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| Jacob B. Erion ca 1876 |
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| Mary Leonard Erion ca 1876 |
My grandfather once told me he would like to know more about his grandfather. However, it was during a time when I was having my own children and the days were filled with raising the next generation. There was no time to look back. But now there is. My Granddad passed away in 1983 but I have always remembered his words to me and this blog is a result of that remembering.
I have sourced my information. These are my own words except where indicated. A wonderful book that I used as a reference to help me imagine the time in which my great great grandparents, Jacob B. Erion and Mary Leonard Erion, were young is "An Ohio Schoolmistress: The Memoirs of Irene Hardy" edited by Louis Filler (The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242) I highly recommend it. Irene Hardy was born in 1841, my great great grandfather was born in 1842 and my great great grandmother was born 1843. All were born in Ohio.
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Jacob Benjamin Erion had RED HAIR. Who knew? He was 5’8” tall and he had blue eyes. These facts are stated in his Certificate of Disability for Discharge from the Army of the United States, signed by Company Commander Samuel Breasley on 27 Oct 1862. Jacob Benjamin Erion walked this earth for eighty-seven years.
A contemporary of Jacob and Mary Leonard Erion’s, Irene Hardy, was born 22 Jul 1841 in Eaton, Preble County, Ohio. Preble County, Ohio borders the State of Indiana. In her memoir, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy, (written over a five year period from 1908 to 1913), edited by Louis Filler, (Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 1980), Irene (pronounced as the Greeks did, eye-reen-a), wrote of growing up in rural Ohio in the 1840s through 1860s, exactly when Jacob and his siblings, and Mary Leonard Erion and her siblings grew up in Ohio.
When young, Jacob Erion and Mary Leonard probably lived in structures such as the ones Irene described in her Memoir. She stated that large virgin forests were interrupted by cabins built of rough unhewn (unfinished) logs with roofs of handmade clapboards. The big chimneys at each end of the one roomed dwelling were initially of sticks and mud, later replaced by stone. Around the middle of the 19th century, those rough dwellings were replaced by comfortable squared log houses. (pages 3 and 24, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy)
It was a prize to find a teacher and a schoolhouse during that time. Parents taught their children what they were able to teach them. If there was an organized schoolhouse with a schoolmaster, the school term usually lasted from September until the term ended in early spring. There were no holidays, not even a break for Christmas Day. Irene wrote that to establish even the giving of a treat on Christmas Day was a struggle for her parents’ generation and that her parents had told her of a teacher that had been ducked in a hole in a frozen pond because he did not recognize Christmas with a treat or a holiday. By Irene’s time, the students received a treat such as candy, gingerbread or apples around noon on Christmas Day, and the afternoon would be filled with an activity such as a spelling bee. (Source: page 39, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy). (Contrast Irene’s memory with the brouhaha that is made today (2010) of the Christmas season. Christmas school holidays, on average, are two weeks long, and the citizens of the United States began being pummeled with advertisements about holiday shopping fully three months before the actual day.)
Girls learned to spin, weave and sew cloth when they were young, although none of this could be done on the Sabbath. Any work done on the Sabbath was considered an absolute sin, and if one did not care what God thought about it, at least one should care what one’s neighbors thought! Irena wrote of wearing a beautiful moss-green, homespun flannel dress with slender stripes of red that her mother had made from cloth that she had woven herself. (pages 40 and 65, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy)
When Jacob and Mary were children, growing up in the 1840s and 1850s, it was customary that if company was present for the meal, children were to wait until after the adults had finished eating dinner before they could come in and eat. (page 49, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy) Everyone usually had plenty of food for each family raised their own food: meat, chickens for their meat and eggs, fruit, and vegetables. In Ohio maple sugar and syrup were made in February and March from sugar trees. The families made their own candles from either beeswax or tallow, and people were usually in bed by 8 p.m. (pages 62- 63, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy)
If letters were sent in the 1840s, they were folded in squares. There were no postage stamps or envelopes, so the letter was sealed with a wafer. (page 63, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy) A wafer was a small slip of paper that had glue on one side. The glue side was moistened and affixed to edges of the folded letter to keep it shut. Paper wafers came into popularity just before 1840. (Source: http://homepage.eircom.net/~lawe/WAFERSEALS.htm) The sender of the letter could either prepay for the letter or have the recipient pay if they wanted to see the letter. (page 63, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy)
More than likely Jacob’s and Mary’s fathers made all of their shoes from calfskin which came from their own cattle. Children went barefoot as soon as the spring had melted the snow and did not put shoes on again until the next winter’s snowfall. Shoe lasts, or the form around which the leather was formed to create the shoe, were carved and whittled from wood usually by the men of the farm. An awl and thread with a pig bristle twisted into the waxed end were used to stitch the shoes. While children were allowed to go barefoot for a good portion of the year, it was a sign of “shiftlessness” in adults to go without shoes. (page 66, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy)
