Pike Township Family Stories
THE HILDEBRAND FAMILY
Nichols, Iowa Centennial Book 1884-1984, pages 242-243
Written by Ida M. Wiker Smith, submitted by Phyllis E. Green HazenThis story of the Hildebrand family was submitted by Phyllis E. Green Hazen. She states that the story was written by her great grandmother, Ida M. Wiker Smith some time between 1901, when Ida was 41 and her last child, the tenth, was born, and 1942, when Ida was 82. She died in 1942. Following is Ida Wiker Smith’s story.
My mother was Ann Elizabeth Hildebrand, a daughter of Jacob Hildebrand and Elizabeth Hildebrand.
Her brothers and sisters are John Hildebrand, James Hildebrand, Jacob Hildebrand, Nelson Hildebrand, Hoover Hildebrand, Susan Hildebrand, Lou Hildebrand and Ella Hildebrand.
Hoover, Ella and my mother were the only ones who came west to live. Ella, who married Samuel Kendig, came later than the others. They lived in West Liberty, on First street, in the house now occupied by Mrs. Will Meeks. Sam was a painter. They had two children, Linn Kendig and Mable Kendig.
Uncle Hoover came to Iowa from Pennsylvania about 1856. He settled on a farm which his brother, John Hildebrand, purchased from the government and is now occupied by Mrs. Jennie Askam.
Uncle Hoover was a cobbler by trade and had his cobbler’s shop in his home. He made all of our shoes and mended them for us. He wrote to my father and mother and wanted them to come to this wonderful new country. He said that all you had to do was go out and kick up the sand with your big toe and out would come potatoes as big as your head.
So my parents came in the spring of 1858, bringing their six small children with them. They came by rail as far as Atalissa, since that was the end of the railroad at that time.
Uncle Hoover came to meet them with an ox team and took them to his home. The house was situated on the sand hill on the east end of their eighty acres. Then they divided the farm and built a house on the west forty, and that was where my parents, John Wiker and Elizabeth Wiker, lived. It was here that I was born two years later, in 1860.
Thirty-five or forty acres was all the land one man could farm in those days, as so much of the work had to be done by hand.
Uncle Hoover bought 160 acres in 1858, where Guy Hildebrand now lives. Here he built the first creamery in this part of the country. He collected cream from the farmers for miles around, Making butter which he shipped in tubs to distant cities.
He also had a sorghum mill, making sorghum for others as well as for his own use.
He gave an acre of this farm for a school, the men of the community donating their work to build the first Union No. 7 school house in 1863. This school house was used until the present building was erected in 1915. Guy Flater then bought the building and moved it to his farm, where he uses it for a garage.
The following families sent their children to school there for several years: Brand, Morgan, Askam, Beatle, Richeneyer, Robshaw, McIntire, Boyles, Allen, Shannon, Armstrong, Wallingford, Wales, Wiker, Hildebrand, Flood, Brown, Smith, McMahon and Wilgus.
This took in families in a radius of about four miles and made a very large school. It was the only school house in this section of the country.
I started to school the first session in the new schoolhouse in 1864, when I was only four years old. Jennie Bell Hull, who later married Emmot Kingsbury, was the teacher. I went there until I was fourteen years old, and I never attended school anywhere else. There was no rule or law for school then. We usually started when our parents wanted to send us and went until we quit to go to work.
Church services were held in the schoolhouse irregularly by preachers who happened along. A preacher by the name of Hildebrand, who was a distant relative of our family although we were not able to trace the exact ancestors, used to come to visit Uncle Hoover, and he lived in Iowa City. No Sunday school was ever held, however.
When my brother Ezra came home from the war, he built the Cedar Valley Methodist Episcopal church in 1871, and Uncle Hoover started a Sunday school.
My folks had to go to Atalissa to trade and get their mail. When I was quite a small child, they started going to West Liberty to get the mail and groceries. When anyone in the neighborhood came to town, they would get all the neighbors’ mail and leave it at our house, and the neighbors would all come there to get it.
West Liberty was a very small place then. Each home had a little fence around it. Planks were laid down to walk on. During wet weather the mud was very bad.
We had open wells, and in dry weather the water supply was inadequate.
There were no roads. When we wanted to go to town, we just took off across the open prairie with a team of horses hitched to a lumber wagon, fording the Wapsinonoc creek at the place where the bridge is now on road 76. We would often see wolves running across the prairie, and there were also wild deer.
We used tallow candles, which we made ourselves, for lighting.
The only way we had to keep fruit or vegetables for winter use was to dry them. Later we got stone jars and sealed them with sealing wax. Then we got tin cans.
Indians were being pushed west as the east was becoming settled by the white people. They had a camping ground near the Jordan creek, which is now the county ditch and empties into the Wapsie at the Harry Nauman farm. We often used to go to visit them in their camp. We would take small scraps of brightly colored cloth as presents, and the Indian girls would give us beaded purses, shoe ornaments and pin cushions. Large tribes of Indians would pass, going single file in the Indian fashion. When they passed the schoolhouse, our teacher would allow us to turn around in our seats and watch them. These Indians were always friendly.
In 1876 my parents sold their land to George Askam, whose descendants still live there. In October my father took four of their ten living children and journeyed back to Pennsylvania where they intended to make their home. They didn’t like it and came back to Iowa the following spring. It was a long trip to make in those days, and on the train we became very well acquainted with Samuel Kirkwood, who was war governor of Iowa and later became Secretary of the Interior. He, with his wife and niece, who was just my age, were going to Philadelphia to attend the centennial celebration (1776-1876). Uncle Hoover and Mary and my sister, Laura, attended the centennial, also, in the summer of 1876.
I am the oldest one of my generation living in the west, and I have the largest family. There are ten of my children, plus grandchildren and great grandchildren here today.
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