| Notes |
- Things to do:
1. send for homestead application and or land records.
2. Stump farms?
3. Subsistance farms?
4. R R in Lincoln county?
5. History of Lincoln county (Historical society?)
6. local mail delivery?
7. Bay County newspapers? property sales, etc.
8. 1860's Gold rush in Montana - became a state in 1864.
9. 1880's railroad crossed Montana
10. Divorce Papers?
11. Land records for May Sherman in Eureka
12. Land records for Elizabeth Smith
Timeline:
1858 15 Dec Elizabeth born Adams Co. Indiana to James and Nancy Daugherty Close
1860 US Census Madison, Allen, Indiana age 1 with parents and sister, Eliza age 2 and half brother George age 11
1862 Decatur, Adams, Indiana
1865-1869 Siblings born Indiana
1870 US Census Root twp, Adams, Indiana with parents, James & Nancy Close
1877 Elisabeth married Loren Sly Hinton, Mecosta, MI
1878 Sister Diantha married Sylvester, Allen, MI
1880 US Census Eliz & Loren Sly Freemont, Isabella, MI, with child Carrie age 1
1894 MI State Census Elizabeth Sly Marr with 3 children, Pinconning Village, Bay, MI
1900 Eliz Sly & Richard Smith marr Rockford, Winnebago, Wis
1910 Census Eliz & Richard Smith Lincoln Co, Montana
1919 8 Jul Libby died of breast cancer in Eureka, Lincoln Co., Montana (death cert gives cause of death as Uterine Carcinoma)
1900 Census, Michigan - searched all of Bay County, Pinconning twp and found no Smith, Libby or Richard nor did I find any Slys
After her husband, Lorian Sly, left for the gold fields (about 1888) during a recession, Elizabeth Sly took in roomers to make ends meet. After a few letters from Lorian, she never heard from him again. Elizabeth (Close) Sly eventually married Richard Smith, one of the roomers, (between 1894 and 1901) and moved to Montana near Eureka to homestead. Elizabeth (Libby) and Richard Smith raised her grand daughter, Bertha Sherman. Libby raised vegetables and strawberries to sell to the neighbors. She also sold cottage cheese, eggs, milk, chicken, cookies, etc. She was well liked by everyone. Richard Smith was a bricklayer, then a ditch tender of the irrigation ditch (circa 1916). It is said that little by little he lost most of his land through lawsuits he initiated. The homestead burned and he lived in the little cabin on the property. It is said that he was onery, but Bertha remembers him as kind to her. The land was eventually bought by Fred and Maye Alverson. She was a cousin to Bertha Sherman. Richard Smith died in Eureka, Montana. The following was taken from a letter dated 19 February, 1970, to Marilyn Parker from Maye Alverson, (daughter of Jennie Close Butler who was a sister to Elizabeth Close Sly Smith.) " Dick Smith's place was built on a piece of land that was not his and when he went to prove up, found it out. So he bought 3 acres from a Henry Wedymeyer. When Dick got too bad, he moved to town with one of their old neighbors and I think some one took what they wanted out of the house and touched a match to it, as it was burned. So nothing was left." "When Dick was buried, I was surprised as he was a real good looking man. He always wore a mustach and the undertaker shaved it off. The reason he wore a mustach, he had a big birth mark on his upper lip. And he was so clean." " Old Dick wasn't too gifted in work. It was always Aunt Lib that did the work. Even worked out at cooking. It's still a wonder to me how things and people got by in those days. (Lib for Elizabeth). At one point Elizabeth lived in a boxcar while picking huckleberries and cranberries in a cranberry bog.
Elizabeth (Close) Sly Smith was diagnosed with cancer at the Mayo Clinic and Bertha often administered Morphine to her grandma to make the pain bearable. Elizabeth died in July 1919.
"The Story of the Tobacco Plains Country,
the Autobiography of a Community"
Page 164 is in a chapter on "Fortine Area Homesteads." It says, "Among many other Michiganders who homesteaded in this vicinity were Dick Smith and his wife, and Mrs. Smith's son and daughter, Ernest and May Sly. For years Dick Smith was the community "radical"--always fighting the capitalist lumber companies and writing accusing letters to his Congressmen: "Just sore at everybody in the world," as Harry Weydemeyer puts it. Mrs. Smith died and her son and daughter went west, but Dick stayed on, living alone at his homestead, and died there at a ripe old age, still kicking."
