Merton Goodrich, helped create, mold and build the town of Cleghorn that he called home for most of his adult years.
As
a youth of 17 he had the honor of setting the plow into the ground for
the first furrow that was to become the railroad siding, prepatory to
the establishment of the town of Cleghorn in 1890.
He was a
member of the moving crew that moved in the building for the first
store. That this store was not the first building moved to the
new town was a quirk of fate. Movers bringing in the building
that was to become the Presbyterian Church were able to move faster,
and though both buildings were en route at the same time, the first
honors went to the crew moving the church.
The store building
which Merton helped move became the J. M. Mills general store, and was
later converted to a hotel, quite grand for that era. This
building later burned and the Cleghorn State Bank is now in that place.
J. M. Mills the towns first storekeeper was also the towns first
postmaster and the post office was kept in that building.
Merton
was born in Battle Creek, Ida County, Iowa and came to Cherokee County
with his parents as a small boy. The parents Mr. and Mrs. Emery
Goodrich took a homestead one-half mile north and 1 mile west of
Washta. The grasshopper plague wiped them out and they moved to the
town of Cherokee, where the father clerked in Vandercook's store.
Merton
lost his mother when he was eight, and worked around staying with
different families. He was able to attend school only in the
winter. He is quoted as saying "since I could never complete a term of
school, the teacher would give me the same old arithmetic book whenever
I reentered school. I got so I knew the thing by heart, so I gave
up and learned by myself."
Farmers in Liberty and Sheridan
townships petitioned the Illinois Central R. R. to establish a station
between Meriden and Marcus. In 1890 this request was granted.
The first task was to get the ground ready for the railroad
siding.
Merton Goodrich was working for T. K. Kennedy a noted
owner and breeder of fine horses. When the men gathered to begin
work on the siding, Mert was handling one of Kennedy's teams. The
plow sunk into the g round and went along fine for several rods and
then stopped dead. After much joshing by the other teamsters,
Mert tried again and soon found himself with a straightened out plow.
The
next day, a teamster showed up with a four mule team. A frost
plow had been obtained. The mule driver challenged Mert to pull
this plow with his horse team. Mert set the team to work with a
will and began plowing a furrow. Suddenly the plow stopped dead
and the team pulled the beam completely out of the plow. Later it
was discovered that they had plowed into a buried telephone pole. The
day after Christmas 1889 the siding was finished and the town began to
grow.
Mr. Goodrich had vivid recollections of the prairies of
his boyhood. He was interviewed in 1962 and related many of these
memories of earlier years to a reporter. Two years later on June
21, 1964, he passed away.
He told of having herded cattle all
over the area of Willow and Rock Creeks. The grass was coarse and
rank and so tall that he could barely see over it while riding on his
pony.
It was not uncommon in those early years to mow this
grass, bind it in bundles, and use the bundles like shingles or logs
for roofs of pole buildings. Roofs so constructed would last
through several years turning the weather very well.
Prairie
fires, grasshoppers, and floods were vivid memories of his youth.
While a youngster he remembered a fire sweeping the prairie from
Correctionville to Mary Hill, hop scotching over the area, jumping
creeks and fireguards.
Another of his memories was of
grasshoppers before his folks gave up their Washta homestead. His
Dad and a Gano boy were discussing the prodigious appetite of those
creatures chewing up all vegetation, wooden tool handles and almost
anything else that lay in their path. The two decided to see if
the g grasshoppers would eat plug chewing tobacco. They nailed a plug to
a board, and within a few moments the offering had been devoured by the
hordes of grasshoppers.
Merton recalled the big flood in
Cherokee his chief memory of that being seeing the flood waters up to
the alley behind McWilliams Drug Store.
Merton married Emma
Mitchell, a school teacher whose parents originally immigrated from
England and had moved to Cleghorn from Farley, Iowa. After almost
63 years of married life she receded him to the grave by about 4 years.
After
their marriage they farmed near Cleghorn for a few years. After selling
his corn crop for 19 cents a bushel, Mert decided there were better
ways to make a living, he moved into Cleghorn and turned to dray work.
Sidewalks were then being laid in Cleghorn. "I hauled gravel for those until I was black in the face", he stated.
Merton
also assisted in moving in and repairing many buildings to quote him
"there is hardly a building in Cleghorn I haven't done something to;
raised it up, put a foundation under, laid the sidewalk or something."
One
such job that occurred in later years was the moving of the Odd Fellows
Hall. This was originally the Larrabee School house before the
brick school was built. Originally built in 1891 it was moved
from Larrabee to Cleghorn in 1922. The building was too heavy and
big to pull across the bridges so the moving crew forded Mill Creek
just east of the Oakdale Church. To accomplish this moving job,
they used Ole Lundguist's steam engine.
Later Merton turned to
digging wells, using horses to do the job for many years. He has
the record for the deepest well by auger: 365 feet. But
ironically did not hit water. Instead bed rock was struck and he was
unable to continue. Most of the time he hit water at 125 to 130
feet.
His well digging career ended upon a tragic note. He lost
both his son and the man who climbed down the curbing to bring him up
while digging a well near Cherokee. They were overcome by bad air and
suffocated. He never dug another well after that.
He came
back from this tragedy too, and turned to truck driving. And also
ran a filling station for a time. He drove a truck until nearly
80 years old.
One of his memories is of the James Gang.
During the period of 1866 to 1882, it is generally concluded that
Jesse James and his outlaw gang traveled the Little Sioux Valley and
were often seen between Cherokee and Correctionville though they never
repeated a route too often.
Mert recalled that a farm family
living about 2 miles west and some south of Cleghorn hosted a trio of
the gang, unaware, as they traveled through the county after a job in
Minnesota.
The horsemen came to the Dan Heins farms and
after looking over the farmstead, asked the wife for dinner. When
the guests sat down to dinner, one of them discovered his back was to
the door, so he calmly got up, moved his plate and sat down again,
this time facing the door. The family was not suspicious until
then. None of the hosts property was molested.
Merton Goodrich lived out his years in a house in Cleghorn that he helped build.
Some 12 years before his death he suffered a stroke and was
forced to use a walker to get about. He attended the Presbyterian
Church and served as Mayor of Cleghorn in 1913 and 1914.
His children included six sons, a daughter and a child who died in infancy.
His
life spanned over the first seventy years of the history of the little
town on the prairie that he helped to found. One son, Emery,
served three terms as Mayor of Cleghorn. Merton Goodrich's
descendants are still a part of the Cleghorn community; their roots
sunk deep in the town that began when Merton Goodrich sank a plowshare
in the prairie soil to help build a railroad siding then years before
the turn of the century.
Source:
Cherokee County Historical
Society Newsletter, Vol 13, No. 1, Jan 1978. (
Their source: An article written by Mildred Smith who had interviewed
Mr. Goodrich & was published in the Cherokee Courier, Sept. 1962) |
