CHAPTER XXI.

I think it was in 1850 that two families came and located in Oskaloosa who were originally from Tennessee, but lived for a while before coming to Oskaloosa on farms a few miles east of Pella. Mr. John Shoemake and Mr. Wesley Moreland were brothers-in-law. Both men were full of business and did much to improve the town. At one time Mr. Moreland was in partnership with Mr. A. G. Phillips in a store of general merchandise. Their store was at the southwest corner of the public square, on the ground where Boyer's clothing store now is. Property and business changed hands very frequently about that time. In 1852 Mr. Moreland and Mr. Shoemake each built for themselves what at that time was thought to be very fine brick residences, on Second Avenue West. They are respectable residences to-day. The Shoemake house is owned and occupied by Mr. Henry Stafford, and the Moreland house is owned by Mrs. Mariah Rhinehart.

Mrs. Moreland was a sister of John Shoemake, and also of M. L. Shoemake, who came from Tennessee when a boy, and has been a resident of Oskaloosa more than forty years. He owns an elegant home, and his wife is said to be one of the finest housekeepers in this region. Mr. John Shoemake built the house which has been the Frankel home for many years. John Shoemake died of consumption more than thirty years ago, leaving a wife and two daughters, Virginia and Pony.

Mr. Moreland was at one time treasurer-recorder of Mahaska County. He was prosperous in business and owned many valuable pieces of property, but reverses came to him in the financial crash of 1857. When the war came he enlisted in the army; he died in St. Louis from sickness contracted in the service of his country,
leaving his wife in straightened circumstances, with five children, none of them grown.

Mrs. Moreland was brave; honest, honorable and industrious. Through great tribulation she educated her children. They were all bright and capable. John Wesley, who looks just like his father, is a capable newspaper man, and Mollie, now Mrs. Walter Campbell, is one of the brightest women in Oskaloosa. Her husband, Mr. Walter Campbell, is one of the nicest young business men to be found anywhere. Mrs. Moreland has always had many friends, and her children idolize her.

Among many other valuable places owned by Moreland and Shoemake, was a large and valuable farm in Harrison township, known as the "Rhinehart farm" situated in sections 8 and 9, about five miles a little southeast of Oskaloosa. That claim was located in 1843 by Mr. Thomas Brooks. Mr. Brooks soon sold the claim to Louis Rhinehart, from Adams county, Illinois. Mr. Rhinehart had a numerous family of sons and daughters, all worthy, respectable arid thrifty people. In 1854 Mr. Rhinehart sold his farm to Judge Rhinehart, from Ohio, and went to Oregon. Judge Rhinehart and the other Rhineharts were not related. Mr. and Mrs. Louis Rhinehart were the parents of thirteen children, who all went to Oregon with them except one daughter, Mrs. Thomas Ratliff, who remained in Iowa. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Ratliff are sleeping in Forest Cemetery. They died in Harrison township, where they had lived for many years, respected by all their neighbors. Their eldest daughter, Ellen, married Valentine Brubaker, who is a successful farmer and much respected citizen of Harrison township. Ellen died in a year or two after she and Mr. Brubaker were married, leaving an infant son, Edward, who has a family of his own now, and is said to possess the honesty and good farming sense of all the Brubakers, Rhineharts and Ratliffs combined, which is saying a good deal for the boy. Maggie, another daughter of Thomas Ratliff, married Mr. Willtam Stephenson. She and her husband are charming people and have a charming home just south of Oskaloosa.  Lizzie, another daughter who married Mr. Thomas Harper, is a fine looking woman, and is as superior in character as she is in looks. Thomas Ratliff has two sons, James and J ohn. James lives in Louisiana. John is a citizen of Oskaloosa, but is about to emigrate with his excellent family to Oregon and make his home among his rich Rhinehart relations.

