Riverbend Journal

  Indulge me one last post about my newly "discovered" pictures from my grandmother's memorial. Two of the pictures I apparently took (because I have no recollection of taking them) were evidently taken for entertainment value. The one above is of a Person of Short Stature who is looking mighty dapper. On the back of the photo, which I will tag on at the end of this post, written in pencil it says, Mayor Oug; age 44 yrs; height 39 in; weight 73 lbs; residence Wapello, Iowa.  Note I'm not 100% certain is says Mayor Oug or Mayor Aug or perhaps something else entirely. I could be reading it wrong and it could be saying Mayor and then the next word is just the common abbreviation for August (Aug). If you have an opinion, please feel free to share it. I have searched for both combinations as well as the words dwarf mayor in the newspapers of the time and haven't been able to come up with an article explaining things. I'm not even sure "dwarf" was the word...

On the first day of the trial of Lant McComb, he was brought into court along with his counsel, M.J. Williams of Ottumwa and Hon. J.C. Knapp of Keosauqua. Judge H.H. Trimble presided over the court and asked McComb how he pled. McComb responded back, "Not guilty." Two applications were made for a continuance of the trial but one was dismissed by Trimble and the other one granted. But the granted one did not lead to a continuance in the trial because the State admitted that they could prove the allegation set out in the affidavit. What exactly was written in those affidavits were not recorded by the newspaper and I haven't found any official court records on the matter.  Next, a request for 100 jurors was issued and it took another day and a half for a jury of 12 men to be formed. Those men were George Tacker, S.B. Fuller, J.A. Hartman, John Montgomery, O.U. Gates, H.D. Hall, E.E. Mastie, Henry Wheeler, O. Moffit, E.T. McCormick, James Van Fleet and F. Gaylord. But before ...

  Elizabeth Chapman Cowles In my previous post, I mentioned that I "discovered" some pictures I had taken of other pictures during the memorial of my late grandmother that I hadn't really processed in the two years since I had snapped them. I also mentioned my quest to locate a picture for all my 3rd great grandparents of which I had found 21 of them counting the recently discovered photo of my 3rd great grandfather Joseph Trimble Cowles. Well that count is now 22 with the introduction of my 3rd great grandmother Elizabeth Chapman Cowles above. Only 10 more to go! I will be honest and that I don't know for 100% certainty that this is my 3rd great grandmother Elizabeth. But underneath it in the same handwriting that identified the picture in the previous post as Grandpa Joseph Cowles, this one simple said Grandma. They were also in the same photo album. Elizabeth C Chapman Cowles was born to John and Jane Barr Chapman in 1833 in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania. I hav...

Joseph Trimble Cowles I have been on a mission to obtain a photograph of every direct ancestor of mine back to my 3rd great grandparents, sixty-two pictures in all not counting myself. Maybe a couple years ago, I wrote about finding a photo for the last remaining missing photo of my 2nd great grandparents, completing all 16 of them. Of my 32 3rd great grandparents, I'm over halfway there with 20 of the 32 possible photos located but I was still missing 12 of them.  Recently I was sorting downloaded photos from my phone for my youngest to use to create photo albums, and I came across a series of photos that I took over two years ago after the death of my paternal grandmother. At a memorial for her, I took a number of pictures of old photos from her albums that were of interest and somehow forgot I had them. Going through them, I came across the above photo of my 3rd great grandfather Joseph Trimble Cowles, one of the missing photos I have been seeking, meaning I have only 11 remaini...

After the anonymous newspaper article about the hanging of Mayberry and implicating Lant McComb as being party to that murder, there was again a couple months of silence and then a recap of the murder appeared in December of 1860. There is more silence until June of 1861 until one G.W. Black files a motion with the Board of Supervisors to be reimbursed for his time as a witness and for mileage of attending the inquest of Laura Harvey. It was accepted and Black was paid $3.60.  Then there was silence for the next three years. On 2 March 1864 in Davenport, Iowa, a young soldier from nearby Fort McClellan, never named, was walking along the street and saw a familiar face. The young soldier recognized the man as someone who used to work for his father for three years near the town of Rockford. The soldier also knew that the man, Lant McComb, was wanted for murder of a girl four years ago. So the soldier immediately went back to the base and informed Captain Ward of what he had witnesse...

  We've been wanting to get rid of our firepit area for many years now but for various reasons, it hasn't been near the top of our list. It was here when we bought the house and looked about how it looks like now with weeds growing up in the cracks of the pavers and the fire ring itself a crumbled broken mess. We occasionally used it over the years and I would like to have another one perhaps someday. However, the next one might be one of those portable ones where I can empty the ashes afterwards and store someplace or perhaps I might build another one someplace else. The current one dictated the width of our garden which had to fit between the fire pit and the greenhouse. Awhile back I decided to remove the fence from around our garden to mow the edges and empty spots in our garden and in the process of doing that, I somehow forgot about the firepit and mowed right over it. In my defense, it was covered in weeds and grass clippings at the time. Only when the spinning blade cau...

