Say a prayer ...

... for our friends along the Gulf Coast as Gustav heads that way. After June, Iowans should have considerably more empathy for folks who live in places that occasionally go under. I hope (and pray) that by the time I get back to this computer more than a week from now, Gustav will have dissipated without causing major damage and folks like Grandmere Mimi et. al. who made the trek from Thibodaux inland to New Roads today will be back in their homes safe and sound.

I'm headed south in the morning and get to stay for a while --- and that's a luxury for me. Now if I could just make up my mind if I want to get out of bed at 4:30 a.m. and hit the road at 5:30 or wait until the more civilized hour of 9. Guess it'll depend on when I wake up --- but I sure do like that early morning drive.

I owe a bunch of people e-mails. If you're one of them --- I've not forgotten; I've just been falling farther and farther behind this week. Give me another week,and I'll be back on track.

Murder Most Foul

Kate Summerscale's "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher" beckoned from the top shelf in the "History: English" section at the bookstore last week and I climbed up on a stool, stretched and grabbed it (New York: Walker & Company, 2008; list price $24.95).

While reading it straight through in short takes over the weekend while doing other things I started to worry about why we (and me in particular) are such avid consumers of murder mysteries.

I don't read them as much as I did years ago (my last marathon maybe four years ago involved paperback editions of all the Tony Hillerman Navajoland series). But if you look on shelves and behind doors around here you'll find DVDs of all the "Midsomer Murders" series released so far, all of the Miss Marple series starring Joan Hickson (the only Miss Marple so far as I'm concerned), all of the "Inspector Linley" series, three seasons of an unlikely series about gardening detectives called "Rosemary&Thyme" and more.

I do draw the line at most of the "mysteries" available on U.S. TV days in large part because there are many things I don't want to see and live broadcasts of autopsies, even though simulated, are among them. But offer me a BBC series or a paperback country-house or desert-southwest riddle involving death and destruction and I'll go for it nearly every time.

I know pacifists, even vegetarians, who relax with these blood-curdling works of fiction; preachers in conservative denominations who wrap their minds around a good murder mystery when the Sunday sermon stalls on the keyboard.

But after all that buildup I have to tell you that I decided I didn't want to worry about this any more; all I really wanted to know was how the story ended; and so I went back to reading. You can fuss about the larger philosophical and social issues if you want to but I'm not going to do it.

"Suspicions" is Summerscale's account of a real country house murder that transfixed England in the mid-19th century and set the stage in many ways for the mysteries we're reading today --- and for how we think about detecting and detectives.

It opens on 30 June 1860 when the body of Francis Saville Kent, just short of 4 years old, was found wrapped in a bloody blanket in the servants' privy of Road Hill House near Trowbridge. He had been stabbed, his throat cut and he may have been suffocated, too.

The only possible suspects were members of a large immediate family plus servants who had been locked securely inside Road Hill House the preceding night.

Enter Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard, among the first of the detective breed.

It's a fascinating book that explores, in addition to the murder mystery, how the nation reacted to it, how it was reported upon, how the world of fiction writing was changed and many other threads. The narrative bogs down once or twice under weightier topics, but that's not a serious flaw --- it's a simple matter just to skip over the philosophisizing and get back to the story.

Iowaville/Black Hawk postscript; Ola Babcock detour

A tire that kept wanting to deflate and couldn't be fixed until after lunch derailed me Monday, so I spent some time instead at the Lucas County Genealogical Society library and while there glanced through back issues of "The Van Buren County Genealogical Society Quill," that organization's newsletter. I happened onto (in Vol. 20, No. 2) an article entitled "She Remembers the Great Black Hawk," written by Alex R. Miller and published in The Burlington Hawkeye of 31 July 1921 (Miller was editor of his own Washington (Iowa) Democrat at the time as well). I'm not going to reprint the whole thing here, since it contains a good deal of excess verbage (Miller was both a newspaperman and a politician after all), but only a few exerpts that pertain to the Iowaville vicinity before 1840.

But first a detour: Alex R. Miller at the time this article was written was, as noted, editor of The Washington Democrat as well as a Democratic party activist. For better or worse, however, he inadvertently dropped dead of a heart attack in 1927 after running unsuccessfully for governor in 1926 and receded into the shadow of his wife, the magnificent Ola Babcock Miller (left). Name sound familiar? Look at the signage in front of what used to be called the Historical Building north of the Capitol in Des Moines and note that it's now the Ola Babcock Miller Building.

The Iowa Democratic Party, kind of as a reward for her loyalty and hard work, nominated Ola as its candidate for Iowa secretary of state in 1932 and she swept into office on FDR's tail after not expecting to win. She proved to be an incredibly hard worker and a remarkably astute state official, so had no trouble winning re-election and served until her own death, resulting in large part from working too hard, in 1937.

She is known as the mother of the Iowa Highway Patrol because she campaigned tirelessly for creation of a uniformed highway patrol to increase safety on Iowa roads and simply created one without authorization in 1934 when the male-dominated government moved too slowly to suit her. The next year, authorization was forthcoming and the Iowa Highway Patrol was officially born. She called its officers her "boys" and they responded with affection and respect. She also became George Gallup's (Gallup Poll) mother-in-law.

But that's neither here nor there so far as Black Hawk is concerned.

While in Libertyville, over east of Eldon in Jefferson County, to make a speech, Alex R. Miller got wind of a woman named Lucinda (Betterton) McClain, born 17 June 1831 in Pennsylvania, who had arrived in the "four-corners" region of Van Buren, Davis, Jefferson and Wapello counties with her parents, William G. and Marcy (Gardiner) Betterton in June of 1837, when she was 6 years old and a year before Black Hawk's death. The Bettertons lived in Wapello County in 1850, but are buried in the Iowaville Cemetery, where his grave is marked but hers, apparently not.

So Alex went out to her farm to visit Lucinda, then 90, and visit with her about the old days down by Iowaville.

Lucinda told Alex that "she first saw Black Hawk a little ways below Eldon, about two and one-half miles. She says Black Hawk talked his native language, of course, and a little English, although he had the Indian's taciturnity. He was not much of a talker. He talked English in broken fashion, but could make himself understood very well; and then, the white folks talked Indian, nearly all of them, more or less. She had a sister who spoke Indian like a native. Mrs. McClain knew a great many words, and formerly knew more, but she was never able to carry on a conversation."

After running through a few of the words that Lucinda remembered, Alex went on to report that "she said they settled right in the midst of the thickest of Indian settlements, near the Des Moines river. I asked if the Indians were good neighbors, and she said they could not have been better. They were friendly and neighborly and as kind as white folks, and sometimes better."

"She said the Indians would give them presents of wild honey and deer meat. She said she had seen droves of deer with 25 and 30 at once (keep in mind this was written at a time when Iowa's deer population had been largely extinguished), and wild turkeys by the hundred, and prairie chickens and quails, squirrels and all kinds of wild fruit, plums and blackberries, wild strawberries and crab apples, and everything you could think of."

"Her schooling consists of about three months in a log school house, and her education is very limited, according to her story. I asked her if she could weave, but she says she never learned, although her mother was an expert. Mrs. McClain could spin and the Indians often visited them to watch the women folks spin and weave, but they never molested anybody."

"All of their clothing was home-made, of course, and I asked her where they got their shoes. It happened that her father, William Betterton, was a shoemaker by trade, and he farmed in the summer time and made shoes for the family and for the neighbors in the winter. The first year they were in Iowa her father sowed ten acres into buckwheat. They had a good crop and they ground the buckwheat on a coffee mill and had buckwheat cakes and hominy and lived like kings. They had just as much fun, says Mrs. McClain, as they do nowadays. They had plenty of salt pork and deer meat and wild turkeys, and one winter her father made a trap to catch prairie chickens, and they caught hundreds of them, and they salted down a barrel of them for use the next summer and they were amazingly good.

