SARAH AND GEORGE

 

In the green book compiled by Edgar Leland, you will find the genealogy of the Robert and George Lelands, who came to EauClaire from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia. I started these memoirs originally be repeating (I thought) some of the things Aunt Sarah told me that summer I spent in their home, and I certainly wandered far afield before I ever begin! Well, at 83, what you expect?

 

I loved Aunt Sarah and Uncle George. He was a tall, fine figure of a man, with reddish hair and beard and piercing blue eyes and an irascible disposition, though full of fun and stories that were most interesting. His hired men were all afraid of him and he worked them hard, I was told, so he didn’t always keep them long.

 

Our father used to work for him at times, and wasn’t afraid to stand up to him. He didn’t want to strike his uncle, but he’s meet him in a fair fight. So he was one of the few who dared stand up to him, and Uncle George once told me again and again that, “John was my favorite nephew.”

 

Aunt Sarah never crossed him. I was impertinent to him only once, and this was one morning when he had grumbled over and over to Aunt Sarah about some little thing – I forget what – and I said, “Oh, Uncle George, please don’t scold Aunt Sarah anymore.”

 

“Huh!” says he, “you never saw me with my back up!”

 

“Well,” I said, “I just wish you’d get it up good and high, then put it down nice and smooth, like the cat does, and keep it there.” He was so astonished (and so was I) that he just glared at me and said not a word. It really helped! He never scolded her anymore, before me.

 

He and I had fun playing dominos and other games. I used to sit on his lap while he spun his long tales, and comb his beard. I’d part it in the center and braid it into two braids, and tie a little ribbon on each. They lived five miles in the country, and not once all summer did he take us to church, although he had fine horses.

 

Grandma Leland, Robert’s wife, had it figured out: “Sarah’s too good,” she said, “she just ought to rise up and tell George a thing or two. Well, George is a Christian, and he’ll go to Heaven. He’ll be punished here on earth, before he dies, for treating Sarah so.”

 

Now I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that after Sarah’s death, he became nearly blind and had great difficulty keeping someone to look after him in the little home he bought down in EauClaire. Finally the woman he had with him said she’s stay only if he married her, and this he did.

 

In 1907, when Bern and I visited EauClaire on our way to Canada, we saw Uncle George. The wife disappeared when he let us in. Uncle George was blind then, and a broken man. He was operated on for cataracts soon after that and died during the operation. The wife inherited all of his property, and he was considered fairly wealthy.

 

I spent part of the 1900 summer vacation and all of 1901 with them. Aunt Sarah had a music box, a large one – different from any I’ve seen, and we played it every afternoon and evening. She had all the old hymns and sang them over and over. How I loved that old music box! She talked to me about her girlhood home in Canada and the beaux she had when she was young. George Leland was Grandpa Robert Leland’s brother, and Aunt Sarah, my Grandma (Jane) Leland and Grandma ( ?) Hepburn were sisters – members of the Hoyt family.

 

Grandma and Grandpa Leland came to EauClaire first, and six months later, Uncle George and Aunt Sarah came, and bought land just half a mile away. Aunt Sarah was older than Uncle George, and she told me that she married him after a tiff with the fellow she was engaged to marry. George’s sister, Margaret, warned Sarah not to marry him (George), as he had had a severe accident as a nine-year-old boy and would be unable to give her children. She wouldn’t listen and the marriage plans were hastily made, and George and Sarah followed Robert and Jane to EauClaire.

 

 

A TALE OF TEN CHILDREN

 

Grandma (Jane Marie Hoyt) and Robert Leland and had eleven children, 10 of whom grew to adulthood. There were five brothers and five sisters, all two years apart:

• Hector Cornelius, born in Mascarene, New Brusnwick, Nova Scotia, 1/19/1851;

• John William, born in Mascarene, New Brusnwick, Nova Scotia, 1/16/1818;

• Darius R, born in Mascarene, New Brusnwick, Nova Scotia, 4/5/1855; 

• Daniel Hoyt, born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (as were the following children), 1/5/1858;

• Anna Marie, 5/1/1860; married John Mayo and took Percy in?

