Relay – A Family History Blog

Mary Etta Hamilton, daughter of James Hamilton and Mary Pray, was born in the small town of Lisbon, Maine in 1820¹ shortly after Maine became a state.  She married Joseph Gould in December of 1840 in adjacent Webster, Maine² and shortly after the birth of their first child, Mary left her parents, her ten siblings³ and many friends and followed her husband south to New York, then Pennsylvania (where they became farmers after Joseph ‘s initial time as a timber and lumber worker like his father) and then west into Iowa.⁴ In 1870, at the age of 50, she left behind her younger daughter and both sons to “Go West” once more, to Nebraska.  In Nebraska Joseph and Mary and older daughter Mary Etta began the arduous process of homesteading. They “built” a dugout for their residence and broke the prairie for their first crop.⁵  Mary and her daughter were the only white women in Harlan County⁶ and the conditions were radically different than their previous settlements. The land was tall grass prairie and prone to drought except along creeks and rivers, there were large herds of buffalo and antelope. Large rattlesnakes and plagues of grasshoppers helped make farming was hard. There were very few trees and even fewer people.⁷ They were very, very alone.  But their children soon followed.  In 1872, Garvin and his young family and his sister made the covered wagon trek from Iowa towards a dugout in the wilderness.⁸  According to family legend, as published in a history of Alma, Nebraska in 1992, while attempting to cross a dry creek bed in the dark, somewhere near the Republican River in Harlan County, the wagon tipped over. Scared and tired the families stopped for the night.  In the morning they heard a rooster crowing and followed the sound to the Gould family dugout.⁹ Oldest son Albert and his family were either on the trek with Sadie and Garvin or followed soon after.¹⁰ Albert and Garvin began the process of homesteading.  Mary Etta and Sadie got married and started families. And Nebraska became their farthest West.    Until the grandchildren started moving to California but that’s another generation’s story.

As far as I have been able to discover Mary Etta Hamilton Gould never saw her parents or siblings again. The infamous creek is still known as Tipover Creek but the original Gould homestead lands now lie under the waters of the Harlan County Lake, formed when the Republican River was dammed in Harlan County in 1952.