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 34
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Often he rode horse eighty miles a day. He had as much confidence in his horse as the deacon has in his pastor, and so both dared sleep in saddle and pew. It was not the up-turn of the virgin soil, that loosed the miasm which shook these prairies with ague like a peat bog in Ireland-it was stagnant water in pools and undrained lands, in which mosquitoes hatched to convey poison germs in their bite. No one knew that fact then.
Dr. J. R. Burroughs filled a large place for many years. No more amus- ing fellow ever fumbled a wrist or looked at a lolled-out tongue. He was a clever mimic, full of drollery and wit, and his good cheer in a sick room did lots more good than his pills and powders that he rather regarded as innocent fakes and jokes. He practiced allopathy, homeopathy and funopathy. It was killing to see him take off his fellow M. D.'s, in his kindly way, he enjoying the caricature as much as anybody. His sketches of Rousseau, Rice, Miller, Eiskamp et al. were real vaudeville. The fun-makers are the best doctors and health-contrivers, and the men and women who laugh most keep young long- est by abolishing the microbe of old age, grouch and cantankerous crankiness.
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Dr. O. H. Prizer
Dr. Nelson Van Patten
Dr. . 1. S. Cowden
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Dr. J. D. Miles
Dr. D. Scofield
PIONEER DOCTORS
HE NEW YORK THIS LIBRARY
THE INOX 4461, 81
.A TION
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A laugh is a specific for anything bad. And Burroughs was a very crisp critic. At a concert, he said of a singer, his voice was a bit "lumpy." That was enough-it was a picture, a kodak snapped on the spot.
Dr. Martin was another humorist in the practice of that profession, in spite of nerves and almost chronic invalidism. He managed to get a deal of fun out of the world. The trouble with humorists is, when they get hold of a good thing that tickles the very soul, they have to tell it, and for a man to give away professional secrets is, surely, not according to Hoyle. I could give some illustrations, but they would need to be sterilized, if not disinfected.
In many ways, Dr. G. Eiskamp was a remarkable man. His reading in medicine, in general science, literature and philosophy was wide, deep, thor- ough, far and away beyond that of any professional man in our whole history. That is no exaggeration at all. His learning was very great, and his memory of it all phenomenal. A St. Louis surgeon had mal-operated on his vocal organs and impaired his speech, but. his mastery of English was, as in Carl Schurz' case, a wonder. For years he knew he was doomed, said he should not reach fifty years of age, and beat his prophecy three months ; but with that fatal conviction, he took up and carried cheerfully the white man's burden.
Dr. Darius Scofield was also a wide reader of the theoretical side of things, but was not fortunate, in many cases, in applying his theories. He was a useful man, public-spirited, an advocate of such good things as libraries, a public and private sanitation, sewerage, hygiene, and he set the first good example for a very simple funeral and the cremation of his own body.
Speaking of queer men, there was an honest, industrious man, big-boned, of bilious temperament, a giant of strength, who used to get a little off men- tally, and under those spells he meditated a new religion that he was going to spring on these parts. He would consult Capt. Kellogg about it, though I can't understand how the Captain could be regarded an expert on such crea- tions as new religions. I do not remember all the tenets, further than this, there were to be five persons in the trinity, and the author quoted Emerson's "Why does Nature love the number five, and the star form repeat?" When Capt. Kellogg asked how soon he would launch the new cult, Hercules an- swered,
"When the blue birds appear The time draws near."
This revives one of J. C. Conger's sly jokes. Several years after his removal from York state, Rev. Dr. J. R. Doig came here from Mr. Conger's old home, and at the end of a delightful visit and talk of old times, Conger kept his face straight and gravely asked the divine about the local religious
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conditions back there, remarking that when he left that region they were just introducing the Bible there. The look that Doig gave Conger !
This picture is unforgetable-our jolly, fat river captain, L. Moreland, was run away with on a Brighton road along Skunk river, and he and the buggy thrown into the river. The reader who recalls the corporosity of the captain can imagine there was a large displacement, as naval architects would say, and if he hit the water slant-wise instead of flat, the concussion would not be great. He was somewhat stunned, but he struggled out under the shelving bank, and was vastly amused by the talk above him, of rescuing parties, who said, "well, I guess Cap is done for. He was probably drowned and the body gone down stream and over the dam." when Cap broke into a laugh and put in a general denial, ending with, "not by a mill-dam site." He was sitting in the sand, as wet as a muskrat, and not hurt a bit.
