Chapter One
 

The date was December Second, and the occasion Dr. Stephen Stevens birthday. He being the eldest of the family usually called for a celebration at Granville.

There were not many as family reunions go. Dr. Harmon Stevens, from Homer, and Dr. Gilbert Stevens from Newton, his brothers, and their sisters Marhyna and Eunice. All with their families, children and a few grandchildren.

While it was an enjoyable time, to the children it seemed no novelty, for they met together so often. Then the question arose, as to why, "when other people had family reunions the had gatherings of hundreds, and we have so few."

So Dr. Stephen attempted an explanation. Telling them that although they had always known a lot about the family, he had been writing a short outline in a diary form, that they could have as soon as it was finished.

He told them "for the benefit of our hundreds of relatives you have never met and may never do so, I think it would be well some day to publish it in book form so they may all know about us and about each other."

"As you know I was born in Vermont, Harmon and Gilbert in Canada, Marhyna and Eunice in Kentucky. You can easily realize the unsettled condition our lives must have been.

Our ancestors came from England in the seventeenth century settling in New England. Not to make a long story, I will being with my father Uriah. Until the close of the Revolution, his family was living at Pittsford, Vermont. A town that had been granted to my great grandmother's brother Col. Epheriam Doolittle, for settlement.

Many of our relatives lived there, also friends that had been neighbors in other colonies.

After the Revolution my grandfather Abel Stevens was given a township in Leeds County Canada by the British Crown for settlement by Vermont families. During the war our people were loyal Vermonters with the exception of my great uncle Roger Stevens Jr. He was an ardent Tory, or rather Loyalist, as they were called.

He was driven from the country, his property sold to defray the expenses of the army. He was given a terrible death sentence, also with forty lashes on his bare body with Beech branches, should he be captured and possibly death.

The New Yorkers, and the French and Indians destroyed everything possible, burned homes, took people captive, murdered many, until it became a fearful place to live in. My grandfather Abel was a peaceful man, and having always been a British Citizen, decided after the war to join his brother Roger Jr. in Canada.

So when the family was broken up. Wars and Borders separated them. It was not safe for any one who held a different political view to try to mingle in their former community. My father with his parents, brothers and sisters went to Canada But later returned to Vermont to marry my mother, Marina Gilbert. I was born in Vermont in 1807, so I am a native son. After remaining three years we returned to Delta Canada and lived on my father's farm until the War of 1812 broke out.

My father's refusal to fight against the United States made him, with about two hundred other young men, an outcast. A price was put on his life, a death sentence given him should he be caught; and he found himself in the same condition his Uncle Roger Jr. had been more than a generation before.

We all escaped across the St. Lawrence into New York State. There the family had some old friends. But it being impossible to return to Vermont, and New York being subject to invasion, father decided with many others to try to make our way to Kentucky.

By leaving Canada Father forfeited the right to his land. And also to his father's vast possessions. His father Abel made a will which is recorded in Brockville, leaving him (Uriah), his eldest son, his entire estate, that being the English law at that time. "Father not only sacrificed money and fortunes, but he lost his beloved sisters and brothers; all who remained in Canada at that time. His parents mourned his loss but they really were proud of his stand. You understand it was dangerous for them to try to communicate with him. To be suspicioned could have caused their arrest and possibly imprisonment.

Strong beliefs, and independent natures, in those who make themselves leaders cause much suffering to all those around them.

But my father was the result of six generations of a free America. His love of freedom and liberty as his training had taught him, could not allow him to fight against his native country.

The trip to Kentucky was full of dreadful hazards. The country was alive with Indians on the warpath. We stopped for a time on the south shore of Lake Erie where my father with the rest helped to build Admiral Perry's fleet. I was nearly six years old when that Battle of Lake Erie was fought on the 10th of September 1813.

I can hear now the roar of those cannons, and feel the intense excitement. Father helped with the burial of the officers that lost their lives. They, the British and the Americans were buried on the American Shore, side by side.

You can see since leaving the settled colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts our people have pioneered constantly. Always strife with enemies, white and Indians. In Kentucky there were Indian raids; log houses; frontier life a warlike existence.

We found so many people from Virginia and Maryland. Before leaving Cynthiana, where we lived, I met and married Elizabeth Ann Wheeler, who was one of the Wheelers from Baltimore. We were married by Samuel Pepper. Her father was teaching a private school in Kentucky. My wife was born on the old Pike Road between Baltimore and Washington on a big plantation. Her father freed three hundred slaves. The bell on the roof of the spring house was our old slave bell in Kentucky.