My 4th great grandfather John M. McKee is a small branch off my family tree after you take several maternal turns in a row. I suppose that is why I haven't looked into him in a long time. He was added to my tree maybe 25 years ago and has largely sat there on his branch getting little attention since. But with newspaper being digitized onto the internet at a rapid clip, I thought I might do another search on his and see what I could find. Prior to the search, I knew little about him. The 1850 U.S. Federal Census records indicate he was born in Quebec, Canada in November 1833 and by the age of 19, was already living across the border with the Furman family working on their farm. I still know nothing about his parentage or ancestry and I have no Canadian roots according to my DNA tests. I suspect that he might be the 2% of Scottish I have on my mother's side of the family (compared to the 39% of Scottish I have on my father's side), especially since his oldest son would be na...

Two months after the body of George Lawrence was found and seven months after the body of Laura Harvey was found in the river, after two months of near silence, the newspaper posted the following article. In 1855, one Mayberry was hung by a mob in Wisconsin, for the murder of a man named Alger. Subsequent developments have given rise to the horrible suspicion that Mayberry was innocent, as he protested to the last. It is now charged that Lant McComb, who seduced and murdered Laura Harvey, some months since, was also guilty of the murder of Alger. - Ex. Although five years earlier than the murder of Laura Harvey, because it may have involved Lant McComb, it was a rabbit hole I had to go down. As with the Harvey case, I did a lot of digging for old newspaper clippings and found quite a few of them but eventually I came across the trial transcripts which told a more complete story than the one by the anonymous Mr. Ex.  David F. Mayberry, a former Mormon, was a known horse thief for wh...

  I was sorting through my phone camera pictures and found this picture of a storm that happened a couple weeks back during one of those really hot evenings. It had been near 100 degrees all day and was still in the mid 90's as evening arrived. As I looked outside and on the radar app, intense storm cells starting popping up all around us and it got sort of greenish dark outside which is when I often think about tornadoes. Fortunately, there were no tornadoes and the cells didn't produce hail or damaging winds. Instead, we received a gentle one inch of rain which in late August when this happened, is nearly unheard. It certainly made for a dramatic shot looking out over our garden and greenhouse.

  I would think most gardeners are a bit thankful towards the end of the year as our gardens slow down in production and the plants wither and die. Perhaps because I had a garden outside my back door for the first time in 30+ years has shaded my views a bit. Being accessible, means I'm out there more often and preserve a larger percentage of the yield. It feels like more work and so I'm ready to start winding things down and getting ready for seed catalog and dreaming season. This morning, before it warmed up, I cut down all our sweetcorn stalks and hauled them down to the compost pile. They were all tangled up, halfway laid over and I thought I had found and picked every ear. But in the process of composting the stalks, I did uncover 8 or 9 ears, only 1 or 2 of which I would consider nice. Still, they are edible and will be eaten or preserved.  I also moved the fence around to allow easier access to parts of the garden. Now, only one half of the garden is fenced in, mostly fo...

From the first week of June though all of July, no word of the murder or the search was published in the local newspaper. Other items of interest caught the public's fancy like another murder of a woman and two children by axe in nearby Batavia, Iowa. However, the killer 70 year old John Kephart was captured a few days later still driving the bloody wagon that the murders took place in, complete with a bloody wagon hammer and the money that the murder happened over. Over the next couple weeks, the newspaper dissected his life much like they still do today, trying to make sense of a senseless act. But then on August 2, 1860, the Laura Jane Harvey murder snapped back into focus. The body of George Lawrence was found making this case a double homicide and a search for a single killer. On the 28th of July, John Butchler, a hired man for Lewis Hess, was searching for a cow among the cane brakes of Copperas Creek and was hiking out of a steep ravine trying to make the nearby Agency Road ...

  As I mentioned last week, a post not long ago by Kevin over at An English Homestead , inspired me to save some seeds, especially tomato seeds. Last year was my first year of planting Amish paste tomatoes which are especially good for canning as they are very meaty and have quite excellent flavor. They also yield about twice as much canned tomato product since they don't have to be cooked down forever to remove all the water. I liked them so much, that I bought more seed that I planted this year. Buying seed only became an option two years ago with completion of our greenhouse build. Before that, we had to buy tomatoes with everyone else at the local plant nursery which didn't carry such exotics like Amish paste. Mostly they carried hybrids designed for slicing and eating on sandwiches and only if we were lucky, could we get a few poor looking roma tomatoes that everyone else had picked through.  While buying seed is still an option and it isn't very expensive, Amish paste...

  After three days of oven like heat, I finally made it out to the garden early one morning. Above is our sweetcorn patch that got blown completely flat earlier this summer during a summer storm. Slowly, some of it has stood back upright a bit but much of it is tangled and still horizontal. I thought it might kill it off since the stalks appeared to have snapped, but evidently enough fibers still connect it as it has stayed green and continues to develop ears. Finding the ears is a challenge but we've picked several messes of it already and there is still more left. Due to the horizontal nature of the ears, only the side facing up to the sky pollinated really well so the side facing the dirt can be a bit sparse in places. It won't win a beauty pageant but it tastes good. Thus far, the raccoons either haven't found it or haven't breached my electrified fence. Above is our okra and Japanese eggplant. The okra was the only thing we planted from saved seed from our previous...