I was born March 25, 1865, on a farm three miles east of the village of Kirkville, Richland Township, Wapello County, Iowa. I was the seventh of my mother's ten children, and the tenth of my father's, for he had three children by an earlier marriage. My ancestors had all been countryfolk, though my father, John Henry Carver, had, as a youth, served an apprenticeship as a steamboat carpenter at Brownsville, Pennsylvania. He practiced carpentry for a while in southern Indiana but finally, in 1846, moved to Iowa and took up farming.

My father and mother were both born in Harrison County, Ohio, but they never met until after they came to Iowa. My grandfather Carver died leaving a wife and three small children, of whom my father was the second. The oldest, Elizabeth Ann, married Thomas Nixon, for whom I was named. The Nixons left no children. My father's younger brother, James Millison Carver, also served an apprenticeship as a steamboat carpenter and remained a mechanic and planing mill operator all his life.

After my grandfather Carver's death, near Freeport, Ohio, my grandmother took her three small children back to her childhood home in Washington County, Pennsylvania, where they grew up. Her maiden name was Abigail Millison, and the Millison farm was the only childhood home that my father remembered. It was not until he was well along toward middle life that he again got in touch with his Carver relatives, who, by that time, were numerous and widely scattered.

My mother, Margaret Jane Bartow, was born near the town of Scio, Ohio. She, like my father, lost her father early in life. Thus I never saw either of my grandfathers, although both my grandmothers lived to advanced ages and I saw a great deal of them. Grandmother Bartow lived with us for many years, alternating between our home and that of my uncle "Lige" Bartow. In those days it was expected, as a matter of course, that aged people, when too old to live alone, would live with their children or grandchildren.

Elijah Bartow (uncle "Lige") became the mainstay of the family after my grandfather, Zenas Bartow's death. When he became of age and was entitled to take up government land, uncle "Lige" migrated to the Iowa territory, going by steamboat from Steubenville on the Ohio River to St. Louis, and then on to Keokuk, Iowa. He steeled on land near the town of Lynnville, Jasper County, where he spent the rest of his life, except for a few years in Newton, the county seat, as county treasurer. The rest of the family, including my mother, soon joined him and lived on the Bartow farm until they married.

I never learned just how my father and mother first met. I did learn that my father used to buy hogs from farmers over a rather wide area. When he had collected a considerable number he would drive them on foot to Keokuk from which point they were carried by steamboat to Cincinnati which was then nicknamed "Porkopolis," being the center of the pork packing industry. In the course of his hog-buying excursions, my father used rather frequently to visit the Bartow farm in Jasper County, and most of the courting was done on these visits, a combination of romance with more practical matters.

My father was of a stocky build, with a broad back and large muscles. My mother was quite tall. In early life she was slender and willowy but later took on more queenly proportions. My father's complexion was dark, with almost coal black hair and beard until they began to turn gray. His hair was so curly as to be almost kinky. My mother's complexion was fair, and her hair was her one vanity. It was naturally wavy, light brown, and very long. she dressed it carefully every day, combing it out straight with a wet comb, parting it in the middle, and tying it in a large knot at the back of her head. As soon as it got dry it waved beautifully without artificial help.

Our branch of the Carver tribe had settled first in North Carolina, I believe somewhere near Winston-Salem but I am not certain. On my first introduction to Dean LeBaron R. Briggs of Harvard, he asked me somewhat eagerly if I was not an Old Colony man--meaning a Cape Codder. I had to admit that I wasn't. There are various Carvers who think they are descended from John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth, but there is no record of his having left any children. The New England Carvers seem to be descended from another Carver who settled in Marshfield, Massachusetts, in 1621. There was also a Carver in William Penn's first shipload of colonists who settled Philadelphia, from whom many of the Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia Carvers seem to have been descended. I am not of that stock.

When I first met Dr. George Washington Carver, the famous Negro chemist, he inquired about my ancestors, thinking that possibly some of them may have owned his ancestors. That seems not to have been the case. My Carver ancestors were Quakers and opposed to slavery.

