Losing Lucy

I missed the good part, back when I wrote up a short bio of Levi D. Jones. The good part is how he lost his third(?) wife in August 1857, half a year after marrying her:[1]


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Crown Point Register, 4 Aug. 1857.

It gets even better: apparently, he got her back for a while, and then lost her again in February 1858.


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Crown Point Register, 16 Feb. 1858.

In case you can't read it:

WARNING

This is to forbid all persons harboring or trusting my wife Lucy Jones, after this date, as she has left my bed and board, without just cause or provocation.

Levi. D. Jones
Ross February 11th, 1858.

I don't think he found her again after that. In the 1860 Census, Levi is living with (I believe) his daughter from the previous marriage, and no one else. Lucy is back home with her parents:[2]


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Image from Ancestry.com.

Notice the three "Jones" children and their ages in the census — George (9), Sydney (4), and Mary (2) — and remember that Lucy married Levi Jones in December 1856. So George can't be the product of that marriage, and Sydney also is questionable.

Let's take a little detour, and speed over to George's death in 1924. According to his death certificate, his parents were Lucy Sly …


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Image from Ancestry.com.

… and Jacob Bigelow. I have not been able to find any record of marriage between those two. Nor can I positively identify Jacob Bigelow.[3]

As for Sydney, people on Ancestry.com and Findagrave.com believe he was actually Seneca Bigelow, born to Jacob and Lucy (Sly) Bigelow in November 1853.

But getting back to Lucy — we next catch up with her in July 1864, when she married William Brown in Berrien County, Michigan.[4] That was just an elopement, I believe; their permanent home was Porter County, where we find them in the 1880 Census:[5]


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The interesting thing we learn here (aside from the fact that Lucy is completely illiterate) is that William has a 25-year-old stepson named Simon Bigelow. Maybe the enumerator got Seneca/Sydney's name wrong, or maybe that's his middle name.

William Brown died in 1897. In August 1902, Lucy married Samuel Scott, who was some 35 years her junior. The marriage did not work out:


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La Porte County News (Union Mills, Ind.), 12 Feb. 1903.

Somewhere, perhaps in the next world, Levi D. Jones was laughing.

Lucy died in Michigan City in 1912. Here is her death certificate:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

Martha Eckert, the informant, was Lucy's daughter. I find it interesting that Martha didn't know her maternal grandmother's name. Also, Lucy is described as widowed, but Samuel Scott outlived her by 30-plus years.

If you have the urge to stand at Lucy's grave and pay your respects, you'll need to go to Michigan City.

Seneca/Sydney/Simon Bigelow died, alas, in Chicago in 1941, meaning that his death certificate is not readily available and his obituary does not give his family background.

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[1] Per the Indiana Marriage Collection, they took out a marriage license in July 1857, and married in December 1857.
[2] Their farm was probably in west-southwestern Ross Township, based on the few of their neighbors I've been able to find on the 1874 Plat Map. (By 1874, Lucy's parents and married brother Russell had relocated to Michigan, and both parents had died.)
[3] Someone by that name was buying land in Porter County in 1837, but I can't find him in any census in this area. There was also a Jacob Bigelow involved in the planning City West (see Lake County 1929 at 183). I just don't know if that was the man who married Lucy Sly.
[4] Ancestry.com. Michigan, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1822-1940 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016.
[5] Neither I nor anyone else, apparently, can find them in the 1870 census.

One Bushel of Buckwheat, One Eternal Mystery

Henry Wells sold Jeremiah Wiggins one bushel of buckwheat in 1837. He also sold him one other thing, but we'll all go to our graves not knowing what it was.



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Images courtesy of Alice Flora Smedstad.
I had to include the back of the paper just to prove that the amount owed to Wells was $1.00, not $100.

My transcription:



As you can see, if I transcribed "one" correctly in the buckwheat line, then the next line also contains the word "one." But that's the only legible thing in that line.


Henry Willmarth Wells was born in Massachusetts in 1801. Eventually he went west to Michigan, although I do not know when. Solon Robinson describes Henry Wells' coming into Lake County thusly:

On [November 1, 1834], Henry Wells, and Luman A. Fowler, came along on foot, in search of locations. They left their horses back on 20 mile prairie. Cedar Lake was then the center of attraction for land lookers, and thither these, like others, wended their way, without thinking to inquire who kept tavern there. They found a lodging in a leafy tree top, and the leg of a roasted coon for supper. They also found David Horner (father of Amos and Henry), his son Thomas and a man by the name of Brown, looking for claims, upon which they settled the next year, lived there a few years and flitted again. Wells and Fowler came back to our camp next day [in the area of the future Crown Point], so tired and hungry and sick of the country, that they would have sold the whole, Esau like, for a mess of pottage. But after a supper sweetened with honey and hunger, and a night's rest upon the softest kind of a white oak puncheon, the next morning being a bright sunny one, the land looked more inviting, and they bought the claim and two log cabin bodies built by one Huntley upon the south half of Sec. 8, T. 34, R. 8, for which they paid him $50 in cash. Of course cash must have been more plenty with them then than it is now.

Wells went back to his family near Detroit, and Fowler spent the eventful winter of 1834-5 with us in the solitude of the first settlement of what soon became known as Robinson's Prairie. Fowler returned to Detroit in the spring, got married in the fall and returned with his wife and Wells' wife and child, and settled upon their claims. Wells arrived shortly after, and both families have since multiplied after the fashion of all new settlers.

Henry's wife was Adaline (née Witherell, according to family trees on Ancestry.com[1]), but I can't find any records of where and when they married. Together they raised five children.

Henry was very active in Lake County affairs. T.H. Ball notes among his accomplishments: that in 1836 he helped to draw up the constitution of the Squatters' Union (and served as one of its arbitrators); that he was appointed the county's first sheriff upon its organization in 1837, and then went on to serve out the terms of two elected sheriffs before being elected to the office himself for another eight years; that he was one of the commissioners handling funds from the sale of "swamp lands" during the 1850s, but was not implicated in the scandal that arose concerning those funds; and that he was a director of the Lake County Agricultural Society formed in 1851.[2] I believe he was also Treasurer of Lake County at one point.

Here is Henry's obituary, published in the Crown Point Register of May 18, 1876:


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Now he sleeps in Crown Point's Maplewood Historic Cemetery, and with him sleeps the secret of what he sold Jeremiah Wiggins, besides that bushel of buckwheat.


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[1] The 1906 death certificate of their son, Rodman, gives her maiden name as Witheral; the 1918 death certificate of his brother, Homer, gives it as Eddy.
[2] Lake County 1834-1872.

A Sad New Year's Day in 1839

On January 1, 1839, Solon Robinson lost his brother and business partner, Milo, to tuberculosis.[1] The settlement of Milo's estate turned out to involve Jeremiah Wiggins' estate.


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Image courtesy of Alice Flora Smedstad.

My transcription:


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Milo had come out from New York City in November of 1835 to join Solon in Indiana.[2] In the winter of 1836-7, the brothers opened a store — the first in Lake County — in the settlement that would be the future Crown Point. According to Solon, during that first winter,

we … sold about $3000 worth of goods [over $100,000 in today's money] out of that little old log cabin adjoining the one now [in 1847] used as a Court House.

The best of our customers were the Pottawattomies, who then dwelt here in considerable numbers. (With them commenced my first efforts of a temperance reformation.) Of them we obtained great quantities of furs and cranberries, in pay for goods, (while those calling themselves far superior to the poor Indians in all the moral attributes, gave us promises to pay, some which are promises to this day.)

When Milo died two years later, he was about 38 years of age, and unmarried (so far as I have been able to determine).


The administrator of Milo's estate, Oscar Robinson, may have been another brother, born in 1809 and christened Jacob Oscar. It's odd that Solon doesn't mention him in his history, nor does T.H. Ball. An Oscar Robinson shows up in a Hobart merchant's records in October 1836 (buying ague syrup):


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

And a Jacob Robbinson is recorded in the Porter County 1840 census. Then the trail goes cold.[3]


Another character in this episode is likewise mysterious: Wilson L.[4] Harrison, of whom Solon Robinson has this to say:

During the same winter [of 1836-7], the first mill in the county was put in operation by Wilson L. Harrison, so that we were able to get a little oak lumber in the spring of '37 for $15 a thousand.

Beyond that, neither Solon Robinson nor T.H. Ball says anything. The 1840 Census shows a Wilson Harrison heading up a household of four in Porter County, but his age is given as 15 to 20, meaning that if this is the person who put into operation the first sawmill in Lake County in 1837, he was between 13 and 17 at the time![5]

The merchants' records at the Hobart Historical Society museum that I have indexed so far turn up a couple of references to Wilson L. Harrison. This one is from June 4, 1837:


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

And this one is from January 13, 1841:


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

After 1841 I cannot find any record of him. Where he came from and where he went remain a mystery.

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[1] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 63. The location of Milo's grave seems to be unknown.
[2] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 34.
[3] Some people on Ancestry.com seem to think he was the Oscar L. Robinson who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, then moved to Chicago, where he died in 1878 or 1880. By the way, Solon Robinson had a son, Solon Oscar, born in 1831; not that that proves anything.
[4] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 50 gives his middle initial as S, but no other source does, and in the writing above, the middle initial resembles the L in "Lake County."
[5] Wild hypothesis: the guy in the census is Wilson L. Harrison, Jr., whose father, the mill-builder, had just died. (But none of the history books mentions his death.)

Puppy Vacation …

This is my life right now.



Sneetch and Grinch are on loan from the Humane Society of Hobart until January 3. They are cute, smart, affectionate, and energetic … oh, so energetic …


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Happy Christmas

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This postcard shows that the "Happy Christmas and Merry New Year" message I posted last year was not necessarily facetious. Apparently, people used to wish you a happy Christmas in perfect accord with religion and decorum.

Sending this happy wish was a lady with a sick baby:



Transcription:

Dear Aunt I heard you was sick hope you are better. My baby was very sick she is some better the Dr. don't come eney more. wish you and Uncle John a most Joyfull Xmas. Bertha M.

The year in the postmark is not really legible, but it has to be 1922 or later, based on that 1922 Christmas seal (sold by the National Tuberculosis Association).

I believe the writer, "Bertha M.," was Bertha Mueller, the daughter of Uncle John's sister, Pauline, and her husband, August Czerwonke. Bertha had been born in Germany in 1882, brought to this country later that decade, and grew up (as far as I can tell) in LaPorte County, where she married August Mueller in 1909. By 1910, the young family was in Hobart. The sick baby was probably Lucy Frances, who had been born December 10, 1921.

Here is the family in the 1930 Census:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

Not listed is their eldest daughter, Mary Elizabeth — who, in a sad twist of fate given Bertha's support of the anti-tuberculosis crusade, would die in 1936 at the age of 26 from pulmonary tuberculosis.[1]

Bertha died in 1962, surviving her husband by four years.

As for Aunt Agnes and Uncle John, they lived out their lives in Wanatah, and are buried in Porter County.

And a Happy Christmas to you.

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[1] Her death certificate gives her occupation as nurse, so in 1930 she may have been away from home training or working in that field.

Resurrecting the Sturtevant Cemetery

Before and after: November 10, 2024 and March 9, 2025



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Images courtesy of Michael White.

We can't say that the Sturtevant[1] Cemetery has been completely lost — it has been visited several times from the mid-20th century to the early 21st by local volunteers who have described its location and transcribed those of its stones that could be found and read, and the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society makes that information available. We can, however, say that the Sturtevant Cemetery has become inaccessible and largely forgotten.

Over the past year or so, local historian Michael White has devoted many hours to the cemetery — not only researching it extensively, but also going out into the woods to locate it and, through a lot of hard physical work, uncovering it from years of neglect. The photos above show the cemetery as he first found it in November 2024, and then again in March 2025, after several clean-up visits with a couple of other volunteers.

I like the sequence below, showing a piece of a grave marker being uncovered from a layer of mud, until you can partially read the epitaph. After more excavation, a full headstone is revealed.




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Images courtesy of Michael White.

Of the epitaph, I could only read the first three words: "Gone to inhabit…" An online search for such an epitaph turned up this one …


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… in a late-19th-century book of epitaphs offered by the Vermont Marble Company.

But the top part of the stone is not legible, so we don't know for whom that epitaph was chosen.


Michael has written up his findings on the history of the cemetery and the Sturtevant family, and presented them to relevant governmental agencies, such as the Lake County Parks Department (which owns the cemetery) and the Ross Township Trustee, as well as two local historical societies. The cemetery is fortunate to have such an energetic advocate. It deserves advocacy, as part of our local history. Its graves are those of early settlers of eastern Ross Township. It is the final resting place of a young Civil War soldier who died in the service. It is even the scene of a possible grave robbery.

With Michael's permission, I am posting the paper he compiled, which contains historical summaries and numerous research sources, and the PowerPoint presentation he prepared for his talks to officials and historical societies.

• The history paper is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MlCNcvZCv2q1XG6i-BHEByYvY4bNZ6-V/view?usp=sharing
• The PowerPoint PDF is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QZuvQ-SVIu85Qh-ItiAblIAtagK9SnD-/view?usp=sharing

Michael also took numerous photos documenting the cemetery as he first found it, and as it slowly began to look like a proper burial ground through his (and two other volunteers') clean-up work. The photos above come from this collection. I am sharing the full collection below.

• The initial condition of the cemetery on November 10, 2024: click to view album
• The first clean-up efforts on February 28, 2025: click to view album
• Ongoing clean-up on March 2, 2025: click to view album
• The latest clean-up visit on March 9, 2025: click to view album (also a short video from this visit)

There remains a lot of work yet to be done, to complete the reading and restoration of the grave markers, maintain the cemetery, and, possibly, persuade the Lake County Parks Department to make it officially accessible to the public. Anyone who is interested in helping is invited to contact Michael White at fwmichaelwhite@gmail.com.


Here's a lovely sunset photographed from the Sturtevant Cemetery … or maybe it's a sunrise for the Sturtevant Cemetery?


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Image courtesy of Michael White.


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[1] This family name shows up in several spelling variations. In my blog I have been indexing it as "Sturtevant" just for the sake of consistency.

Selling Off Jeremiah's Stuff (Part 3) and That Other Wiggins Again

The administrator of Jeremiah Wiggins' estate held a second sale on March 4, 1839, to dispose of whatever hadn't been sold in October 1838.


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Image courtesy of Alice Flora Smedstad.

My transcription:


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I can't make sense out of that scribbling in the line detailing what Wiatt Wiggins bought. Does it mean Jeremiah's informal claim to the land? (The official government sale of Lake County land would begin on March 19, 1839.[1]) Does it mean just the house sitting on the land? The $25 Wiatt paid in 1839 was just short of $900 in today's money.

The slay/sleigh that James Cassady bought seems not to have been noted in the original inventory. He paid very little for it — about $56 in today's money — which makes me wonder if I'm reading the word correctly.


As I've said before, Wiatt Wiggins has escaped all notice in the Lake County census and other official records as well as the early local histories. We would not know he existed but for these estate papers.


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[1] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 64.