When I started this genealogy project over a year ago, I was driven (some have used the word obsessed, but I prefer to think of it as a passionate hobby) by a desire to meet my ancestors. But in the hierarchy of ancestors, not all are created equally. And the ancestors I was most eager to meet were my pioneer ancestors; the first people to leave the east and come to this beautiful place I now love so much: Wisconsin.
I'm fascinated by pioneers in
general. People lived hard lives back then, and to find yourself in the middle
of your life, packing up everything you owned that you could carry, cutting
ties with everything and everyone you had ever known outside your immediate
family, probably never to see them again, and traveling by covered wagon at a
rate of 15 miles a day is a life that I cannot fully fathom.
They had to be unbelievably courageous to set out for
unsettled areas with little knowledge of what lay beyond the scope of their
current civilization. They had no real guarantees that they weren't traveling
west to meet their imminent doom. They had to be a little desperate in their
current situations to make that decision in the first place. They had to be
optimistic enough to believe that a much better life was just over the Adirondacks.
And they had to be just a little crazy, I think. The fact that I am descended
from people like that never fails to astonish me. So initially, I had intended
to research my family history just far enough back that I could meet my pioneer
ancestors. In the case of the Vaughns, that meant researching back to Otis's
parents, Sam and Sarah.
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| Sarah Hart Mills Vose Vaughn |
Sarah Hart Mills Vose was born August 18, 1797 in
Bridgewater, Vermont. Her father was a colonial patriot who had served briefly
in Col. Moss Kelley's regiment in Rhode Island during the Revolutionary War.
Her mother descended from the same Ingalls family that would eventually produce
Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Sarah was my great-great-great-grandmother. She was five
years older than Samuel Cole Vaughn, my great-great-great-grandfather. (When I
imagine them courting, I envision that there were a lot of conversations that
were the early 19th Century equivalent of, "Oh my god, you were barely in
high school when Smash Mouth's Walkin' on the Sun was popular? I was in COLLEGE!
Now I feel ancient!" Or, "I can't believe you weren't even alive when
the Challenger exploded! It scarred me in kindergarten, and you weren't even
born yet!") Did her friends tease her for being the early 19C equivalent
of a cougar, a cradle-robber, an older woman? Did Sam and Sarah fall in love or
was she simply approaching an age that was considered an "old maid"
and wanted more out of her life than that stigma?
Sarah had her first child at 31, her last at 44. This is a
pattern I see repeatedly on this side of my family -- delayed childbearing in
an age when most people had their children much younger. Though her pregnancies
would all be considered "high-risk" by today's standards, she only
lost one baby in infancy, the unlucky Melvin. He was her second child; she had
him when she was 34. But she went on to have four more healthy children.
(Though fourth child Abbie would die at 14, her cause of death now lost to
history.)
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| Samuel Cole Vaughn |
Samuel Cole Vaughn was also born in Bridgewater, Vermont.
His father died when he was 9 years old and his mother when he was 18, making
him the de facto parent to his eight-years-younger brother David. When David
was 17, Sam and Sarah and David moved to Carver, Massachusetts, where Sam and David
trained as
joiners; Sam
remained an expert carpenter all his life and passed the skills down to his
sons as well. He was also a farmer, at a time when it was notoriously difficult
to be a farmer in the east. The soil is bad, the land is steep and rocky and
hard to till, the growing season is short, and there were too many people
attempting to make a living from too little fertile land.
When Sarah was 31, they were still living in Massachusetts
and their first child Benjamin came along. Sometime between Ben's birth and
Melvin's two years later, they headed west, to Michigan. Melvin came into the
world in Tecumseh, Michigan (and sadly departed again just as quickly.) Delia
was born in 1833, and they were still in Tecumseh (which is about 40 miles
southwest of Ann Arbor and had only existed since 1824.) In 1835, Abbie was
born in Franklin, Michigan. At that point, for reasons unknown, they had moved
70 miles north and were now northwest of Detroit. But that move didn't last
long -- within about a year they'd be moving again.
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| Sarah, a little later in life |
They were in Franklin, Michigan during the winter of
1836-1837. It was an incredibly brutal one, possibly the worst Midwestern
winter in modern history. On Dec. 20, 1836, an exceptional cold front moved
with hurricane-force winds across the plains and the Upper Midwest and by
some
accounts, temperatures dropped 60 degrees in a matter of minutes, from 40F to
-20F. Wild animals, livestock and unprepared humans froze to death in a matter
of hours. In Illinois, two men crossing a prairie became disoriented by the
storm and got lost. One killed his horse and climbed into the carcass to keep
warm, to no avail; he was found frozen to death inside the dead animal the next
day.
