Orrin Burke Bissell

BISSELL, DABNEY, ELLIMAN, ELLSWORTH, LATTIN, LEEPER

Posted By: Kent Transier
Date: 1/18/2010 at 14:53:03

Sources: Extracted from the biography of Elmer Bissell found in the 1915 History of Madison County. Information on Mr. Bissell's parents and children obtained from various other sources.

Orrin Burke Bissell was born on the 14th of December, 1829, a native of Portage county, Ohio and son of Roswell and Dorothy (Ellsworth) Bissell. As Orrin grew older he assisted his father in the conduct of his dairy farm, becoming an expert cheese maker. He resided near Aurora, Ohio, until 1856 and then removed with his wife, Caroline (Lattin) Bissell, a native of Trumbull county, Ohio, to Madison county, Iowa, driving across the country and bringing their household effects with them. He entered government land and the family home was at first a log cabin.

Mr. Bissell, like many of the early settlers, was afflicted with ague and as that at times rendered him unable to work his wife helped to build the log cabin. The homestead was near the timber, as the early settlers considered such land to be more valuable than that on the prairie. The neighbors were few and far between and each family was compelled to rely upon its own resources to a great extent, although the settlers were always willing to help each other whenever assistance was needed and it was possible to give aid.

Mr. Bissell gave the land and helped to build the schoolhouse in his district and gave the privilege of holding church service in his house although he himself was not affiliated with any religious organization. He had one of the largest residences in the county and was an extensive landowner, holding title to over one thousand acres. He raised a great deal of stock in addition to the cultivation of his fields and in all that he did employed the most advanced methods. He was among the first to buy improved farm machinery, owning the first binder and mower in his county and also the first self-rake. His holdings were situated in Jackson and Penn townships and he continued to reside upon his land until his death. He believed in the efficacy of organization and was quite active in the Grange, which enabled the farmers to cooperate in matters of general concern.

His political allegiance was given to the Republican party and he held various local offices. In 1874 he represented his district in the state legislature, proving an able and conscientious lawmaker. He was drafted for service in the Union army but hired a substitute—Al Dabney, who used the money paid him in acquiring a law education. Mr. Bissell passed away on the 22d of February, 1894, and his death was deeply regretted, as he was generally recognized as one of the leading citizens of the county. His first wife, who in her maidenhood was Miss Caroline Lattin, was born on the 30th of August, 1831, and died on the 1st of January, 1889. To them were born eight children: L. Alice, died young; Edward B., died young; Frederick L., moved to Oregon; C. Eugene, died young; A. Franklin; William Grant, married Elmira Leeper; Edith Gertrude, died young; and Ellsworth Elmer. Orrin was married a second time to Nettie Elliman and by that union was born one child, Thomas E. Bissell.
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The Winterset Madisonian
Winterset, Iowa
Thursday, April 29, 1926

Orrin Burke Bissell – by W. H. Lewis

A bibliographic sketch prepared for the Madison County Historical Society at the 23rd annual meeting, April 27th, 1926.

The Bissell family are of Puritan – Pilgram stock, and were among the pioneers in the settlement of New England. One of those pioneers is mentioned by Increase Mather, in his “History of Remarkable Providences,” as follows: “On Jan. 13, 1670, three women having gone across the Connecticut River to help some friends, were desirous of returning to their homes and families, but, the weather was extremely cold, and the river frozen partly across. Nathaniel Bissell took the three women in a canoe and started to cross the river, but when they were about midway in the stream, a large piece of ice struck the canoe and crushed it, leaving Bissell in the three women floating among the drifting cakes of ice, but Bissell wasn’t active swimmer and by great exertion was able to get the women upon the cakes of ice and to the shore and safety.” The Bissell’s of this sketch are lineal descendents of the Nathaniel Bissell who was the rescuer of the women from among the floating cakes of ice.

Orrin Burke Bissell was the son of Roswell Bissell and Dorothy L. Ellsworth Bissell, and was born in Portage County, Ohio, December 14, 1837.

Portage County was a part of that portion of Ohio that was given to Connecticut as a payment for services rendered by that colony in the early history of the United States, and was settled by emigrants from Connecticut, thus making the subject of this sketch a Puritan, both by heritage and environment. There were no public schools in Ohio in those days, and Orrin received his primary education from his parents and in private schools, and as he grew up, he worked on the farm of his father in summer, and in winter attended “Twinsburg Academy,” an institution controlled by his uncle, Samuel Bissell who was a graduate of Yale College, as it was then known. While he was yet attending the Academy has father became seriously ill and Orrin was called home to help care for him, and he died soon after, in the year 1851. It had been Orrin’s intention to enter college as soon as he had fitted himself, but the father’s death changed all that. The estate consisted of 350 acres of land, with a mortgage upon 100 acres of it. The father’s will appointed Orrin as Executor, and he was to manage its affairs until the indebtedness was paid, which took four years, and at the first division, Orrin received 42 acres. The family then consisted of his grandmother, mother, and the six living children, his sister Harriet being the oldest and Orrin the second. Orrin had in 1853 married Miss Caroline L. Lattin, and all these with their first child, Alice, lived in the one house until the estate was divided.