"Mrs. McClain not only saw Black Hawk, but Keokuk, Wapello, Appanoose, and of course many of the ordinary braves. These were all chiefs, as you know. Black Hawk had two boys and a girl. The boys were named Thunder and Lightning, but she does not remember the daughter's name. I asked if she had ever seen General Street, who you know is buried in Wapello county, along the right-of-way of the C.B.&Q. railway .... General Street was an Indian agent, and he was very popular with the Indians, so much so that Chief Wapello asked to be buried by his side, and if I err not, they are so buried. Mrs. McClain also knew General Street's son, whose name was William, but they called him Bill."

After waxing poetic for a few paragraphs, Alex finally gets back on track to report that "She even remembered to send word to me, after I had left, that she remembers Black Hawk's funeral and how he was buried in a sitting posture. She said he was buried with his favorite rifle lying over his knees and his favorite hunting dog was buried with him so he might pursue his wonted labors in the happy hunting grounds, whither he was bound."

Now Lucinda would have been seven when Black Hawk died, so it's likely that stories from other family members and friends influenced her own memories. No one else that I know of, for example, reported a hunting dog is Black Hawk's grave. But still, I thought the article was an interesting footnote to Iowaville's history.

Jim Jordan's Bones: Part II

Some time after I’d finally decided that no Jordans other than Victor P. were to be found at Iowaville, I happened upon reference to a James Houston “Jordon,” not Jordan, whose grave WPA workers sent out to transcribe tombstone inscriptions in the 1930s reportedly had found in the big park-like Ottumwa Cemetery northeast of downtown several miles upstream from Iowaville and Eldon. The dates were right even though the name wasn't --- quite.

I finally got around to visiting that cemetery and with assistance from its helpful office staff and meticulous records was able to clear up some of the mysteries --- although several questions remain.

As noted earlier, the three surviving Hinkle children became keepers of the family flame after most other family members had died or moved away. Lora Jordan Hinkle, a determined woman if ever there was one, was the eldest. Then came Houston Arthur “Bud” Hinkle, a year younger. The youngest of the three surviving children was Harry Harper Hinkle.

About 1909, while sister Melvina Mae still was living, the Hinkle children donated to the state of Iowa a variety of documents, photos and artifacts they had inherited from James H. Jordan, including a ledger from his days as an Indian trader that caused a small flurry of excitement among Iowa historians. At the same time, a banged-up sword blade owned by Bud Hinkle was loaned to the state --- according to legend, this had been Black Hawk’s sword, given by him to Jim Jordan then gone astray before ending up in the hands of Masonic lodges at Iowaville and Keosauqua and finally being badly damaged in a fire.

After Abram Hinkle’s death in 1901, the family land had been divvied up among the children. The home place on Selma’s south edge was called Clover Hill Farm by Lora at least. Harry had inherited what was known as the Iowaville farm, which included the site of the old village as well as Robert Rathbun’s Iowaville House hotel, by then a tenant dwelling. Melvina May and Bud also had their land --- and Lora owned property she referred to as “the ranch.”

Lora had a brief early marriage. One record gives the name of her groom as A. F. Crapfel, but I can find no record anywhere of anyone even named “Crapfel,” let alone an A. F. Crapfel, so that probably is not accurate. But it’s really a moot point because they had no children, she divorced him soon and then reclaimed the name Hinkle. Lora seems to have spent most of her time at Clover Hill Farm and seems to have been deeply interested in history. There was a cabin on that farm that Laura decided had been built about 1832 by Thomas Benjamin Saylor --- making it, if that was accurate, one of the oldest surviving dwellings in southeast Iowa. She turned it into a museum that included among other things her grandmother Jordan’s square grand piano, brought upriver about 1850.

Bud Hinkle seems to have rarely left the family farms. He is the family member who turns up consistently on all census records through 1925. He may have been incapacitated to some degree, since Lora in her 1932 will bequeathed a farm to the family of J.W. Calhoun to acknowledge his help in advising and managing "my dear brother, Bud.”

Harry Harper Hinkle, beginning in 1896, spent much of his time in Mexico, where he was manager and part-owner of a firm called Pacific Packing Co. Passport applications show that he lived for more than a quarter of a century in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Chihuahua, but considered Selma his home and spent extended periods of time there over the years.

When the 1925 Iowa census was taken, the three Hinkle children, all in their 50s now, were living together at Clover Hill Farm. Bud and Harry both gave their occupations as “retired.” Harry returned shortly thereafter to his home in Mexico City.

Bud Hinkle died 3 July 1930 and and Lora was unsure what to do. She had his body prepared for burial at the Campbell Funeral Home in Eldon, then placed on July 4 in the receiving vault at the Ottumwa Cemetery to await Harry's return from Mexico. One problem she may have faced was the fact that the family lot in the Iowaville Cemetery was full.



When Harry returned to Iowa in October of that year, he purchased a large lot in a newer section of the Ottumwa Cemetery called “Summit” that appears to have been developed about 1930 or shortly before. This may have been purchased with something larger in mind since only three Hinkles remained unburied and the lot had room for at least nine (and perhaps 12 if a shoehorn were used) arranged in three ranks.

Bud's body was brought back to the Campbell Funeral Home in Eldon from the receiving vault for visitation, then graveside funeral services were held in Ottumwa on Saturday, Oct. 23.

Harry Harper Hinkle died 31 October 1932 in Mexico City and was brought back to Iowa by Lora and buried by Bud’s side. The scaled drawing of the lot maintained by the cemetery shows that Bud’s casket was placed in a steel vault and Harry’s in a “box.” Why the less than first-class burial for Harry I can’t say.


A month after Harry’s death, on 23 November 1932 at Ottumwa, Lora drew up her will. In it she left Clover Hill Farm to the state, noting two historic buildings upon it, one the Saylor cabin; and directed that her “ranch” be traded for the Iowaville farm owned by Harry. If that trade had been carried out as Lora wished, the “Old Rathburn Inn in Iowaville" and adjacent lots also would have gone to the state, presumably for preservation. As mentioned previously, J.W. Calhoun’s children were to receive the Bud Hinkle farm in return for his care of Bud; and the “Mae Hinkle Farm” was to go in trust perpetually to the sisters of Ottumwa’s St. Joseph Hospital. That trust was to be called “Melmae” or “Melvina” in Mae’s honor. All of Lora’s personal property was to be sold and proceeds disbursed to “children of Charles Starr, clerk of Ballingall Hotel, Ottumwa, a child of Edgar Johnson and the two children of Eula Swain Christy of Washington, D.C.”

Soon thereafter, Lora apparently put into motion a plan to uproot all her Jordan and Hinkle kin from their burial places at Iowaville and in Davis County and relocate them to the new lot in the Ottumwa Cemetery.

The reburial occurred, according to cemetery records, on 9 November 1933, and included Melvina Mae Hinkle, Sarah Frances Jordan Hinkle, James Erwin Hinkle, Nellie Brent Hinkle, Abraham Hinkle, Frances Melvina Jordan, James Houston Jordan and Henry Clay Jordan, all from the Iowaville Cemetery; and Thomas Jefferson Jordan, buried at Soap Creek Mill since 1850.

No one I suppose remembers now why Lora decided to do this. The lot in Iowaville was full, however, and this may have been Lora's somewhat unusual way to tidy up, bringing everyone together in one place.

Since Victor P. Jordan’s remains at Iowaville were not disturbed, it seems unlikely that his daughter, Keo, then living in Kansas, was involved.

It must have been done with the approval of Henry Clay Jordan’s daughter, Grace, then living in Chicago, since her father was uprooted and transported.


Exactly what state the remains were in upon reburial isn’t clear. The diagram of the lot shows a full-sized container for Melvina May, so she must have been brought in intact. Henry Clay Jordan has his own grave and his remains were inside a small box perhaps a 18 inches wide and three feet long.

The remains of the other seven were inside a container the size of a child’s coffin. It seems most likely that such bones as could be found when the graves were disturbed, and there wouldn't have been much left in some cases, were jumbled together in smaller containers, although cremation is a possibility.


Lora herself died three years later, on 27 March 1937 at Whittier, Calif., where she was spending the winter. Her body was brought to the Ottumwa Cemetery for burial --- inside a steel vault.