A bird which Jacob and Mary saw when they were little, and people living now have never seen, was the passenger pigeon. In her memoir, Irene wrote,
“In the autumns of my sixth, seventh, and eighth years, (1847-1849), our part of the country (Ohio) was visited by enormous numbers of passenger pigeons, coming for the beechmast. In one of those years, which I cannot tell, the branches of the beech trees were weighed down with a quantity of nuts. Flocks of pigeons, like great clouds, flew over our house not far above the trees. We could hear the rush and see the silvery flicker of their innumerable wings above us. The people on the various farms made coop-like traps and caught them by hundreds.” (page 76, An Ohio SchoolMistress: The memoirs of Irene Hardy)
At age 19, Jacob enlisted as a private in the Union Army, 4th Ohio Infantry, Knox County, Ohio. (Source: Military Records of Individual Civil War Soldiers, Provo, UT: Ancestry.com) His term of enlistment was for three years.) According to The History of Knox County (Ohio) (Source: http://www.heritagepursuit.com/Knox/KnoxFile3.htm), the 4th Ohio Infantry was organized at Camp Jackson, Columbus, Ohio, on 25 Apr 1861. On 2 May 1861, the regiment moved to Camp Dennison. On the 4th of May, 1861, the 4th Ohio Infantry was mustered into the United States Army for a three months’ enlistment by Captain Gordon Granger. A few days after that, President Abraham Lincoln called upon men to enlist for three years which Jacob Erion did. (Source: Declaration for Pension, dated 12 Jun 1912, from the Pension File of Jacob B. Erion located in the National Archives)
While on duty at Camp Pendleton, West Virginia, Jacob was a victim of sunstroke. (Source: Erion, Jacob B., Pension File located in the National Archives. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, dated 19 Apr 1890) He received a disability discharge in 1862 from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. (Source: Military Records of Individual Civil War Soldiers, Provo, UT: Ancestry.com) The sunstroke affected his heart and he was to suffer periodically from chronic diarrhea for the rest of his life. (Source: Erion, Jacob B. Pension File located in the National Archives) The last two months of Jacob’s service in the Union Army, he was unfit for duty for a total of 55 days because of the sunstroke. (Source: Certificate of Disability for Discharge, Army of the United States, dated 27 Oct 1862, copy of which is in the Pension File of Jacob B. Erion, National Archives)
On 31 Dec 1863, (Source: Linn County, Iowa, History to 1878, Ancestry.com) Jacob married Mary Frances Leonard when he was 21 and Mary was 18. Nothing has been discovered about how Jacob and Mary met. The 1860 US census shows Mary living with her birth family in Morris Township, Knox County, Ohio; Jacob is living with his birth family in Monroe, Knox County, Ohio. In later years, during pursuit of his disability pension, Jacob B. Erion, while living in Chunchula, Alabama, filled out a Bureau of Pensions Agency Inquiry which asked “when, where and by whom were you married?” Jacob answered, “31st of Dec. 1863 near Mount Vernon, Ohio, by a Methodist minister from Fredericktown, name forgotten.”
The question after that on the form was “What record of marriage exists?” Jacob answered, “Marriage recorded at Mt. Vernon, Ohio.” This form was dated and signed by Jacob on the 4th of March 1912, two years before his wife Mary’s death. On that same form, page two, when asked where he had lived since his discharge, the following locations were listed by Jacob: near Mt. Vernon, Ohio; Springville, Iowa; Lewis, Iowa; Omaha, Nebraska; and at various National Cemeteries as Superintendent. Now on farm near Chunchula, Alabama. (Jacob left out his and Mary’s time in Appleton City, MO, where their children, Francis Leonard Erion and Esther P. Erion were born. Bleu) (Source: Bureau of Pensions, Agency Inquiries, Department of the Interior, dated 27 Feb 1912, original form in the Pension File of Jacob B. Erion, National Archives)
Shortly after their marriage, Jacob and Mary left Ohio along with Jacob’s parents, Philip and Matilda Latham Erion and their remaining children. Jacob’s younger brother, Salathiel Wheeler Erion, (1855-1946), recounted the families’ trip south in an article about Salathiel’s and his wife’s 60th wedding anniversary, published in Mt. Vernon, Iowa’s Hawkeye Record in March, 1939:
“Mr. Erion who will be 84 next month, was born at Mount Vernon, Ohio, and came with his parents, Phillip and Matilda Erion at the age of nine, to Iowa. He recalls their having been a caravan of five covered wagons accommodating three families making the trip to near Linn Grove in 21 days.”
They all settled close to one another in Linn County, Iowa. Jacob and his family are listed at Linn Township #288 and Jacob’s father Philip and his family are listed at Linn Township #285. (Source: http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ia/county/linn/census/1870censusindexef.htm#E) A copy of the Linn County Plat Map for 1869, obtained from the Linn County (Iowa) Historical Society also indicates that several of the younger siblings of Jacob Erion married the families neighboring the Erions’ farms.
Seeking new opportunities, in 1875, Jacob, Mary and their daughters moved to Missouri. First they lived in Bates County, Missouri, and then they moved to Appleton City, Missouri. (Source: Linn County, Iowa, History to 1878) Appleton City is located in St. Clair County and is located between Springfield and Kansas City on Highway 52. Jacob and Mary moved there about four years after it became a town. (Source: http://www.appletoncitymo.com/history.html)
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