Henry B. Nichols’ Top Hat

You wouldn't see a hat like this today unless you were part of the British elite or a performing magician.  Top hats, such as this one on display in the Benton County Historical Society's Corvallis Museum, were once common wear for gentlemen.

Henry Brainerd Nichols' 1850s top hat

Top hats were once made of felted beaver fur.  As that became scarce, silk was used instead. Most were black or dark brown, though silk ones could be gray.  The hats became standard wear beginning in the 1790s and continued until World War II.  The height increased, earning the nickname “stove pipe” hat. Abraham Lincoln wore this type hat.  Other nicknames included high hat, silk hat, cylinder hat, and chimney pot hat.

This particular hat was worn by Benton County resident Henry Brainerd Nichols.  Born January 31, 1821 in Connecticut, he attended Wesleyan University there. In 1847, he moved to Iowa where he was in charge of a seminary.  He married his wife Martha Overman there.

In 1852, he and Martha settled on a donation land claim west of Monroe. For about 8 years he taught at the Ebenezer school about a mile south of Alpine.  He was the first teacher in Benton County with a college degree.

Ebenezer school

Nichols gradually acquired more land; eventually he owned 1,200 acres west of Monroe. He devoted more time to farming but continued his interest in schools, serving as school district clerk for over 30 years.  

In 1857 he was elected as a “free state” delegate to Oregon's constitutional convention.   Between 1848 (when the Oregon Territory was established) and 1857, Oregon voters, fearing higher taxes, had rejected statehood on 3 occasions. That changed with the 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that only sovereign states (not territories or Congress) could decide the issue of slavery. Oregonians wanted to decide for themselves and so voted for statehood. Each area elected a delegate to the convention; Henry Nichols was one of 60 so chosen. Seventy-five percent were members of the Democratic Party which actively controlled the convention.  Nichols is listed as an “anti-democrat” as was one of the other three delegates from Benton County. During the convention Nichols served on the committee on expenses.

Afterward, Nichols served in the territorial and state legislatures, running on the Republican ticket.

Given the historic nature of these constitutional convention and the importance of the legislature, Nichols would likely have worn this hat on those occasions.

Nichols died in 1907 and is buried in the Alpine cemetery.

 By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon

 

Continued Starr Family Journey to Oregon

 This post will continue the reminiscences of Elizabeth Starr Turner about her 1847 journey to Oregon.

Elizabeth, her parents Samuel and Talitha Starr, and the families of relatives Ransom Belknap and L. D. Gilbert had started out from Iowa in April.

“At one place in the journey we took what they called a big cut-off, going through the mountains were there had been no previous traveling and settling.  Some men had gone through a blazed the trail, and they thought we would gain quite a long time by going that way, if we could get through.”

It seems that this group elected to follow the Applegate Trail. Instead of following the Snake River across southern Idaho, crossing into Oregon, traveling north the heading west along the Columbia, the Applegate trail went south and then west across Nevada.  The trail crossed the northeast corner of California, crossed the Cascades in Southeast Oregon and then turned north following a path similar to that of I-5 from Ashland.

Elizabeth continues, “...the way was very, very bad.  At one place one of the wagons skidded clear about down a hill and left the team standing up the hill and the wagon down hill. At another place one of uncles' wagons tipped over....

“When we came to the Umpqua River, which was a very deep rapid stream, we had to hire the Indians to carry us across which they did by lashing two canoes together.  Then they would swim the oxen across and run the wagons down into two canoes, two wheels in each canoe side by side and so carry the wagons across in that manner. 

Native American canoe,
probably from Northern California

 “There were two wagons across, and then my father drove his wagon down in, lifted the wagon down in the canoes and started across and when he got over, he hitched the team to the wagon to draw it up the bank, but in some way it became unfastened ad ran back and split one of the canoes.  This made the Indians very angry, and they refused to bring any more wagons across.

“There were but six in the train at this time, as other members of the train had decided to go different places in California, and we were the only six wagons going to Oregon at that time. Thus we were left at night with three wagons on each side of the North Umpqua River. The Indians threatened to cut us off and massacre us that night, but they did not.  In the morning, they had become better reconciled: my father having paid them well..., they carried the others over, and they went straight before us.” 

“We had to go through the Umpqua Canyon.  I do not know whether that was a part of this cutoff, but I know there was no road down through it. They had to drive the teams a good deal of the way right down the bed of the stream. It was like any other mountain stream, full of rocks and sand and very, very difficult to drive along.  Part of the way they could get out on the bank. Whenever they could, of course, they drove along the side of the stream; but most of the way, as any of you that have seen the Umpqua Canyon know, it is too narrow for a road....Those women and children waded, and the women carried the babies who were not able to walk.  My mother carried my little brother who was two years old and led me down to that long rugged road- or lack of a road-- waded the stream where she couldn't get room to walk along the side.  It was a very hard and laborious undertaking for her as my second little brother was born two weeks after we arrived at our destination in the Willamette Valley. The reason the women and children walked was because the road was so dangerous they feared the wagons would upset in the stream so they had to walk to be safe.”  A reminder:  Elizabeth was only six years old at this time.

