USA > Nebraska > A Biographical and genealogical history of southeastern Nebraska, Vol. I > Part 39
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BENJAMIN H. BAILEY.
Benjamin H. Bailey, who has been the postmaster of the town of Brock for the past six years, has been a resident of this community since 1870, so that he is one of the old settlers and almost a pioneer of this part of the state. He has been engaged in business for a num- ber of years, and is numbered among the foremost citizens. of the town and surrounding country, where he is well known and popular. He is one of the men who seem to distribute their time and attention to the various affairs of life in proper proportion and thus become well rounded and symmetrical characters, and business, civil, social and do- mestic duties have all made requisition on his interest and been given a due place in his career, with the result that he is a man of broad experience and a largeness of mind fit to undertake any or all responsi- bilities which have fallen to his lot in an unusually active and useful life.
Mr. Bailey was born in Chester county, Pennsylvania, June 26, 1843. His father. William Bailey, was born in the same county, March 20, 1807, and was killed by the cars in Brock, Nebraska, in 1889, when almost eighty-two years of age. He was left an orphan at the age
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cf seven years, and his life was largely one of self-achievement. He was a farmer in Pennsylvania, and in Cedar county, Iowa, for three years, and in 1873 came to Nebraska, where he spent the rest of his life, having accumulated a fair amount of property for his use in old age. In 1831 he married Mary Holstein, who was born in Penn- sylvania in 1812, and was a daughter of Benjamin Holstein, a German. She died in Auburn, Nebraska, in 1881. She and her husband were both of Quaker descent, and joined the Methodist church. They were the parents of six children; Sarah, the wife of John Eastwood, in Colorado; Mary, who married Isaac Bailey and later William Mahony, and resides in Tipton, Iowa, having two children; Martha, who died in Pennsylvania at the age of twenty-one; Benjamin H .; Catherine, who is the wife of James Smith, in Kansas, and has four children; and Eli- sha, a railroad engineer, who was killed in a railroad wreck in Phila- delphia, leaving two sons.
Benjamin H. Bailey had a common school education and was also in an academy, which he left to go to the war. He enlisted in August, 1862, and served ten months, after which he came home, but soon vol- unteered for a second time, and before the war was over had offered his services to the government three times. He was finally discharged in 1865, and for the following two years and a lialf attended what is now Freeland College, near Philadelphia. He farmed in Pennsylvania until he came to Nebraska in 1870, and also followed that occupation for some years in this state. He was in the lumber business in Brock for fourteen 'years, part of the time with Gould and Company, the for- mer a relative of Jay Gould. He was appointed postmaster six years ago, in 1897, and has given his time and attention to that position since.
October 4, 1866, Mr. Bailey married Miss Sarah Smith, of Hope- well, Pennsylvania, and a daughter of James and Sarah (McClurg)
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Smith, the former of Irish and the latter of Scotch ancestry. Her parents lived in Oxford, Pennsylvania, where her father was a cabinet- maker and an undertaker, and Mrs. Bailey is the third of six children, the others being as follows: Nancy, who is the widow of Lafayette Bradley, living near the old home in Pennsylvania, and has five chil- dren; Ann died at the age of ten years; Samuel, who lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and has ten children; Mary, who is the wife of John McFadden, in Pennsylvania, and has four children; and James, of Irv- ing, Kansas, who married Mr. Bailey's sister, and has four children. Mr. and Mrs. Bailey have had three children: Mary Louisa, who is the wife of Edwin C. Huston, and has three living children ; James Walter, who is a grain merchant in Brock, and married Nellie Cathcart, by whom he has one son; and Harry, who died at the age of five years.
Mr. Bailey is a Royal Arch Mason, and is past master of Lodge No. 162 in Brock. He has passed all the chairs in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and in Roberts Post No. 104, of the Grand Army of the Republic, is a past commander, quartermaster, and has held other of the important offices. He is also a member of the Eastern Star. He is a stanch Republican, and he and his wife are Methodists, le being a steward and trustee of the church and superintendent of the Sunday-school. He resides in the pleasant home which he erected twenty years ago, and the family are held in high esteem in the town and vicinity.
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WILLIAM HENRY HAWLEY.
