USA > Illinois > Ford County > History of Ford County, Illinois : from its earliest settlement to 1908, Vol. I > Part 11
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There was John P. Dobbs, and he lived close there, but the next spring he moved out on the prairie, not far from old Pellsville, the farthest out of any one then. Ile built a house with one room upstairs and one room downstairs. Obidah Marlatt gave it the name of the North Pole, and that was the name of the neighborhood for a while. That was the first house north of us until we got to Ash Grove. That spring two more families moved ont on the prairie, Mr. Dove and Mr. Shannon, one east of ns, and Mr. Dove northeast of us. I remember seeing Mr. Dove's team the first trip he made with the material for his house. think the team must have been three miles from our house. There was nothing
I there then but the prairie grass, green or brown, as the season might be. South- east of our home half a mile, Harmon Strayer and his brother John lived, and northwest of us about three miles Milton Strayer lived. He is remembered as one of the good men of this world. He was kindness to perfection ; and Matthew Elliott, father of W. H. H. Elliott, and he and his family were all Methodists of the old-time religion. Their house was the first house I ever ate in away from home, after coming to Illinois. We went to church to our home. Uncle JJohn Dopps, and went there for dinner. We had venison for dinner, I remember. I thought then we had good people here, and I think so yet. We had been here about three weeks then. There has been regular preaching by the Methodist preachers right in the same place. Only a short time after Uncle John Dopps went away, preaching was in the schoolhouse until the church was built.
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I would like to tell the names of the ministers that have been here in these forty-four years, but I think many of them are reaping their reward, and their works do follow them. I will not say anything more about this eventful year at the present time.
1885. That winter was one of the cold, stormy winters of that time, and we got the full benefit of the winds and the snow. I think the snow stayed on the ground perhaps six weeks or more, and cold all the time, and only two rooms to our house, and a smokehouse and a stable for the horses and two cows; no fence, only a pen for the corn fodder for the cows and horses. We bought that. and the cows would stay for the feed, for there was no fence to keep them.
Mr. Patton hired the rails made to fence one hundred and sixty acres of land, a good fence staked and tow rails on the top, and Mr. Patton and Obe Marlatt hauled all the rails to fence it, through the storms and snows. Some- times the snow would blow and drift so that we could not see the tracks of the wagon of the next load. I could see them when they left the timber, and get almost any kind of a dinner, except cook dry beans, before they would get home to dinner. It was a mile and three quarters straight west of the house where we lived to the edge of the timber where they got the rails, and I could see them very plainly.
In the after part of the winter Obe Marlatt went to Bloomington after plows to break the prairie ; that was as near as they could be gotten. Hle bought five, some for the neighbors. I think if some of the people had to do as we did they would think they would have a hard time now. Well. that spring it was break prairie with our own four-horse team and an ox team. The man broke by the acre, $2.50 per acre, broke and planted sowed corn, about one hundred and forty acres, and raised the best vegetables of all kinds, melons, pumpkins by the wagon-load, and the best corn. We sold one hundred acres of it to cattle feeders the next fall for five hundred dollars. and was pleased with our year's work.
In the spring we built two rooms to our house, and dug a cistern, fenced in a garden, and put an addition to the stable.
Money was very plentiful that summer or spring. John Adamson that lived at Covington. brought two hundred and over of four-year-old steers to be herded on the prairie, and they were so large and got so fat on the grass without any expense except to pay the herder and for salt, the prairie grass was so fine.
1856 was another year of improvement. We set out the fence to take in more land, hanled more rails, and built two houses on the farm that winter for two tenants to move on the farm in the spring.
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That spring I was sick, had a spell of fever, and had a girl to stay with me. I had gotten so I did not need her, and she was going home Sunday morning, but Saturday evening she took a chill and was so bad Sunday we sent for her aunt, Mrs. Solomon Koder, but we did not know anything about the disease then. It was spinal or spotted fever, and the doctor nor any one else could do any good, as doctors fail in most cases of that disease. Her name was Nancy Skinner. There were three of them. They were orphan children, and their aunt, Mrs. Koder, had raised them. All three of them were about grown, and all of them died in a very short time. They had such a good home with their aunt and uncie.
