A Long-lived Love Story

Friday, February 7, 2014

Few couples are married for 67 years.  Fewer still can survive war and the harsh realities of pioneer life for all those years.  For one special Kewaunee County couple, Irving and Sarah Hall Elliott, this marriage milestone seems to have been destiny.

At the age of three, Sarah Hall came to Wisconsin from New York.  The family arrived at Wolf River on the schooner “Erie” at sundown on April 22, 1855.  The area was still very wild at that time and her father set out to build the little town, along with his brother Abe Hall, who had started a saw mill.  The Hall family also had a store, a boarding house, and a blacksmith shop.

 

Irving Elliott and his father, brothers, and sisters arrived in Kewaunee County soon after the Halls.  Following a stint as a printer’s devil, (a newspaper apprentice) at the Kewaunee Enterprise office, and after working at the Appleton Crescent, at 15 years old, Irving enlisted in August, 1862, and entered the 32^nd Wisconsin Infantry for the Civil War.  He was the youngest boy in the company ranks.

 

Meanwhile, Sarah taught school in Ahnapee and worked for the family at the Hall’s store and mill.

 

Away at battle, Irving was planning ahead for his future life.  He wrote to his father, George W. Elliott, from Memphis, Tennessee in May of 1863.  “Father,…I want you to let me know what I can get a good village lot for as I want one, and you pick it out and take my allotment money and pay for it so that if I get home, I shall have a little to show for my labors, and when I pay for these I shall want to get lumber.  I can make preparations for building a home…”  After his discharge in June of 1865, Irving returned to Ahnapee, so thin and gaunt that he was barely recognizable.

When recovered, he set out to make a life and start a family.  Irving was among the first members of the local masonic lodge.  He was a catcher on the town’s first baseball team.  When he found his bride-to-be, Sarah Hall was 19;  Irving was 24.  Irving did what had to be done to make her his wife.  As the story goes, the wedding didn’t happen until, as Irving later recalled, “in the dead of winter, with about four feet of snow on the ground,” he was forced to make his way to Carlton town to get the minister to perform the ceremony.  On February 4, 1871, Irving and Sarah were married at her father’s house, which later became the Algoma hospital.  Just nine months later, they would be lucky to survive when most the area north of the woods of Ahnapee burned in the Peshtigo fire and heavy smoke blanketed the area.

Irving’s family built the house that he had planned for.  It is a large two story white house on 2^nd  Street  in Algoma that is still standing today.

A printer all his life, Irving published the Algoma Record newspaper from 1908 to 1918.  This was the period in which the first linotype was installed in the newspaper office.  The technology revolutionized local newspaper publishing at the time.

Sarah, with Irving at her side, raised their children:  Nellie, Ella Isabel, Mae, De Wayne (died in infancy), and Frank.

Each year, Irving appeared at the Memorial Day program in Algoma dressed in costume for “The World’s All Right” Legion play, holding an age-tattered flag.  He and Sarah had an active social life with their children, extended family, and many friends. 

They both lived to an advanced age.  With a bowed back and failing hearing, Irving still enjoyed life, especially strong tobacco.  Having shared a long and fruitful married life, Sarah preceded him in death.  She died in 1938 at age 86; Irving died three years later, in December, 1941.  He was 95 years old and the oldest Civil War vet of Kewaunee County at the time of his death. 

The picture of the couple appeared in the February 5, 1937 issue of the Algoma Record Herald newspaper in an article celebrating Irving and Sarah’s 66^th wedding anniversary.