The following post is a reproduction of an article appearing in the Marion Daily Republican dated March 22, 1940. It summarizes the presence of the bell making, Stockton family who were a very early pioneer family that settled in Marion and distributed their bells all over the west and midwest from their home and factory on North Market between E. Boulevard and W. Stockton Streets.
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A century ago, there was a bell factory in Marion. It has long been forgotten, but its history forms an interesting factor in the records of early Egypt. The Stockton family were early settlers in this section, but later moved to California and recently, Billy Stockton who was just a youth when the family left Illinois, wrote a book of personal memoirs entitled, “The Plains Over.” On January 25, 1940, “Uncle Billy” was 92 years old and his birthday was celebrated by the Cosmic Club of Los Banos, California of which he was a charter member.
The old Stockton bell factory was located on North Market Street, where the Burkhart homes now stand and this plant and its products gained fame all over the west.
Stockton Street, the first street north of Boulevard, was near the old Stockton factory and home and was named for them, even if not spelled the way their name is spelled now.
The memoirs were edited and published by Ralph Milliken of Los Banos and are a fascinating story of the early days in the west. By permission of Mr. Milliken, the Marion Daily Republican will reprint the first chapters which contain historic records of Williamson County and Southern Illinois. The first installment appears today.
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The Plains Over
Chapter One
My father was a bell maker and carried on a flourishing business in Illinois for years. An older sister by the name of Kisiah had married an Englishman by the name of Tulftnell, who was a bell maker by trade and taught my father and my uncle Isaac the business. In those days there was no such thing as sheet iron. Iron came only in strips an inch thick and six inches wide. To make a bell they would cut off as much iron as they thought they would need and then proceed to pound it out on an anvil into a thin sheet. It was very laborious work. From this piece of sheet iron they would fashion the bell. Aunt Kisiah’s husband died a few years later and my father and uncle started up a shop of their own in the new town of Marion, Illinois.
The early settlers in Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois and as far down south as Texas raised horses, cattle, sheep and hogs. They simply turned their stock loose in the woods and let them run. They would put bells on the leaders so that they could find their stock again. Whenever they wanted to look after any of their stock they would simply go out in the timber and listen to the tinkling of the bells in the distance. No two human voices are exactly alike. The same is true of bells. Each settler knew the sound of his own bell and could go right to his own stock.
Bell making was a very profitable enterprise until the factories in the Eastern States got to making bells in wholesale quantities and ruined the business. But in their day, my father and my uncle sold bells all over the newly settled parts of the United States. They would make up several hundred bells and then set out with teams and wagons for Tennessee or Texas or any other part of the West that suited their fancy and sell their bells. They got from twenty five cents for a small bell to as high as one dollar and a quarter for the larger ones. They sold thousands and thousands of bells. Most pioneer families had only five or six dollars in actual money in their possession. But that made no difference. People thought they just simply had to have these bells and at nearly every house and on every cattle range these bells would sell. As a result of their bell making my father and my uncle, Isaac, always had more actual money on hand than most anybody else in Marion.
Usually other men were sent out selling the bells but many times my father and uncle went themselves. They would be gone from one to three months on these trips. When a man had sold most of his load of bells he would sell his wagon and one of the horses and then proceed on horseback until he had disposed of the last of the bells. Then he would sell the horse and start back home on foot. If there were any steamboats or stages on the way back he would travel on the. One time my uncle when returning from one of their trips was attacked by robbers and shot several times. He managed to escape but carried three bullets in his body all the rest of his live.
The Stockton family lived in the north of Ireland. Two hundred years ago, one of my ancestors came to America and settled in Albermarie County, Virginia. For three generations the Stocktons lived in that neighborhood. Then, after the Revolutionary War, the family began to move westward. My grandfather’s brother, Nathaniel Stockton, went to Kentucky and from there to Alabama. My grandfather, Robert Stockton, also moved to Alabama and it was there in 1821 that my father, Samuel Whitesides Stockton, was born. My grandmother, Phoebe Whitesides, was the sister of General Whitesides, who commanded the American army in the greatest of Indian Wars we have ever had, the Mohawk.
Walnut grew in abundance and made the finest furniture. There was also hickory, oak, and poplar. Underneath the timber land, covering the whole southern part of the state is coal. Near the surface, there is a solid sheet of coal about eight feet thick. Wherever a ravine cut through the country it exposes the coal and the place is call a “coal bank” or coal mine. Down 50 feet lower there is another vein of coal. In all there are three veins of coal in Illinois.
The settlers in Illinois at first took up their farms in the timber, as they thought it was warmer there than out on the open prairie. The trees also sheltered their tobacco plants from the wind. Later the people found out that the timber land was the poorest land of all. It was the prairies that were the rich land. On the prairies the roots of the grass were so thick and matted that a single strip of sod when the land was being broken up would often turn over in an unbroken stretch of sod for sometimes half a mile. People thought at first, that this open prairie land worthless. It often took three years for the sod to rot sufficiently after being plowed until another crop could be raised on it. But when people did get to raising crops on the sod they found that one acre of the prairie land was worth half a dozen acres of timberland.
My uncle Isaac was older than my father. When uncle was about fifteen or sixteen years old he ran away from home and joined the army. He was a scout in the Black Hawk War. Later on, besides making the bells, he studied medicine and became a doctor. There were two schools of doctors. In those days calomel was considered by many people as the greatest medicine in the world. It is a mineral. Those doctors who prescribed calomel were known as mineral doctors, while those who refused to use it in their practice were known as botanical doctors. My uncle Isaac was one of the latter.
