Mrs. Mary V. Watson
I was born in Hampshire county, Virginia, in 1850, and came with my parents to Grundy county in 1852. I was too young to remember anything about that trip. We made the trip from Virginia here in a wagon, leaving there in the spring of the year. My father, who was John W. Long, bought 160 acres of land in Felix township shortly after we came here. I do not know what he paid for it. It was, of course, all prairie. A little later he bought 40 acres more adjoining our original homestead and I do not remember what he paid for that.My father was the first assessor of Grundy county. At that time we had a county assessor and he drove over the county to assess property the same as township assessors do now.
Our land was all broken with oxen. The nearest market was Waterloo. As that was 45 miles from where we lived, and as we had oxen to drive, we didn't go to town very often in those days. We hauled our wheat to Waterloo. My father bought timber along the Iowa river near where Union now is located. He cut the trees and hauled the logs for our first log house. Years later we hauled logs to the saw mill to be sawed into lumber for our first frame house.
My father died in 1867. There are not many people in Felix township who will remember him. A number of years later our farm was sold to C. N. Clark. I do not know who owns it now.
After we sold our place in Felix township I moved to Melrose township, where I lived until 1900, when our family moved to Grundy Center, where we lived until three years ago when I moved to New Hartford to make my home with my daughter, Mrs. Gus Wiese.
--The Grundy Register (Grundy Center, Iowa), 31 January 1924, pg 6