Biography of Edwin M Wells, Sunfield, Eaton County, Michigan

Copyright © 1998 by Sue Outman-Wells. This copy contributed for use in 
the USGenWeb Archives.  

 

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Source:  The Grand Rapids Herald Newspaper, Grand Rapids, MI, March 4, 1929
issue, On microfilm at the Grand Rapids Public Library.

THE HERALD'S NONAGENARIAN CLUB - Today Edwin M. Wells of Sunfield

"Sunfield Man Tells of Days When Eggs Sold for Three Cents a Dozen and
Indians' Roved Thornapple Valley."

     Sunfield, March 3---'Member when you could buy eggs for 3 cents a
dozen?  I'll say you don't.  But Edwin Morris Wells, 95 year-old resident
of Sunfield remembers when his parents bought them at that price in
Detroit.

     It was back in 1842 when the family was trekking through from
Onondaga, NY where Mr. Wells was born March 7, 1834, to Sunfield township
where he has lived ever since.

     He was a lad of eight when the family set out, via the Erie canal and
thence to Detroit, to make a home in the wilds of the Wolverine state. 
Arrived in Detroit the parents laid in a supply of provisions--on the list
six dozen eggs for which they paid 18 cents--and then came on by ox cart to
this township.

     Mr. Wells' father, Orrin Wells, was the thirteenth white man to settle
here and the first to vote in the town.  They moved into the unbroken
forest and began to hew out a home.  The second year they were here a log
school was built, a mere shanty, and Mrs. Sophronia Peck Andrews opened
school.

     Indians still roamed the forest and had two large camps in the
neighborhood, one at the foot of Thornapple lake and one on the shore of
Lake Saubee.  The young Edwin made playmates of the dusky skinned children
and still recalls many of them as friends.  

     The whites adopted many of the Indian ways, among them the habit of
"locking" their doors by placing crossed sticks in front of them.  When an
Indian did not wish anyone to enter his wigwam he signified it by placing
crossed sticks in front of the door.  All Indians respected this sign, and
would never enter the house of a white man when the sticks were there.  But
if they were not, the Indians would open the door and enter and feel they
should be made welcome.

     They were harmless and dependable unless under the influence of
liquor, Mr. Wells says.  In this connection he recalls Chief Swaba, a
widely known character of those old days in Michigan.  Chief Swaba was very
fond of the flowing bowl and mighty dangerous when he was drunk, Mr. Wells
remembers.  Religion appealed to the savages though, he says, and tells of
a camp meeting at Kalamo Center which was attended by 500 braves and their
squaws.

     Mr. Wells has always been a teetotaler and has never used tobacco. 
Yet when he dies, he expects to lie in a grave in a cemetery lot paid for
by "toting" beer.

     It happened on this wise.  Way back in 1851 Edward O. Smith, an old
Sunfield settler, decided to divide a part of his farm up into cemetery
lots, and to do this made a "bee."  He wanted someone to carry drinks for
the men and said to "young" Wells.  "Maybe you don't need a cemetery lot
now, but you will some day.  Tell you what I'll do.  You carry beer from
the house to the men at the bee and I'll give you a lot in the new
cemetery."  Wells took him up and got the deed of the lot.  His wife and
two sons are buried there, and, he says, "I expect to lie there, too, some
day and rest as peacefully as if I had carried water to those workers."

     Everybody was suppose to work in those days before child labor laws
and compulsory school attendance were ever heard of and when the young
Edwin reached the age of 10 years his father told him his job would be to
hunt up the cows and get them home at night.  All day the animals roamed
the forest and the boy had to search until the tinkle of a bell gave him an
idea where they were.  Often he was lost when he found them, but they
always go home.  Rounding up his herd, the lad depended on them to find the
way back, and he followed along.  Sometimes it would be so dark he could
not see the animals ahead of him, so he would catch hold of a cow's tail
and be lead along home, sometimes three and a half miles.

     The corner cash and carry was still away on ahead in the twentieth
century, while the Wells family was pioneering.  The nearest grocery store
was in Bellevue, and with ox teams father didn't dash off to town every
time mother ran out of something or other the day she expected the bridge
club.  If she was out of something she needed, she simply had to use a
substitute.  There was soda--the universal leavener before baking powder
crowded it off the pantry shelf.  When Mother Wells ran out of that she
burned a few corncobs, washed the ashes in water, and got enough soda ash
to make her tea biscuits.  As a matter of fact, most of the soda used by
the pioneer woman was made out of wood ashes, which were plentiful, as they
baked in huge outdoor ovens.

     Lacking radios and telegraph wire to bring immediate news of fight and
athletic events, the young men of those days used to match their own
strength in feats of endurance on the farm.  Wells, a giant in size--he is
still six feet tall--held many records.  He tells of cutting three cords of
wood in three hours; a windrowing five acres of heavy beech and maple in
seven and one-half days; he cradled seven acres of grain in a day.  Those
were the days when grain was cut with a cradle, and Mr. Wells used a cradle
four feet, four inches long with which he could cut a 12 foot swath.

     In addition to farming, Mr. Wells learned the trades of carpenter,
mason and cooper.  As a cooper he was in great demand among the farmers to
make sap buckets and in 1860 made 950 buckets from Jan. 9 to April 1.

     In the following December, Dec. 19 to be exact, Mr. Wells married and
for a time he and his wife conducted a tavern.  For supper, a night's
lodging and breakfast, they charged wayfarers 26 cents.  As wages in those
days were only 37 1/2 cents a day, this hit the travelers harder than a $5
cover charge hits a New Year's eve traveler.

     When Mr. Wells was 77 years old he went to Battle Creek and for the
next five years worked as a carpenter drawing $5 a day.  Then he returned
home and is now living with a daughter, Mrs. George Bosworth of
Vermontville.  For the past two years he has been blind, but is still
mentally alert and able to hold up his end in a conversation.  He has three
daughters living, Mrs. Bosworth, Mrs. Josephine Lemmon of Kelly, and Mrs.
Ida Stevens of Charlotte.  Three other children have died.


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