Mr. Louis Rhinehart died in Oregon fifteen years ago; his wife is still living but is away up in the nineties. She has seen her great, great-grandchildren. I was told
recently by one of her grandsons that she had more than four hundred descendants and that she had seen. seven generations of her family, counting her own grandparents. All of her thirteen children lived to be married and raise families. I never .heard an evil report of a single member of that numerous family, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Rhinehart lived in Harrison township ten years; All of their children lived there. Three daughters and one son were married before they went to Oregon. All were. good, substantial citizens, attended strictly to their own business and were thrifty.

James Rhinehart, a lawyer who came from Ohio early in the fifties, purchased Louis Rhinehart's farm, lived there a year or two, then moved to Oskaloosa and was soon after elected county judge. He was a shrewd business man and when he died, some twenty years ago, left a considerable estate to his three daughters, Mrs. Jane Johnson, Mrs. Minerva McKinley, Mrs. Letitia Smith and the heirs of his son, Dr. S. E. Rhinehart. Dr. Rhinehart came to Oskaloosa when a young man, was a popular physician and a much respected citizen. He married one of Mahaska's handsomest girls, Miss Maria Davis. Dr. Rhinehart died of consumption in the prime of mature manhood. Mrs. Letitia Smith and her family moved to Colorado years ago. Mrs. Johnson (now Mrs. Ballinger) and Mrs. McKinley, reside in Oskaloosa. They are lovely women. I don't know where a woman can be found who deserves the gratitude of her neighbors more than Mrs. McKinley. Who of Oskaloosa's noble women have ever been so capable and so ready to respond to the needs of the sick, sorrowing and dying as Mrs. Minerva McKinley? Dr. Rhinehart lived on the Rhinehart farm a year or so after his father moved to town. In the Summer or early Autumn of 1855, while Dr. Rhinehart was living there, my husband and I drove down there one day. We found everything, looking lovely. Peaches were ripe. I had never seen so many. peaches going to waste. There were great big peach trees around the yard and around the garden and a long row along the edge of the apple orchard. The trees were bending over with the weight of great velvety peaches, and the ground under them was literally covered. Great Shanghai chickens were walking about under the trees pecking at those delicious peaches. They would peck a little on one great, red, mellow peach, then leave it and take a bite out of another. Mrs. Rhinehart was making peach butter and the doctor had gone to' town with a wagon load of peaches. We asked Mrs. Rhinehart to sell us a bushel, which she did. We gathered them ourselves and had. pick and choice. We came away thinking that plenty abounded on the Rhinehart farm. About that time Mr. Frank Farmer, brother-in-law to Messrs. Morelahd and Shoemake, came from Tennessee and purchased that farm from Judge Rhinehart. Mr. Farmer lived there a few months, but became homesick. Moreland and Shoemake took the farm off of his hands and let him go back to the hills of Tennessee.

In the Autumn of 1856 my husband bought the Rhinehart farm from these gentlemen. We rented our nice home to Mr. A. F. Seeberger and on the 11th of November, 1856, moved to the Rhinehart farm. That wonderful crop of peaches and other evidences of thrift around there made us think it a veritable paradise. We traded our farm on the border of Oskaloosa in that deal. The winter of '55 and '56 was an extremely severe one and all those peach trees were killed, root and branch.

The Winter of '56 and' 57 was a severe one. A deep snow lay on the ground all Winter, and the cold weather lasted until away late in the Spring. On the 7th day of May, 1857, the ground was frozen hard. My husband sowed wheat about the 17th of May. He hesitated about sowing so late in the Spring, but he never raised so good a crop of wheat before nor since; it was simply superb. Our folks began planting corn on the 21st of May. The plum trees were in blossom. I used to keep a record of things of that kind, and have observed that the ground is always right for planting corn when the plum trees were in blossom. While I think of it I want to say that the first' frost which appeared in the Fall of 1857 was on October 16th. I have never known frost to hang back like that in Iowa since.

