Adam
Matheny was the first child of his parents and the first grandchild of his
grandparents, Isaiah and Elizabeth Montier Cooper. He was born December 20, 1820, in the newly-formed Owen County,
Indiana, of which his grandfather was one of the founders. His mother found religion just before Adam's
birth, so he was reared in a pious home, his father joining the church when
Adam was very young. He moved with his family to Edgar County, Illinois, in
1825, and to Schuyler County, Illinois, in 1830.
Adam
grew up to be an accomplished story-teller.
This was an art form in the days before radio and television. His sister, in her memoirs, makes several
references to Adam's story-telling ability. His descendant Corinne Moen had
heard from her great grandmother, Adam's daughter, about Adam's
story-telling.
When
Adam was sixteen, the family moved to Platte County, Missouri. It was here that Adam came to manhood and,
on the eve of the family's 1843 crossing of the plains to Oregon, eloped with
sixteen-year-old Sarah Jane Layson.
Sarah
Jane's father, David Layson, who had opposed the marriage, caused the departure
to be unnecessarily traumatic for his daughter and Adam, refusing to see his
daughter. In those days all family
property was vested in the husband's name, and Layson refused to permit his
daughter to retrieve any personal possessions, even her clothes. The story is included in Mrs. Kirkwood's
Into the Eye of the Setting Sun.
Because
her brother Aaron Layson (1820-1886) had also married Adam's cousin, Sarah Jane
Matheny (Rachel and Henry Matheny's daughter) at the same time his sister
married Adam, Adam's unhappy bride did bring a part of her family with
her. Because the two women were both
named Sarah Jane, it is easy to confuse them, especially since their marriages,
in effect, caused them to trade last names.
And both women would leave their husbands widowers before the decade was
over. Another Layson brother, Andrew
(1825-1912), would make his way to Oregon in 1846, and he, too, would marry
into the Cooper-Matheny family, marrying Elizabeth, daughter of Adam's uncle Enoch Cooper.
When
the "Great Migration of 1843" reached the Willamette Valley, Adam
claimed land next to his parents and built a small cabin on the land. Here two children were born: David Layson Matheny on 25 August 1844 and
Sarah Jane Matheny (later Thornton), January of 1847. Sarah Jane had difficulty in her first childbirth and did not
survive the second. Mrs. Kirkwood makes
it clear that her sister-in-law died in childbirth, but some accounts confuse
Sarah Jane's story with that of Mrs. James Cave, a consumptive, who selected
her own grave site and was the first burial in the cemetery at Hopewell. Sarah Jane died 20 January 1847, two months
before her twentieth birthday, and is buried at Hopewell. Part of Adam's donation land claim is now
Maud Williamson State Park and is the site of the annual Cooper-Matheny-Hewitt
reunion. The site of the Maud
Williamson home in the park is likely where Adam's home was situated.
Three
years after Sarah Jane's death, Adam, then twenty-nine, married
seventeen-year-old Harriet Hamilton,
who had been born in Indiana on the Wabash River, August 10, 1834, and had come
across the plains in 1844 with her parents, settling in Polk County. Her
parents were Robert Wilson Hamilton (1805-?) and Rebecca Smith (1808-?).
Together Adam and Harriet were to have eleven children in addition to Adam's
two children from his first marriage and an adopted child: (1) Daniel, ca.1852-?; (2) Caroline
ca.1853-ca.1860); (3) Wilson H., 1855-September 26, 1856; Henry H., 1856-1949 (had
no children; probably not married), died Pendleton, OR); Isaiah
"Zay," 1859-after 1895; Cordelia, born 1861 Newport, OR, married
Klaas Bezemer, Polk County, OR, 3 July 1881, died 1942, buried Salkum Cemetery,
Salkum, Lewis County, WA; Josephine 1865-after 1912, married ____ Copenhagen;
Minerva "Minnie" Maude, born 1868, married (1) first cousin Lorenzo
Dow Matheny, (2)____ Bulpin, died 1947; Grant, 1868-5 May 1890 (typhoid fever),
buried Bura Dell Cemetery, Pullman, WA; Wilson "Willie," 1871-after
1895; and Cora, 1875-after 1912, married ____Boutell.
