THE WALDO FAMILY IN FAIRVIEW TOWNSHIP - 1868

Narrator: Mrs. Louisa N. Chapman, 84, of Breckenridge

Mrs. Chapman is the daughter of Asel Waldo and Aurelia A. McNutt, both of Lake City, Ohio. On her father's side, she descends from Seth Sprague who fought for his country in the Revolutionary and 1812 Wars. In 1846, Asel Waldo took up a homestead in Marquette County, Wisconsin, and in 1868 joined the land rush to Caldwell County, Missouri. His farm was near the site where the next year the new town, Proctorville, was founded by Dan Proctor. A "ramshackle" school house was built in the corner of a cornfield and Mrs. Chapman, who had had some good schooling in Wisconsin, was the second teacher there.

The Waldos kept sheep and sent their wool to Berlin and Brunswick to be carded and made into rolls 18 inches long and as big around as one's finger, from which the mother and the girls knit the family stockings and mittens. Mrs. Chapman and her mother both spun and today she can still run an old spinning wheel. While both knew how to weave, they did little of their own weaving but put it out to an expert woman who did it for the community.

At the age of 22, she married J.N. Chapman and he first helped her father with the large tract of land, and later bought a part of the farm. They have three children, Elizabeth Morse, W.W. of Braymer and Asel B. of Madison County, Mo.

Mrs. Chapman recalls in the late 60's, still in the Reconstruction days after the war, that her father and Mrs. Chapman both had to take an oath of allegiance to the government before they could vote. Those days women sufferage was just a wild dream and any woman who wanted to vote was a kind of a freak, and rather unladylike.