• Elizabeth Jane (Lizzie), 6/16/1861;

• Margaret Isabella, 7/10/1866;

• Martha (Mattie) Lucinda, 6/22/1868;

• Belle, died in infancy

• Sarah (Sadie) Delia, 7/28/1870;

• Charles "Charlie" Fillmore, 9/4/1872; whose son, John Leland, (Alfred W. Leland’s father), helped to buy Uncle George’s farm.

 

Hector didn’t like farming, but John was strong and usually won the plowing contests. Hector went to Chicago to the University and after that, to Divinity School, and became a Baptist minister. (Dan and Darius also graduated from Chicago University. Dan became a minister and Darius, an evangelist, working for some time with Billy Sunday as his singer.) Hector tried to persuade John to come to Chicago and go to school, too, as he had led his classes in arithmetic and had won every spelling bee in the county.

 

Grandma (Jane Hoyt Leland) became ill the winter John was 17, and her oldest daughter was only 11, so Papa (John) was called on to take over the household duties, and this he did for over a year, helping both parents keep up the house and the land. By that time he was a good cook, and money was scarce at home, so he went into the woods, as they used to say then.

 

John went as a cook into a lumber camp up in northern Wisconsin. In those days he was all through that country around Rhinelander, Minocqua, Eagle River, etc., and he and old Mr. Sayner knew each other well. Your Grandfather (Alfred, John’s oldest son) can tell you something of that. John Leland was known and respected by many of the lumbermen of the day, for his camp was well run and well managed, and the men kept in line. When I was in high school in EauClaire, a strange man stopped me one day as I was going home. “Aren’t you Johnny Leland’s little girl?” he asked. I don’t remember his name, and he told be what a fine father I had. He had known him “up in the woods” and been in his camps..

 

 

OF THREE WIFES AND GREAT TRAGEDY

 

Catherine Hoyt married Jared H. Hepburn, our grandfather, when our Mother was about 18 months old. She was the younger sister of Sarah and Jane Leland, so she was Papa’s aunt, although not related to Mother. She was at the time of her marriage, a young widow who lost her husband and twin sons all in one week.

 

It was Jared Hepburn’s third marriage. His first wife died and left him one son, Alex. Jared was a stonemason and had a thriving business in St. John, New Brunswick. According to Aunt Sarah, when Alex was 17, he was carrying a bank deposit into town and, as he crossed a bridge, he was attacked and robbed and thrown into the sea.

 

Grandpa Jared grieved so much about this that he started drinking. Meanwhile, he had married Ann Jane Seabury, a devout Episcopalian and teacher who was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Their children were Charlotte, Charles and Margaret (“Maggie” – the writer’s mother). Ann Jane died a week or so after Margaret’s birth, and Maggie knew no mother but this lovely Catherine Hoyt, her stepmother, to whom she was greatly attached.

 

When Mother (Margaret) was 16 years old, a great many changes came into the Hepburn family. Charlotte had married Angus Cameron, Charlie had run away to sea – not to be heard from for twenty years, when he appeared in our home in EauClaire – and Catherine and Jared had a family of three: Jared Jr., William and Alexander "Sandy" (named after Grandpa’s first child).

 

Things were going badly with them. Grandpa (Jared) was drinking heavily, and his fine business was being ruined. Mother (Margaret?) went to work in a candy store near where Charlotte lived. So Catherine decided to take her three youngest children and join her sisters in EauClaire, Wisconsin, Jane and Sarah Hoyt Leland. Margaret was directed to stay with Charlotte and Angus in St John.

 

Catherine was a fine practical nurse and was able to find work to do at once. Margaret/Mother stayed in St. John with Charlotte’s family for only a month after writing “Ma,” as she affectionately called Catherine, that she was coming to her! Uncle Hector, who was going to Chicago University, met her train in Chicago. He told me years later how pretty she was, and how unhappy she was at leaving her father, but “Ma” came first in her affections and she just couldn’t do without her. Hector put her on the train for EauClaire and she and “Ma” were reunited.