Adam
and Harriet began selling off their Yamhill County land claim in 1856, the
summer of the cholera epidemic, just before the disease took so many lives in
the family. On June 27 they sold a
parcel to neighbor William Miller [Deed Book B, p.172]. On August 26, their
sixteen month old son Wilson died of the cholera and the Mathenys took in the
infant William E. Merritt, who, no doubt had lost his mother or both parents in
the epidemic. The couple was surrounded
by death; Adam's mother and two aunts as well as several nieces and nephews
were among the fatalities. The
following year, July 29, 1857, the couple sold land to Adam's father, Daniel
Matheny [Book E, p.106], and they lost nineteen-month-old William E. Merritt,
their adopted son, on 26 October. On July 9, 1858, another parcel was sold by
the Mathenys to William Miller. [Book
E, p.336]
It
was about this time that Adam and Harriet moved their family to Polk County to
a site on the Willamette River across from Salem, although still retaining part
of their Wheatland land.
On June 19, 1860, the
U.S. Census taker visited Adam's home there and enumerated the family. It was
immediately after the census was taken that summer that another family tragedy
occurred. On the evening of June 23,
1860, the Mathenys' seven-year-old daughter Caroline was playing near the
Willamette River by her home when she ran headlong into river and was
drowned. The Oregon Statesman,
operating across the river in Salem, gave a scant two-sentence coverage to the tragedy. The paper was crowded instead with the
politics of the times: slavery, splintering political parties, the Republican
Party platform, and the possibility of secession. Caroline's body was discovered several days later by her
grandfather, Daniel Matheny. The
tragedy left the Mathenys without any girl children other than Adam's thirteen
year old daughter Sarah Jane from his first marriage. But Harriet was pregnant at the time of the drowning, and on
January 15, 1861, a daughter Cordelia "Delia" was born. Perhaps because the infant was now Sarah
Jane's only sister, or perhaps due to a lingering sense of guilt over
Caroline's death (She had been at the scene and perhaps felt to blame for not
stopping her younger sister's careless running), a close bonding took place
between Sarah Jane and Delia.
In
the 1860's the Mathenys moved to Benton County, Oregon. By 1870 both of Adam's
children by his first marriage had left home.
The census of that year, taken on June 19, shows the Mathenys living in
Subdivision #5, Newton & Little Elk post offices of Benton County. This is now in Lincoln County.
In
1871, the Mathenys sold the last of their Donation Land Claim in Yamhill
County, once again to William Miller.
Apparently Miller purchased the portion of the land vested in Harriet's
name and then defaulted on payments.
Yamhill County Circuit Court Journal indicates that Harriet Matheny
filed a lawsuit against William Miller. This land was finally disposed of in
1885 by sale to James Tadlock. Harriet
signed the papers in Whitman County, WA, on February 6, 1885.
From
the memoirs of Burt Brown Barker, a stepgrandson of Adam's, we have the following stories:
Wrestling was a common sport. Each county had matches to determine the champion of the county. In the family of my stepfather was a
wrestling match story. It seems that
the father of my stepfather [Adam Matheny] was the champion wrestler of Polk
County. The champion of Marion County
came over into Polk County and went to the home of Mr. Matheny...to arrange for
a match. Mr. Matheny was at work in the
field; so Mrs. Matheny asked the challenger to come into the cellar for a drink
of cider. She picked up a five gallon
keg, threw it over her arm and drank out of the bung hole, saying as she did,
that he could drink out of a 15 gallon keg which her husband always used. The sequel is that there was no match. The challenger went home without even a
drink and the family always said that Mrs. Matheny won the match, not her
husband.
The
family had another story touching Mr. Matheny.
