( Nov 2021, Thank you to member Laurie Lashbrook 49976360 for assisting with Benschoter burials in the run of counties they settled, from Kossuth County, IA, to Martin County, MN.)
Oliver was accustomed to New Englanders, but would meet people who called themselves Scotch-Irish, plus other new sorts, once in Iowa. When he introduced himself the first time, the new neighbors might ask "What kind of name is that?" Having practiced his answer before, while still in Ohio, he might say "Benschoter is Dutch. Back in upstate New York, where I'm originally from, many Dutch names are as tricky to spell as mine".
He brought his family to Iowa in steps. He first prospected for land with daughter Alice. They reached a relatives' place in Delaware County, in northeast Iowa, late in 1856, in her seventeenth year, delaying their visit to Algona, until early 1857. Once they left for Algona, they would have to trudge through February snow. Were they waiting for the stories of unhappy native tribes and of massacres north of Algona to quiet down?
The point of stopping specifically at Delaware County, barely inside Iowa's eastern edge? Other Benschotters were already there, with their Burgess in-laws, all from Seneca County, Ohio.
Oliver and Alice could inquire about Oliver's uncle Cornelius, who had recently "knocked on death's door". Cousin Alexander and his first wife, the former Alanson Burgess, were now in charge of Cornelius' farm.
Alexander's mother, Diana, was still in the house, not yet in Michigan to stay with her other sons, more cousins of Oliver. Diana and Alexander would have had advice for them on Iowa frontier life, how it differed from Ohio, maybe made sure they had the right supplies. The two travelers then made their way through to Fort Dodge, to file for land, before following a riverside or two northish, to future Algona's older southrn part, still called Calls' Grove.
Alice had recently finished a preparatory curriculum, 1855-1856, at Ohio's Oberlin college. Such academies were a New England idea that would lead to public high schools everywhere. We know she attended, as an old Oberlin college directory listed her achievement, , maybe finishing the teachers' training common there, or trying out the music conservatory.
We are proud of her, so ahead of her time. None of the family histories spoke of her attendance, however.
A family history of 1907 did mention her brother William's attempt to attend the next year. He had to leave the college, he told the family historian, to accompany his mother and younger siblings westward, to join Oliver and Alice. Thus, the Oberlin Directories omit his name. There was no college here for him to continue once in NW Iowa? Not yet?
This Oliver's first wife, Alice's mother, Martha (maiden name Kemp) thus had waited back in Ohio, for Oliver and Alice to ready things, before bringing five other children, some small. The two next eldest after Alice, William and Evaline, would assist. They arrived in Kossuth County later in the same year, 1857, able to go part-way by train, but only as far as Dubuque. The tracks ended there. They would then switch to wagon transport for their own riverside travel, going westish, until near Algona.
To pay for the new business venture in Iowa and their travel adventure on the way, he and Mary had sold their Ohio farm. Located near Ohio's Huron River, they had been in one of the shoreline counties on Lake Erie's south side, their mother county at first Huron, before their daughter section split off as newer Erie County. If leaving Cleveland, taking a route parallel to Lake Erie's south side, to go west,, Oberlin and their farm would be passed when about halfway through Ohio.
On the way to Iowa was Michigan, where some other sons of Cornelius, Oliver's cousins, would be. Also skipped was the Rock River region of Illinois, which Oliver had prospected two decades earlier. Wanting very much to move to that part of Illinois then, for reasons unspoken, he instead returned to Ohio.
For their next twenty years or so in Ohio, the family had been surrounded by cousins. They could visit the graveyards holding Oliver's grandparents and other deceased kin. Now, for the benefit of the living, they were going west. The young might renew some Oberlin acquaintances in Algona, make completely new friends, and gain new in-laws.
We have to ask, why pick Algona in Kossuth County, and not some other new place? Word of mouth? Connections? Advertisements?
A best guess, based on looking up their neighbors , new and old--
One of the Call brothers founding Algona had gone to Oberlin. His relative, Cyrus Call, a Baptist minister, was an Ohio neighbor. (Oberlin was Congregational, formed to train ministers, a general education now praised for its teachers and its music program.)
The Call brothers were visibly active in recruiting settlers to the Algona area. For example, one or both had gone to St. Louis, encountered this writer's Alexander Browns, maybe their Hutchinson son-in-law, as the set came in with a colony from Whitinsville, Mass. The Calls 'message convinced them to forget Missouri and go northish, up the Missouri and Des Moines rivers, to Calls' Grove.
It was a loss, then, when Martha Kemp Benschoter died, not long after arriving, An old, but well written book of family history, published in 1907, by NY-born relative William Henry "Van Benschoten" (using an old spelling), gave Martha's date of death as Sept. 1, 1858 (page 298). Her and Oliver's youngest, Charles, known as Grant, was about to turn nine, not a good time to lose a mother.
Being heavily Dutch, their family's history and culture differed from those of the purely British-descended they found earlier in northern Ohio and now again in northern Iowa, with Scotch-Irish mixed in. The family book giving details can be found at archive.org (easier to search) and at google books.
With other Dutch-speakers in NY state, old church records back to the 1600s were done in their native language, pre-American Revolution. The Dutch generally arrived without legal last names, allowing males in the same family to use different spellings, once finding themselves required to have a surname here.
After the original immigrant tried using his father's first name, the next generation agreed to choose their immigrant's Dutch town of origin. It's now name is now merged with another village, to make Bunschoten-Spakenburg, a seaside place, inside the Netherlands (located in Utrecht province).
Subsets of Benschoters disagreed about whether to make a fuss about form and spelling. Oliver's branch called themselves Benschoter, much as people from NY might call themselves New Yorkers. Another choice was Benschoten, that ending similar to saying "I am an Iowan".
Later, Bun change to Ben, to avoid school children making jokes. What if someone from the Netherlands came to NY, trying to look-up old neighbors "from Bunschoten"? The English "from" translates to the Dutch "van", causing Van Bunschoten.
Even though northern, the New York Dutch, like some other subsets, the Quakers and the plantation Rhode Islanders and the urban wealthy, had owned slaves. A common denominator was that those sets had had ocean shipping connections, rum traded for slave, and had no family stories of "childhood indentures gone bad" (depicted in the old Shirley Temple movie, "The Little Princess"). By 1820, if not earlier, the few northerners with slaves had generally given their slaves freedom.
Oliver's father (one of multiple William Benschoters in the family) and his paternal grandfather (Aaron Benschoter) seemed not to have owned slaves. However, Oliver's uncle Jeremiah, the first in the family go to Ohio, pre-War of 1812, did own a few slaves. There was a requirement when crossing the border into Ohio to free any slaves. Uncle Jeremiah complied. Two of those freed in NY would choose to go along with Jeremiah to territorial Ohio, their names given as Prince and Chloe in the family history book.
Some southerners to come into Ohio, such as Carolina Quakers, repenting their role in past enslavement, also complied. They were able to free their slaves safely in Ohio, even if their home state's laws forbade freeings. Ohio was also a good choice as the freer territory of Canada was jut across Lake Erie, should the US congress or US courts change their minds about Ohio (think Dred Scott decision here).
Jeremiah Benschoter's prior corner of NY had been closer to Pennsylvania than to NYC. Ohio lay just beyond Pennsylvania. Frontiers were often roadless, so Uncle Jeremiah was presumed to have left NY by boating westward along the long shoreline of Lake Erie.
Uncle Jeremiah had hoped to farm once in Ohio. He would give up that notion, after multiple calamities, including a crippling attack on crops by ravenous pigeons that filled the sky, similar to what Iowans would experience later with the grasshopper plagues of the late 1800s . No longer a full farmer, he would instead earn his living as a hunter/trapper, remembered poetically, by the family historian, as taking his canoe along the shores and river-fed marshes of Lake Erie, to set and check traps.
For a time (war of 1812), British warships sent from the Canada side were troubling. The British wanted to retake Detroit, among other things, so Jeremiah built a "block house" for a safe retreat when the ships did come. Once the War of 1812 ended, the fighting ships disappeared from the lakes.
At that point, at least four more Benschoter-related families felt it safe to follow Jeremiah down the lakeside and out of NY. These included the Benschoter grandparents (Aaron and spouse), one of Oliver's sisters (the already wed Mary, her spouse Oliver Peake/Peak), plus this Oliver's younger Benschoter brothers (their father being William, whose father was Aaron). Brother William was named for their father, plus there was brother Daniel, and brother Cornelius (named for uncle Cornelius, ). The name Cornelius was a serious reminder that they were Dutch, in case anyone forgot.
Relative Willliam Henry Van Benschoten, the family historian of old, did original research, going into old records and interviewing relatives. An even earlier book, "History of the Fire Lands", dated 1878, by William W. Williams (aka WW) provided many details repeated in the 1907 family history.
WW added that "Jeremiah Benschoter" was "of Sepronius" (his place in NY after leaving the father's home in Neversink). Jeremiah came to Ohio in 1811, already married to Sarah Weatherlow, was skilled in ironwork, a father to thirteen, including a Jeremiah Jr., and had, very early, bought "lot 20, fourth section", in old Vermillion Twp., in a then larger Huron County, Ohio, about fifty miles west of a baby version of Cleveland. He and the others coming later located near where the big Huron River entered Lake Erie, the river's mouth facing Canada, which was across the enormous lake. WW said that Vermillion township had its first religious meeting in 1810, was soon to build its first church, but, then, with more newcomers present, broadened their audience by re-specifying the church's faith, as Congregational, in 1818 (Calvinist, as was the original Dutch Reformed that their immigrants brought to NY state).
WW usually called the family "Van Benschoter", slipping into Benschoter only on occasion. Again, their religion in NY would have been Dutch Reformed, their faith also much like the Presbyterianism of the Scotch-Irish.
The Dutch Reformed records did not stick to English, however. Another difference, making family trees easier for our generation, their baptismal records added the names of god-parents (often aunts and uncles to the new child), put next to those of the parents.
One of the Jeremiahs, probably the uncle, maybe a cousin, bought desirable "up-river land ", from shipmaker and blacksmith Major Hiram Russel. The latter had arrived a year or so earlier, built a house and ship, alongside the big river in 1810. Due to its prime location, he treated his house also as a store, made it old Huron County's first tavern. Their east side of the river received a road, its future location already surveyed in 1810, when Russel first built there. This allowed those not using boats to arrive.
Uncle Jeremiah V.B. was of record paying taxes in what was still Vermillion Twp. in 1815. Jeremiah's daughters, "Widow Stapleton" [called Delia Steepleton elsewhere] and Mrs. James Paxton [Mary Ann], would share Russel's old property later.
Vermillion would split as the population grew, their part to become Eldridge, remade later in to the modern town of Berlin. However, the town/township was still called Eldridge when Oliver's father William and his grandfather Aaron arrived post-War, from Neversink (Sullivan County, NY), in 1816. The first township election for "supervisors" was Apr. 6, 1818. Father William's name was put up for supervisor then, with one of the Jeremiah Benschoters also elected as an "Overseer of the Poor". Oliver would follow this political example later. He served twice as county sheriff once in Kossuth County, Iowa.
Oliver's father, William, purchased "lot 27 in range 4". (Surveyors used numbers for townships, to get accuracy when selling land, whereas simpler names, such as Vermillion, then Eldridge, then Berlin, were given to townships for election and tax purposes. )
Uncle Daniel had bought "lot 12, range 8". Daniel would widow and remarry, then have six children by his second wife.
They were in a time of religious changes. They would find a heavy mix of Puritan-descended New Englanders in Ohio, with new religious passions emerging. Finding Dutch-trained ministers became hard at some point, caused many to switch away from Dutch Reformed.
Grandfather Aaron was said to turn "Primitive Methodist". Uncle Jeremiah went to the "Spiritualists", but only after trying the "Friends". Jeremiah's son Curtis appeared to marry a Baptist, that religion marking her unusual last name as most likely Welsh, remembering an old Welsh place perhaps, as it was not a father's first name.
Benschoter was increasingly seen, after Van Benschoter, not just the older Van Benschoten preferred back in NY by Dutch Reformed ministers trained to use "proper Dutch" while "back home" (overseas)
Oliver's father William died in 1833, well before Oliver turned 18. Population growth caused the Ohio legislature to let their portion of Huron County split off as a new county in 1838, called Erie County.
Oliver was last obviously in Ohio for the 1850 Census. All six of his first set of children were listed as living in his Erie County farm house, at the time. The youngest was just a toddler, Charles G., later called Grant. He would be the sole son to stay long-term in Iowa.
Of Oliver's siblings. W.W. Williams left out Oliver's brother Almon. Though not seen elsewhere, WW added a brother called Alanson and a sister Betsey G. W.W. Williams noted that that Oliver's sister Esther married Joel Fox. The Fox family was the only one of Oliver's set to remain in the township, after Oliver left in the 1850s to go further west.
Of his Uncle Daniel's set, the eldest and youngest sons stayed, Gardner and Hoffman, their mother being alive there until 1877. Leander, Sheffield, Cordelia and Eliza left.
Noted by a different source, Uncle Daniel's daughter Cordelia would have some notoriety. Was she a late middle child getting attention by following her uncle Jeremiah into the Spiritualists? A group had organized in Berlin Heights. She then went way beyond Spiritualism, to form a free love commune with a Francis Barry and one other party. Their commune had trouble keeping members, so she eventually became conventional, married Barry, and went off to Portage County, Ohio. (Story given by Gina Msiroglu's book, "American Counterculture")
WW Williams gave details for several of Jeremiah's seven sons who stayed in Ohio. One son of Jeremiah, Ensign Van Benschoter, was a doctor, seen in tax records for his medical practice. WW said he had moved, so lived in Portland Township in 1830, a place which later turned into the more important lakeside town called Sandusky.
Portland village's main medical doctor, also from NY, was stricken with cholera in 1834. Maybe Ensign had left Portland by then, given he survived that cholera round. Other sources say he went to Plymouth in Richland County, became its second mayor. Other sources also say locals submitted a petition in the late 1840s to make him an associate judge of Richland County's court.
Oliver's cousin, Curtis Benschoter, like his father Jeremiah, had dropped the Van from Benschoter early. He bought his farm land from the tragic John Dunbar. Dunbar's wife had, in a fit of insanity, thrown herself into a fire of large logs made at the side of their house. Hearing her screams, Dunbar rescued her, put her on the bed and went for medical help, but she got up and "ran wildly" after him. He shouted for help all day, "not daring to leave her", but no one heard. She died in that manner, the first death in the township. Curtis farmed that same land his whole life, dying in 1877, right before WW printed his book.
BACK IN NY. Oliver was born in a farming area, carved out of the NY wilderness over several decades, located some seventy-plus miles northish of NYC. They were of baptismal record as in a wide, multi-county stretch called Shawangunk, no specific town meant. The region, with multiple stringlike settlements, was named for the mountain range it bordered, the impassability of which, even today, makes traveling down to NYC difficult.
The old Shawangunk cited in father William's baptismal record was thus much larger than the modern town in Ulster County that bears the mountains' name. Their part of the wide NY swath was near the Neversink River, in what later spun off as Sullivan County. A splitting into parts as population arrived and churches grew in number meant that the first two US Censuses, done in 1790 and 1800, counted grandfather Aaron's household as in two counties without their moving. The "mother county" was Ulster, seen in 1790, while his 1800 Census counted them in the brand-new daughter county of Sullivan. Aaron would report in court testimony (preserved later in Ohio, while seeking his revolutionary pension) that his last move inside NY was made before the Revolution ended.
In modern times, in the 1940s, the lower basin of the Neversink River was dammed-up to make a water reservoir for NYC. Old churches and thus old cemeteries are now under water. The businesses and population of old Neversink with deep ties had to either move or drown, so mainly rebuilt above the raised water line (Flattsburg?). Oliver died decades before, far away, so never knew of this big, modern change.
MURDER AND MAYHEM? His family apparently had farmed on the higher ground above the dammed part. The land was originally sold to grandfather Aaron from the estate called the Beekman Patent. They bought from the Beekman family, ultra-large landowners ("patroons") originally given the land by Dutch officials. Two decades later, Aaron would have been in the process of turning his hard-worked land over to his maturing sons.
However, In a time of no title insurance, the Beekman land's title was tainted. There was " a lot of drama". Gunshots were not always aimed in the air. A second patroon family laid claim to the now-cleared, much improved land. The second patron family, very oddly, did not make their claim until twenty years after they must have known they could claim title. They would evict the many small farmers who had worked for decades to pay for and improve what was now to be taken from them.
The drama in Sullivan County included an officially unsolved murder, though the family had ideas about the culprit. The ultra-large landlord evicting so many was the one to be murdered.
No one would have felt happy about what happened. While the old place pushed Aaron's family out, a new and better place pulled his people in.
NEXT IN OHIO. They went to the so-called "Firelands region", west of an emerging Cleveland, parts first under survey just before 1800, Connecticut given the land in post-Revolution negotiating over state boundaries, to make up for Connecticut towns on the coast having been burned out by the British, hence the title "Firelands".
The timing was pre-canal, pre-railroads, pre-statehood. Places too close to marshy river mouths would struggle with "ague and fever" (malaria, not understood then, but caused by bites from infected marsh-bred mosquitoes).
Aunt Mary had married Oliver Peak back in Sullivan County, NY. Their first burials in Ohio seem to have been on family farm land converted to a cemetery, what is still called Peaks Cemetery.
By 1833, Oliver Benschoter's parents were both dead, said a NY family historian, writing decades later than WW Williams, in a 1907 book. Oliver's mother died a year after his father. The family historian had talked to Oliver's married older sister, Mrs. Fox, who lived on their parents' farm in Ohio. She would have been the one reporting that their parents had been buried side-by-side at the Peakes' ground. Their deaths were also reported, but not dated, in Oliver's personal biographies, found in old books regarding Kossuth County, Iowa, and Martin County, Minnesota.
Oliver's later biographies were given by his children, not as knowledgeable as his sister back in OH would have been about their parents. His mother's death would have followed news that NYC had just dealt with something horrid brought from abroad in 1832, a late summer cholera, to make its way to Ohio. The disease spread in different ways, but mainly by towns and ships dumping raw sewage into river water and at ocean ports. The sickness would travel with schooners along the oceanfront, then into navigable rivers and across the Great Lakes , eventually brought to the Firelands, taking lives of others in the family. Some graves are listed at a cholera cemetery up in Sandusky. It's not clear. Did the family victims die there? Or, were they merely memorialized there, due to being on a list of all nearby cholera victims?
