HISTORY OF KANE COUNTY.
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The Rev. Robert Williams, a New Hampshire man, was the first resident preacher. There was immense teaming done over the stage roads in the decade preceding the first railway. So old Hampshire became a noted camping place, not only for teamsters but for settlers seeking locations, and it became the temporary stopping place, where pioneers camped while prospecting the country. Prom one to three score wagons in camp was no unusual sight at this place.
John Aurand was the forerunner of a large number of excellent German families, who did much to improve and enrich this fine township. Among them were the Reins, Leitners, Klicks, Garlicks, Wertweins, Getzelmans, Widmiers, Hausleins, Waidman, Peter Johnnin, John Blazer, and others. One of the most quaint and conspicuous was John Wales, a brother of Mrs. Aurand, who was one of the first storekeepers, and earliest Justices of the Peace in the township. Everybody knew him and was his friend. When an old man he spent some years among the Blackfoot Indians near the Canada border, and although they were then accounted the most cruel of the tribes, he declared them to be his kind and faithful friends. Among the early and useful families we find in this township the Dotys, Isbell, Patchens, Reed, Ter-willigers, Bell, Lyon, Hogeboom, Weed, Bean, Williams, DeWitt, and the Baldwins.
Hampshire has furnished three County Sheriffs, viz.: Adjt. Ethan J. Allen, Capt. James C. Brown and N. S. Carlisle. The present Representative in the State Legislature, Hon. Charles H. Backus, is the banker at Hampshire, the only village in the township. The village was platted October 22, 1874, by Andrew J. Willing and Ceylon A. Fassett, and incorporated In 1876. Its first trustees, elected November 9, 1876, were S. C. Rowell, President; J. S. Wyckoff, Secretary; Philip Doty, E. W. Whelp-ley, Hervey Ruin and A. R. Freeman. It is a fine dairy township, and in the village there is a brick and tile yard, grinding mill, pickle factory, and other minor industries.
The first white child born in the township was Jane A. Seymour, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William H. Seymour, born in 1840. The first school house was built a little later on the west half of Section 10, about where the "Bean" school house now stands. Zenas Allen, T. C. Whittemore and Samuel Hawley were the first School Trustees in 1842.
KANEVILLE TOWNSHIP.
Kaneville Township, in the western tier of townships, is the second from the south line of tne county. It embraces Town 39, Range 6, in the government surveys, and today is one of the richest, most productive and handsomest townships in the county. But it was not so considered in the earliest days of the country's settlement, for the pioneers were fond of woods and hills, and this portion of the new country seemed a low prairie, save a little woodland in the northeast, and a grove near the center, so isolated that they called it Lone Grove. The two branches of Big Rock Creek head respectively in the eastern and the western portions of Kaneville, in wide low bottom lands, that, before settlement, grew rank high grass, and were too wet to be attractive. Each of the first two land claimants were drawn to Lone Grove by the view they had of this body of timber across the prairie from Blackberry. Job Isbell, an unmarried man, noticed this grove in passing to a claim his brother James had made in Blackberry; and in the fall of 1835 went across the prairie to it, staked out a claim and built a little log shack. Returning to Ohio, however, he died there, and the claim was abandoned until renewed by his brother James, who, in 1837, came from his settlement in Sugar Grove and took possession of it. In October, 1836, Amos Miner drove an ox-team that M. Sperry, of Blackberry, had purchased of Levi Leach, an emigrant with whom Miner had made his way into the new country as far as Naperville. After delivering the oxen, Miner walked to this grove and staked out a claim on its south side before returning to his family. He must have gone six or eight miles at least across the wild country from any sign of human habitation. The next spring he brought his wife and daughter Rosaline, in some way, to the "claim" and put up a shack in which they managed to live. He had no team, and worked for his distant neighbors, splitting rails in winter and harvesting in summer, sometimes as far distant as Naperville, to pay for a little breaking, a cow, seed, tools, and a team-living as best they could, sometimes the wife and child utterly alone during the whole week. He would buy on time and pay in work, until he succeeded in establishing a home and getting a team. It is said that he split 2,500 rails to pay for breaking his first five acres of land, and
Dundee Area History
