SAMUEL LIVESLEY
the oldest of his brothers and sisters - grew up an English boy in the town and region of his ancestors. His grandparents and great-grandparents were from Northwich, his connection to Cheshire old. His father was a shopkeeper when he was born, later a farmer on land leased from a local estate. Sam first went to the United States with his family in 1741, at age eleven, when they moved to Ohio. His brother John had died as a baby and sister Elizabeth, only 6 1/2, just before they left. So of the five children on the trip Sam was the oldest and William the youngest. We picture him loving the sailing adventure. While they were in America this time Sam got some schooling.

The family went back to England in 1745. These were booming times for England and Cheshire. Railroad 'mania' seized everyone's attention; new factories of all kinds joined the ancient salt and lead works; the traditional life was in great change. Sam learned the sail making trade, perhaps influenced by his mother's family which apparently included many sea farers. Then in 1848, at eighteen, he returned to the U.S. by himself. He sailed on the Great Lakes two years before shipping to the Pacific and more distant ports. He "followed the sea" for six years, including 29 crossings of the North Atlantic. Toward the end of this sailing career he courted the young Margaret Maddock of Chester, Cheshire County. He must have been attractive and persuasive because hers was a landed, church-connected family of a station above his. They nevertheless married in the Great Budworth Parish Church in May 1854. Their first two children, Robert and Esther, were born in Cheshire.

His parents re-immigrated to Ohio in early 1856 and then Wisconsin the same year. It appears Sam, giving up sailing, taking his nascent family first to Reedsburg in 1858 and then Ironton in 1861. Sam became landlocked in the valley for a time, building a family and we presume, a hop business. We know he served as Town Clerk and ran for Assemblyman. After adding seven more children while in Ironton (and living out the Civil War), the family moved to nearby LaValle. In 1873 Sam bought land there and started a 450 acre hop ranch. He had become a hop dealer in 1868 and was the first person to sell Wisconsin hops in England. He said in a 1907 interview that he began when there was a nine year "crash" in the Wisconsin market and he was able to buy the hops very cheaply. He started the LaValle ranch during this slump.

Neither he or his brother Thomas accompanied their parents and siblings when they moved to Nebraska in 1869. Perhaps it was Sam's young family budding up, perhaps his hop business, or both. He had his father's affable style, penchant for commerce and friends in England. He became successful in hops and traveled to Britain on business a number of times, once for a five year stay 1899-1904 when his son Tom came back from Oregon to tend the LaValle farm.

The family in Nebraska moved out to Washington about 1881. Sam, Margaret and their children again stayed where they were in Wisconsin but in 1887 they too went west, retaining the LaValle ranch and operating it from Seattle. Sam began to additionally purchase hops throughout Washington and Oregon and become one of the largest hop dealers in the Pacific Northwest. He purchased the family plot at Lake View Cemetery on Capital Hill in 1889 where he, Margaret and six of their children are buried. Margaret died in Seattle in 1894 at 61. Sam remained active, vigorous and in business 26 years after this. At 77 he was 6'2", 240 pounds.

As mentioned Sam was in London 1899-1904. Apparently he visited LaValle during that time as the Reedsburg Free Press interviewed him 4 July 1901, "recently arrived from London . . . compelled to go back." It is said he lived in LaValle in 1905 and had "a young housekeeper with a little child," and in 1911 in Juneau, seven miles from LaValle. He then listed his occupation as "capitalist." In 1908 he visited Salem OR where the paper said, "Sam Livesley is here from his home in Reedsburg WI."

Sam had lived two years at Yakima's Sidney Hotel when he died in 1920. He was 90. The paper said his death was not unexpected. He was interred next to Margaret in the family plot at Lake View Cemetery. His estate was mostly the property in LaValle and this was divided equally among his living children. Oddly, the farm was sold by Sam's estate to an Andrew C. Johnson with "possession of premises to be delivered to buyer on or before March 20, 1947." Inheritance tax is dated 16 Sept 1947.

Ethel Garvin's notes refer to Sam's maybe second wife Patty (Louise Patterson Livesley>). Apparently Patty was a great friend of Sam's sister-in-law Susan (Thomas' wife), and in fact Susan's July 1909 deeding of Woodburn land to son P.A. Livesley was witnessed by a Louise Livesley. She's also mentioned by the paper as a guest at Flora Livesley's wedding in Woodburn. Sam may have married Louise and divorced sometime before his death.

This Portland OR newspaper article survives from 1918, suggesting he was still traveling toward the end of his life:

MARINER LOSES SEA LEGS Samuel Livesley Tells of Early Days

For the first time since he signed as third mate on the American ship Lantau in 1851, voyaging from New York to the Golden Gate in 185 days, Samuel Livesley lost his sea legs for a short time on the steamer Multnomah, Captain Charles Green, Saturday when she was beset by a beam sea and a head wind. The Multnomah arrived Sunday and sails on the return today.

Mr. Livesley, who fixes his age at 92 years [actually 88], says he was also third mate on the Queen of Shelba on a trip from San Francisco to Valparaiso and the present submarine campaign and use of armed merchantmen recalled to him the fact that the Queen of Shelba was armed, four guns being carried, not for protection against U-boats, then unheard of, but to repel Chinese pirates. On reaching Valparaiso it was learned that gold had been discovered in Australia. Captain Green and Steward MacMillan were praised by Mr. Livesley for courtesies on the trip.

