The Climate Was All That Could Be Desired (Part II)
Posterity and being "settled in the world for yourself."
“James McGinness was a man of great activity in his day,” his grandson John Franklin Meginness wrote in 1891. James, born in Delaware and descended from Irish immigrants, had bought and farmed 106 acres in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for forty-one years. He worked for a time running freight by pack horses over the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh, as well. In 1823, well into his fifties, he was appointed a justice of the peace, an office he held for the rest of his life.
He married three times. His first wife died in 1821 and was buried in a Quaker graveyard. The second, to whom he’d been married no more than a year, died on a visit to his brother in Ohio in 1826—he returned to Pennsylvania with an infant daughter—and the third he married only eight months later, a few days before Christmas.
On April 29, 1837, he sold his farm for $2,000 and purchased a smaller farm, where he lived until he died only two years later, in the late autumn of 1839. His will, filed in the court house of Lancaster County, settled the estate, with which “it hath pleased Divine Providence to bless me in this life.”
To his last wife, Hannah, he left a third of his estate, as well as the provisions of the house, grain for six months, and her choice of a cow. To his five children of his first wife, he left varying amounts, seeing that they were “all married and settled in the world for themselves, and having already received from me as much as my circumstances will admit of,” he wrote.
His daughter Anna, for example, received twenty-five dollars, his son George, fifty dollars. To his son Benjamin, his fifth surviving child, who would have been thirty-six at the time of his father’s death, he left one dollar.
When we last left Benjamin Meginness, the first of several misfortunes had struck. A road had been plowed through his farm, entirely against his will, and disgruntled, he sold the property.
In May of 1843, only a few years after his father’s death, Benjamin joined a wagon train headed toward Illinois. The family arrived in Hancock County on the 23rd of July, and apparently some land sharks sold him property to which they had no title, land that in fact belonged to someone else already. When the actual owners of the land showed up, the Meginness family—and other squatters—were driven over the Mississippi River by no less than a mob. Probably before that whole debacle, John, sixteen at the time, left and eventually returned to Pennsylvania. Illinois was a country that didn’t suit him, reportedly.
Benjamin continued on into Iowa toward Council Bluffs, where they stayed for two years. His wife, Sarah, died there in November, 1849 at the age of forty-seven. She was buried under a tree, a quarter mile from the Union Pacific station, in what is now a parking lot. John was later to have said that he regretted never being able to see her again.
Benjamin continued on, first to Salt Lake City, where he arrived in 1855 and stayed for a time, and then on to San Bernardino, California, where he arrived in 1858. “Here he found an arid country,” the history says, “but the climate was all that could be desired, so he settled there.”
Nearly a decade later, in 1867, Benjamin decided to visit Pennsylvania. He set out by wagon and, once he got to the Union Pacific railroad near Cheyenne, Wyoming, he either took the train overland or moved quicker with his wagon on whatever track must have paralleled the rails—the text is unclear here. Apparently he spent the end of 1869 with friends in Pennsylvania and by early spring, 1870, was back in California. But the journey wrecked his health, and on April 6th, he died in San Bernardino of consumption. The cemetery he was buried in was “obliterated by the passing of time,” or, as J. F. wrote elsewhere, “destroyed by the march of improvement.”
J. F. Meginness, courtesy of Find A Grave (thanks to Cristy and Ronald Sheehan)
John Franklin Meginness was to have a very different life.
In October of 1843, one history reads, the young J. F. “left home to battle his own way through life.” When he left his parents, he went to Warsaw, Illinois, on the Mississippi River, and caught a steamboat to St. Louis. He got a job on another boat and headed to New Orleans. He traveled around for a time and eventually made his way back to Pennsylvania.
He was in school for a while in the winter of 1845. In April, 1847 he enlisted to serve in the Mexican-American War (the one that Henry David Thoreau famously opposed and was jailed for, which he wrote about in his famous essay “On Civil Disobedience”), and in June, he sailed from New York to Mexico. By 1848, he was in Lycoming County, where he taught two terms of school.
On October 25, 1849 he married Martha Jane King of Mifflin Township, and they moved to Jersey Shore, on the West Branch of the Susquehanna. By 1852, he was the editor of the Jersey Shore Republican—he held that position for two years—then founded The News Letter, which he retired from in 1855. This is when he began writing what would become the 518-page octavo, A History of the West Branch Valley of the Susquehanna.
He would become editor of The Sentinel in Peru, Illinois, until it was destroyed by fire, and later, with the help of no less than Stephen Douglas, he got a job as editorial writer at the Springfield Daily Register when Douglas held his famous debates with Abraham Lincoln. After he left the Register, he took a position with the Spectator in Carlinville, Illinois, eventually buying the business. When the Civil War began, he sold the paper at a loss and, in 1861, returned to Lycoming County. By 1862, he was in Williamsport.
He worked several governmental posts as a clerk until 1869, when he became managing editor of the Lycoming Gazette, eventually becoming editor-in-chief (by then, the paper was the Gazette and Bulletin, after a merger), finally retiring in 1889. He also ran a monthly publication, The Historical Journal, and went on to write and revise more books. Finally, in the spring of 1891, he began his exhaustive History of Lycoming County, which took him all of a year.
He was also the father of ten children.
“John Franklin Meginness,” it was written, “is one of the best known literary men in Pennsylvania, and the people of the West Branch valley owe him a lasting debt of gratitude for having rescued from oblivion the principal historical incidents relating to their locality, and placing them in permanent form to be handed down from generation to generation.” His gravestone reads, Journalist - Historian. He labored for posterity.
In terms of what their labor amounted to, it’s hard to find anyone more different than father and son.
J. F. Meginness, courtesy of Find A Grave (thanks to Cristy and Ronald Sheehan)
The History of Lycoming County, despite its shortcomings, is Meginness’s gift to posterity. I am one of that posterity, who more than a hundred years later am reading that book. I still have a long way to go, though I have skimmed through parts of interest to me; for example, sections detailing my own ancestors.