“We had been more than six months on the way, and we were getting very, very hungry for something green as we hadn't had any fresh vegetables since leaving St. Joe in Missouri.  One day as we were driving along after we had got down to Willamette Valley, having crossed over from the east to the west side, going down between the river and the Coast Range Mountains, my father picked up some turnip peelings.  I suppose we had passed a farm, though I don't remember anything about the farm. There were very few in all Oregon at that time, in 1847.

“He pared them both inside and out and then offered me a piece...it was as nice a morsel as anything I have ever tasted before or since. We had had no fruit except dried apples only once or twice as we came through the mountains when we had got a mess of blackberries....

“About the fifteenth of November we arrived...at what is now Corvallis...but at the time there were no houses even. But...Colonel John Stewart...one of the very earliest settlers...directed us to a placed where his son, who was unmarried, had a cabin built and where he had stored some wheat...My uncle Ransom and my father rented that cabin for the winter, and there they were able to buy a great plenty of turnips so we began to have something fresh to eat.

“There my little brother was born and one of my cousins, - my uncle's wife also having a little baby daughter two weeks after my baby brother was born.

“In the spring..., my Uncle Ransom Belknap and my mother's cousin, Orin Belknap, and her brother-in-law, L. B. Gilbert, and my father, Samuel Fletcher Starr, went out land viewing and finally selected, each of them, a section of land, 640 acres, in what is now known as the Belknap Section.”  This is the area north and west of Monroe.

Ransom Belknap's Classical Revival house, built in 1854.

 
By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon

Starr Family on the Oregon Trail

Elizabeth Jane Starr Turner was born September 24, 1841 in Iowa.  Her reminiscences are among the first-hand accounts of life in early Oregon that are part of the Benton County Historical Society's collection.

Elizabeth's parents were Samuel F. Starr and Talitha Belknap Starr who married on November 11, 1840 and moved to Iowa shortly thereafter.

Samuel and Talitha Starr, 1855

Elizabeth recollects, “In 1847, my father and mother and family and one of her sisters and her family (her husband's name was L. D. Gilbert) and one of her brothers named Ransom Belknap and his family crossed the plains to Oregon to take advantage of the land donation law which gave each married man settler three hundred forty acres and each married woman settler three hundred forty acres....They left Iowa in April. There was a large company in the train, but as they traveled along, those of our family who desired not to travel on Sunday, found that they would be obliged to unless they parted company with some of the others, so the train was divided and those who desired to rest one day in seven elected Colonel William Chapman as captain of the train....

“We passed great herds of buffalo, and at one time a herd of buffalo in running past the train started the oxen to run away, and they ran for several miles. One wagon losing off one of the front wheels, the oxen dragged the wagon in that condition for a long ways....

“When we came to the Platte River, there was no ferry.  The water was very deep for fording, so they lifted the wagon beds and put blocks under the beds just as high as the standard would hold the beds on, and the two of the men stood, one on each side of each yoke of oxen as they crossed, keeping them as nearly straight across as they could.

“The oxen swam part of the way and part of the way they could touch the bottom until finally they all got across, but for three yoke of oxen it took six men to take a wagon across the river.

“As we drove along the Platte, we had many terrific thunder storms, and in one of these thunder storms a little boy who was in one of the wagons was struck by lightning and was killed, the lightning running along the chain between the oxen and right through the wagon.

“I had often played with this little boy, and it seemed a sad thing to leave him by the side of the road and go on day after day, knowing that he was all alone in all that wide desolate space.”

Death of a child and burial along the trail was not unique to the Starr wagon train.  One object on display in the Corvallis Museum's Benton County exhibit is this pair of shoes which belonged to Landy Barnard.   He also died on the Oregon Trail.  His death occurred died near the Kansas-Nebraska border either from cholera or from being run over by a wagon.  It may have been both as cholera can lead to altered consciousness in children.

Guilford Barnard made these shoes for his son
Landy Barnard (February 2, 1850 - May 17, 1852)

Elizabeth continues with her recollections. “One night before we knew we were in a hostile Indian country, they shot and killed a great many of our oxen so that we were unable to proceed only as we hitched the cows up to the wagons in the place of the oxen team, and we could not then draw the wagons with so much load, so that a great many things were sacrificed, throwing them away in order to lighten our load.

“I remember going the morning after they shot, out among the wagons of the camp and seeing one lady sitting in her wagon throwing beautiful china plates out on the wagon tongue to smash them; and every other china article that she could break, she broke.

“My uncle took my mother's great kettle out and broke it with the ax, having to hit it three times before he could break it.  And a walnut table that she cared very much about, was chopped up, as they said the Indians would have meat of our oxen but they couldn't have our kettles to cook it in not our tables to eat it from.”

Elizabeth's recollections of her the journey to Oregon will continue in the next post.

By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon