THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, February 1978, Volume 13, Number 4; submitted with written permission of current Editor Grayden D. Slowins:


THE SLOWINSKI SETTLEMENT by Grayden D. Slowins:

On December 9, 1977 a landmark home in Berlin Township was severely damaged by fire, due to a faulty new fireplace and chimney. Long known as the home of "The Old Maids", it stood on Harwood Road just south of Portland Road. This was the home of Michael Slowinski, son of Daniel and Anna (Schnabel) Slowinski. He was born in Posen, East Prussia, on September 18, 1844 and died in Berlin Township, Ionia County, Michigan on May 1, 1917. He was married to Josephine Kloss, born in Prussia on October 2, 1850, died in Berlin Township on November 24, 1927, daughter of Adam Kloss and Mary Krimrick.

After serving three hitches in the German Army fighting against Denmark, Austria and France, Mike and two of his brothers, Chris and Louis, took advantage of the armistice with France to sail out of Hamburg for America in the year of 1870. They landed in New Jersey and worked there at their construction trades for two years, saved every cent possible to send for their families, and brought them to Ionia County in 1872.

They came to section 25 in Berlin Township to the home of their Uncle Martin Schnabel, who found them a log cabin on the Henry Houserman farm next north. The men worked in a logging camp in the Stanton-Sheridan area that winter and in a shingle factory in Sheridan in the summer. About 1874 or 1875 they bought land in section 36. Mike got the N1/2 of the NW1/4 and later added the next 40 acres south to make 120 acres.

Mike was a carpenter and Chris a stone mason. With their brothers and brother-in-law they built their sturdy barns with wide cut-stone foundations. Next they built frame houses to replace the first log structures. They worked on many of the fine brick and stone homes and public buildings in Ionia city and County in the 1870s and 1880s.

In the Old Country they lived and worked on land owned by overlords. Their meager homes and stables were usually of adjoining buildings. The stables were kept as clean as the houses and the manure was carried to country fields each day in a basket on a shoulder. They had raised wheat, oats and barley, kept a cow, a sow and a few sheep on the small plots allotted their own use. These plots, just as in the Russian dominated countries of today, was where the highest production was.

In this country they specialized in small grains, sheep, hogs, a few cattle and horses and an orchard of apple trees. They lifted themselves by their bootstraps to become respected landowners in the American community.

Theresa, Agnes and Anna were Mike’s old maid daughters and Josephine’s nephew, Leo Fialkowski, was their hired man. Leo was the last member of the community to come over from the old country and was always called “The Dutchman”. Mike gave the south 40 acres to his son, Tom, where he raised two sons: Al, who sold insurance and real estate in Ionia and is now deceased, and Richard, who recently retired from the Arnold Machine Shop in South Ionia. Neither had children, so this line is now at an end. Now, with their story, the house dies also.

My grandfather was Daniel Slowinski, son of Chris and grandson of old Daniel, the father of the immigrants.

A LETTER---A BIT OF NOSTALGIA FROM MADISON HEIGHTS:

To Mr. Grayden D. Slowins, January 13, 1978 - Dear Sir: My aunt, Mrs. Kenneth (Statsick) Smith, who resides near the Lakeside Cemetery, sent me this clipping some time ago (the clipping was from the IONIA COUNTY NEWS concerning a photo of the Ionia County Board of Supervisors of 1892-94 and Grayden's efforts to identify the board members pictured) and I have had a desire to answer it for some time.

Adam Fender was my grandfather. I am the son of Warren Fender. I went to the Goddard and Bretz schools. I have seen my granddad together with his daughter, Dora Everest, spend many hours on the assessment rolls of Sebewa Township.

I happened to be born in the house where Karl Eckhard lives or did live, the first farm north of the railroad, west side, from Woodbury. My parents then lived on what was known as the George Fletcher farm, the first one south of what was then the West Sebewa Store. (Clyde Avery's farm)

My Dad passed away January 6, 1925. We then lived just north on the west side of the road from the Hemple farm. (M-66) Leon Williams also served as supervisor of Odessa Township. Even then politics seemed to play its part. My folks were all Democrats and Granddad was supervisor many, many years but Dad never made it in Odessa. It seemed it always went Republican because Leon Williams always won.

The Karl Eckhard farm at the time of my birth, 1906, was owned by my maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Statsick.

One of George Schneider's daughters, Etta, was my schoolteacher at Goddard. At the Bretz School, Hazel Rogers was teacher for a time and Velma Deeg also taught. In my eighth grade we had a teacher from Portland whose name I have forgotten. In the first three weeks she was so homesick that all she could do was stand by the window and pine her heart out. She quit and Etta Schneider finished the term.

I worked for Grover Cook on the farm the summer of 1925 and then worked for my uncle, Ray, in the South End Garage at Lake Odessa. It is now a grocery store. I drove the hearse for Weed and Wortley. Mr. W. Wortley's daughter, Madge, married Maynard Leak. The Leaks lived across from the Sebewa Baptist Church.

In 1927 I married Coral Rairigh. Her dad, John, of Woodland ran a threshing machine (now extinct). Her brother, Glenn, lived on the south side of the old Clinton Trail just west of the Ionia Road.

The Lake Odessa High School burned down when I was in the 9th grade. Mrs. Fender and I celebrated our golden anniversary last June 25, 1977.

Lots of luck and good wishes, Harold J. Fender, Madison Heights, MI

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR,
April 1978, Volume 13, Number 5; submitted with written permission of current Editor Grayden D. Slowins:


HOMESTEADING IN NEBRASKA By Pearl Reed - In the early 1880s many Civil War veterans went west to take up homesteads. They went with their mule teams and covered wagons. Some took their wives with them and some let their families come later on the train. Alonzo Ferguson was one from the Portland, Michigan area to go west. He took his wife and son and daughter. After he got there he wrote to Thomas Corbett Lyon of Danby and wanted him to come west and take up a homestead also. This was in the northern part of Nebraska.

T. C. Lyon’s first wife was a niece of Alonzo Ferguson and that made the connection for us to go. My father, T. C. Lyon, had an auction, sold his personal property and went west with his wife, Mary Brooks Lyon with their two daughters, Jessie and Pearl and these many years later I am Pearl Lyon Reed doing this narration. My father had come from Ohio with his father, mother and sister, Augusta May Lyon.

I was born in Danby Township. I was a year and one half old and had had whooping cough pretty bad and no one thought I was going to live but the Nebraska air was good for me and my mother, too. My sister, Jessie, was older than I. I was born October 14, 1887 and we went west in either February or March of 1889.

