Rebecca Vasey Bloomfield

VASEY, BLOOMFIELD, BRIDGE, WEATHERMAN

Posted By: Deborah Gilbert (email)
Date: 9/13/2016 at 09:51:43

Maxwell Book: 1883-1983

Rebecca Vasey was born in a log cabin east of Maxwell on September 1, 1867, to John R. and Nancy Bridge Vasey. She was the eldest of 14 children. When she was small, the family moved to a farm in Illinois where she learned to read and became a student of the Bible. Her father required her to read from the Bible every evening.

Becky was 14 years-old when the Vasey family returned to Iowa. She remembered that they traveled back to Iowa with a team of horses hitched to a covered wagon and her father had to swim the horses across the river. Some of her memories of the early days included incidents with the Indians who had a camp not far from the Iowa farm.

Becky met and married Thomas Bloomfield. They were separated and she moved to the home in Maxwell which she occupied until her death. In an interview with a Nevada Journal reporter, at the time of her 101st birthday, she recalled the long long ride in a buggy from Collins to Nevada on her wedding day back before the turn of the century.

In this interview, Becky told something of her life. The article stated, "She's a living example of the fact that hard work never killed anyone. She had never been to a doctor until she was turning 100 years-old and broke her hip. She pulled all her own teeth when she thought they needed pulling. Her seven children were born with only the help of a country midwife, and she's happy about the whole thing."

"Approaching 102 years of age, she tends to rooms full of flowers and worries over the colony of cats as she looks back over a lifetime which began shortly after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whose memory she cherishes, satisfied that she has lived long enough to see another republican in the White House."

The article continued with her life as a mother "without funds and widowed (separated), Becky went to work. She had already put in a childhood and adulthood at hard labor tending 90 sheep, miking 16 cows daily and doing other farm labor, so she was able to pass lightly over the y ears in Maxwell while she raised the family by doing housework, doing family washings for 17 families in a week, aided only by a wooden tub, man-powered washing machine as well as turning a hand to any other kind of labor until her children finished their time at Maxwell schools.

"She is almost deaf now and the injured hip keeps her indoors. She gets around with a walker. Bessie, her daughter, lives with her and does the work. Becky looks after house plants and the kittens who keep coming along and pose a problem of keeping them adopted."

Bessie told the reporter that in recent years, when her mother's birthday came, there was a celebration a full week before and after September 1st. The house was crowded with callers, mostly relatives.

In 1969, when she was 102 years-old, an article in the Maxwell Tribune stated that "Becky enjoyed all her visitors, lovely cards, birthday cakes, candy, the lovely mum plant from Maxwell's Mayor, Jimmy Weatherman, and other kindnesses. She especially enjoyed a card and letter from a niece in London, England."

Becky always loved flowers and gardening and according to Bessie, had a big garden until her 95th year when she persuaded her mother not to plant a garden. Becky's death occurred October 15, 1969, at 102 years of age. Newspaper articles gave her birth date as September 1, 1867; however her daughter thinks there is an entry in a family Bible, now lost, which would make her mother's age 105.