EARLY SETTLERS OF BLACK HAWK COUNTY

By H.F. Adams, Prescott, Arizona

    Erasmus D. Adams was born in Maine December 31, 1814. He attended the Methodist Episcopal Wesleyan Seminary and passed in the common English branches in 1832. He came West soon afterward and worked in Cleveland a while at his trade, chair making. Later he taught school for several years in Monmouth, Illinois. In 1841 he was married in Iowa City, Iowa, to Miss Catharine Sturgis, of Sturgis, Michigan (born in 1821), at the home of her brother, William Sturgis. They went to Monmouth, where he taught school a year or more.

    In 1843 they settled on land near Solon, Johnson County, Iowa. Here their first son, John S., was born in June 1844. Early in the next year, 1845, he went to Black Hawk County with his brother-in-law, William Sturgis, who wanted the mill site the trappers told him of, at the "Falls of the Cedar," and which he located later.

    After a careful survey of the country, my father chose land for his claim that suited him better than any place he had ever seen. It was a mile or more southeast of the falls, commencing near the spring in Dry Run, now on the Waterloo road. The line running east took in part of the mouth of Dry Run and a little of the Cedar River. There among the many little springs he saw good building stone, the timber was good with many sugar maple trees and the prairie land south of the timber was rich and of good depth. He built his cabin in the edge of the timber on the south and later had breaking done and hay put up.

    Then the two men returned to Johnson County and, getting their things together, moved up to their cabins at the Falls of the Cedar in September, 1845.

    I remember hearing mother tell of their arrival at the new home, how delighted they were, how father went to the spring for water and brought back a nice fish, how they found in the thickets and woods the different wild fruits and nuts in abundance, also wild honey. The river was alive with fish and easily caught. It was indeed another "land of promise." Then their first winter was mild, the oxen were turned out and lived in the bottoms. Most of the hay was left over.

    But there were drawbacks and hardships to be endured in the years ahead.

    The nearest grist mill, doctor and postoffice were at Cedar Rapids, sixty miles away. There were Indians and large timber wolves prowling around; they had "chills and fever" and lots of mosquitoes.

    In order to have a near neighbor, father, in 1846, gave part of his claim on the west to A.J. Taylor ("Jack" Taylor), his wife being quite a competent nurse. He also let them have a garden spot on land broken the year before. Mr. Taylor told me many years after that he never raised so much on a small piece of land as he did in that garden.

    The last of September, 1846, Jane Sturgis, the first white child, was born in the county. Three days later, October 3d, I was born.

    In the early ‘50s father built an addition to the cabin for a chair shop. I remember well seeing him running the lathe by footpower.

    They made maple sugar every spring, and one year father said they tapped 900 trees with the help of one William Garrison, an ex-soldier, just returned from the war with Mexico. Most of the sugar was taken to Dubuque along with tubs of butter mother had made, the sale of which brought a cook stove with a real oven and doing away with the old bake kettles.

    In 1851 the Town of Cedar Falls was laid out, and the next year father was given a lot on which he built a frame house, into which we moved that fall, 1852. The front room was given up, and father put in some slab benches he made, and Doctor Keeler taught the first school, at least the first I remember of. We were taught to sing the spelling lessons. It was b-a, ba, b-e, be, etc. We thought it great fun and will never forget the tune we spelled it by.

    Father rented space in the mill for his chair shop and did a good business for several years, making enough to pay for his land.

    In 1862 we moved back to the farm into a nice two-story house. In 1870, father’s health failing, they sold out and went to Southwest Missouri.

    In 1891 they went to McAlester, Indian Territory, to live near the only daughter. Mother died there in 1899 in her seventy-eighth year. Father died in 1901, over eighty-six years old.