That summer everything was corn. We could not see the country so far away, and the people had come to the country so fast that there were new houses on all sides of us. There was lots of corn, and no sale for it, unless cattlemen came in with cattle to feed the corn to. Corn would grow then if you planted it, without any trouble. The weeds had not got a start then, only the tumble- weeds, and they would roll over the field and lodge against the fences as high as the fence.
1857 was a new year, and how many times we make resolves to lead a better life if these things concern our future welfare which it should. If we start wrong in our work we are very sure to come out wrong, unless we repent and go back and do our work over again. It is so much easier to make good resolutions than it is to keep them. I have found this true all through life. How true the words prove, "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love."
This winter we did not do much work on the farm and improve it so much, and March 23d there came to our house another baby boy. We called him Charles Delaware, the Delaware being the name chosen by his oldest brother.
This summer was the same; plow, raise corn, ent prairie grass, and cut up corn, and have lots of men to work, as we always had. But the last of this year there came the greatest calamity that we were ever called to pass through. Mattie, our only girl, came home from school sick with what proved to be cerebral spinal fever and as spotted fever. She was very bad from the first, and her suffering was simply agonizing. Her muscles were contracted, and sometimes her head would be drawn to her hips almost like a hoop. We had a Dr. Courtny from Blue Grass Grove, and a Dr. Whitmore, but they did not do any good, neither do I think any other doctor would. Their principal medicine was solelia.
She was very sick eight weeks. When we would go to turn her in bed and let her limbs fall it would almost kill her but she lived through all this intense
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SOUTH MARKET STREET, PAXTON
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suffering. So many times she would have spasms, and we would think she would not live one hour, but she got over all this suffering without being left with some mark of it for life. She was past seven years old at that time.
One or two days after Mattie was taken, LaFayette was taken bad also. Ile had more fever, and his muscles did not contraet so much; it was more in his head, and it has left its mark with him for life, for he has always been deaf ever since that time. Ile had gone to school just two or three days. Ile was siek seven weeks, and when he got better so he was conscious and knew us, we did not know that he had lost his hearing, and was to be deaf all his days. But one night some one was there and brought a little dog, and it came close to his bed and he laughed at it. We talked to him about it and he would not say a word, and then we knew he could not hear, but it never came to my mind that it was to be permanent, or it would have been much harder to bear. His speech did not leave him. Ile just forgot most of the words, being so young, just two or three weeks past four years old, and he says words yet.
There was living at our house with us a good, sweet girl. Iler name was Margaret Shoey. She had been with us about a year and a half. She had a mother and an inhuman stepfather, and the neighbors got her away from them. Mr. Dove had lived close to them, and got us to go and get her, but she hid from him the first time, and the second time she just told him she would not go.
She took the same as the others had Saturday evening. Both doctors were there, but there was no help for her. The spots were more marked than on our own two children. She died Monday night or Tuesday morning at one or two o'clock.
The disease was epidemic. There were fourteen deaths in the surrounding country, but our neighborhood suffered the most. One little girl about two years old, Slyvester King. half a mile north of our home, died. She was siek just two or three days. John Wilson's half a mile southeast of us, lost a sweet little girl about the same age ; and Mrs. David Morehouse, half a mile south of us. All these were taken away in two or three days' sickness.
We were all just like one family around there then. I left my own sick ones to go and prepare the bodies of those that had died. I speak of when our house was full of people helping us with our sick ones.
There were no trained nurses then, and no coffins kept in the furniture store for sale. The first thing after death was to straighten the body and take the measure for a coffin, and go to the carpenter's and get a coffin made, for that would take some time and the funeral would be appointed accordingly. I have helped take the measure of a great many people for a coffin, for I was a born
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leader in taking care of the sick and caring for the dead. I commenced that kind of work before I was married. I remember a little baby just a few days old that I took on my lap and dressed for the grave, when I was not more than seventeen years old. I think this will sound strange to some.
