Cochran Family History, Volume I: John Cochran (1803-1876)

© Copyright 2013 by John Richard Cochran II. All rights reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 INTRODUCTION
1        OUR SCOTTISH FOREFATHERS
Religious Persecution
The McKees of Glencolumbkille
The McKees of Scotland
Our Scottish Dourness
The Cochrans of Scotland

2        OUR IRISH ROOTS
Glencolumbkille
Tenant Farmers
Flax and Linen
Ordnance Survey of 1835–36
Glencolumbkille’s Spiritual Heritage
The Act of Union
The Cochran(e)s of Kilcar
Kilcar Parish
Why They Emigrated

3        DEPARTURE FOR AMERICA
Samuel Love Emigrates
McKeesport, Pennsylvania
The Love Family Emigrates
The John Cochran Family Emigrates

4        SETTLING IN OHIO
The Muskingum Valley
Ohio Canal
The Eleanor Love Family
The Ann Love Family
The James Love Family
The Samuel Love Family
The John Yankee Love Family
The Fannie Love McKee Family
The Thomas M. Love Family
Alice “Allie” Love
John Cochran’s Experience in Ohio

5        UPROOTING TO THE IOWA TERRITORY
Iowa Territory
Black Hawk War
The Cochrans’ Iowa Homestead
Paddleboat
Covered Wagon
The Winter of 1841 – 42
Ann’s Death

6        IOWA:  A BITTERSWEET BEGINNING
John Cochran Remarries
The Cochran Girls of Madison County
The Margaret Ann Cochran Smith Family
The Eleanor Cochran Bishir Family
The Margery Cochran Lowden Family
The Jane Cochran Davis Family
The Isabelle Cochran Wright Family
The James W. Cochran Family
The George Cochran Family
Mary Gregg Cochran
7       FULFILLING A DREAM
John’s Farming Operation
John in Politics
John Suffers a Severe Stroke
John’s Death
John’s Will
John’s Estate
John Gregg Cochran
John Cochran’s Legacy
Conclusion

POSTSCRIPT

APPENDICES (found in PDF file)

NOTES

WORKS CITED

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DEDICATION    – For our children 

Though leaves are many, the root is one.¹ — W. B. Yeats

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PREFACE

Over the years, our family gatherings have included significant table talk about our ancestors. Generation after generation passed down albums of pictures and old documents. Interesting stories have been abundant. china cabinets, dressers, and fireplace mantles have displayed ancestral artifacts and the barn at our family farm in Iowa displays the Cochran name with the date 1877. For me, each image, tale, and object has begged to be identified with an event in the life of a member of our family.

Recently, with time on my hands and marvelous online research capabilities at my fingertips, I’ve uncovered bits and pieces of information that, when combined, produce stories that accumulate to sketch a biography. This project has taken the ancestral name of my great-great-great-grandfather John Cochran (1803–76) from the realm of phantom, to the realm of real. It has connected me with my siblings and distant cousins, and allowed me find an interested network of researchers who have provided invaluable assistance in sorting out the people and events in John’s past.

I view this book as a way of summarizing what is known and can be assumed about John Cochran. I have worked to combine everyone’s discoveries into a narrative that I hope you will find intriguing.

I’m reminded that life stories have the power to instruct as the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan (1803–49), a contemporary of our John Cochran, so aptly expressed in his poem “The Nameless One”:

Roll on, my song, and to the ages
Tell how…
He would have taught men, from Wisdom pages
The way to live.²

The Cochran Family Tree

Relationship: John Richard Cochran II to John Cochran
John Cochran is the third great-grandfather of John Richard Cochran II.
Source: ancestry.com, accessed July 15, 2013

3rd great grandfather
John Cochran
b: 02 Apr 1803, Largymore Townland, Donegal Ireland
d: 10 Jan 1876, Round Prairie Township,

2nd great grandfather
George Cochran
b: 07 Jan 1827, Jefferson County, Iowa,
d: 13 Aug 1901, Fairfield, Jefferson County

Great grandfather
Ulysses Sherman Grant Cochran
b: 12 Apr 1864, Round Prairie Township,
d: 15 Apr 1948, Fairfield, Jefferson

Paternal grandfather
John Hornby Cochran
b: 20 Sep 1887, Buchanan Township
d: 18 May 1951, Fairfield, Jefferson, Iowa.

Father
J Richard Cochran
b: 24 Jul 1910, Fairfield, Jefferson, Iowa,
d: 27 Apr 2004, Fairfield, Jefferson, Iowa,

Self
John Richard Cochran II
b: 06 Feb 1943, Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my sisters: Jo Johnson, Judy Ide, and Sarah Cochran for providing valuable feedback and ideas every step of the way as I wrote and shared this manuscript with them. Their words of insight and encouragement were invaluable.

Thank you also to LuLu Chesnutt of Largymore townland, Kilcar parish, County Donegal, Ireland, who provided me with much of the information on our Irish ancestry. She and her brother Hugh Thomas Cochrane Chesnutt hosted me at their homes in Largymore, the ancestral home of John Cochran(e). Their generous and warm hospitality was greatly appreciated.

Thank you also to LuLu Chesnutt, Patrick “Paddy” McBrearty, and Patsey Love for giving me a personal guided tour of our County Donegal homeland and providing valuable resource material for this book.

My thanks also to Georgette Love, Patsey Love, Steve Love, Harlan Cochran, and Brad Watson for taking the time to read my manuscript and provide valuable material and feedback. Thank you, John Shepherd, for editing assistance and the photos of John Cochran’s son, James W. Cochran and his family; and Melissa Grandt for the photo of John Cochran’s daughter, Isabelle Cochran Wright. In addition, I’d like to thank Bryan Dunleavy who helped me make the connection between Alexander Dunleavy and John Cochran, neighbors both in Ireland and Iowa. An immense debt of gratitude goes to Paul Robert Orr for compiling a comprehensive document on the Love family history.

And to Betty Cordial for the Love family photos and copies of the letters of Anna Elizabeth “Lizzy” Karr (1874–1957) who recorded for posterity, the many wonderful Love family stories chronicled from their life in Coshocton, Ohio, and County Donegal, Ireland.

Finally I wish to thank genealogist Verda Baird, of Jefferson County, Iowa, who got me started in this endeavor. She opened the window of genealogical inquiry and provided a rich and abundant source of information on the Cochrans. Posthumously, I’d like to thank Joe Cochran and Helen Smith who both conducted serious inquiry into the John Cochran family and established the network of inquisitive and knowledgeable relatives I have acknowledged above.

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INTRODUCTION

The exaltation and delight at finding oneself again in the shining presence of inner family and in the realm of beauty from which one originated.³

Shortly after the death of my father (John Richard Cochran, 1910–2004), I was rummaging through a box of memorabilia from the coat closet at the Cochran farm in Fairfield, Iowa. I came across a yellowed handwritten note penned by George Cochran (1827–1901), my great-great-grandfather. He traces his mother Ann Love’s ancestry. On the reverse side are the names of Mrs. Ann Johnson of Galesburg, Illinois, and Mrs. George Rickey of Northfield, Ohio, cousins on his mother’s side. The context suggests he collaborated with them on the facts written in his note, which (with some abbreviations expanded) reads:

My grandfather James Love died November 18, 1843, aged 83. Grandmother Jane wife of James died December 5th, 1830, aged 59 years, 2months, 10 days. Aunt Fannie McKee died December 25th, 1842, aged 42 years. Grandfather James Love was of English parentage. His mother’s name was Kirskadden. Grandmother Jane Love was of English and Scotch parentage. Her mother and father’s names were McKee and were second cousins. Uncle John died March 13, 1892, aged 86 years, 4 months, 6 days.⁴

Dad had a great interest in his lineage and spoke often about his ancestors. I regret that we didn’t have an opportunity to discuss this note with him. It would have taken him back to his pre-Iowa ancestry.

Today, I’m resolved to start that discussion. That is the purpose of this book. I hope what I learn prepares me for what he will some day share with me. For as the apostle Paul wrote in the scripture read at my children’s weddings: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”⁵

The main challenge of genealogical research that goes back several generations is that it’s difficult to confirm facts. Sketchy information inevitably leads to conjecture. Recently I read a piece that relates to that thought:

Grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather…it makes your head spin…. It’s like a bottomless well. Does all this looking down make you dizzy? It does me. So let’s light a scrap of paper, and drop it down that well. It will fall slowly, deeper and deeper. And as it burns it will light up the sides of the well. Can you see it? It’s going down and down. Now it’s so far down it’s like a tiny star in the dark depths. It’s getting smaller and smaller…and now it is gone.

So, armed with this note from great-great-grandfather George Cochran, our “tiny star in the dark depths,” let’s try to discover our Cochran ancestral roots—a great source of fascination, meaning, and pride for my father.

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1        OUR SCOTTISH FOREFATHERS

For the last 300 years (1550–1850) the national history [of Scotland] has been almost exclusively ecclesiastical. The old feuds with England are gone; more bitter feuds are among our selves. Since Knox lifted up his voice at St. Andrew’s, there has been a constant struggle with popery, prelacy, and patronage. The religious struggles of our country were entirely about church government and church discipline and not about inner truths of our holy faith.⁷

Looking deep into the well of our family history at George Cochran’s yellowed note, a faint light glows toward our ancestral heritage before the Cochrans settled in America in 1826.

When George wrote in his ancestral notes about the Love-McKees’ Scottish origins, he was speaking from firsthand knowledge. From the ages of four to fourteen (from 1831 to 1841), George was a neighbor of his maternal grandparents, James and Jennie McKee Love, and his other Love aunts and uncles who also immigrated to Keene township, Ohio, from Ireland in 1819, 1826, and 1838. Living in such close proximity, he would have known his mother’s family quite well. In contrast, his father’s side of the family remained distant and relatively unknown in Ireland. So it’s logical that he would write only about the Loves and the McKees, those he knew best.

He learned from their stories that the Love-McKees were of English and Scotch lineage and that they had a subsequent period of residence in Ireland, which is where both John Cochran (in 1803) and Ann Love (in 1801) were born—in County Donegal, Ulster Province, Ireland. Scotland or England was the Love-McKees’ native home and County Donegal was where they migrated.

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Religious Persecution

According to the Love family oral history, the Loves and McKees (Ann Love Cochran’s immediate family) emigrated from Scotland to Ireland in 1780. Lucy Sprague Dyarman (granddaughter of Fannie Love McKee, Ann’s twin sister) wrote in a letter to Wilma Grace Compton (great-granddaughter of Eleanor Love, Ann’s oldest sister):

He [John Yankee Love, Ann’s younger brother] said the Loves and McKees both moved from Scotland when the Catholics drove the Protestants out, and they settled in Co. (Donegal), Ulster (Province), Ireland. Uncle John said they lived north of the place where the McKee family located.⁸

“Lizzy” Karr (granddaughter of Eleanor Love) writes in a letter to her cousin James Love Karr (Eleanor’s grandson):

In the later years of 1780, when the Catholics drove the Protestants out of Scotland, the Loves and McKees moved to Donegal (County), Ulster (Province), Ireland where James Samuel and Susan Kirskadden Love (our great, great grandparents) died and are buried.⁹

We have established the Love-McKee Protestant faith in the three countries of their migration (Scotland, Ireland, and America). In Scotland, the McKees have been identified as Scots Covenantors of the persecuted Presbyterian Church in Kirkundbright Shire, Scotland.¹⁰ In Ireland the Cochranes, Loves, and McKees are identified as Anglican, Church of Ireland (England), in the parishes of Kilcar and Glencolumbkille.¹¹ There were no Presbyterian Churches in this remote area of County Donegal. In Coshocton County, Ohio, the Loves are buried in either the Presbyterian or Methodist Cemeteries in Keene. The Cochrans were members of the Methodist Church (Glasgow) and the Methodist Episcopal Church (Fairfield) in Jefferson County, Iowa.

The conflict between the Catholics and Protestants in Scotland manifested in the Jacobite rising of 1745, when Catholic clansman of the Highlands descended upon the Lowlands in an effort to win supremacy for the Catholic faith over the Protestants.

The uprising was quelled with the help of Britain. Subsequently, the passage of the English Catholic Relief Bill gave greater powers to the Catholics of the United Kingdom and religious conflict emerged again in Scotland:

[George III] saw fanatical outbursts caused in Scotland by the English Catholic Relief Bill of 1777, when Edinburgh and Glasgow were the scenes of outrage and pillage worthy of the blackest days of the penal law.¹²

The Jacobite risings of the mid-1740s and the rebellion of 1777 made for a contentious religious and political environment in Scotland, motivating the Protestant Loves and McKees to leave their home country in 1780 and relocate to County Donegal, Ireland.

Ye Jacobites by name,
Your fautes I will proclaim,
Your doctrines I maun blame—
you shall hear!
—Robert Burns¹³

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The McKees of Glencolumbkille

The documented stories of four and five generations ago might shed some light onto why the family migrated to Malin More townland of Glencolumbkille parish in County Donegal.

George Cochran (1827–1901) recorded in his note, “Grandmother Jane Love was of English and Scotch parentage. Her mother and father’s names were McKee and they were second cousins.” Jane is further identified in another source as Jane “Jennie” McKee, daughter of Robert and “Fannie” McKee. Jennie McKee’s father is also listed as Thomas McKee.¹⁴

The historical records of Glencolumbkille from the period of 1770 to 1850 show a McKee family that could be linked to the Loves’ migration:

1. In landlord Thomas Conolly’s Glencolumbkille rent roll from November 1773, Thomas McKee is listed as the person in Malin More responsible for ensuring that the others in the townland paid their rents. The amount collected was 66 pounds. John Osborne, the maternal grandfather of John Osborne Love (husband of James and Jennie’s daughter Eleanor), had the same responsibility in the rent roll for Braade townland.¹⁵ Cross-referencing this information with the registers of Glencolumbkille Church of Ireland Parish (PRONI MIC/1/187),¹⁶ baptisms 1827–1984, marriages 1845–1954 and burials 1825–1875, the Thomas McKee in the Conolly rent rolls could possibly be the father (Robert “Thomas” McKee) of our Jane “Jennie” McKee (1771–1830), or an uncle.

2. The Conolly rent roll of 1784 (four years after the Loves settled in Malin More) again lists Thomas McKee as responsible for tenant rent (of 73 pounds) for Malin More and John Osborne for Braade townland in Glencolumbkille.¹⁷ My assumption this is the same Thomas McKee listed in the November 1773 rent rolls listed above.

3. In November 1830, the Conolly rent roll lists Thomas McKee as tenant rent collector for Malin More (139 pounds) and John Osborne for Upper Braade. Rents doubled in the 46-year period of the Loves’ tenure in Malin More.¹⁸ Again, cross-referencing this rent roll Thomas McKee with the Glencolumbkille Church of Ireland Parish register, this Thomas McKee (1780 –1862) represents a next generation and could possibly be either our Jane “Jennie” McKee’s brother or cousin, depending on her relationship with this Thomas McKee’s father.¹⁹

4. Thomas McKee appears in the Griffiths Valuation of 1856 in Malin More townland.²⁰ Again, this would be the same Thomas McKee (1780–1862) of the 1830 Conolly rent roll, possibly a brother to our Jane “Jennie” McKee or a cousin.

5. In the 1901 Census, Susan McKee is listed as head of household and widow of Robert—with son Thomas, 36; daughter Jane, 33; and son Robert, 27.²¹ This information, cross referenced the parish registry noted above would most likely be the widow of Robert McKee (b. February 20, 1831) and sonof Thomas McKee (1780–1862) of the 1856 Griffiths Valuation noted above. Her son Thomas McKee (1865–1908), listed in the 1901 census would be the fourth generation of McKee found in the church registry.²²

6. According to LuLu Chesnutt of Kilcar parish, descendants of the McKee household live in Malin More today. The Loves lived north of the McKee home.²³

As noted above, Thomas McKee shares a surname and dwells in the same townland as Jane “Jennie” McKee Love’s household. His tenancy precedes the Loves. Thomas McKee was a person of influence with the landlord; he acted as his agent, collecting rents on his behalf from fellow tenants. In that role he would have been able to recruit and place the Loves’ in tenancy in Malin More.