Something, however, appears to have gone badly wrong because with one exception (that of Henry Clay Jordan, whose tombstone probably accompanied him in from Iowaville) the family surnames are misspelled in every instance on the new tombstones placed in Ottumwa. All of the Hinkles, including Laura, Harry and Bud, are identified as “Henkel” and all of the Jordans as “Jordon.”

In addition, there is a later note on the lot reference card that the “stone for Thomas Jefferson Jordan, No. 8, is in cemetery office.” It was never placed and so the only record of his burial is the reference card.

These stones probably all were ordered and placed before Lora’s death. Her stone, alone, has no dates on it --- apparently no one bothered to complete that task after she died.

I really have no idea why this occurred, but there are indications in Lora's will and other documents that she knew the surname "Hinkle" had been spelled generations earlier as "Henkel" and that she had been impressed by that fact. So she simply may have decided to spell the name that way on the tombstones and perhaps "Jordan" as Jordon" as well. Who can say now?

The Ottumwa Cemetery file containing information about the Jordan/Hinkle lot also contains correspondence between cemetery association officials and Lora's administrators showing that the administrators declined to pay --- rather rudely --- some of the expenses associated with her burial. That could help explain why Jefferson Jordan's tombstone never was placed and now, of course, has vanished entirely.

Other posthumous difficulties awaited, but I'll talk more about those another time.

But the sad fact of the matter is that Jim and Frances Jordan, Abram and Sally Hinkle and the others who added shape and texture to Iowaville and its environs for a century, now are buried obscurely under the wrong names at a distance from the places their graves would have been in context and added meaning.

Miss Lora may or may not have been amused by all of this. The earth above her grave is smooth and grassy now, 70 years after she died, so if she spun in it for some time because of events after her death we'll never know.

In the long run, however, much of what turned into something of a debacle seems to have been her fault and maybe there's a bit of retribution here. I'd guess trader Jim doesn't care at all.

James H. Jordan's Bones, Part I

You might be a genealogist if … Your heart begins to pound wildly when you see a familiar surname on a tombstone across a crowded cemetery and then, after flying to its side and discovering that Great-great-granny’s inscription still is crisp and clear after 150 years, you place your right hand over your heart and sing “God Bless America.” Seriously. I like to know where the bodies are buried.

So it was frustrating to know that James H. Jordon had been buried in the Iowaville Cemetery but to not be able to find him there.

Trader Jim had lived long and prospered in his fine house upstream from Iowaville and downstream from Eldon along the Des Moines River. He had acquired as many as 1,800 acres of fine land and tended them well. He was honored by his neighbors and sought out for his stories about Black Hawk, Keokuk and the old days of Iowaville and its environs.

On the other, darker hand he had watched his wife and three children die before him.

Finally, on the 15th of July 1893, after almost 60 years an Iowan, most of them spent along the Des Moines, he was called home himself at age 86. Here’s the brief obituary published in The Ottumwa Weekly Courier of 18/20 July 1893:

“Eldon, July 17: We are called upon to chronicle the death of another old settler Saturday evening, the 15th inst., at 8 o’clock, James H. Jordan died at his home farm. He emigrated to Iowa in 1833 and settled near Eldon. He was married to Frances M. Williams Nov. 17, 1838. There were three children born to them who lived to raise families, but all, including the wife and mother, have passed away to the great beyond and now the last of the family is laid away in the Iowaville cemetery.

“Mr. Jordan was personally acquainted with the great Indian chiefs, Black Hawk and Keokuk. Black Hawk was buried near Mr. Jordan’s house. As an Indian trader he had many of them at his home for years and they considered him their friend, as indeed his life has always been a friend to the poor.

“His acquaintance was large, for who, for the last 60 years, far and near, has not known of Jim Jordan. He owned many hundred acres of the finest lands the sun ever shone on, so productive that corn raised on his farm took first premium at the Philadelphia centennial in 1876.

“At 4 o’clock Sunday the roads were lined with vehicles going to his funeral, which was preached by Rev. Bogdston, after which the remains were followed to the beautiful cemetery on the hill side and deposited by the side of his family to await the call of the master at the last day when all shall be judged.”

It’s necessary to talk a little about Jim Jordan’s family here, since all are involved in what turns out to have been Van Buren County’s biggest, although perfectly legal, case of body snatching.

As the obituary states, Jim had married Frances Melvina Brent Williams (born 22 June 1817 in Kentucky, raised in Missouri but visiting Bonaparte when they met) in the fall of 1838. They became the parents of three children, all born in Iowaville or on the riverside farm: Henry Clay Jordan on 25 September 1840; Sarah Frances “Sally” Jordan on 8 February 1844; and Victor P. Jordan on 2 November 1846.

Jim also had a brother, Thomas Jefferson Jordan, who fits into this story. He was living across the Des Moines River in the neighborhood of the Soap Creek Mill when he died on 20 April 1850 at age 45 leaving a widow, Katharine, only 22, and two young children, Peter, 3, and Thomas Jefferson Jr., 1. The mortality schedule attached to the 1850 federal census of Davis County states that Jefferson died of “C,” and I think that probably translates as cholera --- the 19th century equivalent to today’s big “C,” cancer. He was buried near the mill. It’s not clear what happened to Katharine, but Peter and Jefferson, “orphans,” were living with Jim and Frances across the river when the 1860 federal census was taken.

As the years passed, the Jordan children grew up on the riverside farm and married.

Sally married Abram Hinkle, a West Virginian (born 1 July 1835 in Pendleton County) who had distinguished himself in the Union army during the Civil War. His brother, Isaac Hinkle, was an early settler in the area of Selma in Van Buren County, living variously in Davis, Van Buren and Wapello counties, and Abram probably was visiting him when he met Sally. They were married on Christmas Eve, 1866, then moved back to West Virginia to live for a few years before selling out there and coming back to settle permanently on a farm along the river just south of Selma in 1871. The Hinkles prospered, too, and Abram became one of Van Buren’s largest farmers, acquiring as many as 1,100 acres. Abram and Sally had six children: Lora Jordan Hinkle, born 15 January 1869; Arthur E., born 1871; Harry Harper, born 1872; Nellie Brent, born 1874; Melvina May, born 1877; and James Erwin, born 1883.

Victor P. Jordan and Mary Rebecca Taylor were married 23 June 1873 and they had one daughter, Keo May Jordan, born 4 September 1874.

And Henry Clay Jordan married Alice Moore of nearby Eldon, a native of England, about 1884. Their only child, Grace B. Jordan, was born 22 May 1885.

The dying began in 1880 when Jim’s son, Victor P., died on 12 December at age 34. He was the first of nine family members to be buried in the Iowaville Cemetery (and the only one still there; photo above).

Jim’s wife, Frances, died seven years later, on 14 October 1887. The next year, their daughter (and Abram Hinkle’s wife), Sally, died on 10 February 1888 of tuberculosis at age 44 and the Hinkles’ youngest son, Erwin, followed two months later, on 7 April, age 5.

Henry Clay Jordan, the only surviving Jordan child, died on 15 March 1890, age 49; and Abram and Sally Hinkle’s daughter, Nellie B., followed on 10 April 1890.

Abram Hinkle survived his father-in-law by little more than 7 years, dying on 7 February 1901 at the age of 66. Ten years later, on 14 April 1911, his daughter, Melvina Mae Hinkle, died at age 34. She was the last of the family to be buried at Iowaville.

During these years, the family tree had taken some odd twists. Prior to 1900, Victor P. Jordan’s widow, Mary Rebecca, had married her brother-in-law, Abram Hinkle, And Henry Clay Jordan's widow, Alice E., had married Robert Isaac Hinkle, some 10 years her junior and Abram Hinkle’s nephew.

After Abram Hinkle’s death, Mary Rebecca and Keo May moved west to Hutchinson in Reno County, Kansas, where members of her family lived. Mary Rebecca died there on 8 October 1925. Keo May, who never married, continued to live at Hutchison until her own death on 2 December 1952. They are buried in Eastside Cemetery in Hutchinson.