Cleaves and Conger had a world of fun with Peter Dray, a blacksmith just north of the present Press office. Dray must have been a queer one, for he inspired poetry in Conger.
"Hark to the news of Peter Dray Who on the Sabbath makes his hay."
Then follows a stanza about a bed tick and prairie grass and Geo. Mckay, they cut their wood and mowed their hay all on the holy Sabbath day. Some of the stanzas are repeated by the venerables, but I have to censor the un- sterilized things. Peter brought the first steam engine to this town. Conger and Cleaves set a traveling phrenological lecturer, holding forth in the Cowles school house, on Dray, who was very dirty and ragged, just from his shop work, and the speaker, taking him for a tough, gave him a very bad head and character. According to his diagnosis, Dray had the worst "gourd" in the United States and territories, he would steal, lie, murder, etc. Those two wags died several times, laughing. It occurred to them that they could make a nature faker of the lecturer by dressing up Peter for a subsequent meeting, and naming him "Dr. Barker." They coached him as to what to say, dressed him elaborately, armed him with a gold-headed cane, gold watch with long flashy fob, plug hat, etc., and sat him in the back part of the house. When men were called for for examination, gratis, Cleaves and Conger bawled "Dr. Barker !" vociferously, but the doctor demurred, and the lecturer, seeing the style of man, insisted on his coming up, and, like the supreme court, he reversed himself on his estimate. This subject was a compound of St. Paul, Shakespeare, Lord Bacon, Geo. Washington et al. Conger catechised the lecturer. "did you ever see that man before?" "No." "Never felt of his bumps?" "No." "Well, you did, two nights ago, and you gave him a bad roast." The crowd jeered, and the fake left the house and town.
J. C. CONGER
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His pastor tried hard to dissuade our first pioneer, Adam Ritchey, from coming here from Illinois, but in vain, and then said, "You may go, but I warn you no good will come of it. and you will receive punishment for it, for you are deliberately leaving your church and communion, going away among heathen, and the Gospel will never cross the Mississippi." That "cloth" was "punk."
The smart things Wm. McGaughey did and the droll things he said will be current talk for many years. He lived into the 'gos, and never for a moment forgot his cunning and love of fun. And so of others,-H. D. and Chris. Rogers, Aleck Houck, Mart Kilgore, Michael Schilling, J. G. Webb, and many others, funny things could be said, but there is no room. The next his- torian may deal with them.
An irascible man on Crooked creek had been annoyed by neighbor cows camping at night in the road in front of his house, and concluded to fix them, but was mean and cruel. One night he sallied out with an ax and cut the tails off from a herd lying down. In the morning he found they were his own cattle, but he did not know they had got out of the corral.
Two men were frolicking on the bank of said creek, one dressed in immac- ulate white. The other grabbed the dude and with powerful right arm held him out over the creek, by main strength. "Drop me if you dare," said the dandy, not believing he would dare do so, as it was fifteen to twenty feet down to the water, but the challenged did drop him. He came up, soaked, soiled, hopping mad, raging with threats, so deliriously angry he scratched the ground around him like a turkey, said "look over there," pointing to a house where a murder had been committed, and demanded, over and over, "conciliate me," meaning apologize.
However, people are now, probably, as individual and original as were the pioneers, men and women of as distinctive flavor as any in Auld Lang Syne. I could name a score or two, at least, now living, who are as odd, amusing and queer as our forebears, but I shall not do it. They, in turn, will be quoted and laughed over for as long as any of the geniuses I have named.
There is one significant incident that must surely go into this rag-bag chapter : Twenty-five to thirty years ago certain tired house-wives struck on cooking, and an effort was made at co-operative living. Mrs. Malin opened the institution in a big room on the south side over The Fair. Twelve to fifteen families boarded there nearly two years. The cost of provisions was cast up weekly and patrons paid pro rata. Mrs. Malin worked up the raw material. The fare and service were excellent, far above the average the families had known before. But do you know the patrons at last got weary of the promiscuity, and gladly went back to their own flesh-pots in the Egypt of
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their own kitchens and dining rooms. Privacy was sweet. But the experi- ment was a sort of protest of housewives against the awful grind and hum- drum of cooking three meals a day, washing dishes thrice, their homely work never done. Living as we do is a bore. Civilization has added grievous burdens. Our esthetics cost much more than they come to. There is some- thing wrong in our economy if it is necessary for a man to work twelve hours a day just to live and make both ends meet, and for women to work even more. It doesn't pay. Life is not worth living on such terms. " The Indians beat us to a frazzle on dwellings. They do not clean house twice a year, or once a year -- they burn it-it is cheaper to build another. We eat too much. Two meals a day, at 9 a. m. and 4 p. m., are a great plenty. Where drink kills one, gobbling slays a hundred. Gluttony beats booze to the goal of homicide. It's disgusting, having a stomach, liver, bowels-if the Creator had only stirred the foods for animals and mankind into the air, as He did for plants, and let us breathe nourishment, what jolly good luck that would have been. O reader, when you make an animal kingdom, make men and animals that way.