Tradition has it that our first American ancestor was one of the Hessian mercenaries who accompanied the British armies against which our American soldiers fought in the War of Independence. There were also Hessian mercenaries in Rochambeau's army who fought on our side. I do not know on which side my ancestor fought. At any rate, the story goes that after the war, he, like a good many other Hessians, decided to remain in this country. He settled in North Carolina.

Some shyster lawyers have been trying to line their pockets by telling persons who bear the Carver name that they have a claim to the land on which the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are located. This claim is alleged to be based on a treaty with the Indians made at the Falls of St. Anthony by Captain Jonathan Carver of the Connecticut Colony in the course of his explorations in the Northwest. I have had several communications on the subject but have paid no attention to them, as the whole scheme is obviously fraudulent.

Our family has been more inclined to migrate than to remain settled. Starting in North Carolina most of them have now reached California by way of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Iowa. We have been a part of the great westward migration which peopled the continent. This restless, "itching foot" of my nomadic ancestors has impelled me to visit each of our 48 states in at least 17 trans-continental trips by auto.

After the ordinance of 1787 which forbade slavery in the then new Northwest Territory, there was an exodus of Quakers from Virginia and the Carolinas into what is now Southern Ohio. My great-grandfather, John Henry Carver, with his family, including my grandfather (also name John Henry), joined that exodus. They came northward, following the valleys until they reached the old National Pike, and then turned westward to the Ohio country. On this trip westward through Washington County, Pennsylvania, young John Henry met Abigail Millison. The details of their courtship I never learned, but I learned that after a few years, when he had a house, probably a log house, and some cleared land, he went back to Washington County, was married to Abigail, and brought her on horseback to Ohio. As state earlier, he died young, leaving her with three small children which she took back to her father's farm in Pennsylvania.

As might be inferred from the above, the Carvers and the Millisons were Quakers. A few years after her return to Pennsylvania, Abigail Millison Carver married again, this time outside the Quaker church. She was then, after a rule of the Quakers of that time, expelled from the church. She took her children with her into the Methodist church, the church of her new husband, Samuel Ashmead. We children always knew her as Grandma Ashmead and him as Grandpap Ashmead. I never knew Grandfather Ashmead, as he died before I was old enough to remember him.

Sometime after my father came to Iowa, the Ashmead family, including grandfather, grandmother and several Ashmead children, followed and settled in Jefferson County, Iowa, not far from Libertyville. Their farm was about thirty miles from ours, a comfortable day's drive when the prairie roads were good. There were frequent visits back and forth. By frequent visits I mean about once a year, usually in the autumn when work on the farms was not pressing and the roads were dry.

From the accounts which I heard and from the local reputation which he left behind, Grandfather Ashmead was an excellent and successful farmer and a highly respected citizen. Like a great many other excellent farmers and good citizens of his day, he had very little schooling, and never compensated for that lack by private study or practice in writing. In other words, he was almost illiterate. He could read and write, but never learned to spell or to express himself grammatically.

My father, a generation later, had only three months' schooling, but he seems to have made good use of it. I heard him say that he and his brother and sister frequently arrived at the schoolhouse on cold winter mornings while the stars were still shining. He had an active mind and became a great reader. He also wrote a better hand than any of his children, grandchildren or great- grandchildren ever succeeded in doing. He learned to write while an apprentice by practicing with a pencil on smooth pieces of board.

The fact that he wrote a good hand and could not only spell but write grammatical English made him automatically, in early days, the secretary of most public meetings in our neighborhood. Later, after he became a man of som local importance, especially after he had served two terms in the state legislature in the early seventies, he was generally called upon to preside at such meetings.

My brother Charles has in his prossession the minutes of several church meetings, held in the town of Eddyville, a few miles west of Kirkville, written in my father's highly legible hand. Among the minutes is a record of the organization of the Kirkville branch of the Eddyville circuit of the Methodist church. A little later the Kirkville circuit was organized, and the minutes, also in my father's hand, record a number of interesting episodes in local church history.