We arrived by train at Long Pine, Nebraska. Byron Ferguson met us there and took us to his home. We stayed with the Fergusons for a while and then rented a farm near them. It may have been the Avery farm. I don’t remember seeing that farm. Probably in 1890 we moved to the Thompkins farm about five miles southwest of Bassett. Papa had bought a team of mules, a wagon, a half interest in a plow, a few chickens, one pig and one cow. Our home was a one-room house papered with newspapers---The Portland Observer and The Grange Visitor. It was from these papers that I learned my ABCs. We always had the Portland paper to keep up with the news.

We were right in the open prairie. Between the house and barn there was a trail we could see where people had come with their covered wagons ahead of us. The buffalo were gone by this time but there was a buffalo wallow beside the road. At school we used to play drop the handkerchief in a ring around the little buffalo wallow. I suppose I could have picked up buffalo horns but we never saved any. I have said many times that we did not use buffalo chips for fires but really we did. The climate was very dry.

The beautiful climate, the beautiful sunrises and sunsets and sometimes a mirage helped to cheer people up out there. The land was level as a plate and there was no difficulty plowing it. The crops on this Thompkins place were not very good. I have records of the butter and eggs sold there. Papa planted wheat, oats and corn and potatoes for our own use.

I remember that while we were on the Thompkins place that Jessie went to a school called the Crooks school across the railroad track. I visited that school one day and I still have the Winston geography book that I looked at when I visited there.

On the Thompkins place on November 23, 1891 my little brother, Walter Alfred Lyon was born. My mother was very sick for a long time. I remember Jessie washed the dishes and she was yet pretty small. We had this one-room house and then a shanty attached to it. For heat we bought some coal and then there was a place down on Long Pine Creek---they called it the section forty---where we could get pine trees for wood. Perhaps somebody had taken up the claims down there but it was used as a public area where people went to get wood. Crops were pretty poor and food was pretty scarce. One day the only cow we had laid down and died. Of course Papa bought another cow right away. When he wrote to Michigan that our cow had died Uncle Henry Brooks went around among the neighbors and took up a collection to send us $25 to replace the cow.

Our team of mules were named Jack and Jennie. One was almost black and the other was a kind of a mouse color. The barn was a very tiny, small barn. Father was busy in winter with the chores.

The railroad went from Omaha farther west to Valentine and other towns. At an Alliance meeting my folks went to, they met the Crabtrees, who remained lifelong friends. They had one daughter a little bit older than Jessie and they were always chums. At the Alliance dinner---a potluck---they paid ten cent dues. After dinner one of the men came into the house and said “everybody get your teams and wagons as quick as you can. There is a storm coming.” They did get out of there really fast and went home. During that blizzard we burned some corn that Papa had in the shanty. It must have been corn that he had put in there for seed for the next year but he burned it for fuel to keep warm. He tied a clothesline between the house and barn so that he could get out to do chores without getting lost in the blizzard. The next day he did not go to the barn all day. There were two nights that he did not go to the barn on account of the blizzard. Then the sun shone before night. Thirty degrees below zero was quite common.

We got our mail once a week and sometimes not that often. We had to drive in to town to get it---that was Bassett. Long Pine was a little larger town but in the 1900s Long Pine got to be almost a ghost town and Bassett grew to be the center of the state, almost, for cattle conventions.

My brother, Walter, grew up and bought a farm near Papa’s farm in Danby near Frost’s Corners. In 1918 he was stricken with the flu and he was one of many Danby boys who died that winter. He was buried on the first Armistice Day.

We stayed in Nebraska seventeen years. We moved from the Thompkins farm to a contested timber claim. This timber claim had only two trees growing on it but a half mile away was a beautiful grove where people had planted trees and did not have to live on the timber claim to get the deed to the land. Then Papa bought more land until he had about 400 acres all in the same section. There was no schoolhouse in that area. People met at our house---two neighbors came in---to organize the school district. Papa was the director as long as we lived there. Dave Litz was one of our neighbors on the adjoining section. Papa and Mr. Litz found a small schoolhouse that they could move down across Long Pine Creek. Everybody knew how to put two teams on a house and move it. When they moved the schoolhouse across the creek our mules were so afraid of the edge of the bridge that they almost pushed the other team off.

Dave Litz was treasurer and Herman Clauz was the Moderator at the School District. The schoolhouse was located a half mile from our house, a half mile from the Litz house and a half mile from the Clauz house. We were west of the schoolhouse. Our first teacher was Gertrude Harrison. That little schoolhouse was still standing when my son-in-law, John Stair, and Ben Root went to Wyoming hunting antelope.

We were in Nebraska for 15 years. It was my parents’ homesickness that brought us back to Michigan. Papa and Mama were homesick for all the fifteen years but they couldn’t sell their homestead for enough to buy a farm in Michigan. During the years of the drought there was one covered wagon after another, sometimes three or four at a time, following the railroad on the way back east to the places they had once known. Litzs had come from Iowa and the Crabtrees from Illinois. Oscar Sylvester Crabtree and Bert Smith had come west with their covered wagons and mule teams. Mr. Crabtree was a blacksmith and he was also a sort of a carpenter as was my father. Mr. Crabtree built a fairly good house with an upstairs in it and he also had a better barn than we did. The lumber was shipped in on the railroad to Bassett.

After we moved to the homestead we moved the little house and shanty onto the homestead. Then Papa bought another building that he put in between the little house and the shanty. It was larger than the first building. That made our kitchen. Papa was a carpenter enough so that he fastened it onto the house.

In our community we had box socials, play parties where we sort of danced our round dances on the grass. We always had a supper of some kind, sometimes home made ice cream. When the Morris’s came from Kentucky and the Davenports also came from Kentucky, they started a church at the schoolhouse and we had church and Sunday School and Epworth League there. The church was organized as a Free Will Baptist group. There was a boy from Long Pine that came and started the Epworth League---a Methodist institution. These other two families started the church and occasionally we would have a minister come---there was Tommy Holt and Elder Frazier and Albert McGath as the young man with the Epworth League.

There was a cemetery near the Cook school on the north side of the railroad track. The first funeral I remember going to was that of Mr. Litz’s mother. The Litzs lived in a sod house. When his mother died, his two brothers, Andy and Ben Litz and Dave all wore overalls to their mother’s funeral. Mama thought that was pretty bad. Papa always wore his wedding suit to all the funerals he went to. He still had his wedding suit when he came back to Michigan. I do not recall any funeral director or undertaker. There was the lumber wagon to move the home made casket to the cemetery. None of my family died in Nebraska and we were always very thankful for that. Also none of the Crabtree family was left there. When Mrs. Crabtree died, they brought her back to Illinois for burial. Mr. Crabtree sold his farm and lived with his daughter for a while after his wife’s death.

The Fourth of July and Christmas were the two big days of the year in Bassett. One speaker came to Bassett came to give a fourth of July speech. He said that he had passed so few houses in coming that he wondered where all the people came from. People came from far and near when there was a Fourth of July celebration. We would have horse races---horse and saddle, not a sulky race. There were some fire crackers. We had a pavilion covered with branches they had gotten from the woods along the creek to make a bower over the plank floor put there for a dance. I cannot remember what was the source of the music. That was the only time I ever saw Papa dance. He danced with Florence Crabtree. Mother never danced. She had joined the Methodist Church when she was young and she did not believe in dancing.