Uncle Cornelius had "gone west", too, but may have come to Ohio last, too late to find land in what became Erie County, settling instead in Seneca County, in Reed Twp. By 1850, Cornelius and "Dian" had two young men listed in their house, in the spots reserved for children, their known son Alex (for Alexander), age 32, and another male relative, maybe a son, maybe a nephew, a different Oliver than this one, younger, just age 18. The young men were still living at home on August 3, a date when this Oliver would have been ready to turn 23. A little girl, 11, was listed last, "Cirssa Manger", a different surname. Was she a grandchild visiting for the summer, so her name fairly correct? Or, instead a foster child, so name not close to reality? It was not said.
Indenturing was of the recent past, however, eventually to be stopped, along with permanent slavery. This older Oliver's orphaned younger brother, Almon, had had a terrible experience.
Uncle Cornelius was listed as a farmer, his sons as "laborers", their names spelled the way his people pronounced them. The census-taker did not think to ask, just "sounded out" their last name as "Benscooter". Were "Dian" and "Cirssa" the same? Modern transcribers thought they saw "Benschooter" in the handwritten scrawl, so typed that, still not right. The younger cousin Oliver had attended school in the last year, very unusual for that era, lucky to be in a place where high school for farm children was possible. Themselves New York-born, as was their known son Alexander, the adults listed that younger Oliver as born in Ohio. The family move was between the young men's births 32 and 18 years earlier, no earlier than Aug. of 1818, no later than Aug. of 1832.
It thus seems highly likely this older Oliver lived with them when orphaned in 1833 at age 16 or so. They could have used his maturing hands to help with their farmwork while their youngest boy was too small. Being placed in Seneca County with them would allow this Oliver to meet Martha Kemp of Seneca County. He would be of record marrying her there, while his older sister and cousins and a Jeremiah born in 1780, of the right age to be his uncle, were still in Erie County.
He and Martha had at least one child born in Seneca, the rest, in Huron County, in the Firelands region, on Lake Erie. This Oliver's first wife went by Patty , a pioneer nickname for Martha, that rhymed with the more normal nickname of Mattie. (Marys turned into Mollys and Pollys.)
Just as Oliver was a popular male name among the Ohio set , seen also in NY, many repeatedly remembered an ultra-grandmother back in NY named Pieternelle. They called their daughters and cousins Nelle and Nelly, then Nellie, to avoid ethnic criticism from the British-descended. Her full name honored an earlier male ancestor named Pieter in Dutch, aka Peter, if pleasing other ethnicities (much as the feminine name of Janneke, seen in NY, might remember a male named Jan, with that man's name on the Scandinavian end of the Dutch, aka John).
Oliver's homestead claim for land in Iowa was filed at a federal land office in Fort Dodge, near the Dakotah line, for farm land he had most likely already had visited before filing. It was just above the northeast edge of Algona, Iowa. They were there early, but not the very first to arrive in Algona. After first wife Martha Kemp died in 1858, buried inside Algona bounds in its oldest cemetery, he remarried, his second bride to be Sarah Crose. (The "final e" in Crose was pronounced? as seen with Krause in German?).
Oliver and Sarah married in 1862. This was just as the family started to reel from its Civil War deaths.
We know that, no later than 1890, this Oliver had crossed northward, over the nearby Minnesota state line, with Sarah and those of his next ten children not yet grown. Now elderly, he filed that year, using his rural Minnesota address, for a pension, based upon his deceased son George's participation in the Civil War, on the Union side. They were in Silver Lake Township, in its bottom mile of sections, right on the state line, not far from the rural Congregational Church . While he lived, their mailing address was still Centre Chain, Minnesota.
Centre Chain referred to the middle chain of three chains of glaciated lakes running north to south, pointing in the direction of nearby Armstrong, Iowa. Son Hubert worked as a blacksmith in the East Chain, that of the three chains closest to to the old fur-trading place of Faribault.
Over a century after Oliver's death was reported there, the church now called Center Chain Congregational still stands, with its nicely kept, parklike cemetery outside. Mail for both farmers and the church was eventually delivered to and from the larger Fairmont, the county seat some miles to the north. This change later caused Fairmont to be listed as the address of family members who still lived in Silver Lake Twp.
For example, Frank Benschoter, this Oliver's eldest son with Sarah, would eventually be listed as from Fairmont, while actually living outside it, in Silver Lake Twp. An online record says Frank married in Martin County in 1895, nothing more specific, as people eventually understood it was less confusig for outsiders if they did not precisely name the county's rural places.
Oliver and Sarah enrolled daughter Mary Blanche at the school for the deaf at nearby Faribault on Sept. 11, 1889. An old book about the students who attended said typhoid fever caused her loss of hearing. Calling herself Blanche, she would marry a deaf man named Daniel Decker, seen with him, once part of her family had moved down to Emmet County, Iowa. She and Daniel would be on adjacent cards filed for the town of Armstrong, for the 1915 Iowa State Census, not able to communicate well, so state of birth and religion left blank. Her widowed mother and bachelor brother James also were listed as residents. Their cards listed both men as "laborers". They may have been working for a railroad or creamery or on road or carpentry crews. Why not farm? The country had run out of new farm land for farmers, unless one wanted to move to arid places where things were hard to grow or extra-expensive (installing irrigation needed). "Laborer" was the town job offered to rural kids not given high school. Blanche had more education, listing herself as completing Grade 8, whereas her mother, Sarah, listed herself as stopped at Grade 6. Sarah was considerably younger than Oliver, yet died only a year later, in Armstrong, according to state of Iowa records online. There are too many cemeteries to know easily which was hers. Blanch was buried in St. Peter, Minnesota, perhaps moving to be nearer her sister Augusta ("Susan"), who had married Jay Willoughby
ELIMINATING SLAVERY & INDENTURE. Oliver's uncle Jeremiah was told upon his arrival on the Erie lakeshore of Ohio that slavery was not allowed in the new place. He complied by releasing his slaves. There was no belligerence, nor any appealing to Congress to change local laws, as would be seen later, when southern plantation owners insisted on expanding slavery into newly forming states. The Civil War would break out to stop the expansion, timed as Oliver married second wife Sarah in Algona, Iowa, in mid-Dec. of 1862.
Many would die. Oliver and Martha Kemp's son George C. Benschoter would join at 18, then die while in Little Rock, buried there, listed as Iowa Infantry, name mis-understood by the military to be the "Benshoter", the needed " C" omitted. The spelling would be corrected in the pension application, yet the military stone was carved with the Benshoter mistake.
From Erie County, Ohio, so from the Firelands region, cousin Oliver W. Benschoter would be another war casualty. He died in the union's military hospital in Nashville Tenn., late in December of 1862, mere weeks after Oliver A. married Sarah mid. Dec., back in Algona. Both young men died of disease, not as they expected, not in battle.
George's specific disease has not yet been found in records, The younger Oliver died of rubeola (German measles). Vaccinations against measles did not yet exist. Contagious illnesses spread quickly inside soldier's tent-crowded camps.
The bondage of indentured orphans by the British and early Americans was only for a limited number of years, so temporary, not permanent and inherited like slavery or serfdom. Yet, those whose young relatives had been indentured under bad masters had a special appreciation of what slavery meant.
Opposition to slavery was serious in both Ohio and northern Iowa. Their Iowa county was named Kossuth, to honor Louis Kossuth, a man who came to the northeastern US in the 1840s to campaign for everyone to pressure Hungary to abolish serfdom. Serfdom was like slavery, except that serfs "went with the land" Like rocks or trees, they could not be moved ahead of a property's, could have their masters change, but not be moved. This allowed them to form comunites and have church allefiances which continued later.
A younger brother of Oliver, named Almon Benschoten, ran away from presumed abuse at his assigned indenture where an uncle had placed him after his parents died. Being indentured meant having no legal rights over the contract's life, except for details specified in the contract, over which the child had no say-so. The child or preteen was never the one given the contract price, so was not personally paid. The one-time fee paid by a purchasing master often went to pay parents' debts. Indentured children were forced to tolerate hunger and cold and exhaustion, perhaps moved by the master far away from people they loved, perhaps beaten, whipped or branded by a master who lived too well on the proceeds of child labor.
ODD SURNAME? His grandfather Aaron once alternated in his children's baptismal records, between using a longer early spelling and a shorter surname with the same meaning, Van Bunschoten versus Bunschoter/Benschoter. The difference between Van and -er is like saying "I am from New York" versus "I am a New Yorker".
Their first known immigrant ancestor, like most early Dutch in the 1600s, arrived without a surname. He described himself as Teunis, son of Elias. When asked "Where did you come from", he replied "from Bunschoten" (Van Bunschoten). The waterside town of Bunschoten (in Holland, just east of Amsterdam), being walled, would have been a fortified place where local farmers might be expected to take their families whenever the waterway or he town's countryside came under attack. The first known church records for Teunis in America were in old Bergen, a region of what later became New Jersey. That newer Bergen shared the name of a very old Norwegian city, formerly part of the Hanseatic cities. Merchant shippers belonging to an organized group called the Hansa (the League) circulated between the varied Hanseatic cities, at their peak in the 1200s when 170 cities from northern Europe seaways were said to have participated, ranging from Stockholm in Sweden from Krakow and Gdansk in Poland and Denmark, to Riga in Latvia, to Bruges in Belgium and Bremen in Germany, to Steelyar (London) and Ipswich in Britain. In this manner, Scandinavian naming customs mixed with Dutch, explaining why Teunis was also seen with a Danish-style surname accepted by the Dutch, as Teunis Eliasen, moving from NJ to places along the west bank of the Hudson River in NY, children born in both places.
Many in Oliver's larger family traveled "out west" to places near Jeremiah, but in steps. Aaron's nickname of Arie, seen in a child's baptismal record, sometimes was "sounded out" as Ora. He and his wife would not follow Jeremiah into Ohio until after the War of 1812. Waiting with them were Oliver's parents and their other adult children, his uncle Daniel to later be buried as Benschoten in the Firelands region of Ohio, just west of Cleveland. Any war-related threat of the British trying to takeover Ohio's Lake Erie shoreline by attacking from Detroit or Canada? It was gone via treaty, with Detroit now clearly in the US, weakening its old economic ties with southern Canada.
The timing was still very early, pre-statehood for Ohio. Aaron's brothers were last "all together" in old NY, while there for the American Revolution. While serving, sometimes a volunteer, sometimes "pressed, with George Washington at West Point for awhile, Aaron moved a few times along the Hudson River, trying to find better opportunities in farmland. He thus served from different locations, left records at Dutch Reformed churches, beginning in his parents' place of Dutchess County, said to leave records at the Poughkeepsie church, moving to Ulster County, then, with brother Garret and others, to that part of Ulster which became Sullivan County, near the Neversink River. Towns/townships that still exist were much larger then, not yet subdivided into smaller places.
Aaron then lost hard-earned land.
Oliver's father William was the leader in following his uncle Jeremiah off to Ohio, taking the children already born and both of William's long-lived parents. Aaron and wife would live in a cabin on William's land. Then, Oliver's parents, in the year or so after cholera hit NYC, "died too young", leaving their orphans in Ohio with relatives nearby "barely making it".. Long-lived Aaron and wife moved in with William's brother Daniel. Uncle to Oliver, he tried to find placements for the children after being appointed guardian to the ones not deemed adult (adulthood was 12 for girls, 14 for boys).
Oliver and siblings were the second set of Benschoter/Von Benschoten children orphaned in Ohio, the others being Almon and his siblings. Milo's brother Curtis, who appeared to marry into the Baptists, was also in the picture. Living nearby, he was not able to take more than one or two, so an in-law named Peake/Peak stepped in. Proof that Oliver's family lived close-by was that Oliver's parents and grandparents were said to be buried in the Peakes' family cemetery, relatives dying at a later date to be buried instead in Berlin Heights.
In some family trees, the two sets of orphans, not surprisingly, are treated as "mix-and-match", as if there was just one set of orphans. Remembering that there were two sets with different parents and different arrangements for placement into other families is difficult, but essential
.
Some placements as apprentices were good. Other placements were traumatic. After orphaned cousin Almon Benschoten escaped his bad apprenticeship as a tanner and currier, his status as a runaway was perhaps illegal. The unfilled indenture contract was a debt owed. He would wander for decades, the family said, as far west as St. Louis, as far south as New Orleans, as far east as NYC, of record working as a "cooper" (barrel-maker). He finally returned to marry, but never had children.
The luckier Oliver, in the process of "going west" first traveled into Illinois, to explore the Rock Island area. Later, he did not settle immediately in Kossuth County, but went through Delaware County in Iowa's northeast corner, closer to the Mississippi, so across from Rock Island. He visited cousin Alexander and Uncle Cornelius Benschoten, then maybe followed westward whatever pieces existed of the old military trail going from Fort Atkinson west across northern Iowa (which became Hwy 18). Of his children, just his daughter Alice was along. She would help prepare for the others coming to Iowa later, presumably by starting a garden once in Iowa, nursing some animals and fruit trees, helping to dig and plow and chop firewood, and so forth, as women could be expected to be tougher then.
Son William would bring Oliver's wife (Martha Kemp) and Oliver's other children.
To do so, William left his studies at Oberlin, at the time, a newish college in Ohio, one that would become known for its abolitionism and speaking out for varied rights. One of the Call brothers soliciting settlers to the Algona area of Iowa had attended Oberlin, a rare thing in a day when few went beyond grade school/grammar school .
Daughter Alice, to become Alice E Seely/Seeley, was perhaps remarkable in some ways, showing that literacy and entertaining writing were something that could be done by more than her male cousins. Her work on a local newspaper (The Algona Bee?) is currently being researched, not much found so far. She would marry Andrew Seeley, an orphan of sorts, also from Ohio.
BACK TO OLIVER. Oliver's grandfather (great-grandfather?) was Aaron Bentschoter, aka Arie Van Benschoten, who moved several times, firs in Dutchess county, as he served stints in the Revolution. Post-war, he first appeared with family (counted, not named) in the 1790 census, but without slaves. Aaron's brother Jeremiah was another story, his slaves freed by law once inside the Ohio border. Jeremiah was the one going to Ohio first, with a pack of preteen boys among his many children,. The departures were amidst stories of a rich landlord's strategies to confiscate property in NY after letting the lands' buyers settle -in for several decades, clear the land, build houses and barns and cribs upon it, and otherwise improve it, then show and show the fauolt in the legal legal title. There was some negotiation, some getting of uncleared and inferior wild land in return for being evicted peaceably, but the victims were largely forced wither to stay and be beholden to a malignant landlord , or to move. The landlord would be shot dead while riding his horse , circumstances unclear, no one convicted, according to a history of old Sullivan county, but perhaps involving a young boy trying to protect his family from severe loss.
Oliver and siblings were was born near the Neversink River in Sullivan County. Settlements were low density, in swaths that have since divided into smaller towns and townships. Aaron's brother Garrett was one of the ones remaining, a stone still standing for Garret/Gerrit's son, another Oliver, buried as Van Benshoten/Bunshoten. That cemetery is called Flatsburgh/Neversink. Its old town and possibly their old Dutch Reformed church (which kept infant baptismal records naming parents, a wonderful thing for tracing ancestors) no longer are in the old spot. The old town of Neversink, named for the river thought it, had been put underwater, dammed, creating a large reservoir, owned by NYC for a water supply.
Oliver married twice, had six known children survive by Martha Kemp, had ten more by Sarah Crose. He and Sarah moved northward, straight north of Armstrong, into the bottommost, so southmost row of the thirty-six square mile sections that made up Silver Kake Township in Martin County. The biggest town there was Fairmont. . Sarah, being 20 some years younger, died much later than Oliver, after moved south, back to Iowa, to Armstrong.
(Alice's son James Seeley married Agnes Brown, sister to one of the Alexander Browns, in Cresco Twp., just south of Algona. The first Browns to Algona were Scotch-Irish who came from northern Ireland in the potato famine with seven children on their ship the Sir Charles Napier. They made their way from Canada down to Massachusetts by the 1850 Census, with just six children left. They then came to Algona with only four children remaining, with a rail accident and tuberculosis as causes of death for two. They came as part of the "Whitinsville Colony" of Northbridge Town/Township in Worcester County, Mass., a well-planned manufacturing town westish of Boston, northish of Providence. Rhode island. Others from Whitinsville to Algona included Frank Rist, who had been with Thomas and John Brown in the severe rail disaster on an outing to see sailboat races in Providence. The accident was due to someone not minding clocks and two trains then colliding, with cars from one sliding under cars of the other. Thomas died, not immediately, but in pain, begging a kind minister to help him. The Reverend tried to lift what was pinning Thomas by the neck, but did not succeed. Frank Rist and an injured but healing John Brown survived; we assume the same John Brown was the one who made it out to Iowa with Frank Rist and the Alexander Browns. If so, he worked as a courier and stagecoach driver to supplement the family income while others farmed, but "died too young" in 1862.
The Whitinsville set were greeted by one of the Call Brothers of Iowa while en route, coming through the gateway of St. Louis. Mr. Call convinced them to go North, his spot then called Calls Grove, to change later into Algona. They were in the northwest corner of Iowa, just above Fort Dodge, not long after Daniel Boone and other surveyors and army men had made their way through part of Iowa
==
Notes on NY. Their Dutch family previously had considerable history in the Hudson River area of eastern NY. They lived in a corner closer to Pennsylvania than to NYC, so were more rural than urban. The family's infant baptismal records linked children to parents, going many generations back. The Dutch often used relatives as "god-parents", so parents' siblings were also learned when checking infants' baptismal records. The departing Dutch governor had made the British who conquered the NY Dutch to promise some religious tolerance. Thus, Quakers were allowed in NY, unlike in New England. Yet, not all was tolerant, as the NY family historian writing in 1907 seemed surprised that an early family member had somehow found a Catholic to marry.
Both the Quakers and NY Dutch might have slaves in the early days, but both came to see it as wrong. The Friends (Quakers) often came from seafaring backgrounds, as often did the Dutch. The Quakers thus were the other major group owning slaves in rural NY, pre-War or 1812. However, neither set of New Yorkers ever owned slaves to the degree seen in the southern colonies and states. They came to understand ,on their own, without war, by observing the effects of slavery, that freedom should be given.
His son George had died not in vain, but with a purpose. He and multiple others joined from Kossuth, a county named for Louis Kossuth, an anti-serfdom speaker who had come to New England to speak. At least one of the Call brothers had paid attention at Oberlin, which had, not just farmers' children in attendance, but the nearly adult children of ex slaves, as well, not forced to escape to Canada, as freed by former owners in the South . Oliver's daughter Alice would have noticed as well. If she had lessons from Oberlin to teach, they were not lost on George. We thank the family for their sacrifice.