1858 came with all of the sickness and death. Some had died before the new year came, and some after it came in. Mr. Elihu Daniels, south of the Will Moudy farm, died, and Mr. Lucas had a daughter about fourteen years old to die ; A Mr. Mullen, that lived west of the briek church, had two little children that lived with them. They had no children of their own, and these two died. I think the disease was not contagious, but it was epidemie. I never want to see another time like that. There was a family lived east on our farm. Their names were Hartman. They just stayed at our house. They had two little girls, and they slept on the bed with our siek children. Mr. Hartman would only go home to feed his things, sometimes for two or three days; then they would go home to sleep and rest, and come again, and his brother stayed all the time. and their children never took the disease. Who can forget the people that do so much for you in such distress and affliction ? The people did not do any work around there, only what had to be done, and went where they were needed the most. I could write about it, and never get done telling how good the people were to us, and all the rest that had sickness and death in their family. The tears will come sometimes yet when I think of it.
That spring the creeks were very high. We could not cross the middle fork of the Vermilion for six weeks, there was so much rain, and no bridges then. There was a man drowned that spring in the ercek, close to Charley Wood's home and it was more than a week before the body was gotten out of the creek.
Mr. Patton's father came out to see us that spring, and went home and took sick, and died May 31. 1858. Some one eame after Mr. Patton, and he went and found his father very sick. He stayed a few days and then came home, but he was soon sent for again to attend the funeral.
The east fork of the Vermilion was very high. He went horseback, and had to swim his horse to get over the creek. No way to go on the railroad and no telegraph dispatches then.
We took a wagon and went over into Indiana in August to attend the sale of the personal property, Mr. Patton and his brother being the administrators of his father's estate.
1859 came, and nothing special happened until fall, when Mr. Patton rented out our farm here to a Mr. IInnt and Isaac Brown, of Indiana, for five years, and made arrangements to move back to Indiana, his father having left him a
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farm. He had two wagons loaded to go back, but I was not very much in favor of going and leaving more here than we could get there. That night after supper Mr. Patton came down to Mr. Wm. Robinson's and bought his farm of two hundred acres of land, the forty that our house is on and the one hundred and sixty south of our home. We never thought of going back to Indiana since, but loved to go and visit, and to see the old home of my childhood, but the most of the ones that I knew so well are gone.
1860. And who is it that is fifty or sixty years of age that does not remem- ber the first five years of the sixties; about Abraham Lincoln and the war times, and how we would watch for the news if we did not have any friends there.
That spring we moved from the house we had lived in about one-quarter of a mile from the house I call home now, into a double hewed log house, with an entry between them. On January 22d there was another one added to our family, and we called him Franklin. He was a very delicate little one and always was through life.
We built our house that fall under many difficulties. The first house we lived in the lumber was all hauled from Indiana, and we expected to have the inside work of our present house of black walnut lumber, but got it home from Indiana, and put it in a kiln to dry, and it took fire and all burned up, exeept enough for our front door, three wagon loads. All the lumber was hauled from Paxton, and the brick for the cellar from Ten Mile Grove, the other side of Paxton. In October, William went to get a load of brick, and as he was coming home he had a barrel on his wagon on top of the brick, and he was on top of the barrel. The barrel fell off and he also, and the wagon ran over his legs and mashed one of them as wide as the wagon tire, so some of the pieces of bone were on the outside of his leg when I got to where he was. He crawled to the horses and unhitched them and got on and rode one of the horses to Mr. Montgomery's and we were sent for.
