John was born on 13 June 1869. He married
Vida Elizabeth Stipp at
Monroe Co., Indiana, on 10 October 1900. John Otis Baker was migration in 1914 at
Wisconsin; In a letter by Lester Baker to his "cousins", including my Mom, he wrote about his family moving to Wisconsin, below is part of that letter:
"My father was sold on the wonders of Wisconsin and the low cost of land - in March of 1914 we landed in Marinette, with a man and his wife to help with the work. There was little snow. My mother was to stay in the Queen City Hotel with my sisters Julia and Martha and brothers Cecil and Orville. I was 12, Martha 2 and the rest in between. We had no house to go to, we stayed in an old abandoned logging camp until the first part of our new house was built and some of the land cleared of stumps, logs, etc. All our belongins were in a box car, household goods, a wagon, four horses, two cows, hay. The man, Clarence Hillerman, who's wife was with the family in the hotel in Marinette came all the way from Bloomington, Ind. in the box car to care for the animals. March the 18th my father and I left Marinette on the old Wisconsin - Michigan train for Goll, the station nearest to the land and the old lumber camp. We had to set up the wagon and load in a stove, beds, bedding, hitch up a team and start out. It was sort of cold and a little snow, but we found the way over the old logging roads and made ourselves comfortable for the night. Soon the rest of the family came and we hired several men to work on the land and a carpenter for the building of the house."
In another letter Lester continues with:
"Stumps had to be blasted out with dynamite. No machinery was to be had at that time. We had four horses and they were really not the kind we should have had, the wood we burned would have kept many houses warm for a year.
About the fire, a newcomer that had a little clearing about one half a mile south of our land started a grass fire that spread over several square miles and our new house was in the path. The carpenter and 2 men were at the new house with the four horses. When they saw the fire coming they had one man take the horses to a safe place between Lake Julia and Mary. The other two were going to try to save the house, had there been a stiff breez they would not have been able to, but the fire did not get so close that they had trouble, but they were ready to climb down in the well if they had to save themselves. The men and the horses came back to the logging camp where we were living late in the day."
He married
Emma Brown on 28 December 1946. John died on 28 April 1963 at age 93. His body was interred in 1963 at
Clear Creek Twp., Monroe Co., Indiana, at Clear Creek Cemetery.