He was a fine sportsman and a good shot with his rifle. One day he went out to kill some meat for
the family. He was walking along the
bank of a stream when he suddenly saw a native pheasant sitting on the limb of a
maple tree. Just as he raised his rifle
to shoot it, he saw a deer in the clearing some distance beyond the maple. That created a problem. To shoot the pheasant, the deer would
run. To shoot the deer and the pheasant
would fly. He wanted them both so he
took careful aim and shot and cracked the limb of the tree on which the
pheasant sat and its toes were caught in the crack. The bullet then glanced off the limb and struck and killed the
deer. The recoil of the rifle kicked
Mr. Matheny into the stream on the bank of which he had stood, and when he got
up, his pockets were full of fish. It
took a real expert to do all that, and Mr. Matheny was a real expert. [Adam was a great story teller. This one was obviously of the tall-tale
genre.]
In
1880, Adam appeared on two censuses:
the Wheatland, Yamhill County, OR enumeration and the Whitman County, WA
list. This indicates that the summer of 1880 was when he moved his family to
Washington. [Later the Mathenys appeared in the 1885 and 1889 Whitman County,
WA Auditor's Censuses] They lived south of Pullman near the Snake River town of
Wawawai on top of a tall hill and could see twenty miles away if any riders
were coming. When this occurred, Adam ordered his daughters to hide under his
and Harriet's bed (the children slept on straw ticks). He did not want his daughters seduced by
visiting men. This caution was relaxed
when the visiting males were cousins.
But Adam could not control human nature; young hearts seek love, and his
daughter Minnie Maud found it where she could, with her cousin Dow Matheny (son
of Adam's brother Isaiah Matheny, who lived nearby). The family disapproved of the relationship; so Minnie and Dow
eloped and, because of the harsh treatment they received, moved far away to
Southern California.
His
brother Isaiah and all Isaiah's family having left the area, a restlessness
characteristic of most frontier men overtook Adam in 1890. Like his brothers, he wanted a change, a new
environment. Very likely, like most
frontier women, Harriet did not; she wanted roots and stability. So it was alone that Adam traveled to Tacoma
to where his daughter from his first marriage, Sarah Jane Thornton, lived with
her family. There Adam responded to advertising posters that urged people to
"join a colony ... in one of the finest
river bottoms in Western Washington," (according to the diary of a
man named Banta published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly.) "On
Tuesday, March 11, 1890, Banta and Sharp took a party of eight men by way of
the sea route up to the Queets (River).
They were Adam Matheny...."
Adam took up a claim.
Back
at the farm near Pullman, Adam's twenty-two year old son, Grant Matheny, died
of typhoid on May 5 and was buried there without his father in attendance. A
newspaper clipping, source unknown, was among the keepsakes of Cordelia Matheny
Bezemer:
IN MEMORIAM
Died-
on May 5th, 1890, at the home of his parents near Snake river, of typhoid
fever, Grant Matheney, aged 22 years.
Since God in his all wise providence has seen best to remove from our
number one endeared to us all, it seems most befitting and proper that we as
friends of the deceased and the family, extend our heartfelt sympathies. Grant was a bright young man, and his death
leaves a father, mother, three brothers and four sisters to mourn; but saddest
of all, his father was not at home, being in Tacoma visiting his daughter. This is a very severe blow as the parents
are getting quite old. Funeral services
were conducted by Rev. Gibson of Pullman, at the Bura Dell cemetery. While Grant's place can never be filled, and
his parents and friends with emotion ask why God has dealt thus, we can only
look up and pray that he enjoys life eternal on the other shore. He bade his family good bye and requested
them to sing "I Am Going Home Tomorrow." The bereaved family has the sympathy of all.