Boom and Bust: Montana's Homestead Era By Gary Glynn
Although the homestead era in Montana lasted for more than 70 years, the vast majority of those who homesteaded in the state did so during a ten-year period beginning in 1908. The original Homestead Act was signed by Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862. The new law stipulated that any head of household over 21 years old could stake out a 160 acre farm on government land with only a $10 filing fee. If the farmer lived on the homestead for five years and improved the property, he or she would receive title to it. Several different variations on the Homestead Act were passed over the years, and depending on which one a farmer filed under, he could receive 160, 320, or as much as 640 acres.
Despite giving away land for free, the Homestead Act proved to be a failure in the arid West, where even 640 acres was simply not enough land to enable a farmer to succeed. It was an invitation to disaster.
Nevertheless, to many the promise of free land was irresistible. By 1900, half a million families had moved West to homestead. It wasn't until the early 1900s that large numbers of would-be farmers began arriving in Montana, lured by a slick advertising campaign paid for by railroad magnate James J. Hill, the man who controlled the Great Northern, the Burlington and Northern Pacific railroads. Hill knew that customers for his railroads were hard to find in sparsely populated Montana, and he realized that with the help of the Homestead Act, he could convert the empty plains of Montana into a potential gold mine for his railroad empire. All he had to do was convince farmers that the dry plains of Montana were rich farmland.
By 1908 his campaign to bring thousands of small farmers into Montana was in full swing. Hill had thousands of brochures distributed throughout the United States and Western Europe extolling the virtues of the Great Plains as a farmer's paradise. Hill also promoted the "Campbell System" of dry-land agriculture, devised by South Dakota farmer Hardy Webster Campbell. Campbell stated that with deep plowing and scientific agricultural methods, the plains of Montana could produce tremendous yields of grain. Hill also hired another agricultural expert Professor Thomas Shaw, who described eastern Montana as a farmer's paradise. By 1910, Shaw was operating 45 experimental farms in Montana, and the favorable results of his experiments were widely publicized.
Along with promoting the promise of free land in an agricultural paradise, Hill announced cut-rate fares on his railroad to entice farmers to move to the state. His promises of free land, cheap transportation, and rich soil appealed to many people, and Montana's Homestead Boom was on.
Most of the newcomers were Americans, but thousands were Germans and Scandinavians drawn by Hill's European advertising campaign. The cowboys and miners of the state, who had flooded into Montana during earlier booms, watched the trainloads of newcomers arriving, and derisively nicknamed them "honyockers."
By 1908 the boom was in full swing, and every westbound train brought new homesteaders. They erected tar paper shacks and hitched up their plows, eager to make their fortune in the golden fields of wheat. The Great Falls land office averaged 1000 to 1500 homestead filings a month in 1910, and agriculture surpassed mining as the state's number one industry for the first time. At least 40,000 homesteaders filed claims in the state during the first twenty years of this century, and new farming communities began springing up all over the eastern plains.
For several years it appeared as if the small farmers would succeed and prosper. A period of unusually high rainfall blessed the new farmers, and the freshly plowed prairies produced record crops of wheat. When James J. Hill passed away in 1916, it looked as if his plan to populate the empty plain of eastern Montana with homesteaders had paid off.
The one thing that James J. Hill and his agricultural experts had not counted on was drought, and periodic droughts are a fact of life on the Great Plains. The spring rains failed to appear in 1917, and by the summer of 1918 the drought was widespread. Suddenly, thousands of Montana's homesteaders were in serious trouble. Their crops burned up in the fields, and the nonstop winds blew the carefully plowed and powdered topsoil away. Finally, hordes of grasshoppers arrived to complete the devastation. Many farmers found themselves unable to pay their bills, and by the summer of 1919 thousands had been forced from their farms. The same railroads which had brought the homesteaders into Montana now carried them away. The banks and seed merchants and implement dealers, all of whom had fueled the homestead boom with easy credit, declared bankruptcy in record numbers. Although the Homestead Act remained in effect until 1935, the homestead boom had ended in Montana by 1918.
