Julie McDonald Commentary: 1865 Diary Shows Hard Work of Pioneers

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One hundred fifty-three years ago today, near Mary’s Corner at the John R. Jackson home place known as Highland, Barton Koontz threshed oats and his younger brother, John, boiled cider.

We know that because in 1865, their 12-year-old half-sister, Louisa, kept a handwritten diary, which has been preserved in the Jackson-Koontz-Glover Collection at the Washington State Library in Tumwater.

Jackson, who kept meticulous records of purchases and sales, encouraged his children and stepchildren to write in journals. For the most part, Louisa jotted down what chores her brothers and the hired men did and mentions the weather — snowy, rainy, showery, fair, storming, cloudy, foggy, cold, windy, or pleasant.

In 2004, Karen Johnson, who worked at the Lewis County Historical Museum, and her sister, Serene, transcribed Louisa’s diary, complete with its phonetic spellings and lack of punctuation, and added notations about pioneers mentioned within its pages.

“Every other page has an embossed crest in the upper left corner, evidence of stationary of good quality,” the Johnsons wrote. “The calico fabric, though somewhat faded and stained, still retains its squiggles on a dark blue background.”

After Matilda (Glover) Koontz lost her husband to drowning along the Oregon Trail in September 1847, she married Jackson and moved to Highland Farm with her four young boys. John and Matilda had three children together — Mary, Louisa, and Andrew. Within a dozen years, she had buried three of her sons — Grundy, 14, in 1855; Henry, 18, in 1857; and Andrew, 10, in 1861.

Louisa, born May 11, 1853, seldom mentions her mother, perhaps thinking a woman’s daily household chores of baking bread, churning butter, washing clothes, cooking, sewing, cleaning, and caring for the family weren’t noteworthy. Years later, during a newspaper interview, she described her mother as “a wonderful worker.” Sometimes a hired man helped with the cooking, including one named Gus Gangloff, and according to Edward Yates, who worked on the farm in the early 1850s, John helped out around the house.

Jackson relied on his stepsons and hired help to run the ranch while he kept the books for the farm and the hotel. Louisa told an interviewer in 1922 that she accompanied her father outdoors more often after the death of her brother, Andrew. She joined him as he herded horses and cattle, and later he rode in a two-horse buggy because of his rheumatism.

On Jan. 5, Louisa wrote that she and Ma washed clothes, while Barton headed to Claquato to Mr. Lewis H. Davis’s mill but broke down, so Mr. Orton and “Johny” helped with repairs all day. Again on Jan. 21, while John and Bart fanned oats, she mentions that “Ma and I scrubed today.”

Louisa mentions the men built sheds, hauled rails, fixed fences, and thrashed wheat, oats and peas. They boiled mash for pig slop, shoed horses, hooped barrels, sorted apples, pulled and hauled turnips, and dug potatoes. They cut oak for spokes and timber for wagon wheel rims and cut, split, and hauled cedar. They shaved boards for timber, cut and hauled firewood, and sharpened plows. They built doors, stairs, gates, small troughs, a wheelbarrow, a bedstead, and a doubletree wagon axle. They fixed buggy beds. They sealed the front porch, repaired the telegraph line, and cleaned the barn. They washed, greased, mended, and fixed harnesses. They killed and butchered hogs, chopped and stuffed sausage, and hung up meat. They hauled manure, drove cattle, and rounded up lost lambs and stray heifers. They plowed and harrowed fields, planted peas and sowed seeds, and sacked potatoes. They pruned fruit trees in the orchard, staked the grapevines, and hauled loads of ash.

They planted peas, grubbed out stumps, sheared sheep, cut brush and logs, sowed white turnips among the corn, built one shed and tore down another and replaced a roof on yet another, worked in the milk room, fixed the roads, hauled shavings from the wood shed, crafted a breadboard, built wagon racks, mowed the yard and field, hunted stray horses and cattle, repaired machinery, raked hay, washed and painted the buggy, cut and bound wheat, shocked oats, and thrashed peas.



Reading the diary, it’s understandable why a decade earlier Matilda’s brother, Philip Glover, had complained that John Jackson worked his stepsons too hard. They rested only on the Sabbath each week.

Sometimes Louisa noted that one of her brothers had “done one thing & nother” or they or the hired man were “musing away at something.”

“Pa and Ma” visited the home of George Roberts, where Louisa, John, and Mary attended school, she said, and on Oct. 11 they “started to Claquato” and returned the next night.

Louisa mentioned, often by name, the frequent visitors who stayed the night at the Jacksons, and it reads a bit like a Who’s Who of early Lewis County pioneers whose names are listed on Donation Land Claims.

Louisa married Josiah G. Ware, a former Illinois farmer, on July 4, 1888, at the Chehalis Hotel. In 1909, he shot and killed a neighbor in a dispute over a stolen rope and hammer. He eventually served time for manslaughter at the penitentiary at Walla Walla.

Joe and Louisa had no children, but Louisa’s brother John had four daughters, so she had four biological nieces. Her sister, Mary, was stepmother to two children.

In her later years, Louisa deeded a five-acre parcel of her parents’ homestead to the state, and asked that it be dedicated as “Matilda Jackson State Park” in honor of her mother. Louisa died on January 16, 1938, at age 84. She is buried in the Fern Hill Cemetery on Bishop Road (near the Chehalis Industrial Park).

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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.