Every day was a challenge. And entertainment as well as work was self-made so on her way to the spring for water eighty rods away and passing an Indian camp, she balanced a bucket (wooden) on her head while carrying a coffee pot full of cream which she shook heartily as she went. By the time she reached the spring “the butter came.” See how times have changed in just a hundred seventy-five years or so. How she made it back home with two full containers, history doesn’t say but Mary being a clever girl would have figured it out.

A girl had to be clever in those days, in 1834, because every item in the little house on the prairie, nearly, was homemade which will be explained later. Although northwest Illinois was absolute wilderness in the 1830’s and women were few and far between, the most hardworking and intelligent girls were chosen right away as wives, just about the only career for women back then. She, too, looked for the most clever and intelligent fellow.

Mary Melugin had come up from Sangamon County where the family lived, a few miles outside of Springfield. At the request of her brother, Zachariah, she’d keep house for him at his new claim in Lee County in what would become Section 4, Brooklyn Township. Not only would she have some kind of new adventure in this frontier but also might just find a husband!!

Zachariah had passed through the region in 1832 while an enlistee in the Black Hawk War and liked what he saw ... Beautiful, panoramic views of rich fertile prairie soil. The potential was limitless so he returned and John Dixon, keeper of Dixon’s Ferry on the Rock River helped him scout the territory, suggesting that about twenty miles distant, southeast, a nice grove of timber would set him just enough away from the stage stop at the ferry to become a “hotel” on the upcoming planned stage route, Chicago to Galena. The site quickly became known as Melugin’s Grove and, in fact, the township was known as “Melugin’s” by the locals, not Brooklyn. He made a name for himself for his capacities as a leader and honorable reputation. And it didn’t take him too long to find a permanent housekeeper, Mary Ross, from over in DeKalb County of the “historic” Ross family, source describes, that in 1834.

Meanwhile, his sister, Mary, had walked the twenty miles to Dixon’s Ferry to visit Mrs. Dixon and while there met John K. Robinson, a man who’d introduced himself into the Dixon family during the Black Hawk War also as a soldier in the army against the Indian threat. The Dixon’s had hired him to teach the children there at the ferry.

He’d come up from Hancock County and seeing the future right before him, had returned only to also meet that girl from down the road with the very good posture and the graceful gait!! They were married in 1835 with Robinson building a cabin a half mile away from Melugin’s. Both Melugin and Robinson taught school in their cabins until a regular schoolhouse could be built, that in about 1837. Both, too, were voted into local offices and were an integral part of the progress and development of the area.

In the references concerning that Lee County segment of Northwest Illinois there is an interesting description of building, the tools used in housekeeping which you readers might appreciate as I did because of the contrast with our lifestyle today.

It relates, in case you might want to replicate such business although the flower child era has passed but the green game is popular.

“Robinson’s house was built of unhewed logs chinked with pieces of wood and plastered over with clay mortar. The shakes for the roof were made of trees the same as the floor. The shelves for dishes and pans were made by boring holes, driving in long pins then laying a board across the pins. In this hoe, the menage was exactly like every other pioneer cabin. The fireplace warmed the rooms and served as a cooking stove; bread was baked in iron kettles covered with iron covers, the kettles being placed in one side of the fireplace with hot coals and hot ashes placed on the cover. Potatoes were roasted in the same ashes. Gourds played a prominent part in the array of cooking utensils. They were used for baskets, basins, cups, dippers, soap dishes, etc. Hollow trees, sawed, were used for well curbs, beehives, storage receptacles for housing grain.

“Troughs hollowed out were used to contain sugar sap and during a rainstorm caught water from the eaves and to store it, and they were used for milk pans. Sometimes they were used as cradles to rock the babies to sleep. Butter bowls, ladles, rolling pins and brooms, etc., were made by the husband with implements of the rudest sort. So, too, the husband mended his own harness and cobbled their own shoes. In the absence of clocks and watches, certain marks on the door or side of the house indicated the day’s time with the Big Dipper at night. The well or the water trough was used for hairdressing and shaving and with but one change of clothing for each, they were washed and ironed while the children slept.

“Brooms in those days were made from young hickory trees about three inches through, peeling off the bark with a pocket knife, the men-folk commenced at the end of the stick intended to be the brush part thus peeling the stick into narrow strips or splints about a sixteenth of an inch thick and eighteen inches long. The heart of the stick would not peel and was cut off leaving about three inches in the center of the splints. The splints dropped back over this stick then the handle was commenced with the stripped splints dropped back over this stick then the handle was commenced with the stripped splints, already made, covered them. When the stick was stripped, the splints were tied together, the stick left in the center was the handle and stripped to complete the broom.

“Flint and steel were used to kindle fire but “borrowing fire” was very common and much easier when there were neighbors from whom to borrow.

“The nearest grain and livestock market for the Melugin Grove people was Chicago and to go and come never took less than seven days. In the muddy season, the trip took more time. The nearest grist mill was Green’s at Ottawa woolen mill there scutched and carded the wool into rolls for spinning by the women back home.

“John Robinson carried the first currant bushes for Lee County home from Nauvoo. The fashion of the day was for both husband and wife to ride one horse, the man in front on the saddle, and the wife behind. And such was the home and manners of housekeeping for John and Mary Robinson.”

By listing a few things concerning the early settlers such as these helps to humanize them, to give them some personal characteristics so as not to be one dimensional figures. They were part of the grand panoply of the Midwest’s frontier. Such a wonderful assortment—from the many Indians whose campsites in the area went back to ancient times. Chief Shabbona that honorable native American who became a friend to the white man throughout those earliest settlement years. There was such famed people stopping by the stage coach inns as Joseph Smith, the Mormon, who was a regular visitor to the region, especially to Amboy where at Rocky Ford just to its eventual west edge, a Mormon temple was begun and a cemetery organized. What a mix of travelers, some to stay and others to press on to other locales to populate the great Northwest.

The place remained a farming neighborhood, largely German, to the turn-of-the-twentieth century. By that time “civilization” had moved in—by rail. That great modernizer, the railroad brought new spirit and new ideas and in the case of Brooklyn Township (Old-timey Melugins’ Grove), a fierce competition arose when three separate communities vied for dominance; yes, three. To look at them now you’d never imagine that a fierce rivalry was the foundation on which they were based.

Next week.