Mr. Patton was after cattle up at Paxton. He was sent for and brought two doctors. Dr. L. B. Farrar and a Dr. Smith of Loda, and we had sent for a doctor five or six miles south of our home. We got him home about midnight, and all three doctors held a consultation. Two doctors were for amputation, but Dr. Farrar would not give up to have it done, and the doctors set the limb and Dr. Farrar took the case. Billy, as we ealled him, had almost bled to death before the doctors got there, and the doctor had cold water poured on his limb for sev- eral days every half hour or so, and saved his foot, and Dr. Farrar, of Paxton, should have all the credit that Billy Patton has two feet to walk on to-day.
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Well, I did not have a very easy time that fall- all the carpenters and the men to cut corn, for that had to be done if we got anything for the corn; Billy and a sickly baby to care for. I had two girls to work for me some of the time. Mr. Antony Godson worked here, and the girl that afterwards became his wife, Susan Keplinger. John Harmon that lives in Los Angeles, California, did the outside carpenter work, but had Unele John Koder and a Mr. William Civill to help, and after the building was enclosed Mr. Kuder did the inside work and Mr. Wm. Kinmin did the mason work-the fastest man I ever saw work at any kind of work.
1861 came as all years do, and we had moved in our new house, which was a good one for those times in this country, full two stories high, with five rooms above and four below, and a cellar under the house. It has been a comfortable home for forty years, but sorrows have come often, and pleasant times also. If it were possible for me to live in this house for forty more years and I would take care of it as I have done, it would be a good house at the end of eighty years if fire or cyclone did not destroy it.
The first glass windows in the sitting room are all good, and never one pane of glass has been broken out after forty years.
I would like to see all the different people that have made their homes for a long and some for a shorter time with us in this house in the forty years that it has been my home. Many have gone to their long home that had a home with us and were employed by us to work in the house and on the farm. I would like to see them all at one table.
I think it would reach a long way.
1862 came and passed without any special incident to our family, only the same rontine of work that comes to people in every-day life. The horrors of the Civil War were thought more of than anything else those times, and how anxious we were to hear from the ones that left.
1863 came and without incident, only we had plenty of work to do. We had a large drove of cattle that year, and herded them on the prairies that sum- mer. We did lots of farming, and raised wheat, at that time, here on the prairie better than can be raised now on the prairie.
In June that year, the 25th, there came a little girl to our home, and we called her Ida J., and she made lots of racket most of the time when her eyes were open.
That December Billy came home from Indianapolis. He had been there at school, and soon after coming home to spend the holidays took the lung fever and was very bad sick ; and one week after that, his father took sick with the same dis-
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ease. I suppose you would call it pneumonia now. This year had a sad ending to us.
1864 came as no other year that I ever saw, and never to be forgotten. The first day of that year was the worst storm or blizzard. You could not see three steps from you, and it was so cold that you would freeze in a very short time. Sammy Patton and a Mr. Smith had a hundred and twenty-five head of cattle about one mile east of our house that they fed shock corn to, and they would never have gotten home that day if it had not been that there was a rail fence that they got close to and followed to our house and barn. There was a number of people perished that day and night in Illinois. So many school children started home and were lost by the way, and lost their lives or limbs.
Mr. John Wilson, a neighbor, lost over one hundred head of hogs in that storm. Dr. L. B. Farrar came next morning to see our sick folk, and stopped on the way and warmed at Mr. Button's and when he came to our house he was so cold he could hardly get to the house, and the snow was drifted so that it was almost impossible to get any place. Almost all the chickens in the country froze to death.
Mr. Patton took sick that New-Year's day and Dr. Farrar was attending to Billy, and then we sent to Urbana for Dr. Summers to come. Mr. Daniel Moudy went after Dr. Summers. Mr. Moudy will never forget that trip, he almost sac- rificed his life for us in that great affliction. Dr. Summers came and stayed three day and nights, and Dr. Farrar was here most of the time. He came through the bitter cold weather and the snow drifts which lasted several weeks, the like of which I have never seen in this country before or since. Mr. Patton was not expected to live, and Billy was very sick all this time.