After the division of the estate Orrin visited a friend in Michigan, looking for lower-priced land, but he concluded that clearing a farm from the forest as his grandfather and father had done was too hard and slow a manner of getting one, and so he made a trip to Iowa and bought his first land of Dominick Gilleran in section five of what is now known as Jackson township, near North River, and he still owned this land at the time of his death. He then returned to Ohio, loaded his wife, child, and household goods into a wagon, and at the end of the journey lasting six weeks, reached his land in 1855.

They lived in a tent until a log house was built, and one night a neighbor’s cross bull thrust his head in between the flaps and bellowed a challenge to them. Later when Mrs. Bissell was carrying water from the river, the same bull walked at her heels, bellowing and pawing the dirt, and when the well was dug, the bull returned and butted the curb over and rolled it off across the prairie, dragging the rope and bucket.

When the logs of the side of the house were in place but not chinked and daubed, and the openings for the door and windows were being sawed out, a neighbor road up and after watching them he swore that they had better stop some of the holes they already had before they cut out anymore. (There were no windows in his house.)

For years, other houses only reach two miles farther up the river, the farthest was that of Albert Barnett, the father of Anderson Barnett of Berlin, and although Bissell’s house was one of the best in the neighborhood it was so cold that babies have frosted their feet as they toddled around the floor and the ceiling was so low that Rev. John D. Darbey who was holding Sunday services in that house as he rose on tiptoe to stress some point in his sermon, struck his head against the joists above. In this low house, five children were born, and in it Alice and her next two brothers died and the death of those children was a shadow that never lifted from the lonely prairie.

For many years they paid high prices for such things as they must have, and during the few years that the current of emigration was strong they were able to sell their surplus of corn, flour and meet to the eminent travel at a good price but that did not last long, and the home of the Bissell’s was so far north of the main line of that travel that they got but little of that trade. When emigration stopped, their produce had to be taken to the Mississippi to meet the railroads.

They took wheat to the Coon River and paid tolls to have a ground, and then hauled it to Des Moines and sold it for what they could get which was usually about one dollar per hundred pounds, and they hauled dressed pork there and sold it for one dollar and twenty-five cents per hundred pounds. When they got settled and some stock gathered, there came two terrible winters that killed most of the cattle, and dogs and wolves ran over the top of the deep snow and kill all the poor half-starved deer, and Bissell’s had five calves freeze to death in one night. Sometimes the storms would drive the stock out of their poor straw sheds into the brush and over the bank, and the snow would drift them in. Corn rotted in their rail cribs, and hogs were sold for one dollar per hundred, to be driven on foot to the Mississippi River. The Bissells did anything for the promise of a dollar, hoping that they might sometime get it. Mr. Bissell had a kit of tools as carpentering ran in the family, and one of the early remembrances of the children, was seeing their father make a coffin for a neighbor. This is Bissell was an expert seamstress and tailoress in her youth, and as the clothing in those days was made at home she sometimes turned a penny in that way, but they steadily worked for what might sometime be the big winnings. Stock was slowly gathered and Mr. Bissell commenced to feed cattle instead every winter until his death, but the poverty of indescribably hard times grounded down until the war came.

This brought better prices, but it found the Bissell’s with their nearest relatives in Ohio, and alone with their little children to be cared for and no way to let loose. Mr. Bissell was drafted for the Army. To leave his family meant ruin, and so he arranged with A. R. Dabney to go as a substitute. Dabney was a strong young man, and stayed until the close of the war.

The tide of affairs now turn. They worked hard, and as Mrs. Bissell said, “Cut the garment according to the cloth,” or in other words they went without rather than in debt. The ten acre orchard that Mr. Bissell planted when he first came commenced to bear, and although one third of the trees had been killed by the hard winters it still was a little gold mine for years. He added to his holdings of land.

Then he cut logs and hauled to the mill on Middle River to make lumber to build a bank barn, and much of the lumber for a large house. He bought the first of machinery to enable him to farm more acres. Part of the machinery he made himself, as he did with the first two-row hand drop corn planter, but he never speculated, even so far as to change system because he thought some product would go up or down the next year, but things went at high pressure every day, winter and summer.

