CEDAR COUNTY, NEBRASKA - 73rd Birthday of Margaret Jones ==================================================================== NEGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or for presentation by other persons or organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for purposes other than stated above must obtain the written consent of the file contributor. This file was contributed for use in the NEGenWeb Archives by Carol Tramp Permission Granted by Rod Dump, Editor, Cedar County News ====================================================================== Cedar County News – 12-5-1929 Resident of Cedar County for 73 years Recalls Many Experiences as a Pioneer With the coming of December, Mrs. Margaret Jones of near Wynot, oldest resident of Cedar county, starts the 73rd year of her life in the Bow Valley – a life rich in memories of pioneer days. Babyhood in a rude, log house on whose dirt floor she first learned to toddle, school days in the first school in the county, under Mrs. Anna Felber, romance in the lamplit old dance hall still standing at St. Helena, marriage, motherhood, service to 14 children and to the pioneer mother whose memory she worships, these are the rich things which Mrs. Jones can recall as she sits in her little cottage thinking back. Born in Alborough, Canada, June 10, 1856, Mrs. Jones came to the Unites States with her parents, Mary Ann and John Smith Marr, settling for a month in Pacific City, now a part of Sioux City, Ia., and then coming to Cedar county to take a claim on the Main Bow Creek north of Wynot. They had homesteaded timber claimed and pre-emptioned in three places, but when a change in the law in the following year permitted the holding of but one they chose the pre-emptioned farm, where Mrs. Jones is still living in a little cottage of her own. The homestead originally claimed by her father is just adjoining, and the timberland has since become Homewood Park. On the home place where young Margaret remained almost continuously until her marriage, and to which she returned in middle age, John Marr for whose health they had come, built a two room log shack with dirt floor and roof, hewing the logs himself and assisted only by his brothers James and Joseph Marr, who had preceded him there. But when the grown woman who first learned to walk on that dirt floor, pauses to recall those early days, her most impressive memory is of her mother, a sturdy, pioneer woman who, in the illness and following the death of her husband, assumed all the hardest responsibilities of home keeping and farm labor, cutting wood, hauling it, plowing, everything that was to be done. “I can remember only one time when she seemed beaten,” declares Mrs. Jones. “that was after the Wiseman massacre, when my father had been dead only a short while. She took and my sister, Mary Katherine (now Mrs. Priest) and we went back to Canada, but only for about a year. She wasn’t satisfied, with everything she had in Cedar County. And so we all came back and took a homestead of unbroken timberland in the bottom for about a year before we finally went back to the original pre-emption claim. Mrs. Marr, assisted b her daughter was the first one in the county to plant wheat, using seed she had brought from Canada, flailing it out by hand and hauling the grain to Niobrara behind an ox team to be made into flour. Those were lean years for the mother and her two girls. Mrs. Jones can testify, years of hard work with no meat except wild game and little of the since there were no hunters in the family. “We had only such game as the neighbors brought us,” she recalls. “They did a good deal, helping out with the hardest work. The year before her marriage, my sister drove the reaper and mower six weeks in the fields neighboring ours, just to pay back a part of whey they all do for us and for mother. But mother did everything for others too. She was nurse for every baby born in the neighborhood, barber for the men and boys, dressmaker, and teacher of a Sunday school class. On August 17, 1874, Miss Margaret, who had been courted in the old, original log cabin, was married at Yankton by the justice of the peace. The man was W.C. Jones, son of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Jones, who had come in 1857 to settle at St. Helena. He ran the saw and first mills on Bow Creek when she met him, and “seemed an awfully nice fellow,” she says. After their marriage, the young couple moved to a new house built at the mill where they lived eight years before moving to the farm now occupied by John Hochstein where a rather small frame house was made to do for the ever increasing family. The for seven years they were on Green Island; then three miles wide and eight long, after which they came back home to care for Mrs. Jones aged mother and her twin sister. The little house where Mrs. Jones now makes her home, close to her son Joseph’s larger one, was moved from the Hochstein place for the two old people. Rearing her own family of 12 children in the big house, Mrs. Jones divided her time equally with her mother and her aunt, caring for them until their deaths 14 years ago. Now she herself is at home in the little cottage thinking over the old days, happy in the successes of her children, ten of whom are living.