The old Thomas and John

I found and started reading a genealogy from my mother's side (the Wallaces), and in there were a couple of twins, Euphalia and Orpha, who appeared three times. Once I think it was repeated from another, but basically the way they appeared twice in the first place was, both their parents were Wallaces on the same genealogy. Well, I'd seen that before in fact I saw it on the Leverett side. Here's the story.

Back in the early 1700s Knight Leverett became aware that he was the main inheritor of the Leverett name and was proud of it; he was a metalsmith but he took his boys, John and Thomas, to the Church to be baptized (unlike his dad and grandpa) and participate in the community.

When they grew up they went into the printing business. Knight had married a bookseller's daughter, and they more or less inherited her interests as well as her father's trade. As printers they ordered a ream of paper from Ben Franklin in Philadelphia, who they most likely knew from his Boston days (he'd grown up in Boston); the paper never made it to Boston, and he promised to send more. As an aside we know this mostly because Franklin's papers and letters were so assiduously saved and preserved.

But John soon went into the booming women's goods business, selling things like buttons, zippers, and bows, from the Town Dock, and pretty soon both boys were making a fortune. Coming into about 1750 Boston was prosperous and materialistic, and John was making money hand over fist at the Town Dock while Thomas was printing grammar books and every other kind of book that was being used throughout the colony.

John, being the oldest, got the family home where John the President of Harvard grew up, whereas Thomas bought an estate out in Medford where they made good rum. Both had lots of kids. John's oldest was named John, while Thomas's oldest was named Thomas.

John's fate took a turn for the worse when selling British goods became the wrong business to be in. Pretty soon his store had been caught on fire by a mob and in fact mobs were damaging British goods all over the place as in, Tea Party. John was forced to become an Overseer of the Poor, which is kind of like a social worker, but a job usually done by established business people. Thomas went on printing grammar books and making a fortune. Both sent their eldest to Harvard, and there they were, young Thomas and John, inseperable, in Harvard in the class that would graduate in 1775, the year of the revolution, when Harvard actually moved to Concord so as to lend their buildings to the soldiers.

Those had been tough years in Boston, and by the way my ancestor seems to have been there too, in the shadows, as I'm not directly related to either the young John (who would become known as John Esquire, as opposed to his father, Colonel John), or the young Thomas, Thomas the surgeon. When they graduated Thomas the surgeon joined the war, but he got captured on a boat. The prisoners were brought back to Brooklyn harbor by the British and treated so poorly that many of them died. So poorly that they made a movie about it, Ghost ship of Brooklyn Harbor or some such thing. It was terrible. He survived, came out, started being a surgeon again, then died early, probably from his prisoner-of-war experience.

Thomas, remember, had been from Medford. His father also died during the war. His stepmother had to unload a couplle of young children which may have included my ancestor who seemed to be in the shadows of Medford but I'm not sure. But what happened to John Esquire?

John Esquire had studied to be a lawyer as his cousin Thomas was studying to be a surgeon. His father the Overseer and his sick wife moved to Connecticut, and John Esquire went to Connecticut to help take care of his mother. His father died too. At one point he joined the war effort but it was later, and it was easier for him to survive, and he did. Finally they moved to Windsor Vermont where his mother had been from.

His cousin had died, but he, having a fortune, was able to just have kids and be a gentleman farmer up there in Vermont. He ended up having like thirteen. But his second wife was Thomas's young sister Hannah. Hannah had apparently inherited the printer's fortune from Medford and was quite wealthy. John Esquire and Hannah. never had to work. He had a big library and argued about baptism, which was the issue of the day. He took his children to church on Sunday in a carriage; his third wife was Congregationalist. He was Baptist.

What happened to the children he had with his cousin? You aren't supposed to marry your first cousin, but he did. I know that it was also somewhat common back in earlier days, like John the President's day. It had happened several times in our line. But to tell you the truth, I don't know what happened to those. They were the middle ones of the thirteen, like maybe five through nine. Not sure how it worked out.

Of the Windsor Vermont Leveretts several had positions in government and one or two were well-known. They kind of faded away after a while; I don't think there are still Leveretts around Windsor today although that Robert Leverett, a famous ecologist of the Berkshires, may be related. This is not our line so I kind of lost track. But it's interesting. Hannah had the fortune from the grammar books, and it alll went up there with Hannah and into a fabulous library of imported books on various topics.

Somehow marrying one's cousin went out of style. It wasn't such a big deal in those post-revolution days, I didn't even see anyone raise an eyebrow.

More from the Trans-Miss

I have now typed out two articles from the old Trans-Mississippian and a few things have become clear.

One is that what I have is not really in very good shape, so it's now or never. Can I give it, as is, to someone who will type it or scan it better than I can? It strikes me as being almost unable to survive another move. It crinkles when I touch it. another is that the print is so small that i am becoming unable to read it without visual help, i.e. a magnifying glass or something. it is not easy to type it out on paper.

I have three full volumes of it, but recently founnd two more and there is a chance I have more that I don't know about. The Council Bluffs Public Library has not answered my query. I have two copies of the first issue, Feb. 1897, both crinkly. In Dec. 1897 he seems to have gone to a smaller format, half-size, or a single sheet of 8 1/2 by 11 rather than being the whole cover, now folded over sideways. So I have Dec. 1897, the first of the small ones, then found two other small ones from August 1898, both August but different.

It seems, though I'm not sure, that one of those is a special edition created just for the peak of the exhibition season. This might explain then how they seem to have the same date and everything yet be entirely different; I haven't fully examined them yet. Both are crinkly. I'm not sure if I have any more anywhere but will keep looking.

there are places i have yet to look.

Articles from the old Trans-Mississippian

Along comes the question of whether I should do more to preserve the articles from the old Trans-Mississippian.

Will Leverett was the editor and publisher of the Trans-Mississippian, which had a brief life from February 1897 until I'm not sure when exactly, but not more than two or three years. It published monthly. It had a historical bent - he did, really - and some of the better, longer articles are historical, but not written by him.

I have only three editions in front of me. Two are the size of standard paper but one is significantly smaller. I'm not sure if I have more in the crates of genealogical information that I have preserved. I am using one or two articles in the book I am writing about Will and that period of history. Those of course will be saved - I will type the second one out as soon as possible. My plan was to put those two in the back of the book.

The question really gets to whether the Trans-Mississippian is available anywhere else. At one point I believe I found a library that had copies of it. Maybe the next step is to go visit that library (Omaha?) and inquire if anything is being done to save those copies.

We are in the generation where, if one takes crinkly old paper documents like these, and pitches them, they are lost forever. One article that is in question is written by D.C. Bloomer, husband of Amelia Bloomer. He was an interesting character, a Council Bluffs supporter, and my dad's elementary school was named for him. His article is about the early days of Council Bluffs. I really have no idea whether 1) he has anything in there that isn't already known; 2) there is another copy of Vol. 1 No. 1 out there in the Omaha library or elsewhere, or 3) whether the article can be considered accurate and good writing. He was a reputable man; he had no enemies that I know of in his historical arena.

My sense is that I should gather what I can find, and see if any such copies exist in Omaha or elesewhere. It is after all my great grandfather's legacy.

And put pictures of it on this blog.

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/