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The McKees of Scotland

A majority of the Scots who settled in County Donegal came from the Scottish Lowlands.²⁴ In 1610, Sir Patrick Mackee (McKee) of Laerg, Knt., Minnigaff, Wigonshire [noted in Robert Bell’s The Book of Ulster Surnames (1977) as Largs, Ayreshire],²⁵ Scotland received one thousand acres of County Donegal in Cargie Doorin and the eastern part of Inver parish (adjacent to Kilcar parish) from King James I as his part of the Plantation of Ulster.²⁶

Ann Love’s oldest brother Samuel emigrated to the United States in 1819; his destination was McKeesport, Pennsylvania, which was founded by David McKee, of Girthon in Kirkudbright. As a result of the Catholic persecution of the Protestant Scots, David McKee left Scotland for County Donegal in what became known as the The Killing Times of 1680–89.²⁷

David McKee came to America in 1750 with several brothers and settled first in Philadelphia. In 1755 he crossed the Allegheny Mountains into western Pennsylvania and settled in an area at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny Rivers near Pittsburgh that he named McKeesport.²⁸

Notice that the shires of Ayrshire and Kirkudbright, located at the furthest southern point of Scotland, are within 50 miles of Belfast. The parishes of Kilcar and Glencolumbkille are 150 miles west of Belfast. No surprise then that “the southwestern shire of Kirkudbright provided many of the immigrants to Ulster.”²⁹

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Our Scottish Dourness

I.
My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, O;
And carefully he bred me, in decency and order, O;
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne’er a farthing, O;
For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding, O. […]

V.
No help, no hope, nor view had I, nor person to befriend me, O;
So I must toll, and sweat, and broil, and labour to sustain me, O;
To plough and sow, to reap and mow, my father bred me early, O;
For one, he said, to labour bred, was a match for fortune fairly, O.³⁰

This excerpt from Robert Burns’s song “My Father Was a Farmer” offers some insight into the economic conditions for our farming ancestors in the Lowlands of Scotland. It was “dark and drublie” with “poor and barren soil ill-suited to agriculture; primitive methods; constant raw weather, which at any time might result in crop failure and famine; recurrence of plagues.”³¹ Yet they persevered, showed patience, and through migration sought a better place and a better time. Out of their aspirant view despite dire conditions, a characteristic evolved among our Scotch farmer ancestry that might be the true treasure of our inheritance: dourness.

Men who survive centuries of living in a hard environment, both physical and social, learn how to endure the worst that life can send them. The Scot knew famine and plague, thin soil, insecurity of life and property, raids, and aggression. He learned to fight back, to give blow for blow, and then, when he had done his best, to endure.³²

Farming for the common man of Scotland meant leasing a small plot of land either as a kindly tenant, who had the privilege of renting the same piece of ground at each periodic renewal, or as a joint tenant, who shared leased land with several other tenants and was subject to being moved from time to time, which meant improvements were an unsound investment. Subtenants, sometimes known as cotters, were hired by kindly tenants or joint tenants to help with the work.³³

Over time, single farms under the management of one owner became the norm as holdings were consolidated. For instance, in 1700 there were 9,500 landowners in Scotland. This number dropped to 8,000 by the end of the nineteenth century.³⁴ By 1830, most of those who toiled in Lowland agriculture were crofters, landless men, and women servants. Many Lowlanders had either migrated elsewhere or moved into towns. In 1750, one in seven Scots lived in a town with a population greater than 4,000; by the 1820s, that ratio had shifted to one in three.³⁵

At the same time, linen weaving—Scotland’s largest manufacturing industry and the biggest industrial employer in the eighteenth century—was becoming industrialized. “Few societies, if any, in Europe could equal the speed and scale of the Scottish transformation in the eighteenth century. In other words, the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ can still be considered to have profound and legitimate resonance in a Scottish context.”³⁶ The cottage-based tenant farmer equipped with a spinning wheel and loom was losing ground in many ways.³⁷

In addition to religious persecution, this adverse financial trend in tenant farming is a likely secondary cause for the Love-McKees to migrate to Ireland in 1780. In Ireland, land was being leased on longer terms with options for renewal, allowing farmers to benefit from any improvements they made and providing a greater sense of a secure future. This would have been an attractive option—especially if Thomas McKee, a relative, could set them up in a nice plot of land in the most fertile area of Glencolumbkille, Malin More townland.

However, neither Ireland nor Scotland would ever measure up to the opportunity that presented itself to the Loves in 1826: owning 80 acres of rich, arable land in America’s breadbasket, the Midwest. The move to Ireland was just an intermediate step to improving their financial well-being. The real opportunity came forty-five years later and four thousand miles away.

Why would they wait so long? First, farming opportunities in America’s Midwest were not open until the period of 1820–55. Second, cautious citizens rarely became pioneers, and these conservative folk likely would not approve of a large exodus from community. The Loves were moving from a community in Scotland to another in Ireland. The McKee branch of the family were probably the link to that transition, just as they would be in the Loves’ move to America.

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The Cochrans of Scotland

As for John Cochran’s pre-Ireland origin, according to his obituary published in January 1876: “He was born in County Donegal, Ireland, April 2nd, 1803, of Scotch and English parentage.” This suggests his native roots were from Scotland and that his family, like his wife Ann Love’s family, relocated to Ireland, where subsequently each of them was born. There is a clear message in John Cochran’s obituary that, though he was born in Ireland, he was of Scottish descent. This feeling was typical of the Scots-Irish, who regarded themselves as Scottish people living in Ireland. For these Scots, the “Irish” part of the descriptor was a place designation only, not a nationality. To the native Irish they were known as Ulster-Scots and as interlopers.

Our Cochran Scottish roots were reinforced for me several generations later during visits to my Cochran grandparents as a youngster. I would listen to a strange pronunciation of our last name, Co-horn with a long “o,” and be told it was a Scottish pronunciation. As my sister Jo Cochran Johnson recently put it, “Growing up, it was always our understanding that the Cochrans were Scotch and living in Ireland, or that’s how they saw themselves.”³⁸

Our Cochran grandparents made one thing perfectly clear to us: we were not Irish Catholic. Embracing the Co-horn pronunciation may have been a way to differentiate themselves from the Irish Catholic surname Cochrane. The scars from the conflict between Catholics and Protestants experienced by our ancestors in Scotland and then again in Ireland took several generations in America to heal.

The earliest Scottish Cochran migratory door to Ireland was opened in 1607 when the English King James I (aka James VI of Scotland) drove the rebellious Irish clan leaders (in the so-called Flight of the Earls) from Ireland and gave rights to their land to English and Scottish servitors (royal officials) known as Undertakers of the Ulster Plantation. They, in turn, recruited our English and Scottish ancestors and leased them small tracts of land. Our Cochran ancestors probably relocated late in the migration period and would have been influenced by pioneers from their Scottish homeland who provided a migratory link or chain—i.e., a friend, neighbor or relative who provided a contact in Ireland and whose familiarity with this new land cleared a friendly path for our subsequent migration.

Fareweel to a’ our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory;
Fareweel ev’n to the Scottish name,
Sae fam’d in martial story.
— Robert Burns ³⁹

Interestingly, it took well over a century (from 1700 to 1835) for the population of Europe as a whole to double; whereas it took only fifty years (from 1750 to 1800) for Ireland’s population to double.⁴⁰

The Scots in the later eighteenth century, even more than those in the seventeenth century, were drawn to Ireland by commerce and opportunities. The push toward emigration in Scotland was religious tyranny, while the pull of immigration into Ireland was economic opportunity.⁴¹ In Ireland, the Scots were introduced to the potato, a healthy staple for their diet; the more advanced farming methods of the English; and the skills to drain bogs and swamps, which made it possible to settle in the plains rather than farming only the hillsides.⁴² These innovations and opportunities advanced their livelihoods when coupled with their Scotch-Irish ambition, strong work ethic, and basic dourness. This same theme plays out in John Cochran’s eventful life.

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2        OUR IRISH ROOTS

The James and Jane “Jennie” McKee Love family settled in County Donegal, Ireland, in Malin More townland, Glencolumbkille parish, which was a neighbor to the Kilcar parish of the John Cochrane household in Largymore townland (both places are highlighted in the bottom left corner of the map at right). It was in these households, just fifteen miles apart, that Ann Love in 1801 and John Cochran in 1803 were born. In spite of being raised in different parishes, the distance between them was considered within a “marriage field,” meaning a reasonable proximity from the parental home in which to
make a new home in the community.

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Glencolumbkille

In his history of the Glencolumbkille parish, Conall Mac Cuinneagain offers a succinct and evocative description of the area.

[Glencolumbkille parish] is situated in the southwest of Co. Donegal, lying at the extreme end of the Slieve League peninsula. It is part of the Barony of Banagh…. The parish is probably the most remote in the county, and indeed one of the most remote in Ireland…. It has clear-cut geographical boundaries. On the north, west, and south there is the [Atlantic Ocean] and on the east is the Glen River…. [The parish] extends for about ten miles from north to south and somewhat less from east to west. Its area is 32,238 acres, a little more than 50 square miles.

Most of the parish is upland with the Slieve League being the highest point at 1,972 feet. It is also the most spectacular elevation, rising as it does sheer from the ocean…. The southernmost valley is that of Malin More with abundant archaeological remains, mainly prehistoric. The Malin More headland, terminating in Rossan Point, the most westerly point in the parish, has a southern aspect and is the most fertile part of the parish.

There were 210 families (about 1,200 persons) in the Church of Ireland parish census of 1776, to 4,356 persons in the census of 1841. This growth was primarily mediated by the extensive cultivation of the potato which provided more nutrition per acre, albeit of relatively poor quality than any earlier crop…. The hard underlying rock, laid down more than a half billion years ago and so deficient in the minerals necessary for agriculture, has shaped the landscape, giving us the magnificent scenery and at the same time making it extremely difficult for the inhabitants to wrest a living from the soil…. [Glencolumbkille] has given us some wonderful coastal scenery and access to fishing grounds which were once the most fruitful in the world. Another legacy is a cold, wet and windy climate which often inhibited the ripening of grain crops in the past and in some years made it impossible to save turf and caused, or contributed to, food scarcity and famine so common in recent centuries.⁴⁴

It was in this context of this beautiful, yet meager, environment in the most remote part of Ireland that the McKee family lived as tenant farmers.

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Tenant Farmers

According to the Ordnance Memoirs of 1835–36, written when the Loves and McKees were living in Glencolumbkille, farming was a family affair in which the men:

put down the crops in rotation as follows: potatoes, barley, oats or flax, potatoes. The harvest of these crops fed the family and livestock. The food of the inhabitants was potatoes and fish, not much oatmeal. Milk and butter pretty plenty, fuel invariably turf or peat. The breed of horses small but hardy, and well fitted to the soil; black cattle and sheep numerous but of a small breed; pigs increasing fast. Few ploughs, mostly use of spade. The flax crop supported the yarn production of the household, a popular cottage-based business of the family. This was the responsibility of the woman of the house. This production along with the butter and young cattle paid the rent. Children are generally employed taking care of the cattle.⁴⁵

Put quite simply, the tenant farmer’s goal was to feed the family from crops in the field and pay the rent from the sale of yarn, flannel, milk, cheese and calves. With frequent crop failure brought on by infertile land and intemperate weather, it was essential to have a reserve—not only to pay the rent, but also to feed the family during famine. It was not an easy job, especially with successive years of famine from1817 to 1819, and then again in 1822.

Consider Robert Burns’s evocative description of the tenant farmer experience in his 1785 poem “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.”

November chill blaws loud wi angry sugh;
The short’ning winter-day is near a close;
The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh;
The black’ning o’ craws to their repose:
The toil-worn Cotter frae his labor goes, –
This night his weekly moil is at an end,
Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o’er the moor, his course does hameward bend.

At length his lonely cot appears in view,
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
Th’ expectant wee-things, toddling, stacher through
To meet their dad, wi’ flichterin noise and glee.
His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie,
His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie’s smile,
The lisping infant, prattling on his knee,
Does a’ his weary kiaugh and care beguile,
And makes him quite forget his labour and his toil.⁴⁶

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Flax and Linen

Growing flax supported a thriving cottage industry of linen production:

At the end of the eighteenth century, most of the flax absorbed by the Irish linen industry was grown on small plots, rarely in quantities greater than the spinning capacity of the individual household. In addition to the spinning of the yarn, women were responsible for much of the labor involved in cultivating, harvesting, and preparing the flax crop. The yarn was bought up by jobbers at fairs and markets, who then carried it to weaving districts for sale to petty manufacturers and independent weavers.⁴⁷

There were no fairs or markets in Glencolumbkille parish. One of the fairs used for the Love family’s linen trade was the Charles (aka the Mount Charles), according to Jane Love, the daughter of Eleanor and John O. Love, who came to Coshocton from Glencolumbkille with her parents and family when she was twelve years old.⁴⁸

The John Yankee Love household in Coshocton, Ohio, had a spinning wheel in their household. It’s likely the wheel was a remnant of their days in Ireland.

John [Yankee Love] and Mary [McConnell Love] lived in a home on the south portion of the farm [in Keene, OH]. I remember so many things about this home and of the things that happened when I was there. …the old spinning wheel in the parlor with its flax on the spindle ready to spin.⁴⁹

Flax growing and the spinning of yarn for the manufacture of linen or wool was quite pervasive in our Donegal families. In 1796, the government encouraged linen manufacturing in Ireland and offered a free spinning wheel for each acre or more of flax grown. John Cochrane of Kilcar, the head of the household we attribute to our John Cochran’s family, was one of the applicants rewarded with a government-provided spinning wheel.⁵⁰

This being said, it must be noted that sheep wool is the predominant source of yarn in the Kilcar-Glencolumbkille parishes today and might have been also in our ancestors’ days. This observation is made in the 1835–36 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland for the Parish of Killymard:

In the parishes of Gen and Kilcar, west of this county, the inhabitants purchase in Connaught yearling wethers of a large size and fine wool and after keeping them on one or two years, they repurchase in some cases by the original seller, frequently at the first cost, and taken back to Connaught, the Glen men considering themselves tolerably remunerated for their grazing by the fine wool they produce, which affords employment to the females in the manufacture of flannel and stockings. ⁵¹

If that is the case, our Love and Cochrane families were in the minority in their raising and spinning of flax, very likely a carry-over from their Scottish heritage.

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Ordnance Survey of 1835–36

The Ordnance Survey’s author, John Ewing III, recorded some striking details of Glencolumbkille:

…coast, very bold, rugged and precipitous…not one tree in the parish. The roads horribly bad: not a perch of good road in the parish. At present a wheel car with half load could not enter the parish on any side whatever. People from the interior cannot come in here for yarn, flannel, butter or fish. The latter is most abundant on the coasts but the natives have no encouragement to take them. Strangers can’t drive them off by land and there is no safe landing place for boats except at Teeling, which is the eastern boundary of the parish. The first step is to be taken for improvement of this parish is to make roads into it.⁵²

The Conollys, Glencolumbkille landlords for over 150 years (1706–1868), were absentee owners and disinclined to make necessary investments. The result was isolation for the parish from the general commerce of the county. On the other hand, there were advantages to absentee landlords—and the Conollys were absentees par excellence.

[There was a certain] contentedness when the tenants never saw their landlords, rather than having frequent visits from them and having them issue a continual stream of rules and regulations the breaking of which would have dire consequences. This is a view that appears to have been shared by tenants of [Glencolumbkille], who preferred the benign neglect of the [Conollys] to continual interference, however well intentioned.⁵³

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Glencolumbkille’s Spiritual Heritage

During the Love and McKee families’ residence in Glencolumbkille, the Catholic influence was strong, in spite of the English and Anglican attempts at repression. Two-thirds of the population in Glencolumbkille was Catholic, even though the Church of Ireland commandeered their church, St. Columba, and used it exclusively as their place of worship. The derivation of the name for both the parish and church came from the sixth-century Catholic saint Columb.

Much in the manner of his predecessor St. Patrick, Columb rid this furthest northwest point of County Donegal of its demons and evil spirits. Three distinct actions are chronicled from his purge.

By admonition of an angel, Columb with a numerous retinue of holy men stood with his companions on the banks of the Glen River, the river that separates Glencolumbkille and Kilcar parishes. A pole was thrown by a demon from the opposite bank that struck and killed Columb’s servant Cearc Kirke (today the location of Kirke’s grave). Taking up the pole, Columb cast it back in the direction it came from; and as far as it passed, the land was cleared from the demons. Where the pole stuck, it immediately took root and grew into a holly tree that was still present when the Love-McKees resided there nearly thirteen hundred years later.

Columb’s second feat was occasioned by the poisoning of the Glen River by demons. Columb blessed the river and it was purified.

