Ionia County MI Archives Obituaries.....Yeomans, Erastus 1883
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Ionia Co. MIGenWeb
The Ionia Daily Sentinel
Monday, June 11, 1883 
ERASTUS YEOMANS.

Judge Erastus Yeomans, the last survivor of the original colony of pioneers who
settled in Ionia fifty years ago, died peacefully at his home in this city at 8
o'clock Friday evening, June 8th--precisely eleven days after the fiftieth
anniversary of the date of his arrival on the spot where he died. The funeral
services were held in the Baptist church on Sunday afternoon at 3 o'clock. The
sermon was by Rev. James Lamb, and was very appropriate and impressive. The
bearers were Lewis S. Lovell, Alex F. Bell, Osmond Tower, James M. Kidd, John L.
Taylor and C. O. Thompson. The remains were deposited in Oak Hill cemetery,
within a stone's throw of the house where for half a century he had lived and
where at last he died full of years, taking with him to his grave the respect
and esteem of all who ever knew him, and leaving behind him the memory of a
well-ordered and useful life.

The following brief sketch will be read with deep interest by hundreds of his
old friends throughout Ionia county and other parts of the state.

Erastus Yeomans, youngest son of Daniel and Esther Yeomans, was born in New
Lebanon, Conn., Aug. 11, 1791. His ancestry, as the name implies, was of pure
English stock, who came to this country near the close of the Seventeenth
century. He was educated in the schools of his native place and as a student,
early gave evidence of a superior mind. At the age of sixteen he removed with
his parents to German Flats, Herkimer Co., N. Y. The following year he engaged
as teacher in one of the public schools of the county, continuing in the same
school nearly three years. Soon after this occurred the war of 1812, with Great
Britain, in which he demonstrated his fitness to be a citizen of the republic,
by taking his place in the ranks of her defenders. March 19th, 1815, he married
Phebe Arnold, daughter of Job and Hannah Arnold, of Fairfield, N. Y. Any sketch
of the life of Mr. Yeomans, however brief, would be comparatively valueless,
that should fail to acknowledge the fact, that in the marriage with Miss Arnold,
a factor was added to his life-work, by the power of which was given the
solution so perfectly expressed by Solomon in the words: "Her husband is known
in the gates when he sitteth among the elders of the land." From his marriage,
for about fifteen years, he engaged in farming and brick-making. April 20, 1833,
Mr. Yeomans and family joined a colony of five families, and emigrated to the
then territory of Michigan. The magnitude of such an undertaking can at this
time scarcely be estimated. After a journey of thirty-nine days, the last half
of the distance from Detroit being through a trackless wilderness, the little
colony reached their destination, the present site of Ionia city, May 28th,
1833. Small patches of corn and vegetables purchsed from the Indians,
constituted all that could be grown for the subsistance of the colony the first
year. With the work of organization peculiar to a new country, no one of the
pioneers was more closely identified or efficient. He was appointed first
postmaster of Ionia county, in 1834, receiving his commission from Amos Kendall,
postmaster-general in the cabinet of Andrew Jackson, which position he held for
six years. In 1841 he was elected associate judge of the county, an office in
which he served eight years. For thirty of the fifty years which he lived in
Ionia, as township, village and city, he was continually the recipient of
unsought official trust. His death, in his ninety-second year, severs the last
visible bond between pioneer struggles and our present success and prosperity,
in the midst of which, the lesson from such a life should cause us to remember
that,--
"Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay."

No better eulogy can be said of him than that he enters into rest with the
silvery radiance cast athwart his brow by the sunset of life, undimmed by a
single charge of wrong to his fellow men.
________________________________
The Ionia [Weekly] Standard
Friday, June 15, 1883
Another Pioneer Gone.

"Judge Erastus Yeomans, the last survivor of the original colony of pioneers who
settled in Ionia, fifty years ago, died peacefully at his home in this city, at
8 o'clock Friday evening, June 8." It may truthfully be said of Judge Yeomans,
that he was a man of mark; that when he came to this locality he brought with
him a broad and symmetrical Christian character, a firm purpose and an arm to
pull even with any man, not only to make grass grow where it never grew before,
and to carve for himself a home out of the wilderness, but also to build up a
civilization and society that should bless those who were to come after him. How
well he and that noble wife and mother who passed to her reward years before
him, as well as the other pioneers who came with them, did their work. How
deeply they stamped their character, on society, and left their impress for
good, let Ionia with its surroundings, its schools, its churches and its
privileges tell. Surely such men would give an exalted character to any
community. Judge Yeomans early embraced the Christian religion, and shortly
after attaining his majority united with the Baptist church, of which he was a
member at the time of his death, at the ripe old age of ninety-two years, and it
may be added that for nearly fifty years he was one of its honored deacons, as
well as an active member in all its benevolent enterprises. But one more is left
of the constituent members of that church and society which he here helped to
form, and to sustain and upbuild which he contributed so liberally of his means.
He has gone to his reward, but his life work remains a rich inheritance to his
family and a blessing to the community.


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