We knew several families in the Rhinehart neighborhood before we went there to live. Mr. Wm. Bean and family, whose farm joined ours on the south, were excellent neighbors. They came from Adams County, Illinois, in 1843, and lived at first in a wigwam on Skunk River in -the Indian village of Kishkekosh. They sold their claim
on Skunk River in '44, and bought Samuel Tibbetts' claim in Harrison Township. Mr. and Mrs. Bean, like nearly everybody else in the Rhinehart neighborhood, were Methodists of the old-fashioned kind; their oldest daughter, Emily, married Mr. John M. Loughridge, who afterwards became a Methodist minister. Anna, the second
daughter, married the Rev. George Clark, a minister also in the Methodist Church. Dr. Samuel Clark and Miss Nannie Clark, of Oskaloosa, are their only living children. Mrs. Anna Bean Clark was a handsome, bright, sweet-spirited Christian lady.

Mr. and Mrs. Bean had two daughters, charming girls, when we first went to the Rhinehart neighborhood. They were beginning to be called "young ladies" when I first became acquainted with them. Jennie married a Mr. Lindley, and Armilda married a Mr. Orton. They both went to Nebraska long ago. They (the Beans) had three sons: James, the oldest, who went to Pike's Peak when gold was flrst discovered there; I think he went in '59 or '60. I hear that Thomas, the second son, is chief of police in San Francisco, and a grand man. Will, the youngest, is a fine-looking, intelligent man, and a much respected citizen of Council Bluffs. Thomas and William were not much older than my little boys, Orlando and Quincy, when we became their neighbors. They went to school together in the old log school-house; they coasted and hunted rabbits together in Winter, and when a little older would test the speed and mettle of their horses when sent out on the prairie of a summer evening to bring home the cows.

Among the first settlers in that region was a family by the name of Edwards, who were formerly from New Jersey. They came in '43. Mr. Britton Edwards died a few years after, leaving a wife, one daughter and two grown sons. Sarah Elizabeth, the daughter, married John Rhinehart, son of Louis Rhinehart. Thomas Edwards, one of the sons, married Miss Barbara Rhinehart, sister to John. Stephen, the other son, went to California in '49. He never married and is living in Oregon, a rich, retired old bachelor. Mrs. Edwards the mother, was related to our family by marriage. She made her home with her son, Thomas Edwards, and when he went to Oregon in 1854 she went with him.

While they were living in Harrison Township Mrs. Edwards often came to Oskaloosa to visit us. The greater part of her conversation during those visits was about a boy who was a member of her son's family, whom she called "Pierce Ratliff." Pierce Ratliff, in her estimation, was all that could be desired in a boy. He was a manly boy. He was an honest, obliging, good-hearted boy, never shirked a duty, was respectful to elderly people, was kind to everybody, was bright and witty. In fact, he was the life of the household.  Mrs. Edwards would regale us by the hour in relating the smart and nice things which Pierce Ratliff said and did. Thomas Edwards sold his farm, and in the Spring of 1854 went with his father-in-law and the rest of that numerous family of Rhineharts to Oregon. Thomas Edwards had a sale just before leaving, and my husband and I wishing to make some purchases at that sale, drove down there. Men and boys, women and girls, were there from all over the country. I knew some of them, but many were strangers. The yard was full, the porch was full, and people were all about in the house. The women of the family were in the kitchen preparing an elaborate dinner. I was in the sitting-room conversing with some ladies when a boy came in with two books in his hand which looked like school books. He remarked to a gentleman as he walked to a bureau and put them in a drawer, "I am going to take these with me." The boy attracted my attention, though I had no idea who he was. There was something in his voice and manners which led me to think he was no ordinary or commonplace boy. He had an honest, open, intelligent face, and something in his voice and the few words he spoke struck me at once. I was interested in the boy and wondered who he could be. The boy went out and mingled with the crowd, and I went to the kitchen where Mrs. Edwards was, pointed the boy out to her and asked her if she knew who that boy was. I have not forgotten the pleased look which came into her face as she glanced from the boy back to me and said, "Why that is Pierce Ratliff, the boy you have heard me talk so much about." When Mr. Edwards went to Oregon the boy Pierce went with him and drove an ox team across the plains.