I remember Christmas on the Thompkins place. I found a little boy doll in my stocking. He was dressed like a little sailor boy. There was not very much in the way of candy or peanuts but there were some. The first Christmas after the schoolhouse was brought in there before we had started school, we had a Christmas tree from Long Pine Creek. It was decorated with popcorn and a few cranberries on strings. There was a doll on the Christmas tree but it was not for me that time. I had had a doll before that so I did not get a doll this time. I don’t remember of any Santa Claus attending any of our Nebraska trees. At another Christmas we had a tree at our house. The tree kept up a slight movement. People wondered what made that tree move. A few knew that Mrs. Crabtree had brought a cracker box about a foot square with a rooster in it and that caused all the commotion. I think the Litz’s came to the Christmas tree also. Our families were very close. Mrs. Crabtree made me a pin cushion stuffed with wool from the sheep they had. We often said that Christmas and Fourth of July were about all there was to living out there. After the phonograph came around we would meet at the schoolhouse and play the phonograph records. We usually had ice cream and cake afterward.

For games at school we played pom pom pull away, drop the handkerchief and anti-I-over. We did not have any woodshed at our schoolhouse. It was anti-I-over the schoolhouse and we never broke a window that way. There were no serious discipline problems with the school children. We had four months school in the fall and four in the spring. January and February were months of such bad weather we did not have school then. We had July and August for vacation in summer. Sometimes we had a different teacher every term. One teacher drove from Long Pine with her horse and cart. She drove past our house so that I used to ride with her once in a while.

One day on the way home from school I saw something in the little wheel track and I though somebody had lost a piece of rope. When I approached it a little closer it wiggled and I saw it was a rattle snake. I gave it a plenty of room in getting around it. We saw many rattle snakes out there. We were always scared of them because a rattle snake bite was pretty likely to be fatal. I heard of a lady at Ainsworth who was bitten by one. One of my teachers had been bitten by a rattle snake. She was pretty sick afterward but she lived through it.

Nebraska surely was not like Michigan. One time we had bought some cabbage to make sauerkraut and my folks wished they had a stone to hold down the cover on top of it. We went across the road and picked up enough stones in a gallon pail to make a weight to put on the sauerkraut. Our fields were as level as a plate but a little farther back in the pasture there was a low place where once in a while there would be a little water standing in it.

The Fergusons had built a house right in the edge of the sand hills. They were three miles from us. They had a lovely house. Not only was it plastered but the plaster was covered with a kind of a glaze. When they sold their farm and house and moved to Kansas, the house was cut in two pieces and Dave Litz bought half of it and the Garland family bought the other half. Mr. Ferguson had a nice barn. It was fun to go to their barn because you could go upstairs in steps while the other barns did not have steps in them.

We always had cats. We never had a dog until just a short time before---well, we had a dog when we lived on the Thompkins place. It followed Papa to town one day and on the way back he missed the dog. A train had gone by and when he went back he saw where the train had hit the dog. (To be continued.)

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR,
June 1978, Volume 13, Number 6; submitted with written permission of current Editor Grayden D. Slowins:


BIOGRAPHY: HOMESTEADING IN NEBRASKA (continued) By Pearl (Lyon) REED – The other dog we had was just shortly before we came back to Michigan. We never had any sheep. Papa sort of made pets of all of his cows. I never saw an ox team until after I came back to Michigan. When I was teaching the Grubtown school, a man delivered a load of wood with an ox team. It was a Mr. Pryor.

After Jessie began teaching school she bought an organ. I think the Crabtrees had an organ but we did not have one at school. There we used to sing a few songs but that was the extent of our music. Jessie’s first teacher came from quite a musical family. She learned the song TWENTY FROGGIES WENT TO SCHOOL. Mama did not approve of that kind of music; it was too much like nonsense.

Our threshing machine was one of these where you put eight horses on a sweep to get the power to run the separator. After 1900 a man came in with a steam engine. He wanted everybody to be on hand ready to start threshing at five o’clock in the morning. He had to make money enough to pay for his machine. He was really a hustler.

It was the 22nd of April 1899 when Jessie and I went to school as usual. Papa had left the cattle in the corral. We had been watching the light of a prairie fire in the southeastern sky every night for a week. After breakfast Papa went out to plow more furrows to make our fire guard wider. Just before noon the head fire came through between our house and the Valley Grove schoolhouse. The folks at home did not know for a few minutes whether the schoolhouse was burned or not. And we, standing outside the schoolhouse watching, could not tell if our home was burned or not.

Then Papa went again to plow beside the head fire to keep the side fires from burning. When he brought the horses back he called to Mama to get a pail of bread and butter ready to take to the men who were fighting on the line. She had the milk pail half full when he came back. The men were fighting the side fires with wet gunny sacks and shovels to throw sand on the fires. At one time Papa and our neighbor, Mr. Crabtree, were fighting side by side and suddenly a blaze went through and neither of them knew if the other was safe or not. About a mile and a half farther north the head fire turned east by the extra wide fire guard. When the fire was only two miles from Bassett all the town joined in the fire fighting and put it out.

The next day, April 23rd, I was very surprised to find when I came home from school that I had a new baby sister. She had arrived at our house and we named her Eva Grace. She died November 19, 1975. The next day a bad sandstorm hit us and its fury was greatly enhanced by the ashes from the prairie fire. Mama had put an extra tablecloth over our food in other sandstorms and that is what happened this time.

Clarissa was born August 12, 1894. That was one of the years of the drought. Papa had planted some watermelons. When Clarissa was a few days old, our neighbor, Mr. Johnson, brought us a large watermelon that he had raised on the field across the road from our house. How those watermelons ever grew in that dry soil we never could tell.

The chatauqua was a wonderful thing, bringing nationally known speakers and music to our community. It would have meant little to us had it not been for our Sunday School Superintendent, Jim Davenport, who found out that any Sunday School in a group could go past the gatekeeper free. So our Valley Grove Sunday School planned to meet before we drove down the big hill so as to come in our wagons, one behind the other. The Ben Morris family, Crabtrees and our family and maybe a few others enjoyed this for several years. Of course we took our picnic dinner and stayed all day. We were all riding in wagons at that time. I remember a Mr. Sisson and Frances E. Willard who were on the program. There was a phonograph with earphones. Florence Crabtree paid the dime and let Jessie and me listen. Mrs. Willard was a temperance leader. The site of the chatauqua was in a spacious, well kept place with a pavilion and many cottages where people from all over the state came for a two week’s vacation. It was on Long Pine Creek at the foot of a large canyon. Some boys climbed nearly to the top of the canyon and fell from a high cliff. I do not remember if the boy was hurt or not. The chatauqua was a short distance from Long Pine. There was a wonderful spring where we had good water to drink.

About 1900 things began to get better. We had more rain and better crops. The first time the Corbetts came they were dressed in their best. Afterward they came in more common clothes. Mr. Corbett bought two colts that Papa had. The Corbetts lived in Ainsworth, Nebraska. They were our cousins.

When times were better, Papa bought a steel windmill and a double buggy. When Jessie was sixteen years old she began teaching school and bought a carpet for the living room, a sewing machine, an organ, a photograph album for Mama and an autograph album for me.

Jessie went northeast of Bassett to teach at Moriahville and she boarded at Spragues. One week end when she came home, she was bringing a buckskin Indian pony with black mane and tail with a black stripe an inch wide down its back. It was named Pet. I enjoyed riding the pony, too. Florence Crabtree bought a bay, long legged bucking bronco. The two girls, Jessie on her little Indian pony and Florence on her big bronco made quite a picture. Papa told Jessie he did not like to have her ride to bronco for fear she might get hurt; but she did ride it once in a while.

Our wells were about 20 feet deep with very good water that never went dry. The well was boarded up to keep it from caving in. We had a well at the house and a well at the barn. One spring Papa offered Walter and me a penny apiece for milking cows. We would help him milk cows so he could get out to the field earlier. So we took over the milking night and morning. When we finished milking we would go to the house and write down the number of cows we had milked. Each of us would try hard to see who would get the last cow. Mama would carry the full pails of milk to the house for us. We shipped 25# kegs of butter to Omaha that summer.

One morning as the fourteen cows were leaving the corral I saw a rattle snake coming out of the tall grass under the fence into the corral. I called Mama and she came with the hoe to kill it. I ran back and forth between the snake and the fence, kicking sand at it, to keep it from getting back into the grass again. Of course, I was bare footed at the time. Another rattler was under the shanty doorstep. I went out the other door to see what the chicken was looking at under the step and saw the snake. Mama came and killed that one too. Papa cut off the rattles so that I could keep them. I kept them for a good many years but finally they got lost.

In 1903, just after I started for high school, Mildred was born on October 1. Jessie was teaching a school near home at that time and she took a week off from school to stay home to take care of Mama and the baby. Mildred was just one year old when we returned to Michigan.

There never had been a graduating class in Bassett until the year of 1904 when we graduated from the ninth grade. There were eleven in the class. They decided to have commencement exercises. Each graduate wrote up an essay to read and that was the program for the evening. We had the stage decorated with gold and purple bunting and each girl carried a fan. I still have mine. My chum and I had our dresses made just alike. Our mothers made our dresses. I went back to Nebraska in 1964 to the sixtieth anniversary of that graduation. I had my picture taken with one other graduate. There were some others in the town but they did not attend the banquet so they did not get in the picture. One girl that I visited was just not able to come.

Visitors to Nebraska would say they would not live there for anything. To stay there for two or three nights was enough for them considering the likelihood of prairie fires. The railroad engines threw out sparks. A wide plowed and burned strip was kept along the tracks as a fire guard.

We saw one tornado that was headed right for our house about 1900. It looked as if it were coming right for us but it lifted before it got to the Long Pine canyon. After the tornado there was a hailstorm with stones about the size of hen’s eggs. They pounded right through the wood shingle roofs. It pounded out all the glass on two sides of the house and in all the buildings around there so everybody was waiting for the railroad to bring in class and shingles for repair. Our barn was struck by lightning once. There were eight fence posts around the pasture that were struck the same afternoon. Papa came in from the field when the storm was coming and put the horses in the barn. His thought was to not take the harnesses off the horses for there might something happen. When the barn was struck by lightning he took the horses clear to the far side of the garden and hitched them to a couple of fence posts. He came back and got out a little calf and a few other things. Papa rebuilt the barn. Mr. Crabtree came to help put the rafters on.

The same summer the barn burned, the Crabtrees had gone to Elgin, Illinois to sell some horses and to let Florence go to High School in Elgin. She had loaned Jessie her side saddle and it was in the barn. Jessie and Florence were both very glad to think the saddle had burned so that they could get the kind of saddle they wanted. The side saddle had stirrups on one side. They each got a new saddle.

Our years of drought were really terrible. There were three years in succession that we lost all our crops. In some other years we would lose one or more crops. We never went to the place where there was relief sent in but one time somebody was going to the relief store and Mama said if they had a sack of corn meal she would be awfully glad to have one. They brought her a sack of corn meal and it happened to have a ball of butter in it and a name was on the sack. Mama never wrote to the person because she thought she just couldn’t afford the postal card. Our relatives in Rhode Island sent a box of drygoods and dresses and things and, of course, our relatives in Michigan sent things from time to time. It really was a hard time.

Grandma Brooks came out to see us before we moved down to the homestead. She came again in 1900. She was the only relative who came to Nebraska to see us while we were there. Mama and Papa came back to Michigan in 1892 when Walter was a baby to see Grandpa Lyon because he was not expected to live very long and later they came to Michigan with Grandma Brooks. Walter, Clarissa, Jessie and I stayed in Nebraska. The younger children could ride without tickets but we could not.

I went to a high school party and that night Mama told me she thought they had sold the farm. It didn’t enter my mind again until I saw Papa coming up to the schoolhouse on Monday morning at first recess. He came walking toward the schoolhouse. I thought “Oh, they’ve sold the farm!” And, sure enough, they had. I picked up my books and went to my boarding house and went home. That was in 1904. We had 400 acres to sell at $10 an acre and we had some horses and cattle besides. Papa figured he would have enough money to buy a farm in Michigan and he did have.

On this train ride back to Michigan Papa woke us up to see the Missouri River. When we got into Chicago we had a four hour wait. We stayed, all of us, right together without anybody getting out to see the town at all while we waited those four hours for another train. We brought our own food to eat on the train even though there was a dining car on the train. We sort of enjoyed the train ride but we kept thinking about the folks we had left behind.

When we arrived at Mulliken, Rollin Brooks was there with a horse and buggy and Uncle William was there with a wagon. The people of Mulliken always turned out with their lanterns to meet the train. Everybody wondered where that large family went to. We had gone up there in Sebewa to Uncle William Brooks’. After a while they found out it was our family coming from Nebraska.

Papa would not even consider a farm that was more than a half mile from a schoolhouse. We found the Stockwell farm on Frost Road south of Frost’s Corners, fifty acres that had not been heavily farmed and of very good soil. Papa went right to work clearing up the fence rows and took the shrubbery and flowers out of the front yard and planted grass there to make a start for a lawn. He rebuilt the barn and improved the house some after we got there.