We have many more birds than sang for the pioneers. There are in- finitely more roosts for them, and food also-our ampler grain fields, orchards, vineyards, gardens, berry lots, and the myriads of insects they attract. We have more forests for them to nest in, and a net-work of wires, telephone and trolley, for their claws to grasp. This county, and all Iowa, and all the prairie states have largely gained in timber over the primitive days. Still, every man, woman and child, in city and county, should be a forester, at least to the extent of planting one tree a year. In a generation, such unity of effort would realize extensive forests. During the war our public square was full of locust trees. Borers killed all but one, that is still alive. Before the soldiers got home there were not as many leaves in that park as there were hairs on either one of Esau's hands. But see now. Prairie fires killed our ancient forests, but man is a cunning little fellow, and can make forests as easily as mud pies. I could wish the writer of the next history of this county, forty to fifty years hence, nothing better than that he could see and say that full one-quarter of our county area's face should then be whiskered with woods. If he shall so see, let him drop a tear on my bier for suggesting it, but for heaven's sake bid him spell that word bier right.
The sole thing this writer is really pleased with is, that he chanced to name it "Sunset" Park, and the name stuck.
Judge E. Ross once built a grist mill on the site of Benz' hotel, and his pottery, kilns, etc., where he made jugs, crocks and the like, stood where his children's home now is.
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The year 1857 was a very wet one. A circus, hauled overland, stuck in the mud north of town. It was "broke" but gave daily performances in the hope to recoup its fortunes, and every eve it sent up balloons from the academy lot. All in vain. The manager borrowed money of Everson, giving as secur- ity a lion in his cage, placed on his lot now owned by Elmer Mason, back of The Temple. Leo would roar when hungry, and was more effective than the curfew to round up kids at home after dark. Everson did not have to go to Africa to get lions for the Smithsonian, nor lay his hand on the cock- atrice's den.
When we were trying to repudiate railroad bonds, as described previously, Dr. Rice, an unbeliever, saw a hole in our armor and took an arrow shot at it, scoring the meeting for their disposition to do an immoral thing, in spite of our tall religious pretensions. He said we were worse than the heathen, and quoted from their philosophers, Confucius, Zoroaster et al. A rusty farmer rose and said, "I don't care a gol-darned what old Con-fu-cus, Zo-roast-er and other old heathens said ; they're dead-I'm alive ; I am opposed to paying them bonds, b'gosh." Doc just laughed. By the way, he looked exactly like Darwin.
Thirty to forty years ago there was no such functionary as an under- taker, in any such sense as we have them now. A person died, a cabinet maker went to the house and took measurements as for coat or shoes-indeed, a coffin was called an "overcoat" -- and an ugly shaped thing was made of black walnut, with a house roof on it, and smelling of varnish, and ever since those who smelled varnish instantly thought of death and the grave, by the law of association. In those days, Wm. Wilson, Jr., a very sympathetic man, used to conduct funerals, and his warm heart always gushed tears from his eyes, to mingle with those of the more personal mourners. He was one of the most useful men we ever had, and at funerals he seemed indeed an angel.
Certainly, Washington never harbored a more unique genius than Gus Ross. He said the most killingly funny things in the fetchiest way. He had been an ocean sailor, I think, and his head was packed full of out-of-the-way information, and his body covered with tattooing. No one took from the library such a superior line of books, that he read in his dirty gun-shop in lulls of work, and he mastered the books, too. Gus goes into my Pantheon, even if I have to cast out other gods and demi-gods. And 'Squire Burk- holder stays with Gus in there. If those men had only talked into a phono- graph ! Charley Wilson and Charley Hebener are not going to live forever.
