Next week, I will be making a trip to Kansas and Ohio to visit my brother and daughter's family. I'll board my plane in Palm Springs, California and will be at Kansas City International Airport about four hours later. My brother, Gary W. Clark is going to meet me there and we're going to rent a car and drive to Cincinnati, a distance of 588 miles on interstate highways. It will take about 10 hours depending on traffic an weather.
Compare that to the travel of our ancestors about 170 years ago. We will be in warm planes and cars. But our families had little protection from the elements as they moved hundreds of miles in horse- or oxen-drawn conveyances to unknown places where they literally had only the clothes on their back and whatever could be carried in a 6'x12' wagon.
I remember reading descriptions of travel on the Oregon Trail. Wagon trains (no one every traveled alone. There was safety in numbers!) would leave Westport Landing (now Kansas City, Missouri.) Their wagons would be pulled by sturdy oxen and were filled with the fine furnishings that filled their eastern homes, including grandfather clocks, pianos, tables, heavy dressers and trunks of linens. Within a week of leaving Westport, the trail would be littered with that same furniture being left behind. It was more important to transport food, clothing, the apple saplings to plant in orchards, wheat seed, and other commodities that were essential to future survival. All else was excess!
The wagons our ancestors traveled in were most likely very similar to the one shown in the illustration. These sturdy wagons weighed about 1,000 pounds before loading and were usually pulled by four or six oxen, which were considered stronger thank horses. My great great grandparents, Stewart Montgomery and Lurancy Louisa "Lucy" (Grandy) Lemon moved from state to state with their belongings many times.
Stewart and Lucy Lemon were married at Lake Geneva, Walworth County, Wisconsin on August 24, 1847. He was 20 years old and Lucy was 13. My maternal great grandmother, Lucy Mae (Lemon) McCauley-Bonta-Strong was their youngest daughter. She was born in 1873 and died in 1955, when I was 9-years-old. I knew and remember her but most of the stories about family history were handed down to me by her daughter, Mildred Mae (McCauley) Corbin Clark, who was my maternal grandmother.
Grandmother Corbin-Clark said that as she remembered the story, Stewart was working in a lumber camp with Lurancy's father and brother at Lake Geneva, Walworth County, Wisconsin when they met. Lucy, at 13 years old, was considered a woman of marriageable age. Just imagine it! Stewart was 20 and she was 13. Today it wouldn't be allowed, but in those days, it happened often and many times the husband was much older.
Lurancy wasn't from a poor family, her parents had been born in Vermont and both at least attended a few years of country school according to census reports. Ira and Lurancy (Silbey) Grandy had been married in 1824 when he was 22 and she was 16. They had the same trip from Vermont to Wisconsin, with a total of eight children. We don't know if they moved that distance in one move or several. If they moved in one trip, they could have made the entire trip by covered wagon but the Erie Canal had been completed through New York in 1825 so they may have made a major portion of the trip via canal and then passage on a Great Lakes sailing ship to Detroit. Those were both viable options.
Shown is a typical Erie Canal Boat loaded with
passengers bound for the eastern terminus at
Buffalo, New York on Lake Erie.
In any case, both families, the Lemons and the Grandys, experienced journeys of great hardship and distance in migrating from Vermont to Wisconsin and from New Jersey (where Stewart was born) to Wisconsin and Michigan.
If you were traveling by horse and wagon, 15-20 miles was a full day's journey, especially if the wagon was heavily loaded. To "save" the horses, all but the driver usually walked beside the wagon. The exception might be the aged and the infirm. If the roads were muddy or had snow on them, 5 miles or less might be a very good day.
So follow along now as we make the journey from Pontiac, Oakland County, Michigan to Norton County, Kansas where Stewart and Lucy Lemon's journey ends. The distance is 1,014 miles as the crow flies but it's difficult to know how many miles their family actually traveled.
Stewart and Lucy (Grandy) Lemon moved from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to live new his father, brothers and sisters soon after they were married. His father owned 160-acres of land near Pontiac, Michigan which included a small portion of Love Lake. This area is now one of the most expensive residential suburban areas north of Detroit and a single house lot can cost $1 million dollars. At that time it was mostly timbered land which had to be cleared to be worth even $4 or $5 per acre. Stewart's father was also a shoe cobbler and had a small shop in Pontiac, Michigan.