William Henry Hawley, a prominent retired agriculturist of La- fayette precinct, Brock postoffice, on mail route No. I, Nemaha county, now lives on a farm of one hundred and sixty choice acres, the remainder of a section of land which he owned up to a few years ago. He is one of the old settlers of this county, and has had a prosperous career here of over forty years. He and his wife are well acquainted with pioneer conditions and hardships, and for that reason can appreciate the bless- ings and comforts of the twentieth century far more than one who has been surrounded by them all his life. Everything bears a different face from what it did when he first came to this portion of southeastern Nebraska, and the real develpoment of the state has taken place since that time. Besides taking such an active part in the material progress, he has been prominent as a citizen, and his seventy-five years of life have been well spent in performing his duty as he saw it, rewarding him now with the esteem and regard of all with whom his career has been related.
Mr. Hawley was born at Stansted, county Kent, twenty-one miles south from London, England, on February 22, 1830. His father, Thomas Hawley, was born in the same old brick mansion, October 17, 1803, and died at the present home of Mr. Hawley in Nebraska, in his eighty-eighth year. He and his father, John Hawley, were of the yeo- manry of England, voters and owners of large estates. He had only one brother, who died at the age of forty without heirs, and there are now no blood relations in England. Thomas Hawley was married in England in 1824 to Miss Rebecca Venner, who was born in the same county in England as her husband, in 1805. They had six children. three sons and three daughters. Thomas B., born in 1826, was an Eng-
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lish marine, a modest and upright man, and in 1861 enlisted from Rock county, Wisconsin, in the artillery, Van Cleve's Division, was captured at Rosecran's defeat, and was starved to death while a prisoner of war in Andersonville. Jane, the wife of George Vick, of Rochester, New York, died at the age of sixty-six, leaving four of her five children by her first husband, George Waghorn, and three of her children are now living in California. William Henry was the next in order of birth. Ann died in England at the age of fourteen. Eliza, the wife of Joseph Vick, of Rochester, New York, died there in October, 1902. Richard A. is interested in mining in California, and has two sons and three daughters. The mother of these children died in 1877, when nearly seventy-two years old. She and her husband and family had come to America in 1849. landing in New York on May 6, after a sailing voyage of twenty-six days, in which two squalls had carried away the main mast and the mizzen mast. They made their first permanent home in Monroe county, New York, near Rochester, where they lived about five years, lived in Rock county, Wisconsin, for ten years, and came to Nebraska in 1867.
William Henry Hawley received most of his schooling in America, and his first purchase of land was in Wisconsin, consisting of forty acres, and he improved this and sold it at a good figure. He first came to Nebraska on April 1, 1858, and filed a pre-emption, but did not prove up on it as he returned three months later to Rock county, Wis- consin. In October, 1861, he came on with his wife and two daughters, and homesteaded the one hundred and sixty acres on which he now has his home. He was the nineteenth applicant in the first district. He built a frame house, paying fifteen cents a pound for shingle nails and ten cents for common sizes, and four dollars for the eight by ten panes of glass which made up the one window in the house. He began his
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career here at the bottom, but has prospered, and has bought and traded a good deal of land in the county. As one illustration of pioneer condi- tions, in 1863 he took fifteen bushels of corn to Brownville and received but ten cents a bushel for it, while he had to pay fifty-five cents a yard for calico and sixty cents for unbleached muslin. When he came here there was one puny box-elder on the place, and its bent trunk gave it the appearance of going into decline. He has planted a variety of trees around his house, which is now completely embowered, and also around his fields, and some of his outbuildings are built of the lumber which these trees furnished. From one tree he cut and planted over one hun- dred cottonwood sprouts, and there are many large trees which were planted as tender shoots by him forty years ago. He and his son are enterprising farmers, and have carried on operations on a large scale, raising as high as eleven thousand bushels of corn annually, and in 1903 his son sowed two hundred and twenty acres of wheat.