Alice (Jordan) Hinkle’s second husband, Robert Hinkle, died in 1908, but she continued to live in Eldon until her death on 24 May 1930. She is buried in the Eldon Cemetery with Robert. Grace married Van V. Baldwin about 1909 and they continued to live in and around Eldon until after her mother’s death when they moved to Chicago and then to California. They seem to have had two sons, Richard V. and William. Alice died 30 April 1968 in Los Angeles and it she, after all the dust had settled, who owned the old Jordan homeplace and her grandparents’ fine house when it was demolished in 1964.

Trader Jim’s three surviving Hinkle grandchildren, Lora, Arthur "Bud" and Harry, became the keepers of the family flame, however.

Black Hawk's bones

Severe headaches develop when you try to sort out all the conflicting accounts of what exactly happened to the bones of the old warrior Black Hawk after they (or part of them) disappeared in 1839 from his grave here along the Des Moines River. But since I'm more interested in Jim Jordan's bones right now, I'll leave that headache to you and get on with this little tour of the Iowaville bottom.

We were just in Iowaville, remember. What now is the Davis/Van Buren County line formed the west limit of Iowaville because when the village was platted in 1838 by James H. Jordan and others everything beyond still belonged to the Sauk and Fox. Members of the white tribe were welcome to look and travel through, but not to settle.

But trader Jordan, well-known to the Sauk and Fox and considered by them to be a friend, had jumped the border and located his trading house and home, described as a fine double log house, about a mile west/northwest of Iowaville on a prime spot commanding a view southwest out across the Des Moines.

Travel that mile west on the old trail out of Iowaville today and you'll find the only landmark still standing on the bottom --- the lock-keeper's house located on a tiny triangle of land just beside the road fending off assaults from corn fields and that quarry to its northeast.


This was constructed in the 1850s as part of a scheme involving 28 sets of locks and dams authorized by Congress in 1846, the year of Iowa statehood, to make the Des Moines more navigable from its mouth south of Keokuk to the fork of the Raccoon at Fort Des Moines. Apparently some work was done on the lock here, too, but that has long since vanished.

The navigation scheme was abandoned in 1858 when it became clear railroads rather than riverboats would be supplying Iowa in the future, and neither the lock nor dam was completed. You can get an idea of what was planned downstream in the little riverside park in Bonaparte, where Lock No. 5 survives although the dam has long since vanished.

The lock-keeper's house was built on land owned by Jim Jordan and the proposed lock itself sometimes was referred to as Jordan's. He had built his trading house and home just to the north, in the southwest corner of Section 1, Salt Creek Township (Davis County), and would build his "mansion," a fine L-shaped wood-frame home in the federal style, there years later after he had been able to legally purchase the property from the government (patents for both the west half of the southwest quarter of Section 1, where his home was located; and Lot No. 1 of Section 12, where the lock-keeper's house is, are dated 1 February 1848).

This tiny triangle of Davis County, cut off from the rest by the river, has always had an identity crisis. Residents were far more likely to identify either with Wapello County to the north or Van Buren County to the east except when it was necessary to make the inconvenient trip across the river and crosscountry southwest to Bloomfield, the Davis County seat, for legal purposes.

The lock-keeper's house has never been separated from the Jordan property here, although the old homestead site (the home was demolished while the land remained in Jordan hands) and the acres surrounding it were sold out of the family after the 1968 death in California of the last of Jim Jordan's grandchildren, Grace (Jordan) Baldwin. It remains privately owned.

Although residents of the Selma-to-Eldon neighborhood always have valued the venerable building, the cut-off nature of this little corner of Davis County may help to explain why it has not drawn wider attention. Once badly damaged in a storm, it was repaired I'm told in a community effort involving neighbors and its owner. But there are no signs to explain its significance and the building itself is beginning to fray. One corner of the roof has been damaged and shutters on the gable windows have fallen away.

This is changing now. A group of Eldon-area people and the owner are working together to obtain a place on the National Register of Historic Places for the building, a move that will give it recognition long due and also make it eligible for grant funding for repairs.


Adding to the puzzlement of those who pass by the lock-keeper's house is the word "Chief" in concrete letters set into the side of a low mound in the yard. You can't see the letters here because the grass surrounding them hasn't been clipped this year. "Chief" presumably refers to Black Hawk, but it's not clear exactly why --- neither his lodge nor his grave was located here, although the lodge where he died was nearby, a short distance upstream between Jim Jordan's now vanished big house and the river.

The concrete letters mirror in a small way the much larger "Chief Wapello" set into an embankment near the graves of that old chief and members of the Street family in southeast Agency. So far, it's not clear when "Chief" was installed here.


Black Hawk had settled here along the river after his return from what was intended to be a penitential tour of the East that had developed into a personal triumph for the old man already famous because of the war that bore his name and his autobiograhy, "Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, Dictated by Himself," first published in Cincinnati in 1833. It's still a good read by the way and paperback versions are available.

Black Hawk, at this time, was a great national celebrity --- although that may be difficult to conceive of now. In the East especially (far less so on the frontier,which Iowa was at the time) his story had grabbed the hearts and minds of a white tribe now feeling some regret for its treatment of the tribes it had displaced ruthlessly and tangled up in a mare's nest of sentimentality and yearning. The old boy had, too, a lot of what we would call today charisma as well as a faithful wife, beautiful daughter and handsome son --- the stuff that whitefolk dreams are made of.

But he had come here to the banks of the Des Moines to die, and Jim Jordan was his neighbor and friend. And die he did on the 3rd of October 1838, reportedly two hours after Jordan had left his bedside. He was buried less than a quarter mile northwest some distance back from the river, but overlooking it, in an area now farmed over and featureless.

Jordan himself described the circumstances of the old warrior's death and burial several times, and those descriptions have been quoted, misquoted, summarized and just plain stomped on countless times. But here is one version of one account, taken from a letter postmarked Eldon and dated 15 June 1881, that was published later in The Burlington Weekly Hawkeye:

"Black Hawk was buried on the N.E. quarter of the S.E. quarter, Section 2, Town 70, Range 12, Davis County, Iowa, on the Des Moines River bottom, about ninety rods from where he lived when he died, on the north side of the river. I have the ground on which he lived for a dooryard, it being between my house and the river. The only mound over the grave was some puncheons split out and set over his grave and then sodded over with bluegrass, making a ridge about four feet high. A flagstaff some twenty feet high was planted at the head, on which was a silk flag, whch hung there until the wind wore it out. My house and his were only about four rods apart when he died. He was sick only about fourteen days. He was buried right where he sat the year before, when in council with the Iowa Indians, and was buried in a suit of military clothes, made to order and given to him when in Washinton City by General Jackson, with hat, sword, gold epaulets, etc...."

Even this letter reflects some of the problems involved in tracking material about Black Hawk and Jim Jordan to their sources. Although the letter was published in The Burlington Weekly Hawkeye of 9 February 1882, it was part of a long article that the Hawkeye had swiped from The St. Louis Republican "of a recent date," which quoted the Jordan letter --- written to Dr. J.F. Snyder of Virginia, Ill.

In 1839, everyone agrees, the grave was disturbed and all or part of Black Hawk's remains stolen by a James Turner, who then lived at Lexington, just upriver from where Bonaparte is now. Turner apparently felt he could make some money by either selling or displaying, side-show fashion, all or part of the remains.

What became of Black Hawk's bones now becomes multiple-choice based upon several of the many options presented over the years. Your guess is as good as mine --- and apparently we're as qualified to make a judgement here as anyone since it's unlikely all doubt ever will be removed. Choose from the following:

1. Only the head was stolen in 1839. 2. All of the remains were stolen in 1839. 3. The head was stolen in 1839, then thieves returned the next year and took the rest. 4. Black Hawk's family and friends removed the balance of the remains after the head was stolen and buried them secretly elsewhere (this is where the idea that some part of Black Hawk is buried in the Iowaville Cemetery comes from). 5. The skull and bones were cleaned and wired then recovered at Gov. Robert Lucas's order and brought to Burlington where Black Hawk's wife and children viewed and identified them, but asked that the territory retain them. 6. Black Hawk's skull was wired to someone else's bones, so that the remains recovered at Lucas's order and brought to Burlington were largely those of someone else. 7. Black Hawk's bones, once recovered and viewed by his family, were then stored in a building that burned and the bones burned with it. 8. The bones weren't in the building that burned at all, but remained in the possession of someone who buried them secretly in the old cemetery at Burlington from which they were transported upon its abandonment to the Potters Field section of Aspen Grove Cemetery. And there are more versions out there ...

