Israel Taylor's Second Family

 “Miss Anna Lane of Warsaw, Indiana is visiting her cousin, M.C. Barbour. Miss Lane is an accomplished young lady. The Sunflower State exceeds her fondest expectations.” Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 3 Nov 1893, p. 3.

“Anna was almost equally strange in her actions. She never went up the street except for the most necessary errands. She never talked to anyone except in the briefest way on business. She frequently did things which scared little children and caused them to run away when they saw her approaching on the street.”

South Bend Tribune (South Bend, Indiana), 19 June 1899, p. 1. 


     Wow. Both items are about the same woman. Two completely different images are formed. One, 25 years old and an accomplished young lady, visiting a cousin out of state. The other, 30 years old, a hermit-like eccentric who scares children and keeps completely to herself. Worse, Anna made the newspaper that June day in 1899 when she and her mother fought the police who came to evict them from their home. Wielding broomsticks and rolling pins, they relentlessly beat the police over the head until they were carried out, kicking and screaming and driven to jail. 

     In the first item, Anna was visiting my great-great grandfather, Myron C. Barbour. I was puzzled. I’d already researched his family extensively and had no idea who Anna Lane was. How did she fit into the family tree? Was she really his cousin? How did I not know about another cousin with a surname I hadn’t heard before? This led me to the discovery that my fifth great grandfather, Israel Taylor, had a second family. 


Anna’s Origins


     Israel’s first wife was Mary G. Blair, whom he married in 1793 when he was 24. They had nine children, of whom my fourth great-grandmother, Laura Taylor, is the oldest. Both Israel and Mary were from Massachusetts. As was so common for New Englanders in their generation, they began moving west early in their marriage. Eventually they followed two adult daughters, Laura and Eliza, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Later they made one last move to South Bend where they joined two sons; Lathrop and Edmund. Mary died there in 1834 at age 60. 

     Israel did not stay single for long. He was acquainted with a young widow, Abigail Bagley Phelps. A native of Vermont, she moved to Ohio as a child. After she married Arunah Phelps they moved to Michigan, then South Bend. They had two daughters, Mary and Melinda, before Arunah’s death at an unknown date before 1834. 

     Abigail was 34 when she married Israel in 1835 in South Bend; he was 66. Their daughter Ellen P. Taylor, who went by Nellie, was born in May 1837. 

     My fourth great-grandmother, Laura Taylor Suttenfield, was 42 when her little half-sister Nellie was born. Laura’s oldest daughters, Sophia and Jane, were 21 and 22 and married when their new aunt was born. 

     Unfortunately, Israel didn’t live long enough to see little Nellie even to school age. He died in June 1841 when she was only four, leaving Abigail with little. She would spend the rest of her life living with one relative or another. It helped that her 22-year old daughter Mary Phelps married Bradford Cosgrove, a builder, three months after Israel’s death. 

     She first moved in with Israel’s son Horace and his wife Margaret in Fort Wayne. Though he was her stepson, he was two years older. In 1844 Horace was widowed, leaving him with five children ranging from two to eight years old. Maybe she stayed to help him with the children, but by 1850 she, Melinda and Nellie were living with Bradford and Mary Cosgrove. They moved to Dekalb County, then Warsaw, Indiana with the Cosgrove family. Ten years later Mary’s sister Melinda married Dr. Franklin Cosgrove, Bradford’s first cousin. 

     In 1858 at age 21, Nellie married John Lane, a watchmaker and jeweler. They moved to a house one door over from Bradford and Mary. They had four children – John Francis, Q.X.Z. (his real name - the initials did not stand for anything), known as Chick;  Effie, and Anna before John’s untimely death at age 37 in June 1870. Nellie was a 33-year old widow. Her oldest was 13 years old, and she was pregnant with Schuyler, who was born four months after his father’s death.

      In John’s will, he left everything to Nellie including his “stock in trade,” the watches, clocks and jewelry in his shop. He stated in the will that he wanted her to carry on the business. He also wanted his sons to be apprenticed as watchmakers when they reached the age of 16. He also left her with their comfortable home, and a rental house next door. She was not left destitute as her mother had been. 


Anna


     Anna turned two soon after her father was buried. For the next twenty-nine years, she would live in the house her father left to her mother. Her siblings grew up and began working and left home. Unlike her sisters, she never worked outside the home, at least, from the evidence I can gather. 

     Frank left home as a young man - before Anna was 12, and became a watchmaker and jeweler as his father wished. He moved to Chicago. 

     Effie became a teacher and taught in Fort Wayne and Huntington, Indiana until her marriage to Sam Talbot in 1891. She resigned her $400 per year teaching position when she married and was replaced by her cousin Mary Mollie Cosgrove (Mary Phelps Cosgrove’s daughter). She and Sam, a piano tuner, moved to Chicago. 

     Chick was working as a barber in Huntington but later attended college in Chicago to study to be an optometrist. He moved back to Warsaw where he practiced optometry for decades. 

     Schuyler was a different story. He was deaf and mute, and seemed to have a sad story. 


“A Peculiar Family”


     In 1893 Anna visited Myron C. Barbour at his farm in Parker Township a few miles outside oF Coffeyville, Kansas. They were first cousins; Myron was twenty-two years older. His brother Lucius lived nearby on a farm in Fawn Creek Township. Lucius once operated a drug store in Warsaw for a few years. Why didn’t the newspaper say that she was visiting Lucius too? Did Myron also live in Warsaw for a time? How had she gotten close to Myron? Why did Anna visit at that particular time? Was she considering a move? The answers are all unknown.

     Then came the front page newspaper article in the South Bend Tribune. The article was riddled with errors. It said Nellie was widowed about twenty years earlier (it was almost thirty years). She had three sons and one daughter; Fred, George and Schuyler (they were Frank, Q.X.Z. - Chick - and Schuyler, and she had two daughters). It accurately said that the oldest son became a jeweler and moved away. But it said “George” became a recluse and died at age 30. All of Nellie’s sons were living, and she never had a son named George. 

     “Mrs. Lane herself, now an old woman, was probably the most eccentric of this peculiar family,” the reporter wrote. “She lived in her house on Indiana street for thirty years but never had intercourse of any kind with her neighbors. She had never invited callers and of late she excluded them from the house. She had money but was exceedingly parsimonious in her expenditure of it. She would not pay taxes on the house she occupied, nor an adjoining property which she owned. The matter was permitted to run along this way for many years.”

     Authorities were probably lenient because she was a widow, but enough was enough. The property was sold to pay the taxes. A man named Jackson Glessner bought the two homes. He kept up the taxes, did not charge them rent, and tried numerous times to make a deal with the Lanes. A few years passed, then he again made an offer. If they would move out, he would forgive all back taxes and rent and would even pay them $200. This was also refused. That was Glessner’s breaking point. He finally went to the sheriff and got an eviction notice. 

     When sheriff’s deputies went to the house the Lanes refused them entrance and promptly locked the doors. The deputies broke the front door down and were met with furious resistance from Nellie and Anna with their broomsticks and rolling pins. Police carried the two women outside – Schuyler had not put up any resistance – and called for back-up. A carriage arrived to haul the women to jail, and the deputies completed the eviction, putting everything out into the street. 

     “The case is among the most peculiar in the city,” the article continued. “The Lanes have always been regarded with a curious sort of awe by the superstitious, who aver that strange sights and sounds at night compensated for the deathlike quietude of the day. The oldest citizens can remember that there were peculiar stories of the girlhood of Anna Lane.

     “It is said she was disappointed in love and that there were circumstances connected with the sudden disappearance of her lover which created much talk at the time.”   

     Mrs. Lane was well fixed financially, the article said, and therefore her absolute refusal to pay taxes was incomprehensible. It’s impossible to tell if John Lane left Nellie enough resources to support herself for thirty years and beyond. The story is odd, and leaves a lot of unanswered questions.  


The Rest of Their Story


     One immediate question is how did Nellie and Anna support themselves for the next eighteen years of Nellie’s life? They did not move in with Frank, Chick or Effie. On the 1900 census they were renting a home in Wayne Township in Kosciusko County and Schuyler worked as a day laborer “at anything” the enumerator added, an unusual notation. 

     In 1904 Nellie and presumably Anna were living in Huntington, Indiana. A small item in the Huntington paper noted that Q.X.Z. Lane was visiting his mother there. At least as early as 1905 Schuyler was living alone in Michigan City, Indiana, working as a laborer. Nellie and Anna moved to Fort Wayne sometime after Chick’s visit. I have not been able to find Nellie, Anna or Schuyler on the 1910 census.

     In 1915 the Michigan City police picked Schuyler up on vagrancy charges. As the police tried to help him, he was able to communicate that he formerly lived in Fort Wayne. They contacted the Fort Wayne police, who contacted the newspaper, trying to find his family. 

     In 1917 Nellie died in Fort Wayne and was buried at Lindenwood Cemetery where her much older sisters Laura, Eliza, and Elvira, and her much older brother Horace Taylor were buried. Five years later the Michigan City police chief again appealed to the Fort Wayne police about Schuyler. He died in Michigan City and his body was being held pending notification to the family. Unfortunately there were no follow-up pieces, and I can’t find any newspaper items or records of Anna after her mother’s death in 1917. Hopefully, one of Schuyler’s siblings was located and able to help give him a decent burial. 

     Frank also died that year in Chicago and was buried there. Chick’s only child Robert also became a doctor of optometry – and so did his granddaughter, Dr. Martha Elizabeth Lane, one of the first women optometrists in Tennessee. Effie lived in Chicago from at least 1900 until her death in 1956. 

     Two sentences in the Coffeyville newspaper about a visit between cousins opened up this entire branch on the family tree. 


Notes:


Israel Taylor's First Family: Israel and Mary's children were Laura (b. 1795), Horace B. (1798), Eliza (1803), Lathrop Minor (1805), Edmund Pitts (1809), Marshall R. (1811), Elvira (1811), and William H.C. (1817).

I have written about some of the children in other articles, as follows:

  • Laura in "The Desertion and Redemption of William Suttenfield"
  • Eliza in "Eliza's House"
  • William in "The Miracle of Connections and Wendy's Great-Great-Great-Grandfather."
     For information on Lathrop Minor Taylor, I highly recommend reading Bert Anson's outstanding articles, which were a revision of his master's thesis and published in Indiana History Magazine. (Anson later became a professor of history at Ball State University.)

Abigail supported by other relatives - Abigail moved in with Horace Taylor in 1841 when she was widowed, according to her daughter’s Melinda’s obituary. I can’t find Abigail anywhere on the 1860 census. On the 1870 census, she lived with Nellie and John Lane in Warsaw. She died there in December 1870. 


Copyright by Andrea Auclair  © 2024 


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