Later he bought the big brick Triphagen house that was on Potter Street in Mulliken. There were two brick houses and it was the large one that he bought. He had an acre and a few rods besides. The house is still there. He wanted to locate his retirement home in Mulliken because Clarissa and Eva were in college in Ypsilanti and he thought it would be easier to get to Mulliken than Portland on the train.

The rail fences to me looked like something out of this world. All the brush along the roads seemed just terrible. I was used to an open prairie. Nevertheless, Michigan was beautiful.

Once I went back to visit in Nebraska in 1951 with my husband, Fred Reed, so that he could see the West and we went again in 1956 to Pearl and Oscar Peterson’s for their golden wedding. It seemed to me that the country was ruined by the shelter belts. They had planted shelter belts here and there along the roadsides and they were doing strip farming. Instead of planting a big field they were following the contours in strips. They were doing some irrigating and they seemed quite prosperous with lots of cattle. They had had more rain. Our farm sold for double what Papa got for it in only two years afterward. The man who bought our farm looked at the garden and saw the popcorn that Walter had hoed and said that if it would raise as good corn as that, he thought he would buy it. The popcorn helped to sell the farm. End.

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR,
October 1978, Volume 14, Number 2; submitted with written permission from current editor Grayden D. Slowins:


SEBEWA’S FIRST CENTENARIAN – October 30, 1978 will be the 100th anniversary of Miss Clara Evans. Nowhere in our folklore, old newspapers or cemetery records do we find any account of a Sebewa resident reaching the 100-year mark. For many years Miss Clara Evans lived with her brothers, Henry and Charles, and her sister, Ida, on the Evans farm a quarter mile east of Sunfield Highway on Tupper Lake Road. For a number of years she lived with Mrs. Hanna Heinzleman and then went to the Barry County Medical

Care Facility at Hastings. It is there that she bids fair to celebrate her 100th birthday anniversary. I am suggesting that our readers give her a good shower of congratulations and birthday messages. The address is: Miss Clara Evans, Barry County Medical Care Facility, 2700 Nashville Road, Hastings, MI 49058. Sent 2/18/07

SIX GENERATIONS IN SEBEWA By Mamie Downing – My Grandmother, Barbara Schaupp was born in Baden, Germany November 27, 1838. As a girl she worked for a baroness of the then ruling family, the Hohenzollerns. At this time Germany had a conscriptive military service. This was not a career or experience desired by a number of the young men about to emerge into the draft age.

Her brother, Adolph Schaupp was one of those young men coming of military age. Previously, two of his older brothers had “skipped country” to avoid the experience and Adolph decided to do the same. This was not an overnight decision; it was the climax of many months’ planning.

Adolph and Barbara had saved and scrimped to get enough for passage to America as she had decided to accompany her brother to the “land of the free”. They waited as long as they could to get more money and that was nearly too long as she related in later years. The German police came to their house after Adolph and while they were at the front door he jumped out the back window into darkness and was never found by the police.

Adolph and Barbara got together soon and started their trek to America in 1858. They chose to come to Michigan because the two older brothers had settled in Saginaw County when they came. It was there that Barbara later met Fred Sindlinger and married him. (Note: the 1880 census lists Barbara’s husband as Jacob, age 59 and born in Wurtemburg, Germany. Christian’s age is given as 52.) After their marriage they decided to come to Sebewa Township, Ionia County. He had a brother, Christopher, who had a farm on sections 15 and 16 on Kimmel Road at the time.

Two girls were born to them. First was Esther in 1871 and then my mother Theresa (Tracy) in 1874. When my mother was seven her father was killed in a team runaway. He was moving a tank wagon of a threshing rig to the next farm when the team started and his death was the result.

Barbara kept the farm and rented out the fields. She had her own cows and chickens and a garden. Shortly after Grandfather’s death, her brother, Adolph, came from Saginaw County and purchased a farm a short distance east, the one now owned by Howard Knapp. Adolph worked Grandma’s fields for her. He stayed several years but then moved back to St. Charles (near Saginaw) where he had formerly lived. After that the place was worked by a series of Tom, Dick and Harrys, some good, some not so, some honest and some not so much so.

When the girls were grown Esther married Willis DuBois of Oneida Center, Oneida Township, Eaton County where they both lived to a ripe old age on the same farm.

In 1898 my mother, Tracy, married Lewis Williams, a young man brought up by a Doctor Kiblinger of Sebewa Corners. They were married in a double ceremony with Ralph Friend and Lucy Halladay, another Sebewa couple, as the other half of the wedding group.

I was born to Tracy and Lewis February 22, 1900.

When I was yet very young my father got up in the night to fix the fire in the wood stove so that I might stay comfortable and he “took cold”. He could not seem to shake the illness. Of course antibiotics had never been heard of then and the prescriptions for such illness at that time was quinine and other staples of old time medicine. His cold grew steadily worse and finally developed into tuberculosis. As a last resort he went to Utah where the air was drier. The change in climate apparently helped him but he became so homesick that he decided to visit his family in Michigan. Here he became worse and went back to Utah but it was too late. He died there shortly afterward. One of the Sebewa Erdmans who had moved to Utah to be with the Mormans was with him when the end came. He died in January 1901 when I was eleven months old.

My mother and I continued to live with Granny on the farm. Tracy got a job in a millinery store at Sebewa Corners in the Cornell Department Store. Later she worked for John Bradley, who had a general store and was also postmaster of Sebewa. She worked in both parts of the store and received the magnificent amount of $3 for 5 days work. The store was not open Sunday. Tracy also did sewing for others to make a little extra money.

This continued until March 4, 1908 when she married George Snyder, the youngest son of Dr. George Snyder. They lived in Granny’s house until fall when she sold the farm to Joe and Alice Bliss. We then moved to his farm on Keefer Highway, still in Sebewa Township. George was a widower with two boys, Clifton and Max. Of course I was with them, making six in the family as Granny lived with my folks until she died in 1920.

To Tracy and George Snyder were born three boys and a girl making the family up to ten. Don now lives in Owosso; Dale in Battle Creek; Dorothy (Reames) and Leon both live in Lansing.

I started to school at the “High” school on Keefer Highway but when we moved to the other farm I went to the Halladay School. After finishing the 8th grade in 1913 I started high school in Sunfield where Homer Downing and I got acquainted. He and I were in the same class. We graduated June 7, 1917 from Sunfield and I went on to Central State Normal College at Mt. Pleasant and got my third grade teacher’s certificate. I taught one year at the Sebewa Center School. That year I boarded with Louise Gunn (Buchner). Christine Gierman and Zack York were in my beginners class and Howard Cross, Frances Sears and Burton Smith were the eighth graders. On Fridays after classes Homer would come with horse and buggy to take me home.

