Bishop Family

BISHOP SANEM STALKER SMITH HIGLEY TREADWAY

Posted By: Connie Swearingen (email)
Date: 4/18/2010 at 22:58:12

Woodbury County History 1984

Bishop Family
By Dorothy Sanem Levitt

Mary (Bishop) Sanem’s father’s family goes back, as far as we know, to Revolutionary War Patriot, Austin Bishop (1764-1833) in Bristol, Connecticut. In 1788, he married Annah Stalker (1766-1840). Austin was both Deacon of the Baptist Church and tavern keeper! The tavern, in those days, was a respected public institution like the meeting house and the school. They had ten children, the last of whom was Homer Bishop (1809-1884)-Mary’s grandfather.

In 1929, Homer married Martha Smith. They moved to a farmer near Muscatine, Iowa, in the early 1840’s and then to Cedar Rapids in 1847 where Homer became a dry goods merchant and later, postmaster, mayor, toll keeper for the bridge company and a vestryman in the Episcopal Church. He went to the California Gold Rush and took a trip to Australia, too. Their six children were: Annah who married Harvey Grant Higley of Cedar Rapids; John; Elizabeth (1837-1910) who married Ogilvie Carleton Treadway (1829-1907), attorney-at-law in Sioux City; Thalia Martha who married ‘O.C.’s’ brother, William Blackstone Treadway (1835-1899), farmer stock-raiser in Sioux City; Dwight; and Homer, Jr.

Martha (Smith) Bishop died in January, 1849. Six months later Homer married her sister, Elizabeth, who during the next decade gave birth to three sons: Edward W, James Buchanan and Frederick A.

James Buchanan Bishop (1857-1912), Mary’s father, was given the name of the US President because Homer obviously appreciated his second term as postmaster, 1857-61. President Franklin Pierce had first appointed him in 1853. James’s full name, as well as his loyal support for Democrats, surely stood him in good stead with William Jennings Bryan who wrote him a letter, dated 1 December 1900, in appreciation for help during a campaign.

James, or Jim, probably came to Sioux City as early as 1867-as a boy of ten years, to live with his half-sister, Lizzie, and ‘O.C.’ in their home at 703 Douglas. Lizzie taught him to play the piano, had books for him to read, and treasures from all over to look at. When he bored, he visited his brother, Edward or Ned, in State Center. Polk’s City Directory of Sioux City, 1884-85 shows ‘James B Bishop, builder, rooms 703 Douglas.’ That entry indicates he again lived with the Treadways, as a young adult.

Jim’s first wife bore one child, Homer Levi, in 1889. She died either in childbirth or Homer’s infancy.

Early in 1892, Jim married his second wife, Mary Amelia Wilhelmina Krousie (1868-1934). He caller her Mame. Their two children were Clarence who was later renamed Edward Krousie (1895-1975) and Mary Elizabeth (1897), my mother, Mary (Bishop) Sanem, who now lives in Walnut Creek, California, having moved there from Bakersfield in 1982.

My mother’s mother ‘s family came from near Berlin, Germany, in the early 1870s, except for her farmer father, Gottlieb Krousie, who had died there. Her mother, Julia (Schellschmidt) Krousie (1829-1908), so the story goes, was ‘welcomed’ to America by a cousin who swindled her out of all the money she had brought from Gottlieb’s estate. What does a penniless widow with four children to do? Luckily, William and Charles, the oldest two, struck out for themselves. Augusta Carolyn (1859-1919) who married William Heisz of Cedar Rapids helped by ‘working out’, doing housekeeping and laundry. Mary also supported her mother and yet another child, Julius (1872-1967), by becoming a kitchen dining room maid before finishing school. In order to work in one of the hotels in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, she often crossed the Mississippi River on a ferry from McGregor, Iowa. Oh, how she hated sandbars and river water all the rest of her life! Eventually she moved from Lansing, Iowa, to Sioux City, where she managed the dining room of a hotel owned by Mrs. Wales.

Mame was a city girl. She missed people when she and Jim began rural life on ten acres stretching along the east side of Davidson (they called it Davis) Road. It was the site later on their greenhouses and truck gardens. Though Mame helped plant seeds, her rooms did not suit Jim, who, being a builder, wanted them very straight. She said to him quite innocently when they started a poultry business. ‘Why in the world do we need roosters? They don’t lay eggs!’

Jim’s brother, Fred, had greenhouses, too, at 1300 Dubuque. He raised flowers as well as many of the same vegetables that Jim cultivated: asparagus, cauliflower, celery, corn, lettuce, onions, parsley, radishes, rhubarb and tomatoes. They competed for customers among the neighborhood markets of Sioux City, hauling their produce in wagons, on the road before dawn. ‘Which Bishop?’ customers would ask, not knowing whether Jim or Fred was talking on the telephone. Despite the competition, their two families enjoyed picnicking together on a launch kept at the Sioux City Yacht Club (on the Dakota side). Mary ate graham crackers for the first time on one such outing.

Though Jim did not prosper as a contractor during the 1890s, he built a house for Fred on Dubuque and one for his own family, a Dutch colonial structure, close to Calvary Cemetery. It was so close he planted a grove of cottonwoods between the house and the cemetery as a barrier. At that time he was a member of and reader in the Christian Science Church.

The children attended a one-room school on Military Road, a couple blocks west of Davidson. Mary remembers after-school chores, tying parsley and skinning onions. She helped put up vegetables in soldered cans. But life was not all work. She rode in her father’s surrey; saw Halley’s comet from the rooftop; played the organ for church services held in the schoolhouse. (Someone else pumped because she could not reach the pedals.)

After Jim Died, Mary and her mother moved to 1508 West Twentieth Street. This was their home while Mary attended Castle on the Hill High School and later Morningside College. It was our home during the Depression. Mary (Krousie) Bishop cared generously for her family and for others through her volunteer work in the First Congregational Church. She is buried beside Jim in the Bishop-Treadway plot at Floyd Cemetery.