USA > Minnesota > Mower County > The history of Mower County, Minnesota : illustrated > Part 17
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 | Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88 | Part 89 | Part 90 | Part 91 | Part 92 | Part 93 | Part 94 | Part 95 | Part 96 | Part 97 | Part 98 | Part 99 | Part 100 | Part 101 | Part 102 | Part 103 | Part 104 | Part 105 | Part 106 | Part 107 | Part 108 | Part 109
Several houses were erected by these families. The first covering for houses were indeed novel, hay, bark, rails and sod. Abraham Dickerson and father built the first good frame house and barn in the community. A school house was built on land owned by Caleb Stoek. The logs and other timber were donated by the settlers, and it was built in the spring of 1857. Diadamy Phelps was the first teacher; she afterward married John B. Niles, who owned Tefts mill property. Stephen and David Chandler, Solomon Custer, and John and Evan Watkins also married early school teachers of Cedar City.
The earliest birth, I think, was a son born to Mr. and Mrs. John Osborne. The second, a daughter to Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Cressey, and perhaps the third to Mr. and Mrs. Caleb Stoek.
Perhaps it may be of interest to record the style of preparing breadstuff in those early times - no mills, no railroads and pretty nearly no food at times. Personally, I went to Austin three times, with money in my pocket, to buy flour, and finally succeeded in getting eleven pounds of flour of old Mr. Brown of the Log Store. When corn was nearing maturity the settlers took tin pans and punched holes through the bottom, and upon these circular graters managed to get enough corn grated to furnish bread for a time till they could do better. Welcome Chandler hollowed out a log, put it in the ground, attached a sweep similar to a well sweep and by means of a pounder, work- ing like a druggist's mortar, succeeded in pounding out eorn, which good Sister Chandler made into a first-rate "Johnny
147
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
cake." Others resorted to their eoffee mills and ground corn in them.
The settlement saw elose times financially as the days one by one rolled away. Money was hard to obtain, and the money loaners often charged as high as three or four per cent a month for loans on the very best of security.
Among the first of the good men to preach the gospel were Revs. Beach and Loomis. The traveling peachers of that time were Revs. Mapes and J. L. Dyer, of the Methodist denomination. Rev. Dyer held a "protracted meeting" in the log school house which his own hands helped to make. He had a voice which could be readily heard a half mile away. Most of the neighbor- hood were converted and a grand reformation followed. I did not like him, he was too rough ; a sample of his talk, by way of introduction to me, was: "You are going to hell, ain't you?" However, I attended his meetings afterward, and now honor him for his work's sake. In those early times we were building and found it best to use oxen and earts for drawing logs, etc. One night I took my young wife and babe on one of these rude carts and went to meeting. On going home we had to eross the creek, and my wife with her babe in her arms slipped off the cart, but she held on to the babe with one hand and to the eart with the other, the oxen drawing her and the infant to the shore.
I can testify to the good, honest work of Brother John L. Dyer, the pioncer preacher. God honored him by his brethren of a frontier conference sending him as a delegate to the general conference. I joined afterwards under another preacher in charge.
Such are a few of the notes in early days. Jeremiah and M. Phelps had four sons in the Civil war. Mr. Watkins two, Essler two and Chandler one. So I think Cedar City and her people have done something for God and our country worthy a place in the history of Mower county .- Alfred Cressy.
PIONEERS OF FRANKFORD
My father, James B. Glover, with his family of four children, three daughters and one son, moved to the then far West, from Skancatels, Onondaga county, N. Y., arriving at Frankford Minn., June, 1856. There were but few houses to be seen here at that time, but new arrivals were quite frequent and houses went up as if touched by magic hand. Where in early morning would be a bare clearing at nightfall the gleam of a lighted candle could be seen from the windows of some rude vet cosy cabin home, showing the progress of a single day.
The first church in Mower county was built here the next
148
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
year, the principals in the work being Elders Reeves and Wal- dron. The following winter it was formally dedicated as a house of worship. About the same time Frank Teabout built the first publie hall. This was 24x60 feet. It was used that Christmas day and evening for a ball, over 100 couples being present. Mrs. Heidel, an aunt of the proprietor, and Henry Metzgar provided the bountiful supper for the gay and happy company.
