Will Leverett

I don't know his years, or I'd put them in the title. He was born soon after the Civil War, when his father came back from serving, and lived in Warren, Ill. for a short stretch before moving to Wisconsin for twelve years. He would say that he grew up, most of that time, on a farm in Garden Valley, Wisconsin, where the family was relatively isolated and his older brothers kind of competitively and aggressively learned farm skills especially using technology as it arrived on the scene and became available to farmers. They would walk to town for their mail or for supplies but that was a huge endeavor, and even riding the horses there would be no small deal but would be possible; they were in Jackson County, in the middle of the state.

His parents were talked into moving to South Dakota and settling in the new town of Sioux Falls, which had only a couple thousand residents but was likely to expand and become a hub for the entire region. A pretty place with a waterfall in the middle of it, it was full of the kind of hope that new towns had, boom towns, places where everyone wanted to build and get in on the boom. Dad started a lumber business, bought trees from Wisconsin and Minnesota, lumbered them up and sold them to homesteaders and housebuilders in town; he did this in partnership with the wealthy guy who had talked them into moving out there, and that guy knew what he was doing; they made money hand over fist for ten or twelve years. The guy got out of the business, sold his share to his son, went on to build a city block and become a founder of Sioux Falls, but Will's father hung on, until a huge panic/crash came along in the winter of 1893. The railroads crashed and many of them went bankrupt. Their promises to build new lines out into the prairie of eastern South Dakota went under as did most of the lines they'd already established; thousands of farmers were left stranded. Prices of farmed goods crashed too so that even if they could get their food to market they'd lose money. Most of them gave up and came back east where they could at least eat. Dreams of a boom in the prairie disappeared; the lumber business dried up.

Will went to Hillsdale College, married, and moved out to Council Bluffs to accept a job at her brother-in-law's bank. That bank was his main form of sustenance for years, but he also ran a magazine, became a historian, and raised a child, along with his wife Julia Reynolds, who would become my grandfather. This book will go as far as that grandfather, and even my dad, but it's already so full I have to figure out ways to cut back, or perhaps turn it into two books. I'm roughly at the Trans-Mississippian Exhibition now, but lots more happens, and soon it turns into the Great War, the Roaring Twenties, and the Depression. They live through a lot. Council Bluffs is no more or less than any other small midwestern town, but it's the center of the universe for them.

Will died in the fifties; my brother says he remembers him vaguely, though we would have been very small when they met. I don't remember a thing. And I have a hard time writing about people I do remember, since I can't show it to them to verify it, or attribute feelings to them. So this will be the end, this book.

I'm thinking of calling it Bluffs Leveretts: An American Tragedy. I'll explain what the tragedy is, by the end.

Puritan Leveretts

Back in the day
Puritan Leveretts
Kindle Special SAT-MON
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SZS9P87

The Prence situation

Recently I was challenged, and actually it was a challenge I had already faced and thought about to some degree. The challenge is this: You research your Leverett ancestor, from eleven to thirteen generations ago, but if you go back that far there are over two thousand people who played an equal part, genetically, in who you are. Are you going to research any of them? Obviously none of them were Leveretts; only one out of the 2048/4096 was a Leverett.

The fact is that I had already started in on one of them: William Brewster. And there are stunning things about him that will easily make a book. So after this particular conversation I googled him again and came out with a simple kindle unlimited book on the Mayflower that reviews some of the things we know about him. He's an amazing guy. Here are some things I've found:

First, we are related to him through Harriet, my great-great grandmother who I just wrote a book about (see below). This line is apparently all women; in other words, it was his daughter Patience who had a daughter, who had another, who had another, etc., and if you go down through Harriet, she had a daughter (Carrie) who had daughters (Belle had only sons) - so there are women around today, my third or fourth cousins, who would have come down a direct line of women (you may have to let me check that for sure, or document it carefully) - from Patience, survivor of the early days of the colony.

Patience arrived after her father William, who with his sons Love and Wrestling arrived on the Mayflower itself, in 1620 (?). She arrived in 1623. There are remarkable things about her story. First, she married Thomas Prence, Governor of the Massachusetts Colony. Second, she died of smallpox early on, but after she'd had a couple of kids including a daughter.

Her marriage to Prence is important for many reasons. Of the Anglos who came to Massachusetts in the early days, Puritans (including the Leveretts) were the majority and by far the dominant strain. They settled Boston, Charlestown, Salem, Dedham, most of the towns along the Mass. Bay in the 1630s in what is called the Great Migration. But the Pilgrims were important too for several reasons. One was that their ardent separatism was distinct from the Puritans who wanted to purify the church but stay in it. The Pilgrims settled in Plymouth and dominated that area but were not the only people who lived in Plymouth and Duxbury and down along the south shore. Their desire to be separate caused them to make an effort to make their own distinct government as they were determined to survive and run things themselves outside of any oversight by the crown.

William Brewster was, in these early days, the leader of the Pilgrim band. His younger compatriot William Bradford would get a lot of credit and would be easily confused with him, as they were both all over the place with their political and religious leadership. But the main point was that they survived. And that the marriage of Patience to Prence put the two colonies together; it joined them.

Years later history would grab onto that "religious freedom" idea of the Pilgrims and make the Pilgrims heroes of the early settlement of Massachusetts and the colony. Those separatists were actually a minority on the Mayflower itself, and definitely a minority in Massachusetts when they finally got established there. The majority (Puritans) had no use for religious freedom or tolerance although they weren't about to go wipe the Pilgrims out. The Mass. colony and Plymouth colony were separate, simply survivors in those early days. The people who filled the boats just looking for ways to make money, to run across the oceans, etc., filled out the background. They had no particular religious orientation but were opportunists to some degree - if you establish a town, with a church, I'll live in the town. And maybe go to church. Those were the majority of the Mayflower. But the Mayflower had its problems and a lot of its people didn't make it through that first winter. William and Love were among the lucky ones.

Once again, Patience had an unbroken string of daughters leading down to the present and crossing our line of Leveretts in about 1857 with the marriage of Harriet to James Walker. I'll have to research this a little better. I find all aspects of her life to be interesting, but I'm not surprised to find her dying of smallpox as so many people did. Lots to document here. And there are books out there about William Brewster, the leader, father of Fear, Love, Patience, and Wrestling (and another?) - those were the days.

Great review

for Prairie Leveretts
from a blog I love and trust!
https://booksthatmakeyouthink2.co.uk/2024/09/11/prairie-leveretts-thomas-leverett/

Prairie Leveretts

Finally!

The kindle version is here, worth every penny, a lot of work went into this. The paperback is in review, and the hardback is coming. I am still cleaning up a few minor errors. I find it impossible to publish something without getting at least one year wrong.

James Walker Leverett (1830-1916) was important to our family and important, I think, to the region as a whole. He was one of the earliest settlers of both Nebraska and South Dakota, and grew up basically on the frontier when Illinois was the frontier. This book tells the story of him and his wife and children as they moved around in the very early days.

It is the first thing I have finished in a while, since I've been busy on other family things - not just busy, but seriously sidetracked.

Those of you who follow this blog know that I'm well past 1916 (his death date - this book ends here) by now and yes, I'm partly done with the next book in the series, Bluffs Leveretts. That book will have a narrower more specialized audience since there are only a hundred or so of us who are descended from or related to Bluffs Leveretts. James Walker, however, has thousands of descendants by now, I think, and they're spread out pretty well.

Finally, I promise to put all of them on the template of this blog. The first three, Puritan Leveretts, 18th Century Leveretts, and Pioneer Leveretts, take you right up to this one so this is the fourth in a direct line. The two about famous Leveretts, Walking Boots/i> and Harvardinates, are in the series but not in the line.

crinkly old paper file

Spent about an hour this afternoon going through crinkly old paper that was all in a single file. This paper was so brittle that it fell apart when I touched it, and in some cases the print was so small I couldn't really read it.