From birth and death records, we can pretty much surmise that Stewart and Lucy lived in Pontiac, Oakland County, Michigan from the late 1840s to 1857. How do we know that? Because their first three children, Charles Montgomery, Lurancy Louisa, and Ira Elmer were all born there. Ira Elmer was the last in October 1854.
This tintype of Lurancy Louisa (Grandy) Lemon is now in my possession and I will relate the interesting story of how I came to have it later. She is probably about 50 in this photo. It is easy to look at her toil worn face and handmade clothing and get a sense of how hard her life must have been.My maternal grandmother, Lucy Mae Lemon McCauley Bonta Strong, told her daughter Mildred Mae McCauley Corbin Clark, that her sister Lurancy Louisa (named for her mother and grandmother) was killed in an accident. She said that her mother had started from the farm to town to buy supplies and that Lurancy was bundled in a blanket on the wagon seat. The wagon hit a rut and the resulting lunge caused the baby to fall off the wagon. The baby fell under the wagon wheel and was crushed to death. Her death occurred on March 11, 1856 in Pontiac, Michigan. It is hard to imagine how the little pioneer mother must have felt after this horrendous tragedy. She was only 21, and she had already had three children, one of which was now dead as the result of an accident.
This is a tintype of Stewart and Lucy (Grandy) Lemon now in my possession. Stewart would appear to be about 50 and Lucy about
42 or 43. To my knowledge, these are the only known images of Stewart and Lucy (Grandy) Lemon.
The family Bible (which is in possession of the Norman Steele Family in Kansas at this writing) indicates that Ira Elmer Lemon, Steward and Lurancy's third child, died on October 18, 1856 at Pontiac, Michigan but does not indicate a cause. That means that Stewart and Lucy had now lost two of their three children in one year.
The next child, Francis Elbert Lemon, was born on September 16, 1857 in Winona, Minnesota. This would indicate that the family had moved to Minnesota sometime between Ira Elmer's death in 1856 and Francis's birth in 1857.
The author's cousin, James Milton "Jim" Lemon, was the son of George Washington Lemon and Eliza Jane (Fisher) Lemon. That makes him the grandson of Stewart and Lurancy. He was in his 90s when I visited with him in Spokane, Washington in 1977. He is the only person I ever visited with who had actually known both of his grandparents. He was born in 1887 and Stewart passed away in 1894 so Jim would have been seven years old. He knew his grandmother Lurancy Lemon, much longer since she died in 1918 when Jim Lemon was a grown man.
This is a photo of men pulling logs down the frozen Mississippi River in the 1850s. All of the photos and drawings in this blog are compliments of the Minnesota Historical Society.
Again using birth and death records as well as U. S. Census accounts, we can determine that Stewart and Louisa (Grandy) Lemon lived at Winona, Minnesota from 1857 until 1872 or 1873. There, six more children would be born to them:
James Greer on March 26, 1860
Henry Ellsworth on December 21, 1861
George Washington on December 26, 1863
Mary Jane on April 5, 1866
Margaret Elizabeth on January 8, 1871.
While the family lived at Winona, Minnesota, the Civil War raged. In order to obtain the enlistment bonus of $300.00, Stewart Lemon joined the U. S. Army and was gone from the family for nearly two years. He came home sick from chronic diarrhea and was disabled. He obtained a small pension of $8 monthly, but it wasn't enough to keep the family so Lucy went to work as a laundress for the lumber men. In that way, the family could eke out a living.
The Lemon family decided to leave Winona, Minnesota and follow the broom corn harvest to Kansas. This was a way they could make the trip and earn money to pay for it along the way. At that time, broom corn was a major crop across the state of Iowa and many tenant farmers and farm labors would plant and harvest broom corn on rented land. The top/tassel of broom corn was the natural material was used in making all kinds of brooms. The work was very dirty and hot.
Although technically disabled, Stewart fathered he and Lurancy's last child at Eldora, Hardin County, Iowa. Lucy Mae Lemon was born on December 8, 1873. She told her daughter, Mildred McCauley Corbin Clark, that her mother only stopped working for one day before rejoining the harvest hands. Lucy Mae was bundled and tied to her back. Her labor was needed to keep the family from starving. They lived at the edge of broom corn fields in a tent fastened to their covered wagon during that time. At night, Lucy would have to cook supper for the family and at least once each week, she would have to boil water to wash clothing. This memory was also shared by Margaret Elizabeth (Lemon) Miller with her son Bill.