Probably, the three biggest days in our history, in point of numbers in the turn-out, were: Grangers Day in '73, soldiers' reunion in '79, and Brinton's air-ship day ten or fifteen years later. There might have been more on hang-
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man's day, and railroad day in '58, if the population had been denser. Folk will go further to see some one get hurt or killed than for any other reason. But the murderer was given a new trial, and the aviator did not fly, so could not get "hurted." Actually, hundreds, if not thousands, came expecting to see him fall and smash. Emerson rather ungraciously, but perhaps truth- fully, said, "when people hear that any one is sick, all are animated by a faint hope that he may die." Morbid curiosity, you see.
Speaking of railway day, in '58, John W. Morton vividly recalls the evolutions of the Columbus City Guards, in command of the very polite Col. Garner. It was the first company of soldiers Wesley had ever seen, he who was a few years later destined to see thousands of real, not tin, soldiers. Garner would end each cominand thus: "Shoulder arms, if you please." "Right wheel, march, if you please." It tickled even the mourners.
As this chapter is a sort of clearing house for dead notables, I wish to encyst in amber the queer, delightful man whom all affectionately called "Old Bill" Glover. He was a shoe-maker, a nature-lover, a naturalist, with a rough head packed full of nature lore, and an eye, ear and nostril sensitive to beauty of form, color, sound, odor, fond of music and flowers and children, a heart big and warm, no end kind, sympathetic, helpful ; but with all those tender yet steel-strong tendrils reaching out for love he was a bachelor all his many years. Perhaps that detachment was the reason why he was the Commander- in-Chief of all hearts. I muse and pass in slow, searching review the many scores of individual people I have known in Washington city and county, and if I have to select just one who, take him all in all, was The Real Thing, it would be Bill Glover, that rough opal with a constant soul of shifting colored fires.
Or if one asks for samples of men so odd they were unique, just think of Mr. Fitzgerald and his son Gowdy-the limit of individuality. Or think of those men so "con-trai-ry" that it is wittily said if they should drown in a rapid river, their bodies would be found several rods up-stream.
Our railroads used to be more accommodating in the early days, when traffic and travel were less than in this booming time. The old Narrow Gauge would stop at cross-roads to take on an old woman with a basket of eggs. Many years ago on our M. & M., now Rock Island road, when there was one train a day each way, the train crew took all the time there was. One day the fireman dropped his pipe, a few miles from Ainsworth. The train was stopped to recover it, and the conductor would halt anywhere for anybody to alight or to board.
A division roadmaster, long before G. W. Dye, fitted a sail to a railroad tricycle, and one day a gale upset the craft between here and Ainsworth.
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THE FAIR GROUNDS ON BRINTON'S AIRSHIP DAY
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
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The Washington post-office has been a wandering Jew. Mrs. Parker. who married Rheinart, was post-mistress in ' 56, on the present R. T. McCall lot. Dr. M. C. Parker served as P. M. near the Yellow Brick in Buchanan days. Wickersham had the office on an alley that bisected the east side of the square about at Lemmon's jewelry store, and opposite him was public scales, the alley leading to a lumber yard, later run by Boies & Barrett. An alley also bisected the north side, say at Ohngemach's shop, leading to Oz. Phelps livery barns and to Bryson's lumber yard. Wickersham also had the P. () in the rear of the Democrat office, the Press office above, and stairs leading to the sanctum through a trap-door. Then Cols. Cowles and Bell, in turn. and also Wm. Wilson, Jr., had the P. O. across the street in a room back of Chilcote & Cook's drug store. Col. Bell and G. G. Rodman also served in the first room north of the alley in the rear of Hotel Colenso, and of Ite years Rodman, Hood, Cunningham and Lytle were P. M.'s in the present quarters. We have wandered long and far enough, from Post-master Ever- son's capacious hat, all round the square-we must have a federal building --- the next historian will describe it, I can't.
