Church, Jeremiah

CHURCH

Posted By: Karon Velau (email)
Date: 7/5/2021 at 00:49:38

History of Warren County, Iowa; Containing a History of the County, Its Cities, Towns & Etc., by Union Historical Company, 1879, p.442

CHURCH, JEREMIAH. No sketch of the pioneers of Warren county, or no history of its early days, would be complete which should fail to mention Jeremiah Church or "Uncle Jerry," as he was known everywhere. From his autobiography, which contained his life history up to 1857, we glean some particulars of his life. Uncle Jerry, as he was known to this generation and to his friends, and the name which expresses more fully than any other his relation and importance to this section of country, was born in the town of Jericho, now called Bainbridge, State of New York, in September, 1796. His advantages in the matter of education were limited, and at a very early age he started out in the world for himself. His first adventure was in traveling with a museum of wax figures in the State of New York, but not being very successful he turned his attention to selling goods from a peddler's pack, in Virginia and Kentucky. He then wandered for some years, traveling in several different States of the Union, when in 1833 he returned to Pennsylvania, in company with his brother, and purchased the site of the town of Lock Haven in that State, laid out that town, and in October of that year made a public sale of the lots of the perspective city. Here he met with many ups and downs, but remained long enough to see the town of Lock Haven become one of considerable importance, having in 1842, as he says in his journal, "seven retail stores and groceries, one drug and two candy shops, three preachers, two meetinghouses (and one 'Jerry Church'), six lawyers, two doctors and two justices of the peace, and the balance of the inhabitants are what I call a fair community." In the year 1845 he came west to Des Moines while the Indians were yet in possession of the country, and in 1846 laid out the town of Dudley, about two miles east of Carlisle, on the Des Moines river, which place he abandoned in 1851, after the great freshet of that year had made sad havoc with his embryo city, and it was moved to Carlisle, in Allen township, this county, which he had in the meantime laid out. Soon after, he went to Kansas, and in furtherance of his mania for laying out towns he laid out the town of Franklin, near Lawrence, which, however, was another failure, and he spent most of the time for some years at Carlisle until a few years since he went to Nebraska, and carrying out his desire for pioneer life, took a homestead. He remained in Nebraska until brought back by Dr. Hull to the home of his pioneer days, where, on the first day of November, 1874, Uncle Jerry breathed his last, and was buried by the loving hands of those who had known him so long and so well. We have sketched thus fully the details of his adventures to show the natural bent of his life, and his nature as a pioneer. While Uncle Jerry was never a prominent man in society, or in State or nation, yet he was of those men whom it was a pleasure to know, one of those strong, sensible, sturdy pioneers, to whom our country owes so much - one of those who were the forerunners of a more advanced civilization, who prepared the way for the inhabitants of the West, and moulded, to a great extent, the course and destiny of a great and prosperous country. Dangers had no fears for him, and his whole life was spent in their very midst. He was plain and blunt in the expression of his opinions, which were always strong and well taken. He was no fawning sycophant, and never cringed the knee to power or opinion, to creed or profession, but he possessed one of those strong, moral natures that scorned the ways of littleness, and, from natural inclination, and not from policy, did right. Without any of those accomplishments which polish men, he was more a diamond in the rough, one of God's noblemen, acting out the inspiration of his law without guide or teacher, but always doing right as God gave him to see the right. He was scrupulously honest in all his dealings with his fellow-man, and would have scorned an advantage meanly taken. His nature was full of charity, which he possessed almost to a fault, and no poor man or starving woman ever appealed for assistance in vain to his kindly heart. His sympathies were always with the poor and downtrodden, whose best friend he was. To the children, Uncle Jerry was almost a divinity, so kindly in all his actions, so full of his narratives of adventures of frontier life, in which they delight, that he was a welcome visitor at every hearthstone, and the friend and intimate of all who knew him. Enemies he had none, nor could have had, for everything in his nature was such as to make only friends. Reared in the severe school of frontier life he abhorred, and his intense disgust was always excited by any exhibition of supposed superiority, and nothing would call down upon the head of its luckless possessor his anathemas more affectively than an exhibition of pride of rank, or birth, or wealth, for with him the rank was but the guinea's stamp and not its pure unalloyed gold. In his religious belief he was a consistent Universalist, doubtless accepting the doctrines of that church as more nearly in full sympathy with his whole-souled, generous nature. His religious faith was firm to the end, and his last sad burial rites were performed by a minister of that denomination, the fortunes of which he had followed, and the success of which he had desired so long. He easily forgave every injury, and none was ever made through his agency, but he did all in his power to heal. True always to every friend, having no enemies; a specimen of that noblest work of God, an honest man; exacting in the observance of right according to his idea, and vigorous in his condemnation of wrong; the friend of the poor and the unyielding enemy of snobbery and rank and pretence; the sturdy pioneer, but the firm friend of progress, education and advancement, he goes to his grave wept by all who ever knew him, by the friends of his youth and of his old age, by the young and the old, the rich and the poor.