Oliver was accustomed to New Englanders, but would meet people who called themselves Scotch-Irish, plus other new sorts, once in Iowa. When he introduced himself the first time, the new neighbors might ask "What kind of name is that?" Having practiced his answer before, while still in Ohio, he might say "Benschoter is Dutch. Back in upstate New York, where I'm originally from, many Dutch names are as tricky to spell as mine".
He brought his family to Iowa in steps. He first prospected for land with daughter Alice. They reached a relatives' place in Delaware County, in northeast Iowa, late in 1856, in her seventeenth year, delaying their visit to Algona, until early 1857. Once they left for Algona, they would have to trudge through February snow. Were they waiting for the stories of unhappy native tribes and of massacres north of Algona to quiet down?
The point of stopping specifically at Delaware County, barely inside Iowa's eastern edge? Other Benschotters were already there, with their Burgess in-laws, all from Seneca County, Ohio.
Oliver and Alice could inquire about Oliver's uncle Cornelius, who had recently "knocked on death's door". Cousin Alexander and his first wife, the former Alanson Burgess, were now in charge of Cornelius' farm.
Alexander's mother, Diana, was still in the house, not yet in Michigan to stay with her other sons, more cousins of Oliver. Diana and Alexander would have had advice for them on Iowa frontier life, how it differed from Ohio, maybe made sure they had the right supplies. The two travelers then made their way through to Fort Dodge, to file for land, before following a riverside or two northish, to future Algona's older southrn part, still called Calls' Grove.
Alice had recently finished a preparatory curriculum, 1855-1856, at Ohio's Oberlin college. Such academies were a New England idea that would lead to public high schools everywhere. We know she attended, as an old Oberlin college directory listed her achievement, , maybe finishing the teachers' training common there, or trying out the music conservatory.
We are proud of her, so ahead of her time. None of the family histories spoke of her attendance, however.
A family history of 1907 did mention her brother William's attempt to attend the next year. He had to leave the college, he told the family historian, to accompany his mother and younger siblings westward, to join Oliver and Alice. Thus, the Oberlin Directories omit his name. There was no college here for him to continue once in NW Iowa? Not yet?
This Oliver's first wife, Alice's mother, Martha (maiden name Kemp) thus had waited back in Ohio, for Oliver and Alice to ready things, before bringing five other children, some small. The two next eldest after Alice, William and Evaline, would assist. They arrived in Kossuth County later in the same year, 1857, able to go part-way by train, but only as far as Dubuque. The tracks ended there. They would then switch to wagon transport for their own riverside travel, going westish, until near Algona.
To pay for the new business venture in Iowa and their travel adventure on the way, he and Mary had sold their Ohio farm. Located near Ohio's Huron River, they had been in one of the shoreline counties on Lake Erie's south side, their mother county at first Huron, before their daughter section split off as newer Erie County. If leaving Cleveland, taking a route parallel to Lake Erie's south side, to go west,, Oberlin and their farm would be passed when about halfway through Ohio.
On the way to Iowa was Michigan, where some other sons of Cornelius, Oliver's cousins, would be. Also skipped was the Rock River region of Illinois, which Oliver had prospected two decades earlier. Wanting very much to move to that part of Illinois then, for reasons unspoken, he instead returned to Ohio.
For their next twenty years or so in Ohio, the family had been surrounded by cousins. They could visit the graveyards holding Oliver's grandparents and other deceased kin. Now, for the benefit of the living, they were going west. The young might renew some Oberlin acquaintances in Algona, make completely new friends, and gain new in-laws.
We have to ask, why pick Algona in Kossuth County, and not some other new place? Word of mouth? Connections? Advertisements?
A best guess, based on looking up their neighbors , new and old--
One of the Call brothers founding Algona had gone to Oberlin. His relative, Cyrus Call, a Baptist minister, was an Ohio neighbor. (Oberlin was Congregational, formed to train ministers, a general education now praised for its teachers and its music program.)
The Call brothers were visibly active in recruiting settlers to the Algona area. For example, one or both had gone to St. Louis, encountered this writer's Alexander Browns, maybe their Hutchinson son-in-law, as the set came in with a colony from Whitinsville, Mass. The Calls 'message convinced them to forget Missouri and go northish, up the Missouri and Des Moines rivers, to Calls' Grove.
It was a loss, then, when Martha Kemp Benschoter died, not long after arriving, An old, but well written book of family history, published in 1907, by NY-born relative William Henry "Van Benschoten" (using an old spelling), gave Martha's date of death as Sept. 1, 1858 (page 298). Her and Oliver's youngest, Charles, known as Grant, was about to turn nine, not a good time to lose a mother.
Being heavily Dutch, their family's history and culture differed from those of the purely British-descended they found earlier in northern Ohio and now again in northern Iowa, with Scotch-Irish mixed in. The family book giving details can be found at archive.org (easier to search) and at google books.
With other Dutch-speakers in NY state, old church records back to the 1600s were done in their native language, pre-American Revolution. The Dutch generally arrived without legal last names, allowing males in the same family to use different spellings, once finding themselves required to have a surname here.
After the original immigrant tried using his father's first name, the next generation agreed to choose their immigrant's Dutch town of origin. It's now name is now merged with another village, to make Bunschoten-Spakenburg, a seaside place, inside the Netherlands (located in Utrecht province).
Subsets of Benschoters disagreed about whether to make a fuss about form and spelling. Oliver's branch called themselves Benschoter, much as people from NY might call themselves New Yorkers. Another choice was Benschoten, that ending similar to saying "I am an Iowan".
Later, Bun change to Ben, to avoid school children making jokes. What if someone from the Netherlands came to NY, trying to look-up old neighbors "from Bunschoten"? The English "from" translates to the Dutch "van", causing Van Bunschoten.
Even though northern, the New York Dutch, like some other subsets, the Quakers and the plantation Rhode Islanders and the urban wealthy, had owned slaves. A common denominator was that those sets had had ocean shipping connections, rum traded for slave, and had no family stories of "childhood indentures gone bad" (depicted in the old Shirley Temple movie, "The Little Princess"). By 1820, if not earlier, the few northerners with slaves had generally given their slaves freedom.
Oliver's father (one of multiple William Benschoters in the family) and his paternal grandfather (Aaron Benschoter) seemed not to have owned slaves. However, Oliver's uncle Jeremiah, the first in the family go to Ohio, pre-War of 1812, did own a few slaves. There was a requirement when crossing the border into Ohio to free any slaves. Uncle Jeremiah complied. Two of those freed in NY would choose to go along with Jeremiah to territorial Ohio, their names given as Prince and Chloe in the family history book.
Some southerners to come into Ohio, such as Carolina Quakers, repenting their role in past enslavement, also complied. They were able to free their slaves safely in Ohio, even if their home state's laws forbade freeings. Ohio was also a good choice as the freer territory of Canada was jut across Lake Erie, should the US congress or US courts change their minds about Ohio (think Dred Scott decision here).
Jeremiah Benschoter's prior corner of NY had been closer to Pennsylvania than to NYC. Ohio lay just beyond Pennsylvania. Frontiers were often roadless, so Uncle Jeremiah was presumed to have left NY by boating westward along the long shoreline of Lake Erie.
Uncle Jeremiah had hoped to farm once in Ohio. He would give up that notion, after multiple calamities, including a crippling attack on crops by ravenous pigeons that filled the sky, similar to what Iowans would experience later with the grasshopper plagues of the late 1800s . No longer a full farmer, he would instead earn his living as a hunter/trapper, remembered poetically, by the family historian, as taking his canoe along the shores and river-fed marshes of Lake Erie, to set and check traps.
For a time (war of 1812), British warships sent from the Canada side were troubling. The British wanted to retake Detroit, among other things, so Jeremiah built a "block house" for a safe retreat when the ships did come. Once the War of 1812 ended, the fighting ships disappeared from the lakes.
At that point, at least four more Benschoter-related families felt it safe to follow Jeremiah down the lakeside and out of NY. These included the Benschoter grandparents (Aaron and spouse), one of Oliver's sisters (the already wed Mary, her spouse Oliver Peake/Peak), plus this Oliver's younger Benschoter brothers (their father being William, whose father was Aaron). Brother William was named for their father, plus there was brother Daniel, and brother Cornelius (named for uncle Cornelius, ). The name Cornelius was a serious reminder that they were Dutch, in case anyone forgot.
Relative Willliam Henry Van Benschoten, the family historian of old, did original research, going into old records and interviewing relatives. An even earlier book, "History of the Fire Lands", dated 1878, by William W. Williams (aka WW) provided many details repeated in the 1907 family history.
WW added that "Jeremiah Benschoter" was "of Sepronius" (his place in NY after leaving the father's home in Neversink). Jeremiah came to Ohio in 1811, already married to Sarah Weatherlow, was skilled in ironwork, a father to thirteen, including a Jeremiah Jr., and had, very early, bought "lot 20, fourth section", in old Vermillion Twp., in a then larger Huron County, Ohio, about fifty miles west of a baby version of Cleveland. He and the others coming later located near where the big Huron River entered Lake Erie, the river's mouth facing Canada, which was across the enormous lake. WW said that Vermillion township had its first religious meeting in 1810, was soon to build its first church, but, then, with more newcomers present, broadened their audience by re-specifying the church's faith, as Congregational, in 1818 (Calvinist, as was the original Dutch Reformed that their immigrants brought to NY state).
WW usually called the family "Van Benschoter", slipping into Benschoter only on occasion. Again, their religion in NY would have been Dutch Reformed, their faith also much like the Presbyterianism of the Scotch-Irish.
The Dutch Reformed records did not stick to English, however. Another difference, making family trees easier for our generation, their baptismal records added the names of god-parents (often aunts and uncles to the new child), put next to those of the parents.
One of the Jeremiahs, probably the uncle, maybe a cousin, bought desirable "up-river land ", from shipmaker and blacksmith Major Hiram Russel. The latter had arrived a year or so earlier, built a house and ship, alongside the big river in 1810. Due to its prime location, he treated his house also as a store, made it old Huron County's first tavern. Their east side of the river received a road, its future location already surveyed in 1810, when Russel first built there. This allowed those not using boats to arrive.
Uncle Jeremiah V.B. was of record paying taxes in what was still Vermillion Twp. in 1815. Jeremiah's daughters, "Widow Stapleton" [called Delia Steepleton elsewhere] and Mrs. James Paxton [Mary Ann], would share Russel's old property later.
Vermillion would split as the population grew, their part to become Eldridge, remade later in to the modern town of Berlin. However, the town/township was still called Eldridge when Oliver's father William and his grandfather Aaron arrived post-War, from Neversink (Sullivan County, NY), in 1816. The first township election for "supervisors" was Apr. 6, 1818. Father William's name was put up for supervisor then, with one of the Jeremiah Benschoters also elected as an "Overseer of the Poor". Oliver would follow this political example later. He served twice as county sheriff once in Kossuth County, Iowa.
Oliver's father, William, purchased "lot 27 in range 4". (Surveyors used numbers for townships, to get accuracy when selling land, whereas simpler names, such as Vermillion, then Eldridge, then Berlin, were given to townships for election and tax purposes. )
Uncle Daniel had bought "lot 12, range 8". Daniel would widow and remarry, then have six children by his second wife.
They were in a time of religious changes. They would find a heavy mix of Puritan-descended New Englanders in Ohio, with new religious passions emerging. Finding Dutch-trained ministers became hard at some point, caused many to switch away from Dutch Reformed.
Grandfather Aaron was said to turn "Primitive Methodist". Uncle Jeremiah went to the "Spiritualists", but only after trying the "Friends". Jeremiah's son Curtis appeared to marry a Baptist, that religion marking her unusual last name as most likely Welsh, remembering an old Welsh place perhaps, as it was not a father's first name.
Benschoter was increasingly seen, after Van Benschoter, not just the older Van Benschoten preferred back in NY by Dutch Reformed ministers trained to use "proper Dutch" while "back home" (overseas)
Oliver's father William died in 1833, well before Oliver turned 18. Population growth caused the Ohio legislature to let their portion of Huron County split off as a new county in 1838, called Erie County.
Oliver was last obviously in Ohio for the 1850 Census. All six of his first set of children were listed as living in his Erie County farm house, at the time. The youngest was just a toddler, Charles G., later called Grant. He would be the sole son to stay long-term in Iowa.
Of Oliver's siblings. W.W. Williams left out Oliver's brother Almon. Though not seen elsewhere, WW added a brother called Alanson and a sister Betsey G. W.W. Williams noted that that Oliver's sister Esther married Joel Fox. The Fox family was the only one of Oliver's set to remain in the township, after Oliver left in the 1850s to go further west.
Of his Uncle Daniel's set, the eldest and youngest sons stayed, Gardner and Hoffman, their mother being alive there until 1877. Leander, Sheffield, Cordelia and Eliza left.
Noted by a different source, Uncle Daniel's daughter Cordelia would have some notoriety. Was she a late middle child getting attention by following her uncle Jeremiah into the Spiritualists? A group had organized in Berlin Heights. She then went way beyond Spiritualism, to form a free love commune with a Francis Barry and one other party. Their commune had trouble keeping members, so she eventually became conventional, married Barry, and went off to Portage County, Ohio. (Story given by Gina Msiroglu's book, "American Counterculture")
WW Williams gave details for several of Jeremiah's seven sons who stayed in Ohio. One son of Jeremiah, Ensign Van Benschoter, was a doctor, seen in tax records for his medical practice. WW said he had moved, so lived in Portland Township in 1830, a place which later turned into the more important lakeside town called Sandusky.
Portland village's main medical doctor, also from NY, was stricken with cholera in 1834. Maybe Ensign had left Portland by then, given he survived that cholera round. Other sources say he went to Plymouth in Richland County, became its second mayor. Other sources also say locals submitted a petition in the late 1840s to make him an associate judge of Richland County's court.
Oliver's cousin, Curtis Benschoter, like his father Jeremiah, had dropped the Van from Benschoter early. He bought his farm land from the tragic John Dunbar. Dunbar's wife had, in a fit of insanity, thrown herself into a fire of large logs made at the side of their house. Hearing her screams, Dunbar rescued her, put her on the bed and went for medical help, but she got up and "ran wildly" after him. He shouted for help all day, "not daring to leave her", but no one heard. She died in that manner, the first death in the township. Curtis farmed that same land his whole life, dying in 1877, right before WW printed his book.
BACK IN NY. Oliver was born in a farming area, carved out of the NY wilderness over several decades, located some seventy-plus miles northish of NYC. They were of baptismal record as in a wide, multi-county stretch called Shawangunk, no specific town meant. The region, with multiple stringlike settlements, was named for the mountain range it bordered, the impassability of which, even today, makes traveling down to NYC difficult.
The old Shawangunk cited in father William's baptismal record was thus much larger than the modern town in Ulster County that bears the mountains' name. Their part of the wide NY swath was near the Neversink River, in what later spun off as Sullivan County. A splitting into parts as population arrived and churches grew in number meant that the first two US Censuses, done in 1790 and 1800, counted grandfather Aaron's household as in two counties without their moving. The "mother county" was Ulster, seen in 1790, while his 1800 Census counted them in the brand-new daughter county of Sullivan. Aaron would report in court testimony (preserved later in Ohio, while seeking his revolutionary pension) that his last move inside NY was made before the Revolution ended.
In modern times, in the 1940s, the lower basin of the Neversink River was dammed-up to make a water reservoir for NYC. Old churches and thus old cemeteries are now under water. The businesses and population of old Neversink with deep ties had to either move or drown, so mainly rebuilt above the raised water line (Flattsburg?). Oliver died decades before, far away, so never knew of this big, modern change.
MURDER AND MAYHEM? His family apparently had farmed on the higher ground above the dammed part. The land was originally sold to grandfather Aaron from the estate called the Beekman Patent. They bought from the Beekman family, ultra-large landowners ("patroons") originally given the land by Dutch officials. Two decades later, Aaron would have been in the process of turning his hard-worked land over to his maturing sons.
However, In a time of no title insurance, the Beekman land's title was tainted. There was " a lot of drama". Gunshots were not always aimed in the air. A second patroon family laid claim to the now-cleared, much improved land. The second patron family, very oddly, did not make their claim until twenty years after they must have known they could claim title. They would evict the many small farmers who had worked for decades to pay for and improve what was now to be taken from them.
The drama in Sullivan County included an officially unsolved murder, though the family had ideas about the culprit. The ultra-large landlord evicting so many was the one to be murdered.
No one would have felt happy about what happened. While the old place pushed Aaron's family out, a new and better place pulled his people in.
NEXT IN OHIO. They went to the so-called "Firelands region", west of an emerging Cleveland, parts first under survey just before 1800, Connecticut given the land in post-Revolution negotiating over state boundaries, to make up for Connecticut towns on the coast having been burned out by the British, hence the title "Firelands".
The timing was pre-canal, pre-railroads, pre-statehood. Places too close to marshy river mouths would struggle with "ague and fever" (malaria, not understood then, but caused by bites from infected marsh-bred mosquitoes).
Aunt Mary had married Oliver Peak back in Sullivan County, NY. Their first burials in Ohio seem to have been on family farm land converted to a cemetery, what is still called Peaks Cemetery.
By 1833, Oliver Benschoter's parents were both dead, said a NY family historian, writing decades later than WW Williams, in a 1907 book. Oliver's mother died a year after his father. The family historian had talked to Oliver's married older sister, Mrs. Fox, who lived on their parents' farm in Ohio. She would have been the one reporting that their parents had been buried side-by-side at the Peakes' ground. Their deaths were also reported, but not dated, in Oliver's personal biographies, found in old books regarding Kossuth County, Iowa, and Martin County, Minnesota.
Oliver's later biographies were given by his children, not as knowledgeable as his sister back in OH would have been about their parents. His mother's death would have followed news that NYC had just dealt with something horrid brought from abroad in 1832, a late summer cholera, to make its way to Ohio. The disease spread in different ways, but mainly by towns and ships dumping raw sewage into river water and at ocean ports. The sickness would travel with schooners along the oceanfront, then into navigable rivers and across the Great Lakes , eventually brought to the Firelands, taking lives of others in the family. Some graves are listed at a cholera cemetery up in Sandusky. It's not clear. Did the family victims die there? Or, were they merely memorialized there, due to being on a list of all nearby cholera victims?
Uncle Cornelius had "gone west", too, but may have come to Ohio last, too late to find land in what became Erie County, settling instead in Seneca County, in Reed Twp. By 1850, Cornelius and "Dian" had two young men listed in their house, in the spots reserved for children, their known son Alex (for Alexander), age 32, and another male relative, maybe a son, maybe a nephew, a different Oliver than this one, younger, just age 18. The young men were still living at home on August 3, a date when this Oliver would have been ready to turn 23. A little girl, 11, was listed last, "Cirssa Manger", a different surname. Was she a grandchild visiting for the summer, so her name fairly correct? Or, instead a foster child, so name not close to reality? It was not said.