His brother-in-law Martin wrote his sister about him in February 1860, when he and Sam lived near each other in Wisconsin:

Our bro. Sam is our nearest neighbor according to distance, but according to sociability - not; i.e., I speak of them as a family not of Sam individually, for he is sociable enough - and so is she when she can't avoid it - but as neighbors, friends and relatives they do not practice towards us those customs which most commonly prevail among neighbors, friends and relatives. They don't call upon us to spend a little time in pleasant chat and conversation and they act altogether so distant and cold and indifferent that we don't feel at liberty to intrude upon their exclusiveness. And yet they are perfectly friendly for aught we know. We don't wish to complain at all of our lot, but you know sister that a different state of things would conduce far more to our present happiness. Sam is a good a fellow as ever was in the world and I enjoy being with him much, and yet I would like to have him and his wife a little more sociable with my family. Ellen [Margaret] never was as free with my family as she ought to be, or as other people are. She got into her house before we did into ours and had a good dry time to move, while we had a cold wet time, and Ann was not at all well and yet she didn't come in to see how we were getting along or offer any assistance whatever for more than two weeks I think.

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A 1874 newspaper article:

OLDEST PIONEER HOPBUYER TELLS QUEER EXPERIENCES Paid $1.25 a Pound in 1883; Saw 9 Crops Pile Up.

SALEM OR., Feb. 11 --Sam Livesley, the oldest surviving pioneer hopbuyer in the United States and the first dealer to venture across the Atlantic from Wisconsin with a shipment of hops, is here from his home in Reedsburg, Wis., for a few weeks' visit to his sons, Thomas A., of the firm of T.A. Livesley & Co. and Charles, Oregon buyer for the firm of E. Clemens Horst Company. He contemplates making another trip to London in about a month and will take a shipment of between 1000 and 1500 bales of Oregon Hops with him on account of T.A. Livesley & Co.

Mr. Livesley is over six feet tall and weighs about 240 pounds, and although past 77 years of age, is still rugged and healthy, and claims that he is still good for another 30 years. He began his career n the hop business in 1868, when Wisconsin was the greatest hopgrowing state in the Union, and has been more or less active as a buyer and shipper ever since. He came to Washington and Oregon. In the earliest days of the hop industry in the Northwest along with George W. Hubbard, long since retired and living in Los Angeles, Phil Neise, Isaac Pincus and others. He makes trips to England, the land of his nativity, every few years and always takes a shipment of hops along.

"The first year of my experience as a hop dealer was 1868, the year of the first crash in the Wisconsin hop market, when Wisconsin produced 178,000 bales of hops, and it took nine years to dispose of them," he said. "During this period eight more crops piled on top of this immense surplus, and the last of the crop of '68 I purchased together with the growers' eight other crops at 15 cents. During my first year's experience as a buyer I had the experience of paying 45 cents per pound for salt when I thought I was purchasing hops. 'Salting' mines was not in it with the swindle one grower worked on me. Salt was worth 1 cent a pound and this grower bought eight barrels of salt and mixed it with 70 bales of hops during the baling process. The swindle was not discovered until I attempted to sell a large order to a Chicago merchant.

"One of the experiences I had with the last lots of the crop of 1868 and those of the eight intervening years was that I sold all but the rejections at 39 cents and the rejections I sold later at 41 cents. Wisconsin was then put out of business as a hop producer, and I turned my attention to the Northwest. When the high prices of 1882 were in effect, when as high as $1.25 per pound was paid, followed by the second crash and the falling of the bottom out of the market. I was upon the ocean with a shipment of hops for England."

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MARGARET "ELLEN" MADDOCK
was the daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Maddock about whom we know little except this was the middle marriage for her mother, and that her father, who died in 1837 when she was four, was buried in Chester Cathedral. Grandfather Rev. Thomas Maddock was Rector of Holy Trinity Church in Chester (prebendary, an author and also buried in the Cathedral) and her grandmother Emma Anne Scott, judging by her will, was a woman of some substance who died owning five properties, two estates, etc. Margaret's father, grandfather and great-grandfather (also a Rector at Liverpool) and possibly other Maddocks of our line, attended Brasenose College, Oxford and also Manchester School, secondary. Not only Emma Scott's holdings but the Church positions of immediate relatives suggest her Maddocks were of some station. Also Margaret's uncle Thomas Herbert Maddock, in 1813, accepted a position as a writer with the East India Company, left the College and went to India. He gradually rose tot he top levels of judicial and financial affairs and was knighted in 1844. His senior position was deputy governor of Bengal and president of the Council of India. It is often rumored that this person was buried in Westminster Abbey but I think this is not true. In 1851 he returned to England and was conservative MP for the city of Rochester. Margaret was married in 1754.

Margaret must have stayed close with her mother's first and third families, the Hendersons and Lightfoots, as John Lightfoot, a solicitor, was a witness at her wedding and John Magnus Henderson, a railway clerk, signed her marriage settlement. She lived in Hartford at the time. The large Maddock line - originally Madoc - emanated from Celts driven north from Cornwall and Devon to Wales by the Norman and Saxon invasions.

H.A. Henderson, Margaret's step nephew, came to America from Cheshire in 1885 "for his health" and spent the summer in Ironton with Sam & Margaret. He saw both cousins Lizzie (and made marriage eyes at her, so they say) and her sister Esther Emma who was then married to Arthur West. Margaret had money left to her by her family along the way, possibly including some from the Hendersons who appear to have run several cotton mills. Her marriage contract specifies she brought "the sum of Nine hundred and twenty seven pounds nine shillings and six pence three and a quarter per cent Consolidated Bank Annuities." We presume these continued to give until May of 1873 when she and Sam rewrote the contract to use the principal to buy the hop farm land in LaValle.

She predeceased her husband by 26 years, dying in Seattle in 1894, and is buried at Lake View.

@2000 by Sam Bush; reproduced on this website with permission