The company was composed of all classes, from Fillmore and Mower counties. Goodly numbers came from Austin and Chat- field. The musie was furnished by our own home pioneer band, the greater part of whom were married men living near here, George Hunt, Samuel Metcalf, Hazard Titus and Gideon Sherman being among the number who constituted this band.
We had a good and large school at this point that winter. It numbered about seventy pupils. Professor Hotchkiss, of Ober- lin, Ohio, was the teacher, with myself as his assistant. At that time we had the county seat at this place and felt quite im- portant. But the county seat honors were taken away from us, and our dreams were not realized .- Mrs. Matilda Lamb.
FRONTIER EXPERIENCES
At the time of my arrival in Minnesota, and settlement east of Austin, in 1856, there were but two stores in Austin. J. B. Yates and V. P. Lewis were the proprietors of one and A. B. Vaughan of the other. One was located on the corner of Mill and Chatham streets and the other was south of where J. F. Fairbanks now has his warehouse. A. B. Vaughan was post- master. Mr. Day had a blacksmith shop built of logs on the corner of Main and Water streets. Chauncey Leverich, com- monly called "Chance," had a saw mill loeated about where A. S. Campbell's mill is now standing. George H. Beemis had a shoe store on the corner of Chatham and Mill streets. Frank Blank had a shingle machine located where the electric light and pumping station is now loeated. There was a log hotel located on Water street, between Franklin and Chatham streets. At the time I arrived there were no churches or schoolhouses.
In the month of June, on a beautiful Sunday morning, we heard the first sermon in Austin preached by a Methodist min- ister named Erastus Mapes. The meeting was held in a frame house which Mr. Leverich was building for a hotel. In August. Rev. Stephen Cook arrived in Austin from Oberlin, Ohio, with a commission from the American Home Missionary Society to organize a Congregational church. He held meetings in private houses until winter. Late that fall the town people erected a
149
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
building called "Headquarters," for a store and meeting place, and for day school and Sunday school.
The second trip I made from home after arriving in Austin was to Winona with two yoke of oxen for lumber for this "Ilead- quarters" building. I arrived home October 14 and found that the prairie fires had swept the whole county in my absence.
During the summer of 1856 I joined ox teams with one of my neighbors and broke about fifteen acres, on which I raised some buckwheat. In December, John Willson, one of my neighbors. joined teams with me, took my wood-shod sled and started with iny buckwheat for Preston, Fillmore county. Arriving at Carri- mona, we found a grist mill and exchanged the buckwheat for flour. We obtained wheat flour, corn meal and shorts, and started for home. Ours was the last team to eross the prairie between Frankford and Austin that winter. The road between Austin and High Forest and thence to Winona was kept open all winter. The county seat was then at Frankford.
In the spring of 1857. I sold my two yoke of oxen and took up a note I had given to pre-empt my land. Consequently I had no team. I raised corn enough that season to trade for a yoke of oxen with John Phelps. In the summer of 1857 I exchanged work with my neighbors and had sixteen aeres broken. In the winter of 1857-58 I cut and split oak rails enough to exchange with George N. Conkey for fourteen bushels of seed wheat. I sowed the wheat in the spring of 1858. In the fall I cradled and bound, threshed and cleaned, and thus secured seven bushels of wheat all told. In the spring of 1859 I sowed that seven bushels and never raised better wheat. That same spring a party eon- sisting of James T. Sargent, Hugo Mills, John Whalasky, Will- iam Baker and myself went to HIesper, a Quaker settlement in Iowa, and secured flour, corn meal and middlings. In the fall of 1860 I went to Mitchell county, Iowa, for flour. This time I took wheat of my own raising. That same fall I exchanged my yoke of oxen and a small stack of wild hay for a three-year-old Arabian horse. I also exchanged 120 bushels of wheat for a three-year-old mare. The first trade was made with James Carver and the latter with Abraham Lott. Then I had no har- ness. I worked for a neighbor, John Watkins, and took a mule- iron tug harness for pay. This harness had no lines, but I bought a bell cord and made a pair of lines which I used two years. In the latter part of December, 1862, I loaded forty bushels of wheat and a 400-pound dressed hog for a merchant of Austin, George B. Hayes, and started for Winona, our nearest wheat market. When about half way between Brownsdale and Beaubien Grove the tire on one of the wheels of my wagon broke. I stopped immediately. There I was, all alone. The
150
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
ground was frozen hard and there was no snow. But fortune favors the brave. The porker was on top of my load. I took the end boards out of my wagon box, piled up the wheat saeks as high as the bottom of my box, slid the hog out on saeks, un- loaded the balance of the wheat, and then took the broken tire and returned to Brownsdale, where I had it set. Then I went back as far as Mr. Tanner's, the last farm house, and there stayed all night. The next morning after breakfast I started for my load of wheat and pork. When I reached the spot everything was as I had left it, and the prairie wolves had not scented the feast. I backed up to the pile of wheat, slid the hog in the box, reloaded the pile of wheat and made another start for Winona, which place I reached without further mishap.
In the winter of 1865-66, I think it was in January, Obadiah Smith, A. V. Ellis and myself planned to start on a Friday morning for Casson with wheat. In the morning it looked very stormy, so I was the only one that started. I arrived in Casson in time to sell and unload my wheat. That night it snowed all night. I started for home the next morning. The roads were badly drifted. When I came to the last farm house I had the farmer go with me and start me across the lone prairie. After looking around, he advised me to go back with him and stay until Monday morning. This was Saturday afternoon. I did so. Monday morning was cloudy and it looked like snow. There was nothing to guide me, no sun was visible, and it was not less than fifteen miles to the settlement north of Brownsdale. How- ever, I started. There was no evidence of the summer road to guide me. The grass, weeds and hazel bushes were all snowed under. The railroad had been finished to Casson the fall before. After I had gone about two miles, it was apparent that the team was lost. I stopped, tied the lines to the box, dropped on my knees and prayed to the Lord to guide the horses to the settle- ment on the other side of the prairie. I did not touch the lines, but let the team go as they pleased, and did not hurry them. In the afternoon I came to the settlement about one mile north of the right road. I was very happy after striking the right road. That is the only time I was ever lost.
In February, 1865, James T. Sargent, George N. Conkey, Henry Carter, Isaac N. Peterman, Hugh Mills, James Mills and myself started for St. Paul with loads of oats. The wheeling was good, and all the ground, except the roads, was about cov- ered with snow. We sold our oats in St. Paul and drove across the country to Minneapolis. That was my first trip to the Twin Cities. The rest of the party loaded their wagons with lumber for a Methodist church. I loaded mine with pine siding and flooring to finish an addition to my house.
151
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
May 5, my house was destroyed by fire and we lost every. thing except what we had on our backs. The building was insured with the Madison Mutual of Wisconsin for $300. In Au- gust of the same summer, I took a load of wheat to Winona, accompanied by our oldest son, Calvin. We eamped out along the way and slept under our wagon nights, except when in the city. At Winona we sold our wheat, purchased a carload of lum- ber, and shipped it by rail to Rochester. We followed the train to Rochester, unloaded the lumber, brought a load home and finished the house in time to move in November 16.
My wife helped me in all my work until the boys were old enough to take her place. With heroie fortitude she loaded and stacked hay and grain, cut corn, dug potatoes, milked the cows and did her housework. My wife and I are charter members of the Congregational church of Austin, which we helped to organ- ize July 6, 1857. We also had the pleasure of assisting in the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary, July 6, 1907. I am a life member of the American Board of Foreign Missions, a life mem- ber of the American Home Missionary Society, a member of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers' Association; helped to organize the Austin Co-operative Creamery Association, and was its first president ; was president of the Mower County Old Settlers' Association eighteen years, and have been a member of the Aus- tin town board for a number of terms, as well as town treasurer and a justice of the peace .- Jacob S. Decker.
INDEPENDENCE CELEBRATION
M. J. Slaven has furnished this work with an interesting account of an early Fourth of July celebration in Rose Creek. "What an event our first Fourth of July celebration was to those of us who had known no play for a year! It was the people along Rose Creek who took the lead. A few days before the Fourth we called our neighbors together to prepare for the coming of the great day. Mrs. Aaron Draper and Mrs. Catherine Slaven were appointed as a flag committee. They procured their own material and experienced something of the satisfaction and joy of Betsy Ross at the wonderful results accomplished. Mrs. Patrick O'Malley, Mrs. Thomas Smith, Mrs. Stephen Sutton and Mrs. Andrew Robertson planned the feast and the men went at their work with zeal. At sunrise on the Fourth the sound of Draper's anvil awoke the echoes and people began to gather at the O'Malley farm, near the site of the present village of Rose Creek. People came from Anstin, Brownsdale, Frankford, Le Roy, Nevada, and in fact from the whole length of Rose Creek. What a jolly crowd it was that greeted our flag, which floated
152
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
from the top of an oak tree which had been stripped of its branches. There was a program, of course. Thomas Smith read the Declaration of Independence. James Slaven delivered the oration and then came a bountiful dinner, followed by games and races. Then the tables were spread again, for we were a healthy, hungry raee, and though not epicurean in our tastes the joys of the table certainly appealed to us. As evening came on the older people prepared to go home. Not so the younger ones, who clamored for a dance. The Fourth did not end for them until the dawn of the following day, when after a hot breakfast they were obliged to start for home. Perhaps it was this gatlı- ering more than any other which promoted a feeling of interest in one another among the people, and that interest has not entirely died out, as witnessed by the yearly gathering of the steadily decreasing circle of those who are privileged to call themselves old settlers."
EARLY DAYS IN LANSING
Clymer, Chautauqua county, N. Y., was the place of my birth, September 17, 1845. From there I moved with my parents to Warren county, Pennsylvania, and stayed six years. Then, in the fall of the year, our family started for Iowa with a team. After a long journey we reached Maquoketa, Jackson county, the night before Christmas. Then we went to a farm near where Delmar Junetion is now located. There we stayed four years. Then we changed our horses for two yoke of oxen, and made our way to Gundy county, Iowa. We arrived there in May, 1856. We did not like the place, however, and in August of that year we started for Minnesota. We found a place that suited us and on August 25, 1856, we pitched our tent in what is now section 22, Udolpho township. There we started to make a home. When we reached here father had two yoke of oxen, one cow, and thirty-five eents in money. The third day after we arrived father was taken ill with malaria and rheumatism and had to be helped to get out of bed. We badly needed some hay cut for the winter use of the cattle. I mowed what I could, but I was barely eleven years old, my eleventh birthday coming in Sep- tember of that year. Mother bunched up what hay I could mow and then we hauled it and stacked it around some crotches and poles, thus making a place to sleep in. We had the stove in a tent made of the wagon cover. We had an early frost and this killed the grass, so I could cut no more hay. Then I started to cut logs for a house, father being just well enough to get out and show me how. Our first visitors were five Indians on horseback, who seemed much interested in all that we were doing. Later
153
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
the forest fires began to run. I secured a plow and plowed some guards. I thought this made us safe, but one windy day a fire came and while mother and I were getting father where it was safe the fire jumped the guards and burned everything we had, except the clothes on our bodies, and even those clothes were of the very poorest. I went out and found the frightened oxen and took father and the rest to one of the neighbors, where we spent the night. The next day we went to Austin and sold one pair of oxen, thus securing money to buy provisions and clothes. While we were gone the neighbors had been about and gathered some bedding and clothing for us, so with what we purchased we managed to get along. Some of the men from Lansing came and cut logs, with which they built us the body of a house, one story high. We laid some poles across and a neighbor loaned us a tent to put over for a roof. We chinked the cracks and plas- tered the logs with mud, and in this edifice we lived, keeping the cattle in the other end. In November I went to Brownsdale and got a load of oak timber for floors and doors. Provisions were scarce and high. Corn meal was $5 a hundred and pork $15 a hundred. Flour we did not dare even think of. Winter set in early and very cold. We had to sell our last team and wagon to get food and clothing for the winter. In the spring we wanted to get some breaking done. It cost us $5 an acre. Wages were fifty cents a day, when one was fortunate enough to get work. Father secured the use of two yoke of oxen for breaking ten acres each. Then he joined with another man who had two yoke and secured a twenty-four-inch grub plow and broke all summer. Thus we lived through the summer. I drove four yoke of oxen and father worked out when he could find anything to do, in the meantime doing things to make the house more comfortable. Our clothes wore out and mother colored