Indenturing was of the recent past, however, eventually to be stopped, along with permanent slavery. This older Oliver's orphaned younger brother, Almon, had had a terrible experience.
Uncle Cornelius was listed as a farmer, his sons as "laborers", their names spelled the way his people pronounced them. The census-taker did not think to ask, just "sounded out" their last name as "Benscooter". Were "Dian" and "Cirssa" the same? Modern transcribers thought they saw "Benschooter" in the handwritten scrawl, so typed that, still not right. The younger cousin Oliver had attended school in the last year, very unusual for that era, lucky to be in a place where high school for farm children was possible. Themselves New York-born, as was their known son Alexander, the adults listed that younger Oliver as born in Ohio. The family move was between the young men's births 32 and 18 years earlier, no earlier than Aug. of 1818, no later than Aug. of 1832.
It thus seems highly likely this older Oliver lived with them when orphaned in 1833 at age 16 or so. They could have used his maturing hands to help with their farmwork while their youngest boy was too small. Being placed in Seneca County with them would allow this Oliver to meet Martha Kemp of Seneca County. He would be of record marrying her there, while his older sister and cousins and a Jeremiah born in 1780, of the right age to be his uncle, were still in Erie County.
He and Martha had at least one child born in Seneca, the rest, in Huron County, in the Firelands region, on Lake Erie. This Oliver's first wife went by Patty , a pioneer nickname for Martha, that rhymed with the more normal nickname of Mattie. (Marys turned into Mollys and Pollys.)
Just as Oliver was a popular male name among the Ohio set , seen also in NY, many repeatedly remembered an ultra-grandmother back in NY named Pieternelle. They called their daughters and cousins Nelle and Nelly, then Nellie, to avoid ethnic criticism from the British-descended. Her full name honored an earlier male ancestor named Pieter in Dutch, aka Peter, if pleasing other ethnicities (much as the feminine name of Janneke, seen in NY, might remember a male named Jan, with that man's name on the Scandinavian end of the Dutch, aka John).
Oliver's homestead claim for land in Iowa was filed at a federal land office in Fort Dodge, near the Dakotah line, for farm land he had most likely already had visited before filing. It was just above the northeast edge of Algona, Iowa. They were there early, but not the very first to arrive in Algona. After first wife Martha Kemp died in 1858, buried inside Algona bounds in its oldest cemetery, he remarried, his second bride to be Sarah Crose. (The "final e" in Crose was pronounced? as seen with Krause in German?).
Oliver and Sarah married in 1862. This was just as the family started to reel from its Civil War deaths.
We know that, no later than 1890, this Oliver had crossed northward, over the nearby Minnesota state line, with Sarah and those of his next ten children not yet grown. Now elderly, he filed that year, using his rural Minnesota address, for a pension, based upon his deceased son George's participation in the Civil War, on the Union side. They were in Silver Lake Township, in its bottom mile of sections, right on the state line, not far from the rural Congregational Church . While he lived, their mailing address was still Centre Chain, Minnesota.
Centre Chain referred to the middle chain of three chains of glaciated lakes running north to south, pointing in the direction of nearby Armstrong, Iowa. Son Hubert worked as a blacksmith in the East Chain, that of the three chains closest to to the old fur-trading place of Faribault.
Over a century after Oliver's death was reported there, the church now called Center Chain Congregational still stands, with its nicely kept, parklike cemetery outside. Mail for both farmers and the church was eventually delivered to and from the larger Fairmont, the county seat some miles to the north. This change later caused Fairmont to be listed as the address of family members who still lived in Silver Lake Twp.
For example, Frank Benschoter, this Oliver's eldest son with Sarah, would eventually be listed as from Fairmont, while actually living outside it, in Silver Lake Twp. An online record says Frank married in Martin County in 1895, nothing more specific, as people eventually understood it was less confusig for outsiders if they did not precisely name the county's rural places.
Oliver and Sarah enrolled daughter Mary Blanche at the school for the deaf at nearby Faribault on Sept. 11, 1889. An old book about the students who attended said typhoid fever caused her loss of hearing. Calling herself Blanche, she would marry a deaf man named Daniel Decker, seen with him, once part of her family had moved down to Emmet County, Iowa. She and Daniel would be on adjacent cards filed for the town of Armstrong, for the 1915 Iowa State Census, not able to communicate well, so state of birth and religion left blank. Her widowed mother and bachelor brother James also were listed as residents. Their cards listed both men as "laborers". They may have been working for a railroad or creamery or on road or carpentry crews. Why not farm? The country had run out of new farm land for farmers, unless one wanted to move to arid places where things were hard to grow or extra-expensive (installing irrigation needed). "Laborer" was the town job offered to rural kids not given high school. Blanche had more education, listing herself as completing Grade 8, whereas her mother, Sarah, listed herself as stopped at Grade 6. Sarah was considerably younger than Oliver, yet died only a year later, in Armstrong, according to state of Iowa records online. There are too many cemeteries to know easily which was hers. Blanch was buried in St. Peter, Minnesota, perhaps moving to be nearer her sister Augusta ("Susan"), who had married Jay Willoughby
ELIMINATING SLAVERY & INDENTURE. Oliver's uncle Jeremiah was told upon his arrival on the Erie lakeshore of Ohio that slavery was not allowed in the new place. He complied by releasing his slaves. There was no belligerence, nor any appealing to Congress to change local laws, as would be seen later, when southern plantation owners insisted on expanding slavery into newly forming states. The Civil War would break out to stop the expansion, timed as Oliver married second wife Sarah in Algona, Iowa, in mid-Dec. of 1862.
Many would die. Oliver and Martha Kemp's son George C. Benschoter would join at 18, then die while in Little Rock, buried there, listed as Iowa Infantry, name mis-understood by the military to be the "Benshoter", the needed " C" omitted. The spelling would be corrected in the pension application, yet the military stone was carved with the Benshoter mistake.
From Erie County, Ohio, so from the Firelands region, cousin Oliver W. Benschoter would be another war casualty. He died in the union's military hospital in Nashville Tenn., late in December of 1862, mere weeks after Oliver A. married Sarah mid. Dec., back in Algona. Both young men died of disease, not as they expected, not in battle.
George's specific disease has not yet been found in records, The younger Oliver died of rubeola (German measles). Vaccinations against measles did not yet exist. Contagious illnesses spread quickly inside soldier's tent-crowded camps.
The bondage of indentured orphans by the British and early Americans was only for a limited number of years, so temporary, not permanent and inherited like slavery or serfdom. Yet, those whose young relatives had been indentured under bad masters had a special appreciation of what slavery meant.
Opposition to slavery was serious in both Ohio and northern Iowa. Their Iowa county was named Kossuth, to honor Louis Kossuth, a man who came to the northeastern US in the 1840s to campaign for everyone to pressure Hungary to abolish serfdom. Serfdom was like slavery, except that serfs "went with the land" Like rocks or trees, they could not be moved ahead of a property's, could have their masters change, but not be moved. This allowed them to form comunites and have church allefiances which continued later.
A younger brother of Oliver, named Almon Benschoten, ran away from presumed abuse at his assigned indenture where an uncle had placed him after his parents died. Being indentured meant having no legal rights over the contract's life, except for details specified in the contract, over which the child had no say-so. The child or preteen was never the one given the contract price, so was not personally paid. The one-time fee paid by a purchasing master often went to pay parents' debts. Indentured children were forced to tolerate hunger and cold and exhaustion, perhaps moved by the master far away from people they loved, perhaps beaten, whipped or branded by a master who lived too well on the proceeds of child labor.
ODD SURNAME? His grandfather Aaron once alternated in his children's baptismal records, between using a longer early spelling and a shorter surname with the same meaning, Van Bunschoten versus Bunschoter/Benschoter. The difference between Van and -er is like saying "I am from New York" versus "I am a New Yorker".
Their first known immigrant ancestor, like most early Dutch in the 1600s, arrived without a surname. He described himself as Teunis, son of Elias. When asked "Where did you come from", he replied "from Bunschoten" (Van Bunschoten). The waterside town of Bunschoten (in Holland, just east of Amsterdam), being walled, would have been a fortified place where local farmers might be expected to take their families whenever the waterway or he town's countryside came under attack. The first known church records for Teunis in America were in old Bergen, a region of what later became New Jersey. That newer Bergen shared the name of a very old Norwegian city, formerly part of the Hanseatic cities. Merchant shippers belonging to an organized group called the Hansa (the League) circulated between the varied Hanseatic cities, at their peak in the 1200s when 170 cities from northern Europe seaways were said to have participated, ranging from Stockholm in Sweden from Krakow and Gdansk in Poland and Denmark, to Riga in Latvia, to Bruges in Belgium and Bremen in Germany, to Steelyar (London) and Ipswich in Britain. In this manner, Scandinavian naming customs mixed with Dutch, explaining why Teunis was also seen with a Danish-style surname accepted by the Dutch, as Teunis Eliasen, moving from NJ to places along the west bank of the Hudson River in NY, children born in both places.
Many in Oliver's larger family traveled "out west" to places near Jeremiah, but in steps. Aaron's nickname of Arie, seen in a child's baptismal record, sometimes was "sounded out" as Ora. He and his wife would not follow Jeremiah into Ohio until after the War of 1812. Waiting with them were Oliver's parents and their other adult children, his uncle Daniel to later be buried as Benschoten in the Firelands region of Ohio, just west of Cleveland. Any war-related threat of the British trying to takeover Ohio's Lake Erie shoreline by attacking from Detroit or Canada? It was gone via treaty, with Detroit now clearly in the US, weakening its old economic ties with southern Canada.
The timing was still very early, pre-statehood for Ohio. Aaron's brothers were last "all together" in old NY, while there for the American Revolution. While serving, sometimes a volunteer, sometimes "pressed, with George Washington at West Point for awhile, Aaron moved a few times along the Hudson River, trying to find better opportunities in farmland. He thus served from different locations, left records at Dutch Reformed churches, beginning in his parents' place of Dutchess County, said to leave records at the Poughkeepsie church, moving to Ulster County, then, with brother Garret and others, to that part of Ulster which became Sullivan County, near the Neversink River. Towns/townships that still exist were much larger then, not yet subdivided into smaller places.
Aaron then lost hard-earned land.
Oliver's father William was the leader in following his uncle Jeremiah off to Ohio, taking the children already born and both of William's long-lived parents. Aaron and wife would live in a cabin on William's land. Then, Oliver's parents, in the year or so after cholera hit NYC, "died too young", leaving their orphans in Ohio with relatives nearby "barely making it".. Long-lived Aaron and wife moved in with William's brother Daniel. Uncle to Oliver, he tried to find placements for the children after being appointed guardian to the ones not deemed adult (adulthood was 12 for girls, 14 for boys).
Oliver and siblings were the second set of Benschoter/Von Benschoten children orphaned in Ohio, the others being Almon and his siblings. Milo's brother Curtis, who appeared to marry into the Baptists, was also in the picture. Living nearby, he was not able to take more than one or two, so an in-law named Peake/Peak stepped in. Proof that Oliver's family lived close-by was that Oliver's parents and grandparents were said to be buried in the Peakes' family cemetery, relatives dying at a later date to be buried instead in Berlin Heights.
In some family trees, the two sets of orphans, not surprisingly, are treated as "mix-and-match", as if there was just one set of orphans. Remembering that there were two sets with different parents and different arrangements for placement into other families is difficult, but essential
.
Some placements as apprentices were good. Other placements were traumatic. After orphaned cousin Almon Benschoten escaped his bad apprenticeship as a tanner and currier, his status as a runaway was perhaps illegal. The unfilled indenture contract was a debt owed. He would wander for decades, the family said, as far west as St. Louis, as far south as New Orleans, as far east as NYC, of record working as a "cooper" (barrel-maker). He finally returned to marry, but never had children.
The luckier Oliver, in the process of "going west" first traveled into Illinois, to explore the Rock Island area. Later, he did not settle immediately in Kossuth County, but went through Delaware County in Iowa's northeast corner, closer to the Mississippi, so across from Rock Island. He visited cousin Alexander and Uncle Cornelius Benschoten, then maybe followed westward whatever pieces existed of the old military trail going from Fort Atkinson west across northern Iowa (which became Hwy 18). Of his children, just his daughter Alice was along. She would help prepare for the others coming to Iowa later, presumably by starting a garden once in Iowa, nursing some animals and fruit trees, helping to dig and plow and chop firewood, and so forth, as women could be expected to be tougher then.
Son William would bring Oliver's wife (Martha Kemp) and Oliver's other children.
To do so, William left his studies at Oberlin, at the time, a newish college in Ohio, one that would become known for its abolitionism and speaking out for varied rights. One of the Call brothers soliciting settlers to the Algona area of Iowa had attended Oberlin, a rare thing in a day when few went beyond grade school/grammar school .
Daughter Alice, to become Alice E Seely/Seeley, was perhaps remarkable in some ways, showing that literacy and entertaining writing were something that could be done by more than her male cousins. Her work on a local newspaper (The Algona Bee?) is currently being researched, not much found so far. She would marry Andrew Seeley, an orphan of sorts, also from Ohio.
BACK TO OLIVER. Oliver's grandfather (great-grandfather?) was Aaron Bentschoter, aka Arie Van Benschoten, who moved several times, firs in Dutchess county, as he served stints in the Revolution. Post-war, he first appeared with family (counted, not named) in the 1790 census, but without slaves. Aaron's brother Jeremiah was another story, his slaves freed by law once inside the Ohio border. Jeremiah was the one going to Ohio first, with a pack of preteen boys among his many children,. The departures were amidst stories of a rich landlord's strategies to confiscate property in NY after letting the lands' buyers settle -in for several decades, clear the land, build houses and barns and cribs upon it, and otherwise improve it, then show and show the fauolt in the legal legal title. There was some negotiation, some getting of uncleared and inferior wild land in return for being evicted peaceably, but the victims were largely forced wither to stay and be beholden to a malignant landlord , or to move. The landlord would be shot dead while riding his horse , circumstances unclear, no one convicted, according to a history of old Sullivan county, but perhaps involving a young boy trying to protect his family from severe loss.
Oliver and siblings were was born near the Neversink River in Sullivan County. Settlements were low density, in swaths that have since divided into smaller towns and townships. Aaron's brother Garrett was one of the ones remaining, a stone still standing for Garret/Gerrit's son, another Oliver, buried as Van Benshoten/Bunshoten. That cemetery is called Flatsburgh/Neversink. Its old town and possibly their old Dutch Reformed church (which kept infant baptismal records naming parents, a wonderful thing for tracing ancestors) no longer are in the old spot. The old town of Neversink, named for the river thought it, had been put underwater, dammed, creating a large reservoir, owned by NYC for a water supply.
Oliver married twice, had six known children survive by Martha Kemp, had ten more by Sarah Crose. He and Sarah moved northward, straight north of Armstrong, into the bottommost, so southmost row of the thirty-six square mile sections that made up Silver Kake Township in Martin County. The biggest town there was Fairmont. . Sarah, being 20 some years younger, died much later than Oliver, after moved south, back to Iowa, to Armstrong.
(Alice's son James Seeley married Agnes Brown, sister to one of the Alexander Browns, in Cresco Twp., just south of Algona. The first Browns to Algona were Scotch-Irish who came from northern Ireland in the potato famine with seven children on their ship the Sir Charles Napier. They made their way from Canada down to Massachusetts by the 1850 Census, with just six children left. They then came to Algona with only four children remaining, with a rail accident and tuberculosis as causes of death for two. They came as part of the "Whitinsville Colony" of Northbridge Town/Township in Worcester County, Mass., a well-planned manufacturing town westish of Boston, northish of Providence. Rhode island. Others from Whitinsville to Algona included Frank Rist, who had been with Thomas and John Brown in the severe rail disaster on an outing to see sailboat races in Providence. The accident was due to someone not minding clocks and two trains then colliding, with cars from one sliding under cars of the other. Thomas died, not immediately, but in pain, begging a kind minister to help him. The Reverend tried to lift what was pinning Thomas by the neck, but did not succeed. Frank Rist and an injured but healing John Brown survived; we assume the same John Brown was the one who made it out to Iowa with Frank Rist and the Alexander Browns. If so, he worked as a courier and stagecoach driver to supplement the family income while others farmed, but "died too young" in 1862.
The Whitinsville set were greeted by one of the Call Brothers of Iowa while en route, coming through the gateway of St. Louis. Mr. Call convinced them to go North, his spot then called Calls Grove, to change later into Algona. They were in the northwest corner of Iowa, just above Fort Dodge, not long after Daniel Boone and other surveyors and army men had made their way through part of Iowa
==
Notes on NY. Their Dutch family previously had considerable history in the Hudson River area of eastern NY. They lived in a corner closer to Pennsylvania than to NYC, so were more rural than urban. The family's infant baptismal records linked children to parents, going many generations back. The Dutch often used relatives as "god-parents", so parents' siblings were also learned when checking infants' baptismal records. The departing Dutch governor had made the British who conquered the NY Dutch to promise some religious tolerance. Thus, Quakers were allowed in NY, unlike in New England. Yet, not all was tolerant, as the NY family historian writing in 1907 seemed surprised that an early family member had somehow found a Catholic to marry.
Both the Quakers and NY Dutch might have slaves in the early days, but both came to see it as wrong. The Friends (Quakers) often came from seafaring backgrounds, as often did the Dutch. The Quakers thus were the other major group owning slaves in rural NY, pre-War or 1812. However, neither set of New Yorkers ever owned slaves to the degree seen in the southern colonies and states. They came to understand ,on their own, without war, by observing the effects of slavery, that freedom should be given.
His son George had died not in vain, but with a purpose. He and multiple others joined from Kossuth, a county named for Louis Kossuth, an anti-serfdom speaker who had come to New England to speak. At least one of the Call brothers had paid attention at Oberlin, which had, not just farmers' children in attendance, but the nearly adult children of ex slaves, as well, not forced to escape to Canada, as freed by former owners in the South . Oliver's daughter Alice would have noticed as well. If she had lessons from Oberlin to teach, they were not lost on George. We thank the family for their sacrifice.
( Nov 2021, Thank you to member Laurie Lashbrook 49976360 for assisting with Benschoter burials in the run of counties they settled, from Kossuth County, IA, to Martin County, MN.)
