Warren Stiles

Stiles Family Came in 1838
Built 2-room Log House, Biggest Along the Dillon Furrow

From the Iowa City Press Citizen, July 1, 1939, p. 16AA:

Warren Stiles was one of the small band of adventurous settlers who came to Johnson County in 1838. Unlike so many of those first emigrants who came as young men, unmarried, footloose, Mr. Stiles was a married man and the father of several children at the time of his arrival here. It is difficult to visualize the courage and the fortitude which must have been his and that of his brave wife to risk and dare all, even their precious family to reach a new, better land and there establish a home.

Born in West Chazy, [ Clinton County near Canadian border] New York, he had followed the business of merchant there untl 1837 when he brought his little family west, by way of river steamers down the Ohio, up the Mississippi to Bloomington. Here he stopped for a year, but not liking the low, unhealthy surroundings along the "Big Slough," he came on to Napoleon in the spring of 1838 and settled north along what next year was established as the Dillon Furrow linking the new town of Iowa City with Dubuque--the Old Military road.

Here he built a large two-room log house, the biggest along the road, and kept tavern along with his farming enterprise. Here in 1840 was held the first election when Johnson county was laid off in two precincts, the south part voting at Iowa City, the north part at Stiles' log house.

In 1849 Warren Stiles was one of that first great surge of adventurers blazing the dangerous overland trail to California and the gold diggings. He was supposed to have been successful in his mining activities, and in 1850 boarded a boat for home. While still in San Francisco bay, cholera broke out on ship board, the boat was beached and many perished in the resulting confusion. Among them was Mr. Stiles, either from the cholera or murdered and robbed for his gold as some believe.

Meanwhile his wi dow and six children carried on, running the farm and the tavern for travelers for many years. She did not die until 1880, when she was 80 years old, a remarkable age considering her years of toil and privation following her husband's untimely death. Her oldest daughter, Hannah, married Strauder Devault, himself a true pioneer of the county. Her second daughter, Mary, married in 1855, William Chandler, who came to Iowa in 1858, and followed a course in married life very similar to that experienced by her mother. For, in 1865 her husband died, after just ten years wed, leaving the care of a young family and the management of a farm entirely to her hands. Like the courageous woman that she was and a true daughter of a valient p ioneer mother, she never faltered in her duty, keeping together and educating her little brood, building up and improving for a full generation the Chandler farm, the present home of Mr and Mrs. Stephen Sunier, just north of Iowa City on the Solon road. No one can say that the education which Mary Stiles received in the school of pioneer experience did not serve her in good stead, when the emergency came in her life. [sic]

In 1856 a daughter was born to Mr. and Mrs. William Chandler, named Elizabeth, who was destined to have much more than an average experience with the world in her role of school teacher, for, following attendance at the university, lacking graduation in the class of 1880 only because she was a hopelessly "irregular" student, irregular because of the interrrrmittent schooling possible from a fatherless home such as hers she became a school teacher. In 1880 she had the lower grades at West Branch, some 48 pupils in all. Among this number was a new pupil, his first term at school, a blocky little square faced fellow who answered to the name of Herbert Hoover!