; breakfast foods, ready prepared. probably worth- less, but as the Frenchman said. "varee pla-zant ;" handy machines for sew- ing, mowing, raking, hoisting, refrigerating-we used to hang milk, butter, meat, etc., down the well-heatless gas and electric stoves, bicycles, auto-
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mobiles, and so on with hundreds of labor-savers and comfort-bringers. Just take screens, for instance. We used to be eaten alive with flies and mosquitoes. Doors and windows had to be open, and these insects filled the house and paid not a cent of rent. Folks made whips of paper strips tacked on sticks, or flourished bushes with leaves on. or waved a stately feather affair when company came Flies defiled with filth and disease germs slices of bread and cake, mashed potatoes and all they alighted on, swarmed into the sugar bowl and blew down the cream pitcher. They had been on the stable dung-heap, but when the horn blew or the bell rang, they knew what that meant, and rushed into the dining room, never stopping at the pump to wash off their feet the germs of tuberculosis, scarlet fever. diphtheria, typhoid. It was a fright. They inked everything that was white ; if there was a crack in the plastering, they etched a mourning border round it. In the early morning, when sleep hung in festoons round your head, they woke you by crawling over your countenance, tickling your nose, blowing in cars and nostrils, and complacently braiding their fore and hind legs on your alabaster brow. What flies skipped, mosquitoes took. Where the skin was exposed. they raised colonies of muskrat cones. The baby, next morning, seemed to have old-fashioned hives on face, neck and arms. Just strips of fine mesh wire stop all that old torment. There is nothing happier in the sanitary line than screens.
Then houses were stifling hot in summer, cold in winter. Bare floors were as austere, half the year, as oil-cloth or cement. Men and boys had no under- clothing or night gowns. and got into beds of ice-no woolen sheets. but cotton ones, and they spooned, or hutched up cold feet to get warm, and radiated their body heat to warm the bed-the bed should have warmed them. Bed rooms were as frigid as the ice section in Dante's Hell, where sinners from the tropics eternally froze, while Eskimos fried in the boiler rooms. Gen. Sherman can talk about war being hell, but war is not a circumstance with domestic conditions sixty years ago in this climate. But now furnaces give houses the winter climate of Cuba-it is jolly to go to bed. and to get up. mornings, is heaven. Under the old regime. to pull on a pair of frozen breeches and stockings and shoes was like drawing on sections of stove pipe and slippers of frosted metal. And there were then no easy chairs and lounges-the sick could not be made restful on furniture that was contrivances of torture. And no such thing as a rest room, a warm bath room and closet in the house. How did folks endure it when mercury ranged twenty-five to forty degrees below zero, and the air going as many miles an hour was full of icicle poniards? That old order of things for whites was hardly above the
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barbarism of Indians. The truth is, the earth has not been a comfortable and decent place to live in till the last fifty, perhaps forty, years.
The one respect in which we have lost ground is, the dearth of good hired help in house and on farm. Girls decline to work in kitchens, as they feel they are looked down upon and disgraced by doing menial work, and they go into factories, stores, millinery shops, etc., deeming that employment more genteel, and in the end get less net recompense than in the old, hated places. But it is not disgraceful to be a good cook, a neat house-keeper, a deft server at table. Nevertheless, in the personal equation, their thinking so makes it so -for them.
Well, somehow we have grown, and let me show how :
Additions to City .- The original plat of Washington was very small- just a little huddle of land around the square. The trouble in all pioneer settlements, in Illinois and Iowa, seventy-five to one hundred years ago, was, no one had faith in the outcome of the west, nor provided for the future with any prevision, wise or otherwise. In laying out towns now, folk forecast and anticipate all things possible. Daniel Webster, giant intellect as he had, scoffed at the vast Oregon country-"would never, could never be settled, worth nothing." "supreme folly." Our pioneers had the same scant notion as to the rich Mississippi valley. It was hard getting here, there were no advantages, comforts, conveniences when they got here, the prairie would never have habitants-freeze, blow away-absurd! Not an optimist among them, unless it was Norman Everson ; every one a pessimist, a knocker, had a grouch. had it in for the country. Everson came in '41, and believed that folk would be glad to skip the heavily wooded lands in Ohio and Indiana and take this rich land ready for the plow ; it would enrich any man who settles on it, cultivates it, stays by it. He was right, but few shared his views. So they laid out a picayune town, anticipated not a single need of a village bound to expand, provided no sewerage, no water, no light, "no nothing." Every man dug a shallow well and scuffled with the noxious germs in it ; his wife threw the shops on the ground for the sun to take care of, if he would ; shallow drains carried off the rainfall ; folks had no walks, and wallowed in mud ; in a civic way they lived from hand to mouth, and were wasteful. In the matter of sewerage we have sunk enough money in shallow ditches and drains -one administration ripping up what another had put down-to have now the best sewered city in the state if an engineer had given us a system and we had worked it out in detail. But no one believed the town would ever be any thing but a measly hamlet-why monkey with sewers and things? People were not up in sanitation then. Let us not blame them. The people perish from lack of knowledge.
