Born in the Old Brick
The last land available for homesteading in Van Buren County, Iowa was in
the northwest part of Village Township. It was here in 1853 that Jesse
Ratcliff purchased 320 acres at $1.25 per acre, using a land grant issued
and signed by President Franklin Pierce.
The large piece of land was located north of the present village of Douds,
in the area near where a settlement called Business Corners was located.
According to a newspaper article written by descendant Roy Ratcliff of Douds
which is dated November 3, 1955 Jesse was born in South Carolina on January
14, 1809. At about ten years of age, he moved with his parents Job and Tamar
Davis Ratcliffe to Indiana.
Job Ratcliffe had been born in Catham County of North Carolina around 1780
and died in Wayne County, Indiana in 1829. He had married Tamar Davis, who
was born August 3, 1780 and who also died in Indiana. For reasons I am not
yet absolutely sure about, Job was disowned by the Cane Creek Monthly
Meeting of Quakers in the Piedmont area of North Carolina on November 7,
1801 which partly explains why he would abandon his family clan and roots to
remove himself to another area. He is said to have lived in Kentucky from
1811-1818 where he leased land.
In an effort to separate themselves from the clan they left behind, many
members of the family began to drop the "e" from their last name, spelling
it Ratcliff. Among the descendants that followed, this was a popular
spelling more with the men of the family than the women. My maternal
grandmother, Mary Ina Ratcliffe Fellows insisted on adding the "e" to her
name as it followed earlier tradition.
In an accident, Job was killed in 1829 when a tree fell on him, driving an
axe through his abdomen. Jesse, the fourth son of Job Ratcliffe married
Rosanna Cozad in Fairfield, Ohio on January 27, 1831 and subsequently had 8
sons and 7 daughters. Rosanna, born January 2, 1813 in Fairfield, Ohio was
from a family who had roots in Holland and Belgium. Part of their married
life was spent in Noblesville, Indiana but when Jesse and his family
uprooted themselves to homestead in Iowa not far from the frontier, they
bade farewell to his mother and the remainder of his clan who were now
scattered across Ohio and Indiana.
Several years after arriving at Business Corners, Jesse and his sons began
building a large brick home on the property in 1860, but completion of the
project was delayed by the Civil War where his sons all fought for the Union
cause. When he died in 1879, the farm was divided and son Aaron inherited 80
acres where the "Old Brick" sat. Aaron had married Charlotte Morrison of
Libertyville and resided in a log cabin southwest of Leando on the other
side of the river. My grandmother Mary, youngest of their 8 children, was
born in 1881 and was the only one of her siblings that was born in the "Old
Brick" as it was called, rather than in a log cabin.
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Contributed to the Van Buren Co. IAGenWeb Project by Andy Reddick
http://iavanburen.org