Oliver was accustomed to New Englanders, but would meet people who called themselves Scotch-Irish, plus other new sorts, once in Iowa. When he introduced himself the first time, the new neighbors might ask "What kind of name is that?" Having practiced his answer before, while still in Ohio, he might say "Benschoter is Dutch. Back in upstate New York, where I'm originally from, many Dutch names are as tricky to spell as mine".
He brought his family to Iowa in steps. He first prospected for land with daughter Alice. They reached a relatives' place in Delaware County, in northeast Iowa, late in 1856, in her seventeenth year, delaying their visit to Algona, until early 1857. Once they left for Algona, they would have to trudge through February snow. Were they waiting for the stories of unhappy native tribes and of massacres north of Algona to quiet down?
The point of stopping specifically at Delaware County, barely inside Iowa's eastern edge? Other Benschotters were already there, with their Burgess in-laws, all from Seneca County, Ohio.
Oliver and Alice could inquire about Oliver's uncle Cornelius, who had recently "knocked on death's door". Cousin Alexander and his first wife, the former Alanson Burgess, were now in charge of Cornelius' farm.
Alexander's mother, Diana, was still in the house, not yet in Michigan to stay with her other sons, more cousins of Oliver. Diana and Alexander would have had advice for them on Iowa frontier life, how it differed from Ohio, maybe made sure they had the right supplies. The two travelers then made their way through to Fort Dodge, to file for land, before following a riverside or two northish, to future Algona's older southrn part, still called Calls' Grove.
Alice had recently finished a preparatory curriculum, 1855-1856, at Ohio's Oberlin college. Such academies were a New England idea that would lead to public high schools everywhere. We know she attended, as an old Oberlin college directory listed her achievement, , maybe finishing the teachers' training common there, or trying out the music conservatory.
We are proud of her, so ahead of her time. None of the family histories spoke of her attendance, however.
A family history of 1907 did mention her brother William's attempt to attend the next year. He had to leave the college, he told the family historian, to accompany his mother and younger siblings westward, to join Oliver and Alice. Thus, the Oberlin Directories omit his name. There was no college here for him to continue once in NW Iowa? Not yet?
This Oliver's first wife, Alice's mother, Martha (maiden name Kemp) thus had waited back in Ohio, for Oliver and Alice to ready things, before bringing five other children, some small. The two next eldest after Alice, William and Evaline, would assist. They arrived in Kossuth County later in the same year, 1857, able to go part-way by train, but only as far as Dubuque. The tracks ended there. They would then switch to wagon transport for their own riverside travel, going westish, until near Algona.
To pay for the new business venture in Iowa and their travel adventure on the way, he and Mary had sold their Ohio farm. Located near Ohio's Huron River, they had been in one of the shoreline counties on Lake Erie's south side, their mother county at first Huron, before their daughter section split off as newer Erie County. If leaving Cleveland, taking a route parallel to Lake Erie's south side, to go west,, Oberlin and their farm would be passed when about halfway through Ohio.
On the way to Iowa was Michigan, where some other sons of Cornelius, Oliver's cousins, would be. Also skipped was the Rock River region of Illinois, which Oliver had prospected two decades earlier. Wanting very much to move to that part of Illinois then, for reasons unspoken, he instead returned to Ohio.
For their next twenty years or so in Ohio, the family had been surrounded by cousins. They could visit the graveyards holding Oliver's grandparents and other deceased kin. Now, for the benefit of the living, they were going west. The young might renew some Oberlin acquaintances in Algona, make completely new friends, and gain new in-laws.
We have to ask, why pick Algona in Kossuth County, and not some other new place? Word of mouth? Connections? Advertisements?
A best guess, based on looking up their neighbors , new and old--
One of the Call brothers founding Algona had gone to Oberlin. His relative, Cyrus Call, a Baptist minister, was an Ohio neighbor. (Oberlin was Congregational, formed to train ministers, a general education now praised for its teachers and its music program.)
The Call brothers were visibly active in recruiting settlers to the Algona area. For example, one or both had gone to St. Louis, encountered this writer's Alexander Browns, maybe their Hutchinson son-in-law, as the set came in with a colony from Whitinsville, Mass. The Calls 'message convinced them to forget Missouri and go northish, up the Missouri and Des Moines rivers, to Calls' Grove.
It was a loss, then, when Martha Kemp Benschoter died, not long after arriving, An old, but well written book of family history, published in 1907, by NY-born relative William Henry "Van Benschoten" (using an old spelling), gave Martha's date of death as Sept. 1, 1858 (page 298). Her and Oliver's youngest, Charles, known as Grant, was about to turn nine, not a good time to lose a mother.
Being heavily Dutch, their family's history and culture differed from those of the purely British-descended they found earlier in northern Ohio and now again in northern Iowa, with Scotch-Irish mixed in. The family book giving details can be found at archive.org (easier to search) and at google books.
With other Dutch-speakers in NY state, old church records back to the 1600s were done in their native language, pre-American Revolution. The Dutch generally arrived without legal last names, allowing males in the same family to use different spellings, once finding themselves required to have a surname here.
After the original immigrant tried using his father's first name, the next generation agreed to choose their immigrant's Dutch town of origin. It's now name is now merged with another village, to make Bunschoten-Spakenburg, a seaside place, inside the Netherlands (located in Utrecht province).
Subsets of Benschoters disagreed about whether to make a fuss about form and spelling. Oliver's branch called themselves Benschoter, much as people from NY might call themselves New Yorkers. Another choice was Benschoten, that ending similar to saying "I am an Iowan".
Later, Bun change to Ben, to avoid school children making jokes. What if someone from the Netherlands came to NY, trying to look-up old neighbors "from Bunschoten"? The English "from" translates to the Dutch "van", causing Van Bunschoten.
Even though northern, the New York Dutch, like some other subsets, the Quakers and the plantation Rhode Islanders and the urban wealthy, had owned slaves. A common denominator was that those sets had had ocean shipping connections, rum traded for slave, and had no family stories of "childhood indentures gone bad" (depicted in the old Shirley Temple movie, "The Little Princess"). By 1820, if not earlier, the few northerners with slaves had generally given their slaves freedom.
Oliver's father (one of multiple William Benschoters in the family) and his paternal grandfather (Aaron Benschoter) seemed not to have owned slaves. However, Oliver's uncle Jeremiah, the first in the family go to Ohio, pre-War of 1812, did own a few slaves. There was a requirement when crossing the border into Ohio to free any slaves. Uncle Jeremiah complied. Two of those freed in NY would choose to go along with Jeremiah to territorial Ohio, their names given as Prince and Chloe in the family history book.
Some southerners to come into Ohio, such as Carolina Quakers, repenting their role in past enslavement, also complied. They were able to free their slaves safely in Ohio, even if their home state's laws forbade freeings. Ohio was also a good choice as the freer territory of Canada was jut across Lake Erie, should the US congress or US courts change their minds about Ohio (think Dred Scott decision here).
Jeremiah Benschoter's prior corner of NY had been closer to Pennsylvania than to NYC. Ohio lay just beyond Pennsylvania. Frontiers were often roadless, so Uncle Jeremiah was presumed to have left NY by boating westward along the long shoreline of Lake Erie.
Uncle Jeremiah had hoped to farm once in Ohio. He would give up that notion, after multiple calamities, including a crippling attack on crops by ravenous pigeons that filled the sky, similar to what Iowans would experience later with the grasshopper plagues of the late 1800s . No longer a full farmer, he would instead earn his living as a hunter/trapper, remembered poetically, by the family historian, as taking his canoe along the shores and river-fed marshes of Lake Erie, to set and check traps.
For a time (war of 1812), British warships sent from the Canada side were troubling. The British wanted to retake Detroit, among other things, so Jeremiah built a "block house" for a safe retreat when the ships did come. Once the War of 1812 ended, the fighting ships disappeared from the lakes.
At that point, at least four more Benschoter-related families felt it safe to follow Jeremiah down the lakeside and out of NY. These included the Benschoter grandparents (Aaron and spouse), one of Oliver's sisters (the already wed Mary, her spouse Oliver Peake/Peak), plus this Oliver's younger Benschoter brothers (their father being William, whose father was Aaron). Brother William was named for their father, plus there was brother Daniel, and brother Cornelius (named for uncle Cornelius, ). The name Cornelius was a serious reminder that they were Dutch, in case anyone forgot.
Relative Willliam Henry Van Benschoten, the family historian of old, did original research, going into old records and interviewing relatives. An even earlier book, "History of the Fire Lands", dated 1878, by William W. Williams (aka WW) provided many details repeated in the 1907 family history.
WW added that "Jeremiah Benschoter" was "of Sepronius" (his place in NY after leaving the father's home in Neversink). Jeremiah came to Ohio in 1811, already married to Sarah Weatherlow, was skilled in ironwork, a father to thirteen, including a Jeremiah Jr., and had, very early, bought "lot 20, fourth section", in old Vermillion Twp., in a then larger Huron County, Ohio, about fifty miles west of a baby version of Cleveland. He and the others coming later located near where the big Huron River entered Lake Erie, the river's mouth facing Canada, which was across the enormous lake. WW said that Vermillion township had its first religious meeting in 1810, was soon to build its first church, but, then, with more newcomers present, broadened their audience by re-specifying the church's faith, as Congregational, in 1818 (Calvinist, as was the original Dutch Reformed that their immigrants brought to NY state).
WW usually called the family "Van Benschoter", slipping into Benschoter only on occasion. Again, their religion in NY would have been Dutch Reformed, their faith also much like the Presbyterianism of the Scotch-Irish.
The Dutch Reformed records did not stick to English, however. Another difference, making family trees easier for our generation, their baptismal records added the names of god-parents (often aunts and uncles to the new child), put next to those of the parents.
One of the Jeremiahs, probably the uncle, maybe a cousin, bought desirable "up-river land ", from shipmaker and blacksmith Major Hiram Russel. The latter had arrived a year or so earlier, built a house and ship, alongside the big river in 1810. Due to its prime location, he treated his house also as a store, made it old Huron County's first tavern. Their east side of the river received a road, its future location already surveyed in 1810, when Russel first built there. This allowed those not using boats to arrive.
Uncle Jeremiah V.B. was of record paying taxes in what was still Vermillion Twp. in 1815. Jeremiah's daughters, "Widow Stapleton" [called Delia Steepleton elsewhere] and Mrs. James Paxton [Mary Ann], would share Russel's old property later.
Vermillion would split as the population grew, their part to become Eldridge, remade later in to the modern town of Berlin. However, the town/township was still called Eldridge when Oliver's father William and his grandfather Aaron arrived post-War, from Neversink (Sullivan County, NY), in 1816. The first township election for "supervisors" was Apr. 6, 1818. Father William's name was put up for supervisor then, with one of the Jeremiah Benschoters also elected as an "Overseer of the Poor". Oliver would follow this political example later. He served twice as county sheriff once in Kossuth County, Iowa.
Oliver's father, William, purchased "lot 27 in range 4". (Surveyors used numbers for townships, to get accuracy when selling land, whereas simpler names, such as Vermillion, then Eldridge, then Berlin, were given to townships for election and tax purposes. )
Uncle Daniel had bought "lot 12, range 8". Daniel would widow and remarry, then have six children by his second wife.
They were in a time of religious changes. They would find a heavy mix of Puritan-descended New Englanders in Ohio, with new religious passions emerging. Finding Dutch-trained ministers became hard at some point, caused many to switch away from Dutch Reformed.
Grandfather Aaron was said to turn "Primitive Methodist". Uncle Jeremiah went to the "Spiritualists", but only after trying the "Friends". Jeremiah's son Curtis appeared to marry a Baptist, that religion marking her unusual last name as most likely Welsh, remembering an old Welsh place perhaps, as it was not a father's first name.
Benschoter was increasingly seen, after Van Benschoter, not just the older Van Benschoten preferred back in NY by Dutch Reformed ministers trained to use "proper Dutch" while "back home" (overseas)
Oliver's father William died in 1833, well before Oliver turned 18. Population growth caused the Ohio legislature to let their portion of Huron County split off as a new county in 1838, called Erie County.
Oliver was last obviously in Ohio for the 1850 Census. All six of his first set of children were listed as living in his Erie County farm house, at the time. The youngest was just a toddler, Charles G., later called Grant. He would be the sole son to stay long-term in Iowa.
Of Oliver's siblings. W.W. Williams left out Oliver's brother Almon. Though not seen elsewhere, WW added a brother called Alanson and a sister Betsey G. W.W. Williams noted that that Oliver's sister Esther married Joel Fox. The Fox family was the only one of Oliver's set to remain in the township, after Oliver left in the 1850s to go further west.
Of his Uncle Daniel's set, the eldest and youngest sons stayed, Gardner and Hoffman, their mother being alive there until 1877. Leander, Sheffield, Cordelia and Eliza left.
Noted by a different source, Uncle Daniel's daughter Cordelia would have some notoriety. Was she a late middle child getting attention by following her uncle Jeremiah into the Spiritualists? A group had organized in Berlin Heights. She then went way beyond Spiritualism, to form a free love commune with a Francis Barry and one other party. Their commune had trouble keeping members, so she eventually became conventional, married Barry, and went off to Portage County, Ohio. (Story given by Gina Msiroglu's book, "American Counterculture")
WW Williams gave details for several of Jeremiah's seven sons who stayed in Ohio. One son of Jeremiah, Ensign Van Benschoter, was a doctor, seen in tax records for his medical practice. WW said he had moved, so lived in Portland Township in 1830, a place which later turned into the more important lakeside town called Sandusky.
Portland village's main medical doctor, also from NY, was stricken with cholera in 1834. Maybe Ensign had left Portland by then, given he survived that cholera round. Other sources say he went to Plymouth in Richland County, became its second mayor. Other sources also say locals submitted a petition in the late 1840s to make him an associate judge of Richland County's court.
Oliver's cousin, Curtis Benschoter, like his father Jeremiah, had dropped the Van from Benschoter early. He bought his farm land from the tragic John Dunbar. Dunbar's wife had, in a fit of insanity, thrown herself into a fire of large logs made at the side of their house. Hearing her screams, Dunbar rescued her, put her on the bed and went for medical help, but she got up and "ran wildly" after him. He shouted for help all day, "not daring to leave her", but no one heard. She died in that manner, the first death in the township. Curtis farmed that same land his whole life, dying in 1877, right before WW printed his book.
BACK IN NY. Oliver was born in a farming area, carved out of the NY wilderness over several decades, located some seventy-plus miles northish of NYC. They were of baptismal record as in a wide, multi-county stretch called Shawangunk, no specific town meant. The region, with multiple stringlike settlements, was named for the mountain range it bordered, the impassability of which, even today, makes traveling down to NYC difficult.
The old Shawangunk cited in father William's baptismal record was thus much larger than the modern town in Ulster County that bears the mountains' name. Their part of the wide NY swath was near the Neversink River, in what later spun off as Sullivan County. A splitting into parts as population arrived and churches grew in number meant that the first two US Censuses, done in 1790 and 1800, counted grandfather Aaron's household as in two counties without their moving. The "mother county" was Ulster, seen in 1790, while his 1800 Census counted them in the brand-new daughter county of Sullivan. Aaron would report in court testimony (preserved later in Ohio, while seeking his revolutionary pension) that his last move inside NY was made before the Revolution ended.
In modern times, in the 1940s, the lower basin of the Neversink River was dammed-up to make a water reservoir for NYC. Old churches and thus old cemeteries are now under water. The businesses and population of old Neversink with deep ties had to either move or drown, so mainly rebuilt above the raised water line (Flattsburg?). Oliver died decades before, far away, so never knew of this big, modern change.
MURDER AND MAYHEM? His family apparently had farmed on the higher ground above the dammed part. The land was originally sold to grandfather Aaron from the estate called the Beekman Patent. They bought from the Beekman family, ultra-large landowners ("patroons") originally given the land by Dutch officials. Two decades later, Aaron would have been in the process of turning his hard-worked land over to his maturing sons.
However, In a time of no title insurance, the Beekman land's title was tainted. There was " a lot of drama". Gunshots were not always aimed in the air. A second patroon family laid claim to the now-cleared, much improved land. The second patron family, very oddly, did not make their claim until twenty years after they must have known they could claim title. They would evict the many small farmers who had worked for decades to pay for and improve what was now to be taken from them.
The drama in Sullivan County included an officially unsolved murder, though the family had ideas about the culprit. The ultra-large landlord evicting so many was the one to be murdered.
No one would have felt happy about what happened. While the old place pushed Aaron's family out, a new and better place pulled his people in.
NEXT IN OHIO. They went to the so-called "Firelands region", west of an emerging Cleveland, parts first under survey just before 1800, Connecticut given the land in post-Revolution negotiating over state boundaries, to make up for Connecticut towns on the coast having been burned out by the British, hence the title "Firelands".
The timing was pre-canal, pre-railroads, pre-statehood. Places too close to marshy river mouths would struggle with "ague and fever" (malaria, not understood then, but caused by bites from infected marsh-bred mosquitoes).
Aunt Mary had married Oliver Peak back in Sullivan County, NY. Their first burials in Ohio seem to have been on family farm land converted to a cemetery, what is still called Peaks Cemetery.
By 1833, Oliver Benschoter's parents were both dead, said a NY family historian, writing decades later than WW Williams, in a 1907 book. Oliver's mother died a year after his father. The family historian had talked to Oliver's married older sister, Mrs. Fox, who lived on their parents' farm in Ohio. She would have been the one reporting that their parents had been buried side-by-side at the Peakes' ground. Their deaths were also reported, but not dated, in Oliver's personal biographies, found in old books regarding Kossuth County, Iowa, and Martin County, Minnesota.
Oliver's later biographies were given by his children, not as knowledgeable as his sister back in OH would have been about their parents. His mother's death would have followed news that NYC had just dealt with something horrid brought from abroad in 1832, a late summer cholera, to make its way to Ohio. The disease spread in different ways, but mainly by towns and ships dumping raw sewage into river water and at ocean ports. The sickness would travel with schooners along the oceanfront, then into navigable rivers and across the Great Lakes , eventually brought to the Firelands, taking lives of others in the family. Some graves are listed at a cholera cemetery up in Sandusky. It's not clear. Did the family victims die there? Or, were they merely memorialized there, due to being on a list of all nearby cholera victims?
Uncle Cornelius had "gone west", too, but may have come to Ohio last, too late to find land in what became Erie County, settling instead in Seneca County, in Reed Twp. By 1850, Cornelius and "Dian" had two young men listed in their house, in the spots reserved for children, their known son Alex (for Alexander), age 32, and another male relative, maybe a son, maybe a nephew, a different Oliver than this one, younger, just age 18. The young men were still living at home on August 3, a date when this Oliver would have been ready to turn 23. A little girl, 11, was listed last, "Cirssa Manger", a different surname. Was she a grandchild visiting for the summer, so her name fairly correct? Or, instead a foster child, so name not close to reality? It was not said.