cotton meal sacks with bark and made dresses for herself and the girls, and trousers and jumpers for father and me. We killed game and caught fish for food, and had one cow to furnish milk. The second winter father worked at burning charcoal. He also had some traps made and caught animals, from which he sold some fur. With this money we purchased a little flour and some clothing. In the spring I worked four days for a bushel of potatoes, so small that each one would go through an inch hole. But they made good seed and we raised good potatoes, In the spring of 1859 father had $15, which he had received from ¿urs. With this he hoped to buy a hog, but the man who brought them in from Iowa wanted fourteen cents a pound and would not cut one up. So we could not buy. But a man said he would seil a three-year-old cow for $15, so we brought the cow home. This we traded for a four-year-old bull. Soon we purchased
154
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
another bull at Brownsdale for $17 and broke in the pair to work together. We had a wagon, so we made a wooden sled, which had to answer for freight and pleasure. Then we joined with two of our neighbors and broke ten acres apiece. One of the neighbors had a stag and a cow for his team, the other had a good yoke of oxen, and we had the bulls. In the spring of 1862 we sowed fifteen acres to wheat and broke some more land. August 9 we commenced to harvest. Father cut with a cradle, mother raked in the sheaves, and I bound, while the two girls placed it in shocks. That day father enlisted in Company C, Ninth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, and went to Ft. Snelling, from which place he went out after the Indians. Mother and I harvested the erop. I cradled, mother raken in, and then would carry the cradle back and I would bind it. This took a long time. Father came home on a furlough and helped stack it. Then I secured a threshing machine and threshed it. We had no granary, so I laid up a rail pen and thatched the sides and roof with straw and put the wheat in. We needed some elothing and desired to change the wheat into money. So we had to get it taken to Winona. I could not haul with my team, so we hired a neighbor to take a load for us. He charged twenty-five cents a bushel. When we reached Winona all he could get for it was thirty cents a bushel. It cost seven cents to get it threshed. So he took it to the Stewartville mill and had it ground into flour. He gave me half the flour and kept the bran and the shorts to feed his team. That is the way I made money. But I got enough to eat and managed to get along. Father went south with his regiment and was taken prisoner at the battle of Guntown. He was starved to death by the rebels in Milan prison. I stayed in Udolpho, paid for the place and took care of mother and furnished a home for the girls until they were married and had homes of their own. Mother died January 1, 1910. I have never had time to get married, so I am still single. -O. J. Rhoades.
155
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
CHAPTER XVI
EARLY AUSTIN
City Founded at the Old Water Ford-Coming of Austin Nichols -Arrival of Chauncey Leverich-Beginning of Settlement- Platting the Village-Pioneer Days-Important Events-Mur- der of Chauncey Leverich-Stories of the Small Beginnings of What Has Become an Important City.
Austin, the county seat of Mower county, is situated, broadly speaking, in seetions 2, 3, 10 and 11, in Austin township, and sections 34 and 35, in Lansing township. The exact incorporate limits are as follows :
All of seetion 3; the north half and the southwest quarter, and the northwest quarter of the southeast quarter of seetion 2; the northeast quarter of seetion 10; and the northwest quarter of section 11, all in township 102, range 18. Also the south half of the south half of seetion 34, and the south half of the south- west quarter, and the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of seetion 35. Also a strip of land, 40 feet wide, off from the west side of the northwest quarter of the southeast quarter of same section 34. Also the land within and known as Oakwood cemetery, being in the southwest corner of the northeast quarter of the same section 34, township 103, range 18.
The city is three miles from the western line of the county and midway north and south. It is built on both the east and the west banks of the Red Cedar river, which raises in Dodge county to the north and flows south into the state of Iowa. Austin was laid out in the fall of 1855 by Chauncey Leverich and A. B. Vaughan, and regularly platted in the spring of 1856.
FIRST SETTLEMENT
The first settler on the present site of the city of Austin was Austin Nichols, who loeated here in 1853. He sold his claim in 1854 to Chauncey Leverieh.
Chauncey Leverich was a young man, from twenty-five to thirty years of age, naturally bright and ambitious, with an eye to business. He pre-empted 160 aeres of land, described as fol- lows: The south one-half of the northwest quarter of seetion 3, and the southeast quarter of the southeast quarter of the same section, and the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of section 2. The latter piece of land included the mill site. He immediately commenced building a saw mill, which was com-
156
HISTORY OF MOWER COUNTY
pleted early the next year. He started in business with good prospeets, but his career was suddenly brought to an end in 1856.
During the same year, 1854, the following named eame: D. J. Tubbs, Benedict Brown, Robert Dobbins, David L. and Willard Smith, and a man named Pinkham. Late in 1854, or early in 1855, Winfield Loveland and Francis Stuhfell came.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.