On June 7, 1919 I married Homer and we worked his dad’s farm on Musgrove Highway in Sebewa Township. In 1921 my folks sold their farm in Sebewa and bought one at Eagle. Later they moved to Grand Ledge where he died in 1929. Tracy came to live with us in 1949. She died in 1972 at the age of 97 ½ years.

Our two children were born on the Ezekiel Downing farm on Musgrove Highway. Bruce was born in 1923 and Cleo was born in 1928.

In 1940 we bought the John Lehman farm at West Sebewa and moved there April 20 of that year. Our children attended the West Sebewa School until they entered High School at Lake Odessa where they both graduated.

Bruce farmed with his father until he was married in 1953. His wife is the former Myrtle Thomspson, a registered nurse at Sparrow Hospital, Lansing. They now own a farm on Knoll Road where they had four children, two boys and two girls. Vicki Bowerman, the oldest has two girls and lives on Grand River Trail in Orange Township. Their oldest girl, Jodi, was born in Sebewa. Diane Black has one girl and lives in Nashville, Michigan. The boys, Jim and Tom are still at home.

Cleo decided to be a commercial teacher and went to Western State Teachers’ College at Kalamazoo. She graduated June 18, 1949 and was married the same day to Gordon Piercefield also of Sebewa Township. Cleo is still teaching at present in Portland. They also live on Knoll Road in Sebewa Township. Their children are Lori, born in 1953 and John, born in 1955. Lori attended Travis School and Portland High School. To finish her education she attended Lansing Community College and Michigan State University, becoming a commercial teacher like her mother. She married Wm. Fox, Jr. They own a home on Knoll Road. Lori and Wm. have two children, James born in 1973 and Lisa born in 1975.

John, likewise, attended Travis School and Portland High School. He is now enrolled at the University of Tennessee. John married Cindi McNeil of Kalispel, Montana in 1977. They live in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Now there is the story of six generations in Sebewa, four of them never having lived any other place, all born in Sebewa and still there. We have always lived in Sebewa since we were married, having moved only twice in 59 years and we can think of no better place to live, so we will probably continue here.

Tracy’s name was Maria Theresa but every one called her Tracy. Likewise my given name is Mamie. Although our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren call Homer Grandpa, they always refer to me as Mamie.”

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association.
Volume 14, February 1979, Number 4. Submitted with permission of current editor Grayden D. Slowins.


1878 WAS A GOOD YEAR FOR CENTENARIANS. Besides Clara Evans, who celebrated her 100th birthday last October, another one-time Sebewa resident, Mrs. Edith Shaupp Rusher became a centenarian. Mrs. Rusher is in a convalescent home in Chesaning. Mrs. Rusher and her sister, Cora, who married Rev. Riley Sandborn, were daughters of Adolph Shaupp, a brother to Mamie Downing’s grandmother and mentioned in her account of the Sindlinger family in the October issue of the Recollector. The Shaupps lived on the farm that is now the Howard Knapp farm. Nearing the 100 year goal is Mrs. Mabel Williams, who was born in Sebewa July 15, 1879. She has already celebrated her 100th Christmas and New Years at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Donald Bippley.

IN 1848 THE INDIANS TOOK LEGAL TITLE TO SHIMNECON BACK.

From (Liber) F, Page 332, Register of Deeds Office, Ionia County, Michigan

Wm. Fitch and wife to Dagmacke and Menekquett

21st of December 1848

Party of the first part for the sum of $324 in hand paid by party of the second part has granted, bequeathed, do grant, bargain and sell to second part now in actual possession, now being and to their heirs and assigns forever. All that certain piece or parcel of land lying and being in Ionia County, State of Michigan

The NE fr. Of SW1/4 of Sec. 21 Town 5 N, R 5 W containing 108 and 20/100 acres according to U. S. Survey.

Followed by a long paragraph customary in deeds that gave the Indians full rights to the property with Fitches giving up their rights along with their heirs.

Sworn before Chas. W. Ingalls, Justice of the Peace.

Previously the Indians had an encampment about a mile east in Danby. Later Chas. W. Ingalls purchased the property when the Indians were removed to the reservation at Mount Pleasant.

(SEBEWA VETERANS’ GRAVESITES:)


LITTLE ORVILLE HAS LOST HIS FLAG

The Michigan Veterans Trust Fund Board of Trustees has recently made inquiry of local officials as to whether the local cemeteries may have any unmarked veterans’ graves or if any government headstones or bronze plaques might be held in storage rather than being placed on veterans’ graves. That brings us to the list of graves that have flag holders and have had flags placed in the holders each year for many a year in the past.


The graves in the EAST CEMETERY so marked are:

Frank H. Rathburn, Heman S. Brown, Jacob W. Evans, J. Snow Peabody, Elmer J. Showerman, Irving A. Brown, Nick DeVries, Rollin Derby, Ernest Showerman, Carl McClelland, Walter Luscher, Ross Tran, Joseph Schnabel, William H. Pettingill;

William Lumbert, Jacob Showerman, Jonah Carpenter, Samuel Bigham, Dr. G. W. Snyder, Charles Hiar, Annis M. Hiar, Nathanial N. Tidd, John R. Petrie, Charles Deatsman, Charles A. Nichols, George E. Friend, John P. Franks, Alonzo N. Evans, J. H. McClelland, John Cross, Orlando V. Showerman, Myrtle D. Showerman, Allan B. Lippencott, Wm. H. Southwell, John M. Bradley, A. L. Olmstead, G. W. Lusk, Dale Tran, Glenn Fender, Wm. Showerman, Cecil Tackett.


In the BAPTIST CEMETERY:

L. J. Heaton, George Trumpower, Oren Daniels, H. Rodegeb, H. Bates, J. C. Clark, D. W. Goddard, H. Evans, Stephen York, Burton Daniels, Elkanah Carpenter, J. S. M. Peabody, J. S. Henry, Stephen Everest, Cleon Creighton.

The George Trumpower grave is not marked with a headstone. For many years the name of Orville Albro has been on this list. Dr. Orville Albro was wonce a resident physician of Sebewa Corners and was health officer in 1872. Soon after that he moved to Portland and he is buried in the Portland Cemetery. The Orville Albro in our East Cemetery was the doctor’s infant son.MI, IONIA COUNTY: THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association. Volume 14, February 1979, Number 4. Submitted with permission of current editor Grayden D. Slowins.

THRESHING A CENTURY AGO:

August 6, 1879. Sebewa Corners. The Ionia County Farmers Mutual Insurance Co. have had their inspectors around examining threshing machine engines where there interests are involved.

August 27, 1879. Mr. Albert Figg had the misfortune of having a stack of wheat containing about 130 bushels entirely destroyed by fire last Tuesday. The fire was caused by Charlie Bennett’s Pitts thresher engine. Charlie generously declared that he would stand half the loss and no one blames him for carelessness.

