Harrison County Iowa Genealogy

HISTORY OF HARRISON COUNTY, IOWA, 1891
BIOGRAPHIES
Page 495
THOMAS TOMAS

Thomas THOMAS, who has been identified with the history of Harrison County since September, 1865, settled on section 27, Union Township, the site of his present home, at first purchasing fifty acres, to which he added, until at one time he owned two hundred and seventy acres. His present farm comprises one hundred acres of fertile land all under a high state of cultivation.

Upon coming to this county, the nearest trading point was Council Bluffs, this being before the railroad era. Mr. THOMAS is an adopted citizen of this country, having been born at Carmarthenshire, Wales, May 24, 1832. He is the son of William and Mary THOMAS. The father was also a native of Wales, born about 1787, and died in his native land, aged seventy years. William and Mary were the parents of twelve children, ten of whom grew to manhood and womanhood, our subject being the ninth child. The father was a farmer and shipping agent on the sea side.

When twenty years of age, our subject sailed for the New World, landing at Montreal in the autumn of 1853. He went to Michigan and worked that winter on the railroad at Manchester, but believing that the Hawkeye State afforded better opportunities for young men starting out in life, in the early spring of 1854, he came to Council Bluffs, and in a short time went to St. Louis, where he engaged in coal mining, which occupation he followed for about seven years, and then started across the Western Plains with a party of Mormons en route for Utah. After remaining there one winter, he returned to St. Louis and mined for six months, when he saw visions of the Far West, and engaged to drive one of the teams which made one of the overland trains. He remained two years and a half engaged as a teamster over the mountains in the summer time, and mining in the winter, thus acquiring a small start.

In September, 1865, we find him, as before related, located in Iowa, where for a few years he had a hard struggle to make a livelihood, but by perseverance and a vast amount of hard labor; he has over come the obstacles, and is now surrounded by a comfortable home. He was married in St. Louis about 1855, to Mary Ann DOYLE. He was again married December 10, 1862, at Sacramento City, Cal., to Mrs. Elizabeth LEWIS, with whom he had been acquainted in his native country, and where in 1848 she married David THOMAS, who emigrated to California in 1856; he died September 30, 1860. They are the parents of sex children, five sons and one daughter.

Politically Mr. THOMAS is a supporter of the Democratic Party, and in religious matters he and his wife are Latter Day Saints. All in all, our subject has had his share of vicissitudes, coming as he did, at an early day from a far away foreign shore, to a land where he met strange customs and new faces. He has steadily grown into the spirit of our institutions, and is now a highly respected citizen, whose eyes looked out upon the great Western domain when it was yet a howling wilderness; and doubtless he is now better qualified to enjoy our modern day luxuries than as though he had been rocked in the cradle of one who was in affluence, as he knows what all these things have cost, both the nation and him as an individual.

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