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.



(Click on images to enlarge)
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:


(Click on image to enlarge)

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.