Catharine Bussard, my 2nd great-grandmother, was born in 1853 in Ohio, the third child of Joshua and Rebecca (Riegel) Bussard. Joshua and Rebecca were married in 1846 in Ohio, and in 1848 Joshua paid $211.49 for 157.83 acres of “Miami Canal Lands” in Brown Township, Darke County, Ohio, land that he and his family would live on for the rest of his life. In 1850, Joshua, Rebecca and their eldest two daughters Mary and Elizabeth were living in Brown Township, Darke County, Ohio, Joshua was farming. The 1860 census located Joshua, Rebecca, Mary, Elizabeth, Catharine, Martha, Susannah and Loretta still residing in Brown Township; Joshua was still a farmer. The early 1860s must have been particularly difficult for the Bussard family, as Elizabeth, aged 11, died in November 1860, Susanna and Martha, aged 2 and 4 respectively, died in December 1860, and Mary, aged 15, died in October 1862. Cincinnati and southern Ohio were particularly affected by a cholera epidemic during that time; it is possible that the girls succumbed to that disease, or possibly to one of the many influenza epidemics that spread through the United States during that time.
In 1870, Catharine was still living with her parents and siblings Loretta, John and Joshua in Brown Township; her father was still farming. Many years later her obituary would tell: “Catharine…was educated in the local public schools and the Ansonia High School. For several years she taught in the public schools in her community. She was converted in early life and joined the Webster Chapel Methodist Church two miles west of Rossburg, Ohio and was active in Sunday school and church work. In addition to her work as a Sunday school teacher, she was secretary of the Missionary and Bible Society. Catharine made a house-to-house canvass of Brown Township selling and giving away Bibles. Very few homes in Brown Township were without a Bible.” Catharine was married at the age of twenty-six years on New Year’s Day, 1880, to William Henry McEowen, also an Ohio native. I’m in possession of William and Catharine’s “diary and records” book, and in the “marriages” section of their book, they wrote that they were married “at the residence of the bride’s parents in Brown Township, Darke County, Ohio.” When the census was taken in 1880, William and Catharine were living in Allen Township, Darke County, Ohio, where William was employed as a laborer and Catharine was “keep[ing] house”. Catharine had eight children; her eldest child, Flora, was born in January 1881 and died in September 1881, of whooping cough. She next had a son Jesse in 1882, and another son Elmer in 1885. Catharine’s mother Rebecca died in 1885, when Catharine was thirty-one years old. William and Catharine’s brother John Bussard together bought 60 acres of land on Hiestand Road in Allen Township, Darke County, Ohio in 1886. Their wives, William’s Catherine and John’s Georgia, signed the property and mortgage documents to “hereby release their right and expectancy of dower in the said premises.” According to my cousin Roger, who visited the property many times in his childhood, at the time they purchased it, the farm “consisted of a log house, a large barn with an attached tobacco shed, a tobacco strip shed, and a small hen house.” More children were born: Martha in 1887, Orlando in 1889, Everett in 1892, Vergil (my great-grandfather) in 1894, and Orpha in 1896.
When the census was taken in 1900, William, Catherine and their seven children were living on the farm in Allen Township, Darke County, Ohio. When Catharine’s father died in 1901, she was listed as one of his heirs at law, residing in Hagerman, Ohio. (This community near Rossburg, Ohio, is now known as Hagemans Crossing.) In 1901, William and Catharine bought John Bussard’s share of the farm, likely because John inherited part of or all of his father’s farm at his death. William and Catharine’s fifth child, Orlando, died in 1905 at the age of only fifteen years. His obituary tells only that he “met with death through accident,” but a small news item in another paper on another day told that he “was drowned last Sunday in a gravel pit on the Replogle farm, east of Lightsville.” In that part of the country, far from any natural lakes or ponds, young people would often go swimming in gravel pits in their leisure time, and Orlando had probably swum there dozens if not hundreds of times before without incident.