In our home there was always as much reading matter as a busy farm family had time to read. There were no daily papers available in my early youth, but, as far back as I can remember, we always took the Ottumwa "Weekly Courier," the "Central Christian Advocate," "Harper's Weekly," "The Hearth and Home," "The Prairie Farmer" and one or two monthly magazines, besides at least one children's magazine. Among these were "the Schoolday Visitor," "Our Boys and Girls," and "The Golden Hours." Later "The Youth's Companion" and "St. Nicholas" were both taken and read greedily.

As evidence of my father's thirst for knowledge he spent his spare time during the last six years of his life reading Chamber's Encyclopedia, and finished it before he died. He was then living in Los Angeles, the home of so many retired Iowa farmers. He busied himself about the garden as much as his declining strength would permit. He would take frequent rests in an easy chair under a pepper tree if the weather was good, and spend the time reading with the aid of a large reading glass. He thus realized on oh his great ambitions, that of reading the whole of the Encyclopedia which had been in the home for many years, which he had always wanted to finish, but never had time to do while running a farm.

My mother had had a little more schooling than my father, but not much. She had even taught a country school for a short time before her marriage, but the educational standards of that time were not high. She was also an omnivorous reader and was one of the best informed persons I ever met on contemporary American history, especially the history of the slavery controversy and the Civil War. Her interests ran somewhat toward poetry and romance also, but she always respected, but did not share, my father's prejudice against novels. She never read any encyclopedia through.

One may wonder how a farmer's wife with a large family and several hired men to care for could have found time to read so much. Counted by pages, I suspect that her reading would now be considered somewhat meager. But when she had time she read hungrily and seemed to remember what she read. Besides, there was not much trashy reading then available.

Our library was considered large by the neighboring farmers, whose ideas on such subjects were not high. I doubt if there were a hundred books in the house, but they were mostly on serious subjects. The ones I remember best were mainly about the Civil War, though there was a life of Napoleon which I read in part. The only poetry I remember to have been included were Milton's "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," and Young's "Night Thoughts." The latter I remember to have contained a good many quotable bits of wisdom, but I never got much else out of it. Quite early I read and reread the first part of "Paradise Lost" but never got very far into it. I got lost in the mazes of its Christian mythology.

During the Civil War my parents subscribed for "Harper's Weekly." Each number was profusely illustrated with battle and marching scenes and pictures of the leading personalities of the period. Mother carefully saved every number and bound them in yearly volumes. They were preserved for many years and literally worn out my much handling and lending. I used to lie on my stomach by the hour, pouring over one or another of these volumes spread open before me. Years afterward I read that "Harper's" had republished many of those illustrations, using the original cuts, in a two-volume history of the Civil War. About 1925 I saw worn copies of those two volumes in a second-hand bookstore in Boston. I bought them and still have them.

Among the other much read books in my father's library were a well illustrated "History of the Great Rebellion," but I have forgotten the author's name; "My Days and Nights on the Battlefield," by a writer named Carleton; "Parson Brownlow's Book," "Daring and Suffering, or the Great Railroad Adventure" by Wm. Pittenger, a participant in an attempt by a group of Union soldiers to steal a railroad train near Atlanta, race it to Chattanooga, burning bridges and destroying tracks on the way. The late John Buchan included this story in his volume of thrillers called "Great Escapes and Hurried Journeys." There was also a large volume called "A History of the United States Secret Service," by Baker, which contained, among other things a detailed account of the assassination of President Lincoln, and the pursuit and killing of Booth. These volumes I read and reread many times.

My parents were deeply religious. Family prayers were never omitted before breakfast, and except in cases of sickness we were never allowed to miss Sunday school and church services. At family prayers Father read a chapter from the Bible and led in prayer. All attended, including the hired men and the hired girl. Father was for many years the Sunday School superintendent, until a younger man was found who was willing to assume the responsibility. It may be difficult for younger generations to imagine how such things could be. That is why I am setting them down in these pages.

After moving to Iowa in 1846, my father combined carpentry with farming for several years. He "took up" 160 acres of government land three miles east of Kirkville but in order to fence it, dig wells, build a house and barn, bread the sod and, in general, create a farm out of raw prairie land, he required both time and money. Meanwhile he had to live. Farming during the farming season, carpentering, hog trading and shipping during the off season occupied his time. Several farm and village houses and a number of barns were built by his labor and skill. I heard him say that he had made the first coffin that went into the Kirkville cemetery.

