Mary Elisabeth’s story; Harvey Newton Fox & Margaret Ayres Fox, continued -

 

First they  went to western Pennsylvania, then to Ohio, and finally the Ayres and Fox families converged on Warren County, Ohio – in the north-western corner of the state. From there, both Harvey Newton Fox and Margaret Ayres went to the Baptist Liberal Arts College of Hillsdale, Michigan. There they met, graduated (Margaret majored in mathematics), and later married. Harvey went on to medical school at the University of Cincinnati, at the time of the Civil War. Having acquired his M.D., he settled in Wyoming, Illinois, just south of Chicago.

 

But, after retiring, he moved on west to the pioneer agricultural area of Kearney, Nebraska and invested in farming properties. Margaret became an early president of the Kearney Women’s Club – and so took her place in the Feminist Movement.

 

Meanwhile (Ella) Grace Hobstetter grew up in rural Iowa, near Cedar Rapids. She was the oldest girl in the family, and after high school graduation was a teacher in a rural school. She was also the family dressmaker, and had a flair for millinery. So, when her younger sister, Allie, at an early age, married Harry Small, a rising pharmacist, and moved with him to Kearney, Neb. – she gave up teaching and ran (or worked in ) a millinery shop in this small town.

 

Fred Fox (the Grandad Fox you knew) had, meanwhile, gone to Hillsdale College, and graduated the year of the Chicago World’s Fair. After working all summer pushing visitors in wheeled chairs, he was urged to come out to Kearney, were his father had a fine job for him. He was to work in the local bank – for the first year on NO salary! This was what they called “learning the business”

 

The local young people had a very active group, of which we have some pictures in the album. Here Fred & Grace met and became engaged. When they were married (1900), Harvey Newton (Fox) invested in a grain elevator in Tipton, Indiana, and the young people set up housekeeping there in February. The locale was, no doubt, chosen because a family friend from Wyoming, Ill., was a banker there – Fred Davis. The small cottage in which I was born, was across the street from the Davis home, on Independence Street.

 

There is one more colorful character in the family annals whom I don’t want to leave unmentioned. This was Margaret Ayres Fox’s brother, William Ayres, who was a bachelor, and later lived his declining years with Margaret and Harvey. Uncle Willie was a stagecoach driver on the Leavenworth to Dodge City, Kansas run for many years.

 

There was also an Ayres relative, Porter, who went out to California in 1850 to seek his fortune in the Gold Fields. He was an uncle of Margaret’s, but, although he lived in California for 8 years, he never found the fortune.

 

One of the values of this autobiographical account, as I see it, is to record a picture of a much simpler, less sophisticated, and slower-paced lifestyle than you, or any or your descendants will know. The technological and scientific developments that have taken place in my lifetime are unbelievable. As a small example – we have an anatomy text book that your Great-grand-father, Harvey Newton Fox, used in medical school, which would be about what an 8th grade student would get today. And, of course, your father and I have seen the coming of automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, computers, vacuums, dish-washers, washing machines, dryers – to say nothing of organ transplants, genetic engineering, mechanized agriculture, etc., etc.

 

 

 

Roots; that which helps to account for all that came later...

Connections. The ties that bind the past to the present, and beyond. Our Grandmother, Mary Elisabeth, has provided me with a strong beginning to the continuing, although not necesarily linear, narrative that is a story of our family.

Mary Elisabeth was born January 24th, 1904, & died March 24th, 2000. She had both intelligence and class. We miss her tremendously.

Mary Elisabeth Fox Quibell, Part 1, written 10/1991 - in her own words:

Mary Elisabeth Fox: her BOOK (1904-1931) or “More than you want to know about her growing up years”

INTRODUCTION

I am definitely a W.A.S.P.

My Fox ancestors came from England (with some French admixture, possibly). My Hobstetter ancestors all came from Germany – Hesse-Darmstadt, and Bavaria.

The German family came over after the 1848 upheavals, and apparently went directly to Iowa. Both of my grandparents were born in this country, but had older brothers and sisters who had been born in Germany.

The Fox line - in this country - started with George, the younger, who came to New Jersey in 1704. He was the great-nephew of the George Fox who founded the Quakers. His son, Absalom, married one Christiana Bonham, one of whose forbears came over on the Mayflower. The Bonham family has long roots, probably going back to a French village (no longer in existence) by the name of Bon Homme. So if, at some future date, anyone wants membership in a Society of the Mayflower, the lineage can be traced in the Library of Congress.

Similarly, if (perish the thought) anyone wants to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, she

can probably do so through David Fox, who was a captain in the 1st Regiment, Company 4 of the Pennsylvania (?) State Militia. David would have been a great-great grandfather of Harvey Newton Fox (Granddad Fox’s father). I don’t have his birthdate, but his wife was born in 1767, and he was probably older at the time of the American Revolution. At that time I believe the state militia were the first sent into the fray.

On the Ayres (Ayers) side of Granddad Fox’s family, the first record is from an account book of a trading post in the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania area. This would have put it at the crossing of the Alleghenies, where Daniel Ayres, the one of whom was the grandfather of Margaret Ayres Fox (Grandad Fox’s mother). The account book makes good reading. The chief items sold were whiskey and axes. This was the period when there were no roads to the coastal markets. So if a man raised a crop of corn his simplest method of marketing it was to distill it into whiskey. I think the farmers, with their concealed stills, ran a running battle with the “revenooers”, who were trying to collect taxes on the liquor .

From Daniel’s son, Samuel (who was 3 mos. old when his father settled in eastern Pennsylvania) the movement was steadily westward. In this way our family’s progress mirrored that of the nation.