The steamboat trade, with its expense and limitations, dropped off sharply in the mid- 1880s, as the first railroads reached Montana and opened up to passenger service. "Emigrant cars," specially designed for the prospective settler, afforded dismal and cramped accommodations to those with enough money to pay for the cost of trip. Passengers in emigrant cars were often forced to spend their journeys sitting upright on uncushioned, backless benches. On many trains, the management offered thin straw mattresses (at a cost of $3.00 each), which could be laid on the floor beneath the benches. One settler remembered, "My mother had a real hard time getting any sleep on the train. Anytime she laid down under the benches, her feet stuck out into the aisle, and the conductor would come along and kick her." Privacy in the cars was minimal, with no dividing partitions and a common toilet and cookstove for as many as 30 emigrants. Wealthier settlers could rent out entire boxcars, in which to transport not only their family members, but also their household goods, farming equipment, and up to six heads of cattle.
Bay County, Michigan land records? The date is before Libby and Richard Smith's marriage?
Smith Libby J Sec 32 T 15N R 4E 80 acres Land office 04 (East Saginaw) Document #639 signing date 1874/04/10
1860 United States Federal Census Record about James Close
Name: James Close
Age in 1860: 33
Birth Year: abt 1827
Birthplace: Ohio
Home in 1860: Madison, Allen, Indiana
Gender: Male
Post Office: Fort Wayne
Value of real estate: $300 farmer
Household Members: Name Age
James Close 33
Nancey Close 23
George Close 11
Eliza Close 2
Elizabeth Close 1
1880 United States Federal Census Elizabeth Sly
Name: Elizabeth Sly
Home in 1880: Fremont, Isabella, Michigan
Age: 21
Estimated Birth Year: abt 1859
BirthPlace: Indiana
Relation to head-of-household: Wife
Spouses's Name: Loren A.
Father's birthplace: OH
Mother's birthplace: OH
Occupation: Keeping House
Marital status: Married
Race: White
Gender: Female
Household Members: Name Age
Loren A. Sly 26
Elizabeth Sly 21
Carey A. Sly 1
Laura Bronk 10 nurse
The 1894 statecensus, Michigan, Bay Co. Pinconning Village, dated June 8, 1894 (film #915292) page 206 family 822:
Smith,Richard, age 30 M Board, single, carpenter bp Indiana, father bp Canada, mother bp Indiana
15 years in state.
Sly, Elizabeth. age 35 F wife marr, 3 children, 3 living, bp Indiana, fath bp Canada, mo bp Indiana
15 years in state
Sly, Carrie age 15 F daug single, bp Michigan, father bp Indiana, mother bp Indiana
Sly, Addie M age 12 F daug single, bp Michigan, father bp Indiana, mother bp Indiana
Sly, Earnest age 10 M son single, bp Michigan father bp Indiana, mother bp Indiana
1910 United States Federal Census
Name: Elizabeth Smith
Age in 1910: 51
Birth Year: abt 1859
Birthplace: Indiana
Home in 1910: School District 10, Lincoln, Montana
Race: White
Gender: Female
Relation to Head of House: Wife
Marital Status: Married
Spouse's Name: Richard Smith
Father's Birthplace: Ohio
Mother's Birthplace: Ohio
Neighbors:
Household Members: Name Age
Richard Smith 49
Elizabeth Smith 51
Bertha I Sherman 7
Marr: film # 1004849, Book A, page 53 "Marriages, Mich, Mecosta County" #787
Montana Death Index, 1860-2007
Name: Elizabeth Smith
Age: 61
Estimated birth year: abt 1858
Gender: Female
Death Date: 8 Jul 1919
Index Number: Lin 34
findagrave.com
Elizabeth Smith
Birth: 1858
Death: Jul. 8, 1919
Burial:
Tobacco Valley Cemetery
Eureka
Lincoln County
Montana, USA
Created by: Jim Lee
Record added: Nov 19, 2009
Find A Grave Memorial# 44563149
Elizabeth Libby Close Sly
Birth: Dec. 25, 1858
Adams County
Indiana, USA
Death: Jul. 8, 1919
Eureka
Lincoln County
Montana, USA
Elizabeth married Loren Sly on Sept 23, 1873 in Michigan.
Loren disappeared sometime in between 1888 to 1898.
Elizabeth married Richard Smith on July 14, 1900 in Illinois.
Parents:
James Close (abt 1827 - Unk)
Nancy Ann Daughterty-Close
(abt 1836 - Dec 8, 1910)
Family links:
Spouse:
Loren Alvanus Sly (1853
Burial:
Tobacco Valley Cemetery
Eureka
Lincoln County
Montana, USA
Created by: RMW
Record added: Jun 01, 2012
Find A Grave Memorial# 91113262
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1858 - 1919 (60 years)
