John R. Mickey was born January 9, 1812, near Laurel Hill in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, the eldest of the three sons born to Isaac Mickey and Elizabeth Roberts. When John was nine months old, his father Isaac enlisted in the War of 1812. Isaac served as a lieutenant in the 2nd Regiment (Patterson's) of the Pennsylvania Militia in Captain Thomas McQuaid's Company from Dec. 2, 1812 to April 17, 1813.
John's mother Elizabeth was a niece of Methodist Episcopal Bishop Robert Richford Roberts, a man who began his ministry as a circuit rider on the western Pennsylvania frontier. Elizabeth died in 1816, leaving Isaac with three little sons. The following year he married Susannah Brinley (or Brindley) Hipple, a widow with one daughter. In 1821 the family left Pennsylvania to take up residency in Richland County (now Ashland County), Ohio, an area where Isaac's brothers Daniel and Robert had located a few years earlier. The family grew with the birth of eight children to Isaac and Susannah. One of those children, Lucinda, in later years described the family farm as a small clearing in a great deciduous forest where, "wolves howled around it."
In Richland County, Ohio, at the age of nineteen John married Sarah Wasson. After the birth of their first and only daughter Mary, they moved further west to farmland near Peoria, Illinois, where they remained about two years. John Murray Mickey, eldest of their eight sons, was born here. In April 1835 the family of four crossed the Mississippi River at Burlington and took up land near Pleasant Grove twp, Des Moines County, Iowa Territory. John broke the prairie sod for his farm and those of his neighbors. After two years the family moved again a few miles west to a farm near Morning Sun, Louisa County, Iowa. John's two brothers Robert and Harrison, as well as some Mickey cousins, also came to live out their lives in Louisa County.
Despite being raised on the frontier, John was literate and served as justice of the peace in the Lower Court 1844-45, but his life was cut short at thirty-seven years by the typhoid fever epidemic in 1849. He left a widow and nine children under seventeen. John is buried in the Brown-Rice cemetery near Morning Sun. His biography is included in the Portrait and Biographical Record of Louisa County, Iowa, copyright 1889.