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The early ones had claims near the town site, and as the burg grew these were platted, that is, they crumbled into the "city," as farms drop into the Missouri river, and re-appeared as additions. There is a south, a south- west, an east Washington, a west addition, a north-east, a Chilcote addi- tion, eighty acres in the last in the south-east ; Wm. E. Chilcote laid out a few blocks as a sub-division ; Ashby's addition had four blocks, Crandall's sub-division a few blocks. Conger's addition, but it was never platted, left in acre tracts ; James H. and Margaret Young each made a twenty-acre addi- tion in the north-west ; James Dawson, McConaughy and Len. Smouse each laid out two blocks, Cunningham and Knupp two, but the big things were these :
One of Dr. Chilcote's strokes of humor was calling the flat frog land north of the Rock Island tracks "The Heights." The name stuck. In 1875 he and J. M. Denny, Col. Cowles and John A. Henderson paid to the Chet Weed estate six thousand dollars for sixty-eight acres there. They laid off fifteen blocks, eight lots, four by eight rods in size, to the block, though a few lots were smaller. That plat took about half the land. Lots sold at one hundred to two hundred dollars, and in later years as high as six hundred dollars. The growth of that suburb was astonishing. In '66 I rode horse all over that fenceless expanse, cumbered with only one homestead, the Botkin, afterwards the Thomas, one hundred and sixty acres. That is now the most attractive part of the city.
Win Smouse is "the Little Giant" of city real estate, and has done noteworthy things, that enriched himself and benefited and beautified the town, enhanced it, enlarged it. In 1882 he created "Eastside," the twenty- eight acre tract where the Wallace school stands, that he turned into ninety- eight lots. He paid seventy dollars an acre for it. It was an impulse, a sudden whim, almost a caprice ; when he rode horse out in the mud that wet spring to the auction sale, he had no notion of buying, but a swift vision flashed on him, he obeyed the call of the wild, and realized a lovely suburb. To the east was a tract of forty-nine acres, that he paid thirty-eight dollars an acre for in '84. It continued across the tracks, and Jackson Roberts bought twenty- seven acres at thirty-seven dollars per acre. Smouse turned his tract into one hundred and thirty lots, and they made his "Second Addition." In de- veloping these two city adjuncts, he gave us his first fine object lesson in the construction of streets, making walks, planting trees, etc. He was and is a real landscape gardener. Those two tracts, being close in, were quickly sold and covered with a superior class of houses.
In1 1892, he created Highland Park addition of four hundred and thirty lots, laying out a six-aere park and an artificial lake of three acres, with boats,
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boating house, etc. This was formed from the one hundred and forty Thomas tract, that cost him one hundred and five dollars per acre. Win and brother Len. had bought of Mrs. Everson twenty-five acres at three hundred dollars per acre, north of the railway tracks, and Win bought of her forty acres at two hundred dollars per acre, where the pipe organ factory stood, also twenty acres from Ab. Anderson at one hundred and ten dollars per acre, twenty acres from Parkinson at eighty-five dollars an acre, and six and a half acres from Frank Graves at seventy-five dollars an acre. These tracts, together with the Everson tracts, made the Columbian addition, two hundred and ninety-six lots. Ile improved them, set out hundreds of trees, graded streets, etc., and the big sewer headed that way.
West of Highland Park he bought of Geo. S. Mckay fifty-three acres for six thousand dollars, and sold it in acre bunches. From Bowland he bought five and a half acres for three thousand dollars. It lies between Highland Park and the Heights, and is called his north-east addition. Sighing for other worlds to conquer, he expended twenty thousand dollars and a lot of Napo- leonie energy on the town of Haskins, in 1902, a one hundred and twenty- acre town site covered with structures. Withal, he has been our greatest builder of blocks, stores, houses, and his trading enterprises have extended from Dan to Beersheba. In '82 he put up the Columbian block, in '93 the ornate house the Commercial Club bought, and houses no end. As a sagacious man of affairs he might truly say, as Danton said at the Revolutionary tribunal in Paris, "I was known tolerably well in the Revolution, I did not lack energy."
Well, all these additions pushed out the bounds of the city till now the corporation embraces one and a half square miles, and commercial travelers and other visitors say it is one of the prettiest little cities in Iowa. It is, indeed, a comfortable and comforting place to live in.
CHAPTER XVIII.
POLITICS, CAMPAIGNS, ELECTIONS.
Men love to fight-perhaps women, too. It is an instinct we inherited from our forebears, the animals we ascended from. An animal at bay will fight till it dies. It must, in self-defense. Men never become so highly civilized and angelic that those combative lumps behind the ears entirely dis- appear. At bottom, we are fighting animals. In the natural state human tribes were ever at war. It was the great merit of Rome that she stopped the tribal wars that were decimating mankind. She would have world-wide peace if she had to fight for it. She conquered a peace. Those reduced tribes she brought into her vast empire, let them bring their mob of gods along and set them up in her Pantheon and worship them in perfect tolera- tion-they could do as they pleased, only fighting had to stop. Politics is the modern substitute for war. It is exciting, it is cruel, it lets you break heads and smash noses once in a while-it is quite satisfactory. Washington county has had her share of this rude fun.
The record of our elections for the first decade of our history from 1839. is as hopelessly lost as certain of "the lost books of Livy." No great loss. In that decade there was no political interest, as local offices were without enticing pay or held in honor. Salaries were ridiculous, mere shrimps. Party lines were not drawn till '46 when the territory came in as a state. The county was generally anti-democratic ; whig and republican had it their own way. Pro-slavery men, that is, democrats at that day, naturally emigrated to Missouri, a slave state, while anti-slavery folk as naturally came to Iowa. a state that expressly came in as a free state to balance Florida, a slave state that was admitted at the same time, to maintain equilibrium. And yet Iowa was democratic quite a while, four times electing Gen. A. C; Dodge delegate in congress, and sending him and Gen. Jones to the United States senate, but Kirkwood beat him for governor.
The first spirited local eontest was over county judge in '57, and its tem- perature was about two hundred and fifty degrees in the shade. S. P. Young had seven hundred and seven votes. Dickey, democrat, seven hundred and ten ;
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