Indenturing was of the recent past, however, eventually to be stopped, along with permanent slavery. This older Oliver's orphaned younger brother, Almon, had had a terrible experience.
Uncle Cornelius was listed as a farmer, his sons as "laborers", their names spelled the way his people pronounced them. The census-taker did not think to ask, just "sounded out" their last name as "Benscooter". Were "Dian" and "Cirssa" the same? Modern transcribers thought they saw "Benschooter" in the handwritten scrawl, so typed that, still not right. The younger cousin Oliver had attended school in the last year, very unusual for that era, lucky to be in a place where high school for farm children was possible. Themselves New York-born, as was their known son Alexander, the adults listed that younger Oliver as born in Ohio. The family move was between the young men's births 32 and 18 years earlier, no earlier than Aug. of 1818, no later than Aug. of 1832.
It thus seems highly likely this older Oliver lived with them when orphaned in 1833 at age 16 or so. They could have used his maturing hands to help with their farmwork while their youngest boy was too small. Being placed in Seneca County with them would allow this Oliver to meet Martha Kemp of Seneca County. He would be of record marrying her there, while his older sister and cousins and a Jeremiah born in 1780, of the right age to be his uncle, were still in Erie County.
He and Martha had at least one child born in Seneca, the rest, in Huron County, in the Firelands region, on Lake Erie. This Oliver's first wife went by Patty , a pioneer nickname for Martha, that rhymed with the more normal nickname of Mattie. (Marys turned into Mollys and Pollys.)
Just as Oliver was a popular male name among the Ohio set , seen also in NY, many repeatedly remembered an ultra-grandmother back in NY named Pieternelle. They called their daughters and cousins Nelle and Nelly, then Nellie, to avoid ethnic criticism from the British-descended. Her full name honored an earlier male ancestor named Pieter in Dutch, aka Peter, if pleasing other ethnicities (much as the feminine name of Janneke, seen in NY, might remember a male named Jan, with that man's name on the Scandinavian end of the Dutch, aka John).
Oliver's homestead claim for land in Iowa was filed at a federal land office in Fort Dodge, near the Dakotah line, for farm land he had most likely already had visited before filing. It was just above the northeast edge of Algona, Iowa. They were there early, but not the very first to arrive in Algona. After first wife Martha Kemp died in 1858, buried inside Algona bounds in its oldest cemetery, he remarried, his second bride to be Sarah Crose. (The "final e" in Crose was pronounced? as seen with Krause in German?).
Oliver and Sarah married in 1862. This was just as the family started to reel from its Civil War deaths.
We know that, no later than 1890, this Oliver had crossed northward, over the nearby Minnesota state line, with Sarah and those of his next ten children not yet grown. Now elderly, he filed that year, using his rural Minnesota address, for a pension, based upon his deceased son George's participation in the Civil War, on the Union side. They were in Silver Lake Township, in its bottom mile of sections, right on the state line, not far from the rural Congregational Church . While he lived, their mailing address was still Centre Chain, Minnesota.
Centre Chain referred to the middle chain of three chains of glaciated lakes running north to south, pointing in the direction of nearby Armstrong, Iowa. Son Hubert worked as a blacksmith in the East Chain, that of the three chains closest to to the old fur-trading place of Faribault.
Over a century after Oliver's death was reported there, the church now called Center Chain Congregational still stands, with its nicely kept, parklike cemetery outside. Mail for both farmers and the church was eventually delivered to and from the larger Fairmont, the county seat some miles to the north. This change later caused Fairmont to be listed as the address of family members who still lived in Silver Lake Twp.
For example, Frank Benschoter, this Oliver's eldest son with Sarah, would eventually be listed as from Fairmont, while actually living outside it, in Silver Lake Twp. An online record says Frank married in Martin County in 1895, nothing more specific, as people eventually understood it was less confusig for outsiders if they did not precisely name the county's rural places.
Oliver and Sarah enrolled daughter Mary Blanche at the school for the deaf at nearby Faribault on Sept. 11, 1889. An old book about the students who attended said typhoid fever caused her loss of hearing. Calling herself Blanche, she would marry a deaf man named Daniel Decker, seen with him, once part of her family had moved down to Emmet County, Iowa. She and Daniel would be on adjacent cards filed for the town of Armstrong, for the 1915 Iowa State Census, not able to communicate well, so state of birth and religion left blank. Her widowed mother and bachelor brother James also were listed as residents. Their cards listed both men as "laborers". They may have been working for a railroad or creamery or on road or carpentry crews. Why not farm? The country had run out of new farm land for farmers, unless one wanted to move to arid places where things were hard to grow or extra-expensive (installing irrigation needed). "Laborer" was the town job offered to rural kids not given high school. Blanche had more education, listing herself as completing Grade 8, whereas her mother, Sarah, listed herself as stopped at Grade 6. Sarah was considerably younger than Oliver, yet died only a year later, in Armstrong, according to state of Iowa records online. There are too many cemeteries to know easily which was hers. Blanch was buried in St. Peter, Minnesota, perhaps moving to be nearer her sister Augusta ("Susan"), who had married Jay Willoughby
ELIMINATING SLAVERY & INDENTURE. Oliver's uncle Jeremiah was told upon his arrival on the Erie lakeshore of Ohio that slavery was not allowed in the new place. He complied by releasing his slaves. There was no belligerence, nor any appealing to Congress to change local laws, as would be seen later, when southern plantation owners insisted on expanding slavery into newly forming states. The Civil War would break out to stop the expansion, timed as Oliver married second wife Sarah in Algona, Iowa, in mid-Dec. of 1862.
Many would die. Oliver and Martha Kemp's son George C. Benschoter would join at 18, then die while in Little Rock, buried there, listed as Iowa Infantry, name mis-understood by the military to be the "Benshoter", the needed " C" omitted. The spelling would be corrected in the pension application, yet the military stone was carved with the Benshoter mistake.
From Erie County, Ohio, so from the Firelands region, cousin Oliver W. Benschoter would be another war casualty. He died in the union's military hospital in Nashville Tenn., late in December of 1862, mere weeks after Oliver A. married Sarah mid. Dec., back in Algona. Both young men died of disease, not as they expected, not in battle.
George's specific disease has not yet been found in records, The younger Oliver died of rubeola (German measles). Vaccinations against measles did not yet exist. Contagious illnesses spread quickly inside soldier's tent-crowded camps.
The bondage of indentured orphans by the British and early Americans was only for a limited number of years, so temporary, not permanent and inherited like slavery or serfdom. Yet, those whose young relatives had been indentured under bad masters had a special appreciation of what slavery meant.
Opposition to slavery was serious in both Ohio and northern Iowa. Their Iowa county was named Kossuth, to honor Louis Kossuth, a man who came to the northeastern US in the 1840s to campaign for everyone to pressure Hungary to abolish serfdom. Serfdom was like slavery, except that serfs "went with the land" Like rocks or trees, they could not be moved ahead of a property's, could have their masters change, but not be moved. This allowed them to form comunites and have church allefiances which continued later.
A younger brother of Oliver, named Almon Benschoten, ran away from presumed abuse at his assigned indenture where an uncle had placed him after his parents died. Being indentured meant having no legal rights over the contract's life, except for details specified in the contract, over which the child had no say-so. The child or preteen was never the one given the contract price, so was not personally paid. The one-time fee paid by a purchasing master often went to pay parents' debts. Indentured children were forced to tolerate hunger and cold and exhaustion, perhaps moved by the master far away from people they loved, perhaps beaten, whipped or branded by a master who lived too well on the proceeds of child labor.
ODD SURNAME? His grandfather Aaron once alternated in his children's baptismal records, between using a longer early spelling and a shorter surname with the same meaning, Van Bunschoten versus Bunschoter/Benschoter. The difference between Van and -er is like saying "I am from New York" versus "I am a New Yorker".
Their first known immigrant ancestor, like most early Dutch in the 1600s, arrived without a surname. He described himself as Teunis, son of Elias. When asked "Where did you come from", he replied "from Bunschoten" (Van Bunschoten). The waterside town of Bunschoten (in Holland, just east of Amsterdam), being walled, would have been a fortified place where local farmers might be expected to take their families whenever the waterway or he town's countryside came under attack. The first known church records for Teunis in America were in old Bergen, a region of what later became New Jersey. That newer Bergen shared the name of a very old Norwegian city, formerly part of the Hanseatic cities. Merchant shippers belonging to an organized group called the Hansa (the League) circulated between the varied Hanseatic cities, at their peak in the 1200s when 170 cities from northern Europe seaways were said to have participated, ranging from Stockholm in Sweden from Krakow and Gdansk in Poland and Denmark, to Riga in Latvia, to Bruges in Belgium and Bremen in Germany, to Steelyar (London) and Ipswich in Britain. In this manner, Scandinavian naming customs mixed with Dutch, explaining why Teunis was also seen with a Danish-style surname accepted by the Dutch, as Teunis Eliasen, moving from NJ to places along the west bank of the Hudson River in NY, children born in both places.
Many in Oliver's larger family traveled "out west" to places near Jeremiah, but in steps. Aaron's nickname of Arie, seen in a child's baptismal record, sometimes was "sounded out" as Ora. He and his wife would not follow Jeremiah into Ohio until after the War of 1812. Waiting with them were Oliver's parents and their other adult children, his uncle Daniel to later be buried as Benschoten in the Firelands region of Ohio, just west of Cleveland. Any war-related threat of the British trying to takeover Ohio's Lake Erie shoreline by attacking from Detroit or Canada? It was gone via treaty, with Detroit now clearly in the US, weakening its old economic ties with southern Canada.
The timing was still very early, pre-statehood for Ohio. Aaron's brothers were last "all together" in old NY, while there for the American Revolution. While serving, sometimes a volunteer, sometimes "pressed, with George Washington at West Point for awhile, Aaron moved a few times along the Hudson River, trying to find better opportunities in farmland. He thus served from different locations, left records at Dutch Reformed churches, beginning in his parents' place of Dutchess County, said to leave records at the Poughkeepsie church, moving to Ulster County, then, with brother Garret and others, to that part of Ulster which became Sullivan County, near the Neversink River. Towns/townships that still exist were much larger then, not yet subdivided into smaller places.
Aaron then lost hard-earned land.
Oliver's father William was the leader in following his uncle Jeremiah off to Ohio, taking the children already born and both of William's long-lived parents. Aaron and wife would live in a cabin on William's land. Then, Oliver's parents, in the year or so after cholera hit NYC, "died too young", leaving their orphans in Ohio with relatives nearby "barely making it".. Long-lived Aaron and wife moved in with William's brother Daniel. Uncle to Oliver, he tried to find placements for the children after being appointed guardian to the ones not deemed adult (adulthood was 12 for girls, 14 for boys).
Oliver and siblings were the second set of Benschoter/Von Benschoten children orphaned in Ohio, the others being Almon and his siblings. Milo's brother Curtis, who appeared to marry into the Baptists, was also in the picture. Living nearby, he was not able to take more than one or two, so an in-law named Peake/Peak stepped in. Proof that Oliver's family lived close-by was that Oliver's parents and grandparents were said to be buried in the Peakes' family cemetery, relatives dying at a later date to be buried instead in Berlin Heights.
In some family trees, the two sets of orphans, not surprisingly, are treated as "mix-and-match", as if there was just one set of orphans. Remembering that there were two sets with different parents and different arrangements for placement into other families is difficult, but essential
.
Some placements as apprentices were good. Other placements were traumatic. After orphaned cousin Almon Benschoten escaped his bad apprenticeship as a tanner and currier, his status as a runaway was perhaps illegal. The unfilled indenture contract was a debt owed. He would wander for decades, the family said, as far west as St. Louis, as far south as New Orleans, as far east as NYC, of record working as a "cooper" (barrel-maker). He finally returned to marry, but never had children.
The luckier Oliver, in the process of "going west" first traveled into Illinois, to explore the Rock Island area. Later, he did not settle immediately in Kossuth County, but went through Delaware County in Iowa's northeast corner, closer to the Mississippi, so across from Rock Island. He visited cousin Alexander and Uncle Cornelius Benschoten, then maybe followed westward whatever pieces existed of the old military trail going from Fort Atkinson west across northern Iowa (which became Hwy 18). Of his children, just his daughter Alice was along. She would help prepare for the others coming to Iowa later, presumably by starting a garden once in Iowa, nursing some animals and fruit trees, helping to dig and plow and chop firewood, and so forth, as women could be expected to be tougher then.
Son William would bring Oliver's wife (Martha Kemp) and Oliver's other children.
To do so, William left his studies at Oberlin, at the time, a newish college in Ohio, one that would become known for its abolitionism and speaking out for varied rights. One of the Call brothers soliciting settlers to the Algona area of Iowa had attended Oberlin, a rare thing in a day when few went beyond grade school/grammar school .
Daughter Alice, to become Alice E Seely/Seeley, was perhaps remarkable in some ways, showing that literacy and entertaining writing were something that could be done by more than her male cousins. Her work on a local newspaper (The Algona Bee?) is currently being researched, not much found so far. She would marry Andrew Seeley, an orphan of sorts, also from Ohio.
BACK TO OLIVER. Oliver's grandfather (great-grandfather?) was Aaron Bentschoter, aka Arie Van Benschoten, who moved several times, firs in Dutchess county, as he served stints in the Revolution. Post-war, he first appeared with family (counted, not named) in the 1790 census, but without slaves. Aaron's brother Jeremiah was another story, his slaves freed by law once inside the Ohio border. Jeremiah was the one going to Ohio first, with a pack of preteen boys among his many children,. The departures were amidst stories of a rich landlord's strategies to confiscate property in NY after letting the lands' buyers settle -in for several decades, clear the land, build houses and barns and cribs upon it, and otherwise improve it, then show and show the fauolt in the legal legal title. There was some negotiation, some getting of uncleared and inferior wild land in return for being evicted peaceably, but the victims were largely forced wither to stay and be beholden to a malignant landlord , or to move. The landlord would be shot dead while riding his horse , circumstances unclear, no one convicted, according to a history of old Sullivan county, but perhaps involving a young boy trying to protect his family from severe loss.
Oliver and siblings were was born near the Neversink River in Sullivan County. Settlements were low density, in swaths that have since divided into smaller towns and townships. Aaron's brother Garrett was one of the ones remaining, a stone still standing for Garret/Gerrit's son, another Oliver, buried as Van Benshoten/Bunshoten. That cemetery is called Flatsburgh/Neversink. Its old town and possibly their old Dutch Reformed church (which kept infant baptismal records naming parents, a wonderful thing for tracing ancestors) no longer are in the old spot. The old town of Neversink, named for the river thought it, had been put underwater, dammed, creating a large reservoir, owned by NYC for a water supply.
Oliver married twice, had six known children survive by Martha Kemp, had ten more by Sarah Crose. He and Sarah moved northward, straight north of Armstrong, into the bottommost, so southmost row of the thirty-six square mile sections that made up Silver Kake Township in Martin County. The biggest town there was Fairmont. . Sarah, being 20 some years younger, died much later than Oliver, after moved south, back to Iowa, to Armstrong.
(Alice's son James Seeley married Agnes Brown, sister to one of the Alexander Browns, in Cresco Twp., just south of Algona. The first Browns to Algona were Scotch-Irish who came from northern Ireland in the potato famine with seven children on their ship the Sir Charles Napier. They made their way from Canada down to Massachusetts by the 1850 Census, with just six children left. They then came to Algona with only four children remaining, with a rail accident and tuberculosis as causes of death for two. They came as part of the "Whitinsville Colony" of Northbridge Town/Township in Worcester County, Mass., a well-planned manufacturing town westish of Boston, northish of Providence. Rhode island. Others from Whitinsville to Algona included Frank Rist, who had been with Thomas and John Brown in the severe rail disaster on an outing to see sailboat races in Providence. The accident was due to someone not minding clocks and two trains then colliding, with cars from one sliding under cars of the other. Thomas died, not immediately, but in pain, begging a kind minister to help him. The Reverend tried to lift what was pinning Thomas by the neck, but did not succeed. Frank Rist and an injured but healing John Brown survived; we assume the same John Brown was the one who made it out to Iowa with Frank Rist and the Alexander Browns. If so, he worked as a courier and stagecoach driver to supplement the family income while others farmed, but "died too young" in 1862.
The Whitinsville set were greeted by one of the Call Brothers of Iowa while en route, coming through the gateway of St. Louis. Mr. Call convinced them to go North, his spot then called Calls Grove, to change later into Algona. They were in the northwest corner of Iowa, just above Fort Dodge, not long after Daniel Boone and other surveyors and army men had made their way through part of Iowa
==
Notes on NY. Their Dutch family previously had considerable history in the Hudson River area of eastern NY. They lived in a corner closer to Pennsylvania than to NYC, so were more rural than urban. The family's infant baptismal records linked children to parents, going many generations back. The Dutch often used relatives as "god-parents", so parents' siblings were also learned when checking infants' baptismal records. The departing Dutch governor had made the British who conquered the NY Dutch to promise some religious tolerance. Thus, Quakers were allowed in NY, unlike in New England. Yet, not all was tolerant, as the NY family historian writing in 1907 seemed surprised that an early family member had somehow found a Catholic to marry.
Both the Quakers and NY Dutch might have slaves in the early days, but both came to see it as wrong. The Friends (Quakers) often came from seafaring backgrounds, as often did the Dutch. The Quakers thus were the other major group owning slaves in rural NY, pre-War or 1812. However, neither set of New Yorkers ever owned slaves to the degree seen in the southern colonies and states. They came to understand ,on their own, without war, by observing the effects of slavery, that freedom should be given.
His son George had died not in vain, but with a purpose. He and multiple others joined from Kossuth, a county named for Louis Kossuth, an anti-serfdom speaker who had come to New England to speak. At least one of the Call brothers had paid attention at Oberlin, which had, not just farmers' children in attendance, but the nearly adult children of ex slaves, as well, not forced to escape to Canada, as freed by former owners in the South . Oliver's daughter Alice would have noticed as well. If she had lessons from Oberlin to teach, they were not lost on George. We thank the family for their sacrifice.
Oliver was accustomed to New Englanders, but would meet people who called themselves Scotch-Irish, plus other new sorts, once in Iowa. When he introduced himself the first time, the new neighbors might ask "What kind of name is that?" Having practiced his answer before, while still in Ohio, he might say "Benschoter is Dutch. Back in upstate New York, where I'm originally from, many Dutch names are as tricky to spell as mine".
He brought his family to Iowa in steps. He first prospected for land with daughter Alice. They reached a relatives' place in Delaware County, in northeast Iowa, late in 1856, in her seventeenth year, delaying their visit to Algona, until early 1857. Once they left for Algona, they would have to trudge through February snow. Were they waiting for the stories of unhappy native tribes and of massacres north of Algona to quiet down?
The point of stopping specifically at Delaware County, barely inside Iowa's eastern edge? Other Benschotters were already there, with their Burgess in-laws, all from Seneca County, Ohio.
Oliver and Alice could inquire about Oliver's uncle Cornelius, who had recently "knocked on death's door". Cousin Alexander and his first wife, the former Alanson Burgess, were now in charge of Cornelius' farm.
Alexander's mother, Diana, was still in the house, not yet in Michigan to stay with her other sons, more cousins of Oliver. Diana and Alexander would have had advice for them on Iowa frontier life, how it differed from Ohio, maybe made sure they had the right supplies. The two travelers then made their way through to Fort Dodge, to file for land, before following a riverside or two northish, to future Algona's older southrn part, still called Calls' Grove.
Alice had recently finished a preparatory curriculum, 1855-1856, at Ohio's Oberlin college. Such academies were a New England idea that would lead to public high schools everywhere. We know she attended, as an old Oberlin college directory listed her achievement, , maybe finishing the teachers' training common there, or trying out the music conservatory.
We are proud of her, so ahead of her time. None of the family histories spoke of her attendance, however.
A family history of 1907 did mention her brother William's attempt to attend the next year. He had to leave the college, he told the family historian, to accompany his mother and younger siblings westward, to join Oliver and Alice. Thus, the Oberlin Directories omit his name. There was no college here for him to continue once in NW Iowa? Not yet?
This Oliver's first wife, Alice's mother, Martha (maiden name Kemp) thus had waited back in Ohio, for Oliver and Alice to ready things, before bringing five other children, some small. The two next eldest after Alice, William and Evaline, would assist. They arrived in Kossuth County later in the same year, 1857, able to go part-way by train, but only as far as Dubuque. The tracks ended there. They would then switch to wagon transport for their own riverside travel, going westish, until near Algona.
To pay for the new business venture in Iowa and their travel adventure on the way, he and Mary had sold their Ohio farm. Located near Ohio's Huron River, they had been in one of the shoreline counties on Lake Erie's south side, their mother county at first Huron, before their daughter section split off as newer Erie County. If leaving Cleveland, taking a route parallel to Lake Erie's south side, to go west,, Oberlin and their farm would be passed when about halfway through Ohio.
On the way to Iowa was Michigan, where some other sons of Cornelius, Oliver's cousins, would be. Also skipped was the Rock River region of Illinois, which Oliver had prospected two decades earlier. Wanting very much to move to that part of Illinois then, for reasons unspoken, he instead returned to Ohio.
For their next twenty years or so in Ohio, the family had been surrounded by cousins. They could visit the graveyards holding Oliver's grandparents and other deceased kin. Now, for the benefit of the living, they were going west. The young might renew some Oberlin acquaintances in Algona, make completely new friends, and gain new in-laws.
We have to ask, why pick Algona in Kossuth County, and not some other new place? Word of mouth? Connections? Advertisements?
A best guess, based on looking up their neighbors , new and old--
One of the Call brothers founding Algona had gone to Oberlin. His relative, Cyrus Call, a Baptist minister, was an Ohio neighbor. (Oberlin was Congregational, formed to train ministers, a general education now praised for its teachers and its music program.)
The Call brothers were visibly active in recruiting settlers to the Algona area. For example, one or both had gone to St. Louis, encountered this writer's Alexander Browns, maybe their Hutchinson son-in-law, as the set came in with a colony from Whitinsville, Mass. The Calls 'message convinced them to forget Missouri and go northish, up the Missouri and Des Moines rivers, to Calls' Grove.
It was a loss, then, when Martha Kemp Benschoter died, not long after arriving, An old, but well written book of family history, published in 1907, by NY-born relative William Henry "Van Benschoten" (using an old spelling), gave Martha's date of death as Sept. 1, 1858 (page 298). Her and Oliver's youngest, Charles, known as Grant, was about to turn nine, not a good time to lose a mother.
Being heavily Dutch, their family's history and culture differed from those of the purely British-descended they found earlier in northern Ohio and now again in northern Iowa, with Scotch-Irish mixed in. The family book giving details can be found at archive.org (easier to search) and at google books.
With other Dutch-speakers in NY state, old church records back to the 1600s were done in their native language, pre-American Revolution. The Dutch generally arrived without legal last names, allowing males in the same family to use different spellings, once finding themselves required to have a surname here.
After the original immigrant tried using his father's first name, the next generation agreed to choose their immigrant's Dutch town of origin. It's now name is now merged with another village, to make Bunschoten-Spakenburg, a seaside place, inside the Netherlands (located in Utrecht province).
Subsets of Benschoters disagreed about whether to make a fuss about form and spelling. Oliver's branch called themselves Benschoter, much as people from NY might call themselves New Yorkers. Another choice was Benschoten, that ending similar to saying "I am an Iowan".
Later, Bun change to Ben, to avoid school children making jokes. What if someone from the Netherlands came to NY, trying to look-up old neighbors "from Bunschoten"? The English "from" translates to the Dutch "van", causing Van Bunschoten.
Even though northern, the New York Dutch, like some other subsets, the Quakers and the plantation Rhode Islanders and the urban wealthy, had owned slaves. A common denominator was that those sets had had ocean shipping connections, rum traded for slave, and had no family stories of "childhood indentures gone bad" (depicted in the old Shirley Temple movie, "The Little Princess"). By 1820, if not earlier, the few northerners with slaves had generally given their slaves freedom.
Oliver's father (one of multiple William Benschoters in the family) and his paternal grandfather (Aaron Benschoter) seemed not to have owned slaves. However, Oliver's uncle Jeremiah, the first in the family go to Ohio, pre-War of 1812, did own a few slaves. There was a requirement when crossing the border into Ohio to free any slaves. Uncle Jeremiah complied. Two of those freed in NY would choose to go along with Jeremiah to territorial Ohio, their names given as Prince and Chloe in the family history book.
Some southerners to come into Ohio, such as Carolina Quakers, repenting their role in past enslavement, also complied. They were able to free their slaves safely in Ohio, even if their home state's laws forbade freeings. Ohio was also a good choice as the freer territory of Canada was jut across Lake Erie, should the US congress or US courts change their minds about Ohio (think Dred Scott decision here).
Jeremiah Benschoter's prior corner of NY had been closer to Pennsylvania than to NYC. Ohio lay just beyond Pennsylvania. Frontiers were often roadless, so Uncle Jeremiah was presumed to have left NY by boating westward along the long shoreline of Lake Erie.
Uncle Jeremiah had hoped to farm once in Ohio. He would give up that notion, after multiple calamities, including a crippling attack on crops by ravenous pigeons that filled the sky, similar to what Iowans would experience later with the grasshopper plagues of the late 1800s . No longer a full farmer, he would instead earn his living as a hunter/trapper, remembered poetically, by the family historian, as taking his canoe along the shores and river-fed marshes of Lake Erie, to set and check traps.
For a time (war of 1812), British warships sent from the Canada side were troubling. The British wanted to retake Detroit, among other things, so Jeremiah built a "block house" for a safe retreat when the ships did come. Once the War of 1812 ended, the fighting ships disappeared from the lakes.
At that point, at least four more Benschoter-related families felt it safe to follow Jeremiah down the lakeside and out of NY. These included the Benschoter grandparents (Aaron and spouse), one of Oliver's sisters (the already wed Mary, her spouse Oliver Peake/Peak), plus this Oliver's younger Benschoter brothers (their father being William, whose father was Aaron). Brother William was named for their father, plus there was brother Daniel, and brother Cornelius (named for uncle Cornelius, ). The name Cornelius was a serious reminder that they were Dutch, in case anyone forgot.
Relative Willliam Henry Van Benschoten, the family historian of old, did original research, going into old records and interviewing relatives. An even earlier book, "History of the Fire Lands", dated 1878, by William W. Williams (aka WW) provided many details repeated in the 1907 family history.
WW added that "Jeremiah Benschoter" was "of Sepronius" (his place in NY after leaving the father's home in Neversink). Jeremiah came to Ohio in 1811, already married to Sarah Weatherlow, was skilled in ironwork, a father to thirteen, including a Jeremiah Jr., and had, very early, bought "lot 20, fourth section", in old Vermillion Twp., in a then larger Huron County, Ohio, about fifty miles west of a baby version of Cleveland. He and the others coming later located near where the big Huron River entered Lake Erie, the river's mouth facing Canada, which was across the enormous lake. WW said that Vermillion township had its first religious meeting in 1810, was soon to build its first church, but, then, with more newcomers present, broadened their audience by re-specifying the church's faith, as Congregational, in 1818 (Calvinist, as was the original Dutch Reformed that their immigrants brought to NY state).
WW usually called the family "Van Benschoter", slipping into Benschoter only on occasion. Again, their religion in NY would have been Dutch Reformed, their faith also much like the Presbyterianism of the Scotch-Irish.
The Dutch Reformed records did not stick to English, however. Another difference, making family trees easier for our generation, their baptismal records added the names of god-parents (often aunts and uncles to the new child), put next to those of the parents.
One of the Jeremiahs, probably the uncle, maybe a cousin, bought desirable "up-river land ", from shipmaker and blacksmith Major Hiram Russel. The latter had arrived a year or so earlier, built a house and ship, alongside the big river in 1810. Due to its prime location, he treated his house also as a store, made it old Huron County's first tavern. Their east side of the river received a road, its future location already surveyed in 1810, when Russel first built there. This allowed those not using boats to arrive.
Uncle Jeremiah V.B. was of record paying taxes in what was still Vermillion Twp. in 1815. Jeremiah's daughters, "Widow Stapleton" [called Delia Steepleton elsewhere] and Mrs. James Paxton [Mary Ann], would share Russel's old property later.
Vermillion would split as the population grew, their part to become Eldridge, remade later in to the modern town of Berlin. However, the town/township was still called Eldridge when Oliver's father William and his grandfather Aaron arrived post-War, from Neversink (Sullivan County, NY), in 1816. The first township election for "supervisors" was Apr. 6, 1818. Father William's name was put up for supervisor then, with one of the Jeremiah Benschoters also elected as an "Overseer of the Poor". Oliver would follow this political example later. He served twice as county sheriff once in Kossuth County, Iowa.
Oliver's father, William, purchased "lot 27 in range 4". (Surveyors used numbers for townships, to get accuracy when selling land, whereas simpler names, such as Vermillion, then Eldridge, then Berlin, were given to townships for election and tax purposes. )
Uncle Daniel had bought "lot 12, range 8". Daniel would widow and remarry, then have six children by his second wife.
They were in a time of religious changes. They would find a heavy mix of Puritan-descended New Englanders in Ohio, with new religious passions emerging. Finding Dutch-trained ministers became hard at some point, caused many to switch away from Dutch Reformed.
Grandfather Aaron was said to turn "Primitive Methodist". Uncle Jeremiah went to the "Spiritualists", but only after trying the "Friends". Jeremiah's son Curtis appeared to marry a Baptist, that religion marking her unusual last name as most likely Welsh, remembering an old Welsh place perhaps, as it was not a father's first name.
Benschoter was increasingly seen, after Van Benschoter, not just the older Van Benschoten preferred back in NY by Dutch Reformed ministers trained to use "proper Dutch" while "back home" (overseas)
Oliver's father William died in 1833, well before Oliver turned 18. Population growth caused the Ohio legislature to let their portion of Huron County split off as a new county in 1838, called Erie County.
Oliver was last obviously in Ohio for the 1850 Census. All six of his first set of children were listed as living in his Erie County farm house, at the time. The youngest was just a toddler, Charles G., later called Grant. He would be the sole son to stay long-term in Iowa.
Of Oliver's siblings. W.W. Williams left out Oliver's brother Almon. Though not seen elsewhere, WW added a brother called Alanson and a sister Betsey G. W.W. Williams noted that that Oliver's sister Esther married Joel Fox. The Fox family was the only one of Oliver's set to remain in the township, after Oliver left in the 1850s to go further west.
Of his Uncle Daniel's set, the eldest and youngest sons stayed, Gardner and Hoffman, their mother being alive there until 1877. Leander, Sheffield, Cordelia and Eliza left.
Noted by a different source, Uncle Daniel's daughter Cordelia would have some notoriety. Was she a late middle child getting attention by following her uncle Jeremiah into the Spiritualists? A group had organized in Berlin Heights. She then went way beyond Spiritualism, to form a free love commune with a Francis Barry and one other party. Their commune had trouble keeping members, so she eventually became conventional, married Barry, and went off to Portage County, Ohio. (Story given by Gina Msiroglu's book, "American Counterculture")
WW Williams gave details for several of Jeremiah's seven sons who stayed in Ohio. One son of Jeremiah, Ensign Van Benschoter, was a doctor, seen in tax records for his medical practice. WW said he had moved, so lived in Portland Township in 1830, a place which later turned into the more important lakeside town called Sandusky.
Portland village's main medical doctor, also from NY, was stricken with cholera in 1834. Maybe Ensign had left Portland by then, given he survived that cholera round. Other sources say he went to Plymouth in Richland County, became its second mayor. Other sources also say locals submitted a petition in the late 1840s to make him an associate judge of Richland County's court.
Oliver's cousin, Curtis Benschoter, like his father Jeremiah, had dropped the Van from Benschoter early. He bought his farm land from the tragic John Dunbar. Dunbar's wife had, in a fit of insanity, thrown herself into a fire of large logs made at the side of their house. Hearing her screams, Dunbar rescued her, put her on the bed and went for medical help, but she got up and "ran wildly" after him. He shouted for help all day, "not daring to leave her", but no one heard. She died in that manner, the first death in the township. Curtis farmed that same land his whole life, dying in 1877, right before WW printed his book.
BACK IN NY. Oliver was born in a farming area, carved out of the NY wilderness over several decades, located some seventy-plus miles northish of NYC. They were of baptismal record as in a wide, multi-county stretch called Shawangunk, no specific town meant. The region, with multiple stringlike settlements, was named for the mountain range it bordered, the impassability of which, even today, makes traveling down to NYC difficult.
The old Shawangunk cited in father William's baptismal record was thus much larger than the modern town in Ulster County that bears the mountains' name. Their part of the wide NY swath was near the Neversink River, in what later spun off as Sullivan County. A splitting into parts as population arrived and churches grew in number meant that the first two US Censuses, done in 1790 and 1800, counted grandfather Aaron's household as in two counties without their moving. The "mother county" was Ulster, seen in 1790, while his 1800 Census counted them in the brand-new daughter county of Sullivan. Aaron would report in court testimony (preserved later in Ohio, while seeking his revolutionary pension) that his last move inside NY was made before the Revolution ended.
In modern times, in the 1940s, the lower basin of the Neversink River was dammed-up to make a water reservoir for NYC. Old churches and thus old cemeteries are now under water. The businesses and population of old Neversink with deep ties had to either move or drown, so mainly rebuilt above the raised water line (Flattsburg?). Oliver died decades before, far away, so never knew of this big, modern change.
MURDER AND MAYHEM? His family apparently had farmed on the higher ground above the dammed part. The land was originally sold to grandfather Aaron from the estate called the Beekman Patent. They bought from the Beekman family, ultra-large landowners ("patroons") originally given the land by Dutch officials. Two decades later, Aaron would have been in the process of turning his hard-worked land over to his maturing sons.
However, In a time of no title insurance, the Beekman land's title was tainted. There was " a lot of drama". Gunshots were not always aimed in the air. A second patroon family laid claim to the now-cleared, much improved land. The second patron family, very oddly, did not make their claim until twenty years after they must have known they could claim title. They would evict the many small farmers who had worked for decades to pay for and improve what was now to be taken from them.
The drama in Sullivan County included an officially unsolved murder, though the family had ideas about the culprit. The ultra-large landlord evicting so many was the one to be murdered.
No one would have felt happy about what happened. While the old place pushed Aaron's family out, a new and better place pulled his people in.
NEXT IN OHIO. They went to the so-called "Firelands region", west of an emerging Cleveland, parts first under survey just before 1800, Connecticut given the land in post-Revolution negotiating over state boundaries, to make up for Connecticut towns on the coast having been burned out by the British, hence the title "Firelands".
The timing was pre-canal, pre-railroads, pre-statehood. Places too close to marshy river mouths would struggle with "ague and fever" (malaria, not understood then, but caused by bites from infected marsh-bred mosquitoes).
Aunt Mary had married Oliver Peak back in Sullivan County, NY. Their first burials in Ohio seem to have been on family farm land converted to a cemetery, what is still called Peaks Cemetery.
By 1833, Oliver Benschoter's parents were both dead, said a NY family historian, writing decades later than WW Williams, in a 1907 book. Oliver's mother died a year after his father. The family historian had talked to Oliver's married older sister, Mrs. Fox, who lived on their parents' farm in Ohio. She would have been the one reporting that their parents had been buried side-by-side at the Peakes' ground. Their deaths were also reported, but not dated, in Oliver's personal biographies, found in old books regarding Kossuth County, Iowa, and Martin County, Minnesota.
Oliver's later biographies were given by his children, not as knowledgeable as his sister back in OH would have been about their parents. His mother's death would have followed news that NYC had just dealt with something horrid brought from abroad in 1832, a late summer cholera, to make its way to Ohio. The disease spread in different ways, but mainly by towns and ships dumping raw sewage into river water and at ocean ports. The sickness would travel with schooners along the oceanfront, then into navigable rivers and across the Great Lakes , eventually brought to the Firelands, taking lives of others in the family. Some graves are listed at a cholera cemetery up in Sandusky. It's not clear. Did the family victims die there? Or, were they merely memorialized there, due to being on a list of all nearby cholera victims?
Uncle Cornelius had "gone west", too, but may have come to Ohio last, too late to find land in what became Erie County, settling instead in Seneca County, in Reed Twp. By 1850, Cornelius and "Dian" had two young men listed in their house, in the spots reserved for children, their known son Alex (for Alexander), age 32, and another male relative, maybe a son, maybe a nephew, a different Oliver than this one, younger, just age 18. The young men were still living at home on August 3, a date when this Oliver would have been ready to turn 23. A little girl, 11, was listed last, "Cirssa Manger", a different surname. Was she a grandchild visiting for the summer, so her name fairly correct? Or, instead a foster child, so name not close to reality? It was not said.
Indenturing was of the recent past, however, eventually to be stopped, along with permanent slavery. This older Oliver's orphaned younger brother, Almon, had had a terrible experience.