Personally, I'm not quite sure what to think --- but suspect that the most widely-accepted account of the fate of Black Hawk's bones is the most accurate: That they went up in smoke in Burlington. But if you'd prefer to believe something else --- more power to you.

Like I said, a century later Jim Jordan's bones were snatched, too. I'm more confident here because I can show you where they ended up and propose to do just that.


This photo was taken upriver northwest just across the road from the lock-keeper's house. If you followed the river just a little ways in 1838, paddling hard against the current, you would have passed the lodge where Black Hawk died with Jim Jordan's double log house on the slight rise beyond it. About a quarter mile farther along, looking east from your canoe, you might have spotted a ragged silk penant flying from a 20-foot staff over the old warrior's grave.

Main street in Iowaville, late afternoon

The Des Moines River is back within banks by now, late August, but just barely as the drawdown at Lake Red Rock upstream continues. The “road closed” sign that discouraged travel down to Iowaville has disappeared and it’s possible to reach this evocative no-place, then turn west and drive up along the old trail to Eldon.

“There’s nothing here,” some who have come along on other treks have said. Exactly.

Those of my tribe, Eurotrash who washed up on the shores of America a couple of centuries earlier, would recognize the landscape they found when they got here in the 1830s, but not the surface --- corn and beans and weeds with a few junk trees along the fringes. We’ve not improved the place.

What was here before we arrived --- Sauk and Fox, Ioway, others unnamed before them --- is the stuff of myth within myth, truth obscured by layers of fancy, legends endlessly repeated, shifting slightly each time they’re told, that have settled over the place like silt. Dilettants like myself, who dabble in history, need to be careful lest we muddy the waters further.

Some say this was the site of a principal village of the Ioway people from the late 18th into the early 19th century. Some say it was Sauk and Fox; others, both. There are stories of a great massacre by a Sauk raiding party northwest of here that decimated the Ioways. Others doubt that occurred. Believe what you will.

I’m standing here just east of Iowaville, looking east toward the hills north of Selma, a mile and a quarter downstream, on the river trail that has shadowed the north bank of the Des Moines for goodness only knows how long. The sharp left turn is fairly new, however, as is the arrow-straight stretch of road that now shoots north from here midsection out to Highway No. 16. The old river trail used to meander on down along the river southeast to Selma, but at some point that stretch was abandoned and closed. The old road north used to come down to the river behind me, straggling alongside the Iowaville ditch that now cuts through the village site. There was no Highway 16 then.

Back up with me a ways, then click and enlarge the photo below, look to the northeast, and you’ll see a white dot in the distance. That’s the Iowaville Cemetery sign, marking the spot where most of those who died down here when there was an Iowaville are buried --- suspended below enigmatic mounds that reportedly crown the bluff above and the highest reaches of the flooding river below. There are tall tales of young men who swam from the Iowaville Cemetery to Selma once when flood water spread bluff to bluff four miles wide.


If I am not mistaken, Robert Rathbun’s Iowaville House hotel, long a farm house, stood to the right of the old grain bin here until the 1950s --- Iowaville‘s last building. I listen for Robert’s voice sometimes while standing here, or nearby, without much hope of hearing it.

Robert, who came here before 1840, age about 40, was Iowaville’s blacksmith and later proprietor with his second (or third) wife, Letitia, of the Iowaville House. They had six guests when the 1850 federal census of Iowaville was taken in October of that year --- a sawyer, a laborer, a farmer and three carpenters.

One of the early true believers, Robert’s son, Hiram, credited him (along with my uncle, George Miller) of being responsible for convicting Sidney Rigdon, a towering and later disgraced figure among the early Saints, of the prophetic truth of the Book of Mormon and by extension the veracity of its revelator, the prophet Joseph Smith Jr. Robert followed that prophetic voice to Independence, Missouri, where his blacksmith shop was destroyed by “gentiles,” then to Caldwell County, Missouri, where something went horribly wrong at Haun’s Mill and his family shattered. His then-wife, Hannah, took the surviving children back to Ohio and Robert ended up here, described still as “a Mormon preacher” in the 1850s.

Robert survived the great Des Moines River flood of 1851, but became suddenly ill mid-April, 1856, scrawled a minimal will on 11 April, died on the 14th. He died seized of the Iowaville House and its barn, four other town lots, “a cow and yearling calf, household furniture, notes, books and accounts, provisions, &tc.”

Robert is buried at Iowaville Cemetery beneath a broken stone so blackened by time that it’s almost illegible. His name is misspelled “Rathburn” on it, not surprising since Letitia, who probably ordered it, could neither read nor write. I would love to know more of Robert’s story, but time has silenced him most effectively.


Turn around and look west now and you’ll see the little bridge across the Iowaville ditch in the heart of the village, dug during the late 1870s from the river to Avery spring --- a lavish source of pure water flowing out of the base of the hills to the north.

The rail line built around the rim of the bottom in the late 1850s had created a drainage problem. Water coming down from the surrounding hills backed up behind its grade to the north, flooding farm land, and as the water moved south behind the embankment it finally overflowed east of Iowaville, flooding the lowlands. The Iowaville ditch, passing through a breach in the grade, rectified that.

Some say that as the ditch was dug, hundreds of human bones were disturbed. Others doubt that.

Cross the bridge and look farther west. Most of Iowaville would have been on the rise to your right, the river to your left.


Follow the road west, bend slightly southwest along the river with it and then turn again to follow the river northwest and you’ll come after a little more than a mile to the old lock-keeper's house, the last visible sign of this valley's history, and just beyond it, the site of James Houston “Jim” Jordan’s home and, just across from it, nearer the river (if not in the river by now), the site of Black Hawk's lodge.

The Jordan home place, once the finest in this valley, survived until 1964. By now, the site has been bulldozed flat and left entirely featureless, a rock quarry dug in its back yard.

I listen for Jim Jordon’s voice, too, because the tales he told seem to have set the agenda for most of what we‘ve heard since about this place. He was Black Hawk’s friend as the old warrior moved toward death.

Black Hawk and Jim Jordan, in a macabre sort of way, share more than a friendship and old men's tales.

Just as Black Hawk’s body was snatched from its grave some distance north of the Jordan house in the 1830s, so too, during the 1930s, was Jim Jordan’s body snatched from its resting place in Iowaville Cemetery. But, more of that another time.

In the mean time, the Des Moines River flows on by as it always has just beyond the trees.

High water marks

As you can see, the proprietors of the 1846 Mason House Inn at Bentonsport are taking no chances. Sandbags remain in place in front of the venerable building, flooded many times in its 162 years but spared when the Des Moines spread beyond its banks and crept onto the street in front during June.

There was some joking at the Greef Store, when I stopped in Monday headed back upriver from Farmington, that the bags painted red and green would look cheery for Christmas. I doubt it will come to that.


Still, the old river is running high, as you can tell from this photo shot upstream from the old 1883 bridge connecting Bentonsport and Vernon toward the new. This is less a factor of recent rain than it is of the Army Corps of Engineers managing the level of Lake Red Rock at the dam southwest of Pella, but it looks darned intimidating.

Here's a shot looking east toward Bentonsport and the Mason House from the footpath that since 1994 or so has used the old bridge as a base to connect the two villages for pedestrians. Driving across that old bridge, when it was the only bridge, used to be a major treat --- approach cautiously from either end to make sure no one was headed your way (if you were careless enough to meet someone on the bridge there was no option other than one or the other backing off), then drive slowly across as the old girl rattled and shoook. Ah the good old days.


Bentonsport and Vernon have taken a couple of big hits lately as towering figures in their recent history died. Burretta Redhead, who with her husband, Herbert, literally shook Bentonsport and brought it back to life, died during February of 2006. And Wendell Mohr, acclaimed watercolorist who turned the 1851 Vernon School into his home and studio in 1970, died on 25 May of this year. The old bridge that connects their former homes isn't a bad place to remember them and say "thanks!" for lives superbly lived.