After the harvest, the family moved southwest to Norton County, Kansas, a trip of about 300 miles. They made the trip for two reasons: first they could homestead 160-acres of land if they were able to remain there and build a house on it within five years. Second, the Union Pacific Railroad was building across northern Kansas and the family learned there were jobs available. Somewhere during his life, Stewart had picked up stone laying skills, which were very useful at their new destination.
A special plow was used to cut sod from the Kansas prairie. This sod was made into "bricks" which were used to build houses, barns and outbuildings. Often times, a pit was dug into the ground about three feet deep. Pioneers knew that this would help them keep their new dwelling cool in summer and warm in winter. Then sod bricks were used to build 4' walls around the pit to make total height about 7'. Timber for roofing was very scarce in western Kansas, so pioneers used what timber was available just to make the roof frame. Then they would cover the frame with sod blocks three deep.
This is a photo of a "dug out" sod house in western Kansas but is not the one the Lemon family built. When the family arrived in Kansas, they met neighbors who were German. They were the Christian and Catherine (Crosby) Miller family, who helped them build their new home. Margaret Elizabeth "Maggie" Lemon, would later marry William Miller, one of the Miller sons.The Lemons were looking forward to homesteading their 160-acre claim. It seemed that finally they might have the opportunity to better themselves. But fate is cruel and it was not to be. 1874 was the year of the Great Grasshopper Plague in Kansas. Millions and millions of grasshoppers moved into Kansas from north to south. It is still called the greatest natural disaster that the State of Kansas has ever sustained.
Pioneers wrote many descriptions of the event but in general, they usually say that the grasshoppers came in "clouds" and that they were accompanied by a deafening noise. They describe walls of animals on the ground as well, eating every bit of vegetation in their paths. In addition, they craved salt so they would also eat leather harness, the handles out of farm implements, men's leather gloves, wooden cutlery handles. Usually they remained only day or two, ever advancing to the south, but in the path of destruction, almost nothing remained.
This engraving appeared the the Farmer's Grange newspaper and depicts the Great Grasshopper Plague. There are many reports of humans and animals simply going mad. The noise is often described as so deafening that humans could not stand it and would shoot themselves. The Great Grasshopper Plague of 1874 was a horrific pandemic that disillusioned pioneers and reduced the possibility of their survival.Some of the families surrounding the Lemons had been in Norton County for a couple of years or longer, including the Christian Millers. These families shared what they could and somehow, the Lemons and other newcomers survived the winter, which was severe. The next spring, Stewart Lemon, his wife Lurancy and other family members abandoned their homestead farm and went to work for the Union Pacific Railroad. The family seems to have clustered around Concordia and Beloit, Kansas. Lurancy and her daughters who were old enough, went to work as cooks, laundresses and seamstresses for the railroad workers. Stewart was not able to work, but his sons did. The family began to pull itself together and have the resources to move forward.
A photo of a grasshopper. They seem small and rather innocuous, the this is the little critter that did so much damage in 1874.In 1887, some of the family learned that the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad was going to build a new rail line across central Kansas. They caught up with the work at what would be come Maple Hill, Wabaunsee County, Kansas. Maple Hill would become home to many members of the Lemon family for generations. Sadly, there are no families named Lemon now living in Maple Hill. However my brother, Gary Clark, great great grandson of Stewart and Lurancy Lemon still lives in Maple Hill along with Loren Justice, who is also a great great grandson.
In about 1890, Stewart heard that stone masons were needed in Perry, Jefferson County, Kansas. He and Lurancy moved there and Stewart, although old and infirm, worked on the construction of two stone structures. In 1894, he suffered a stroke at Perry and died there. He is buried in the Perry Cemetery. Lurancy lived another 24 years and died at the home of her daughter, Lucy Mae (Lemon) McCauley Bonta Strong, at Clements, Kansas in 1918.
I will write other blogs that have more detailed, specific genealogical information about the Stewart and Lurancy (Grandy) Lemon family, but I specifically wanted to write this article to emphasize how our pioneer families traveled and the hardships they endured. Despite failure after failure, they never lost hope. When the going got tough, the tough got going!
Educational Exercise: I hope that the adults reading this article will get maps of the United States (they're readily available on-line) and have their children and grandchildren retrace the route Stewart and Lurancy followed during their lives. It would be fun to do it as you read them some of the story. They will learn geography, learn about travel, and hands-on activities will help them remember the family heritage. You can also click on the photographs, change the image to black and white, and print them out for coloring pages.
I hope you're enjoying reading these blogs as much as I am writing them! Happy trails!
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