Pioneer Woman of Ives' Settlement

Pioneer Women

Chenango Telegraph, September 30, 1875

 

The settlement in Guilford, Chenango Co., called Ives' Settlement was mainly settled by parties from Connecticut.  My father and grandfather came in 1805, making the whole distance with a pair of oxen and cart.  My mother, who had never seen her future husband, came in 1806, with her sister and family on a load of goods.  She is now 89 years old, and has just gone out to the neighbors visiting, and can walk better than many of our young ladies.  Her first summer here, she taught school between Sidney Plains and Jericho, as Bainbridge was then called, in a school house near where Elam Yale now lives.  In 1808 she married Milton Norton, and settled in Ives' settlement, where she lived until father's death in 1833.

 

The roads in this part of the country were then mere paths or trails, and seldom turned aside for the steepest hills.

 

My mother had a sister living in Triangle, Broome Co., and my parents made her a visit on horseback when their first child was ten months old, mother carrying it the whole distance in her lap, and returning in the same manner, making the distance ridden sixty miles.  Think of this, ye pinned back dears, who are almost exhausted after a ten mile ride in your luxurious carriages. She says the child was tired after its return, but was all right in a day or two. When they reached the Genaganstlet Creek beyond Greene, the high water of the previous week had carried away the bridge, and mother crossed on the stringers of the new one, carrying her child in her arms, while my father crossed at a ford one mile down stream with the horses.

 

Mother had eight children by her first husband, and in 1833 the Typhus fever swept through the family, taking off my father and two oldest sisters.

 

In 1838, my mother married Paris Winsor, and four years afterwards he committed suicide by hanging, in consequence of financial trouble.

 

In 1873, that is two years ago, she broke her ankle, and it healed as rapidly as it could have done had she been a young person.

 

My sister and myself are the only children left of the original eight, and there is a fair prospect that the remaining branches will be lopped off, while the present trunk stands in its loneliness, a landmark of bygone days.

 

R.C. Norton