Then, upon crossing the river, the angel handed a stone to Columb and directed him to throw it at the remaining demons. The evil spirits were driven to the craggy rocks that hung over the ocean. Instructed again by the angel, Columb aimed the same stone at them along with the bell he carried and commanded the demons in the name of Christ to precipitate into the ocean and no longer cause anyone harm. Since he could not through human power retrieve the stone or bell, he prayed to God for their restoration; and immediately he saw both fly on high through the air and fall near him; but the bell was driven too deeply into the earth, losing its tongue and causing a great hole. Both the stone and bell’s hole were shrines in the period of the Love-McKee residence in Glencolumbkille, as they are today.⁵⁴

How much were the Love-McKees influenced by this folklore? Being Scots of both fundamental and practical beliefs, you would guess they distanced themselves from this blarney. However, these holy monuments were within walking distance of their cottages and they would have passed them daily. There were the remains in Beefan townland of the ancient Columb Cille’s Chapel with a slab that is called Columb Cille’s Bed, a place St. Columb would bed down at night, laying stones over his eyes to put him to sleep. Worshippers would collect a sample of dirt from beneath the slab and take it home to prevent fires or provide a cure for headaches. Or there was Columb Cille’s Well, also in nearby Beefan townland. A drink from the well’s water was reputed to cure “all that ails you.” Or, if you had a sore throat, a sure-fire remedy was to simply raise your chin at the Garden of the Turus monument at Ballard townland. Barren women would pray for a child at the ancient cross pillar at Cloch na Suil near Farranmacbride townland and be assured good results. For a glimpse of heaven, you peered through the perforation in the upper panel of the symmetrical cross at the sacred Stone of Assembly monument and you would get your divine wish. Couples would formally pledge their engagement by touching their fingers through this same hole from opposite sides of the stone, a ceremony witnessed by an assembly of family and friends.

Did John and Ann bring their family and friends to this place when they decided to get married? They were married at St. Columba’s Church (Church of Ireland), just a short distance from the monument. Why not receive a divine blessing before your marriage? Many of these places are part of the Turas of St. Columb Cille, a religious procession that venerates fifteen sacred monuments or stations on a three-and-a-half mile path that starts at St. Columba Church, meanders up into the hills and down the valley of Glencolumbkille, and ends back at the church. It is a ritual that is still celebrated today, as it has been for many centuries. The procession begins just after midnight on June 9, the exact time in 597 AD when St. Columb Cille was said to have taken his last breath.

In his 1835 Ordnance Survey letters, John O’Donnell recorded a firsthand impression of the people of Glencolumbkille that might make one believe that although our ancestors were Anglican and Scottish, they may have been influenced by the area’s folklore and superstition. He writes of his visit:

What their forefathers thought, believed, said, and did, a thousand years ago, they think, believe, say, and do, at present…. [They] cling to the notions of their fathers with dignified independence. Social immobility seems to me the dominant trait in the character of these people who live in what may be called the brink of the world, far from the civilization of cities. The inhabitants of these glens and mountains are fair specimens of what the Irish were in times of yore. They have no idea of comfort; smoky cabins of the cottier; the wet potatoes that grow in holme or bog serves them food; and if they can procure buttermilk for kitchen (as they call it) it is deemed a luxury; every thing else (eggs, butter, pigs, sheep, etc.) is sold to make the rent or to buy tobacco. It is probable that their condition is worse now than in ancient Irish times before the introduction of peace and potato; for then they had little or no rent to pay except a few methers of butter in the year; and the population being small they were well able to live upon the little corn produced by the rich spots in the mountains and glens, and upon the milk and flesh of the cattle fed upon the mountains. Fish also was a great source of support. Their comfortless conditions and their awe of religion render them moral.⁵⁵

Distinguishing John’s character are the traits of moral and religious faithfulness. We can see the foundation of his faith in his Irish spiritual heritage and its depth in his adult life in America. Research adds detail to the general spiritual tenor ascribed to John’s place and time in Ireland. The earliest Church  of Ireland records show the burial of his parents, John and Isabella Cochrane, in 1826 and 1825, respectively, at St. Cartha churchyard in Kilcar—evidence of John’s religious upbringing in his formative years.56 In his adult years, John and his family were members of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Glasgow, Iowa. There, we find a record of John’s son George as the superintendent of the Sunday school and the source of a five hundred dollar personal donation to the building of a new church in 1874. John’s daughters Harriett, Henrietta, and Mary are listed as Sunday school teachers in this same period.⁵⁷ John’s obituary also attests to his faith, “A devout Christian, he found comfort in the blessed Redeemer.”⁵⁸ The evidence leads us to conclude that he was a man of faith from his humble beginnings forward.

Happy the nations of the moral north
Where all is virtuous and winter season
Sends sin without a rag shivering forth
T’was snow that brought St. Anthony to reason.
— Juvenal II ⁵⁹

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The Act of Union

We are reasonably confident that the Loves and the McKees settled in Glencolumbkille.

During the debate and passage of Ireland’s Act of Union with England in 1800, Thomas Conolly’s tenants in Glencolumbkille (Conolly was a representative to the House of Commons in London and he stood in support of the union) showed their solidarity with him by publishing their names in the Belfast Newsletter.⁶⁰ The names Samuel, James, and Patrick Love (father and sons) from Glencolumbkille appeared in the paper along with their neighbor Thomas McKee. Further evidence emerges in the oral history of the Love family, as noted in a letter from Lucy Ann Sprague to Wilma Compton dated February 8, 1932: “Uncle John [Yankee Love] said they lived north of the place where the McKee family located.”⁶¹

The McKees played an important role in Malin More and in the Love family. Remember that George Cochran’s notes indicate that his grandmother Jane “Jennie” Love’s grandparents were McKee second cousins. And recall also that Thomas McKee of Malin More was listed on the rent roll for the Conolly estate for the years 1774, 1784, and 1830, and then again in Griffiths Valuation, published in 1857.⁶²

Among the gravesites near St. Columba Church in Glencolumbkille are several Love relatives. Samuel Love, a stonemason and bridge builder, the father of our James and Patrick Love, has a prominent stone in the cemetery that was erected by Patrick Love.

Here lieth the body of Anne Crawford alas Love who departed this life July 5, 1799 aged 32 years. Also the body of Samuel Love who departed this life May 20, 1810 aged 82 years. This tomb erected by Patrick Love who departed this life and who was interred underneath this monument October 12, 1821 aged 45.⁶³

In that same cemetery can be found the gravesite of the grandparents of John Osborne Love, husband of Eleanor Love (who was the older sister of our Ann Love Cochran), inscribed with their names: Bess Osborne and John Osborne.

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The Cochran(e)s of Kilcar

There are strong indications about our Cochran(e) Irish roots, albeit, the metaphorical “lighted paper” reflecting that information “is very deep into the well.”⁶⁴

John Cochran’s obituary in the Fairfield Daily Ledger, published in Fairfield, Iowa, in 1876 states, he “came to America from County Donegal.”⁶⁵

John Cochran married Ann Love of Malin More, Glencolumbkille parish, County Donegal, which strongly suggests that the location of the John Cochran homestead was in southwest County Donegal. Kilcar parish and Glencolumbkille parish abut one another and are well within the “marriage field” of fifteen miles that was the traditional distance for potential marriage partners.

Chain migration, in which your neighbors in your homeland become your neighbors in a new land, was a strong influence. The Ordnance Survey of Kilcar parish in County Donegal states:

Parish register in Kilcar Parish, St. Matthews Church of Ireland, a Protestant church, Protestant families were very minority in the parish—in fact only families [located] in Derrylaghan, Roxborough, and Largymore townland…. The names of resident families are mostly of English or Scots origin —Chestnutt, Cochrane, Corscaddden, Crawford, Cunningham, Dunleavy, Gartley, Jameson, Love, Walker, Watson.⁶⁶

If you look at lists showing the early settlement of Round Prairie township, Jefferson County, Iowa, you come across similar names: Crawford, Cochran, Dunleavy, Love, McKee, and Walker. In 1841, John Cochran left Coshocton, Ohio, for Round Prairie township, quite possibly accompanied by Alexander Dunleavy, son of George Dunleavy of Kilcar parish (Roxborough Glebe townland). Within three days of arriving in Round Prairie, he bought land from Scott Walker, another familiar Kilcar surname. John sold 80 acres of that land to Alexander Dunleavy within two years and they were neighbors for the rest of their lives. James Patrick Love moved into Jefferson County and became a neighbor before moving to Albia, Iowa. He was the son of Samuel Love, the schoolteacher in Roxborough Glebe townland of Kilcar parish.⁶⁷

All of this evidence accumulates to suggest that Kilcar parish was the Irish home of John Cochran. In St. Matthew’s Church in Kilcar parish, the church register lists the burials of John Cochrane (April 19, 1826) and Isabella Cochrane (July 6, 1825)—dates that closely precede May 1826, the month our John Cochran left Ireland for America. The presumption is that they are our John Cochran’s parents. The next generation to farm the Cochrane homestead in Kilcar parish was James Cochrane (1776–1871), who was likely our John Cochran’s brother. The Ordnance Survey reference list of 1831 shows James as the tenant on the Cochrane homestead. The Cochrane farm then passed to James’s son, William (1841–1928). The current Cochrane owner is Hugh Thomas Cochrane Chesnutt, a descendant of William.

Hugh’s sister LuLu Chesnutt lives in a separate cottage on the historic Cochrane property.

Hugh and LuLu Chesnutt are my fourth cousins, once removed—or, possibly, third cousins, once removed (see Appendix C). In saying Hugh and LuLu Chesnutt are fourth cousins, once removed, we assume our John Cochran is a brother to James and accept a span of 27 years between the birth of siblings John (1803) and James (1776). Otherwise, to assume Hugh and LuLu Chesnutt are my third cousins once removed, our John Cochran (1803–76) would be the son of James Cochrane (1776 –1871). This is conceivable from a father-son age differential of 27 years, but would place sibling John Cochran (b. 1803) at an age differential of 38 years with William (b. 1841), the youngest of James’s children. Either way, we can place ourselves in the family of John Cochrane and James Cochrane and identify the place of our Irish Cochrane ancestors to be Lot #1, Largymore Townland, Kilcar parish, County Donegal, Ireland, as identified in the 1831 Ordnance Survey Map.

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Kilcar Parish

Kilcar parish, in the barony of Banagh, county of Donegal, was home to 4,319 inhabitants in 1835. Killybegs lies to the east, while Donegal Bay is to the south, Carrick sits immediately north, with Ardara farther north, and Glencolumbkille is to the west. The mountains make the road distances much farther than the distances as the crow flies. The parish is similar in area to a township in the state of Iowa. The parish includes some 45 townlands, including Largymore. Townlands are generally a square mile.

According to the Ordnance Survey of 1833–36:

Kilcar parish comprises 18,883 statute acres, about one-sixth of which are arable, the remainder bog and mountain land. Agriculture is in a very backward state, and there is not a single tree in the parish. Fairs are held quarterly for cattle, yarn, and flannel. The living is a rectory and vicarage, in the diocese of Raphoe, and in the patronage of the Bishop: the tithes amount to £125. The church is a small handsome building, erected in 1828. The parochial school, in which are about 100 children and there are three other schools and a dispensary.⁶⁸

More than fifty years after our John Cochran left for America, Henry Acland, an English physician and educator, visited County Donegal and wrote:

The place in which I’ve been living (Carrick) is a very wild spot on the North-west coast of the wildest part of Ireland. The inhabitants are of the pastures. The pigs, calves, and fowls for the most part live in the single room with the whole family, sometimes two families. There are no chimneys. Each smoke, that is each fire, typifying a family, pays the priest four shillings a year. They have potatoes and oats in a very rude way of culture. Perhaps a patch of oats giving twenty sheaves, each giving a stone of oats. Some few fish, some weave their homespun. Few women or children have shoes or stockings. Many of the girls are very beautiful. They are quick and intelligent, with great powers of conversation in the way of humour and repartee. A large portion can neither read nor write. The great feature is the cliff Slieve League on the edge of Fielen (Teelin) harbour. There are two great parishes, Glen and Kilcar.⁶⁹

Life in Kilcar and neighboring Glencolumbkille parish is described quite similarly: rudimentary subsistence farming with grain, livestock, yarn and flannel, butter and milk, potatoes. The inhabitants produced and lived on the staple farm products, supplemented by fish from Donegal Bay.

Knowing our Cochran(e) girls, it’s not surprising that they are descendants of Kilcar women Acland describes as “beautiful…quick and intelligent, with great powers of conversation in the way of humour and repartee.”

The Cochranes’ landlords were the Murrays, a wealthy family from southwest Scotland who held title to the land from 1730 to 1878. The last Murray owner was Horatio Granville Murray-Stewart (1835–78). The owner during our John Cochran’s residence was James Murray. Like the Conollys, the Murrays were absentee landlords. They hired agents to collect their rents and paid little attention to their holdings. Improvements to roads and charitable support during the periods of famine were negligible The infertility of the land and the inclement weather inhibited the cultivation of grain and potatoes; these two factors were the major causes of frequent famines in Ireland. Famines were the driving force behind the Irish migration to America, and the famines of 1817–19 and 1822 directly affected our John Cochran.

The road in the end taking the path the sun has taken, into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you as you stand where the ground turns to ocean: … abandon the shoes that brought you here right at water’s edge, not because you had given up, but because now, you would find a different way to tread, and because, through it all, part of you could still walk on, no matter how, over the waves.
–       David Whyte⁷⁰

John Cochran, with his wife Ann Love and their daughter Jane, left County Donegal in May 1826. They were accompanied by his father-in-law and mother-in-law, James and Jane “Jennie” McKee Love, and their children Fannie, John Yankee, Thomas, and Alice. The group sailed to America and continued traveling to reach their new home in Keene township, Coshocton County, Ohio.

Waiting for them in Keene township was Samuel, James and Jennie McKee Love’s eldest son, who preceded them to America in 1819. He settled in Keene township in 1822, purchased a farm, and wrote home to invite his family to join him. Apparently the invitation was tempting; they came en masse.

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Why They Emigrated

The basic way of explaining migration is still to say that it is the result from the tension between “push” and “pull” forces which are mainly economic: the attraction of another location only has meaning when compared with conditions at home.⁷¹

During the first two decades of the 1800s, conditions in County Donegal were ripe for emigration.

For those families, like ours, who were living off the land, famine hit hard between 1817 and 1819 and then again in 1822 as potato crop failures persisted. Outside assistance was minimal, so the people of Donegal were left to fend for themselves, tapping any financial reserve to find or purchase food for their hungry families.

The population boom in Ireland in the last half of the eighteenth century (the population grew from two million in 1750 to seven million in 1821) created crowding and increased competition for leased land. Primogeniture (i.e., the eldest son inheriting the father’s farming operation) played a role in pushing younger sons, among them our John Cochran, to seek places like America where they could more easily secure land to farm. According to one expert: “Irish emigration is best pictured not as an outcome of expulsion or selfishness, but as a collective accommodation to the chronic incapacity of the Irish society to provide for each new generation.”⁷²

With the end of the Napoleonic War in the early 1800s, Ireland lost the favored status of linen exports in the British Isles. This loss dramatically affected Donegal’s bustling cottage industry of yarn production, which was an important supplemental income for our families. As one historian summarizes:

The strong growth registered by the Irish economy in the second half of the 18th century and in the early years of the 19th came to an abrupt halt in the mid-1810’s. The deflationary fiscal policies of the post-Napoleonic War government [caused] the decline in the volume of linen and the value of agricultural goods exported in the late 1810’s. The crisis was most acute in the countryside, which was affected not only by the agricultural slump, but by a general economic downturn, for much of Ireland’s manufacturing was domestic based.⁷³

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3        DEPARTURE FOR AMERICA

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Samuel Love Emigrates

The pioneer emigrant from our Donegal Love-Cochran households was the eldest of James Love’s sons, Samuel. In 1819, with two other friends, he departed Queenstown (a seaport town on the south coast of County Cork that’s known today as Cobh) for New York, arriving at Pier 4 in New York City on July 4, 1819. It’s tempting to imagine the festiveness of that Independence Day in New York City contributing to Samuel’s excitement as he stepped onto the soil of America after his journey. Aunt Lizzy Karr, granddaughter of Ann Love’s oldest sister Eleanor, writes of Samuel’s arrival in a letter to James Love Karr dated February 1, 1942:

In 1819, James and Jennie Love let their son Samuel come to America with two other boys. The idea was that he was to find a suitable home and the other members of his family would follow (which they did in 1826 and then subsequently followed by Eleanor, the eldest daughter, with her husband John O. Love and family in 1838). The boys found an old ship in Queenstown, not insured but the boys got on because it was cheap. It was a freighter carrying grain. They had a very rough voyage. Landed at Pier No. 4, New York City at 2 o’clock P.M., July 4, 1819. The ship reloaded and started back but was never heard from again. … The boys went to Philadelphia, after staying there for awhile, they walked to Pittsburgh. Then on to McKeesport, where a family of McKees lived.⁷⁴

This incredible story of Samuel walking from New York City to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is mind-boggling considering today’s standards of transportation. There were established roads that went from Philadelphia to Lancaster (Lancaster Road) and then continued on to Pittsburgh (Forbes Road). Eventually, the roads became known collectively as the Pennsylvania Road or Turnpike. The conditions of the roads were poor; they were torn up by the era’s popular, and heavy, Conestoga wagons, making them impassable for horse-drawn carts or smaller wagons.

