Rubel, Jacob (1836-1919)

RUBEL, CLARK, RUBLE

Posted By: Linda Linn (email)
Date: 3/10/2011 at 20:23:33

LeMars Semi-Weekly Sentinel
12-19-1919

LONG LIFE CLOSED
JACOB RUBEL HOMESTEADED
HERE OVER FIFTY YEARS AGO
FIRST ELGIN TOWNSHIP SETTLER

Jacob Rubel, one of the first settlers in Plymouth county, died at the
city hospital on Tuesday morning at the age of nearly 84 years. Mr. Rubel had been in failing health for a long time, owing to infirmities of age, hardening of the arteries, and dropsical tendencies, although his death was hastened by suffocation caused by an accident.

On Saturday late I the afternoon, his son, Dr. H.F. Rubel, who since his return from army service in France last August has been assiduous in his care of the father, started to town to obtain provisions for the household. Mr Rubel, who had been feeling poorly that day was sitting in his arm chair. He told his son he thought he would go back to bed soon. Dr. Rubel returning to the place about 8 o’clock found the house on fire. A large hole had been burned in the floor of the room where Mr. Rubel was and the old gentleman was lying on the floor in an unconscious condition. The room was full of smoke. After extinguishing the fire, Dr. Rubel, with assistance of a neighbor brought his father to the city hospital. It is conjectured that Mr. Rubel got up to replenish the stove and that sparks set fire to the carpet. Mr. Rubel was not burned but his lungs were badly affected by the smoke.

Jacob Rubel was born in Baden, Germany on April 17, 1836, a son of Joseph and Mary Rubel. He attended school there until he was 16 years of age, when he came to America locating in Newark, N.J., and later lived at Philadelphia, Penn. He served during the Civil war in a Pennsylvania regiment. Following the war he returned to Philadelphia and was united in marriage at that place to Miss Margaret Clark. His wife died about eight years ago.

They came west in 1867 finally landing at Omaha and from Omaha came to Sioux City making the trip with a team of oxen.

Mr. Rubel in search of a homestead came to Plymouth county and was the first settler to locate
in Elgin township. He walked from Sioux City, then a small outpost, to where the city of LeMars now stands and stopped over night with the late Captain Betsworth, who lived in a log cabin on the banks of the Floyd.

Mr. Rubel finally claimed as his homestead the southwest quarter of section 34 in Elgin, where he resided until recently when he moved into another house south of his homestead.

As an early settler he could relate much of interest showing the hardships and privations of a prairie frontiersman. Two years after his coming he found many droves of elk and deer, illustrating the wildness of the country. In the winter of 1868-69 he found a drove of over a hundred, which had been run down and were so wearied by their chase for life that they could be approached and Mr. Rubel getting within gunshot of them was able to kill the buck with his trusty old musket. He quartered it and surprised his family with a plentiful supply of fresh meat. After killing the animal, it was with the greatest difficulty that he found his way home over the trackless prairie mantled in the deepest of snows.

[There is much more to this obituary, but it is virtually unreadable because of the darkness of the filmed copy.]

Civil War Record
 

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