 

Meanwhile, Grandpa Hepburn, distraught at the loss of his favorite daughter, his wife and young children, and his business in ruins, pulled himself together and stopped drinking. He pled with Catherine to allow him to come to her, and after several months and many promises Grandpa (Jared) Hepburn joined his family in EauClaire.

 

Jared and Catherine had two daughters after that: Mabel (whose daughter, Catherine, lives in Chicago; and Grace, whose daughter, Gertrude, has been with Bern and me (Ethel) since she was in her teens. Grace, who married Jim Thayer, died when Gertrude was 15. Jim Thayer died in an auto accident when Gertrude was an 18-year-old freshman at Pomona College in California. Mabel had expected her to live with her in Chicago, but Gertrude had spent so much time with Bern and me that she naturally became our daughter. After all these years, she and I have had a wonderful, God-given relationship.

 

 

CHILDHOOD ADVENTURES AND FRIENDSHIPS

 

When we were children in EauClaire, Grandpa Jared and Grandma Catherine Hepburn lived across the alley and one house down, and we children all grew up together. Jared, Will and Sandy were older, and Jared and Will went to college in Chicago. Jared became a doctor, Will, a dentist. Sandy was in high school and an older pal to my brother Alfred, who looked up to him as small boys do with older ones. I vaguely remember that he pulled my loose teeth and my mother laughed because his hand shook.

 

Grace was one year younger than Alfred and she tried to imitate everything he did in the way of running, jumping and trapeze work. When Grandpa Hepburn moved out to the lovely farm Uncle Jared bought for them, five miles outside EauClaire, she and Alfred had a wonderful time with the horses. Alfred did things he had seen at the circus, and Grace would stand up in back of him on the horses, her long blond hair streaming in the wind. I was a coward and sat on the fence shivering.

 

Grace was two and a half years older than I and it was she who took me to school the first time, admonishing me, “ You call me Aunt! A-N-T Aunt!” We used to crawl up on the dining room roof, where she spun long, weird tales to me, stopping now and then to say in awesome tone, “Listen to my tale of woe!” I stood in great awe of her, and how she loved it! She, in turn, looked up to Alfred and tagged him all she could.When there were no boys around, that was all right with him, but he was usually off with the boys swimming, running races, picking half-ripe plums in the surrounding woods, and burying them in our back yard – or in winter, skating, skiing, riding down the hill on bobsleds, etc. Alfred was the leader of his crowd of boys and excelled in every sport.

 

Our woodshed was always full each fall and the backyard had several rows of wood that Alfred had to pile. He did this by lining up 3 or 4 boys, who passed the wood hand-to-hand from the pile to Alfred, who neatly stacked it.

 

Our big, fenced backyard was fitted up with every sort of paraphernalia an enterprising boy could think of. Mother’s clothesline reel was built up on a platform, and underneath was a cave dug out be the boys. Off it was a long springboard, with a pile of sawdust underneath into which Alfred and the more daring boys would land when turning somersaults and flips. A wire extended across the backyard and it was here that Alfred learned to perform with agility and ease high in the air – and oh, the agony of our poor father when returning home from the woods one dark night, ill with a carbuncle on his neck when he hit that wire and was thrown off his feet into a tree stump! Alfred will vividly describe the rare instance of feeling his father’s wrath.

 

Many years later, your Grandmother Ettie (Harriet VanSpanckeren Leland) waxed quite sarcastic at his brilliant performance on the wire at the Philmathian Circus at Central College! I remember I thought Alfred was beautiful in those red leotards, and carrying a small parasol, but she thought he was showing off. He even knelt on the wire!

 

 

OF LOVE AND LOSS

 

I’d better go back to the time when Mother came to EauCLaire from St. John and met all her Leland cousins, including cousin John, who was 21 and home from the woods and farming for Uncle George Leland. They fell in love and were married before she was quite 18. They lived for a time at Uncle George’s and Aunt Sarah’s and their first baby was a boy they named Melvin (12/29/1875). Mother, being very Scotch-Irish-English, every one of us was given English names. Babies those days didn’t have the chance of survival they have now, and Melvin died at eight months.