The solitary Adam settled on a creek
tributary to the Queets River, which now carries his name: Matheny Creek. The adjacent ridge also is known as Matheny Ridge. Here Adam lived out the remaining years of
his life. Here he heard of the deaths
of his brother Daniel and then of his brother Jasper. Adam was the third brother to die within a five-year span, dying
7 November 1895. He was buried in a
small cemetery now located within the Queets Corridor of Olympic National
Park. His obituary can be found in
Scrapbook #21 on p.103 at the Oregon Historical Society Library in Portland:
Sketch of
A Deceased Pioneer of the Immigration of 1843
Adam
Matheny, who died near Salem [sic] November 7, was nearly 75 years old. He was born in Owen County, Ind., December
20, 1820. His parents moved to Illinois
when he was quite young, where they lived until the summer of 1837, when they
went to Missouri. Here, in April of 1843,
he was married to Sarah J. Louson [sic], and started for Oregon with his bride,
in company with his parents and others, numbering in all about 1000 souls. Thus he became a part of the immigration of
1843. He first settled on the Tualatin
plains, near where Hillsboro now stands, his nearest neighbors being Joseph
Meek and Squire Ebberts. Finding this
place too isolated, he located near his father, who had purchased the old
Leslie farm. on the west side of the Willamette, just below and across the
river from the first site of the Methodist mission. Here, in January, 1847, his young wife died, leaving him with a
little son of two summers and an infant daughter. He was one of the oldest pioneers of Free Masonry on the coast,
having passed beyond the Royal Arch degree, and stood high in that order. He was an old soldier, having served under
Colonel Neal Zilliom [Gilliam] in the Cayuse War of 1847 and 1848. When the rebellion broke out he enlisted
under George B. Curry, at The Dalles, and though retained upon this coast,
became a factor in that great struggle, receiving from the government in the
last years of his life a disability pension of $12, which was his sole support.
He
left his eldest son, D.L. Matheny, of Salem, and Mrs. Sara J. Thornton, of Tacoma,
the children of his first marriage. Of
his second family, there are four daughters and four sons--living in Eastern
Oregon, Washington, and California--besides an aged wife.
Perhaps
Adam traveled to Tacoma for the marriage of his granddaughter, Mary Alma
"Allie" Thornton, on 28 February 1893 to Ernest Lister. There Allie received a congratulatory
telegram from Governor West of Oregon, an old friend from her school days. If Adam did meet his new grandson, he did
not know that he was looking at the future eighth governor of the State of
Washington, for that would be in 1912.
Harriet died September 24, 1912, in the
Laurelwood District of Portland, Oregon, and was buried in Multnomah Cemetery.
(Oregon Historical Society Library, #SB 36, p.52) The following was her obituary:
October 6, 1912 -
Mrs. Harriet Matheny, an Oregon Pioneer of 1844, died at Laurelwood
Sept. 24 and three days later was buried in the Multnomah Cemetery. She was the widow of Adam Matheny, who died
in 1896. [sic]
Mrs. Matheny
was born on the Wabash in Indiana August 10, 1834 and came across the plains
with her parents in 1844 and settled in Polk County, Oregon. At the age of 17 she married and, with her
husband, took up a joint donation land claim near Wheatland.
She was the
mother of 13 children, being survived by four sons and four daughters and 17
grandchildren. Her surviving children
are Henry and William of Pendleton, Daniel of the Phillipine Islands, Izzae
[Isaiah, known as "Zay"] of Lincoln County, Mrs.Delia Bezener, [sic]
Portland, Mrs. Minnie Matheny, Mrs Josie Copenhagen, and Mrs. Cora Boutell,
Napavine, Wash.
Revised January 13, 1999
David
Layson Matheny was the first-born child of Adam and Sarah Jane Layson
Matheny. He was born August 25, 1844,
in Washington County, Oregon, on the Tualatin Plains. Although the Mathenys had made arrangements to move to what is
now Wheatland, their crops were in the ground, and they had to wait until after
the harvest to make their move. Thus
David, like other babies born in the family that year, was not born at
Wheatland. When he was two years old,
his mother's became the first family death in Oregon. David was living in the West Salem area of Polk County when, on
October 27, 1878, he married a divorced woman, Elvira Brown Barker [1844-1924], the inspiration for the statue of
"The Pioneer Mother" at the University of Oregon. The statue was planned and placed there by
Elvira's son from her first marriage, Burt Brown Barker, an outstanding figure
in Oregon in the first half of the 1900's, and then vice president of the
university. Besides Burt, David and his
wife reared two other children by her first marriage, Cary and Marietta Barker.