During these years, the products of the land, the corn, wheat, cattle and hogs, everything the farmer had to sell, brought very low prices, while the prices of lumber, coal, salt and every other class of goods the farmer had to buy, were very high. The farmers decided that high rates of freight made the low price on what they had to sell, and the high price on what they had to buy, and that if possible, it must be remedied. The plan of shipping by the Mississippi River to the seaboard and from thence to any desired destination, was promptly met by the railroads making the freight rate to any point on that river the same as from that point to Chicago. This seemed to close the case, but about that time the railroad companies discovered that their title to the vast empire of land that had been given them to aid in the construction of their roads lacked the legislative consent of the State.

Up to this time there had been no control of freight rates by law, and the railroad interests had interested themselves in politics, and had a strong representation in the Legislature, and when a bill for a law that would control the rates of freight charges was proposed it was promptly voted down. This writer recalls that one time he bought a car load of coal from a mine near Des Moines and that the freight he paid was between ten and eleven dollars, and on a second car load from the same mind, the freight bill was more than forty dollars. He also bought lumber in Chicago, and the freight bill was about twelve dollars, but on later carloads of freight was raised to above forty dollars. These later rates were probably made at the suggestion of the local dealers in those commodities, but they were nonetheless oppressive.

The new organization of farmers known as “The Patrons of Husbandry,” or otherwise as “The Grange,” was forbidden by its organic law to carry on any other than social activities, and while the members felt themselves oppressed by the political situation, they were controlled by the organic law of their order. In Iowa, and probably in other Western localities, the number of voters in that organization was so large that it was a tempting bait to an office-seeking man. The financial situation of Iowa farmers at that time made them peculiarly sensitive to the proposition, “If you will help me, I will help you,” and so the farmer was promised legislative help from the oppressive railroad tariffs rates, if he would help them to a complete title to their lands, and the “Granger” law controlling the rate of railroad freights, was one of the results of the Grange entering the political field.

Mr. Bissell that always interested himself in his social surroundings, had been Township Clerk, and had represented his township in the Board of Supervisors, and was widely known as a upright, honest and dependable man. While Mr. Bissell was serving on the Board of Supervisors, he had refused to vote for some measures that were desired by the political managers of the Republican Party, and they had made a powerful attack on him when he was a candidate for re-election but he had enough friends to elect him. When he was nominated and placed on the ticket of the Anti-Monopoly party as a candidate for Representative of Madison county in the State Legislature, the storm broke out afresh. People at the present time have no adequate idea of the bitterness that was then sometimes injected into a heated political campaign. The files of the Madisonian preserve some memories of that fight, and they are in the main, the mildest of that contest. The fact of his having been drafted and sending a substitute, was used among former soldiers as evidence of disloyalty to his country in the most extreme terms were applied to him. The attacks were so bitter and unscrupulous that some of the candidates withdrew from the ticket, but Mr. Bissell felt that he represented a principle, and stayed on and won the fight. Mr. Bissell refuse to be a candidate again, and from that time on the word, Politics, was taboo in the family, but as a member of the legislature, he was a prominent member of the element that sought to control the rates of railway freights, and he felt gratified at the success of that movement.

Mr. and Mrs. Bissell were now starting on the last half of life, and though the pace was not slackened, each year found them less able to bear the strain of the strenuous life that they had so long led. As Mr. Bissell observed the failing strength of his wife, he divided the farm and built a large house on the north section and they became residents of Penn Township. Mr. Bissell was forced to slacken his pace at fieldwork as accidents wrecked his once rugged body, but Mrs. Bissell slowly failed, and died January 1, 1889. After the death of Mrs. Bissell he had a family live in his house for a year, and then married Miss Nettie Elliman of Portage county, Ohio, on December 31, 1890, and of this marriage one son was born, it being Mr. Bissell’s ninth child. In the winter of 1894, while pumping water for stock, he had a stroke from which he only partially rallied, and he died on February 22, 1894, at the age of 57 years. At the time of his death he left five sons, three of whom are still living.

Mr. Bissell was a true pioneer. He went alone to seek a place for a home, and having found it, he brought it to his wife and child and his entire earthly belongings, and he stayed on the spot he had selected, to the end of his life, thirty-nine years. He did not yield to the temptation that comes to the first settlers, selling land at the increasing price and move on to a farther frontier, but he developed an improved it so that it was a model in his community. He was active in shaping the public policies of his new home, and very successful in bringing them about. Mr. Bissell was always known as an industrious and capable man. He never made mean use of any man, and never asked any one to do what he would not do himself. His word was never questioned in any relation business or social. This is the life of one of the pioneers that took Iowa from the wilderness.

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