Minden, Iowa

Today would have been my dad's birthday; James Leverett Jr. would have been 95, but died a few years ago. He was a prolific photographer and I will try to get some of his photographs up here as there are many of the family.

He grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where his dad met his mom, Verna Mauer, whom I never met. Verna Mauer was born "near Minden, Iowa" according to their marriage records, and I'm pretty sure the Mauer family actually lived in Minden for a while. Minden was over half destroyed by an April 26 tornado, and I'd love to know if their house survived; it could have been long gone even before the tornado of course.

Her family was German as was most of the town of Minden. German immigrants had come by the thousands through New York and Chicago and many of them ended up in towns like Minden where their friends had settled and where they thought they could make a living. Charles Mauer met Catherine Singelman in Minden and had Verna and her older brother Roy.

According to a family story a feud developed between mother and Roy (because he talked her into investing the family fortune into the railroads, and they crashed?) - I don't know the reason. But though Uncle Roy was a doctor, my father wasn't able to get to know him, because the grandmother lived in the house and wouldn't allow it.

This house would have been in Council Bluffs. My grandmother died before I was born, and it's unlikely Uncle Roy could have prevented it. To my father, though, that was the definition of a dysfunctional family - where siblings have skills that could really help each other, but don't, because for family reasons they aren't allowed to share them.

I have an old photo of the extended Mauer family in some house in Minden which I'll try to find; it has Verna and Roy in it. I'll get back to you. This will be in the next book, after Prairie Leveretts - Bluffs Leveretts.

The Story of My Life

Now on ACX, narrated by Bill Anderen
The Story of My Life - Autobiography of Lorenzo Reynolds, the Treasurer of Hillsdale College, 1862-1877 #hillsdale #michigan #pioneer #biography

Coming Soon

The Story of My Life
On ACX

James Walker Leverett

I'm knee-deep into the biography of James Walker Leverett (1830), an ancestor of many people I know - fifth, sixth cousins and the like. He lived an interesting life. He settled in Nebraska before it was a state, back when many people back east were "Anti-Nebraska." He ran a farm in Wisconsin for ten years, and then went into the lumber business in South Dakota, before it was a state.

Right at the moment I'm about at the Civil War, but there are some things before it that have me a llttle confused. One is a steam-powered sawmill. He apparently took this sawmill out to Nebraska, but I'm not sure if it ran by steam engine before he took it or if they developed that out there. The thing was a conversation starter, for sure. I'm not sure if I'd know one of those if I saw it. I definitely wouldn't know how to use one, let alone make one.

Keep your eyes out - it's on its way. It'll be called Prairie Leveretts>.

Must read

Another good review:

Sears building, Sears Tower

In about 1870, Sears built this building in downtown Boston; it was on the site of the old Leverett estate where what is today Congress Street comes right downtown into Washington Street. That Sears building eventually became the Sears Tower as Sears owned prime real estate right downtown and had to use it to its full advantage.

In the earliest days of Boston, Thomas and Anne and their son John lived at this estate, which went all the way out to the harbor. The harbor kept being filled in to make more land, and John, after Thomas and Anne died, would make trades or deals with the city to allow it. The land originally had a tenement house at the back of it, near the harbor, but eventually came to have a ropewalk and be a prime place for boats to land and unload. A friend of the Leveretts, John Gray, was very prominent in those days and this became Gray's Wharf. It became famous in the Boston Massacre and again when the Boston Tea Party happened right off its shores.

The road from the house to the wharf was called Leverett Lane at first, because it went right through their estate, but later Quaker Lane, when a Quaker meeting house was on that street. Today it is Congress Street. The Tea Party Museum is right where it crosses the channel.

The Leveretts lost the house and the land when Harvard bled John Leverett, its President, dry in a bitter academic fight. He died in debt so badly that his daughters had to sell of the land. Leveretts survived, but it's hard to see their legacy, unless you look carefully within the Sears buildings, and even then you'd be lucky to get a glimpse of what it was like back in the 1600s.

Read all about it in my book (below), though that takes place mostly in Cambridge.

Harvardinates (Har-VAR-di-NAH-tays): The Life and Times of John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNC4X71R

murky times in the 1700s

I didn't quite give you the entire story (in the Ipswich Mary posts below). I have been searching for signs of the Williams - and there may be even more than we know about - but the one who is most interesting appeared in Chelsea marrying Rachel Watts, daughter of a deacon there. Now I've been researching old Chelsea but haven't found much. She is easy to find, where her family came from, etc., but how he got there, is another story. There are mixed accounts.

But what I think happened was this. I will have to get the timing right because I admit this story sounds a little full of holes and not filled in accurately with time details. But I think a William was born in about 1727, and could have been born in Roxbury (Boston) which he would come to identify as Boston later. His son and grandson (William and then Joseph), as well as William's sister (Aunt Caroline) and younger brothers (uncles Warren and Washington) all believed that he was descended from Knight and two Johns, Colonel John (son of knight) and John Esq., Col. John's son. But John Esq. was born basically after he found Rachel Watts in Chelsea. He couldn't have descended from John Esq..

He could, however, have latched onto that family in hard times (which were plentiful and very hard), such that legends of who they are and where they came from came out of him when he was talking about where he'd come from.

He lived most of his adult life on a farm in Needham, a little southwest of Boston. It was rural at the time and not an easy life. He had his wife Rachel, daughter of Deacon Watts of Chelsea, and eleven children including William, Aunt Caroline, Daniel and some older girls who seemed to grow up, marry, and live in Cambridgeport. He had apparently started out with Rachel and stayed in the city for a while, living in Cambridgeport and various places. I found it interesting that when he died they came and got his body and buried it in Medford. Is it possible that he'd latched onto Thomas's family (Col. John's brother)? In that family they reported an older step-brother, half brother, not accounted for in any other way. Their accounts of this half brother, John W., don't quite match in the time area; he's just a legend and I couldn't get the times to work.

But let's go back to young William (1727) whose family has fallen apart, perhaps because his parents, William (~1697) and Mary Whiteridge, have died. He finds the Leveretts perhaps when they are still together: Knight and two sons, Col. John and Thomas, still living in the house downtown. John will eventually get that house, stay there, have a son John Esq., and a family, until moving off to Connecticut and dying right during the war. Thomas however will go into printing, make big money, and get an estate out in Medford. Would this William go with him? When he meets Rachel Watts, has twin girls and is struggling to make it (in Cambridgeport, where the girls ended up coming back to?) - are John and his family somehow involved in this?

Once again timing is crucial, and I still have to solve the problems, but it seems to me that the true line of descent goes down through the Williams, while the belief was that it went down through the Johns. They were obviously wrong about John Esquire, who went to Harvard in 1776, and was a kind of celebrity for doing that. But they claimed Col. John and Knight because they believed that. Whoever William (1727)'s parents were, William (1697) and Mary, they were long gone when he was small. He'd been taken in and brought up by the Leveretts who were around.