The Mathenys also had children of their own: an unnamed baby born January 27, 1880, that
died the same day; David Claude Matheny, born March 5, 1881, in Salem, OR, died
May 5, 1964, in Tacoma, WA; Vida Matheny, born October 12, 1883, Salem, OR; and
Blanch Matheny, born June 6, 1885, Salem, OR, married Dr. _____ Walker, living
in Tacoma, WA, 1964.
In
1898 David Layson Matheny moved his family to Tacoma, WA, where his sister
Sarah Matheny Thornton lived. Near the end of his life, David and his wife
moved to Los Angeles, CA. Here Elvera
died on10 February 1924, at the age of seventy-nine. She was cremated and David took her ashes to Salem, OR, to buried
in the Jason Lee Cemetery, probably to be near her parents. Apparently David moved to San Bernardino,
CA, after the death of Elvera, because he died there 2 April 1925, at the age
of eighty and his ashes were buried at the Hopewell Cemetery at the foot of his
mother's grave.
There
seem to be no living descendants of this line.
Obituaries make it appear that both Claud and Blanch were childless. Corinne Moen of Eureka, CA, had original
photos of both David and Elvera.
Sarah
Jane was the second child of Adam Matheny and his first wife, Sarah Jane
Layson. Her mother died at the time of
her birth in January of 1847.
Presumably until Adam's remarriage, Sarah Jane was cared for by Mary
Cooper Matheny, his mother. In 1850
Adam married Harriet Hamilton, who was to rear Sarah Jane and her brother
David. The 1850's saw the birth of five
half-siblings. Sarah Jane was present
in 1860 when her sister Caroline fell into the Willamette River and
drowned. About 1866 she married Samuel
Thornton and moved to Tacoma, WA, in the 1870's. A daughter Mary Alma "Allie" Thornton was born
September 3, 1867. There were probably
other children, but they are unknown at the present time. Sarah Jane lived to be an old woman, but her
date of death has not yet been ascertained.
Her daughter Allie became a woman of some note.
Allie
was married February 28, 1893, to Ernest Lister, a native of Halifax, England,
who immigrated to Tacoma in 1884. He
was the nephew of David Lister, Tacoma's first mayor, and the son of J.H.
Lister, a pioneer iron founder of Tacoma.
Ernest Lister ran for governor of Washington and won in 1912. He was re-elected in 1916 and worked himself
to death. He died in office June 14,
1919. Shortly after her husband's death
Allie was discovered to have cancer and she died May 26, 1923. Her daughter Florence Lister Odell died in
1928 and her son John in 1934 at the age of twenty-seven; these were her only
children. [Seattle Times, pp.10-11, December 18, 1966]
Cordelia,
known as "Delia" to the family, was born the year the Civil War
started, on January 15, 1861. Her
mother had been pregnant with her the previous summer when her older sister
Caroline drowned in the Willamette River.
Beginning in 1872, Delia lived with the family of her aunt, Elizabeth
Matheny Hewitt. It isn't clear on the
part of Adam and Harriet why they permitted this, but it happened a lot during
frontier times. Schooling was usually
the reason. Elizabeth, with a household
of boys, likely enjoyed the idea of having another female in the house. In 1875 she moved with the Hewitts to the
site of the Salem ferry, which the Hewitts purchased that year from her uncle
Jasper Matheny. Many people used the
ferry, including young Klaas Bezemer to attend classes at Willamette University
in Salem. He and Delia married 3 July
1881 in Polk County, OR. Their children
were (1) Leo Bezemer, a twin, born in 1882; he was childless (2) Leona, Leo's
twin; she also was childless (3) Jacob "Jay" Bezemer, born c.1886; he
was also childless (4) Chester, born c.1892, who married and had four children: Chester Kay, born c.1927; Paul Darvin, born
c.1929; Aloha Lee, born c.1931; and George, born 1935, killed c.1946 by being
dragged by a horse. (5) Inez Harriet
Aaljia Bezemer, born December 17, 1898, in Napa, California, married _______
Stout; had one son, Phillip Stout, born 1923; she died in 1977.