February 21, 1856, Mr. Hawley was married to Miss Eliza A. Walton, who was born in England in 1837. Her father, Thomas Walton, was an English farmer, and her mother was Sarah Dolden, whose brothers were prominent merchants in England. They came from England and settled in Oneida county, New York, near Water- ville, thence moved to Madison county, and from there, in 1847, to Wisconsin, where Mr. and Mrs. Hawley met each other. Seven chil- dren have been born to Mr. and Mrs. Hawley. Emma died in Nebraska when fourteen years old. Ella is the wife of Thomas Smith, and has two daughters. Richard T., who was graduated from the Peru nor- mal, is an able and prosperous farmer on two hundred and eighty acres across the road from his father, and he has a wife and two sons and two daughters. Belle is the wife of Jake 'Huffman, a fruit farmer at Auburn, and has three daughters and a son. Cora is the wife of George
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Sapp, a farmer on part of this farm, and has three children. Grace Victoria died here aged one year. Daisy Blanche was educated in the Lincoln Normal School, where she was graduated in the vocal depart- ment of music, and she has been a piano teacher for the past fourteen years, and has also been organist at the Brock Baptist church. She sings soprano and alto and plays her own accompaniment and her broth- er is also a musician and plays and sings. This musical talent is in- herited from both sides of the house, and the whole family have musical inclinations. Mr. Hawley has been a member of and an organizer of four secret orders in this vicinity. He has usually been Republican in principle, but of late has been Prohibitionist. He has served as register of votes, served a short time as justice of the peace and for twenty-three years as school director and treasurer. He and his wife are members of the Baptist church, and he has been a deacon for thirty-three years.
HARVEY A. BROWN.
Harvey A. Brown, a highly respected citizen of the town of Brock, Lafayette township, Nemaha county, and who has for some years conducted the leading nursery of this part of the county, is a citi- zen of long and honorable standing in southeastern Nebraska, where he has lived since 1869. He has been very active in the industrial and civic life of the county, much of his efficient work being in visible evidence in many of the houses of Brock and vicinity, which he as a carpenter and contractor erected. He is a man of undoubted worth and substantiality, and his record in all the affairs of business and private relations has been above reproach and highly creditable to his sterling manhood.
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Mr. Brown belongs to one of the old families of the country, mem- bers of which were good citizens of the east long before the colonies won their freedom and became an independent nation. His great- grandfather, Sylvanus Brown, was a native of Vermont, and during the Revolution was one of the doughty and valiant minute-men famous in this country's history. He married Keziah Cushman, and they moved to New York state in an early day and settled in the wilds of Oneida county, where he lived to an advanced age. Harvey Brown, their son and the grandfather of Mr. Brown, was born in Oneida county, and by his wife Ruth Vaughn had six children: Ancil H., Eunice, Keziah, Sarah and Jennett, and one that died young.
Ancil H. Brown, the oldest of Harvey Brown's children, was born in Oneida county, New York, September 21, 1818, and was reared on a farm and received an academic education. He studied for the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal church and was admitted to the conference, but was assigned to a charge in which the work and the exposure were so severe that his health broke down and he was forced to retire. He then engaged in farming, and also did service as a local preacher, which, in fact, he continued until his old age. He moved to Wisconsin in 1852 and lived there until he came to Nebraska in 1869. He was located on a farm in Lafayette township, Nemaha county, until a few years ago, when he and his good wife retired into the city of Brock, where they have a nice home, are enjoying good health in their old age, and have celebrated their sixty-third wedding anniver- sary. In June, 1840, he was married, in New York, to Miss Eliza Gilbert, who was born in Oneida county, April 27, 1821, a daughter of Joel and Mary (Sturdivant ) Gilbert. They became the parents of six children : Ellen E., the wife of Henry Sherman; Sarah E., the wife of J. M. Campbell, a merchant of Brock; Harvey A .; Riley A .;
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Maneroia, the wife of J. P. Johnson, of Johnson, Nemaha county ; and Adella A., at home.
Harvey A. Brown was born in Oneida county, New York, Feb- ruary 9, 1849, being third in his father's family. He lived with his parents until he was twenty-one, and enjoyed a common school edu- cation. He was taken to Wisconsin when he was five years old, and was living there at the time of the Civil war. On his sixteenth birth- day he enlisted in Company H, Forty-ninth Wisconsin Volunteer In- fantry, and served till the clise of the war, seeing duty in Missouri and the southwest and being in some skirmishes with the bushwhackers. He was discharged at Madison and returned home, where he learned the carpenter's trade, which he followed for many years. He came to Nebraska with the rest of the family in 1869, and as a contractor and builder constructed most of the houses in Brock and many throughout the county, the large schoolhouse in Johnson being among the number. In 1882 he moved into the town of Brock and engaged in contracting and building until 1896, when he engaged in the nursery business, which he has carried on very successfully. He has a nice residence in the southwest part of town, situated on the ten acres where he raises his fine fruit and keeps his large stock of trees and shrubs of all des- criptions needed for sale in the country round.