 

John Arthur (4/5/1877) was born next, and my Mother talked to us children about him more than any of her lost babies. They were still living at Aunt Sarah’s when he was two and a half years old when scarlet fever broke out. Mother was expecting Lottie and Grandma Leland has lost a son, as had Grandma Hepburn. Aunt Sarah said that it was five or six weeks after her little boy’s death before Grandma Hepburn would come visit as she didn’t want to take a chance of exposing young Arthur. Arthur was already in bed when she came one evening, but he got up and ran to her when he heard her voice. Her gloves were lying in her lap, and he played with them. Eight days later on a Friday morning, he complained of feeling ill, and he died the following Monday. This was just six weeks before Charlotte Maude "Lottie"  (3/8/1879) was born and the superstition prevailing then determined that she would be a solemn baby, rarely to smile. She certainly changed, for she was a gay and laughing lady up to her last illness, and my memories of her are of gaity and fun.

 

I think it was about this time that Papa decided to quit working in the woods and get into something that would keep him with his family through out the year. He moved into EauCLaire, on Water Street and opened a bakery store. Alfred William (3/13/1881) had just been born and all was going well until August 1884, when a great flood struck the town. A fresh carload of flour had just been delivered and Papa’s bakery was completely ruined. Mother was in bed with me, Ethel Jane (8/31/1884),only a few days old, and water covered the bedroom floor 10 or 12 inches deep! A houseboat rescued us all, Mother being put in a bed on it. Alfred was three and a half years old and he scampered around the house trying to find his few treasures, and refusing to get on the boat without his little quart pail. “My little tin tittle” he fondly called it. Being Canadian, my Mother called it “kettle” rather than “pail,” and that was Alfred’s version.

 

 

THE HOUSE ON PLUM STREET – AND BEYOND

 

We moved then into a house up on “Plank Hill,” on the outskirts on EauClaire, and as soon as he could, Papa began building the house on Plum Street that we loved as children and which still stands.

 

I think Muriel Anna (5/13/1886) was born here, and I know that Percy Earl (9/22/1890) was because I was six years old and remember the day well. I loved dolls, and Lottie came out in the yard where I was lying in the hammock, and told me I was going to have a real live doll that could learn to talk, to take care of. I took every word literally and Percy became my complete care.

 

After he was born, they called me in, I sat in a little rocker, and Grandma Hepburn put him in my arms. I remember his first steps, his first words and all the cute things of his babyhood, as well as his serious illness at six months with erysiplas (?) For the first six years of his life he was my special charge and I remember it all up to the day of our separation.

 

The home on Plum Street was my mother’s pride and she kept it very well in spite of five lively children. Alfred says he used to scrub the kitchen but Muriel and I did this only once that I remember, and that was after we had come in with muddy shoes just after Mama had scrubbed it. It was a lovely hardwood floor, and the kitchen was large, with table and chairs at one end. Once, I leaned back in my chair and when Mother told me to stop, I said, “Why? Lottie does it.” Just then the chair and I fell against the window, breaking it. I don’t remember many spankings, but that one I haven’t forgotten!

 

Mother always drank tea, and Muriel loved it and used to help herself occasionally. Once she accidentally poured it down the back of Percy’s head and neck and he cried for hours. A peddler came by, and gave him a little rooster. We had peddlers those days and we all gathered ‘round to see his wares!

 

Every spring and fall, Theresa McGee, the seamstress, used to come to our house for a week to sew. She made dresses for Mama and Lottie, and for Muriel and me, and cute little suits for Percy, as well as nightgowns and underwear for all of us.

 

Sometimes when Papa came home for a few days in the winter, all the Leland and Hepburn relatives would come to visit. Papa would buy a big wooden pail of oysters and made oyster stew in Mama’s wash boiler! He made wonderful hot yeast biscuits, as well as baked beans and cabbage salad with homemade dressing. He taught Mother how to cook, too, and her bread was wonderful.

 

 

 

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