Here's a final photo --- from the bridge toward the back of the 1852 post office building that used to stand just south of the Mason House until it was moved onto the riverbank --- and beyond it, the 1853 Greef Store.

Abner Kneeland don't get no respect ...

… at least not much in Iowa, including Farmington down in the southeast corner of Van Buren County, where the grand old infidel rests on a hill overlooking the Des Moines River valley with his fourth wife, Dolly, and other family members by his side. You’d expect at least a plaque when you’ve got custody of the mortal remains of one of the most innovative (and controversial) religious thinkers of the first half of the 19th century, the last man tried and jailed for blasphemy in Massachusetts and, some say, the nation.

Abner also, in 1839, was the first Iowan to launch a utopian community (this one for free-thinkers) at his Salubria along the river about two miles south of Farmington --- establishing a tradition carried forward by others, including arguably the most successful to date --- the Christ-centered Community of True Inspiration’s Amana Colony. And if you think that tradition is dead, consider Maharishi Vedic City north of Fairfield, founded in 2001 by followers of Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, the guy who brought us Transcendental Meditation. Ah, heaven on earth and the wonderfully whacky notion we can create it (overlooking the possibility the Creator may already have done that and we're just not paying attention).


Abner is a fascinating guy, born 7 April 1774 in Gardner, Massachusetts. Largely self-educated and trained to be carpenter, he moved as a young man to Dummerston, Vermont, where he married in nearby Putney the first of four wives (all removed in sequence by death save the last, Dolly, who survived him), Waitstill Ormsbee.

At Putney, he was duly dunked by the Rev. Josiah Goddard, became a member of the Baptist church and in 1801 began to preach. But Abner was by nature a seeker --- and soon the notion of universal salvation then rising in New England attracted him. Most Baptists were not amused by the idea of universal salvation.

That Universalist line of thought --- that God has an open-door policy --- developed in an era when it generally was felt one needed the proper combination to unlock the door to salvation (as a good many Christians still profess). In Universalism, the concept of hell went to hell, and that was considered heresy by many anxious to see those who disagreed with them fry. Still, Universalists (many of whom also were unitarian in outlook, dismissing the notion of the Trinity as fanciful) were more strongly Christocentric than the Unitarians and few of either profession dispensed entirely with God.

Abner was licensed as a Universalist preacher in New Hampshire in 1803 and ordained in 1805. He subsequently served Universalist societies in Charlestown, Mass., Whitestown, N.Y., and Philadelphia before relocating in 1825 to the Prince Street Universalist Society in New York City where his increasingly pantheistic views split the fellowship and led to his eventual withdrawal and finally disfellowship.

In 1831, he moved to Boston to become lecturer for the new First Society of Free Enquirers and with a long history in writing, pamphleteering and editing, founded his own newspaper, The Boston Investigator. By this time, he had tossed Christianity and organized religion as a whole out with the bath water and in the process of doing so landed himself in hot water.

The straw that broke the Boston establishment’s back was published in The Investigator of 23 December 1833:

“1. Universalists believe in a God which I do not; but believe that their God, with all his moral attributes (aside from nature itself) is nothing more than a chimera of their own imagination.

“2. Universalists believe in Christ, which I do not; but believe that the whole story concerning him is as much a fable and fiction as that of the god Prometheus, the tragedy of whose death is said to have been acted on the stage in the theater in Athens five hundred years before the Christian era.

“3. Universalists believe in miracles, which I do not; but believe that every pretension to them can be accounted for on natural principles, or else is to be attributed to mere trick and imposture.

“4. Universalists believe in the resurrection of the dead, in immortality and eternal life, which I do not; but believe that all life is mortal, that death is an extinction of life to the individual who possesses it, and that no individual life is, ever was, or ever will be eternal.”

Holy heresy! After three trials stretching over a five-year period, Abner finally was jailed for 60 days in Boston in 1838.

The whole process, however, was something of a turning point, although a far from complete one, in U.S. views of religious dissent. Even firm and convicted Christians began to understand what could happen if they dared express a view that seemed unorthodox to whoever was in charge at the time.

And Abner himself stoutly maintained that he was in no way an atheist --- merely a pantheist: "I had no occasion to deny that there was a God; I believe that the whole universe is nature, and that God and nature are synonymous terms. I believe in a God that embraces all power, wisdom, justice and goodness. Everything is God. I am not an atheist but a pantheist," he wrote.

Backing up 30 years, you’ll remember perhaps that Abner had married Waitstill Ormsbee in 1797 in Putney, Vermont. They became the parents of four children before her death in 1806. He then married Lucinda Mason of Wrentham, Mass., in 1806 and they had four children as well before her death in 1812. In 1813, Abner married as his third wife Mrs. Eliza (Deland) Osborn of Salem, Mass., and although that union produced no children it endured until her death, too, Finally, in December 1834, he married Dolly Lovering Rice whom he had met a year earlier when she asked him to officiate at the funeral of her late husband, James Rice, who died 5 December 1833. Abner was 60 at the time of the marriage and Dolly, in her early 30s with four children of her own Abner and Dolly went on to have four more children, the youngest of whom was born in Iowa when he was 68.

Out of Jail in 1838 and with the backing of the Boston First Society of Free Enquirers, Abner looked west for a new home where he and others could perhaps escape militant Christianity and found a city of free thought, set on a hill.

It‘s not especially clear who conceived the idea of the community called Salubria or who alighted upon its location about two miles south of the frontier village of Farmington on the east bank of the Des Moines in what became Van Buren County. More than likely it was a collaborative effort of several Society of Free Enquirers members and Kneeland. But when Abner decided to go there, he became its leader and prime mover.

Abner came west in May of 1839 with his stepson, James Rice, and they built a home. Dolly and her four daughters, three Rice and one Kneeland, followed, leaving Boston in June and arriving in Iowa in July.

Some misunderstandings about Salubria have developed over the years. It was in no way intended to be communal, for example; merely free of organized religion. By some estimates there were as many as 100 Salubrians in and around the community center. And there was some evangelizing going on. Abner is known to have lectured in the river towns of Farmington, Bonaparte, Bentonsport and Keosauqua and elsewhere and to have continued contributions via letter to The Investigator back in Boston.

The Christian preachers arrived hot on Abner’s tail --- and probably because most of them outlived him by many years, it doesn’t take long with a Google or other search to find several instances online of preachers strutting around crowing about how they bested Abner in debate and sent the Godless infidel running for cover.

This all seems unlikely, since Abner was by all accounts a gifted speaker and debater and the most gentlemanly of contenders, and unlikely to run from anyone. He who lives longest sometimes wins merely by doing so, however, and Abner didn’t.

Abner was old in terms of those days and his followers were few and his sudden death on 27 Aug 1844 at age 70 pretty much removed the unlikely possibility that Iowa would develop as a pantheistic paradise rather than as one of the stronger links in the Bible belt of America.

Abner was buried with others in a little cemetery at Salubria and remained there for somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 years. Among those who joined him were his stepson-in-law, Thomas Crim, who died June 6, 1858; his stepdaughter, Dorcas J. (Rice) Crim, who reportedly died in 1864; a James Kneeland, whom I can’t identify because I can’t read the inscription on his tombstone or find anything else to tell me precisely who he was; and Dolly, who died at Keokuk at the home of her daughter, Dolly L. (Rice) Drummond/Farris, on 5 November 1871, age 71.

All still were at Salubria in the late fall of 1880 when the following report appeared in The Farmington Bee of 6 November: “On last Sabbath it was our pleasure to visit the grave of the aged and celebrated Pantheist, Abner Kneeland. This noted man established himself two miles south of this city, in a small colony which he called Salubria. In the month of August, 1844, he very suddenly died. His grave is marked by a plain marble slab, surround by some half dozen other mounds. Over the sleeping-place is growing kenicanick and briars, the whole surrounded by a field of green growing wheat, and in the distance is still standing the house built by his hands. The place is, indeed, salubrious and romantic. One standing upon this beautiful spot cannot help being struck with the former bravery and wisdom of the venerable sleeper.”