Uncle Cornelius was listed as a farmer, his sons as "laborers", their names spelled the way his people pronounced them. The census-taker did not think to ask, just "sounded out" their last name as "Benscooter". Were "Dian" and "Cirssa" the same? Modern transcribers thought they saw "Benschooter" in the handwritten scrawl, so typed that, still not right. The younger cousin Oliver had attended school in the last year, very unusual for that era, lucky to be in a place where high school for farm children was possible. Themselves New York-born, as was their known son Alexander, the adults listed that younger Oliver as born in Ohio. The family move was between the young men's births 32 and 18 years earlier, no earlier than Aug. of 1818, no later than Aug. of 1832.
It thus seems highly likely this older Oliver lived with them when orphaned in 1833 at age 16 or so. They could have used his maturing hands to help with their farmwork while their youngest boy was too small. Being placed in Seneca County with them would allow this Oliver to meet Martha Kemp of Seneca County. He would be of record marrying her there, while his older sister and cousins and a Jeremiah born in 1780, of the right age to be his uncle, were still in Erie County.
He and Martha had at least one child born in Seneca, the rest, in Huron County, in the Firelands region, on Lake Erie. This Oliver's first wife went by Patty , a pioneer nickname for Martha, that rhymed with the more normal nickname of Mattie. (Marys turned into Mollys and Pollys.)
Just as Oliver was a popular male name among the Ohio set , seen also in NY, many repeatedly remembered an ultra-grandmother back in NY named Pieternelle. They called their daughters and cousins Nelle and Nelly, then Nellie, to avoid ethnic criticism from the British-descended. Her full name honored an earlier male ancestor named Pieter in Dutch, aka Peter, if pleasing other ethnicities (much as the feminine name of Janneke, seen in NY, might remember a male named Jan, with that man's name on the Scandinavian end of the Dutch, aka John).
Oliver's homestead claim for land in Iowa was filed at a federal land office in Fort Dodge, near the Dakotah line, for farm land he had most likely already had visited before filing. It was just above the northeast edge of Algona, Iowa. They were there early, but not the very first to arrive in Algona. After first wife Martha Kemp died in 1858, buried inside Algona bounds in its oldest cemetery, he remarried, his second bride to be Sarah Crose. (The "final e" in Crose was pronounced? as seen with Krause in German?).
Oliver and Sarah married in 1862. This was just as the family started to reel from its Civil War deaths.
We know that, no later than 1890, this Oliver had crossed northward, over the nearby Minnesota state line, with Sarah and those of his next ten children not yet grown. Now elderly, he filed that year, using his rural Minnesota address, for a pension, based upon his deceased son George's participation in the Civil War, on the Union side. They were in Silver Lake Township, in its bottom mile of sections, right on the state line, not far from the rural Congregational Church . While he lived, their mailing address was still Centre Chain, Minnesota.
Centre Chain referred to the middle chain of three chains of glaciated lakes running north to south, pointing in the direction of nearby Armstrong, Iowa. Son Hubert worked as a blacksmith in the East Chain, that of the three chains closest to to the old fur-trading place of Faribault.
Over a century after Oliver's death was reported there, the church now called Center Chain Congregational still stands, with its nicely kept, parklike cemetery outside. Mail for both farmers and the church was eventually delivered to and from the larger Fairmont, the county seat some miles to the north. This change later caused Fairmont to be listed as the address of family members who still lived in Silver Lake Twp.
For example, Frank Benschoter, this Oliver's eldest son with Sarah, would eventually be listed as from Fairmont, while actually living outside it, in Silver Lake Twp. An online record says Frank married in Martin County in 1895, nothing more specific, as people eventually understood it was less confusig for outsiders if they did not precisely name the county's rural places.
Oliver and Sarah enrolled daughter Mary Blanche at the school for the deaf at nearby Faribault on Sept. 11, 1889. An old book about the students who attended said typhoid fever caused her loss of hearing. Calling herself Blanche, she would marry a deaf man named Daniel Decker, seen with him, once part of her family had moved down to Emmet County, Iowa. She and Daniel would be on adjacent cards filed for the town of Armstrong, for the 1915 Iowa State Census, not able to communicate well, so state of birth and religion left blank. Her widowed mother and bachelor brother James also were listed as residents. Their cards listed both men as "laborers". They may have been working for a railroad or creamery or on road or carpentry crews. Why not farm? The country had run out of new farm land for farmers, unless one wanted to move to arid places where things were hard to grow or extra-expensive (installing irrigation needed). "Laborer" was the town job offered to rural kids not given high school. Blanche had more education, listing herself as completing Grade 8, whereas her mother, Sarah, listed herself as stopped at Grade 6. Sarah was considerably younger than Oliver, yet died only a year later, in Armstrong, according to state of Iowa records online. There are too many cemeteries to know easily which was hers. Blanch was buried in St. Peter, Minnesota, perhaps moving to be nearer her sister Augusta ("Susan"), who had married Jay Willoughby
ELIMINATING SLAVERY & INDENTURE. Oliver's uncle Jeremiah was told upon his arrival on the Erie lakeshore of Ohio that slavery was not allowed in the new place. He complied by releasing his slaves. There was no belligerence, nor any appealing to Congress to change local laws, as would be seen later, when southern plantation owners insisted on expanding slavery into newly forming states. The Civil War would break out to stop the expansion, timed as Oliver married second wife Sarah in Algona, Iowa, in mid-Dec. of 1862.
Many would die. Oliver and Martha Kemp's son George C. Benschoter would join at 18, then die while in Little Rock, buried there, listed as Iowa Infantry, name mis-understood by the military to be the "Benshoter", the needed " C" omitted. The spelling would be corrected in the pension application, yet the military stone was carved with the Benshoter mistake.
From Erie County, Ohio, so from the Firelands region, cousin Oliver W. Benschoter would be another war casualty. He died in the union's military hospital in Nashville Tenn., late in December of 1862, mere weeks after Oliver A. married Sarah mid. Dec., back in Algona. Both young men died of disease, not as they expected, not in battle.
George's specific disease has not yet been found in records, The younger Oliver died of rubeola (German measles). Vaccinations against measles did not yet exist. Contagious illnesses spread quickly inside soldier's tent-crowded camps.
The bondage of indentured orphans by the British and early Americans was only for a limited number of years, so temporary, not permanent and inherited like slavery or serfdom. Yet, those whose young relatives had been indentured under bad masters had a special appreciation of what slavery meant.
Opposition to slavery was serious in both Ohio and northern Iowa. Their Iowa county was named Kossuth, to honor Louis Kossuth, a man who came to the northeastern US in the 1840s to campaign for everyone to pressure Hungary to abolish serfdom. Serfdom was like slavery, except that serfs "went with the land" Like rocks or trees, they could not be moved ahead of a property's, could have their masters change, but not be moved. This allowed them to form comunites and have church allefiances which continued later.
A younger brother of Oliver, named Almon Benschoten, ran away from presumed abuse at his assigned indenture where an uncle had placed him after his parents died. Being indentured meant having no legal rights over the contract's life, except for details specified in the contract, over which the child had no say-so. The child or preteen was never the one given the contract price, so was not personally paid. The one-time fee paid by a purchasing master often went to pay parents' debts. Indentured children were forced to tolerate hunger and cold and exhaustion, perhaps moved by the master far away from people they loved, perhaps beaten, whipped or branded by a master who lived too well on the proceeds of child labor.
ODD SURNAME? His grandfather Aaron once alternated in his children's baptismal records, between using a longer early spelling and a shorter surname with the same meaning, Van Bunschoten versus Bunschoter/Benschoter. The difference between Van and -er is like saying "I am from New York" versus "I am a New Yorker".
Their first known immigrant ancestor, like most early Dutch in the 1600s, arrived without a surname. He described himself as Teunis, son of Elias. When asked "Where did you come from", he replied "from Bunschoten" (Van Bunschoten). The waterside town of Bunschoten (in Holland, just east of Amsterdam), being walled, would have been a fortified place where local farmers might be expected to take their families whenever the waterway or he town's countryside came under attack. The first known church records for Teunis in America were in old Bergen, a region of what later became New Jersey. That newer Bergen shared the name of a very old Norwegian city, formerly part of the Hanseatic cities. Merchant shippers belonging to an organized group called the Hansa (the League) circulated between the varied Hanseatic cities, at their peak in the 1200s when 170 cities from northern Europe seaways were said to have participated, ranging from Stockholm in Sweden from Krakow and Gdansk in Poland and Denmark, to Riga in Latvia, to Bruges in Belgium and Bremen in Germany, to Steelyar (London) and Ipswich in Britain. In this manner, Scandinavian naming customs mixed with Dutch, explaining why Teunis was also seen with a Danish-style surname accepted by the Dutch, as Teunis Eliasen, moving from NJ to places along the west bank of the Hudson River in NY, children born in both places.
Many in Oliver's larger family traveled "out west" to places near Jeremiah, but in steps. Aaron's nickname of Arie, seen in a child's baptismal record, sometimes was "sounded out" as Ora. He and his wife would not follow Jeremiah into Ohio until after the War of 1812. Waiting with them were Oliver's parents and their other adult children, his uncle Daniel to later be buried as Benschoten in the Firelands region of Ohio, just west of Cleveland. Any war-related threat of the British trying to takeover Ohio's Lake Erie shoreline by attacking from Detroit or Canada? It was gone via treaty, with Detroit now clearly in the US, weakening its old economic ties with southern Canada.
The timing was still very early, pre-statehood for Ohio. Aaron's brothers were last "all together" in old NY, while there for the American Revolution. While serving, sometimes a volunteer, sometimes "pressed, with George Washington at West Point for awhile, Aaron moved a few times along the Hudson River, trying to find better opportunities in farmland. He thus served from different locations, left records at Dutch Reformed churches, beginning in his parents' place of Dutchess County, said to leave records at the Poughkeepsie church, moving to Ulster County, then, with brother Garret and others, to that part of Ulster which became Sullivan County, near the Neversink River. Towns/townships that still exist were much larger then, not yet subdivided into smaller places.
Aaron then lost hard-earned land.
Oliver's father William was the leader in following his uncle Jeremiah off to Ohio, taking the children already born and both of William's long-lived parents. Aaron and wife would live in a cabin on William's land. Then, Oliver's parents, in the year or so after cholera hit NYC, "died too young", leaving their orphans in Ohio with relatives nearby "barely making it".. Long-lived Aaron and wife moved in with William's brother Daniel. Uncle to Oliver, he tried to find placements for the children after being appointed guardian to the ones not deemed adult (adulthood was 12 for girls, 14 for boys).
Oliver and siblings were the second set of Benschoter/Von Benschoten children orphaned in Ohio, the others being Almon and his siblings. Milo's brother Curtis, who appeared to marry into the Baptists, was also in the picture. Living nearby, he was not able to take more than one or two, so an in-law named Peake/Peak stepped in. Proof that Oliver's family lived close-by was that Oliver's parents and grandparents were said to be buried in the Peakes' family cemetery, relatives dying at a later date to be buried instead in Berlin Heights.
In some family trees, the two sets of orphans, not surprisingly, are treated as "mix-and-match", as if there was just one set of orphans. Remembering that there were two sets with different parents and different arrangements for placement into other families is difficult, but essential
.
Some placements as apprentices were good. Other placements were traumatic. After orphaned cousin Almon Benschoten escaped his bad apprenticeship as a tanner and currier, his status as a runaway was perhaps illegal. The unfilled indenture contract was a debt owed. He would wander for decades, the family said, as far west as St. Louis, as far south as New Orleans, as far east as NYC, of record working as a "cooper" (barrel-maker). He finally returned to marry, but never had children.
The luckier Oliver, in the process of "going west" first traveled into Illinois, to explore the Rock Island area. Later, he did not settle immediately in Kossuth County, but went through Delaware County in Iowa's northeast corner, closer to the Mississippi, so across from Rock Island. He visited cousin Alexander and Uncle Cornelius Benschoten, then maybe followed westward whatever pieces existed of the old military trail going from Fort Atkinson west across northern Iowa (which became Hwy 18). Of his children, just his daughter Alice was along. She would help prepare for the others coming to Iowa later, presumably by starting a garden once in Iowa, nursing some animals and fruit trees, helping to dig and plow and chop firewood, and so forth, as women could be expected to be tougher then.
Son William would bring Oliver's wife (Martha Kemp) and Oliver's other children.
To do so, William left his studies at Oberlin, at the time, a newish college in Ohio, one that would become known for its abolitionism and speaking out for varied rights. One of the Call brothers soliciting settlers to the Algona area of Iowa had attended Oberlin, a rare thing in a day when few went beyond grade school/grammar school .
Daughter Alice, to become Alice E Seely/Seeley, was perhaps remarkable in some ways, showing that literacy and entertaining writing were something that could be done by more than her male cousins. Her work on a local newspaper (The Algona Bee?) is currently being researched, not much found so far. She would marry Andrew Seeley, an orphan of sorts, also from Ohio.
BACK TO OLIVER. Oliver's grandfather (great-grandfather?) was Aaron Bentschoter, aka Arie Van Benschoten, who moved several times, firs in Dutchess county, as he served stints in the Revolution. Post-war, he first appeared with family (counted, not named) in the 1790 census, but without slaves. Aaron's brother Jeremiah was another story, his slaves freed by law once inside the Ohio border. Jeremiah was the one going to Ohio first, with a pack of preteen boys among his many children,. The departures were amidst stories of a rich landlord's strategies to confiscate property in NY after letting the lands' buyers settle -in for several decades, clear the land, build houses and barns and cribs upon it, and otherwise improve it, then show and show the fauolt in the legal legal title. There was some negotiation, some getting of uncleared and inferior wild land in return for being evicted peaceably, but the victims were largely forced wither to stay and be beholden to a malignant landlord , or to move. The landlord would be shot dead while riding his horse , circumstances unclear, no one convicted, according to a history of old Sullivan county, but perhaps involving a young boy trying to protect his family from severe loss.
Oliver and siblings were was born near the Neversink River in Sullivan County. Settlements were low density, in swaths that have since divided into smaller towns and townships. Aaron's brother Garrett was one of the ones remaining, a stone still standing for Garret/Gerrit's son, another Oliver, buried as Van Benshoten/Bunshoten. That cemetery is called Flatsburgh/Neversink. Its old town and possibly their old Dutch Reformed church (which kept infant baptismal records naming parents, a wonderful thing for tracing ancestors) no longer are in the old spot. The old town of Neversink, named for the river thought it, had been put underwater, dammed, creating a large reservoir, owned by NYC for a water supply.
Oliver married twice, had six known children survive by Martha Kemp, had ten more by Sarah Crose. He and Sarah moved northward, straight north of Armstrong, into the bottommost, so southmost row of the thirty-six square mile sections that made up Silver Kake Township in Martin County. The biggest town there was Fairmont. . Sarah, being 20 some years younger, died much later than Oliver, after moved south, back to Iowa, to Armstrong.
(Alice's son James Seeley married Agnes Brown, sister to one of the Alexander Browns, in Cresco Twp., just south of Algona. The first Browns to Algona were Scotch-Irish who came from northern Ireland in the potato famine with seven children on their ship the Sir Charles Napier. They made their way from Canada down to Massachusetts by the 1850 Census, with just six children left. They then came to Algona with only four children remaining, with a rail accident and tuberculosis as causes of death for two. They came as part of the "Whitinsville Colony" of Northbridge Town/Township in Worcester County, Mass., a well-planned manufacturing town westish of Boston, northish of Providence. Rhode island. Others from Whitinsville to Algona included Frank Rist, who had been with Thomas and John Brown in the severe rail disaster on an outing to see sailboat races in Providence. The accident was due to someone not minding clocks and two trains then colliding, with cars from one sliding under cars of the other. Thomas died, not immediately, but in pain, begging a kind minister to help him. The Reverend tried to lift what was pinning Thomas by the neck, but did not succeed. Frank Rist and an injured but healing John Brown survived; we assume the same John Brown was the one who made it out to Iowa with Frank Rist and the Alexander Browns. If so, he worked as a courier and stagecoach driver to supplement the family income while others farmed, but "died too young" in 1862.
The Whitinsville set were greeted by one of the Call Brothers of Iowa while en route, coming through the gateway of St. Louis. Mr. Call convinced them to go North, his spot then called Calls Grove, to change later into Algona. They were in the northwest corner of Iowa, just above Fort Dodge, not long after Daniel Boone and other surveyors and army men had made their way through part of Iowa
==
Notes on NY. Their Dutch family previously had considerable history in the Hudson River area of eastern NY. They lived in a corner closer to Pennsylvania than to NYC, so were more rural than urban. The family's infant baptismal records linked children to parents, going many generations back. The Dutch often used relatives as "god-parents", so parents' siblings were also learned when checking infants' baptismal records. The departing Dutch governor had made the British who conquered the NY Dutch to promise some religious tolerance. Thus, Quakers were allowed in NY, unlike in New England. Yet, not all was tolerant, as the NY family historian writing in 1907 seemed surprised that an early family member had somehow found a Catholic to marry.
Both the Quakers and NY Dutch might have slaves in the early days, but both came to see it as wrong. The Friends (Quakers) often came from seafaring backgrounds, as often did the Dutch. The Quakers thus were the other major group owning slaves in rural NY, pre-War or 1812. However, neither set of New Yorkers ever owned slaves to the degree seen in the southern colonies and states. They came to understand ,on their own, without war, by observing the effects of slavery, that freedom should be given.
His son George had died not in vain, but with a purpose. He and multiple others joined from Kossuth, a county named for Louis Kossuth, an anti-serfdom speaker who had come to New England to speak. At least one of the Call brothers had paid attention at Oberlin, which had, not just farmers' children in attendance, but the nearly adult children of ex slaves, as well, not forced to escape to Canada, as freed by former owners in the South . Oliver's daughter Alice would have noticed as well. If she had lessons from Oberlin to teach, they were not lost on George. We thank the family for their sacrifice.
Family Members
Spouses
Children
-
![]()
Alice Ester Benschoter Seely
1839–1912
-
![]()
Mary "Polly" Benschoter Weaver
1842–1901
-
![]()
George Benschoter
1844–1863
-
Evaline E. "Eva" Benschoter Carlisle
1847–1920
-
![]()
Charles Grant Benschoter
1849–1910
-
![]()
Frank Benschoter
1865–1933
-
Edward "Ned" Benschoter
1867–1937
-
![]()
Nellie Benschoter Holman
1867–1944
-
![]()
Hubert Benschoter
1870–1945
-
![]()
Louisa M. Benschoter
1875–1894
-
![]()
James Benschoter
1877–1942
Advertisement
Advertisement