The 1910 census located William, still farming, Catharine, Martha, Everett, Virgil and Orpha residing together in Allen Township. They built a new two-story home on their farm in 1912, and the old log house was torn down. In 1913, the McEowens lost their daughter Martha, when she was only twenty-six years old. Her obituary, long and filled with hundreds of adjectives and many poetry quotations, does not give the cause of her death, but my cousin Roger, who would have been Martha’s grandnephew, found her death certificate in his exhaustive research and reported that Martha died of tuberculosis. [For further reading about how tuberculosis has ruled the world with an iron fist for centuries, and how it has shaped human history more than pretty much anything else, I can highly recommend John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis.] The less flowery portions of Martha’s obituary tell: “…She completed the common school course of study with honor. As a dutiful and affectionate daughter early in her teens she began to relieve her mother of as many cares and tasks as she could… Her health began to fail about a year ago…” My cousin Roger wrote: “It is my personal opinion [that] this tragedy broke my great-grandmother’s heart, as she became ill a short time later.” Catharine never recovered from the death of her daughter; perhaps it was one tragedy too many in her life filled with loss. When she was seven, she lost three of her four sisters, then the fourth sister when she was eight years old. She lost her firstborn child at the age of twenty-seven years. She lost her mother when she was thirty-one, then her last surviving sister when she was thirty-two. Her father died when she was forty-seven. Her son Orlando died when she was fifty-one, and her daughter Martha when she was sixty. Then she spent a decade unable to rise from bed even to care for herself. No wonder she had a stroke.
In 1920 William and Catharine were living on their farm in Allen Township, Darke County, Ohio. Neither reported an occupation. Catharine died at the age of seventy years in 1924 of a paralytic stroke. Her obituary told: “Twelve years ago her health began to fail. For the past ten years she has been unable to care for herself.” She died ten years and one month after her daughter Martha. Catharine’s husband William was living with his daughter and son-in-law Orpha and Frank Hiestand in 1930; and in 1940 with his son Elmer McEowen. William died in 1944 at the age of eighty-six years, from pneumonia.
Catherine’s eldest son Jesse became a woodworker and moved to Indianapolis, Indiana when he was still quite young, and spent the rest of his life there, raising a family and working in the city. Everett, a salesman and eventually a barber, lived and worked in Miami County, Ohio, where he also had a family. Vergil, my great-grandfather, became a teacher and later worked in industry in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he raised his family and spent the rest of his life. Thus, it fell to Elmer to run the family farm when William could no longer do it. Elmer had two children, Lowell and Mildred, and Lowell had four children, the eldest of whom was Roger Lowell McEowen, my second cousin once removed. Elmer, Lowell and Roger all occupied and ran the family farm, not always as their only source of income, but they were all very familiar with it. Before his death in 2023, Roger shared his memories of the farm frequently via a personal connection with the Greenville Advocate newspaper in Greenville, Ohio. One of his memoirs follows:
“How well I remember the huge garden by the side of the house. In the summer it would teem with all the basic vegetables used for eating fresh and canning. Peas, green beans, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, sweet corn, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, peppers, turnips, beets, carrots, and melons would flourish in this well fertilized ground. There were the old standby crops such as asparagus, horseradish, rhubarb and ground cherries. Through the center of the garden was a long two wire grape arbor. On this arbor were about four different varieties of grapes. Purple Concord was the most prominent variety. My favorite for eating were the small Red Delaware which were usually off-limits, as there was only one vine and it would produce a small crop. Fruit trees such as apple, cherry, plum, peach and pear were grown in the yard and orchard. Of course, there were strawberries, gooseberries and raspberries in the garden also. Years ago, the garden and pantry were relied on for food instead of the grocery store.”
Though Roger, born in 1934, did not know his great-grandmother Catherine, undoubtedly she was originally the one who planned this garden he remembered so well, and until her final decade-long illness, she likely planted it, cared for it, harvested it and preserved the food she had grown for many years. When Roger sold the farm and orchards after he retired, he made a hobby of grafting several kinds of fruit onto the two small trees he kept in his suburban backyard. When we visited him there in about 2005, he picked apples, pears, peaches and plums to share from a single tree, and showed my children where they could pick raspberries, blackberries and strawberries from the bushes near the fence in his backyard.
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