November 15, 1871, Mr. Brown was married to Miss Hester A. Hogue, who was born in Greene county, Ohio, August 9, 1851. Her parents were George and Mary Killin Hogue, natives respectively of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and they came to Nebraska in 1866, locating in Nemaha county, where he died at the age of seventy and she at the age of thirty-two. Mr. and Mrs. Brown have had six children : Myr- tle A. is the wife of George Corryell, and they have one son, R. Earl Corryell; Wilford married Elsey Young and has one son, Ancil H .:
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Luzetta B. is the wife of Sidney Young; Ruth L. Marie is at home; Wallace A. died at the age of seven months; and Winnifred A. died at the age of nine years. Mr. Brown is a stanch Republican, and has served his township as constable. Fraternally he affiliates with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Modern Woodmen of America.
FREDERICK J. HAHN.
Frederick J. Hahn is one of the prominent agriculturists of Lafay- ette precinct, Nemaha county, and is one of a family which owns in the aggregate over two thousand acres of Nemaha county land, a large part of which estate was built up by the fine business management and industry of the father. Mr. Hahn is progressive and up-to-date in all his methods and is an exponent of high-class Nebraska farming. Also as a citizen and friend and neighbor he is held in high esteen through- out his community, and is a man of the strictest integrity and sterling manhood. His farmstead is one of the beautiful spots which man and nature together have brought to the highest point of productiveness and profit. He has a fine large farm house, of two stories and seven rooms, and the handsome barn, painted in red and white, is twenty- four by thirty-two feet, and all the other equipments and improvements are such as mark the model farm. He each year grows about sixty acres of corn, producing from thirty-five to fifty bushels to the acre, and about sixty acres of wheat. He keeps some good cattle and horses, and from twenty-five to one hundred Poland China hogs.
Mr. Hahn was born in Peoria county, Illinois, January 21, 1861. His father, Henry Hahn, was born in Germany, December 4, 1832,
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and died in Nemaha county, Nebraska, October 30, 1899. In his young manhood he came to America, being forty-two days on the ocean voy- age. He had enjoyed good educational advantages, and was reared to farm life. He had only enough money to pay his way to this coun- try, and after arriving here worked out by the month and the year for some time, but was soon started on his prosperous career. After his marriage he was in the coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania for a time, and then came to Illinois, where he was a tenant farmer until 1871. In that year he started for Nebraska, driving three horses to a prairie schooner, and made his arrival in Johnson in the fall of that year. He possessed only a few hundred dollars at the time, and he bought one hundred and sixty acres of raw prairie land at five dollars an acre. This was the nucleus around which his efforts and untiring diligence built up a handsome property. At the time of his death he owned five hundred and twenty acres in four farms, and with what his sons own the family estate now comprises twenty-two hundred and sixty acres.
Henry Hahn, after he had got a start in the new world, married the girl with whom he had attended school, and who was one day his junior in age. He and Catherine Lehn came to America on the same ship, and they spent many years of happy married life together, and she is still living, active in mind and body, and greatly beloved by the children whom she has reared to noble manhood and womanhood. Of their large family of children, eleven are living at the present time, as follows: Christine is the wife of Jacob Lehm, a farmer in Johnson county, Nebraska, and has fourteen children; Catherine is the wife of August Elciste, of Phillipsburg, Kansas, and has four children; Frederick J. is the next of the family ; J. H. Hahn lives in Kansas and has six children; Jacob, who resides in this neighborhood, has eight
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children; George, also in this vicinity, has seven children; Mary is the wife of Chris Ritter, of Oklahoma territory, and has ten children ; Barbara is the wife of Phillip Schoene, of Norton, Nebraska, and has five children; Charles J. lives in this neighborhood and has six children ; Emma is the wife of Charles Smith, a farmer of Johnson county, and has four living children and two deceased; Lizzie is the wife of Henry Coleman and has two children.
