Great, great, great grandparents

Dr. Bateman has told his personal experience of going through college, and 1 think that my personal experience was so similar in a way that maybe it will not be a miss to tell how I went through college. My father brought some land (2 quarter sections of land) in the early days and at that time they gave scholarships for 25 years tuition in the college for each quarter section that people bought, my father thus having two scholarships. My sister and I paid our tuition through Knox College with the use of those scholarships. We lived on the farm, south of town, on the section which grandfather gave to my father. Sister was a little in advance in school and staid out and taught school a term or two. I went straight through, entered in 1860 and graduated in 1863. I had a room in Whiting Hall on the third floor part of the time. During the war there were 12 or 15 girls in the hall. Most of them were on the second floor. Most of the rooms on the third floor were vacant. I used to come up from the farm Sunday afternoons or Monday mornings and bring a basket of food from home. There being plenty of vacant rooms and a room was given me to use in which to keep my food and eat. I was so fortunate as to have a grandmother on the corner and several aunts in town who were typical Galesburgers of the time and I had a standing invitation to come in and take a meal any time I wanted to, which I did with many thanks for the great kindness and helpfulness with which they put me through. My father and mother thought they couldn’t afford to put me through school and board me, so as you see, I boarded myself with their help. My sister and I kept house the last year of our school in the home, which my father and mother owned and lived in when they lived in town. We had a very efficient housekeeper and we kept some boarders. The lady who had lived there before us had the boarders and when we moved in they wanted to stay there; so my sister with the help of the efficient cook let them do so. There were two married men and their wives and a few others who came in for their meals. The last year of our school we spent in that home and supported ourselves. Among the boarders there, there was a Mr. B. F. Arnold. My sister was the great favorite and I was second best usually. This Mr. Arnold took a notion that I was the one he wanted, so he proposed to me one night on the sofa. I took the matter under consideration and decided I would accept. We were married the 26th of May after I graduated. We were married at home on the farm. This house, where we lived the last year of our schooling, was on Simmons St. at the head of Boone’s Ave., where the fire department is today. Our class ran the college while we were there we thought. There were ten girls and five men in the class, which graduated that June. The men are all passed on and all the girls except Mrs. Bell Cathren Ayres and myself.

Little Caroline Elizabeth born there on June 18, 1851. Father kept two or three hundred sheep and it was the work of the children who were old enough to watch the sheep graze on the prairie and keep them from wandering away and getting mixed with the neighbors, or getting into the grain fields. There were no fences only around the outside of the farm and we drove the sheep into a yard at night and let them out onto the prairie in the morning. We always carried a stout stick to protect ourselves from mad dogs and rattle snakes, but I think our bare legs were the safest protection, as I never remember to have been attacked by either. Father sold the sheep and then our job was to herd the cattle, but by this time we were furnished with an old mare to ride and the work was more interesting. I remember following the plough day after day all the spring and dropping corn in every third furrow, which my brother made when breaking up the east field with three yoke of oxen. I rode on the back of one of them when going to and from the field. We all had chills and fever the summer of 1852 caused by the rotting of the sod after the west field was broken and my little brother Henry Blanchard died from jaundice following ague the winter of 1853. He was a beautiful black-eyed boy, the gem of the family we all thought, of four years of age. He was buried on the corner south of the house. My little sister Gala died the next September by falling into a pail of hot water and being scalded. These were sad times for the family and mother almost went distracted because of grief at losing her two youngest children so near together.

It must have been in 1854 that father had his foot ground from his leg by stepping on the joint of the “tumbling shaft” of the threshing machine and slipping so that his foot and ankle were drawn into the joint and crushed so that his foot was separated from the leg all but the heel cord and the main artery. Dr. Bunce was called as soon as possible and bound the foot in place. It was years before it was entirely healed and hundreds of pieces of bone were taken out for months after at the daily dressings. The ankle joint was always stiff but father thought his foot was much better than none. He always made his own shoes after, as he had special lasts and a set of shoemakers tools and could suit himself better than in any other way.

Lillie born in 1856 and I think it was in 1857 or 1858 that father rented the farm and moved into town. He traded the north farm for a brick house at the head of Boone’s Avenue and some lots near the depot and some other property. The Fire department is now located where our Family home was for several years. We only lived in town a couple of years when father and mother and Tim and Lillie moved back to the farm, as renting did not prove satisfactory. Hattie and I entered College in 1860 and we staid in the house and some married people boarded with us. We kept a competent maid and with some help from the ladies in the house got along very comfortably till we graduated in 1863. Several gentlemen boarded with us the last year or two as Hattie was a good provider and quite a popular landlady. Among them were Scott Dewey, a R. R. Conductor and Warren Bakers, a moneylender and B. F. Arnold, a lawyer and real estate man. The two former were rather “sweet” on the landlady but the latter actually proposed to the headwaiter and they were married at the farm home on May 26, 1864. The town house was broken up and “the girls" moved back to the farm where they lived till they were both married. B. F. Arnold and Ella were married at eight o'clock on May 26, 1864 and Edwin Crandall and Hattie in Nov. the day after Thanksgiving of the same year.

It was a lonesome Mother that winter who kept the home for father and Tim and Lillie. Hatti came home in the spring and always after that they were closely associated in their home life, often living together. Tim was married to Mary Drew in a year or two and was proprietor of the farm and father and mother and the Crandalls moved back to the city. My father’s and mother’s family consisted of seven children, Alfred Garret the eldest, Harriet Maria born in 1839,

Ella in 1842, Timothy Harvey in 1845, Henry Blanchard who died aged/4, Caroline Elizabeth aged 3 and Lillie Cornelia born in 1856.

Thus endeth something of a family record, but I have been asked to tell

of some of the doings of our childhood in a frontier town located in the middle west in the thirties and forties of the last century. These records begin when we moved onto "the section" in 1849.

There used to be great discussion where to build the schoolhouse. All the people lived in the north end of that school district and my rather wanted it down nearer our farm and the center or the district, but the major1ty overruled and the schoolhouse was built where it is now, the Thurwell School, the site given by Mr. Thurlwell, a mile and a half from our home. We did not go to school very much. We went through the Primary Dept. at home. When we left the farm and

moved to town, I graded up with all the other girls that had gone to school all their lives. Sometimes, when there were two or three of us going to school, and when my father wasn’t too busy, we rode an old horse, but we usually walked. We only had school in the summer season.

One family built a house about half way between my uncle's and our house. Finch was their name.

My father and his family moved to town in 1856. We girls went into the Academy and later into the college. War broke out in l861. Nearly all the boys left for war, or went home so their fathers could go. There were only 15 or 20 boys left at college. The first death of the college boys was an event that touched our hearts almost beyond our ability to endure it. He was George Foster. He was a young man, a senior, who had been planning to be a minister. He left and went to war. He was a lieutenant. It was his duty to lead his men. He went forward and was shot. He had not been in service more than two or three months when he was killed. He was brought home and burial service was held in what is now Beecher Chapel. He was buried in Hope Cemetery. After that there were others who were taken sick and died, or who were killed and brought home. Some of the finest young men the city ever had are lying there in the cemetery on account of their war service.

The women of the city organized the Soldiers Aid Society and went into it just as they did here in the Red Cross. They made garments and packed barrels of food. Mother Bickerdyke lived here and was very efficient. Mary Allen West was a local woman who did much for the soldiers. She canvassed for food for the hospitals and sent carloads of food to the soldiers in hospitals along the Mississippi River. They canvassed the farmers, who gave cattle and hogs and vegetables and fruit, in fact anything they raised, and all this was sent to these hospitals in Tennessee, Louisiana and Kentucky on the Mississippi River. Everything had to go by boat. There were no railroads.

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