Harrison County Iowa Genealogy

HISTORY OF HARRISON COUNTY, IOWA, 1891
BIOGRAPHIES
Page 974
URIAH HAWKINS

Uriah HAWKINS, next to the first actual settler of Harrison County, is deserving of a bigraphical notice in this connection, so we will invite the attention of the reader to a little hamlet in New York State, where he was born September 27, 1800. He was the son of Edward and Charity (SHIPMAN) HAWKINS. Edward was a farmer; and came from New York to Missouri, and after roughing it for some time in that State, went to Illinois, and when eighty-nine years of age in 1846, his son Uriah took him to Jackson County, Iowa, where he died September 16 of that year.

Uriah had come to Jackson County in 1835, and July 10, 1847, he landed in Harrison County, and settled in what is now Cass Township, where he "squatted" on one hundred and sixty acres of land, which he subsequently paid the Government price of $1.25 per acre for. When he came to the county, he had a wife and five children: Jane, who married William J. ELSEY, who died in 1863; Edward is now on the old homestead; Emma died on October, 1863, and was buried on the farm in a private cemetery; Mary died in August, 1888, and is buried in the home cemetery; Esther married Adam CONRAD in Harrison County and died February, 1874.

Uriah HAWKINS was a poor man when he came to Harrison County, having two yoke of oxen, two yoke of cows, a yearling heifer, a wagon and a little household furniture, but at the time of his death, September 29, 1869, he was in fair circumstances. He had been a member of the Latter Day Saints Church for thirty-eight years.

Edward HAWKINS, the only son of pioneer Uriah HAWKINS, was born in Jackson County, Iowa in 1841, and came to Harrison County with his parents in 1847. When twenty-seven years of age, he left home and conducted a farm on his own seventeen acres. He was married in March, 1884, to Miss Lydia Ann Thorn THOMAS, a native of England, who came to America in 1883.

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