Wherever they were, or wherever they led, most of the common roads were so rough as to inhibit travelers who might want to use them. Small wonder, then, that some people chose to walk hundreds of miles to their destination rather than deal with the wear and tear that such roads inflicted on wagons and draft animals. The pedestrians would just take along the minimum needed to survive: a rifle or musket, a knife or hatchet, a knapsack, and a bedroll.⁷⁵

It would have taken Samuel a month to make the 320-mile trip by foot, and his course would have taken him through the Alleghany Mountains.

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McKeesport, Pennsylvania

The destination of Samuel’s long travels was McKeesport, home of the David McKee family. David McKee is legendary in the settlement of Western Pennsylvania, as recorded in this centennial piece celebrating his establishment of McKeesport, a strategic suburb in the development of Pittsburgh:

About the beginning of the eighteenth century David McKee, with his family, moved from Scotland (Girthon, Kirkudbright) to the Protestant settlement in the north of Ireland, settling near Londonderry. But persecution followed the Presbyterians and about the middle of the century he was forced to seek a new home. He came to America with several brothers. He settled near Philadelphia, but in the year 1755 he crossed the Allegheny Mountains and under the protection of the once-celebrated Queen of the Delawares (Alliquippa), he settled permanently in the wilderness he found at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers. There he built a log cabin and became the first white settler. In 1769 David McKee applied for and received a charter to operate a skiff ferry at the Forks of the Yough, known as McKee’s Ferry, which operated for a hundred years. A survey was made November 30th, 1782, on order #1103 for 306 acres, 143 perches and allowances for the above-mentioned David McKee, who died in 1795. John McKee, his son, on November 4, 1795, received the patent for this land, dated November 3, 1795, and listed as “McKees Port.” The new town was called McKeesport by the end of that same year and grew in both size and population for many years to come.⁷⁶

In a testament to the appeal of chain migration, Samuel Love settled in McKeesport and stayed for three years, working as a teacher. At the time of his residence, the town was comprised of “eighteen houses, one church and one small grist and sawmill. 22 families resided in the town, in addition to the McKees. Each resident kept a cow, raised hogs and sheep and usually had a flock of geese to look after.”⁷⁷

After three years of residence in McKeesport, Samuel discovered Coshocton County, Ohio, a place that was settled in 1810 and 1812 respectively by his distant relatives William Love (1784–1856) and Alexander Love (1782–1849), pioneer brothers who settled in Linton township in Coshocton County. Other families of probably (Love) relationship were reaching Coshocton County in the heavy immigration which followed the end of the War of 1812. …John (Yankee) Love, born in County Donegal came to America in 1826 and settled in Keene Township. John O. Love and Thomas Love, both relatives of Alexander, were born in Malin More Parish, on the northern shore of Donegal Bay, and John Love married Eleanor Love of the same parish. All three came to Coshocton County. They and the McKees, two of whom married Loves, were believed related to Alexander and William.⁷⁸

Samuel settled in Coshocton County in 1822, first as a farmhand and then as an owner of his own farm in Keene township. In 1826, he wrote his family back in Malin More and invited them to join him.

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The Love Family Emigrates

With this important link in America, and the fares of transcontinental ship passage dropping to more reasonable levels in 1826 (the repeal of the Passenger Vessel Act of 1803 caused fares to drop from £10 to £4, the equivalent of a tenant farmer’s wage for a year), the Loves and John Cochran family in Donegal responded favorably. We can’t underestimate the importance of Samuel Love having a place waiting for them in America in helping them make the decision to leave Ireland.

The most important resource was having a link to relatives or friends already there, able and willing to help them—by directing them to the areas where their precursors had gone and where there were still good opportunities.⁷⁹

Once the family made the decision to leave for America, the first order of business was to liquidate their farm in Ireland. One important asset was the land lease, which was called the Ulster Custom. This was the departing tenant’s right to dispose of his saleable interest in his tenancy to the highest bidder, subject to the landlord’s approval, including the value of any improvements he carried out, which in the case of the Conollys was next to nothing.⁸⁰ The Ulster Custom could have been a tidy sum because Malin More parish was quite fertile land.

The Ulster custom prevails [in Kilcar and Glencolumbkille parishes] to the full. Yesterday a tenant sold his farm of 5 acres by auction, and obtained forty years purchase of the regular rental. I gather from conversation with several that their idea is that their farms are truly their own, and their landlord’s relation to them is a sort of just-tolerated eccentricity.⁸¹

According to the Love family oral history, Ann Love Cochran’s younger brother, John Yankee Love, helped liquidate the livestock. This is the story, as told by Lizzy Karr in her February 1942 letter to John Love Karr:

It seems [James Love] had cattle and other things to sell. Uncle John [Yankee] and his father took them to Miller where our McKees lived, to make the sale. They had to have a Bible. After searching around they found a Protestant family who had a Bible and sold their belongings. Uncle John was 20 years old and was thrilled about coming to America. He told everyone. This lady (her name was McKee) told him her son was in America and she would like for Uncle John to give him a message. She told him many things to tell her boy Andrew. John Yankee explained America was a big place and it was very unlikely he would ever see her son. She responded, “You’ll see him, I know you will.” Uncle John did find her boy, Andrew McKee, who married John Yankee’s sister Fanny, who became Lucy Sprague’s grandmother.⁸²

I find a couple of things intriguing in this story. First, that “the swearing on the Bible” affirmed to the buyer that the Loves owned the cattle they were selling. Obviously there was no title of ownership or branding. The oath alone proved the Loves’ ownership and spoke volumes about the strong religious convictions of the time. Second, that John did indeed meet Andrew McKee. Lizzy Karr continues in her letter, “Sam Crawford told me one time, most all in their community [in Coshocton County, Ohio,] were neighbors or close friends in Ireland.”⁸³ The Andrew McKee story proves the truth of that claim.

During a recent visit to the Love family homestead in Malin More townland (see Appendix A), I was told that the Love family farming operation extended to corn milling, a corn kiln as well as a school. These would have been additional assets to liquidate before they departed for America.

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The John Cochran Family Emigrates

I’m not sure what preparations John Cochran made to leave Ireland in May 1826. Both his parents passed away in a relatively short period of time, his father as recently as April 1826. John doesn’t appear in the parish registry, so we don’t think he lived in Kilcar parish at the time of his departure. He might have been farming with the Love-McKees in Glencolumbkille. Unfortunately, the parish records there are missing. We know that he, Ann, their one-year-old daughter Jane, and the Loves (James, Jennie, Fannie, John Yankee, Thomas, and Alice) left for America in May 1826 and ended up on the doorstep of Samuel Love in Keene township, Coshocton County, Ohio. The Ohio and Erie Canal was not finished yet, so their route was by land. Combined with the transatlantic voyage, it would have been a long, hard journey.

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4        SETTLING IN OHIO

The Scots-Irish were very fit for the tasks of pioneers. They were a strong, tough and hardy breed. They did not shrink from the heavy labor of leveling the forest, building their log cabins and tilling the soil, or from hardships and deprivations of the frontier. …they were practical, level-headed, fearless, self-reliant and resolute.⁸⁵

In 1783, as a result of the colonists’ victory in the Revolutionary War, all territories south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi River were ceded by England to America. Under the Land Ordinance of 1785, Congress designated the western interior of this area as the Northwest Territories. Over the next seventy-five years, six states were formed within the boundaries of the Northwest Territories: Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Wisconsin (1848), and Minnesota (1858).⁸⁶

Our John Cochran, originally of County Donegal, was born in the same year Ohio was established as a state, 1803. Its boundaries were Indiana in the west, Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the east, Lake Erie and Lake Michigan of the Great Lakes in the north, and the Ohio River in the south. When Ohio was granted statehood, approximately six thousand Indians lived within its boundaries. Through a series of Indian treaties, beginning with the Iroquois Tribe (Six Nations) in October 1784 and ending October 6, 1818, with the Miamis Tribe, the land of the State of Ohio was ceded by the Indian population for white settlement. The Delaware Tribe, under one of their hostile chiefs, Hopocan, “Captain Pipe,” ceded Coshocton County in the Muskingum River basin in 1785. He was at odds with the friendly Delaware chiefs Kilbuck and White Eyes, who were long-time supporters of the colonist cause. Hostilities continued into the early 1800s, as Indians and settlers alike ignored the treaties’ stipulations. The vast and abundant lands of the Northwest Territories served incompatible purposes for each group. For the Indian, it was their sacred hunting grounds. For the pioneer, its highest and best purpose was farming. Our Scots-Irish pioneers were relentless in their desire to possess and cultivate the fertile frontier land against the will of the Indians who resolutely, but futilely, defended their native lands. Eventually the ongoing hostilities brought the brutal arms of federal and state militias, who cleared the path for white settlement—and by extension, ushered in extraordinary changes to the landscape and economy of the region.

The verdant hills are covered o’er
With growing grain,
And white men till the soil
Where once the red man reigned.⁸⁷

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The Muskingum Valley

So in 1822, just twenty years after Ohio achieved statehood, Ann Love Cochran’s oldest brother Samuel settled in Coshocton County, Ohio. Then, in 1826, he persuaded his family to join him from County Donegal, Ireland, including his sister Ann (Love) Cochran and brother-in-law John Cochran with their one-year-old daughter Jane. They arrived in May 1826 and their transcontinental route would have been by wagon, horse, or foot (as Samuel’s had been in 1819).

Arriving in Ohio, John Cochran must have been happy with what he saw. One nineteenth-century source observes:

Looking upon the surface of this State, we find no mountains, no barren sand, no marshy wastes, no lava-covered plains, but one broad, compact body of arable land, intersected with rivers and streams and running waters, while the beautiful Ohio [River] flows tranquilly by its side.⁸⁸

In 1770, George Washington explored the Muskingum Valley and made extensive land claims in the vicinity, approximately thirty thousand acres in the Kanawha and Ohio River area. He spoke of the region in glowing terms:

No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum River [which flows through what became Coshocton County]. Information, prosperity and strength will be its characteristics. …If he were a young man, he knows of no other place in which he would sooner settle than in the Western region.⁸⁹

In 1826, at age 23, John Cochran was just such a young man who had picked the right place in America to match his skills and extraordinary ambition.

Coshocton County is located in the center of a triangle formed by the cities of Cleveland and Columbus in Ohio and Wheeling in West Virginia. The town of Coshocton sits in a valley roughly in the center of the county. The beauty of the undulating terrain marked by river valleys and forested hillsides was both a unique agricultural opportunity and an interesting contrast for the immigrant Love-Cochran farming families:

The topographical features of Coshocton County are so developed by hill and valley as to afford pleasing variance in agricultural products. … By the junction of the Walhoning and Tuscarawas Rivers, three broad and beautiful valleys are formed, radiating in different directions from the county seat [the town of Coshocton]. The valleys of Mills Creek and the Killbuck are scarcely less marked, and these five, together with many others, of greater or lesser scope, threading the country in all directions, present an abundance of rich, sandy, fertile bottom lands, well adapted to growing corn, wheat, potatoes, and kindred crops. The rolling or hill lands are more adapted to growing wheat and grass…and the growing of sheep. Water is abundant throughout the county.⁹⁰

A more detailed breakdown of farming opportunities in the late nineteenth century shows that 166,299 acres of the county were arable, 89,438 acres were meadows or pasture, and 90,582 acres remained uncultivated or wild lands.⁹¹

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Ohio Canal

It wasn’t until shortly after our family’s arrival in the early 1830s that the area began to grow and prosper. This came with the development of the Ohio Canal (an extension of the Erie Canal) that traversed within a few miles of the Love family home in Keene township, stopping in the towns of Canal Lewisville and Roscoe as it worked it way from Lake Erie in Cleveland to Portsmouth on the Ohio River.

Immediately after the Ohio Canal was completed in 1832, the value of wheat jumped from $0.25 per bushel to $1.00 per bushel. The free flow of freight through the canal created viable markets for crops from this agriculturally rich area. Between 1830 and 1840, the population of Coshocton County nearly doubled, increasing from 11,162 to 21,590. And, for the most part, the newcomers were not the traditional immigrants from Virginia and Maryland. Instead, they hailed from New York, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, Germany, and Ireland. John Osborne Love, his wife Eleanor (older sister of Ann Love Cochran) and their family of six (soon to be seven) chose the canal route when they joined the Love family in Ohio after emigrating from Ireland in 1838.⁹²

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The Eleanor Love Family

Lizzy Karr relates a story about the John Osborne Love family’s trip in a letter to Harry Robert Karr Jr.:

Uncle John [Yankee] and his father our great grandfather [James Love] built a cabin up in their orchard and wrote for our grandfather [John Osborne Love] and grandmother [Eleanor Love] to come, they did July 1838 to New York on the ocean, then the Erie Canal, Ohio Canal to Roscoe, then to Uncle John’s. My mother [Susannah Love, daughter of John O. and Eleanor Love] was born August 24, 1838, six weeks after they arrived [and] after they moved into the cabin with five children, Jane, Ann, James, Tom, and Susan.⁹³

John O. (1795–1881) and Eleanor Love (1798–1881) lived in that cabin for their remaining 43 years.⁹⁴ They died eleven days apart: Eleanor on November 24 and John on December 5, 1881. They are buried in the Keene Methodist cemetery.⁹⁵ (See Appendix D.)

The Cochran Family Tree
John Osborne and Eleanor Love
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The Ann Love Family

When John and Ann Love Cochran came to America in 1826 with Ann’s family, they initially settled in Jefferson County, Ohio, which is adjacent to Coshocton County. There they expanded their family, adding two sons: George, born in 1827, and James, born in 1829. John soon gained his citizenship, being naturalized in Steubenville, Ohio, on November 26, 1831. According to the obituary of their son George, the Cochran family moved to Coshocton County in 1831, shortly after John became a United States citizen (see Appendix D).

Although James and Samuel Love are listed as residents of Coshocton County in the 1830 census, John Cochran doesn’t appear in a census until 1840, when he is listed as a neighbor of the Loves in Keene township. In the 1830 U.S. Census, John appears as “Jno Crughrin” in Cross Creek township, Jefferson County, and his profession is unknown. The next evidence of his residency in Coshocton is a document recording that he purchased 80 acres of land from William Adams on August 16, 1832 (see Appendix D).

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The James Love Family

The elders of the Love family, James (1760–1843) and Jane “Jenny” McKee Love (1771–1830), spent the remainder of their lives on the farm that was homesteaded by their eldest son, Samuel (1796–1872). Jenny died four years after their arrival from Ireland, while James lived for another thirteen years. They are both buried in the Presbyterian Church cemetery in Keene township (see Appendix D).

The Cochran Family Tree
James and Jane “Jenny” McKee
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The Samuel Love Family

Samuel Love was engaged in milling and distillery businesses while in Coshocton. Samuel married Deborah Mitchell, a native of Maryland, in December 1839. In 1852, they left Coshocton County for Sidney township, Champaign County, Illinois, where he prospered as a farmer during his remaining years. They had six sons and a daughter: Philander (1841–70), John Mitchell (1843–1910), James McKee (1845–1927), Joseph Kirk (1847–98), Elizabeth (1849–98), and Samuel Sharon (1851–1934).⁹⁶ All the members of this family remained in Illinois for the duration of their lives.

It’s interesting to note that their son James McKee Love returned with his daughter Myra Anna Gabbert to Pier 4 in New York City at 2:00 p.m. on July 4, 1919, to celebrate the hundred-year anniversary of Samuel’s arrival in America from Ireland. This same James McKee also traveled to Ireland with his cousin Maro J. Love (son of Thomas M. Love) in 1923, where they visited the Love homestead in Malin More townland, Glencolumbkille parish, County Donegal.⁹⁷

The Cochran Family Tree
Samuel and Deborah Mitchell Love
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The John Yankee Love Family

When Samuel left for Champaign County, Illinois, he passed the ownership of his Coshocton County farm to his younger brother, John Yankee Love (1806–92). John Yankee married Jane Mary “Jin-Mary” McConnell on January 25, 1838. Jin-Mary was the daughter of John McConnell and Sarah Rodgers McConnell, who came to America in 1834 from Ireland with their eight children and settled three miles west of Keene. John Yankee and Jin-Mary had eight children: Sarah Jane (1838–1914), James (1840–51), Mary Ann (1842–67), Catherine (1842–68), Samuel (1846–99), Eleanor “Ellen” F. (1849–78), Emma Florence (1854–1910), John M. (1857–1907), and Miranda (1859–1907). Also living with the family were John Yankee’s parents and his maiden sister Allie. He took care of his parents for the remaining years of their lives.⁹⁸

The John Yankee Love family established a family cemetery in Ohio on a hill in their orchard. James [and] Jane “Jennie” McKee Love, and their daughter Fannie (Love) McKee were buried there. Before John Yankee died he asked all the families in the neighborhood who had used the cemetery plot to bury family members to remove their remains to cemeteries then established in Keene. James and Jennie Love and Fannie (Love) McKee were moved to the Presbyterian Cemetery in Keene.⁹⁹

The Cochran Family Tree
John Yankee and Jane Mary McConnell Love
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

Mikki Crawford provides an illuminating glimpse of the John Yankee household in the McConnell family history:

Some of my earliest memories are of times I spent at the old Love home. There were no children then in the [John Yankee] Love family and they used to beg my parents to let me go down and spend time with them. Samuel, Emma, and Miranda (their adult children) were living in the old home. John and Mary (and perhaps “Allie”) lived in a home on the south portion of the farm…. I remember so many things about his home and of the things that happened when I was there. I remember of how they carried water from the spring house, how the wash-water was heated in a big kettle that swung from a crane over the big fireplace in the basement, of the fireplace in the living room and the big cupboard to the right of it (where they kept taffy they made for me), of the old spinning wheel in the parlor with its flax on the spindle ready to spin, of the sundial in the front yard, and so many other things that come back to me.¹⁰⁰

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The Fannie Love McKee Family

Ann Love Cochran’s twin sister was Fannie Love McKee, who married Andrew McKee on December 5, 1837. Together they had three children: Samuel (1838– 1902), Elizabeth “Lizzie” (1840–71), and James “Sonny” (1842–53). Before her death on the same day she gave birth to Sonny, Fannie asked Eleanor Love, her older sister, if she would take her baby and raise him, which she did. Samuel and Lizzie, four and two years old at the time, were taken in and raised by Andrew’s sister Eleanor McKee Sprague.¹⁰¹

The Cochran Family Tree
Andrew and Fanny Love McKee
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The Thomas M. Love Family

James Love’s eldest son Samuel was in the whiskey distillery business. When he left for Champaign County, Illinois, in 1852, that business was taken over by his younger brother Thomas M. Love (1810–73). Tom married Miranda Jones and they had eight children: Robert Hay (1846–1902), Maro Johnson (1848–1926), Josephine A. (1850–1907), Lenora “Laura” J. (1852–1934), Paul J. (1853–1912), Eveline R. (1855–?), Julia E. (1857–1925), and Melbourn Thomas (1860– 1937).¹⁰²

The distillery business was quite active in Coshocton County until the Civil War. Samuel, and subsequently his brother, Tom managed a significant enterprise. According to one contemporary account:

Next to water, the drink of the pioneers was whiskey – copper-still rye whiskey. Everybody drank it. It was supposed to be indispensable to health, to strength and endurance, and to sleep at night…. Stills for its manufacture sprang up everywhere, all along the streams. Pioneers soon found a market at these stills for their corn, hence corn became the great crop and whiskey the great article of commerce. It was the only thing that would buy money and money was a must to pay taxes. The whiskey not consumed was shipped in flatbeds on the Muskingum, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans and sold for Spanish gold.¹⁰³

The Cochran Family Tree
Thomas M. and Miranda J. Jones Love
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

The Love family distillery was eventually known as Thomas Love & Company, Distillery. It was located at the intersection of Main and Second Streets in Coshocton. According to historian Norman Hill, the Love distillery was one of the leading industries of the county seat. The business dissolved in the mid-1860s and Thomas died tragically in 1873 at age 64 after he was thrown from a wagon near his home and broke his collar-bone and three ribs.¹⁰⁴

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Alice “Allie” Love

James and Jane “Jennie” McKee Love’s youngest daughter Alice (1814–98) was a cripple, to use the terminology of her day. Allie fell down the stairs as a small child in Ireland and injured herself. She never married and lived with her brother John Yankee’s family.¹⁰⁵ She was born in January 1814, Malin More townland, County Donegal, Ireland, and died August 3, 1898. She is buried in Keene township, Coshocton County, Ohio (see Appendix D).

Though there is little representation of the Love family in Coshocton County today, according to Lizzy Karr, in those early years in Keene township, living so close together, “The Loves seemed to be a happy, carefree, go-lucky family” who were pleased they had migrated as a family to the vast opportunities of America.¹⁰⁶

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John Cochran’s Experience in Ohio

Looking deep into that dimly lit metaphorical well of history, a scenario takes shape that could explain John Cochran’s fifteen years (1826 to 1841) in Ohio and the conditions that motivated his family’s migration from the comfort of his wife Ann Love’s family in Coshocton County to the outer reaches of the new frontier, the Territory of Iowa.

The scenario goes like this: Someone or something initially drew him to Cross Creek township, Jefferson County, Ohio (see Appendix E), which was near the Love family settlement in neighboring Coshocton County. There he gained citizenship (November 26, 1831, Steubenville, Jefferson County, Ohio) and a financial footing such that within five years he could buy land in Coshocton County, (listed in Keene township in the 1840 U.S. Census). He became financially independent and remained a close neighbor of the Loves. For the next ten years he continued to grow his family and his financial assets (see Appendix D). This is substantiated in this biographical sketch of John Cochran found in Charles Fulton’s 1912 book, History of Jefferson County. “John Cochran was a native of Ireland and came to this country in his youth, settling in Ohio where he operated a farm for a number of years.”¹⁰⁷

Alexander Dunleavy, his neighbor from Kilcar parish in County Donegal, emigrated and settled in Ohio near John about 1833.

Pioneers from the East Coast and elsewhere, traveling on the Ohio Canal that essentially passed John Cochran’s doorstep, brought news of the opening of the Iowa Territory, which was reputed to hold great promise for farming. Iowa is open prairie, and ninety-eight percent of the state is arable land with six feet of topsoil. Farmland in Iowa is both more fertile and more readily tillable than the land of Coshocton County, which is only forty-eight percent arable. Land in Iowa was available and affordable.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America from his native France, observes that John’s migration to Iowa was the norm for the times:

It is not fifty years since Ohio was founded. Most of the people who live in the state were not born there. Its capitol is not thirty years old, and its territory still incorporates vast stretches of unclaimed wilderness. Yet already the population of Ohio has resumed its westward march: most of the settlers of Illinois’ fertile prairies come from Ohio. These people left their original homeland in search of the good life. They left their second homeland in search of a still better one.¹⁰⁸

Early in September of 1841, shortly after harvest, John settles his affairs (see Appendix D), gathers his family and belongings, says goodbye to his Love family, friends and neighbors, and accompanied by his long-time friend Alexander Dunleavy, starts out for Iowa and the last stage of his full and productive life. For his wife, Ann Love, the toils of pioneer life would soon take a tragic toll.

The rich land was here – only men and machines were needed to turn it into a garden.
–        Joseph Frazier Wall ¹⁰⁹

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5        UPROOTING TO THE IOWA TERRITORY

When I bring them into the land, a land flowing with milk and honey, they will eat their fill and prosper.
—     Deuteronomy 31:20 ¹¹⁰

1803 was a magical year for John Cochran. It was the year of his birth. It was the year Ohio, his first home in the new world, entered into statehood. And, it was the year the United States expanded its western borders through the Louisiana Purchase, a swath of land that included Iowa, John’s final resting place. In that year the stage was set, fixing the horizons of his destiny. The landscape of John’s life reminds me of Robert Frost’s words in his 1923 poem “The Gift Outright”:

The land was ours before we were the land’s. […]
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright […]
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.¹¹¹

Like those who shared his Ulster Scotch heritage, John moved to find opportunity — first from Ireland to Ohio, and then on to Iowa. He was a true pioneer in the sense of being venturesome and opportunistic.

One author offers this romantic description of the nature of pioneers and their choices to strike out for parts unknown:

Pioneer life has charms that cannot be found in the perfected stages of business and shallow pretentions of society, and many [pioneers who] … feel crowded by the conventionalities of society, push on to new if not unexplored fields for elbow room and freer exercise of their faculties, and enjoyment of the functions of mind and body acquired by experience in hardships and privations…. To them Nature’s wide world domain beckons them on to prepare the way for rapid and persistent stride of advancing civilization, and it’s around their lives that history [has] woven its finest fibers and tinged it with the magic and weird touch of romance.¹¹²

John and his family had experienced their first taste of pioneer life when they immigrated to Coshocton County. However, in its first decade of white settlement, Iowa was far more of a wilderness and it posed many significant challenges. The move to Ohio brought him to the established community and security of the Love family, but his relocation to Iowa meant leaving that safety net behind. John and his family were on their own. Not the best conditions for John’s wife Ann Love, who up to this time had never been separated from her family. Their experience reflects the observation that “America was the great divider of families…a ‘shadow kingdom’ to which one’s relatives disappeared, never to be heard from again.”¹¹³

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Iowa Territory

No doubt the rewards of this new territory were significant for John and his family. Unlike the heavily forested land of the Muskingum Valley of Ohio, which required clearing trees and stumps before cultivation, the whole of Iowa is part of a great plain. Seven-eighths of the surface of the state was prairie when it was first settled. It should be noted, however, that before the introduction of the John Deere steel plow in the 1840s, farming the grassland prairie was no easy task:

The knot of prairie roots, some as thick as a man’s finger, extended several feet underground in a maze that could be cut only with a heavy iron plow, and then only with the greatest exertion [with a team of oxen].¹¹⁴

The cause of the perpetual prairie was the prevalence of annual prairie fires that most often occurred in the fall. The flames would reach from fifteen to twenty feet high and the glow of the fires could be seen as far as forty miles away. If prairie fires had been prevented, Iowa would be timbered country like the Muskingum Valley. In time, as a result of protected housing and tilled fields, woodlands did begin to develop on the Iowa prairie: “The encroachment of forest trees upon prairie farms as soon as the bordering woodland is protected from these annual prairie fires, is well known to farmers throughout the state.”¹¹⁵

Just as important as the open prairie’s cultivation was the fertility of its rich, deep black topsoil. As one expert describes, “The soil of Iowa is justly famous for its fertility, and there is probably no equal area on the earth’s surface that contains so much tillable land, or whose soil has so high an average fertility.”¹¹⁶

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred France’s claim to Louisiana and what had been called the Northwest Territory since 1787 to the U.S. government. Before opening this land to white settlers, however, a second party had to be appeased — the native Indians who possessed the land. This included the Sauk and Fox, and the Iuwa tribes. As was the course of settling the West, the displacement of the Indians was a bloody and brutal affair. Interestingly, the battle for entry into Iowa did not take place on Iowa soil, but across the “Father of Waters” (Mississippi River) in Illinois, at the point where Rock River enters the Mississippi near current-day Rock Island.

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Black Hawk War

The Sauk, as did most tribes of the West, roamed a wide range of land, following the migration of the animals they hunted. But they had a home base they returned to each year. In 1830, a band of Sauk Indians under the leadership of Chief Black Hawk returned to their great village Saukenuk after a prolonged absence and found it occupied by white settlers. Blackhawk chased the white settlers from his ancestral village, terrorizing them with the use of force. A report on the attack to the Illinois legislature given on February 5, 1830, reads:

A band of Sauks, commanded by the well-known War Chief called “The Black Hawk” have been in the habit of hunting upon ceded lands within the limits of this state, committing trespasses upon the lands of individuals by destroying their sugar trees, killing their hogs, stealing their horses, and otherwise demeaning themselves as to keep a constant state of alarm among the settlers of the northern part of our State, and which is calculated to prevent others from settling upon lands which they had honestly paid for.¹¹⁷

Black Hawk and his people were eventually subdued by military force and forced to sign the Corn Treaty of 1831, which banished them to the western shores of the Mississippi. In April 1832, Black Hawk chose to ignore the treaty and returned to Saukenuk, this time intent on forcibly and permanently securing the village. This act of defiance started a fifteen-day war known as the Black Hawk War, which the United States Army won decisively. Black Hawk was imprisoned and forced to sign away the Corn Treaty lands he was given on the western shore of the Mississippi.

The land he ceded comprises the eastern border of Iowa, a band of land that runs parallel to and extends forty miles west of the Mississippi River and runs from the northern to southern border of the Iowa District. The land is called the Scott or Blackhawk Purchase and represents the first settlement of Iowa. This is where John Cochran purchased his Iowa farm in 1841.

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The Cochrans’ Iowa Homestead

John bought his homestead in Round Prairie township, Jefferson County, Iowa, in three different stages. The first record of purchase was August 11, 1841.¹¹⁸ The second stage is recorded in a deed executed October 8, 1841, three days after he arrived with his family. The third document pertains to the release of a quick claim deed by Samuel Walker to John Cochran on NW section 21 of Round Prairie township on March 7, 1845; it indicates satisfaction by John Cochran of a lien incurred on the property by Walker (see Appendix B). The significance of these dates is how they reveal John’s physical contact with Samuel Walker. The August date would have been a scouting trip John made to find and secure a farm before bringing his family to the area. The October date marks the arrival of the family.

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Paddleboat

In planning this long trip from Ohio to the Iowa Territory, John Cochran had a couple of choices of transportation. One imagines he would have been interested in making the first trip as quickly as possible. He fit the scouting journey in just before harvest and may have brought his friend Alexander Dunleavy along with him. The fastest and least troublesome route was right at their Coshocton doorstep. They could catch a canal boat at the Ohio Canal in Canal Lewisville, no more than five miles south of the farm, and travel by water thirty miles south to Portsmouth. There they could catch a steamship on the Ohio River that would take them to Cicero, Illinois, where the Ohio converges with the Mississippi. At Cicero they could catch a steamboat traveling upriver on the Mississippi to St. Louis, where they could board another steamship that stopped at the port towns of Keokuk, Fort Madison, or Burlington. By that point, they would need to travel overland for no more than seventy miles.

Steamboat deck fare at this time was $15.00 per person. Deck passage meant traveling next to the boiler, fuel, and cargo (including animals) and it was very rough. According to one description:

Cargo went on first, then the deck passengers scramble for the space that is left. Find boxes or bales marked for port farther than your destination. These should make a good bed for your journey. With luck you will find a crate with cargo piled higher on at least one side of it. In this way you can be sheltered from the wind and rain. There is little or no protection from the elements. Deck passengers can cook their own meals on stoves provided by the captain, if you can find room. ¹¹⁹

John Cochran and Alexander Dunleavy could have reduced their fare by wooding — cutting wood and feeding the boiler—and scooping manure off the deck. A $15.00 deck fare from Pittsburgh to Galena was reduced to $3.00 by wooding.¹²⁰

Given their modest means, it’s likely John and Alexander chose this mode of transportation for their farm-scouting trip. They would have returned home in the same manner, just in time for John to harvest his crops before preparing to leave Ohio for good.

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Covered Wagon

Traveling by water for the second trip would have limited how much the family could take with them. Making the journey overland in a farm wagon retrofitted with a protective top and pulled by four oxen—with a horse or two free to scout ahead to find the best trail—would have allowed them to pack clothing, household goods, food, and farm tools. In this way the oxen, wagon, horses, and perhaps even a cow or two would be available for use once they started farming in Iowa. (Oxen were perfect to plow the virgin Iowa soil and remove stumps from the fields.) Choosing this method of transportation meant a five-week journey, versus a ten-day trip by waterway. However, not many pioneers could afford the price of steamboat fare and then the start-up costs of resupplying a farm and the household needs of a family at their new, remote destination.¹²¹

The land route they would have taken through Ohio was very likely the National Road, which they could pick up in Zanesville, just thirty miles south of Coshocton. The National Road would have taken them all the way to Indianapolis, Indiana— covering 304 miles of the 700-mile trip. The National Road was an extension of the old Cumberland Road, which began in Cumberland, Maryland. It initially went as far as Pittsburgh, but later extended to Valenda, Illinois, southeast of St. Louis. It was a toll road that provided the fastest trail leading westward. It was heavily used and served as an interesting source of entertainment to its travelers. Consider this colorful description:

Wagons pulled by oxen or horses passed in a steady stream: freight haulers, their loads piled high and held secure by rope, jockeyed for position; and dozen of stages, most of them lacking paint but still brave in the aristocracy of the highway, swept forward [with] imperious blasts from tin horns. Drovers with dust heavy in matted whiskers trudged patiently behind cattle and sheep.¹²²

Once John Cochran and his party had arrived in Indianapolis, they would have traversed a 200-mile trail leading to Springfield, Illinois (where Abraham Lincoln would have been practicing law at the time). By then, they would have been more than two-thirds of the way through their trip. Next they would have taken the Springfield and Rushville State Road, crossing the Illinois River by ferry at Beardstrom, Illinois, and then working their way a full one hundred miles to the Mississippi River. It wasn’t unusual for it to take a day or two to cross the Mississippi River by ferry, depending on how many pioneer wagons waited at the eastern bank.

Depending upon how far north they chose to cross the Mississippi, they could have landed at Keokuk, Fort Madison, or Burlington. The earliest settlers to Round Prairie, who arrived in 1836, came from Morgan County, Illinois, which is near Springfield, and they crossed the Mississippi at Fort Madison. Later, the Fort Madison wagon road went right past the Cochran farm.

Once they crossed the river and were on Iowa soil, they could easily make their own trail through the prairie—and they had to:

The natural surface of the ground is the only road yet to be found in Iowa District; and such is the nature of the soil, that in dry weather we need no other. The country being so very open and free from mountains, artificial roads are little required. A few trees taken out of the way, where the routes much traverse the narrow woods, and a few bridges thrown over the deeper creeks, is all the work necessary to give good roads in any direction.¹²³

The last geographic obstacle they faced before coming to rest in Round Prairie was Cedar Creek. According to the following account of the 1836 crossing of Thomas Lambirth, one of the first white settlers of Round Prairie, and his party, the creek was already prepared for passage:

When the pioneer cavalcade reached the banks of Cedar Creek, it came to a sudden halt. The water was high. There was no ferry. The banks were steep. No wagon had ever essayed to cross before, and it became necessary to cut the banks down so the teams and vehicles could descend on one side and ascend on the other. The work was soon accomplished on the one side, and then mounting horses, two or three of the men with spades in hand, crossed to the other side and cut away the far bank. This completed, the men crossed back. Lambirth’s wagon drawn by three yoke of cattle, was in advance, and was first driven down into the water. The rear end of the wagon-cover was loosened and turned back, and Mrs. Lambirth raised to a seat to be carried over. Joseph Tilford sat in the forward end of the wagon to guide the wheel-oxen and Mr. Lambirth rode a horse by the side of the forward cattle to guide them to the crossing. When the opposite bank was reached, Mr. Lambirth lifted his wife down from the place to which he had lifted her but a few moments before, and carried her out to the bank, and sat her down on a log in the midst of nettles as high as a man’s head. And thus it came to be recorded that she was the first white woman to cross Cedar Creek.¹²⁴

Despite that vivid description, it’s difficult for us to imagine what the John Cochran family experienced in 1841 as pioneers traveling to this remote wilderness area just west of the banks of the Mississippi.

Traveling as they did would be foreign to our modern way of life, pampered with all our resources and conveniences. They wouldn’t have stopped at a Holiday Inn for the night or for a quick meal at McDonald’s. They didn’t have the luxury of a paved highway or an air-conditioned vehicle that could travel 65 miles an hour. Rather, the journey centered on an open wagon, alongside which most of the family plodded through prairie grass higher than their heads. Their wagon moved at a snail’s pace and was pulled by four oxen that needed water and rest every two to seven miles. It meant wearing boots up to the knees to protect them from snakebites. It meant walking up to twenty miles a day, then setting up camp and sleeping under the wagon with minimal protection from the elements, covered only by a blanket. It meant tending a campfire through the night to keep the howling wolves at a distance.

The tough and brutal experience is evoked in some detail in the following account by Iowa Congregational Church missionary Asa Turner in 1838 as he warned young seminary students back East of the challenges they would face as they ventured West to its wilderness existence.

Come prepared to expect small things, rough things. Lay aside your dandy whims and take a few lessons of your grandmothers before you come. Get clothes firm, durable, something that will go through hazel brush without tearing. Don’t be afraid of a good hard hand or tanned face. If you keep free from a hard heart, you will do well. Get wives of Puritan stamp, such as honored the distaff and the loom, those who can pail a cow, and churn the butter, and be proud of a jean dress or checked apron. Tell those who think of leading out a sister we will try to find homes as good as Keokuk, the high [Indian] chief and his lady live in, and my wife will have a kettle of mush and the Johnny-cake ready by some cold night in November. But it is of no use to answer any more questions, for I never expect to see one of you west of the Mississippi River as long as I live.¹²⁵

In the face of certain hardships, which would not have been abstract to them as they are to us so many generations later, the John Cochran family pushed off for Iowa on the first of September 1841 for a month-long trip to their destination forty miles west of the Mississippi: Round Prairie township, Jefferson County, Iowa. They picked the perfect time of the year to make the trip. One historical source advised:

Fall is the best time to move West. Roads are in top condition from September through November. There is little rain in the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys in autumn. The roads and many of the smaller streams become dry. Most of the rivers are easily forded because the water level is very low…. [By] waiting until fall, the farmer planning a move West can harvest one more crop. The sale of grain gives him additional travel money.¹²⁶

The seven children of the John Cochran family making the arduous but well-timed journey from Coshocton County, Ohio, to Jefferson County, Iowa, were all single. They ranged in age from two to seventeen years old: Jane (1825–66), George (1827–1901), James (1829–79), Eleanor (1833–67), Isabelle (1831–1907), Margaret Ann (1835–57), and Margery (1839–1920).

Accompanying the John Cochran family on their trip to Iowa was Alexander Dunleavy, their neighbor in Coshocton. Alexander was born in Roxboro Glebe, Kilcar parish, County Donegal, Ireland, in 1810—where he was a neighbor and childhood friend of our John Cochran. In 1833, Alexander immigrated to the Jefferson County–Coshocton County area of Ohio. He and our John Cochran stayed connected over their lifetimes. A few years after settling in Round Prairie, John sold eighty acres of his initial land purchase to Alexander, who remained there for the rest of his life. Given that Alexander and John were close friends for the entirety of their lives, I imagine it would have been of great assistance and comfort to John to have his lifelong friend along on that long trek from Ohio to Iowa—and to have his help setting up his homestead and farm once they arrived. Bryan Dunleavy, descendent of Alexander Dunleavy, concluded this about the close migratory relationship of Alexander Dunleavy and his friend John Cochran.

Alexander Dunleavy, [was] born in Ireland in 1810. He arrived in Jefferson County in 1841, according to his obituary, when presumably they were just opening up the state for farming. Some of the records suggest he came via Ohio. He arrived in Glasgow [in Round Prairie township of Jefferson County, Iowa] with a John Cochran as neighbor.¹²⁷

On October 5, 1841, at the age of thirty-eight, John Cochran, his family, and his friend Alexander Dunleavy arrived at their new place in Jefferson County of the recently formed Territory of Iowa, and they set to work settling in.

The Cochran Family Tree –
John and Ann Love Cochran
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

On October 8, 1841, three days after their arrival, John consummated the purchase of a 210-acre farm in NW section 21 of Round Prairie township, just a mile southeast of Glasgow. John bought the farm from Samuel Scott Walker, one of three cousins (Walker, James Tilford, and Thomas Lambirth) from Morgan County, Illinois, who became the first white settlers of Jefferson County in February 1836.¹²⁸ Walker established pre-emption (sometimes called squatter’s rights) on this land as of November 18, 1839, and he planted corn there for two seasons before John Cochran’s purchase.¹²⁹

Officially, the 210 acres were purchased for $262.50 in a government land auction held in Burlington, Iowa, early in 1841 by land speculator Dr. Richard F. Barrett of Springfield, Illinois. Barrett was a director of the State Bank of Illinois and armed with $100,000 of the bank’s money, he came to the auction to purchase land for settlers: any land not spoken for, he purchased with the intent to resell. On that particular day, Barrett purchased fourteen tracts of land in Round Prairie township. His selling price to farmers was double the original cost, due by the end of five years. At over a thirty-five percent annual percentage rate, this was usurious under state law—but, by purchasing the initial title directly from the government, he could call the excessive profit a capital gain on a sale. He would transfer the title to the investor or farmer after they made the last payment. In this case, Barrett bought the land on behalf of Samuel Scott Walker, who marketed it and found a buyer in John Cochran. Walker paid Barrett $450 for the land, nearly doubling Barrett’s investment in just a few short months, and then Walker sold the land to John Cochran for $1,200, making a tidy profit of $750.¹³⁰

The government’s official survey of Round Prairie, conducted by E. F. Lucas in August 1837, states, “Enter cornfield owned by Samuel Walker on the NW quarter of Section 21. Leave field. Wagon Road to (Fort) Madison SE and NW.”¹³¹ Walker had cultivated and planted the field with corn for at least two growing seasons. So this quarter section was purchased in 1841 with improvements. Perhaps Walker’s improvements included a cabin in addition to land that had been tilled, planted, and harvested. John was apparently pleased with his purchase. He made it his home for the remaining thirty-six years of his life. He sold 85 acres to his friend Alexander Dunleavy, but over the years added 230 more acres to his holdings (see Appendix B).

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The Winter of 1841 – 42

If the farm included a cabin, his job in those first few weeks of November would have been easier. The new settlers were in for a formidable task with winter bearing down on them. In 1840, the first of November brought a huge snowstorm that didn’t let up all winter.

Snow commenced to fall in early November, and fell to great depth and continued to cover the ground until the first spring month was well advanced, so that with difficulty the men could get around to attend to their domestic duties or prosecute the plans laid out for the campaign of the spring and summer.¹³²

If the farm did not already have a cabin, the covered wagon probably would have served as a temporary home while John, his two boys George and James, and Alexander Dunleavy, worked together to raise a cabin quickly.

Cabins were made of round logs. The floors were made of puncheons split from trees of the forest. The doors, door-checks, window-checks, etc., as well as all the other finishing stuff, was made in the same way and then dressed down with a broad-ax. The roof was made of clapboards or “shakes” split from some monarch of the forest. The boards were held in place by weight-poles laid lengthwise, and kept at convenient and suitable distance by “knees.” Very often a cabin would be completed without the use of a single nail in the entire structure. A mud and stick or sod chimney and earthen hearth finished the “cabin.”¹³³

Perhaps initially it was a one-room cabin that was expanded to multiple rooms — but, by and by, the primitive log cabin gave way to a frame house with a shingle roof, two stories, plank floors with rag-rug carpets, and a brick or stone fireplace. But upon their arrival in 1841, shelter from winter on the Iowa plain was their first imperative and a log cabin provided it.

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Ann’s Death

The hardship of the long trip from Ohio, followed by the arduous task of setting up a rudimentary prairie homestead and added to the rigors of caring for her large, young family must have been a difficult experience for Ann Love Cochran. Within two months of their arrival in Iowa, on January 8, 1842, she died.

Where through the broad lands of green and gold
The Western rivers roll their waves.
Before another year is told
We find our home; perhaps our graves.¹³⁴

On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. – John O’Donohue¹³⁵

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6        IOWA:  A BITTERSWEET BEGINNING

It is common to think of a new venture as having both inherent risks and rewards — and the greater the risk, the greater the reward. Sometimes the consequences of bold actions have vaguely foreseen, but uncalculated, consequences. This was probably the case for John Cochran and the unexpected loss of his wife Ann. The rewards from settling in the agriculturally rich Iowa prairie were plenty, but the costs were significant—and the loss of Ann was a great cost. He would quite naturally miss his wife and the important role she would have played as their family life took root in the frontier community of Iowa.

When Ann died in Iowa, isolated from her Love family back in Ohio, one imagines John must have felt guilt for distancing her from her family and causing her suffering from a difficult trek from Ohio to Iowa. Through the exercise of his ambition, he lost a valued companion.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
– W. B. Yeats¹³⁶

However, the odds were that death would visit their pioneer journey. Walter Prescott Webb in his book The Great Plains, calculates that each mile of a 2,000-mile journey west cost seventeen lives —for a total of 34,000 lives lost in the U.S. settlement of the West.¹³⁷ John and Ann surely would have heard about, perhaps even witnessed, death and fresh makeshift gravesites along the trail. But, as with most tragic events, they would have hoped the odds wouldn’t apply to them.

In the Cochran-Love households of this era, it seems death came too readily to our children and women, a marker of the period’s high mortality rate caused by the risks of childbirth, the absence of vaccines, and other factors.

With Ann’s death, John lost a valuable team member in the pioneer life they embarked upon together.

The chief figure of the American West, the figure of the ages, is not the long-haired, fringe-legging man riding a raw-boned pony, but the gaunt and sad-faced woman sitting on the front seat of the wagon, following her lord where he might lead her, her face hidden in the same ragged sunbonnet which had crossed the Appalachians and Mississippi long before. That was America, my brethren! There was the seed of America’s wealth. There was the great romance of America—the women in the sunbonnet; and not, after all, the hero with the rifle across his saddle horn.¹³⁸

On their 700-mile trek from Ohio to Iowa, Ann would have kept a watchful eye on the children so they did not stray or incur injury. At stops for rest, she would have helped feed and forage the cattle, oxen, and horses; supervised the gathering of fuel for a fire and fresh water; prepared and served meals; cleaned the cookware and packed it away; addressed the problems of the children; washed the clothes; put the children to bed; pitched in when the wagon broke down; helped gather animals that strayed; helped maneuver the wagon as they navigated countless small streams or washes, which were more numerous than the occasional river; and extended tender thoughtfulness to John, bringing comfort when he showed the strains of the travel.

A’ that I hae endur’d
Lassie, my desire
Here in thy arms is cur’d.
— Robert Burns ¹³⁹

The timing of her death strongly suggests Ann was worn out by the family’s travels. Jane, her seventeen-year-old daughter, likely would have been her surrogate when Ann’s health failed, which could have occurred on the trail or after they settled into their homestead cabin.

Whenever her illness began and whatever its nature, two months after their arrival in Iowa, Ann was buried in the Glasgow cemetery just a mile from their new home and Jane was required to fill the big shoes of her mother. The new cabin had to be domesticated — furnished and kept clean, with clothes to be sewn and mended, meals to prepare, and young sisters to tend. Spring was quickly upon them, and the chickens had to be hatched and cared for along with other livestock and the garden needed planting, along with the regular duties of the surrogate housewife.

In the summer, gardens needed to be weeded and harvested, and fruits and vegetables were to be canned and stored. As one historian describes:

There were many constants in the farm woman’s routines. Everyday meals had to be prepared, children cared for, even through illness without a doctor, and housekeeping done…. The farmwoman had both indoor and outdoor work. Through their activities, women produced most of their family’s food supplies [and even had a hand in butchering and preparing the meat that was served at the dinner table].¹⁴⁰

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John Cochran Remarries

Jane’s role as a surrogate for her mother lasted one year. John, seeing that Jane was soon to marry, sought a new wife to support his demanding household. He couldn’t hold his family together and tend to the needs of the start-up farming operation alone. Spring was upon him again and he had to prepare the rich, Iowa soil and plant the fields. He needed to expand and tend to the livestock (including cattle, hogs, oxen, and horses). Soon thereafter he would be busy haying and threshing. In the fall, the corn must be picked, which was the most difficult task of all. Of course, he had two boys and his friend Alexander Dunleavy to help, but still, he needed a “woman in the sunbonnet,” at his side. So on March 3, 1843, John married Mary Gregg from Washington County, Pennsylvania. They were married in Lee County, Iowa, and she came home to John’s family of seven children. Soon the number of children in John’s home was reduced to six, when two weeks later, on March 16, 1843, Jane married Otho Davis and they started their own household in Round Prairie.

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The Cochran Girls of Madison County

Through all the hardships of their trek to Iowa and the loss of their mother Ann, the younger Cochran girls (Isabelle, Eleanor, Margaret Ann, and Margery) formed close bonds with their older sister Jane that carried forward into their adult lives. In 1850, Otho and Jane moved to Winterset in Madison County, Iowa, and eventually three of the sisters followed — Margaret Ann, Eleanor, and Margery.

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The Margaret Ann Cochran Smith Family

Margaret Ann (1835–57), then age fourteen, went to live with Jane and Otho and is listed as part of their Winterset township household in the 1850 census. In 1854, Margaret Ann married Levi Smith (1830–94), a farmer, and the couple settled in Union township in Madison County and had two children: John C. (1851–57), Serena Ann (c. 1855–69), and Anna (c. 1857–61). It possible that Margaret Ann and Levi had a second daughter, Anna E. (before 1858–61). Anna is listed in the Primitive Baptist Church cemetery rolls as Levi and Margaret Ann Smith’s daughter who died November 20, 1861, at three years old. That age would place her birth after Margaret Ann’s death. So the familial relationship is affirmed in the records, but the dates are questionable. John C. and his mother Margaret Ann died within a month of each other. Levi remarried in 1858 to Sarah James (1838–1920) and they had ten children together.

John Cochran placed his granddaughter Serena Ann in his will, gifting her five dollars; it was the only gift he bequeathed to a grandchild. Serena did not claim her inheritance. She had settled in Kansas and lost contact with her mother’s family by the time of John Cochran’s death in 1876. Levi remained in Winterset, the same community as Margaret Ann’s sisters Jane and Margery, which suggests that he lost contact with Serena as well. Levi was not the beneficiary of an inheritance from John Cochran, as was the case for Otho Davis, widower of Jane.

The Cochran Family Tree
Levi and Margaret Ann Cochran Smith
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The Eleanor Cochran Bishir Family

Eleanor (1833–67) married John Henry Bishir (1829–98), a blacksmith from Round Prairie, in 1854. In the early 1860s, they moved to Winterset, Madison County, Iowa, where they raised four children: Herbert S. (1855–1928), Roxanne (1858–1925), William Frederick (1859–1902), and Ulysses Grant (1864–1951). After Eleanor died in 1867, John Henry married Josephine Atkinson (1838–1921).

The Cochran Family Tree
John Henry and Eleanor Cochran Bishir
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The Margery Cochran Lowden Family

Margery (1839–1920), the youngest of John and Ann’s children, stayed back in Round Prairie and in 1855, at the young age of 15, married Edward P. Lowden (1833–1903). In 1870, they moved to Winterset, where they lived for their remaining years and raised six children: Jeremiah Milton (1856–62), Matilda “Tillie” Jane (1858–99), John J. (1862–1947), Edward “Frank” (1867–1918), William F. (1869–1953), and Ada R. (1876–1962). Edward was a farmer and he preceded Margery in death. The Lowdens and Davises were neighbors in Webster township.

There was a fifteen-year difference in age between Jane and Margery. The evidence suggests that Jane’s grandson Otho Witt, son of Jane’s daughter Sarah Ann (Witt), married Margery’s daughter Matilda “Tillie” Lowden on March 17, 1881. Even though it is recorded in the marriages in Madison County, neither Tillie’s or Otho’s obituaries mention a marriage between them or that they were related by blood.

The Cochran Family Tree
Edward Paren Lowden and Margery Cochran Lowden
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

.

The Jane Cochran Davis Family

Jane and Otho Davis moved from Winterset to Webster township in Madison County in 1856, where they raised seven children: Sarah Ann (1844–1929), Henry Cochran (1846–1900), Lydia Jane (1848–1903), George W. (1852–1907), John T. (1855–1933), Ida Belle (1858–59), and Eva M. (1866–1944). Jane died in the year she gave birth to Eva. Otho distinguished himself by laying out the town of Webster, farming 145 acres of land at the town border, holding every office in the township at one time or another — serving as Madison County’s first county supervisor, as sheriff, as county recorder, and the Webster postmaster for a number of years.

The Cochran Family Tree
Otho and Jane Cochran Davis
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The Isabelle Cochran Wright Family

The fifth child and third daughter of John and Ann Love Cochran was Isabelle (1831–1907). In 1850, the year her older sister Jane and husband Otho Davis left for Madison County, she married William W. Wright, a blacksmith and farmer from Round Prairie. She was eighteen years old when they married. Isabelle and William lived their remaining years as neighbors to John Cochran in Round Prairie and they raised eight children: John William (1850-1919), James Love (1852–1927), Eleanor “Ella” A. (1854–1946), George C. (1856–74), Frank R. (1859–1958), Samuel L. (1860–82), Martha “Mattie” J. (1862–1944), and Van V. (1867–1933).

I find interesting the name William and Isabelle chose for their second son, James Love Wright. Isabelle spent the first ten years of her life in Coshocton County, Ohio, as a neighbor to her Love aunts and uncles. Her choice to name her son in honor of her grandfather James Love, suggests an abiding affection for the side of the family Isabelle left behind in Ohio.

Consider also the picture of Isabelle’s three sons (shown on page 124), two of whom are accompanied by their wives. We speculate that this picture was taken at the death of Josephine Wright, John William’s second wife, in 1915. John William Wright was a two-term sheriff of Jefferson County, between 1903 and 1906. John Cochran’s son-in-law, Socrates S. Crane—husband of John and Mary Gregg Cochran’s daughter Henrietta Cochran (1850–1910)—was the sheriff of Jefferson County from 1890–95.

William and Isabelle Wright lived their entire lives together in Round Prairie township, very close to John Cochran’s farm. William farmed 115 acres, just down the road from John, and maintained his blacksmith shop, at some point employing his sons. Both William and Isabelle are buried in the Glasgow Cemetery in Round Prairie.

The Cochran Family Tree
William W. and Isabelle Cochran Wright
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The James W. Cochran Family

John Cochran’s son James W. Cochran (1829–79) married Elenor “Ellen” J. Abrams (1835–82) in 1854 and they left Round Prairie after 1856 for Jackson township, Clarke County, Iowa. James’s youngest sister Margery Cochran Lowden also left for Jackson township around the same time. They can be found as neighbors in the 1860 U.S. Census. The Lowdens did not stay long, though; they returned to Round Prairie in 1861.

Clarke County and Madison County were populated by a third wave of settler opportunity in Iowa. The first wave was the result of the Blackhawk Treaty of 1832, and included the pioneer settlement of John Cochran and his family. A second wave came with the extension of the Blackhawk Treaty that expanded the borders of Jefferson County and pushed a little west. Then in 1850, a third wave started in a large, diagonal band of land that dissected the state from the northeast through central and on to southwest Iowa. The third wave was made possible when land became available following the Sauk and Fox Indian Cessation of 1845, and third wave settlement took place between 1850 and 1860. In 1850, Otho and Jane Cochran Davis were among the earliest settlers of Madison County. In 1856, James and Ellen Cochran were some of the earliest settlers of Clarke County. Both families were taking advantage of opportunities to farm virgin soil in a newly organized Iowa that was gradually expanding west toward the Missouri River.

Ellen Abrams Cochran’s sister Sarah Ann Abrams married Asa Carson in Clarke County, Iowa, on September 30, 1857. Asa had moved to Jackson township in 1855 with his family, and his father Abram purchased eighty acres of government land at its initial auction. I would guess that Sarah Ann traveled along with James and Ellen to Clarke County, where she met Asa. In the 1856 census, Sarah Ann was listed as still living in Round Prairie township with her sister Margaret Abrams Kirpatrick, whose family were neighbors of James and Ellen while they lived in Round Prairie.

James and Ellen remained in Jackson township the rest of their years, raising a family of ten children: Alvord F. (c. 1856–95), William R. (c. 1858–83), George A. (1859–95), John Henry (1860–1914), James Oliver (1861–1928), Iona Dell (1862–79), Charles L. (1864–1944), Allie Belle (1867–1948), Pearl E. (1870–85), and Fred E. (1874–93).

The 1870 census lists James W. Cochran as “James W. Cahorn, head of household and farmer.” A Scottish pronunciation of the surname was Co’horn or Cah’horn. This pronunciation of Cochran, which prevailed in both Clarke County and Jefferson County, must have been an important way for the family to distinguish their cultural heritage.

Shortly after 1860 U.S. Census, James and Ellen were joined by her parents John and Mary Abrams of Round Prairie township. John died in 1861 and is buried in Clarke County, as is Mary, who died in 1876 while living with her daughter and son-in-law, Asa and Sarah Ann Abrams Carson in Jackson township.

Photographic evidence demonstrates a striking similarity in looks between John Cochran’s s

ons James and George, which leads one to imagine a composite image of what our John Cochran might have looked like. One of my relatives said they look like an older version of today’s popular television personality Simon Cowell, of American Idol fame.

The Cochran Family Tree
James W. and Elenor “Ellen” J. Abrams Cochran
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

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The George Cochran Family

Our great-great-grandfather George Cochran first farmed near his father in Round Prairie. He married a neighbor girl, Elizabeth Jane Lynch, on December 16, 1849. They had six children: Alice B. (1850–53), Frances Ann (1852–1936), Willa Jane (1855–1940), Charles Clinton (1859–1931), Ulysses Sherman Grant (1864–1948), and Mary Elizabeth (1870–72). George moved his farming operation to Buchanan township in 1877, after his father passed away in 1876 and the homestead went into the hands of his stepmother, Mary Gregg Cochran.

The Cochran Family Tree
George and Elizabeth Jane Lynch Cochran
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

.

Mary Gregg Cochran

Between 1775 and 1800, three Gregg brothers (Henry, William, and John) along with their sister Peggy (later Mrs. Jacob Springer) came from Ireland to settle in Pike Run township, Washington County, Pennsylvania. These siblings became the nucleus for the Gregg family presence in Washington County and from their progeny emerged John’s second wife, Mary Gregg (born in 1810 in Washington County, Pennsylvania).

Succeeding generations of Greggs migrated west to Iowa. Thomas Gregg (born December 17, 1814, in Jefferson County, Ohio) settled first in Lee County, Iowa in 1843 and later, in the fall of 1851, in Doyle township, Clarke County, Iowa. Andrew Gregg (born November 19, 1798, in Washington County, Pennsylvania) settled in Bernhart township, Jefferson County, Iowa, where he died in 1872. John Cochran could have been acquainted with members of the Gregg family through their shared residence in Jefferson County, Ohio, their Irish origin, and/or the close proximity of Jefferson County, Ohio, to Washington County, Pennsylvania (only thirty-five miles apart). Regardless of how they came to know each other, history shows that Mary came west to Iowa, like her other Gregg relatives, and that she and John were married in Lee County in 1843.

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The John and Mary Gregg Cochran Family

The marriage of Mary Gregg and John Cochran set a new tone and temperament for John’s children with Ann Love, all of whom moved to other communities except Isabelle. In part, their moves can be explained by the pull of rich, virgin Iowa farmland opening up to the west. Another factor could have been the push of John’s second marriage and his new family with Mary Gregg vying for John’s attention. John and Mary had four children of their own: Mary E. (1844–92), John Gregg (1845–1912), Harriett Mathilda (1847–1927), and Henrietta (1850–1910). Three of John and Mary Gregg’s children stayed in Round Prairie. Young John Gregg Cochran took over John’s farm—first as a superintendent for his mother, and then upon her death, as the sole heir. Interpreting what facts are available, it appears there was little continuity for John and Ann Love’s children after their mother’s death.

The Cochran Family Tree
John and Mary Gregg Cochran
Source: ancestry.com, accessed April 8, 2013

The family spirit in a sense becomes materialized in the earth. The family represents the land; the land represents the family. The land perpetuates the family’s name, its origins, its glory, its power, and its virtues. It is an imperishable witness to the past and a precious guarantee of a continued existence.
–       Alexis de Tocqueville¹⁴¹

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7        FULFILLING A DREAM

Stories make you live right. Stories make you replace yourself. The ethical energy, the earth character, flows from land to words and back again to land as “you replace yourself” in the earth that is the source of character and story alike.¹⁴²

When his descendants walk into the fields of John Cochran’s Iowa farm and reach down to pick up a handful of the rich black soil, they are touching a piece of the soul of John Cochran and each of his succeeding generations. In my case, those generations flow from John’s son George, to his son U. S. Grant, to his son John H. and his wife Hazel, to their son John Richard, who was my father. Each generation yielded more from an acre of land than the last, but it’s hard to imagine any of them got more satisfaction from that land than John Cochran did—simply because of where he came from and all the sacrifices he made to create the opportunity to own and work it.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, modes of transportation were quite primitive, so few people took on the hardships that attended a journey of four thousand miles—the distance from Ireland to Iowa — just for the adventure, especially with a family of seven children. The reason for the trip needed to be clear and the effort quite focused. John Cochran’s migration was not motivated by a compelling need for political or religious freedom, but rather by a desire for economic opportunity. His long trek brought him to an ideal place to exercise his trade, and he took full advantage of Iowa’s resources once he reached his destination. I imagine he must have marveled at what remarkable advances he had made in his lifetime. I also wonder if he might have experienced moments of recollection when he shared the sentiments of the famous County Donegal poet, W. B. Yeats, who wrote fondly of his homeland in his 1888 poem “Lake Isle of Innisfree”:

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

For John, the lapping waters of County Donegal—even the lapping water of the Atlantic Ocean—were in the distant past. The rustling of corn stalks in the hot summer breezes of Iowa became his new music.

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John’s Farming Operation

John’s experiences in Ohio gave him good lessons in frontier farming and a sound financial footing. In 1841, when he bought his first land in Iowa — NW section 21 of Round Prairie township—he paid $1,200 for 210 acres. At age 38, after just fifteen years in the United States, this Scotch-Irish immigrant become a significant operator in Iowa farming with that purchase.

To provide a perspective, farm ownership in 1841 required a minimum of $400 cash. That amount would purchase eighty acres of land, and fully equip a farm and home. John’s $1,200 purchase was solely for land, he had other expenses that needed funds to get his operation started.

Within the sum of $400 you can be comfortably settled upon your 80 acre tract, in Iowa, furnished with a comfortable log house, a good yoke of oxen, a horse, cow, twelve sheep, poultry, pigs etc.; like-wise farm wagon, plough and farming utensils generally, with thirty weeks provisions laid in, until a small crop is raised for subsistence.¹⁴³

John’s initial investment was closer to $1,500. According to the Selected U.S. Federal Census Non-Population Schedules, 1850–1880, from Round Prairie township, by 1850 John calculated the value of his farm operation at $2,650. Included in that were: 240 acres of land, $2,000; implements and machinery, $110; and livestock, $540. He also reports harvested crops of 1,000 bushels of Indian corn, 600 bushels of rye, 200 bushels of oats, and 50 bushels of wheat.

By this time his recently married son George was set up on a neighboring farm and his son James W. was working by his side. Included in his inventory of livestock were four oxen that were essential in breaking prairie soil, but he also had five horses that would soon replace them. The advantage to oxen was their ability draft a plow in uncultivated soil, whereas:

horses perform all kinds of work expeditiously as well as continuously thus keeping those who labor with them more fully employed than is the case in working with oxen …. Horses may be employed in any work and be attached to any kind of vehicle or implement of the farm.¹⁴⁴

By 1860, John no longer had oxen and was totally reliant on horses and mules to work his fields.

John was an active farmer, purchasing and selling a lot of land during his life in Iowa. The 210 acres he initially purchased were the nucleus of his holdings. Surveying the land transactions in Jefferson County, Iowa, from 1841 to 1875 shows that John was involved in sixteen land sales or purchase transactions. The most significant of his purchases was a 200-acre plot in Section 16, that had initially been dedicated to the establishment of a school, but was later sold to farmers in public auction. He bought and transferred land to his children: his daughter Isabelle and her husband William Wright, and his sons George and James all purchased land from their father in this period of time, and those lands became their entrées into farm ownership.

By 1860 John was farming 263 acres, 130 improved and 133 unimproved. The value of his farm operation had grown to $4,100, and he reported a barn full of harvested crops—wheat, corn, oats, and Irish potatoes. His land value was estimated at $3,000, his farm machinery at $100, and his livestock at $1,000. According to 1860 U.S. census documents for Round Prairie township, Jefferson County, Iowa, he had 5 horses, 9 dairy cows, 22 head of cattle, and 60 swine. He had slaughtered livestock in inventory, along with 75 lbs. of butter. All of this together paints a picture of a prosperous and growing business. At his death in 1876, John was farming 360 acres of land, which indicates that he kept expanding his holdings over the next few years.

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John in Politics

A common characteristic of the Scotch-Irish in America was their involvement in politics and John, with his ambition and desire to seize control of his destiny and preserve his good fortune, was no exception. He chose to exercise his political rights and hold public office.

In 1848 and every election thereafter he voted for the Republican slate of candidates with a strong conviction. This was most evident in a report in October 29, 1868, Fairfield Ledger:

Messrs. John Cochran, Chas. Unkrich, and Henry Webb were appointed a committee to attend a revision of the Register and see that every Republican name was properly registered. As members of the Grant Club, they were making sure that the supporters of U. S. Grant for presidency were on the voter registration rolls so as to be able to cast their vote in the 1868 election.

Also, John served as a member of the Board of Supervisors of Jefferson County in 1867 and 1868 and simultaneously as the Round Prairie township supervisor.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French scholar, began his examination of American political institutions and made this observation:

It is not by chance I considered the township first …. Political life first developed in the township. One might almost say that, in the beginning, each township was an independent nation …. The [citizen] is attached to his township not so much because he is born there as because he sees the township as a free and powerful corporation of which he is part and which it is worth his trouble to seek to direct.¹⁴⁵

Beginning with the November 1860 election, each township elected one township supervisor. Together, the newly elected supervisors formed the county Board of Supervisors. The term in office is four years, beginning on the first day of January following a general election. John would have been elected in the fall of 1866. The Board of Supervisors is the legislative body of the county, composed of three or five members. They serve as the policymakers for the county and administer the various county programs. Their powers include reviewing budget requests, appropriating funds, establishing county tax levies, enacting ordinances, filling employee vacancies and hearing reports from county officers. The board is also responsible for overseeing economic development in the county.

His role as township supervisor involved another set of duties. Townships had many governmental responsibilities, such as holding elections, repairing highways, listing property for taxation, equalizing taxes, relief of the poor, protection of public health, protection of persons and property, and caring for township property. As you can imagine, these years would have been a demanding time for John, with significant governmental responsibilities in addition to running his 360 acre farm.

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John Suffers a Severe Stroke

In 1869, John was sun struck (what we would now call heatstroke) and suffered a paralytic stroke. He was unable to complete his term on the Board of Supervisors and as township supervisor. His son George stepped in to serve in his stead. As an invalid, John was dependent on others for support and care. A columnist for the Fairfield Weekly Ledger records a visit to John in 1876:

We visited the eastern portion of the county passing through the townships of Buchanan, Cedar, Round Prairie, and into the villages of Wooster, Glasgow, Coalport and Salina. We found many old friends and some new ones. Among them we must mention our old friend of a quarter of a century, John COCHRAN, with whom the ills of this world do not overbalance the pleasures.¹⁴⁶

What is remarkable about this report is John’s apparently positive attitude despite his paralytic condition. Instead of burying himself in self-pity, he was accepting and positive about his situation, making him a pleasing person in the most challenging conditions. I attribute this to his Scottish “dourness”— enduring difficulties with a positive frame of mind and rising above the worst that life can send him.

This quality was evident at other times in his life as well. I think of the loss of his inheritance of the family farm in Ireland because it went to the eldest son, his older brother James. Or of John’s heartbreak when he lost his wife, Ann, just when he needed her most as he struggled to settle his family on the Iowa frontier. John’s dourness was passed on to later generations of Cochrans. I saw it clearly in Dad as he willingly accepted the care of Mom after her stroke, and in his positive attitude about life, right to his end. John’s dourness is a gift passed through each generation of Cochrans as each models its particular blend of strength and perseverance for the next. Dourness shows us how to endure and overcome life’s heartbreaks and tougher challenges.

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John’s Death
John died on January 17, 1876, at the age of 72 years, 9 months, and 8 days. He was buried beside his wife, Ann Love, in the Glasgow Cemetery, located in the NE quarter of his Section 21.
His obituary, which appeared in the Fairfield Daily Ledger, reads:

Near Glasgow, Iowa. January 17, 1876, John Cochran in the 73rd year of his age. Mr. Cochran has always been one of our most upright and exemplary citizens. Always honest and frank, he endeared himself to all who came in contact with him. A devout Christian, he found comfort in the blessed Redeemer during all the late afflictions that visited him. Cheerfulness was a characteristic of Mr. Cochran and his always pleasant disposition made his company agreeable and pleasant. He was born in County Donegal, Ireland, April 24, 1803 of Scotch and English parentage. He emigrated to the United States in May of 1826 and settled in Jefferson County, Ohio. He lived there about five years and then moved to Coshocton County. In 1841 he came to Iowa and settled in Round Prairie township, Jefferson County. Three days after his arrival he bought the farm on which he lived at the time of his death. He served as a member of the Board of Supervisors of Jefferson County in 1867 and 1868. During that time he was sun struck and in 1869 he suffered severely from a paralytic stroke. He died in full hope of a better life beyond the grave.¹⁴⁷

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John’s Will

In 1865, John established a will that set the stage for the farming futures of his sons George, James, and John Gregg. His will stipulated that a loan to James of $283.87 from September 16, 1864, and another to George of $300 on May 5, 1865, were to be forgiven. John G. was given the responsibility of overseeing the 360-acre farm for the benefit of John’s widow Mary Gregg Cochran, along with the right to be its sole heir upon her death. Each daughter (or her widower and children) received $200. Overall, John’s estate paid out $1,400 in cash and forgave the loans to George and James. The will included only one bequest to a grandchild: $5.00 was gifted to Serena Ann “Lerena” Smith, the daughter of John’s daughter Margaret and her husband Levi Smith. Margaret preceded John in death and John must have lost contact with her husband and granddaughter. Nothing was given to Levi, and Serena did not claim her inheritance. George was the executor of John’s will, which shows a generous distribution of his wealth, and ample funds to provide handsomely for his widow Mary Gregg.

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John’s Estate

According to the 1880 Selected U.S. Federal Census Non-Population Schedules, the farm’s value four years after John’s death was $13,770: a total composed of land, $9,000; farm implements, $500; livestock, $2,400; and farm production in storage, $1,870. (Consider that in 2013, John’s 360 acres would be worth at least $8,250 per acre, for a total value in excess of $3.0 million.)

The census schedules show that the farm paid its help $500 year, which at the era’s farm labor rates of $13.90 per month, plus board (meals) indicates that they had three full-time farm hands.148 John’s farm was in the upper quartile of farm asset values in the 1880 farm census. The John Cochran farm had the sixth highest farm asset value of the 183 farmers listed in Round Prairie township in the 1870 census, and the fifth largest farm asset value of the 188 farmers in the township in 1880. His financial success was a remarkable achievement, especially when you know that back in 1825 his annual wage in Ireland was £4, or translated into 2013 dollars, $145 per year.¹⁴⁹ He had clearly made a better life for his family and himself in America.

John is a classic example of how America provided opportunities to break away from the bonds of lower-class origins in the Old Country. After his early months of primitive frontier living, John soon distinguished himself as a leader through his rapid material progress and the political offices to which he was elected. In America he discovered social status was no longer tied to family pedigree, but was available to families who had always enjoyed those privileges (along with land and political control) was abandoned in America and “a shift had been to that of individual achievement. One’s own strength of will, self-control, inward determination, were now the primary factors determining status in a community.”¹⁵⁰ John’s initiative, hard work, sacrifice, and endurance through hardships (his dourness) made him a perfect match for the challenges of frontier America and earned him the respect of his community.

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John Gregg Cochran

John and Mary’s son, John Gregg Cochran, lived on the Cochran farm all his life. As stipulated in John’s will, he was given its management upon his father’s death.¹⁵¹ John G. continued to expand the original Cochran farming operation by buying more land and taking on debt. On September 16, 1892, five years after Mary Gregg’s death, John G. was forced by creditors to downsize his holdings. At his death in 1912, John G. was farming just forty acres, and those were thanks only to the generosity of his half-brother, George Cochran. Unfortunately, maintaining and expanding John Cochran’s initial 360 acres was too much of a financial challenge for the young John G. He tried to expand his father’s operation and failed miserably. At the height of his holdings, he owned 520 acres of land, meaning he purchased another 160 acres of land after his father’s death.

Farming conditions in this period were challenging. “Every year, the prices farmers received for their crops seemed to fall. Corn fell from $.41/bushel in 1874 to $.30 in 1897…. Facing high interest rates of upwards of 10% per year, many farmers found it impossible to pay off their debt.”¹⁵² That was the case for John G., who by 1891 had $15,000 of debt and $20,000 of farming assets. In spite of a positive net worth of $5,000, he could not maintain the operation’s cash flow and was forced by his creditors to liquidate.

In 1893, his farm operation was the first recorded farm auction (bankruptcy) in Jefferson County. In that auction, George stepped in and bought the original 210 acre farm in Round Prairie township from John G.’s creditors for $2,295; he held the land until 1899, when he sold it for $4,625, doubling his initial investment. Before the 1899 sale, he gave John G. forty acres of the land, including the area of the original John Cochran homestead. John G. died in 1912, at sixty-seven years of age, from sclerosis of the liver.

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John Cochran’s Legacy

The legacy of John Cochran is not the material wealth he left in his estate, although it was significant. His true legacy to his descendants was his character—a character formed by his Scotch-Irish heritage and forged by the fires of his challenging pioneer life.

A good man struggling with hardships, and encompassed by danger and difficulty…is a sight which gives lessons to the men and women of the future …. Education in the school of adversity is hard, but good. It teaches us to fight the great battle of life; to know ourselves, and form a proper estimate of our powers of endurance, our strength and our self-reliance.¹⁵³

John Cochran’s legacy is visible in many examples of future generations that exhibit his ambition, perseverance, self-reliance, service, compassion, and especially his dedication to and love for family. My dad, for instance, was a shining example of these qualities. He was deeply interested in his ancestry and found both inspiration and pride in it.

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Conclusion

I am thankful for this opportunity to explore deep into the figurative well of our ancestral history and focus on John Cochran, “a tiny star in the dark depths” who through further examination emerges as big as life. The stories of friends and family, a wealth of books, and Google have all placed definitive marks on these pages of his history. I allowed my imagination to weave together connecting threads. My goal has been to describe, perhaps even experience, a figure significant to who I am and where I began — “a source of character and story alike.”

In closing, it is important for the current generation of Cochran descendants to reflect on John’s record of frontier boldness and ambition and carry his lessons into our lives. First, his story reveals a legacy of dourness, the capacity to seek out and accept life’s challenges and hardships and then do our best to master them, or at the minimum, accept difficulties and make them work for our lives. Opportunities are only found through openness and we grow through determination. Grief following the death of loved ones, or paralytic stroke, or debilitating illness don’t bring us down—they are transformed into new platforms from which we forge a viable life. Second, John’s choices show the value of family, how prioritizing those closest to us guides our time commitments and demonstrates our personal affection and generosity. Third, John was a sterling example of being well integrated into the community. He did his part to make it a better place, assuming an active role in politics and civic leadership. Finally, faith, both God-fearing and God-directed, is a source of guidance and enrichment in our lives.

I see these values as our building blocks, as the tangible legacies of John Cochran’s stories that are foundational in our lives. In this final chapter about John Cochran, we come face-to-face with who we are. In the words of T. S. Eliot, “To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”¹⁵⁴ And so we start, with this history as a roadmap. The past we inherit, and the future we create. I wish you God’s blessings and speed.

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POSTSCRIPT

On the June 2013 morning of the Cochran family picnic at our farm in rural Fairfield, Iowa, my sister Sarah and I were at the kitchen table in the farmhouse as the sun shone brightly into the room. I sat in my dad’s chair looking out the window at the century-old barn displaying the words “Cochran Farm 1877” painted in black on a white signboard. The red barn richly contrasted against the dark green of the sprouting bean field and the gleaming silver of the windmill stationed in its machine-planted rows.

On this particular morning, I’m thinking of my late father, who in the last thirty years of his life got so much enjoyment from this scene. My sister Sarah is sitting across the table from me reviewing the manuscript of this book. She remarks, “Wouldn’t Dad have loved every minute of this!” We both knew about Dad’s love of our family history and how much his participation in our research and writing would have been a pleasure to him.

I regret that I didn’t start this project twelve or fifteen years ago when he was still alive and counseling me to do so. At the time I was committed to my job and too preoccupied to listen to him, but in retrospect I know he was right. I imagine the great enjoyment the two of us would have found in sharing every new discovery as I researched the life of John Cochran. Then, to top it off, the added joy in sharing the experience and photo journal of my trip to John Cochran’s homestead in Largymore townland in County Donegal, Ireland. Wow, that would have been an incredible experience for the two of us!

Without further thought, I got up from his chair at the table and took from my knapsack a plastic Ziploc bag filled with a sample of soil I collected at the Cochrane farm in Ireland. I drove to Dad’s gravesite at Evergreen Cemetery on the edge of town. There I used a tablespoon to dig a shallow hole above his burial place and deposited the Irish soil. Covering it with the grave’s topsoil, I tamped it gently with my foot so as to secure my gift. I had taken a tangible step in realizing my soul’s desire. Over time, I’ll watch to see if the Irish clover of our Cochrane Largymore field begins to bloom from his grave. In my mind’s eye, I can see Dad smiling.

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NOTES

Dedication and Preface

1. Yeats, 96.
2. Mangan, 146.

Introduction

3. Metzner, 268.
4. Cochran, 1.
5. 1 Corinthians 13:12 (NIV,2285).
6. Gombrich, 2.

Chapter 1

7. T. Wright, 20.
8. Orr, 360.
9. Karr 1942, 2.
10. McKee, 55a.
11. Orr, 322.
12. Hunter-Blair, 13.
13. Burns 2001, 314.
14. Orr, 300.
15. Manning, 75.
16. Ulster, 3-6. 17. Manning, 76.
17. Manning, 78.
18. Ulster, 3-6.
19. Mac Cuinneagain, 302–3.
20. Manning, 290.
21. Ulster, 3-6.
22. Orr, 360.
23. Leyburn, xvi.
24. Bell, 163
25. Hanna, 507.
26. McKee, 59.
27. Abbott, 8.
28. Leyburn, 48.
29. Burns 2007, 255.
30. Leyburn, 27.
31. Leyburn, 67.
32. Leyburn, 15–16.
33. Devine 2011, 5–6.
34. Devine 2011, 48.
35. Devine 2004, 48.
36. Devine 2004, 326.
37. Johnson, 1.
38. Burns 2001, 313.
39. Kelly, 75.
40. Fitzgerald, 129.
41. Leyburn, 115.

Chapter 2

43. Moloney, 9.
44. Mac Cuinneagain, vii-viii.
45. Day, 64–5.
46. Burns 2007, 139.
47. Crawford, 55.
48. Orr, 322.
49. Orr, 382.
50. Manning, 99.
51. Day, 104.
52. Manning, 64–5.
53. Mac Cuinneagain, 62.
54. Herity 2000, 104.
55. O’Donavan and Herity, 111.
56. St. Cartha and St. Matthews Churches, 1–2.
57. Parson, 4.
58. Fairfield Daily Ledger, 7.
59. O’Donavan and Herity, 111.
60. Belfast Newsletter, 4.
61. Orr, 360.
62. Manning, 290.
63. McBrearty, 126.
64. Gombrich, 2.
65. Fairfield Daily Ledger, 7.
66. O’Donavan and Herity, 111.
67. S. Love, 7.
68. Lewis, 117.
69. Atlay, 433.

Chapter 3

70. Whyte, 22.
71. Baines, 301.
72. Fitzgerald, 22.
73. Kelly, 88.
74. Karr, 4.
75. Garavaglia, 49.
76. Abbott, 9–12, 18–19.
77. Berry, 171.
78. Orr, 170–71.
79. Fitzgerald, 27.
80. Fitzgerald, 30.
81. Atlay, 433.
82. Karr, 4.
83. Karr, 8.

Chapter 4

84. Moloney, 9.
85. DeMay, 1.
86. Hill, 62.
87. Hill, 18.
88. Hill, 138–39,
89. Hill, 139.
90. Hill, 290.
91. Hill, 291.
92. Hill, 285.
93. Orr, 323.
94. Orr, 323.
95. Karr, 7.
96. Orr, 300.
97. M. Love, 1.
98. Orr, 382.
99. Orr, 384.
100. Orr, 382–83.
101. Orr, 354–65.
102. Orr, 390.
103. Hill, 207.
104. Orr, 304.
105. Orr, 407–8.
106. Orr, 342.
107. Fulton, 152.
108. de Tocqueville, 326.

Chapter 5

109. Wall, 78.
110. NIV, 390.
111. Frost, 348.
112. Slinger, 51.
113. R. Wright, 34.
114. Faragher, 63.
115. Scovel, 1870 Iowa State Almanac, 4.
116. Wall, xvi.
117. Scovel, Events Leading to the Blackhawk War, 3.
118. Prell, 3.
119. Scovel, Helpful Hints for Steamboat Passengers, 4.
120. Scovel, Helpful Hints for Steamboat Passengers, 4.
121. Scovel, Teamster Guide to Iowa, 1–2.
122. Whitaker, 1.
123. Lea, 42.
124. Western Historical Company, 352.
125. Douglass, 55–56.
126. Scovel, Teamster Guide to Iowa, 1–2.
127. S. Love, 4–5.
128. Western Historical Company, 351–53.
129. Taylor, 369.
130. Gates 1968, 159.
131. Fulton 1914, 63.
132. Western Historical Company, 358.
133. Western Historical Company, 360–61.
134. Adams, 17.

Chapter 6

135. O’Donohue, 4.
136. McGuire, 157.
137. Webb, 151.
138. Hough, vi.
139. Burns 2001, 380.
140. Schweider 2013.
141. de Tocqueville, 55. Chapter 7
142. Casey, 305.
143. Newell, 59.
144. Scovel, 1870 Iowa State Almanac, 16.
145. de Tocqueville, 73.
146. Fairfield Daily Ledger, 7.
147. Fairfield Daily Ledger, 7.
148. Lebergott, 470.
149. Fitzgerald, 27.
150. Leyburn, 269.
151. Western Historical Company, 358.
152. Casey, 305.
153. T. Wright, 20.
154. Eliot, 58.

Postscript

155. Berry, 201.

Appendix A

156. Kilcar Parish Register, 2–3.
157. Campbell, 10.
158. McBrearty, 142.
159. McBrearty, 126.
160. Herity 1998, 2.
161. Herity 1998, 4.
162. Harte, 1.

Appendix B

163. Fulton, 63.

Appendix D

164. Orr, 384.

.

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