To trace the journeys of old buildings is an interesting quest. Mrs. Parker's P. O. is now a dwelling on north Marion avenue, four blocks north of the tracks, opposite Mrs. Hannah Durst's home, north. Dr. Chilcote's drug store is the wood house on Dr. Stewart's home lot, near the M. E. church. The first frame M. E. church stood south of the opera house, and is a residence east of the late Win. E. Chilcote's old home, opposite Brookhart's home, a four-gabled house. Friday Mason lived in the moved-off old Iowa House, on courthouse street north. Sam Gardner's late home once stood on Michael Schilling's lot on south side of square, where Tondre & Benz' millin- ery store is now, and in it Mother Axtell took boarders and had such patrons as Everson and Scofield. Hise Bros. snaked the United Brethren and Pres- byterian churches to the creamery in N. W. Washington. The Starry House was moved to the lot just west of E. T. Beman's home, and was sold by Hugh Smith to Abe Snider. S. A. White sold the old Axtell house on the site of the present Presbyterian church, and it stands unoccupied and ramshackle the first door north of the button factory. The Iowa House barn and feed lot covered the block now occupied by court house, city hall and jail. It would be interesting if a local antiquarian should identify and chart all these old derelicts. What a map it would be.
The first Methodist service held in this city was in a log cabin between the homes of Harry Shrader and J. W. Morton. It was standing after the war, occupied by the father of John L. and M. C. Kilgore.
JJISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
The wonderful prosperity of farmers the last dozen years, the enrichment of them by a series of fat crops and high prices, and the marvelous upward appreciation of their land, have resulted in the retirement of many of them to towns to live on the pensions of their fortunes, and the upshot of it is, a guild of tenants or renters. Good judges say over one-third of the active farmers in this county to-day are renters. A considerable per cent of them become farm-owners in due time. Cash rent now averages five dollars per acre, but the prevailing arrangement is a sheer halving of the crops produced. Now and then the owner requires say a dollar an acre cash besides half the grain.
Mrs. B. F. Brown recalls the universal farmer cry, in her girlhood, "Iowa can never be a grass state-what a pity-white clover is impossible." There was blue stem, wild prairie grass almost as coarse-haired as saw-edged slough grass, but farmers wanted mermaid tresses on their lands. The roadsides were then thick-set with dog-fennel. But it was noticed that if farmers cut the fennel before it seeded, white clover, that had been watching for a chance, came in, and all at once there were wide areas as white with this perfect honey- clover as elderberry blossoms and margarites. Infinitely more white clover then, if given a chance, than now. And red clover perpetuated itself when purple-coated, yellow-breeched bumblebees crossed the Mississippi and by their longer injectors fertilized the red-headed blossoms. And little by little, like a deepening dawn, blueglass crept in, perhaps a little before the '7os. It did not come directly from Kentucky, but via Missouri, and started around movers' camps where horses had been fed. Some have surmised that the grass came in with the big white Kentucky Henry Clay cattle that Clemons brought here in the late '50s, but he got them in Illinois. O. E. Brown, a close and generally accurate observer, is satisfied that bluegrass came to us via Missouri, thanks to movers. It was rather slow in spreading, as from one camp to another, ousting other grasses and weeds merely by packing the ground so full of its own rootlets that the other fauna had no chance, and was suffocated. That matter of roots of grasses preoccupying the soil is the entire secret of weed-killing. Bluegrass is the sign mannal of a fertile soil, the world over, a soil that will grow clover and all the cereals that feed mankind.
It is strange, what a retinue of seeds, plants, animals follow men in their wanderings. It seems certain, tho' it has been disputed, that 'possums were not indigenous here, but sneaked after the white man. Same as to foxes. Both tag after chickens, as if they watched to see if the emigrant packed in the wagons the coops. They say, though, there was not a 'possum in this county in '54, nor till about '65. But skunks were ever here. Wolves drove back foxes. Woodpeckers, too, were comparatively late comers. Kentucky
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cardinals have come in within the last ten years. Rats are, notoriously, white men chasers. No sooner was a log cabin built, than rats and mice reported in them for duty. How did they get here? In the packing of furniture, etc .? Anyway, they came, as if the Devil brought them up his sleeves. Men are always losing something, from knives, money, trinkets to their virtue and things. The Mormons in streaking it through Nebraska and the miners who took the Santa Fe trail through Kansas, spilt sunflower seeds all along the way, and Kansas got its pet name from the yellow efflorescence, and in cer- tain seasons both those states are as buff in landscape as the wall tints of churches. Seeds of weeds, good plants, fruits, vegetables, get scattered by birds, cattle, horses, men, and by such agencies bluegrass stole in here to rout . out dog fennel and clothe the roadsides and fields with that loveliest of all hair-grass that, like snow, casts a blue shadow.
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