The Canterbury and Long Point Carltons Genealogy

click here to jump to the index

CHAPTER 12

DAVID HENRY CARLTON

AND ELIZABETH ELLEN SWIFT

1852 - 1947

David Henry and Elizabeth (Jennie) Ellen Swift Carlton

D.H. 1872 (age 20), Jennie circa 1890 (about age 33).

D.H.'s photograph was taken at Cook & Fenwick Photographers, Southwest Corner of Square, Bloomington, Illinois.

David Henry was born on March 15, 1852. He was known throughout his life as D.H. He would have attended the District 4 rural school that was established in 1857 (the year before he probably started). He probably did not attend school after the 8th grade (about 1866). On January 21, 1875 he married Elizabeth Ellen Swift (Jennie). Jennie was the daughter of Sarah and Civil War veteran Robert Simpson Swift. Jennie was 17 and D.H. was 23 when they were married (Jennie was born in 1857). See the section THE SWIFTS for complete information on this branch of the family. The summer after they were married, on June 25th, General Custer and his troops were massacred at the Little Big Horn in Montana (Custer's last stand), not far from the place where their son Arthur would homestead his ranch 35 years later.

We believe that Jennie and D.H. lived for a time in the old 3 room farm house across from Edward and Diadama's house on the Carlton farm. Jennie was quite small and is remembered by everyone as "pert" and "cheery." Their grandson, David Raleigh Carlton, recalls an unusual family story about these days. Once, when D.H. was gone at night, Jennie was alone with Ida, Edward Arthur, and baby Ralph, when she heard a noise outside. She got a pistol out and as she was unwrapping it to investigate, it went off, placing a hole in the dining room table.

In 1890 D.H. bought the 40 acres immediately east of the Carlton farm from Frank J. Block. This land had been sold by the township supervisors to Nathan Springer in 1867, who sold it to Block in 1882. In 1899 D.H. was able to buy another 40 acres to the east of the first plot from Van Buren Martin. This land was low lying and had been declared worthless swamp by Sam Wickery, who did the government survey in 1857. After being tiled by D.H., Albert Post (who farmed the land from 1924 until 1980) says that it was the most fertile section of the entire farm. J. Cooley originally had owned the land in 1867, and he had sold to Martin the same year. The end result of these purchases was to give D.H. 80 acres of land to the east and adjacent to his father's farm.

In 1880 James A. Garfield was elected President and then assassinated in the late summer of 1881, elevating Chester A. Arthur to the Presidency. During this period in the 1880s the steam tractor replaced horse power on the farms and circuses began to travel from town to town, often highlighting the summers where they appeared. In 1884 Grover Cleveland was elected President but lost his re-election bid in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison. The tables were turned in 1892 with Cleveland winning over Harrison's re-election bid. In 1893 the World's Fair Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago, featuring the first Ferris Wheel. This was a depression year for farmers but by the late 1890s farm prices were moving upward and very good times were ahead. In 1896 William McKinley became President and for 5 months in 1898 the Spanish-American War was fought. This was also the era when baseball became a national phenomena and by the 1900s Long Point was fielding teams that became local legends.

During this time D.H. farmed, raised cattle, and bred horses. He was generous with his children. Around 1900-1905 Arthur and Ida worked for Lea Filbey in his general merchandise store in Long Point. It is probably that D.H. contributed some monies to this venture. In 1903 Long Point got telephone service with the new Long Point Automatic Telephone Company, owned in part by Lea Filbey, who Ida married. After D.H.'s uncle Frederick (the Immigrant) died in May of 1905, D.H. was appointed guardian of his estate. In 1913, when his mother died, D.H. received full title to the north half of the Carlton Farm (valued at $20,000.00). In 1914 he bought the south half of his parents' farm from his brother Absalom and built a tenant house on the southwest 120 acres of his land for Arthur and Daisy to raise their children. See the section on Arthur and Daisy for the complete story.