Eight days after Mr. Patton took siek, Samnel, the second son, took as the rest ; the red, brick-colored spittle, and pain in the left side like all the others, The doctor was here at the time he took down, but could not check the disease, and he was very bad siek. Three beds in two rooms, and most of the time three men to care for the sick and sometimes more, day and night. There were no trained nurses at that time, but I got to be a pretty good one before all got well, especially in taking care of fly blisters. Three men siek at one time. It did not take me long sometimes to shed tears with all the care and trouble I had and hard work, and to think of things out of doors and in the house.
Joseph Harris came and left his home and stayed twenty-six days, and fed the cattle and took care of the other stock, and in the deep snow and very cold weather. Money does not pay for such work at such times, and the men in the neighborhood would come and stay, sometimes two or three days and then go
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home and sleep and rest, and then come back again. What would we have done if the neighbors hadn't been so good ? I never got tired of doing something for the sick after that, as long as I was able, if I could do it, no matter who they were.
After all I have told about this siege of sickness in our own family, Charles MeGlaughlin, an old Irishman that had no home only our house, took down with the same disease one week after Sammy took sick : three downstairs and one up- stairs ; four beds occupied with the sick ; one or the other of the doctors was there almost all the time.
Franklin Rice went to Indiana after William Patton, and to tell the folks over there about the family all being sick, and William Patton came and stayed fifteen days, and his sister came soon after and stayed several days. All these trips then were worse than a trip to Denver would be now, but all our family got well after three months from the first to the close of the siekness. There was only one death in the neighborhod, and that was a young man named Shaver.
If we never got sick we would not be thankful for good health. I thought sometimes that I was nearer worn out than the sick were; I would go out in the kitchen sometimes after something and forget what I went after, but never gave up but once and that was the afternoon that Samuel came in and I had to fix another bed for him. I sat down on the floor and cried, and thought I could not do anything more, but I thought this will not do, and I had to do all I could do, and was thankful I had so much help. This is enough for one year, but not half I could tell about it.
1865 was a year of no special incident in the family, only the common work on the farm and in the house. There was always plenty to do that year. Billy came home from Jacksonville the 15th of April, the day Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and when he came about five o'clock in the evening I went to meet him, and the first word that he said was to ask if I knew that the President was killed. I had not heard it until then. A Mr. Ballard had just moved in the house we first lived in, and I went there the next day, and when I told him he just walked the floor, he was so excited that he did not know what he was doing hardly. The whole country was stirred up and in mourning for the beloved President's death. His name will live through ages to come.
February 27, 1902. After almost one year of the time has passed I will try to finish the sketches I commeneed some time ago, and will tell something of what happened in the year that has just closed, the year 1901. In this year I have passed through the greatest affliction of my life of bodily suffering that it was possible for me to pass through, and still live to tell about it, but I will
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never tell it all for it would be impossible to tell it so any one would know how much I suffered.
May 8, 1901, I ran a small oak splinter in my forefinger on my left hand, and blood poisoning started from the effects of the splinter. The next day, the 9th of May, we called Dr. Wylie, of Paxton, and Dr. Hester, of Clarence, and they split my finger. The next day they came and split my finger and the third time had eight or nine places opened on my hand. I did not know much by this time, and when the doctor would dress my hand it was all I could do to stand it. The doctor came twice a day for a while, and then went to Chicago for a trained nurse, and she stayed ten days. I had to have medicated water poured in every two hours, and take whiskey and stryelmine every four hours The perspiration from the poison was very offensive, and I had to have alcohol baths twice a day and a chill one every twenty-four hours, and suffered intensely then. I would sometimes look at my hand and wonder if it would ever get better.
Oh, how glad I would be when the doctor would get through dressing it ! But everything has an ending, and so did my trouble with blood poisoning, after being under Dr. Hester's care from May 9th until July 17th, making fifty-nine visits. I thank him for his kindness to me all this time. May God's blessing be with him through life, and may he live a righteous life, and be a blessing to the people wherever he may be.
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