When we first went to that neighborhood to live we had for neighbors a family by the name of Loper, who were excellent neighbors. Mrs. Loper was a woman of great kindness of heart and full of energy. Mr. and Mrs. Loper had several children, among them a boy about the age of my Quincy, whom they called John. John Loper is Colonel of the 51st Iowa Regiment, now in the Philippine Islands.

M. M. B. Davis, from Maine, owned a fine farm not far from ours, where he and his mother lived in a cozy, comfortable home. Everything about them was orderly, and one could see" the evidence of Yankee thrift at a glance. Directly after we became his neighbor, Mr. Davis was married to Miss Ida Earl, a lovely and cultivated lady from New Yor~. One baby after another came to them, until they had four sons and one daughter. Ida Augusta, the daughter, is a charming woman and a lovely character. There is Will and Harry and John and Fred, all nice men. I have known everyone of them from their infancy, and never heard of one of them doing a mean trick in their lives. Mr. Davis provided bountifully for his family and was one of the tenderest sons, husbands and fathers I was ever acquainted with. Mrs. Davis possessed much, strength of character, though her body was frail. Her children, everyone of them, were models of kindness. They never slacked in loving tenderness to that frail little mother, and when she fell asleep to wake no more, her four sons laid her tenderly to rest in a beautiful spot in Forest Cemetery. I never drive by the Davis lot in our city of the dead without thinking of the time that I stood by and saw those four sons place their mother gently in her last resting place.

Mr. Davis came with his parents from Maine to Iowa in 1848. His father died soon after coming to Iowa. His mother lived many years and was one of the loveliest old ladies that anybody ever saw. Her home, as long as she lived, was with that son and his family, every member of which treated her with the most unfeigned tenderness. Mr. Davis was not only a model of kindness in his own family, but was an exceedingly kind and obliging neighbor. Their home was a charming place to visit. Mr. and Mrs. Davis were well informed, were good talkers. A dinner prepared by Mrs. Davis was a marvel of dainty cooking and she honored her guests by serving them on rare pieces of old Dutch china brought from Holland by her ancestors. Her mother was a Vanderbilt. Ida Augusta, the lovely daughter of that house, possesses the taste and skill of her excellent lady mother, as well as the hospitable and tender ways of her father.

When we went to the Rhinehart farm in November, 1856, the country between our place and the little village of Fremont, ten miles east, was almost an unbroken expanse of prairie. If the sun was shining in the late afternoon we could stand on our front porch and see that village. There was one house in a grove of cottonwood trees some four or five miles away in that direction which loomed up in plain view. There, lived a family by the name of Haskell-elderly people, with several grown-up sons. W. W. Haskell, a lawyer and citizen of Oskaloosa, is one of those sons. Mr. and Mrs. Haskell were intelligent Christian people. Mr. Haskell had read and thought much; was an entertaining talker. When I hear his granddaughters, Edith and Carrie Haskell, so highly spoken of as scholarly girls, I think of that grandfather, whose words of wisdom I listened to with delight forty years ago.