Lillian Filbey Prunuske wrote down many of her memories about the Carlton Farm of this time. She said David Henry and Jennie raised mostly corn and oats which they fed to chickens and livestock as well as using it as a cash crop. There were many beautiful horses, all very tame and willing to be petted by a small girl. Pigs were kept and the Carltons would butcher their own pork. Cows were kept for milk o make sweet cream butter and Jennie had butter customers who would eat no butter "except Jennies." Lillian would help with the barrel butter churn which had a handle to turn on the side. Jennie was very parlticular as to how fast it was turned and when there was a certain sound it had to be turned faster to "set the butter" as she called it. The butter was then removed from the churn and put in a wet wooden bowl and worked with a wooden paddle to get out the excess buttermilk. The buttermilk usually went to the pigs. The milk from the cows was run through a separator, which also had to be turned by hand at a certain speed. The cream was used for the table, cooking, and butter while the skim milk was fed to the pigs. Lillian recalled that the skim milk that went to the pigs was much richer than the skim milk available in the stores in 1985.

Lillian was the "go-fer" on the farm. There was a large cool cellar divided into storage for canned goods and another place for anything which would not fit in the upstairs icebox. Potatoes and root vegetables from the garden were stored in another part of the cellar and there was always a huge barrel of home made vinegar as Jennie made her own vinegar too. Ice for the icebox was cut from the Vermillion River in winter by D.H. and packed in sawdust in the ice house. Lillian said that she and Jennie were "the ice cream faces" of the family. Jennie would send her to catch the ice cream cow (who might be less thatn enthusiastic about a mid day milking). Jennie thought this cow's milk was "a mite richer" and therefore better for ice cream. As Lillian was chasing the cow around the field, Jennie would get a block of ice from the ice house and make her special ice cream mixure of eggs, cream, and spices for the ice cream. Lillian always got to lick the paddle when they were finished adn she said it was amazing how much ice cream you can have manage to stick to a paddle if you really try. The ice cream had to be "ripened" by setting on ice for a time. Sometimes a large appetite would result in very short "ripenings."

At this time all cooking and baking, including bread every day, was done on a wood stove. Usually corn cobs were used for quick fires and coal for longer cooking adn baking. Breakfast usually would consist of buckwhet pancakes with home made sausage patties. The pancake batter had been started the previous day, wrapped well with an old blanket and, in winter, set on a chair next to the hard coal heater in the dining room so it would rise properly. Jennie would cook her home raised chickens (she raised them from the eggs that her hens had laid) in a 12" skillet on the corn cob and coal fired stove with her own home made butter and home butchered hog lard. There was no running water, but there was a drinking pump, cistern pump, and a windmill pump for the livestock (which was still standing between the house and horse barn in 1990.) The Carltons had a "block house" (built of cement blocks) attached to the rear of the main house. It had the cistern pump and cook stove for use in the summertime as well as the milk seperator and the washing machine. The washing machine had a wooden tub with a hinged lid. Attached to the understide of the lide were six wooden paddles about 5" long and 1 1/2" thick. Pulling a rod on the side back and forth would cause a gear to rotate the paddles. Lillisn still regrets casually mentioning that it was fun to run the washing machine one day, as you can imagine the consequences of her comment.

Threshing was a very special occasion. Neighbors would go from farm to farm with the men helping thresh the grain while the women got together to cook for the threshers. Cooking in August over a coal stove was truly "laboring over a hot stove." The threshing machines were run by belts connected to coal fed steam engines like the one in the picture from the Long Point Centennial book. Some of the men would arrive by 4:30 AM to get the steam up in the engine. The oats on the Carlton farm had been cut and tied in bundles with twine by the binder machine and then shocked. To shock the oats, three or four bundles would be stacked together like a teepee with one on top as a cover. Horse drawn hay racks would be driven to the fields, three men with pitch forks would load the rack and it would be driven to the thresher. At the thresher the oats would be tossed onto the feeder belt and the seperated grain would go into a wagon with high sides. The straw would be stacked for bedding for the animinals while the grain was stored in cribs. Due to the massive amounts of chaff in the air from the thresher, the work was extremely dirty.