After my father and my uncle located their bell factory in Marion, my father bought a quarter section of land adjoining the town. He married Miss Nancy Gassaway Pope, whose father was County Judge of Franklin County, Illinois. For years, Judge Pope, was also a doctor. The Popes were of old English stock and had settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where they were large slave owners and very wealthy. My father settled on his farm adjoining Marion and it was here that I was born. Gold was discovered in California on the 24th of January, 1848. I was discovered the next day, my birthday being January 25th, 1848. The first recollection that I have of anything was along about 1852, when I remember my father and my uncle getting ready to set out with loads of bells for Texas.
There are a number of people in Los Banos whose early home was the same part of Illinois where I lived. George Hopper’s grandfather (John Hooper) had a saw mill in Marion. He came to California in 1848. Charles Cothran who was a supervisor here for eight years was a cousin of mine. His mother was my mother’s sister. She was a school marm. Marshal E. Martin, who is a cousin of the Cothrans, came from the neighborhood of DuQuoin. Charles W. Smith, and Lowry Smith, of Badger Flat, lived in Marion County to the north of us. The town of Marion, where we lived was named after General Francis Marion, the famous fighting Revolutionary General and leader of “Marion’s Men.” To all the frontier people he was the outstanding hero of the Revolution, second only in their esteem to General Washington himself.
The first school I attended was in a barn on my Uncle Isaac’s Coal Bank. Every family in those days hired a school marm for two or three months each year to come in their home and teach the children to read and write. People in general could just barely read and write and it was nothing uncommon to see a grown person who could neither read nor write. After a school marm had stayed a couple of months or so with one family another family would hire her and she would go and live with them for a few months.
My uncle and my father together hired a man and his wife by the name of McCoy to come to my uncle’s farm and teach the children of both families. A few other pupils also attended. In all there were between fifteen and twenty scholars. Part of the barn was cleaned out and a floor put in for the use of a school. A big pile of corn in the back part of the room was simply thrown back out of the way. Everything was very crude. For a desk for the use of the older pupils on which to write, a large wide poplar board was nailed up along the wall. Benches on which to sit were made out of jogs split in two and held up by wooden pegs for legs.
The older children sat at the desk along the wall while we smaller children sat on these logs in the middle of the room. There was nothing on which to lean our backs or which to rest our feet. This is where I learned to read. Mrs. McCoy taught us little ones while her husband handled the older pupils. My brother, Robert, and I was boarded at my uncle Isaac’s during the week and taken home every Friday night. We lived three miles from my uncle’s farm. We went two different years to this school, but only about six months all together.
There were three burning political questions in Illinois when I was but a child. One was whether the State of Illinois should provide free public schools for the children of the state. When the question actually came to a vote, the free school idea won and in 1857, I attended my first public school.
My father was elected a member of the school board. They built a school house in the town of Marion and hired several teachers. Among them were both Mr. and Mrs. McCoy, who had been teaching out at my uncle’s. The school board also employed the sister of Robert G. Ingersoll. She was my first teacher in Marion. Before the year was out she became sick and her brother himself finished out her term. So I am a pupil of Robert G. Ingersoll, but not one of his followers.
There was another young man in Marion, who afterwards became famous. He was a young lawyer and married Miss Cunningham, a very dear friend of my mother. A few years later, he became the celebrated Union soldier, General John A. Logan.
Another question that was being bitterly waged when I was a boy was the question of prohibition. In the early days, every family had their own still and made their own whiskey. The state went dry and all these stills were outlawed. These stills were all the way up to sixty gallons in capacity and had as much as five pounds of copper in them. Father and uncle bought up a hundred or more of them. They used the copper to braze their bells with. Before the Civil War, prohibition was making great headway in this country. But when the war come on liquor was allowed to come back for the sake of the revenue it would produce. The Civil War set back the advance of prohibition many years.
My uncle Isaac was a strong anti-slavery man and when the Broder Warfare was going on he moved in 1854 to Kansas. He was a personal friend of John Brown and was elected to the Kansas Legislature. The people of Kansas voted to see whether the state should come into the Union with slavery or as a free state. The contest became so hot and my uncle was such a strong free soil man that he had either to get out of the state or be killed. He started overland in 1856, with his family for California. Kansas came in as a free state and the Civil War followed.
On arriving in California, my uncle settled in Petaluma. He bought a ranch about five miles north of town in the Two Rock district and went to dairying. He simply coined money. Butter was bringing a dollar a pound in the mines and he could sell all the butter he could make. My uncle became acquainted with George Hopper’s grandfather, and they decided that they could make a fortune by going back to Illinois where there were fine dairy cows and bringing a thousand head of them out to California.
My uncle returned in 1858 to Illinois and bought up a thousand head of heifers at about twenty dollars apiece. He started with them for California, but got only as far as Kansas when news came that Mormons were acting so bad that it would be very dangerous and maybe impossible to get through to California with them.
My uncle left the cattle on the Big Sandy River in Kansas to be cared for until the next spring and returned to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama. It was arranged that during the winter, father was disposed of his business in Illinois. Then he was to come overland to California and bring this thousand head of cattle with him.
(Marion Daily Republican, March 22, 1940)