A FIRST FOR SEBEWA

The Michigan History Division, Department of State, Secretary of Stat’s Office to Lansing has announced that the old Weippert Mill on Sebewa Creek at the corner of Bippley and Keefer Roads in Sebewa Township has been added to the State Register of Historical Buildings. David Schroeder’s application for the building’s historic designation was sponsored by The Sebewa Center Association.

The mill and dam were built in 1876 by Adrew Weippert on the site where Melvin Rogers and Charles Ingalls had previously had such an operation. Mr. Weippert operated the mill until his death in 1903. It was later in business under the successive managements of John Benedict, Harry Gibson and a Mr. Merritt. Although it was primarily a grist mill, buckwheat flour was one of its products.

This is the first time that any building in Sebewa Township has been placed on the State Register of Historic Buildings and probably the first such building to be so honored in the south part of Ionia County.

THINGS I REMEMBER By Ben Probasco

When I started farming I used a hand corn planter. My dad marked the rows with a home made tool that was a six-inch log or timber with stakes protruding to scratch the ground and leave marks for the rows of corn………Later we got a couple of John Deere riding cultivators……..I was born May 21, 1885 at the Showerman house a half mile south. When I was about six years old my parents decided to make a trip to Texas to visit Uncle Uzel Probasco. We left Sunfield by train.

We lived in the Merrifield house on Bippley Road on the land that Howard Meyers now owns. When we returned from Texas my father built this house where I live so that we could move in in late tall. He always said that it took the last cent he had to pay for the plastering……Granddad came here as a cooper and had a cooper shop, first on the corner at Sebewa Center soon after 1852. A little later he sold that land to Sam Gunn and bought the land where I live and built another cooper shop across the road from where Howard Meyers lives. I never saw him do any cooperage work because he was finished with that work before my time. He made a tight barrel and made whiskey barrels and cider barrels. When that kind of played out he made butter tubs. He could make four a day when he had the timber, at a dollar and a quarter apiece. I think he used white oak. The hoops were made out of hickory. When they were notched out right you could slip them right together and they would stay. He had a lot of tools up in his buggy shed and corn shed. They were right in there when I sold Roy Sears the shop so Roy got the tools but they didn’t keep them anymore than I did. I think I sold the building for $40 and I don’t know if Wallace has the building left or not. Frank Cassel came over and moved it. Before 1883 the schoolhouse was on Granddad’s corner. He was always good to kids and raised flowers. He would work harder than a man would at farming. He had a good garden for everybody. He had about half an acre of flowers around the house that was moved for the Portland Christian Reformed Church parsonage.

Granddad was married three times. His first wife, my grandmother, was Deborah Showerman. After she died he married I. A. Brown’s sister, Luryette. The next one was a Quackenboss. She had been married before and her man died. Her maiden name was Boyer. Pa always said that Granddad could make a barrel airtight but he couldn’t nail up a gate.

My Dad, Gene, and Heman Brown went to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Near the fairgrounds they had Libby Prison set up. Heman had been a prisoner of war when the old tobacco warehouse was made a prison at Richmond, Virginia. He was in the prison a short time before the war closed. He had cut his initials in a door frame. When they went to look over the reconstructed building at the fair, there were his initials in the door frame. For souvenirs at the fair, Pa brought folders and he brought me a little box about an inch high that was made in Japan. It had two mud turtles about as big as a nickel. You just wiggled the box a little and the turtles seemed alive.

I was at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. I got a stopover to the fair for three or four days on my way to Texas. I was seventeen years old. St. Louis people took the fairgoers in to make a little money and accommodate the crowds. Frank Showerman and Kelly had a cousin there and they stayed with her…….Granddad was the youngest one in his family. There in Ohio he did the farming. The other boys had all gone then…….Uncle Ephraim Probasco was here in Sebewa first. He owned the land where Ken Seybold lives in section 15. Uncle Uzel took this up for Granddad. Granddad was only 16 years old when he got it. His brother it up for him through a Mexican War grant. They had a brother who was killed in the Mexican War. There were a lot of the Ohio people who came up here. Lots of the settlers were from Ohio. I suppose they got noise of this part of Michigan down there that this was a pretty good place—probably a few mosquitoes and a little water. Anybody from Sebewa was known as a “Swomp Angel”. It’s a pretty good place to live in now.

When Granddad came to look at land here he wanted to go to the land on the southeast corner of the Center. He was at the corner of Bippley and Sunfield Roads and went to the Center by way of Marshall Ralston’s on Musgrove Road. Pa asked him what he went that way for. He said “Well, the water was four feet deep between the Center and a mile east”. You can imagine what it could be in the spring when there were no ditches. Pa said he could remember when from the corner on Bippley east past Wesley Meyers’ place to the hill there was an old crossway—logs and blacksnakes and a little dirt on them logs. He said the water was four feet deep on either side of the road. I guess the country has improved quite a lot. End.

Ben is now 94 and is at the Eaton County Medical Care Facility at Charlotte.

OUT INTO THE WORLD FROM WEST SEBEWA; As told on tape by T. Leander Peacock.

I was born near West Sebewa June 3, 1894. My parents were Eunice Lindley and Sam Peacock, son of John Peacock, who lived in the log house on M 66 just north of the Clarksville Road on the Odessa side. I went to school at West Sebewa and that was the extent of my education through the eighth grade in my sixteenth year. We took the eighth grade examination at Lake Odessa in the old High School building. I remember Alta Johnson as one of my teachers and also one of the Carpenter girls.

At home I worked on the farm some. When my brother got a little bigger, I began to work out in the summers for two or three years. I worked in the West Sebewa store one summer when W. R. Wells owned the store. His son was operating the store and he wanted to be gone for the summer so I took his place in the same building that Mrs. Patterson now operates her store. We bought eggs and cream from the farmers. The truck came over from Woodbury once a week and picked up the cream and eggs and took them to Woodbury to ship them out. We tested the cream and paid for the amount of butterfat. We had a Babcock centrifugal tester turned with a crank. We also bought butter. We did not buy poultry. A truck came through the neighborhood for that. We sold drygoods, overalls, groceries and things of that kind. We did not have the post office in that building.

About that time the Presbyterian Church just south of the store stopped holding meetings. The membership got so low that they quit and went to other places to church. The Creightons, Goodemoots, Thorps and others as well as myself used to go to that empty church to play cards and fool around as young men do. The stove was about shot so we met there only in good weather.

I painted houses some in early summer but later I went to work threshing and working in the sawmill. I worked eight winters in the sawmill and eight falls with the gang thresher. I tended the separator and looked after the blower so that whoever was stacking straw could get the straw where he wanted it. By that time we had begun threshing out of the field though some were still stacking the grain before we threshed it. I worked with Jimmy Creighton one year and the rest of the time with his son, Sam Creighton. Jimmy was a good manager. He had threshed for a good many years before that. I think that my father was with his crew for one or two falls.