His work as a steamboat carpenter had all been "inside work" including paneling, window and door fitting, making stairways, setting newel-posts and stair- railings. This was nicer work and required more skill than the outside jobs. He had a large box of fine tools which suffered somewhat from unskilled tinkering by us boys, but he managed to keep them in fairly good condition. He used them in making and repairing things about the farm and the house. There were two well-made gate-legged tables, a handsome bureau, a high-posted bedstead and a cradle in the house, all of black walnut and all made by him. Within my memory, he mad a handsome sleigh and bobsled, several harrows, a device by which a dog, by walking a treadmill, operated a churn for the making of butter. We called it the "dog-churn." It was a labor-saving machine, substituting dog power for human power, but our dog, Fido, never liked it.

Father's first house on his own land was a log cabin. It must have been a sorry affair because I have heard my parents speak of putting everything which rain could injure on the bed during a hard rain and holding umbrellas over them. This cabin was soon discarded for a small frame house and this, in turn, by a larger house, the one in which I was born. The little frame house stood in the backyard for a number of years, serving as a granary and tool shed. I remember looking out of the kitchen window one morning and seeing a number of men and horses hard at work. Pretty soon the horses--there must have been more than a dozen of them--began to pull and the little house began to move. Soon they were out of sight. They were moving the house to another part of the farm where it became the home of a tenant, named Smith Woods, and his family. They had a boy named Selma, near my own age, who was the only playmate I had until I began going to school.

The house in which I was born was considered a good house at the time. It stood facing southward about fifty feet back from the country road.

All the prairie roads, except the old Dragoon Trail, ran straight north and south or east and west. The old Dragoon Trail ran from Fort Madison to Fort Des Moines, roughly paralleling the Des Moines River, skirting the timber and following the edge of the prairie. As this trail was traveled long before the land was surveyed, it remained an important diagonal road across the general checkerboard system of roads. The main street of the village of Kirkville ran diagonally, being a part of that old trail.

The house in which I was born was a story and a half high, with two plastered attic bedrooms. The lower floor was planned to economize space to the maximum. Its general plan and construction resembled what is now known as a Cape Cod house.

The house was painted white, but underneath the paint, the weatherboarding was of black walnut. In that early day everything that was shipped out of Iowa had to be hauled by wagon to some point on the Mississippi River and then shipped by steamboat to St. Louis or Cincinnati. Before the building of the great trunk line railroads, St. Louis was the metropolis of all that region included in the Louisiana Purchase. Later the railroads made Chicago the marketplace for Iowa products. At the same time, everything which the Iowa people bought from the east had to travel westward by the same expensive route. Consequently the Iowa settlers--those who succeeded-- formed the habit of buying nothing that could possibly be got from their farms. There were some large black walnut trees on the north end of Father's farm. he cut them and had them sawed at a sawmill already operating in Kirkville. Hence the black walnut weatherboarding on the house.

Shortly before I was born, a large red barn had been built, the framework of which was of heavy white oak timber. The larger pieces were hewn out with broadaxes. This timber was not grown on the farm but purchased from a man who lived near the Des Moines River. The hewing and framing, however, were done on our farm.

By the time I came on the scene Father had given up all carpenter work except small jobs on his own farm, and was devoting himself to farming. He had bought extra land until the farm included approximately 480 acres. The west line of the farm was a mile and three-quarters long, but the farm was nowhere more than a half mile wide. The north end of the farm lapped over into Mahaska County and was crossed by Cedar Creek, which was skirted by brush and some fairly good timber, mostly walnut, hickory and oak, with some elm, soft maple and basswood.

So long as it drained a grassy prairie region, Cedar Creek was a clear stream, with a few good swimming holes and some small catfish. Later, when all the land came under the plow, the stream became so muddy and clogged that one could have no pleasure in it.

