Life in the McKibben Family,

MCKIBBEN, LAYMAN, ADAMS, STANLEY, KENWORTHY

Posted By: Carol Spitz (email)
Date: 2/16/2003 at 13:55:13

The McKibben Family
By Dora B. Stanley – 1941

Samuel Spencer McKibben and his wife Mary (Layman) McKibben and their eight children came from Brown Co. Ohio to Iowa in 1854. They drove through with two ox teams and led two cows to furnish milk for the children and brot [sic] two large watch dogs to guard the wagons at night. They were several weeks on the road. They got sleeping quarters when possible for the mother and little children but the father and older boys slept in or near the wagons. They had sold a farm in Ohio and got several hundred dollars in gold which the father (my grandfather) carried in a belt made of heavy ticking strapped around his waist. Grandfather was Scotch Irish with plenty grit and was not afraid of work. He also had the knack of seeing to it that everyone else worked. Four of the older children were boys and when they settled on 240 acres of fine prairie land 30 miles west of where Des Moines now is, they soon built a comfortable log house and a stable for their live stock. Then they got busy with the ox teams and the big old breaking plow and started making a farm. They bot [sic] more oxen more cows and soon managed to get a good start of hogs sheep and chickens. They sowed wheat & planted corn, potatoes cane, and everything that would help to feed a large family. They soon had a large flock of sheep and the men sheared the sheep and grandmother spun the wool and wove the cloth to clothe the family. Every garment was made by hand. Just scissors, needle and thread was all the tools she had. She also spun wool into coarse yarn & knit it into stockings for the family. The girls when quite small learned to knit, each one had to knit their own stockings and if they were real smart – before the winter was over they knit wool mittens for themselves and their brothers. Grandmother also wove blankets for the beds. The girls soon learned to help with all kinds of house work spinning weaving etc. The first year there was no school no church and only one neighbor within five miles of this new Iowa home. The women and children hardly saw anyone but the family from fall until spring. The snow in those days was often 4 to 6 ft deep and the blizzards of those early days were terrible. The men were kept busy cutting and hauling wood for the huge fireplace for they had no stove the first year but cooked over the fire in the fireplace. Kettles were hung over the fire on a hook called a ‘crane’. Then they had a “dutch oven”. It was a very heavy flat-bottomed iron kettle and had an iron lid and legs about three inches long. In this they put corn bread or “jonny cake”, raked out a bed of coals, set this three legged kettle on the coals and they say that grandma could make wonderful corn bread in this ‘oven’. Father used to say that they didn’t have white bread (bread made with flour) only on Sundays or when the preacher came. But they soon raised wheat and there was a grist mill built on the ‘coon river only a mile & a half from the McKibben home, and some one set up a sorghum mill and their hogs grew & fattened and they had plenty of plain healthy food. They built a double log house with a sort of loft above where the big boys slept. This was considered quite a house for those days. This new house was built between 1865 & 1870. They soon had a lot of that 240 A farm plowed up and raising good crops. Their flocks and herds increased and grandfather was real well off. He had managed with the help of his husky boys to get the farm fenced with a rail fence. Then he bot [sic] more land and put up a good frame house of six rooms and a good barn with a big loft for hay. The buildings were the best for miles around. Then he put up sheds for the young stock a hog house & a large double corn crib etc. The new house had a large back room they called the loom house for grandmother still did some weaving. She wove carpet for the floors of the new house. At that time they had the nicest home and the best set of farm building anywhere in the country. Grandmother had a nice cook stove & they had a big heater in the front room. The house had green shutters on every window upstairs and down. The country by this time was quite thickly settled there being several neighbors within half a mile but none owned such a home and was as well equipped for farming and stock raising as Samuel McKibben. He was 37 yrs old when he came here from Ohio and it took about twenty years of hard work and good management to make a real home out of the raw prairie land on which they settled when they first came to Iowa. They still owned the original 240 acres and had bot [sic] forty A. more on which was located the new house and other buildings also a large orchard of about three acres. Grandfather gave the land for the first schoolhouse in that part of the country and helped to put up the building, was school director and treasurer also boarded the teacher as he was the only one who had room. He also gave the land for a cemetery about one fourth mile north of his home. My grandparents and three of their six sons, one daughter, three daughters-in-law and three granddaughters are buried there. There are also many strangers buried there. This cemetery was started some seventy-five years ago and for many years was the only one for many mile. It is still called the McKibben Cemetery. In later years a number of the McKibbens, my parents, uncles and aunts were buried in the Earlham cemetery. Also my sister Mattie Kenworthy. The old farm now stands as the estate of the youngest son Samuel Spencer McK who died in Jan. 1939 age 79 yrs & 11 mo. This farm consists of about one hundred acres of the old home farm. The east part has been sold to strangers but the west part on which was the old home, the buildings, orchard is very much as it has been for many years. The house is a modern house but stands just where the old house stood. A part of this land was bot [sic] from the government for $1.25 an acre. A few years ago I was told it would sell for $200 an acre. This land has been owned by only two people, Samuel Spencer McKibben Senior and Samuel Spencer McKibben Junior. It is about 88 years since grandfather purchased the land. While grandfather & the boys were working to make a home, raising big crops on the new freshly broken land, caring for stock, splitting rails for fencing the farm etc, grandmother wasn’t having any picnic. She was the mother of eleven children within twenty-two years. Nine of them lived to grow up, six boys and three girls. It took a lot of food to feed the bunch and it would seem a mother would be busy just cooking but she had big washings to do by hand for no one at that time had ever heard of washing machine. She also spun the wool and flax into thread and wove it into cloth for their clothing and made the garments by hand. In those days every child was taught to work but it must have been very hard when the first half dozen were small.

Grandmother only weighed about ninety-six pounds but was a hustler to work. She always had a good garden, she raised chickens and always kept a flock of geese and made pillows and feather beds in her spare time so that when the children married they each had their featherbed, pillows and a quilt or two. She also dried apples, pumpkin and corn for winter use. She made a barrel or two of soap for washing their clothing. For this soap she used the winters accumulation of meat rinds butcher scraps etc and lye leached from wood ashes. In those days everyone burned wood and everyone had an ‘ash-hopper’ and soap kettle. After doing this kind of work for twelve or fourteen hours she would sit up and knit for two or three hours after the rest of the family were in bed. She had no electric light either. Only the light from the fireplace. They made a few tallow candles but did not use them except when absolutely necessary, when eating supper or when they had company. Grandfather always kept the preacher over Sunday when he made his monthly visit and the preaching service was held in their home until the schoolhouse was built. They had a better house and more room than others in the neighborhood. In my minds eye I can see the house yet as it looked when I was a child of some five or six years. It was weather-borded [sic] and painted a pale yellow trimmed in redish brown and had green shutters on all the windows. It had a very steep room and stood with the gable end to the road with front to the east. It had a portich about six feet square at the front door and roof of this portich made the floor of the upstairs porch for there was a front door upstairs with banisters where they put bedding out to air. There were two large rooms upstairs. There was also a large back porch with a roof and the men folks
left their boots & chore clothes in the porch and grandmother did her washing and churning there in summer. It was really a wonderful home and grandmother kept it very neat. There was the one “fly in the ointment” about going to grandmothers. Us children were not allowed to disturb a thing in that immaculate house. If we moved a chair a little out of place she would immediately get up and straighten it. She usually got us some apples to eat and sat with us in the back porch. When she sat down she was always knitting. She only had two boys at home when I was small but she knit stockings and mittens for the grandchildren, sixteen of whom lived within half a mile of the old home. The six sons were all farmers and one daughter married a farmer. There were two sets of buildings on the home place besides the big house where my grandparents lived. Uncle Gid live in a new house on the north side of the farm and my father (Harvey Stewart McKibben) lived on the east side of the 200 A. which the family settled on when they first came to Iowa. I grew up & was married in the same old house where we had lived since I was three years old. My sister also was married there about a year later. In 1890 Grandfather willed the land to the three sons who had always lived there. They each got sixty-six & one third acres. It was divided so that each had their own set of buildings. Uncle Pent the youngest got an extra 40 A. with the big house for keeping grandmother. Uncle Gid kept up building and painted his buildings remodeled the house several times and kept his fences and everything in good shape, but our old house never was painted and the old weatherboarding got blacker and blacker each year. The wood work inside was never painted until I worked out and bot[sic] paint for the front room. We were a half mile from the state highway and entirely out of sight of the road. My mother (Azuba Arabelle (Adams)spent a good share of her life scrubbing & scouring the old unpainted wood-work and floors of that old house. All the others of the McKibben family had comfortable homes and managed to get paint, wall paper, screens, carpets, furniture etc. when they needed it but nothing doing in that line for us. It was a log house that grandfather moved there & rebuilt for my father soon after Pa & Ma were married and they put weatherboarding on the outside & years later lathed & plastered it. It was very rough dark plastering and mother wanted wall paper & she finally got it. Then it didn’t look so bad. Then mother & I wove a carpet for the front room, and the next summer I worked out earned money for new wall paper. The folks lived there almost twenty-five years but the kitchen and upstairs never were plastered. We must have burned many tons of green wood in the old wood stove. We never used coal or never had dry wood only for kindling the fire. Our house never had a chimney, just a length of stove pipe thru the roof as in pioneer day. I think my fathers house was the only one in the neighborhood that did not have a brick chimney. Our house caught fire several times but it was always discovered in time and was not much damaged, which was a pitty for we might have had a new house.

About 1894 my brother Will became of age and took over the farm & bot [sic] 40 A. more out on the road and they built a new house. They made the mistake of building too large a house which at that time they did not need as us two older girls were married and the third girl and brother Will were teaching school and were not at home much. They kept the place just five years after the new house was built then sold the farm & bot [sic] a home in Stuart, Iowa where mother passed away in 1908 and my father came to live with me. He visited the other children (two in Minn. and two in Kansas) staying six months or more at a time but he spent about seven of the twelve years after mother died at my place. He died at Mildred’s in Northfield Minn. in July 1920 age 74 years. I feel that my father’s life was a failure for lack of the education that he craved. He had a wonderful memory & when he heard a sermon or lecture he could come home & repeat it almost word for word. If he could have had even the limited education of those early days he could have been a preacher, lawyer a temperance lecturer or public speaker. He was especially interested in law & politics. But grandfather had tackled quite a proposition when he came to the country with a family of seven or eight children and bot [sic] a three hundred acre piece of land and proceded to make a home of it and every child had to work. There was no going to school for boys after they were old enough to work excepting two or three months in winter.

My father made about three trips to Kansas and three to Minn. after Mother died and the year before he died he spent in Canada with sister Jo & family. His health wasn’t so good for a few weeks & he wanted to get home. He started home in July & got as far as Mildred’s in Northfield, Minn. Was taken sick there and only lived about a week. His trouble was diabetis [sic] disease & one foot broke out & would not heal.

Samuel Spencer McKibben married Mary Layman. They had 11 children.
1. Elizabeth married Sylvanus Compton
2. Harvey married Azuba Arabelle Adams
3. Jane married a Mr. Wm Beasley – (had 1 son?) 2 daughters May & Lola
4. Luke Oct 16, 1839 – May 1919 Clyde, Floyd & Louisa
5. Martha A 7,1,1848 – 4,22,1849 Louisa
6. John 1837 – 1919
7. Samuel Spencer (Anna Marks & Ann McKibben) Byron Scott Carroll
8. Gideon Jennie Marks McKibben - Gertie, Pearl, Wilda, Myrtle, Leo, Esther, Nita, Ed, Harry (Tib) Everett, Dene, Dewey, Myrtle
9. other children Esther married Wm Lorimer
10. Louisa died in childhood Mar 16, 1852 – 1965 [sic]
11. William married Nehusta Wilson
Order of birth, John 1837, William 1839, Luke 1841, Harvey 1846, Martha A 1848, Elizabeth 1850, Louisa 1852, Gideon 1855, Esther 1856, Spencer 1859

By Dora B. McKibben Stanley 1941

Jan 26, 2001. This is transribed from Xerox copies of a 'journal' of handwritten pages that were provided to me by Joyce Moore Hodges, Bonner Springs, KS, a great granddaughter of Dora Belle McKebben Stanley. Many thanks for this wonderful look at early life in Iowa!