Not long thereafter, perhaps because of the abandoned nature of the cemetery, the Kneelands and their tombstones were brought into Farmington and the bodies reinterred in a new addition to the Farmington Cemetery, located on a bluff just east of town. And there they remain to this day.

And I think some sort of minor monument explaining a bit of this history to passers-by is in order. The people of Van Buren County might consider this, the Unitarian Universalists (who consider Abner a founding light on the road to rationalism), even a coalition of Christians: There’s nothing better for stirring up revival, after all, than the sort of righteous indignation a pain in the ass like the Rev. Mr. Kneeland can and did inspire.


The grave of Dorcas J. (Rice) Crim, one of Dolly's daughters by James Rice, is located just south of Abner's. She reportedly died in 1864 although most of the inscription on her tombstone either is below ground or, if this is just a tombstone fragment, missing entirely.


Dorcas J. Rice's husband, Thomas Crim, who died in 1858, is buried just south of her. Like the others buried on this lot, his original resting place was the small cemetery at Salubria about two miles south.


This appears to the top part of a larger tombstone. The inscription begins, "In Memory of James Kneeland," but I simply couldn't make out the rest. I do not know who James was. He was not a child of Abner, however.


This is a view, looking northeast, of the entire Kneeland lot. The stubby marble obelisk at the south end of the lot has simply dissolved over the years and there's not a trace of an inscription although probably there once was one to tell us whose grave it marks.

To reach the Farmington Cemetery, turn east off Highway 2 in the east part of town onto Van Buren County Road J56 (Pearl Street) and follow it up around the hill on which the cemetery is located. The cemetery is full and a newer burial place in south Farmington has supplanted it. In addition to some interesting old tombstones, many in deplorable shape, the old cemetery contains some of the finest oaks I’ve seen, trees that perhaps predate this hill’s present use. You can turn onto short circling drive through the newer east part of the cemetery. But be warned if you’re tempted to drive into the old cemetery on what looks like a grass trail you’ll have to back out, dodging tombstones and trees all the way. It’s best to park and walk. You’ll find the Kneeland lot in the extreme northwest corner of the cemetery, out on a point west of the original hilltop burying ground.


There’s a good deal of material about Abner available online and, of course, in print. I’ve relied heavily on Mary P. Whitcomb’s excellent article entitled “Abner Kneeland: His Relations to Early Iowa History” published in the April 1904 edition of Annals of Iowa (I lifted the alleged heretical statements published in The Investigator from this source); Stillman F. Kneeland’s 1897 Seven Centuries of the Kneeland Family, where I found the report of a visit to Abner’s grave as reported in the Farmington Bee; and an excellent concise summary of his life found on the Web site of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.

On the road to Abner Kneeland's grave Monday ...

... I stopped at the Davis County Iowa Welcome Center in Bloomfield to pick up an Iowa map. Didn't really need one, but a map makes me feel secure and the last time the old pickup went in for an oil change I did a clean sweep to make it look a little less like someone was living in it --- and the maps ended up in a heap in the house in Mason City. Iowa produces and gives away wonderful road maps and welcome centers (rest stops, too) are some of the places you can find them.

Besides, I like the Bloomfield Welcome Center, located maybe a block north of the northeast corner of the square right on Highway No. 63. If I'm remembering right, it's a restored Sears, Roebuck & Co. house. The two front rooms form a shop featuring local crafts, books and the like. The volunteer attendant, surrounded by the usual blizzard of pamphlets and promotional material, sits in the old dining room and the room north of that is a Christmas center --- interesting if you're in the mood for Christmas in August. And then there are the usual restrooms, etc.

I always find something to buy, for better or worse, and this time it was a copy of the brand new "Mars Hill: A Living Legacy," by Michael W. and LeAnn Lemberger (Ottumwa: PBL Limited, 2008, list price $24.99 --- yikes!). But it's for a good cause, the restoration of Mars Hill Baptist Church whose torching by stupid-kid arsonists I lamented a couple of years ago (with pictures) somewhere else in this rat's nest of blog entries.

The restoration after the fire of Iowa's oldest functioning log church out there in the woods between Ottumwa and Floris is nearing completion, it's good to report. I planned to stop when I was headed home later Monday, but took a wrong turn north of Floris and missed it entirely (but it was a pretty drive anyway). I can always find Mars Hill coming in from the north, so that can wait until another day.

The fiberglass horse attached to an Amish buggy in front of the welcome center signifies that Bloomfield is at the heart of one of Iowa's fastest-growing Old Order Amish communities and if you're interested in visiting some of the dozens of on-the-farm shops operated by the Amish (offering everything from groceries and furniture through tack and buggies to baked goods), you can get a map at the welcome center --- and you'll need one.

I'm not sure if it still works this way, but the welcome center folks used to turn that big plastic horse over to the historical society before Christmas and it was moved to the museum and hitched to a sleigh as part of a holiday display before being stabled inside during snow season.

I had gotten to Bloomfield along one of my favorite routes --- east from Chariton on Highway 34, then south through Melrose (the Irish capital of southern Iowa) to that Appanoose County road that skims along the north side of Lake Rathbun (water's as high as I've ever seen it there) on the Mormon Trail route before plunging south and east through Moravia, Unionville, Paris (Bunch) and Drakesville (still on the Mormon Trail) to pick up No. 63 just north of Bloomfield.

After lunch at Uncle Bob's (not quite the same as when Uncle Bob actually ran it but good enough), I headed east off the southeast corner of the square toward Troy.

Ghost stories

I’d expected lonesome, but was surprised even so by how empty the old home place felt when I drove out late Tuesday --- as if the very life had been sucked out of it.

Truth be told, I hadn’t planned to go out there this week --- let it rest for a while, leave it to the Realtor. But my aunt, now safe in the suburbs a long day’s drive away with the old Buick in Linda’s and Randy’s driveway and all her belongings in storage awaiting the perfect apartment or condo, had started to worry: Where was the thermostat set? Had the phone really been disconnected? And where the heck was her pill-cutter? She wanted some photos of the old place, too.

There’s nothing spooky about the house. When my aunt and uncle started working there in the early 1970s, they gutted it, had it propped up and a new basement inserted, made a few additions and rearranged the interior space. They dropped a brand new house inside the shell of the old. And when the tiny louvers between layers of glass in those Pella windows are closed, you could be in the suburbs of any city .

Walking around outside is a little different, however, thinking about all the feet that had walked out here before, and those big old barns can be spooky --- especially when the owl family that calls the upper barn home is in residence, hooting unexpectedly from its depths.

I kept hearing a sound I couldn’t place out by the barns --- a humming. Someone operating equipment in the distance? A ghost? Then I batted away a few incoming rounds that had gotten tangled in my hair and looked up into the twin pines, remnant of a great windbreak that once had encircled the farmstead, and spotted the swarm of bees. A big one.


I could just see Granddad then in his bee-keeping gear, smoker in hand, headed up a ladder to soothe, then capture and hive that swarm. An orchardist, he always kept bees; and I remember the honey, still in combs, in a big cut-glass bowl in the middle of the kitchen table.

That got me to thinking in a fanciful sort of way about ghosts who might haunt this place now that the life had gone out of, who might have taken advantage of the vacuum and moved in for a while to reclaim it. It had to be people who had died here, I decided, on the larger farm that our home place and the older Miller farmstead with its 60 acres just down the road once formed.

It’s nice when you can pick your ghosts and set the parameters for them.

Understand that I don’t believe in ghosts --- spirits from beyond the grave. Such ghosts as do exist live in our heads I think; we create them --- sometimes to feel good, sometimes to feel bad and at other times just to scare ourselves to death. I’ve known people whose ghosts come to possess them. But I just think in ghostly terms sometimes.

