Gillespie, A. D.

GILLESPIE, TURNER

Posted By: Volunteer Transcriber
Date: 8/23/2009 at 15:44:35

Gillespie, A. D.

The most of people who have never lived on a farm think that it does not require any special skill to conduct the operations of husbandry. They are accustomed to think that the driving of a team of horses to a plow or harrow, a reaper or a wagon, the scores of other duties connected with general husbandry do not require a finished education or a high degree of intellectual activity. Neither does it to conduct a grocery store a hotel or a foundry. In both cases it does require, however, a thorough knowledge of the subject. The farmer must know how to sow his grain, the best varieties and whether it is in good condition, when to cut his wheat and his grass, when it should be cured, when it is ready to stack, whether it has gone through the sweating process and is ready to thresh, in fact, he must know a thousand such things, without which he is certain to lose heavily, a thing he cannot afford to do, because the farmer's profits are some years small and he must figure very close to the grain if he is adequately repaid for his expenditure of hard labor. Such a farmer is A. D. Gillespie, of Rock Creek Township, Jasper County.

Mr. A. D. Gillespie was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1846, the son of George Washington C. and Virtue (Turner) Gillespie, the father born in Tennessee and the mother in England, from which country she came to America with her parents, George and Mary Turner, who located in Philadelphia where they lived for a period of ten years, then moved to Alabama. The paternal grandparents lived and died in Tennessee.

The parents of the subject came to Iowa in 1848 and located at Burlington, coming to Knoxville, Marion County, in 1851, and in 1864 they moved to Jasper County, locating on forty acres, which they purchased in Rock Creek Township. Here the elder Gillespie set to work with all his courage and soon had a good home and a comfortable income, adding to his original purchase from time to time until he became the owner of two hundred acres of excellent land on which he lived until his death in 1891, his widow surviving until 1906 when she passed away at the age of eighty-two years. They were high respected in this part of the County and in fact, wherever they were known. Their family consisted of eight children, six of whom are living. Politically the father was a Republican.

A. D. Gillespie was reared on the home farm, which he worked when boy, and attended the public schools in the winter months, later taking a course at Grinnell Academy. He has spent his active life on the home place, having been about eighteen years old when he came here, and he and his sister Mary are still operating the homestead, having kept it well improved and well tilled. He raises a diversity of crops and raises considerable livestock. Mr. Gillespie has remained unmarried. Politically he is a Republican. Past and Present of Jasper County Iowa B. F. Bowden & Company, Indianapolis, IN, 1912 Page 964.