Frederick J. Hahn remained at home until his marriage, which , occurred when he was twenty-two years old, February 27, 1883. His wife was Miss Catherine Mannschreck, who was born in Germany, February 26, 1865, a daughter of Christian Mannschreck. They have lost an infant daughter, and their eight living children are Mary, Minnie, George, Clara, Rosa and Robert, twins, aged nine years, Elsie, aged seven, and Arnold, aged two. Mr. Hahn and his wife are mem- bers of the Evangelical church, and in politics he is a Democrat.
MRS. CATHERINE HAHN.
Mrs. Catherine Hahn, the widow of Henry Hahn, who died at his home in Lafayette precinct, Nemaha county, October 31, 1899, aged sixty-six years, is one of the noble pioneer women of southeastern Nebraska and the beloved mother of sons and daughters who have gained honorable places in the world and displayed true manhood and womanhood in all the relations of life. Mrs. Hahn's maiden name was Catherine Lelin, and she was born in the village of Edenkoben, Bavaria, Germany, December 15, 1832, in the same place and just one day later than her husband, and they grew up together. Her parents were Michael and Lizzie (Ochner) Lehn, and they owned a vineyard
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. and made wine. They reared one son and five of their six daughters. Fred Lehn followed his sister Catherine to America, in 1865, and one of her sisters had come in 1864. Miss Lehn and Henry Hahn came to America in 1854, before their marriage, and they were married near Reading, Pennsylvania, April 14, 1854. Her husband worked in the coal mines there for a time, and they afterward came to Illinois, where they both worked for a farmer in Bureau county for two years, after which they rented a farm, and lived in that state altogether for thirteen years. They came to Nebraska in the fall of 1871 and settled on one hundred and sixty acres of raw prairie which he had bought in 1868 at five dollars an acre. He was very successful, and built the home in which his widow still resides, and four others. They had twelve children, eleven of whom are still living, and their names as well as further facts in regard to this interesting family are given in the biog- raphy of the son Frederick J. Hahn.
FRANCIS BARION REED, M. D.
Dr. Francis Barion Reed, one of the oldest practicing physicians in southeastern Nebraska, has had his home in this state since 1859. and has been an esteemed and useful citizen of Peru since 1876. He has been a man of much ability in business and professional life, and few men at the age of seventy-five can look back on a career of greater devotion to duty, family and his own highest interests. He has been almost continually engaged in the practice of medicine for over forty- five years, and in this most exacting profession has gained high rank and a place of esteem as the loved family doctor of many a household.
Dr. Reed was born in Meigs county, Ohio, December 26, 1828.
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His grandfather was a farmer and of English descent, and was among the earliest settlers of Meigs county, having taken up his residence there in 1798. The old farm on which he located in that year is still the home of his grandchildren, having been in possession of the three gen- . erations for one hundred and five years. Major Reed, the father of Dr. Reed, was born in Genesee county, New York, and was eighteen years old when he went to Meigs county, Ohio, with his father. He was a blacksmith and farmer, being a strong man both physically and mentally, although his early education was much neglected. He served in the office of justice of the peace for over forty consecutive years, and was everywhere known as a conscientious and high-minded official. He was married in Ohio to Miss Sylvania Barstow, of Scotch-Irish ancestry, and her family came from Rhode Island. They became the parents of ten children, two of whom died in infancy, and but three are now living; the eight who grew up are as follows: Sylvester S. was an Ohio farmer and died at the age of sixty-five, leaving five children ; Manley W. was a farmer in Ohio and died in his sixtieth year, leaving seven children; Amanda Alice Chambers died in New York, leaving four children; Maria A. Hoyt, a widow of seventy-nine years, is the only living daughter and resides on the old farm in Meigs county ; C. R. Reed, M. D., was an able physician and surgeon, serving in the field and hospital in the Civil war, and died in Middleport, Ohio, in 1900, at the age of seventy-three; Franklin, a twin brother of Fran- cis B., is a farmer on the old home place in Meigs county ; Francis B. and his twin brother were the eighth in order of birth; and Cornelia S., the deceased wife of Cyrus Rose, left five children. The mother of these children died at the age of forty-six, and the father was again married, also surviving his second wife.
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