I often heard my parents grow eloquent over the wonderful crops, especially of melons and garden truck which they grew in their first years on that prairie farm. It seems that the enemies of their crops, parasitical, bacterial and otherwise, had not yet caught up with them, so the crops had nothing to do but to grow. Musk melons, one year, were too abundant to give away and too good to be allowed to go to waste, so mother tried to make them into jam or marmalade, probably with no great success, for she never tried it again.

The village of Kirkville lies in the northwest corner instead of the center of Richland Township. Richland is the name of the civil township whose boundaries are almost identical with those of Congressional Township 72 north Range 13 west of the 5th Principal Meridian. The Des Moines River cuts a little off of the southwest corner of the civil township.

the village was named for John W. Kirkpatrick who laid it out as a promising site on the old Dragoon Trail running from Fort Madison to Fort Des Moines. He had, for a time, operated a store and a tavern doing a flourishing business. In my early days, however, the store was run by his nephew, George W. Kirkpatrick and his partner I. E. Page. There was a flourishing grist mill, run by stream, a sawmill, and a mile south of the village there was a coal mine.

The grist mill was operated by three partners named Roop, Eichelberger and Tucker. Roop and Tucker were sons-in-law of a very old man named Remi (pronounces "ray me") who had been a lieutenant in Napoleon's bodyguard. I have listened to some of his accounts of experiences in the famous retreat from Moscow. Later in his career he was captured by the British and put on board a transport. While on the high seas the prisoners managed to overpower the crew and to sail for America, where they arrived in time for him to enlist in Commodore Perry's fleet. He took part in the Battle of Lake Erie. Afterward he settled in this country, enlisted in the Mexican War, and joined a regiment of Graybeard home guard in our Civil War. Enough adventure for a dozen lifetimes!

Most of the families around Kirkville had come from Ohio. Many of them were originally from Northern Ireland, sojourning for a time in Ohio. John W. Kirkpatrick and several brothers were born in Ireland, as were several other older men and their wives, including the Pickens, the Forsyths, the Johnsons and the Thompsons. Other names in our neighborhood were McNair, McLean, McClure, McCune, McCarrol, McFadden, McCulloch, McLaughlin, McDonough, McIntire, McKinley, McGlasson, and McIlheny. It was distinctly a Scotch- Irish neighborhood and should have been predominately Presbyterian, but was about half Methodist--probably as a result of the sojourn in Ohio when the Methodist circuit riders were at the height of their activity.

There were three churches in the village, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Christian (or Campbellite, as it was called by outsiders). There was some rivalry, generally of a friendly nature. Each church tried to give the best Christmas entertainment, and to have the largest addition to the parade to the grove on the Fourth of July. Their greatest rivalry was at the school election. The Presbyterians and Campellites ganged up against the Methodists, which mad the elections about even.

Speaking of the Methodist circuit riders, they were less in evidence in my day than they had been further east and a generation earlier. There were circuits consisting of several village or country churches, but the preachers no longer lived in the saddle. The Kirkville circuit, for example, had a resident minister living in a parsonage belonging to the church. He preached in the Kirkville church every Sunday morning and at the Salem church every Sunday afternoon. Generally, he preached again in Kirkville Sunday evening. The Salem church was in the open country about five miles southeast of Kirkville. Somewhat earlier, before I can remember, another branch of the Kirkville circuit was a Cedar about four miles north of Kirkville. In my day Cedar belonged to the Eddyville circuit.

Fourth of July was taken seriously. There was no brass band but a small fife and drum corps, usually consisting of one, sometimes two fifes, two tenor drums, and one bass drum. Their performers were all Civil War veterans who had fifed or drummed in the Union Army.

Wapello county, and especially Richland Township, had supplied by enlistment more than their quota of soldiers, so that the draft was not needed.

The members of each Sunday school gathered at their own church and marched to the grove lying just back of the school grounds about 10 o'clock on the morning of the Fourth. There a platform had been erected for the speakers and musicians. In front of the platform, seats, consisting of planks laid on low trestles, were erected for the listeners. Prayer was offered by one of the pastors, followed by a hymn and the reading of the Declaration of Independence by some budding elocutionist. One hymn was invariably sung at the opening. I have not been able to find it in any hymnal and I can remember only one verse of it: