Cox, Steve

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Swedish American GenealogistVolume 29 | Number 2 Article 26-1-2009Joseph B. Oakleaf 's journeySteve CoxFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/swensonsagPart of the Genealogy Commons, and the Scandinavian Studies CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center at Augustana Digital Commons. It hasbeen accepted for inclusion in Swedish American Genealogist by an authorized editor of Augustana Digital Commons. For more information, pleasecontact digitalcommons@augustana.edu.Recommended CitationCox, Steve (2009) "Joseph B. Oakleaf 's journey," Swedish American Genealogist: Vol. 29 : No. 2 , Article 2.Available at: https://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/swensonsag/vol29/iss2/21Swedish American Genealogist 2009:2In 1869, when Joseph B. Oakleaf wasnot quite eleven years old, his Swed-ish immigrant family left their homein Moline, Illinois, to make a freshstart farming virgin land in south-eastern Kansas.1Joseph Oakleaf remembered thattrek to the end of his days.His parents, Benjamin Peter (B. P.)Oakleaf (1827-1893) and Mary Oak-leaf (1830-1905), were among the fewSwedes – no more than 1,400 of them– who came to America in 1854.2B. P. Oakleaf was twenty-sevenyears old and Mary twenty-four,when, with two young children in tow,they sailed for America. Leavingtheir home near Melbystrand, on thesouthwestern coast of Hallands län,they sailed from the port of Göteborgon June 25, 1854. Their son Chris-tian, two and a half years old, died atsea. They landed in Boston forty-fivedays later and, along with otherSwedes who had come on the sameship, the Oakleafs went directly toMoline. A few days later, their seven-teen-month-old daughter, Christina,also died.3B. P. found a steady job in the S. W.Wheelock paper mill, in Moline, andthe Oakleafs started a new family. By1869, they had three sons and twodaughters to make the trek to Kan-sas: Charlie (born 1856), Joseph(1858), Junia (1862), Lydia (1866),and Emanuel (1868). Two childrenhad died in Moline, and the lastOakleaf child, Stephen, was born in1871, two years after they arrived inKansas.4NeighborsJust next door to the Oakleaf familyin Moline lived Peter and JohannaSwanson, who had emigrated fromSweden in 1855, the year after theOakleafs, and their five daughters. Inage, the Swanson sisters fit with theOakleaf children like cards expertlyshuffled. Augusta or Gustie Swanson,the eldest, was born in 1855; she wasa year older than Joseph’s elderbrother Charlie Oakleaf. Then cameLottie Swanson (1857), a year olderthan Joseph, and Nell Swanson(1859), a year younger than Joseph,and Jenny Swanson (1862), the sameage as Joseph’s sister Junia, and Pau-line Swanson (1869), the youngestSwanson, born in January 1869.5The Oakleafs and Swansons wereamong the few Swedes in Molinewhen they arrived, but more andmore Swedes came until, by the1870s, about half of Moline (popula-tion 7,800 in 1880) was Swedish.6Moline was a compact, lively in-dustrial city, full of things for child-ren to see and savor – steamboats onthe Mississippi, the railroad carryinggoods and people to the West, the fireand smoke and bustle and rumble ofworkers and machines in the fac-tories: when the John Deere plowshop worked late, the constantpounding of the drop hammers rat-tled the windows of the town far intothe night.7The Civil War cameThe Civil War added to the excite-ment. Moline was far from the front,but Gustie Swanson remembered, asan eight-year-old girl, watching Con-federate prisoners, captured at theBattle of Chattanooga of November1863, being marched to the militaryprison on Rock Island, visible fromMoline across a narrow channel ofthe Mississippi River.The brick schoolhouse, built in1843, was a short three-block walkfrom the Oakleafs’ home. The papermill where B. P. worked was down-town, six blocks away, and just fiveblocks east and around the cornerwas the home of Moline’s most pro-minent citizen, John Deere, whoseplow factory was the anchor ofMoline’s industry.B. P. Oakleaf was an orphan whohad made his way in Sweden as asoldier and had acquired, accordingto one chronicler, “a sound Englisheducation.” Within six years of arri-ving in America, he held a personalJoseph B. Oakleaf’s boyhood journey to Kansas– a sequel to B.P. Oakleaf’s reflections in SAG 1/09BY STEVE COXOne of the early factories inMoline.This is the wagon factory,but the others probablylooked much the same.The Swedish populationgrew from about 360 in 1860to about 4100 in 1900, com-pared to the total populationof 19,700.2 Swedish American Genealogist 2009:2estate of $1,600 and real estatevalued at $600. His neighbor PeterSwanson, a farmer in Sweden, hadworked in a sawmill for all of hisfourteen years in Moline.8The Oakleafs go westB. P. Oakleaf was capable of betterthings than working at the papermill. And breathing the chemicalfumes of the paper plant made himill. He had once taken a three-yearbreak from the paper mill and itsfumes to try farming in the Rock Riv-er valley. Finally, his doctor recom-mended that he go west for hishealth.After the Civil War, land in theWest was opening up. Late in May1869, B. P. Oakleaf and Peter Swan-son, both in their forties, quit theirfactory jobs, left their families inMoline, and went to Kansas, lured bythe prospect of good, cheap land.9By riverboat, train, and wagon,and finally on foot, the two men madetheir way to Labette County insoutheastern Kansas. By June 10they had staked claims on Osage In-dian land in the valley of PumpkinCreek. About two miles from theirclaims, settlers were organizing abrand-new town, Mound Valley.10While B. P. Oakleaf settled hisKansas claim, Peter Swanson re-turned to Moline to spend the threesummer months organizing the moveand preparing to pilot a party oftwenty or more Swedes to Kansas:his wife Johanna and their fivedaughters, B. P. Oakleaf ’s wife Mary,three Oakleaf sons and two Oakleafdaughters, and, in addition, as B. P.recorded, “Swan Peterson and family,Carl Olson and family, Mr. SwanLarson, Mr. Sandburg and youngestdaughter.”Decades later, Joseph B. Oakleaf,the Oakleafs’ second son, recalledthis adventure as seen through aboy’s eyes. It was a fast trip – ineleven days, between September 20and September 30, they traveledmore than 520 miles, 180 of them bywagon caravan, averaging all toldbetter than 47 miles per day. For thefinal part of the route, by wagon, theparty followed the Missouri-Kansasstat line some 140 miles directlysouth from Kansas City to thesoutheastern corner of Kansas, andfrom there almost directly west 40miles to Mound Valley. Joseph re-membered the names of a string oftowns along the route, perhaps thelocations of inns where the partystayed rather than making campeach evening and breaking campevery morning.11The journey to KansasIn his reminiscence, Joseph wrote:“Father could have purchased landaround Kansas City for $10 an acre,but it was hilly and rough and hedidn’t think it was very good forfarming. He wanted governmentland so he continued on south andfinally reached the quarter section onwhich he lived when he died.“He reached there [Mound Valley,Kansas] about the first of June, 1869,and built a house.“Mother and we children left forKansas on the 20th day of September,1869, and there were several immi-grants who had just come fromSweden who went with her. She hadto be the spokesman for all of them.“We went to Rock Island [IIl.] andtook a steamboat for Quincy [Ill.] inorder to get the Wabash train, as thatwas the only railroad which wentthrough Kansas City. We took theWabash railroad at Hannibal [Mis-souri] for Kansas City.“When we reached Kansas City,Mother went out and hired a coupleof wagons and two men to take thecaravan down through Kansas. Wepassed through Fort Scott and Gir-ard, they are the only towns I canremember, and then on through Co-lumbus, I remember that, and thecounty seat of Cherokee County andOswego, the county seat of LabetteCounty. When we came to a hillhalfway between Mound Valley andhome, he [Peter Swanson] pointedout to us a light which shone from ahouse not far distant, and he saidthat was where Father lived. We werewalking, and how jubilant we werethat we would soon see Father. Wehad not seen him since May. Thecreek was low so we could ford it ashort distance from the wagon road,and then we started up towards thehouse. It was a little bit uphill all theway, and the light shone brightly.Joy at meetingWe ran ahead of Mr. Swensson[Swanson] and pounded on the doorand called “Papa, Papa, Papa.” Hehad gone to bed, for he didn’t knowwhen we were coming. He wasoverjoyed to see us and we just hungonto him as though we could neverlet go. The next day, the first ofOctober, was my birthday, and I waseleven years old.“The next day the caravan arrived.Father had not seen the Petersonssince we left them in Sweden, andthey surrounded him and left Moth-er sitting over on the wagon waitingfor him to come over to her. He wasso bewildered he didn’t seem to knowwhich way to turn, so finally shecalled out, “Peter, don’t you know Iam here too?” Then of course he cameto his senses and helped Motherdown.“It was a wonderful evening, andwe didn’t get to sleep until early mor-ning. Just think of it! Some had tosleep out in the wagon, some underthe wagon, and the rest crowded intothe house, which was only thirteenby sixteen and beds were made onthe floor. That was my first night onthe old homestead where I lived untilthe fall of ’76 when I went east toschool.Joseph B. Oakleaf as a young man.3Swedish American Genealogist 2009:2Moving to Kansas, B. P. Oakleaftook the long view. Near his ownclaim, he also purchased a quartersection of land for each of his sons,and three of the Oakleaf sons—Char-lie, Emanuel, and Steve—farmedthere all their lives. Indeed the homeplace remained in the Oakleaf familyfor more than a century12.B. P. Oakleaf also joined with othercivic-minded settlers in building thecommunity of Mound Valley. He wasamong those investing in stores andencouraging business ventures, anduntil the government established apost office in Mound Valley, B. P.Oakleaf himself carried the mailseventeen miles from the county seat,Oswego.13Son Joseph goes toschoolStill, the quiet farm town of MoundValley stood in contrast to the busylittle industrial city of Moline. School-ing was sketchy, and B. P. Oakleafseems to have recognized that bynature his son Joseph was meant forbusiness, not farming. By age fifteen,Joseph was clerking in a store in thelarger nearby town of Independence,Kansas, and then in Peru, a smallerand newer town, founded in 1870further west in Kansas.14In 1876, which he called “the yearof the great grasshopper plague,” Jo-seph Oakleaf went east to Bailey’sMercantile College in Keokuk, Iowa,on the Mississippi River about ahundred and twenty miles down-stream from Moline.On graduation, he returned to hisbirthplace, Moline. Within threeyears, he married Josephine Ander-son, a daughter of Swedish immi-grants who came to America on thesame ship with B. P. and MaryOakleaf, twenty-five years before.In Moline, Joseph B. Oakleafbecame a successful lawyer and awell-known collector of books andmanuscripts concerning AbrahamLincoln. He wrote this memoir inApril 1930, just two months beforehe died at age sixty-two.15The author isSteve Cox5242 E. Alhambra PlaceTucson AZ 85711(520) 795-0315E-mail: <sfcoxaz@cox.net>Notes:1) Ilene Oakleaf Bussman, Descen-dants of Benjamin Peter Oakleaf(2008), formatted by a secondOakleaf descendant, Anne FrankChittenden.2) Hans Norman and Harald Run-blom, Transatlantic Connections:Nordic Migration to the NewWorld After 1800 (Oslo: Nor-wegian University Press, 1988), p.115.3) Bussman, p. 11.4) Bussman, pp. 11, 12.5) Birth dates of Swanson daughtersin membership roll of the FirstLutheran Church of Moline(founded as the Swedish Evan-gelical Lutheran Congregation inMoline), in Swenson SwedishImmigration Research Center,Augustana College, Rock Island,Illinois.6) Lilly Setterdahl, Swedes in Mo-line, Illinois, 1847-2002 (Moline:Universal Publishers, 2003), p. 17.7) John Diehl, a John Deere em-ployee of 1874, described the shopof earlier days, as quoted in WayneG. Broehl, Jr., John Deere’s Com-pany: A History of Deere & Com-pany and Its Times (New York:Doubleday, 1984), p. 230.8) Bussman, pp. 11, 12, 13, citingWilliam G. Cutler, History of theState of Kansas (1883), LabetteCounty, Part 29, BiographicalSketches. Moline city directorieslist Peter Swanson as working asa “lastmaker” (probably a mis-spelling of lathmaker; 1856) andsawyer (1867).9) Bussman, p. 12; B. P. Oakleafrefers to Peter Swanson as PeterSfanson, and Joseph refers to Pe-ter Swanson as Svennson. TheSwanson family left Kansas forColorado in 1876 (perhaps as aresult of the grasshopper plaguethat Joseph mentions) and seemsto have disappeared from theOakleafs’ awareness. (The eldestSwanson daughter, Augusta, mar-ried a local farmer, Charles Tib-bets, and raised her family on theTibbets’ farm near the Oakleaffarms south of Mound Valley.)10)  B. P. Oakleaf reminiscence,Mound Valley (Kansas) Herald,April 27, 1882, reprinted in MoundValley Times-Journal, (Thursday,August 21, 1969). See also SAG1/09, p.1.11) Reproduced in Bussman, p. 12.12) Until 1976, after the death of hisgrandson, Marcus Oakleaf, in1974. Bussman, p. 14.13) As he testifies in his own re-miniscence and as recalled by hisgranddaughter, Gertrude OakleafBelknap, Bussman, p. 14.14) William G. Cutler, History of theState of Kansas (1883), chapter onChautauqua County. Peru, Kan-sas, is coincidentally the birthplaceof Madelyn Dunham (born 1922),the grandmother of President Ba-rack Obama.15) Bussman, pp. 12, 19.Joseph B. Oakleaf as an elderly man.

Joseph B. Oakleaf\u27s journey

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Joseph B. Oakleaf\u27s journey

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