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Pages of History
Sept. 9, 1946, marked Dave French‘s 100th birthday. These days quite a few people make it to the century mark, but in 1946 Dave not only was the oldest person in Cedar County.
David French was born in New Hampshire near the Canadian border.
At the time of his birth in 1846, the United States was only 70 years old and consisted of only 28 states. The southwest including California was still claimed by Mexico, part of the northwest was claimed by Canada, and the land where we now live was Indian country.
Dave had many interesting experiences as a boy and a young man. At the age of 10 he worked as a cabin boy on a Great Lakes freighter. He later dug for gold in the Black Hills, punched cattle in Texas, owned a lead mine in Missouri, and raced horses in South Dakota.
In 1872 he married Ruth Wannamaker of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and moved to a farm in Iowa. In 1888 French purchased a farm three miles north and east of the future town of Laurel. He and Ruth had nine children before her death on Nov. 26, 1894 shortly after giving birth to a girl (later Mrs. Ed Hirschman).
Ruth French was either the first or second burial in the Laurel cemetery laid out in October 1894. The Advocate of Oct. 13, 1894, reported the four-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. William Peterson had been buried in the new cemetery that afternoon. If so, the grave apparently was not marked.
In 1895 Dave married Mary Tiedeman of Concord. She was 30 years younger. They moved to a farm near Concord where Dave raised mules for the army and fathered nine more children. At the time of his 100th birthday, 12 of his 18 children were still living. One of the older children by his first marriage was James Hawley French. He was the father of Martha Holm who died in 2006 at the age of 102. Three generations spanned 160 years.
At the time of his death in 1949 at the age of 103, Dave French still was Cedar County‘s oldest person. Mary died in 1974 at the age of 98. (I believe I drove her in the Diamond Jubilee parade in 1968.)
Dr. Raymond P. Carroll marked a double anniversary in September 1946. One was the 25th anniversary of the beginning of his lifelong medical practice in Laurel. The other was the 25th anniversary of his marriage to Marie Maney of Blair.
When Dr. Carroll came to Laurel in February 1921, he rented two rooms in the hotel on Oak Street before moving to the late Dr. Sackett’s office at 202 Oak where he remained until retiring in 1971. The office was destroyed by fire in February 2013.
At their anniversary celebration, Carroll told of receiving an emergency call from a farmer who asked if he had anything for gas. Carroll said he did and would be right out. He grabbed his bag, put in a box of pills, and drove out to the farm. When he arrived, he asked the farmer who the patient was. “It’s my cow,“ the farmer replied.
‘’You need a veterinarian,” said the doctor. “I’m a physician.”
‘’I know you are,” replied the farmer. “But I could not find a veterinarian so I thought you could do something to save my cow.”
Carroll went to the barn and saw the cow in misery. The recommended human dosage was one pill.
Carroll shoved eight down the cow’s throat and it survived after releasing a load of methane into the atmosphere that might have provoked a protest against global warming these days.
In other news of September 1946: Bob Harrington, son of Mrs. Grace Harrington, was chosen to play left guard on the University of Nebraska football team. Harrington had played football while serving in Germany with General Patton’s 3rd Army.
Congressman Karl Stefan noted that Communists in Yugoslavia had been killing priests, nuns, and others who refused to accept the Communist doctrine.
Stefan also noted the first step in returning the bodies of 75,000 American war dead in the Pacific theater was underway. The first shipment of 600 bodies had arrived in Honolulu and the bodies of 37,000 others were in storage at collecting points in the Pacific area. “A coffin shortage may make it impossible for the bodies to be returned home until 1947,“ he said.
Or maybe it was due to a shortage of transportation. A large number of ships and planes had been diverted to transport thousands of war brides to the United States.
Most of the brides were in their late teens or early 20s. They came from the British Isles, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and even North Africa. Japanese war brides would be coming soon.
The brides thus far numbered around 70,000 as compared to an estimated 4-8 thousand who came to America after World War I. Many more would be on the way.
It was noted approximately one third of the brides also had children.
While the majority of war mothers had only one child, some had as many as three. Apparently, the men of the so-called “Greatest Generation“ had not been spending all their time fighting Nazis.