In Spring Prairie, Wisconsin, (where - spoiler alert - Sam
and Sarah would end up in March of 1837), the event was remembered as "the
four terrible cold days." Another early Walworth County settler, S.A.
Dwinnell, arrived in November of 1836. His account of that winter appears in a
history of Walworth County from 1890:
The pioneers of Wisconsin must ever remember the 20th of
December, for one of the most sudden changes to severe cold ever experienced in
our history. It had rained all day upon some fifteen inches of snow. Early in
the evening, the wind veered to the northwest and the temperature ran down at a
rapid rate. Having no thermometer, I can form no certain estimate of the
intensity of the cold. It soon became unendurable in our cabin, and, building a
large fire and hanging up blankets before it, I saw down in front of them to
keep from freezing.
It was so terribly cold that, had a person been caught four
or five miles from a house, he must have perished. Fortunately, few were thus
exposed. James Van Slyke, with his hired man, were on their way from Belvidere,
Ill., to his house, at the head of Geneva Lake, with a drove of hogs. They had
reached Big Foot Prairie, three miles from home, when the change came. They
soon left their drove and started at a rapid rate for their house. Van Slyke
succeeded in the undertaking, but his boots were so loaded with ice that it
took a teakettle full of boiling water to thaw it off, as his wife afterward
told me.
A mile from home, the hired man, named Disbro, fell,
exhausted and overcome with the intensity of the cold. He must have perished
had not a man, providentially at the house, started out at once and brought him
in. As it was, his feet were so frozen that he lost several of his toes, which
Mrs. Van Slyke amputated with her shears, having made unsuccessful efforts to
obtain a surgeon to do it. All the hogs, except two, froze to death that night.
From other Wisconsin and Minnesota reports, we can deduce
that the weather hovered between -30F and -20F during that time, after which it
probably warmed up to about 0F and started snowing relentlessly.
Mr. Dwinnell was entirely alone in his cabin during the four
terrible cold days of the last of December, and had hard work to keep himself
alive. He says, “It soon became unendurable in our cabin, and building a large
fire and hanging up blankets before it, I sat down in front of them to keep
from freezing.” Notwithstanding the cold and the deep snow, Mr.
Dwinnell got so thoroughly lonesome that on the 20th day of January he
started on a journey of forty-five miles to have a visit with some friends in
Belvidere, Ill., then a little hamlet of six families.
In other words, for an entire month Dwinnell sat alone in a
bitterly cold log cabin struggling not to freeze to death, having no contact
with any other human beings, until it became necessary to risk his life with a
45-mile journey on horseback in the cold and snow just so that he would not
lose his mind. Pioneers had to be the toughest kind of people to survive.
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| Sam, posing with the tools of his carpentry trade |
We don't know what that bitterly cold winter was like for
Sam and Sarah, 8-year-old Ben, 3-year-old Delia and 1-year-old Abbie in
Michigan. It is likely that they considered themselves lucky to have survived
it. And in the spring of 1837, a now 40-year-old Sarah packed up her
three young children and what she could of her home and traveled again, most
likely by covered wagon, even deeper into what was then the Northwest
Territory, which had until very recently been occupied by Potawatami Indians.
Sam's sister Mary, her husband Isaiah Dike and their two young sons came as
well, most likely from Ohio. Together, they settled in Walworth County, at the
same small settlement at which Dwinnell had arrived just months
earlier: Spring Prairie.
We don't know exactly what Spring Prairie would have looked
like when Sam and Sarah arrived in March of 1837. Dwinnell later claimed that
the spring was so slow in arriving that year that the trees did not bud until
June, so it's likely they found a very wintry landscape. And the demographics
of the area probably remained similar to what Dwinnell had seen when he arrived
four months earlier:
On the morning of the 16th of November, 1836, I took the
trail of
Black
Hawk, at Belvidere (IL), at the point where, four years before, he sunk his
canoes in the mouth of
Piskasaw,
and, with his army, took the land. His encampments were still visible every six
or eight miles, as I proceeded northward to Big Foot Prairie, where I entered
Wisconsin, at 4 o’clock p.m. The day was cloudy, cold and cheerless; the
temperature at the freezing point; the streams swollen by recent rains, and
unabridged. Several times I was obliged to wade from four to six rods. As night
set in, snow fell plentifully. Big Foot Lake (Geneva Lake -ed.) was in view at
my left. At seven o’clock evening, I reached the “Outlet of Big Foot,” near
Geneva (Lake Geneva - ed.), having traveled thirty-five miles without seeing a
human dwelling. The settlement consisted of five families, living in rude log
cabins, without floors, chimneys or chambers, the roofs covered with shakes,
and hardly a nail used in the construction of their dwellings. There were then
twenty-seven families in what is now the county of Walworth, and all but four
in the eastern half of it; all living in log cabins. All of them had come in
since Spring, and had put under cultivation about 80 acres. I settled on Spring
Prairie...”