And the sleigh bells you use occasionally were on father's horses when, one day in the winter of 1800, he drove to Toronto on business for his father Abel. There he met two homesick New Yorkers named Crawford, and they traded their two pieces of land, of 100 acres each for his team of black horses and sleigh.

But father kept the sleigh bells and those same bells have traveled far. the business for his father concerned his survey of the Thousand Isles. His survey has always been used and they tell me his maps are preserved in the archives in Toronto in the Parliament Building.

When father left Canada he made a trip into Toronto and there leased his two pieces of land to some land sharks for ninety-nine years. This land lies in the very heart of Toronto. His purchase was recorded in Little York in 1800. These land men had all the Americans so frightened that the gained possession of much valuable property belonging to the young men, that had been given them by the crown, to get them to leave the states and settle in Canada.

In Kentucky my father trained us in his profession, medicine. We finished our training in Louisville. I practiced for some time with father in Cynthiana. It is hard to believe we all came through all this without any one losing their lives. The Stevens family have all been strong hearty people and enjoyed life as they met it.

When Champaign Co. Illinois was opened to settlers we all came north where new land was being opened. We were really glad to get back into a country that was more like our old New England.

And being anxious to settle in communities near each other where we could practice our professions; we took up land all of us and began to make a new life for our families. Father's homestead where my sisters live north of Newton where we will all be buried someday.

The Stevens families at Delta, Canada are buried in the Denault Cemetery there, and many in the burial ground at Pittsford. Father was not allowed to return to visit his parents before they died. They would not have wanted him to endanger his life to do so.

We must all consider our ancestor Uriah, one of America's real patriots. His steadfast belief in his native country, his love of Freedom, and American way of life, gave to us an inheritance that we know is to be envied by many other lands. I will never be able to know those relatives of ours but I hope some day some of you will meet them.

You will find them in Canada and Vermont. Many living on land that was homesteaded by some of the different families.

There will be people by the names of Stevens, Doolittle, Buck, Waters, Gould, Shaw, Spaulding, Gilbert, Blanchard, Paine, Allen, Beebe, Haskins, Babbitt, Crippen, in Vermont and all New England.

One day some captives were taken to Gen. Gage. On being told he was named Stevens, he ordered him out, exclaiming, "Boston is full of Stevens. They should all be hanged for rebel spies." The patriot was later exchanged and sent back to Vermont.

They were all noted fighters when it came to defending their rights, and I can only say to you that you can be proud to be one of them.

Coming to this part of the country gave us new contacts. My wife's parents Zaddock Wheeler and Zipporah (Schofield) Wheeler were among the younger generation of the Wheeler and Scholfield families of Baltimore, noted for buildings of clipper ships, and later interested in building the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Elizabeth's brother, Isaac Wheeler, was a forty niner to California. He wrote of the hard trip west. But was successful for many years in gold mining and ranching. When the Union Pacific was put through he bought a ticket and came back on one of the first trains home. His four beautiful daughters, Ada, Maria, Eugene, and Violet, were actresses in California at one time.

After coming north we gained new members in our family when Harmon married Serena Stanfield and Gilbert married her sister Marilla, daughters of Judge Stanfield of Homer, who had recently arrived from Tennessee.

So you see while we left many behind. We gained new people from new parts of the United States that have enabled us to live in the happiest harmony possible. While our family reunions are small we have them several times a year and love and know each other and are able to be good companions always.

All over this earth families have been born apart, many never to know even as many relatives as we have here. Our interests are alike and it has been so hard to travel that we have been very closely united. Some times I feel we may be happier this way. We had our parents with us, and that was one of the hardships when young men came to America; they had to bed farewell to all the older generations never to be able to see them again.

After our Civil War, our friends in the south were allowed to remain in the regions where they lived. While much of their property was destroyed the could, by taking the oath of allegiance to their country, carry on as before and begin anew.

You have all had good opportunities for schooling, and the country is developing so fast, I am sure you all have a happy life before you. My story is written from facts given me by my father and mother and other relatives and friends who have visited us; information received from the British archives in Toronto and Ottawa Canada and from the archives in Montpelier and Pittsford, Vermont, and many other sources.

And many thanks to Dr. A. M. Caverly of Pittsford, Vermont for verifying many of the family incidents, in his histories, especially the history of Pittsford, Vermont. My father's diary covered his entire life and was written by him when the events were fresh in his memory. His life contained many interesting periods of American History as mine has. I have lived from almost the beginning of this century through the most intense part of the construction of our government and through the Civil War, that decided the holding and keeping this on Union forever. The most wonderful Nation on this Globe.
 
 

It was a lively party. In the three Doctor's families, and in Marina's, there were in all thirteen girls and six boys. Dr. Stephen Stevens had educated his son Stephen Jr., and his daughters, Elizabeth, Marina, Zipporah and Violet, at Westfield College, while Harmon and Gilbert had chosen the Illinois State University for their children. The boys became dentists and doctors and practiced in their home towns. Some of them served through the Civil War with honor.

As the children grew up, they all had an interest in medicine. Many stories were told of some of their experiments.

Stephen Jr., and Elizabeth Ann took all their school home with them during a small-pox scare, and their father Dr. Stevens being away, they went into his office across the drive and proceeded to vaccinate them, some as many as ten times on an arm.

Dr. Stephen Stevens had built his home, modeled after some of the Maryland Plantation homes. Surveying a row of lots on the front of his land for a town, leaving a wide street back to his home, many fine gardens and lots were fenced.

A good roomy house that in later years was enlarged; having fireplaces in all the lower rooms. The Doctor's office was across the drive leading to the front entrance of the house, a large two room office and a drug room as there were no drug stores at that time. The doctor was considered a good surgeon. In the rear of the yard was the spring house. Entering a large room full of many kinds of good food you went down three steps into another room that had a spring of icy cold water. There the milk and butter and other things were kept in stone jars set in the running water.

A second story of this building had dried fruit and smoked meat in quantities, and many things stored, such as spinning wheels, extra looms, to be used when necessary. During the civil war they had been put to good use.

In the rear a large barn lot circular in shape, had openings into all the buildings adjoining it. There was a drying house, fitted with tills where apples, peaches, and other fruits were dried as well as a place to smoke meat.

The doctor kept many fine horses; always two ready to drive, and two doctors sulkies, with high wheels that could travel easily through the stiff black mud in that country.

One of the worst features of the climate at that time was ague and milk sickness. Dr. Stephen was noted for his cures of milk sickness. He traveled many miles to help his brothers care for their patients when they needed his council.

Many times he would be called out in the night to go into the dense forest to take card of a new baby, and often when he knew they had no means for paying him, he would say, "Sometime when you feel like it bring me a pig or a lamb or whatever could be easily spared."

He owned vast acres of oak timber, that later was used for railroad ties, when the new road was built from the north to Cairo through his town.

The Doctor lived to vote for McKinley for President. He rode his horse two blocks to the polls and voted the Republican ticket as he had done since Lincoln's time.

Always interested in the public life of his nation, being too old for combat duty during the Civil War, he performed many duties that younger men would have done had they been at home.

Being near the border, many deserters were able to hide among their friends. It was one of the duties of the Doctor and some of his friends to capture these men, and often as long as lived you could hear the refrain on a dark rainy night, some roudy voice singing, "Old Doc Stevens and Old Henry Clark, when they go to hunt deserters, they go in the dark." If you should look out in the rain in the Stile Block, one or more lungers a little under the influence of some moonshine, would be singing lustily, but not unkindly. He was a greatly loved man by all about him, and Stephen was a popular name for sons. Before his death 100 doctors visited him.

Before he passed away he say his family names increased by inter-marriages; many fine young men coming west, nearly all from some good school. The new names added to the immediate families included McComack, Denman, Dodds, Beers, Hasket, White, Rayhill, Bryant, Coffeen, O'Dell, Austin, Blain, Bateman, McRaynolds, Hill, Harrell, Lathrop, Reisner, Dillman, Stephenson, Grosvenor, Mann, Lefever, and Berry.

It takes generations for families to develop in great numbers. Abraham Doolittle coming from London in 1620 has hundreds of descendants in America and Canada; in ten generations could scarcely be enumerated although many genealogies have been written about them. The same with the families of Pittsford, Stevens, Buck, Rowley, Mott, Gilbert, and scores of others. So many moving to Canada in the early nineteenth century caused families to be lost to each other. We know while looking forward ten generations, there are many descendants but one person looking backward to ancestors in that many generations, there would be direct grand parents 1024 and one wonders where they could have been. Most of the New England families can feel quite sure they spoke the English language and were looking toward a new world where they hoped to live in a new freedom.

In ten generations one's forefathers running into four figures gives one many names to select from if they happen to dislike the one they have.