Henry Stubbs and Mary Grave Stubbs

 

The Stubbs Story Chapter IV

 

Chapter IV

 

Henry Stubbs was born in 1806 soon after Nathan and Elizabeth Jones Stubbs moved from Georgia to Ohio. Henry worked in Nathan’s mills while growing up and when Nathan died in 1835, Henry and his younger brother Elijah were each bequeathed a mill.

Henry married Rachel Pray in 1828 and the couple had 5 children: William Pray Stubbs, Joel Henry Stubbs, Mary Ann Stubbs (died in infancy), Elizabeth Mendenhall Stubbs and Enos Pray Stubbs. All were born near West Elkton where Henry’s father Nathan had settled in 1805. Rachel died in 1836 and in 1837 Henry married Mary Louisa Eccles. This couple had Nathan John Stubbs, Anna Jane Stubbs, Rachel Melinda Stubbs, Milton Aurelius Stubbs, Charles Rolla Stubbs and Levi Mark Stubbs (died in infancy).

When Henry inherited Nathan’s mill and associated land, he built a new saw mill, “After I came into possession of mine I built a saw mill on the opposite side of the stream and dug a new race and built a large stone mill-dam. In building my saw mill I had to borrow money to carry on the work and paid a high rate of interest.  That was a great draw-back, for the interest ran away with the profits, even at ten per cent.  I had to carry on my farming for my family was small in size and number, say three or four children. … It cost about one thousand dollars and paid for itself, had not the interest eaten it up so fast that it became necessary to sell, which I did a few years after I built.  I sold it and the grist mill to Henry A. Bennet, with 17 acres of land.  Then I took some few trips out to Indiana to a place on the Salimany [River], six miles from Lagro, on the Wabash.  There I bought 90 acres of land with the intention of starting a mill, but finally the next year after I bought, there was a mill built opposite of where I  had  proposed to build, so it all fell through, on my part.” In addition to sawing lumber and grinding flour, Henry butchered beef and sold lime and stone for building. The land that Henry inherited from Nathan had the best lime stone quarry within 10 miles, thus making the stone quite valuable. Mary Louisa Eccles died in 1851and in 1852 Henry married Mary Stroud Grave.

Mary Stroud Grave’s father, Jacob Grave was a prominent leader in the Quaker anti-slavery movement. He owned land near Richmond, IN.

Henry sold his Indiana land and in 1856 moved to Minnesota with Mary and his younger children where he homesteaded land north of Lake Minnetonka. Henry was 50 years old. The older children eventually moved to Minnesota also.

In 1862, Jacob Grave died and Mary Stroud Grave Stubbs inherited the farm near Richmond, IN. Henry and Mary moved back to Indiana for a year to farm and then sell the land before moving back to their land in Minnesota.

Henry served as postmaster for several years and cleared and farmed his homestead north of Lake Minnetonka. He also got involved with growing apples and had trees shipped from Indiana in 1857. In 1865 he bought 100 apple trees from Peter M. Gideon, the developer of the Wealthy apple and a famous early Minnesota fruit grower. Henry died in 1881 just 4 days short of his 75^th birthday.

Nathan Stubbs mill on Elk Creek

Top: Nathan Stubbs Mill on Elk Creek near West Elkton, Ohio

Bottom: Elk Creek near Nathan Stubbs mill site

The Stubbs Story Chapter III

Nathan Stubbs was born to John and Esther Maddock Stubbs on October 3, 1759 in Chatham County, NC. He was the oldest of 14 children. Nathan married first Eleanor Jones in 1785. Eleanor died shortly thereafter and Nathan married her cousin, Elizabeth Jones in 1788. This couple had 10 children, of which, Henry Stubbs was the 9th child. Nathan and Elizabeth moved between NC and GA in the early years of the Wrightsborough colony. He most likely worked with his father, John at his grandfather’s mill in Wrightsborough. Elizabeth’s father, Henry Jones, was a saddler, making leather saddles. Shortly after his father John Stubbs died in 1803, Nathan and 12 of his siblings moved away from Wrightsborough to Ohio and Indiana. True to his milling profession, Nathan settled on Elk Creek south of West Elkton, OH and built a flour mill and a saw mill. In the 1820 census for Ohio, Nathan reported, “I ground about 4000 bushels of wheat each year. Costs are about $150 to $200 each year. I have one man full time and one boy helping.” West Elkton Quaker minutes noted that on June 11, 1823, Pliny Crume took three barrels of flour from Nathan Stubbs mill valued at $6 on demand of $19 for non-performance of military requisition by his young son Nathan, Jr. (They were still pacifists at that time but by the time of the Civil War many of the family’s young men enlisted and fought, including Henry’s sons William, Enos and Milton Stubbs.) A cousin, Alpheus Maddock, who lived his whole life at West Elkton remembered about the underground railroad that the Stubbses participated in and said that his father told him that Nathan’s mill furnished barrels of flour for Andrew Jackson’s army in the War of 1812. It was hauled by team to Cincinnatti and then by flatboat to New Orleans. A schism developed in the Quaker community in the 1830’s when the followers of Elias Hicks had a philosophical disagreement with a more evangelical movement within the community who called themselves Orthodox. Nathan joined the Hicksite group and his sons Henry and William followed him. The two groups bickered for several years and finally reconciled in 1855. The Hicksites were involved in anti-slavery activities and gradually this view was incorporated into the Orthodox as well. Nathan died in 1835.