Earl's Account of His Family History

   While I was visiting my mother, we found many pages of family history.  Among these was this account given by Earl McIntyre in 1972.  It fills in some blanks for me. 



John R. and Elmyra McIntyre

     My information about the McIntyre family is rather limited prior to my dad and some of that is kind of limited also.  My grandfather is John R. McIntyre and I don't recall just where he was born.  I never saw him but about two or three times in my lifetime that I remember of.  He died when I was about eight years old.  I think he died in 1902.  My grandmother then came and lived with us for awhile after he died, and then she went to California where she lived for several years afterward.  She died in California in about 1906, I believe.  She fell and broke her leg and her hip, and she never really recovered from it.  That's the information about my grandfather.    


      I have heard some stories about my grandfather that might be of interest.  He was a carpenter and the name means son of a carpenter.  He worked the carpenter trade quite a lot.  He built some houses anyway, and he built the house that you were born in. In the early days they didn't have the sawmills and things to get the lumber that they have now and didn't have the nails as we have now.  So he would go out in the timber and cut down his timber for the sills and beams on the houses and things.  Maybe some of them were for studding and rafters, I don't know.  He would put them together with mortise and tenon joints.  He would square up the logs with a broad ax, and then he would use an auger (he had two augers, a 2-inch auger and a 1-auger) to cut the holes in the logs.  Then he would saw down on the other log a ways on each side and split it out and fit it into the holes he had cut in the first log.  He would put them together and take an auger and drill holes through both of them.  Then he would use a hickory pin to hold them together.  He'd drive a wedge down in there and hold them together.  That joint stayed pretty good, better than nails would ever stay.  There was a barn on that farm where you were born that made that way, out of those that he had made, and it stood up longer than a shed that was built at the end of that barn several years later.  It was still standing when that other shed fell down that was built with modern ways of building.

Mortise and tenon joint

       I was attending church over in Decatur, Nebraska, one time, I know a gentleman there.  I was a young man then.  An old gentleman came up to me and asked me if I was related to John McIntyre, and I told him yes that I was his grandson.  He said that he was one of (I don't recall his exact words) the best men that ever graced God's footstool.  I can remember that part of it.  I understood someone to say that he had told them that my grandfather had helped him more in sickness than any doctor he had ever had.  In the early days, there were no doctors, and I guess my grandfather had a little knowledge of medicine.  They used to call on him to set broken bones.  I don't know whether they called him for baby births or not, but at any rate, he was a kind of doctor around the community where he lived.  He was one of the early settlers close to Woodbine, Iowa.  When they had the Centennial celebration at Woobine, Iowa, he and his brother-in-law, Amon Fry, were both mentioned as some of the early settlers there. That's about the extent of my knowledge of him.
    
       My father, of course, kind of followed the carpenter trade.  He built quite a few houses and buildings up around Moorhead [Monona County, Iowa]. He had been in business, a number of different kinds, but he wasn't cut out for a businessman.  He was cut out more for a carpenter.  He did that better than anything else, I think, that he ever tried.  He moved to California in about 1890.  I'm just not sure when it was.  It was after Lewis was born, and Lewis, I think was born in 1889.  I thought he was born in 1888, but Charlie [Earl's brother] told me that he was born in 1887 and Lewis was born in 1889.
    
      There was quite a bunch of people who left Iowa and went to California.  Most of them belonged to the Reorganized Latter Day Saints Church.  And while I'm on that, my grandfather was a member of the old Latter Day Saints Church, and I think he was an elder in the church.  But when Brigham Young took the church to Utah, he left it.  He did follow another fellow that went out to Preparation, Iowa (that's just a little ways northwest of Woodbine) and started a colony there.  The reason it is named Preparation is they were preparing themselves to go to heaven.  Then he got the followers to sign the property over to the church.  It was kind of a communistic government that they had.  My grandfather became dissatisfied with his teachings and with his actions.  So he and a bunch of others left and brought suit to get their property back, and I guess they got it back.  He owned that farm where you were born [near Moorhead, Iowa].  Then he moved down by Woodbine at Biglers Grove later on.  It was 1860 when my dad was born at Biglers Grove in a log cabin there.  I have seen that cabin.  Dad took me by there one time and pointed it out, that that was the house he was born in.  It was just a small log cabin.  I don't think it had as much room as my trailer has here.


Pear label from Santa Clara County, CA

       Like I said, they went to California.  They traveled quite a little bit over California, I guess in a covered wagon.  Mother said that they moved several times in one year.  They finally settled in what is called Santa Clara Valley up close to Gilroy, California.  It was the county seat of the county.  I don't know what the name of the county is now, whether it is called Santa Clara or what.  At any rate, we lived out south of Gilroy fairly close to the foot hills of the mountains.  Dad started a fruit orchard there.  I don't know just how many acres he had, but he built a house, put down a well, and had a windmill on it and a tank up in the windmill so we had running water there in those days.  When I was born, my mother came back to Iowa, and I was born in Iowa in house that Rowena Lamb lives in now.  Then we went back when I was a few months old.  Then, when Wayne was born, he was born in California.  And if I remember right, my Grandmother McIntyre came over there when he was born, but I'm not positive about that.  Grandma Adams might have come out there at the time.  She was out there at one time.

        Dad used to trim his fruit trees and plow the ground in the spring of the year, and then he would float it down and break up the clods so as not to lose any more moisture than he had to because that was a semi-arid country there.  He would then take a covered wagon and we would go over the mountains into the San Joaquin Valley where he worked in the hay fields there.  They raised a lot of hay there and irrigated at that time over there, and they still do, of course.  Now, the San Joaquin Valley is a very fertile valley.  It's wide.  I was surprised at the width of it and the greenness of it.  Everything was green when I went through there the last time.  There is parts of it that are still kind of desert like when it gets to higher ground.  As you go up from Bakersfield on the north, you can go clear to Red Bluff.  It goes into the Sacramento Valley and then on north without hardly seeing a hill.  You don't go over a hill of any kind.  It's just as level as a floor all the way up through there, and a lot times, you can't even see the mountains or the hills of any kind.  So, it's quite a wide valley up through there, and quite fertile.  So, Dad used to go over in there and he would work in the hay fields, alfalfa.  They raised lots of alfalfa there.  When it came time to pick fruit, we would come back over the mountains in a covered wagon to our valley and pick his fruit and dry it.  He had a fruit house that had big bins in it, that he would put his fruit in.  He had to sort it out and put it in there.  He raised peaches and pears and prunes.
    

       I guess I didn't mention that my Grandfather and Grandmother McIntyre are both buried pretty near straight west of Woodbine [Iowa] out in what is called Biglers Grove Cemetery.  There is a big stone there with their names on it.  There are quite a few other relatives buried there in that cemetery.  That would be my great uncles and aunts and probably some distant cousin and things like that.  That's about five or six miles straight west of Woodbine.  I have taken some of the children out there to see it...[at this point, Earl lists which of his children have been to the cemetery]...It's out in what used to be called Biglers Grove. There used to be a settlement out there, but now it is just farm land and a distant cousin of mine owns most of the land around there, I guess.

     I also talked with two of my uncles this week.  They told me that although she did die four days after Veryl's birth, Ada Mann was a victim of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919.  Estimates are that between twenty and forty million people worldwide died in one year.  More people died in that period  than in the four years the Bubonic Plague raged in Europe.  It is considered the worst epidemic ever recorded.