That ten mile stretch of prairie which in 1856 we thought was going to be a free pasture for flocks and herds for ages to come, was, in the course of five or six years, dotted over with farmhouses, groves and young orchards. Great fields of waving grain were to be seen where a short time before was a vast, native meadow. What great prairie fires we used to see. out east, between our house and Fremont. There would seem to be a rim of fire miles and miles long. People who were called smart used to say that prairie would never be settled up; it was too flat, and another thing was, it was too far from timber. We used to wonder why Mr. Haskell went away out there to live when there was so much land near the timber. The Rhinehart farm, the Bean farm, the Morrow farm and the Stuart farm each had a background of fine timber, with the best of prairie land for farming; About a half a mile northwest of our house, and near thenorthwest corner of our land, was the Rhinehart school house a miserable log hut-but the only public building of any kind for miles around: There school was taught, religious meetings were held, and sometimes the honest yoemen of Harrison township met there and cast their ballots for township officers. School laws have been changed since then, but at one of these elections my husband was made school director, which office he held for
two or three years. A young man came to our house one day and applied for the school. He was so young he hardly looked to be able to govern a lot of big, rough boys. He was only nineteen but had taught one term of school successfully. Robert Wesley McBride was his name. His father was a soldier in the Mexican war and died from the effects of exposure in the same and he was making his way as best he could. Mr. Phillips knew his family to be very superior people, and the boy Wesley looked all right, so Mr. Phillips employed him to teach the Rhinehart school in the winter of 1860 and 1861. Wesley McBride boarded with us while he was Jeaching that school. He proved to be capable of teaching all that he proposed to teach. He was quiet and modest, never tried to make a display of his knowledge, but we soon discovered that he had read much, was well-informed and exceedingly level-headed. He was altogether trustworthy, and was the very soul of honor. Was not at all inclined to push himself forward but at the same time was self-respecting. He had the manners of a gentleman and the brains of a statesman, or the kind of brains a statesman needs. He was not strong physically, but when the war of the rebellion broke out, was wild to go in the army, but was rejected on account of physical disability. But before the war was over he managed some way to join the army. I don't know what his position was, but he remained until the war was over, then went to Washington, D. C., studied law, was admitted to the bar, began practicing, law in Waterloo, Indiana, and was prosperous from the first. Was elected Judge, was a candidate for Supreme Judge and was defeated, but was afterward appointed by Governor Hovey to fill a place made vacant by the death of one of the Supreme Judges. Robert Wesley McBride is now a prominent and successful attorney at law in the city of Indianapolis, Indiana.

One day, after we had lived in the Rhinehart neighborhood two or three years, Jennie Bean came flying over to our house with the news that Pierce Ratliff had come back from California and was with his mother and brothers, who resided in Oskaloosa. In a few days this paragon of a boy, whom every body had a word of praise for, came down to visit his old friends. Everybody in the neighborhood who had lived there when Pierce went to Oregon were his friends and were glad to welcome him back. The Bean girls, Jennie and Armilda, brought him over to our house. I remember with what pride Jennie Bean introduced him to my husband and myself. We had heard so many nice things about Pierce Ratliff that we were prepared to like him. A friendship such as only happens once or twice in a lifetime immediately sprung up between him and our family. He bought a farm in the neighborhood, and he and his widowed mother became our neighbors. Mrs. Ratliff, Pierce's mother, was a part of the salt of the earth. She lived up to the golden rule, and I think she sometimes exceeded it, for she would do more kind acts for her neighbors than she ever wanted them to do for her.

Pierce, as I have before stated, went to Oregon when a boy, with Mr. Thomas Edwards. He stayed in Oregon a year or two, then with some other young fellows went to California, packing their provisions and all the rest of their worldly goods on mules. I have heard him relate in an interesting and amusing manner his adventures on that tiresome and uncomfortable journey. They went through rain and mud and slush and many other trying things on their way to "the land of gold." Pierce was a boy of nerve and energy and honesty of purpose. Remade friends among the miners who washed out gold along the creeks in Northern California, Pierce's educational advantages had not been great when a boy, his book learning being confined to the crude country schools of Adams County, Illinois. His mother was left a widow. with seven children, Pierce being the youngest, and only one year old when his father died. Mrs. Ratliff's family consisted of four sons and three daughters. The sons were Thomas, John, James and Pierce. The daughters were Mary Ann, Elizabeth and Sallie. Mary Ann married Mr. Charles Gilmer, of Adams County, Illinois, who was a son of Dr. Gilmer, who was a highly-respected and prominent citizen of that county. Elizabeth married Mr. Robert Gilmer, a planter from Louisiana, and a relative of the doctor's. Sallie, a handsome young girl, went to live in the family of her brother-in-law and sister, near Shreveport, Louisiana, where she married a southern gentleman by the name of Nicholson. James, their brother, when a young man, also went south and established himself in business in the city of Shreveport. They all lived in ease and luxury until the war of the rebellion wrought havoc with their fortunes, as well as with many others who espoused the cause of the confederacy.

Mr. Nicholson, Sallie's husband, went into the Confederate army, was severely wounded, and died soon after the war was over. After Mr. Nicholson's death Sallie came to Iowa with her two lovely children, Mattie and Robert, where she made an extended visit with her mother and brothers. Mattie and Robert are married and have. families of their own now. Mrs. Nicholson pined for the Sunny South and is now living on a plantation in Louisiana.

Thomas Ratliff and family came to Iowa in an early day and when there were none of Mrs. Ratliff's family left in their old home in Illinois except herself and her boy Pierce, they came too to Harrison township, where I first introduced them to the reader. While Pierce was in Oregon and California his mother's home was with her son Thomas' family. Pierce Ratliff, though a mere boy, and possessed of nothing but a healthy body, good sense, pluck and an honest heart when he went away, came back to his good old mother with several thousand dollars in bright gold coin. I think everybody in the neighborhood was glad when it was known that Pierce had bought a farm and he and his mother were established among us as citizens of the Rhinehart neighborhood, How clean arid comfortable and cozy they lived, Pierce and his mother. Pierce was not much beyond boyhood when he came home from California. What a jolly, rollicking, witty, good natured boy he was. He had come home full of knowledge of things and people and countries, and how he used to entertain and amuse us with his peculiar style of relating events. It was wisdom interspersed with wit. I never heard him say a flat thing, nor did he ever spoil a joke for his own or relations' sake. I have heard him relate his experience, when a boy and engaged in the hoop-pole trade, in a manner which would convulse a whole room-full.

Though my husband was a good many years his senior a friendship sprang up between them at first which was of the kind that lasts. I used to call them "John Halifax and Phineas Fletcher." The friendship between Pierce Ratliff and our family was more like that of Phineas and the Halifaxes than anything I ever knew. We came near having everything in common. Pierce would have gotten up at the hour of midnight and gone through mud and slush and rain, or any other thing, if it had been necessary, to relieve any of our families. Any member of our family would have done the same for him or his mother. That family and ours shared each other's joys and sorrows. If Pierce had chosen to come to our house every day in the week, and sit at our board, he would have been a welcome guest every time. Pierce was not a member of any church organization when he came among us, though he was honest and honorable in all his dealings and had a tender heart. He was a man of peace and treated everyone with kindness. By nature he was a man of fine feelings, and his regard for the feelings of others was peculiarly evident. At the same time, if unjustly attacked, he was and is to-day capable of the most stinging sarcasm. He lacks a great deal of being a coward, and stands by what he says.

The majority of the heads of families in the neighborhood were members of some church, Methodists mostly. The only place they had to worship, except private house-s, which were mostly little log cabins, was that poor, unsightly, uncomfortable school-house. But poor and cold and crude as it was, the Lord blessed his children who assembled there to worship. A few of the members were pretty comfortably fixed, but the majority were living in poor quarters. They had land, and were struggling to get fixed to live, but that was in the early days. Some of the earliest settlers-the Beans, for instance, who were thrifty peoples had a good home, a fine orchard, and many other comforts when such things were scarce.

But I must go back to the old school-house where the humble and unpretentious were wont to assemble in their plain and shabby attire and worship God with ant any feeling of restraint or embarrassment. I can think of a number of them who were full of the Holy Spirit. Their plain, unvarnished stories of faith and love to God and man ring in my ears even now. Nearly all of them have gone to their reward. There was one woman inparticular, who a few months ago, at the age of seventynine, laid down her burden of poverty, toil and affliction and took up ber abode in one of the mansions prepared for the faithful.. That woman was Mrs. Lydia Noe. Everybody called her "Aunt Lydia." She possessed very little of what are caned the good things of this world, but was so full of faith and the Holy Spirit she was always rejoicing. She used to say to me, "Sister Phillips, when I think of my Heavenly home and the joys laid up for me there, I get in a hurry to go." I could write a whole chapter of "Aunt Lydia's" exhortations, prayers and talks in love-feast meetings. She was unlearned in what the world calls learning, but she knew bow to take hold of God's promises and how to cast her burden on the Lord.