For
awhile the Bezemers lived in Napa, California, moving there c. 1895. About 1901, the family moved to the Bezemer
family homestead in Lewis County, Washington.
Klaas, who had been born in 1858, became the postmaster at Salkum in
December 1905. Cordelia died in 1942
and Klaas 2 or 3 years later.
Minnie
(Minerva according to the 1870 Census) Maud Matheny was very much the frontier
child--she made and wore poke bonnets and long aprons until her death after
World War II and walked barefooted whenever she could, much to the dismay of
her more urbane daughter Helen. Like
her father, she was an accomplished story-teller. Born in Polk County, Oregon,
she was the daughter of Adam and Harriet Hamilton Matheny. Her young years were spent in Whitman
County, Washington Territory between Wawawai and Pullman near the Snake River,
where the family lived on Blue Mountain and could "see for twenty miles."
In her later years Minnie related to her family
that her father had been extremely strict, but fair. Whenever a group of men would be spotted coming up the road, Adam
had his daughters hide under the only bed in their cabin. (The children slept
on straw ticks on the floor.) He was
very protective of them. But cousins
were welcome. Adam's brother Isaiah
lived in the vicinity with his family.
With no other young men upon whom to attach her affections, Minnie Maud
became enamoured of her cousin Dow, who was about ten years older than
she. When she was eighteen, the couple
eloped, against the wishes of the family.
They were to have five children together.
Ona Kicho was born in 1886 in an Indian cave
near the Snake River near Walla Walla while Dow and Minnie were traveling in a
covered wagon not long after they were married. Minnie went into labor and the
Indians gave the couple shelter in their cave while Minnie gave birth. It was for this reason that Ona Kicho was
given the Indian name. Ona Kicho became a great grandmother in the last years
of Minnie's life, and so there were five generations alive. But Ona Kicho did not long survive her
mother, dying in 1948. Both are buried
in Inglewood, CA. Whereas Minnie had
dark hair and eyes and showed her Indian ancestry, Ona Kicho had the dark hair
but had blue eyes. Ona Kicho was very
short, five feet tall, if that. She
wore a size four shoe.
Other
children of Dow and Minnie Maud were Bonnie, who married Henry Herschel, had
two sons, and died following an abortion; Charles Matheny, who married Ruth
_____, had two daughters, and was last known to be living in Huntington Park,
CA; Maud, who married Decker Sowell, was widowed, and died in Cave Junction,
OR, in the 1970's; and Helen, who married Elmer Reynolds.
Minnie and Dow were married about twenty-five
years when they divorced. Minnie Maud
then married a Mr. Bulpin and was later widowed. Bulpin had been a retired railroad worker who had invested in
property. He left Minnie well provided
for.
Corinne
Moen tells a story that illustrates the conflict of the frontier generation
adapting to urban Los Angeles County life:
Minnie Maud's daughter Helen was always chastising her mother for her
embarrassing habit of going barefooted.
"People in the city don't do that!" Helen would tell her mother
incessantly, but Minnie Maud was not to be budged out of her frontier
ways. At Christmas time the family had
gathered to have a taffy pull;
"Grammie" (Minnie Maud) was stationed in the kitchen with some
of her grandchildren. To rankle her
daughter, Minnie wrapped the taffy around her toes and was entertaining her
grandchildren. She got a good laugh out
of Helen's reaction.
Minnie
Maud was an avid gardener. Everything
in her vegetable garden was in perfect order.
Corrine recalls Minnie always sitting on her back porch with a colander
on her lap shelling peas, snapping green beans, or otherwise preparing her
vegetables for consumption-- always barefooted.
© Don RIVARA, Salem, Oregon, 1999,
2001
see more pages about this family:
Adam's account of an Indian War following the WHITMAN Massacre
Back to MATHENY listing in Oregon
Trail Pioneers