The first to die here in our time, after 1880, was a baby boy, youngest child of my great-grandparents, who didn’t live long enough to be named although he was called Joseph Cyrus in the family Bible, named after his death for the father who had inadvertently killed him. Born 26 July 1895, he was a sickly infant and his mother, sicker. Mary Elizabeth was 40 at the time and probably should have stopped with Uncle Jerry, born three years before. Cyrus, with a houseful of other kids, a sick baby and a desperately sick wife, confused medication and gave the baby a dose of something powerful intended for its mother. The baby died as a result on 14 August 1895, less than a month old.

Cyrus brooded about that, Grandpa used to say, consumed by grief and guilt. Three months later, on 15 November 1895, he fell over backwards dead into a wagonload of hogs he was taking to market in Chariton. Neighbors noticed the team and wagon traveling on their own, stopped the horses and found him. He was 42, but his ghost for me always stands alongside the road out on Highway 14 south of the Williamson turnoff, just as it starts to angle southwest down the Little Whitebreast hill to cross the creek. That’s where he died or so Grandpa said.

The next to die was another baby, this one up the road at the new house, son of my grandparents, Will and Jessie Miller. Like his uncle, whose death was a tragic accident, this baby too was named after his death in the family Bible, William Ambrose Miller Jr., just so he’d have a name. Little Will died of the whooping cough, no less sorrowful an event but less tragic. Born 6 November 1912, he died on 23 December of the same year. Even though he had been given a name, Grandpa had just the worlds “Our Baby” inscribed on the big tombstone erected many years later on that little grave in the Columbia Cemetery.

But surely two babies are unlikely to haunt much of anything 100 years or so later, long after all who remembered them are in their graves as well.

Two years after the second baby died, Jessie’s mother, Chloe Brown, died at the new house on 15 June 1914. She was 80 and had outlived two husbands, Moses W. Prentiss and Joseph Brown, and had come up from Columbia to live with Jessie and Will when they were married in 1905. This gentle and gracious lady, who had come west as a young woman with her family from Mason County, (West) Virginia, died more or less of old age, it was said, and 80 at that time was very old. My Uncle Joe, about 8 at the time, used to say he could just barely remember her at rest in her coffin in the living room.

I doubt Chloe would have much interest in haunting or inclination to haunt in these parts. Maybe a stroll down the street in old Columbia, or out north of Corydon; Point Pleasant on the Ohio perhaps. But not here.

Great-grandmother Miller, nee Mary Elizabeth Clair, was the next --- on 11 October 1933 down at the old house. She was 78 at the time, a strong woman who had raised a big family mostly on her own after Cyrus died, built the house she died in, pulled the farm out of debt on her own. She accomplished a lot in a fairly long life and I can‘t think of a reason she‘d look back regretfully enough to haunt her descendants --- hundreds if not a thousand of them by now.

Grandmother Jessie died 12 years later in the new house on 7 January 1945 at age 70 after a long and meticulous battle with diabetes conducted when treatment for that disease was in its infancy. Seventy is not especially old now, but it was a miracle some say that Jessie lived as long as she did. That was before I was born, but my folks talked sometimes of her funeral down at Belinda Christian Church on a day so cold and snowy it took a road grader running in advance to get the funeral party from the church to Columbia Cemetery and out again. This was the last time the whole process --- from embalming to visitation --- took place on the farm.

Jessie was a lot like her mother, and my mother (her daughter), I’ve been told, kind, gentle and gracious --- but strong enough to keep my rambunctious grandfather firmly in control. She also talked a lot --- maybe I inherited that since my mother didn’t. But a ghost? I don’t think so.

And finally Warren, who was my Uncle Jerry’s youngest son. Warren sometimes took on almost mythic proportions for us grandkids, his much younger cousins just up the road --- because we never saw him even though he was there all along less than a quarter mile away.

He’d come home after the Korean War to live with his dad and just got shyer and shyer as the years passed, or so it seemed. When any of us, or other strangers, showed a sign of getting close he headed in the other direction as fast as he could --- into the barns, out across the fields or upstairs if caught in the house. I saw his back one time from an upstairs window at Granddad’s house as he walked north through the orchard --- moving away from a houseful of his Miller cousins. And that was it.

Warren rented Granddad’s farm for a while, even lived in the new house off and on in a camp-out sort of way after Grandpa moved to town. But we never saw him.

“It’s just too bad,” my dad said one time. “He was a fine looking man and a smart and well-spoken one, too.” We never figured out what the problem was --- of if there was a problem at all. Sometimes when people don’t behave the way we think they should we conclude something’s wrong. But this could have just been Warren being Warren and there was nothing wrong with that. Or maybe he'd allowed his own ghosts a little too much latitude. I just don't know. I do know his sisters and brother, nieces and nephews, loved him a lot.

Warren died of a heart attack on 13 August 1980, when he was 55, in his shop down at the old farmstead. My dad was one of the pall bearers.

Warren was the last of us to die out there on the farm but I doubt he‘d haunt us. Not very sociable in life, death would be unlikely to change that.

The uncomfortable thing about all this ghostly speculation was how clearly it brought into focus my own ghost story --- the one I know is true. I’ve never told it and am unlikely to, not because it frightens but because it makes me sad. And there’s no point in dwelling on such things and I don’t think much about it anymore. Like I said, our ghosts live in our heads.

But it seemed odd out at the farm then, as evening settled it; so I got into the truck and went home.

I’m anxious for the old place to sell now, for new life to take possession and send those old ghosts, whoever they may be, on their way.

Splendor in the grass

I'd just as leave drive a truck when it comes right down to it, or farm, or build stuff --- do something that's useful. But the sad truth is I'm mechanically inept and you have to be mechanically apt to do stuff like that. (Well maybe not drive a truck these days, considering the price of diesel.)

I think this may be some kind of birth disorder --- color-blindness, for example. Like most of us who think we want to do stuff we can't, I prefer to think that if I really applied myself, worked hard at it, I could change the oil in the truck, too. Or build a deck. But another fact of the matter is I'd rather read another book, and not about mechanics or building decks, and so most likely will never know for sure.

Which brings me to the venerable Snapper (above). Isn't she a beauty? Looks a little like a small dinosaur that just crawled out of its rock, a fossil come to life. We've spent a lot of quality time together.

Other folks play golf; I mow lawn. It's not the finished product that's important you know. It's the process.

I like to push the old pusher (not the Snapper) out to the back 40 on a crisp day, divide it into neat quarters with even slices, then cut each quarter into swaths headed in different directions, a visual treat for whoever might be flying over. Cavafy is my lawn-mowing muse:

"Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches."

But when push comes to shove, I'm just as content aboard the Snapper going around in fast circles and getting that darned grass cut darned quick --- especially if I want to go somewhere else or it's 100 degrees in the shade.

The Snapper had developed a couple of minor problems this summer --- it needed a new part and one tire was wounded. So Darrin came over last week and fixed her up and on Monday when, plagued by heat and houseguests, I fired her up and roared out to the back 40 I was fired up, too.

Then I noticed she was riding kind of high --- not cutting the grass short enough.

Now I don't want no long-haired hippy lawn. I want buzz-cut. I've got long-haired hippy lawns for neighbors. The guy who owns the quarter block back of me doesn't care about grass --- he's focused on the model train outfit he's been building for years among the tufts and weeds. Fine by me; mine looks better by comparison. The guy who owns the other half of my quarter block, just to the south, cares too much about his grass and he likes it long, uniform, weed free and boring (he patrols the line with a spray can filled with poison, zapping any hapless immigrant that tries to sneak over the border from my territory into his and has accused me at times of grass abuse for cutting mine too short). I still cut mine short.

Anyhow, I kept mowing even though what was left was way too long, then drove the Snapper back to the house trying to figure out why she hadn't cut shorter.

As it turns out, Darrin had been watching and came over to see how the old lady had performed. "Well," I said, "she's cutting a little long."

"Well," he said (or something like this; trying to spare my tender feelings), "you know that little lever right there raises and lowers the blade; I raised it when I fixed it and forgot to lower it again."

Now I knew that --- a couple of years ago; but since I always mow short hadn't thought about it in a long time and that useful piece of information had just flown right out of my pretty little head.

So he lowered the blade, I rose above my humiliation, fired her up, went back to the back 40 and mowed it again. It was just as much fun that time as it had been the first time around.