Sam Creighton had a bean huller besides the thresher. Lots of times we slept right in the barns where we were threshing because we were quite a little ways from home. Sam had seven or eight men in the crew that followed the thresher. Bill Elens and one of the Downing boys were in the crew. There was quite a bit of transient help in the crew. The pay was 50 or 60 cents a day. This went back to the period of 1910-1918. The Creightons used a steam engine. When I was a kid we would hear the steam whistle blow and we would run out by the road and watch the outfit coming and kept on watching until it got out of sight.

I went in the first call of the first draft in World War I. At Fort Custer at Battle Creek they put me in the first squad. The Corporal had been in there about three weeks and they made him a Sargeant and they had to replace him with somebody and I became the Corporal so I had the first squad in the outfit. I got a chance to volunteer with an outfit that was going across the pond. I thought the war was going to end before I would get over there. When we got down to New York State, half of our men were in one barracks and half were in another small barracks. The other barracks became quarantined for measles so they sent my half right on across. Over there we were helping to build a camp at St. Lazare, in France…………….I spent from spring until Armistice Day on the ammunition detail. Part of that time I was chauffeur for French officers. I drove both an English-made Model T Ford and a French Renault. That was the best job I had in the army. I had two leaves of two weeks while I was in France and visited mountain resorts in Southern France.

My father died while I was on the front and I did not know about his death until six weeks afterward. Once in a while the mail would catch up to us but it was a long time between times. We came home on a German ship that had been confiscated. The apparatus that desalinized our drinking water played out and the last two days we had no fresh drinking water. We made tea from the salt water. We were five days in New York and then they sent us on down to Camp Custer and then we were sent home the next day. I was paid off $30 and $30 extra and on that I came home to find a job. I think I pained some houses as my first work. We never got any other Government help.

I worked for Sam Creighton again for a year and then started farming on my wife’s folks’ place near Lake Odessa and ran a threshing rig of my own for a while. I also did some tile ditching. I worked for Zerfas International Harvester dealership for eleven years, six years in the Lake Odessa Machine Shop and then I worked thirteen years for the John Deere dealer in Lake Odessa.

My sons are Tom, Harry and Dick. Betty is our oldest daughter and one other daughter, Kathryn, died. Frances and Helen are the other two daughters. Walter Peacock is my youngest brother. The two boys between us died. I also had three sisters.

Mrs. John P. (Shirley) Lich is my granddaughter. She has carried a part of the family back to its Sebewa beginnings.

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association.
Volume 14, April 1979, Number 5. Submitted with permission of current editor Grayden D. Slowins.


JOHN WADDELL, HIS BOOK OF MEMERYANDOM, July 15th, 1828.

John Waddell was naturalized in New York March 21, 1836.

John Waddell was Bornd August the 15 in 1800

Harriett Cramp was Bornd July the 8 in 1805

John Waddell Ht Cramp was married November the 20 in 1824

The Registers of their Sons & Daughters

John Waddell was Bornd in England in England February the 25th in 1825

Arrived in America July the 26th, 1826

William Waddell was bornd November the 25th in 1828

Walter Waddell was Bornd November the 1, 1830

Walter Waddell Died November the 10, 1830

George Waddell was Bornd October the 20, 1831

George Waddell Died October the 25, 1831

Elisor Waddell was Born May the 1 in 1836

Thomas Waddell was Bornd September 14, 1832

Harriet Waddell was Born July the 22, in 1838

Jacob Waddell was Bornd November 14, 1834

Jacob Waddell died December the 17, 1834

Richard Waddell was Born October the 5, 1840

William Waddell Died January the 12, 1839

Sharlot Waddell Was Born October the 14, in 1841

John Waddell Died February the 16 in 1880

Harriett Waddell Died March 28th 1884.

(Editor’s Note: John Waddell in 1850 owned the SE ¼ of the NE ¼ of section 22 and the W 1/2 of the SW ¼ of Section 14 in Sebewa. In their old age John and Harriett were cared for by the Theodore Gunn family in a little house to the east of where Ken Seybold now lives.)

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association;
Volume 14, June 1979, Number 6. Submitted with permission of current editor Grayden D. Slowins.


CENTENNIAL FOR MRS. MABEL WILLIAMS. On July 15 Mabel Williams celebrates her 100th birthday anniversary. She was born on her father’s farm on Musgrove Highway where Henry Smith now lives. She and Leon Williams raised their family a mile further west in Odessa Township. You may send your greetings to her in care of her daughter, Mrs. Bernice Bulling, Box 66B, R2, Lake Odessa, Michigan 48849.

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR Bulletin of The Sebewa Center Association;
Volume 15, August 1979, Number 1. Submitted with permission of current editor Grayden D. Slowins.


WEST SEBEWA INDEPENDENT ORDER OF ODD FELLOWS:

Although the West Sebewa Odd Fellows had an organization prior to 1910 it was on February 15, 1910 that a charter of incorporation was issued for the West Sebewa I. O. O. F. Stock was issued and a program was started to build a hall, the same building that is the Patterson store building of 1979.

Here follows a list of the subscribers to the capital stock of the West Sebewa IOOF: S. A. Haight, J. M. Rounds, Frank L. Kauffman, Buel Austin, S. L. Kauffman, Oliver Prosser, Barney Oatley, Edwin Leak, G. E. Waring, Ezra Oatley, C. F. Harper, J. W. Evans, W. L. Munson, W. S. Hunt, C. I. Goodwin, Howard Williams, Charles Boynton, Harry Millstead, Fred Andrews, T. H. Reed, Henry Pierce, R. W. Goodemoot, James L. Lalonge, John Seybold, W. P. Fender, John Millstead, William Rubedew, George W. Greenman, B. Brand, Ernest York, Sidney Chapin, Dell B. Sherman, Charles Hough, John Williams, Leon D. Williamson, D. A. Creighten, B. N. Schneider, Geo. H. Ritenburgh, Geo. M. Hazzard, Francis L. King, Clarence Bessey, Fred Edinger, C. R. Waring, Sam Leak, Lewis Staples, Benjamin Lowe, Edward Demaray, J. A. Schetler, A. M. Baird.

NAMES LATER ADDED BY TRANSFER OF STOCK:

Frank Bippley, H. M. Brownfield, Seymour Gates, Jno. S. Hunt, Melvin Ingall, John Leak, Joseph Ralston, Byron Snyder, Benj. Brand, Henry Darnell, Adam Fender, Guy Harwood, George Gunn, F. M. Kenyon, Geo. Liverton.

I am Louise Buchner.  I was born in Roxand Township (Eaton County) in February 1872.  I lived there all my girlhood days and then came to Sebewa Center 55 years ago and lived with my husband, Emory Gunn, in the Theodore Gunn tenant house. 

FORTY-EIGHT YEARS IN A COUNTRY STORE---Interview with Letha (Robinson) Patterson