There was no furnace in the house so the ktichen with its hot stove was the most popular room during winter. The dining room had a big hard coal heater with isinglass on the doors, through which you could watch the fire inside. The big top would be pulled aside and hard coal, about the size of eggs would be loaded in. The coal would burn very slowly and would last 10-12 hours. Lillian remembers that it was a good place to get warmed up before dashing upstairs "to bed in a room that didn't even have a speaking acquaintance with heat." If you were thinking ahead, you had put a brink on the cook stove before supper to get it hot, then wrapped it up in a heavy cloth and put it in your bed before you got ready for sleep.

Christmas baking was a veyr special occasion. They would always have a marvelously rich hickory nut cake with caramel filling. Lillian Filbey Prunuske collected this recipe from Jennie herself:

Both Bessie Mason Ball and Lillian Filbey Prunuske recall that they cracked the hickory nuts for these cakes by holding an old iron upside down between their knees and hoping they hit the shell and not their fingers with the hammer. Christmas cakes of other types, cookies of all sorts, and pies (usually made with cherries, apples, raspberries, blackberries or peaches from the orchard north of the house or from the surrounding woods_ were always made as well. Sometimes there would be home made mince meat, and of course Jennie made the Carlton steam pudding too.

In these days there would be a trading wagon (Jennie thought the Raleight products man was the best) that would come around to the farms with pots, pans, kitchen gadgets, some staple groceries, and odds and ends of all descriptions. The news of the neighbors was often the main attrction when the Raleight man came and the children always got some sort of "gift" from him. Kerosine lamps were the major souce of light at this time and they had chimneys that required washing and wicks that had to be trimmed every day. During the 1910s D.H. installed a carbide light in the barn yard. The dinning room had a large green Tiffany shade that has since been lost but there is a considerable amount of furniture and glassware from the farmhouse that is owned by Illlian Prunuske. See the section The Filbeys, Fentons, and Prunuskes for a complete descriptive listing.

D.H. was the first Carlton to own an automobile, although his driving left something to be desired. There is a story in the family of D.H. hollering "whoa" and forgetting about the brake as his car crashed into the back of his garage one day. When he later moved to Pontiac, he build a garage so it had doors on both ends, allowing him to drive right on through if necessary to stop completely. In 1985 the cement blocks of the garage on the Carlton Farm were still pushed out, never having been repaired by the Post family (see photograph). D.H. also had difficult in steering on the narrow country horse tracks and Raleigh remembers riding in the back of one of his early open touring cars and hearing him knock three mailboxes from their posts during a single trip into Pontiac. Although it was admittedly difficult to steer when the narrow wheels were locked into deep ruts in the mud, the neighbors complained because it happened so often and D.H. was obliged to go into the mailbox rebuilding business for a time. Beginning in 1911, Illinois enacted laws to assist in the construction of hard surface roads, but it w as not until 1920 that the state began to seriously provide automobile quality roads. In 1916 D.H. bought out Fauher-Quinn Motors in Pontiac and he formed a partnership with a man named Gibson to operate the Gibson-Carlton Motor Company. The company specialized in Mitchell autos (see the accompanying advertisement). D.H. owned a Willis-Knight auto and Ralph, who helped with the business, drove a Hudson Roadster with the wheel wells painted red. Gibson ran the office and minded the accounts but he got into trouble and ran off with the money to Iowa. D.H. managed to survive and he found another partner and they formed the Wheelin-Carlton Motor Company in 1918. However, in 1920 the business failed. D.H. also had a interest in Flanagan Hardware, which bought heavily in farm implements about 1919-1920 and then went out of business in the early 1920s.

Click here to see the Gibson-Carlton Motor Company add full screen.

*****This chapter is still in the process of being transferred from old Apple language into modern PC and HTML language.