Willy Black portrayed agricultural entrepreneur Lewis Bonnett (1830-1899) during Sunday's 18th annual Chariton Cemetery Heritage Tour. Willy is a nephew some generations removed of Lewis. His great-great-grandfather was the Daniel Bonnett, also mentioned here. Here's the text of Sunday's presentation.
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Lucas County always has been livestock country and I was a pioneer in that industry. After moving to Chariton just after the Civil War, I amassed 4,000 acres during the next 30 years and became one of Iowa’s leading sheep producers as well as a leader in cattle and hog production.
My name is Lewis Bonnett and I followed the lead to Iowa from Illinois of my brother, Daniel, who settled two miles west of Chariton during 1856. My home place, which we called The Pines, was located three miles south of town, astraddle the Warren-Benton township line.
DANIEL AND I BOTH were born near Mount Vernon in Knox County, Ohio, me in 1830 and he, in 1832, middle among the 10 children of John and Elizabeth Bonnett. We were raised on a farm there and educated in the public schools although I attended a private academy, too, thinking that I might teach. In 1851, our parents moved west to a farm near Bloomington in McLean County, Illinois, and we went along.
My first work in Illinois was as a school teacher, but I soon satisfied myself that I was not suited for that profession. So I joined Daniel as a herder for the Birney livestock operation in McLean County, an outfit that marketed mostly in Chicago and owned land on that city’s outskirts. This was how we became familiar with the Chicago of the 1850s --- herding livestock where Rush Medical College later was built.
This also was how we determined that our futures lay in buying, selling and producing livestock, even though we would need to leave Illinois behind in order to develop the size of farming operations we had in mind. That was why Daniel moved west to Lucas County in 1856 and I followed nine years later.
During the late 1850s, I had renewed my acquaintance with Miss Maria L. Virgin, who had grown up in near Mount Vernon, Ohio, too, and we were married Dec. 12, 1859, at her parents’ home in Menard County, Illinois. I was 29 at the time and she was 25.
We began housekeeping on a farm in McLean County that I owned --- too small in acreage for production but large enough to operate a successful livestock marketing business. Our proximity to the Chicago market during the Civil War meant that we prospered mightily, generating the stake I would need to expand into production in Iowa once the war was over.
Maria and I arrived in Chariton during 1865. We traveled overland with two yoke of oxen and two teams of horses, shipping other stock and goods in rail cars to Eddyville, where the rails ended at the time. During our first year here we acquired 1,000 acres of unimproved prairie south of Chariton and built and moved into our new home there in 1866.
BY 1879, when a correspondent for the newpaper “Western Rural” visited us, we had accumulated 2,800 acres and had become a showplace, marketing 1,000 head of livestock a year, all shipped by rail from the Chariton stockyards. Chicago remained our principal market.
Our fields, a dozen of them averaging more than 100 acres each, all were fenced. We were pioneers in Osage Orange hedge fencing with the balance old-fashioned rail or the newest, barbed wire. We raised 400 acres of hay and 250 acres of corn and offered other Lucas County farmers a market for thousands of bushels of oats.
But mostly we raised livestock --- cattle, hogs and, after 1875, sheep, most Merino or Southdown. Our sheep herd in 1879 numbered about 1,200 --- valued both for flesh and, most lucratively, for wool. Sheep, however, were labor intensive in part because they had to be penned nightly to guard against coyotes and feral dogs so many producers were unwilling to take them on. We employed dozens of men and kept on hand 30 to 50 horses, including breeding stock.
By 1879, Maria and I had become the parents of seven children. Our first, daughters Anna and Emma, died very young in Illinois. John Virgin Bonnet, born during 1863, accompanied us to Lucas County and four children were born here: Arthur Isaac in 1865, George Yountz in 1868, Lewis Rex in 1873, and Elizabeth Ruth, in 1875. All four boys carried on the Bonnett farming tradition as adults. Ruth married Alfred Trump and moved initially to Kahoka, Missouri, where he had a store, and then to Chicago.
Like many rural families, the farm itself always came first. So we lived in the same modest house that we moved into during 1866 until 1887 when fine new home was built on the home place, now called The Pines because one of my passions had been to plant conifers in a region only the red cedar was native to. Some said we had the finest pine grove in Iowa.
Sadly, Maria had only three years to enjoy her new home. She died of heart failure on the 27th of March 1890 at the age of 56. Three years earlier, Dr. James E. Stanton --- owner of the Chariton Cemetery --- had built a public mausoleum here with spaces for 30 interments. After funeral services at The Pines, we placed Maria’s remains in one of those crypts and I reserved another as my eventual resting place.
IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING Maria’s death, I continued to expand and improve my operation and our sons joined me in partnership. I dealt with the challenge of providing water to the livestock by having nine more wells drilled across the property and more windmills installed. By 1896, my land holdings had increased to 4,000 acres, including tracts in Wayne County that allowed me to ship from both Cambria and Chariton. And more than 4,000 head of sheep now grazed our pastures.
But I was beginning to take life a little easier, too, as the doctors were worried about my heart. I spent several weeks each year traveling to visit family, old friends and familiar scenes in both Illinois and Ohio, took in major livestock expositions across the country and spent more time with my daughter and son-in-law in Missouri.
It seemed wise to plan for the future of my estate, too, and so during late spring, 1899, almost as if I’d had a premonition, I deeded to each my five children land valued at $25,000 in tracts ranging from 500 acres to more than 600.
The end came unexpectedly on June 10, 1899, in Chicago. I had accompanied a rail car of sheep to market and met up with an old friend. We checked into the Drovers’ Hotel near the stockyards, then on Saturday night set out for State Street to celebrate both the sale and a modest profit I had made that morning speculating in wheat on the Board of Trade.
Crossing a street after attending a vaudeville show, I suffered a heart attack and was carried to a room in the nearest hotel, a seedy operation above a bar, where I died. The nature and place of my death, confusion afterward and my prominence resulted in considerable gossip, but my son, George, and a family friend went to Chicago, sorted it out and brought me home. Following funeral services at The Pines, my remains were interred beside those of Maria in the Stanton Vault.
We rested side by side there for more than 60 years, but then what had seemed a secure final resting place turned out not to be. The cemetery had been sold by then to the city and the mausoleum was in such bad shape that the decision was made to demolish it. Our descendants evacuated our remains and reburied them over there, overlooking the Chariton River valley. They also removed the doors from our crypts --- iron-framed with inscribed marble inserts --- and had those mounted at our graves. We also have a modern stone, which is just as well. The marble slabs by now have broken and eroded and are no longer legible, but those relics remain the last trace of the old Stanton Vault still above ground here in the cemetery. And so far as our farming empire south of Chariton is concerned, that, too, has vanished. (Research and script writing by Frank D. Myers.)
This image of the Bonnett tombstone is several years old. It shows the fronts of the Stanton Vault crypts in which they were interred originally mounted flat in the foreground and more or less intact. By now, the marble has completely deteriorated.
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