Riverbend Journal

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 which

  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 for

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