BIOGRAPHY

SUSANNAH EMILINE ASHBAUGH (1840-1930)

Sharon (Mickey) Norton, January 2003

Susan was born in Trumbull Co., Ohio, the fourth of eleven children of Alexander Ashbaugh and Lydia Fox, who both appear to be descendants of Palatine Germans. Her father Alexander was the great-grandson of Johann Heinrich Eschbach who sailed aboard the Winter Galley in 1738 to Philadelphia, and, calling himself Henry Ashbaugh, settled in what is now Mountjoy twp., Adams Co., Pennsylvania. Her mother Lydia was the great-granddaughter of John Michael Sprinkle (variations: Sprankle, Sprenckel, Sprenkle), who came from Palatine Germany in 1725 to settle in what is now York County, Pennsylvania, and later moved with his sons to become the first settlers in Huntington Twp., Huntington County, Pennsylvania. Lydia's father John B. Fox, may also be German; the family name perhaps was Fuchs.

In 1853 Susan's parents moved the family to Michigan State and then in 1857 to Iowa where they farmed land in Des Moines County.

Susan was working on a neighbor's farm when she met John M. Mickey. She was probably cooking for the farm crew that included John, his brother Robert, and two other men hired for the summer. John in his diary says he was smitten with Susannah right from the start but hesitated to court her because his friend also had his eye on her. But Susan took things into her own hands, throwing John a kiss from the window one day and later contriving to meet him at the well (according to John, "like Rebecca and Jacob"). They were married February 13, 1862, and went to live in Henry County, Iowa on the farm John had purchased with earnings from his gold mining days in Oregon.

Under the cloud of war and the threat of John's being drafted into the Union Army, Susan and John worked especially hard that first year to pay off the debt they incurred farming their own land. John noted in his diary that the calico dress he bought Susan cost twenty bushels of corn, the high cost due to the loss of southern cotton supplies.

On May 4,1863 Susan gave birth to her first child, a girl they named Dora May. Four of the eight children Susan bore died as small children and are buried in the Winfield, Iowa cemetery "on the sunny slope". Dora was her only surviving daughter, and it was she who cared for her mother in the last years of her life when Susan became bedridden after a hip fracture.

If one reads between the lines of her husband's diary, Susan must have resisted for many years his arguments for moving to the West Coast, for it was not until 1890 after the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad that she agreed to go. She was fifty years old and her husband fifty-six. They chartered a boxcar to move their household goods and livestock across the county. Susan and her youngest child Dowd traveled by passenger train to Portland, Oregon, where they joined her husband John and son John Alexander who had ridden on the freight train with the family goods. Susan and John had more difficult years in Battle Ground, Washington, trying to turn stump land into a productive farm.

Susan must have welcomed the arrival of several other members of her family to the Northwest. Son James, who never married, came to help on the farm; daughter Dora and her husband Jim Christy left their homestead in Nebraska to live in Vancouver, Washington, and two of her sisters came west with their families: Priscilla Herrold to Ilwaco, Washington, and Sarah Elliott to Portland, Oregon. Susan's ten grandchildren were raised in the Battle Ground area.

In 1908, Susan and John sold their Battle Ground farm and bought a house in Vancouver, where friends and relatives came to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary in 1912. Susan was raised in the Methodist Episcopal church and was a member of the Baptist Church in Vancouver. She is buried beside her husband in the Old City Cemetery in Vancouver.