Jane Nelson McDonald Lovell Redden

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Among my female ancestors was a feisty Scotch-Irish pioneer settler, my great-great-great-grandmother, Jane Nelson McDonald Lovell Redden. 

Jane Nelson was born in Ireland on October 31, 1810 to Andrew and Catherine Lennox Nelson.  She came to America in 1829.

In New York state, she gave birth to six of her eight children:  Catherine "Katie" (b. about 1832); John (b. 1837); Andrew "Andy" (b. 1838); Mary Jane "Molly" (b.1840); Margaret "Maggie" (b. 1843); and Michael, my great-great-grandfather (b. 1845).  (Information about one child is unknown.)  The family left New York and came west where Elizabeth "Lizzie", her youngest child, was born in Wisconsin, in 1847.

In 1850, Jane lived with her children in Racine.  Her first husband, Patrick McDonald, the father of all of her children, died sometime after 1847 and before July, 1850.  Between 1850 and 1855, Jane married John Lovell.  John, Jane and the children came to Wolf River, later named Algoma, in 1856.  The next year they acquired a dwelling on First Street originally called the Ahnapee House Hotel (near the southwest corner of First and Steel Streets).  It was the second or third framed building in the town.  It was later renamed the Lovell House Hotel.

This original plat map of Ahnapee was drawn by
my great-great-great-grandfather George W. Elliot.
G.W. Elliot surveyed much of the land surrounding Ahnapee.

In 1860, Jane was 49 and John was 38 but they fibbed about their ages on the census, reporting his age as 43 and hers as 42.  John entered the Civil War and returned to Ahnapee after nine months, discharged with disease in January, 1863.   He moved out to the 160 acre farm in north Ahnapee on the Door/Kewaunee County line that he had purchased in 1858.  John divorced Jane in 1870 and married Caroline Matzke.  (Caroline had seven children with John Lovell but divorced him in 1887 on the grounds of cruel treatment, drunkenness and desertion.)

Zero in on the S of Steel. The first building is Graf/Fax/hotel.  
One property south (left) of the building is Jane's hotel, 
called Union House.  
(1883 birdseye view of Algoma courtesy of Virginia Johnson) 

By 1870, Jane had changed her name back to Jane McDonald and called her hotel the Union House.

She was a feisty lady who ran a tight ship. According to Virginia Feld Johnson's book, An-An-api-sebe "Where is the river?": Wolf River and Ahnapee 1851-1897, Grandmother Jane was a devout member of the Church of England and was known to use her "Scotch-Irish" brogue to maintain order, especially when the sailors came to town in the winter to work in the woods and sought a boarding place at her hotel.

On August 18, 1880, 70 year-old Jane and a 37 year-old stone mason, brick layer and plasterer named Patrick Redden were married by a Baptist minister at Jane's home.  Patrick was Canadian born and a boarder at her hotel.  The Ahnapee Record newspaper on August 19 stated "Although the report that they were married was not credited at first, it is nevertheless true."  Many of the stores, schools and other buildings in Algoma were the mason work of Patrick Redden.  Patrick was the son of Irish parents, Daniel and Ellen Redden.  Jane and Patrick divorced in the 1890s.  

Jane attempted to sell the Union House in 1883 "at a low price for cash" according to the Record.  There were no takers.  In June of 1884, there was a fire in the upper story of the building and it was heavily damaged but not a total loss.  She still owned the hotel at the time of her death. 

At age 90, Jane Redden died at her home in Algoma on July 12, 1901.  Among the first settlers, she had lived in the city for half of her long life.  

Jane Redden was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Algoma.  This morning I saw her headstone there for the first time. 

At rest in the Evergreen Cemetery in Algoma, WI
Jane Redden