Grace Clark Richmond

RICHMOND, CLARK

Posted By: Emmet County IAGenWeb Coordinator (email)
Date: 3/10/2011 at 19:05:16

From travel across the prairie in a covered wagon to travel across the country in a jet airliner is quite a contrast and an item to take note of in anyone’s life.

Mrs. Grace (Walter A.) Richmond, who will be 88 next month, has had that unique experience. With her son, Wally, she recently returned from Jacksonville, Fla., by jet airliner to Minneapolis in only 2 hours and 40 minutes flying time. She thinks that is a big improvement in travel, compared to her trips to Iowa from Wisconsin by covered wagon.

Mrs. Richmond came with her family to settle in the Iowa Lake township when she was only three years old. She relates that her father, B. P. Clark left Rock Falls, Wis., to come to Iowa with “only $10 in his pockets and his wife and four kids”. [See Contributor Note below]

She recalls herding cattle on horseback on the open prairie range northwest of what was later the site of Armstrong. She would drive the cattle three miles to Tuttle Lake for water.

The next year after the Clark family settled, their home was destroyed by fire and they went back to Wisconsin, but returned again in 1889. Except for this period of time Mrs. Richmond has made her home in the Armstrong community.

Both sides of the Richmond family have had more than their share of schoolteachers, but Mrs. Richmond’s mother had the distinction of starting the first school in the Iowa Lake district. She started the school in her own home with her own children, she took on a few more. In those days if there were at least five children in an area of school age, you could ask for a school, so the classes conducted at the Clark home soon were replaced by a country schoolhouse.

Mrs. Richmond would pick up some children on horseback and she once had to make a run for the river to escape a prairie fire.

She was married in 1897, only five years after the Town of Armstrong was incorporated, to Walter Richmond, son of Matthew Richmond, who had homesteaded southeast of town.

Mrs. Richmond now has 12 grandchildren and 22 great grandchildren. She chuckled when she related that her husband at one time was “afraid the Richmond name might die out for lack of grandsons.” Mrs. Richmond no longer has to worry, because six of her great-grandchildren are boys named Richmond.

[Contributor Note: This quote was used incorrectly here. It is correctly attributed to Matthew Richmond, father of her late husband, Walter Adam Richmond. Mrs. Richmond had only one sibling, Bert Lee Clark].

Contributed by: James Richmond. Source: Armstrong Journal, Vol. LXX, No.25, June, 20 1963, Armstrong Iowa.

Interment in Armstrong Grove cemetery
 

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