Dwinnell actually settled in what would come to be known as LaFayette,
but the account explains that there were only 22 acres of land under
cultivation in Spring Prairie at that time. It goes on to describe:
The trouble and difficulty of reaching and selecting a claim
was so great that settlers were often obliged to bring in their families before
any shelter was provided for them, either camping in their wagons, or remaining
at the house of some “neighbor,” three or four miles away perhaps, while the
logs were prepared for the little cabin, where one room should serve for
kitchen, living room and sleeping room for the family.
The hardships of getting there and getting established were
obviously enormous, but what the pioneers found in Spring Prairie was beautiful
land that was ideally suited to farming. Dwinnell goes on to say:
I found the place to be unsurpassed for beauty and
fertility. It was one mile in width by four in length, with a gently undulating
surface, surrounded on all sides by beautiful groves of timber. Upon one side
were several hundred acres of heavy timber, consisting of oak, ash, basswood,
butternut and maple, in which was a large sugar-bush, which had been the annual
resort of the Indians for making sugar. Their wigwams, sap-trough and boiling
kettles had been left – evidently for future use – a pleasure which they were
never again to
enjoy. In the groves surrounding the prairie were springs of the purest
water, from which flowed streams in all directions – one of which was
sufficiently large to the turn the machinery of a flouring mill, shortly
afterwards erected a short distance from its source.
Samuel C. Vaughn laid a claim just north of the modern-day
intersection of Spring Prairie Road and Hargraves Road, and built a small log
cabin on the property. Sam must have been crazy for apples, because in addition
to everything else they must have packed into that covered wagon with them, he
brought two dozen grafted apple trees from Michigan and planted them almost as
soon as he arrived. Those trees bore the first apples ever grown in Walworth
County, which must have made theirs a popular cabin to visit come fall.
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| Sarah a little older |
The five of them (and soon, six of them) lived in that
one-room log cabin for 2 1/2 years, until the fall of 1839, when Sam built a
frame house on the property. In 1838, Sam's brother David, with his wife and
two young sons, had come to Spring Prairie as well, and once the frame house
was finished, Sam gave the log cabin to David and his family. However just a
few months later in December of 1839, the log cabin caught fire and burned to
the ground. Miraculously, David and his wife Rebecca, for no logical reason at
all, had woken up their boys and taken them along that night to visit Sam and
Sarah in the new house, so no one was hurt. But the destruction of Sam's log
cabin is credited as the first fire in Walworth County. (Lots more on David and
Rebecca Vaughn in a future post.)
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| The Vaughn farm. The frame house that Sam built in 1839 is on the left. This photo likely dates from before the 1880s. |
In November of 1838, Sarah gave birth to Phebe, presumably
in the log cabin; Sam and Sarah were now parents to four surviving children.
And finally in 1841, when Sarah was 44 years old and they were living in the
frame house, Otis was born.
The Vaughn family was now complete and had found their place
in the great Northwestern territory. Otis was seven years old before Wisconsin
was admitted as the 30th state in the union. He would call it home his whole
life. Sam and Sarah, after a lifetime of restlessness, of moving from Vermont
to Massachusetts to two different towns in Michigan, had finally found a place
that made them say, "I love it here; let's never leave." And they
never did.
Sam passed away in 1868. He is buried in Hickory Grove cemetery in Spring Prairie. Sarah continued living on the farm with Otis and Fannie until her death in 1884. She is buried next to her husband.
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| Sam and Sarah's shared monument in Hickory Grove Cemetery. |
*Note: All of the quotes and information about the early settlement of Walworth County in this post come from two sources: Albert Clayton Beckwith's History of Walworth County, Wis., published in 1912; and the indispensable History of Walworth County, Wis., published in 1882 by the Chicago Western Historical Society.