But I felt that, for my own sake, and because I am writing about Will's life, it was important for me to record at least a little of what I learned.

Will was a (an?) historian, and at one point was made secretary, or president, of the Pottawattamie County Historical Society. He used that position to try to find out a couple of questions that were on his mind. First, were the Pottawattamie ever actually in the county? From what he knew they had lived out in Michigan, had been marched to Kansas, and were now in decline in a kind of reservation down in Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma. When he found this out he became curious. How did this county actually get its name? Did it play a role in the march and movement of the true Potawatomie?

So he wrote to government officials around the country, and one of his questions had to do with the Pottawattamie. Another was whether there was actually an Indian reserve in the county. Reserves (I may have the name wrong) were not reservations but rather places where they stayed on their way from here to there. And I may be wrong about that too. In any case his question was what role the county had played in the massive Indian wars that had proceeded his arrival in the county (in 1863).

It was generally accepted that the place had first really been "settled" by whites when the Mormons were passing through, either with their push-carts or before that, and stopped for a long layover, after which some never left. Thus the Mormon influence in the area was big and there were plenty of people around to talk about it. He had his work cut out for him. What actually was the history of the county like?

I find it interesting because in his own way he was one of the first historians to stumble on the wreckage of the Indian wars and try to make sense of it. He seemed to be serious about history, i.e. not making judgments until after one has the facts, framing it in such a way that he is not making up facts himself, etc. I like his style and his historical bent in his writing. I need to dig more into it.

While I'm here and it's on my mind, I stumbled on something many years ago that I'd like to recover; it was a short passage on the origins of the name "Iowa." I published it on one of these blogs (my main one?my professional one? I really don't know) - and I'd like to get it back.

As a historian myself, I find othing more interesting than crinkly old paper. It falls off my clothes long after I've been working with it.

Boston Transcript, Leverett Pond

I never knew there was a Leverett Pond in Brookline, but there is, and I've located it on a map. It's in the heart of a very urban territory just to the west of the central city, and though lots of roads pass through the area, it's part of a green ribbon of woods and lakes that kind of run all the way through the area.

An old article from the Boston Transcript in the 1890s outlines the history of the area and shows how the Leverett family contributed to its development, or lack thereof. It was part of a series of grants to the heavies of the early Puritan colony: the Leveretts, the Cottons, the Olivers, and a few others. Where did the colony get this land? Not sure. It was all called Muddy River back then and only later became Brookline. Nowadays it may be part of Olmstead Park.

Here I am already over my head in specific west-Boston geography. The article outlines the boundaries of what became the park, but it's clear that what exactly was Thomas', upon his death, and what of other grants got mixed in there, has been middied by history. And then the article references a period of time when the whole thing was tied up in endless lawsuits. Some history books have said that the property deed for Thomas' land somehow fell into the hands of the Gardner family in the late 1600s without ever a document showing that. But I also know that Leveretts came and went from the land, or at least appeared to, all throughout the 1700s, and often were referred to as living in Roxbury, but at other times Brighton. The land is lowland, swampy, heavily wooded, and could in fact straddle both what was Old Roxbury at the time and what was Brighton. It is very possible that there were houses on either end of it, or, that it could have been used by several people at once.

The whole thing leaves me with a number of questions, which I have no idea how I could possibly answer. Thee is probably some record somewhere of the boundaries of this land, but in the position I'm in, I'd have a hard time understanding it. I'm not about to go wading through legal documents to find out what happened or how it happened to fall into the hands it did. It seems to have become a park around then, in the 1890s, and was called Leverett Park for a while, apparently, but only the pond has kept its name. And what about Cotton's land? Who knows - the Cotton family didn't fare that much better than we did at the time, in terms of keeping its family estate safe from the marauding marches of time. It was the first area to get swallowed up by Goston's westward exxpansion and it was only because it was hostile lowland swampy bush that it apparently got left alone for years, regardless of who actually owned it or who was suing whom.

Someday I'll find the banks of Leverett Pond.