“Wind Talkers” of World War II weren’t all Navajos

The feature film “Wind Talkers” was probably the first time most people heard that Native Americans, members of the Navajo Tribe in the movie’s plot, were pressed into service during World War II to create secure communications. The Native People, speaking their own language, foiled efforts by both the Germans and Japanese to listen in.

But the Navajos were far from the only tribespeople involved in the project, and World War II wasn’t the first time Native Americans were pressed into service to provide secure voice communications during wartime.

Choctaw “code talkers” of World War I. (Texas Military Force Museum)

During World War I, the men of the 142nd Infantry Regiment, comprised of National Guardsmen from Texas and Oklahoma, had only just arrived in France when they were suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into combat when a portion of the French line collapsed and Germans poured into rear areas.

During the confusion, an officer of the 142nd overheard some of his men talking back and forth in a strange language, which turned out to be Choctaw. The army was suffering because its communications were being intercepted by the Germans who were tapping their landline phones, and the officer’s bright idea was to put Choctaws at both ends of the unit’s telephone lines to translate from English to Choctaw at one end and back into English at the other. The idea proved a rousing success.

It was so successful that according to the U.S. Army, after the war, Germany sent some scholars to the U.S. to covertly study Native American languages in case another war broke out, but the government discovered their aim and sent them back home.

The reason the code talkers were so effective was that of all the Indian languages, only the Cherokees had a written language, famously developed by Sequoia. As a result, the only way to learn any of their languages was to live with the tribes, which pretty much limited the opportunities to missionaries and government officials.

Ironically, the U.S. government had done its level best in a shameful effort to eradicate the languages and cultures of Native People, going so far as to punish students at government-run Indian schools who were caught speaking their own languages.

By the time World War II broke out, their best efforts to stamp out the Indians’ languages had—fortunately—failed and the idea of ‘code talkers’ was quickly revived. The Navajos who served with the U.S. Marines are the best known code talkers, but both the Marines and the Army also made use of servicemen from the Comanche, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Choctaw, Creek, Hopi, Kiowa, Menominee, Seminole, Oneida, Pawnee, Sac and Fox, and both Lakota and Dakota Sioux tribes as well as many others. In all, some 33 tribes and tribal subgroups served during World War II as code talkers.

168th Infantry in Tunisia. (America in World War II Magazine)

The Sac and Fox Tribe lived in Illinois and Wisconsin before tribal land was seized by the government and they were forcibly moved west of the Mississippi in the 1830s. Even so, with war on the horizon, Native American men began flocking to the colors to volunteer their services. Early in 1941, on the eve of World War II, a group of young men from the Fox and Sac homeland at Tama, Iowa enlisted in the Iowa National Guard. They were assigned to the 168th Infantry Regiment, a component of the 34th Infantry Division.

Eight of the men were assigned to the communication section of Company H in the 168th’s 2nd Battalion. The Fox and Sac code talkers included Dewey Roberts, Edward Benson, Melvin Twin, and Dewey Youngbear, and two sets of brothers, Frank and Willard Sanache and Judy Wayne Wabaunasee and Mike Wayne Wabaunasee (whose surname ought to ring a bell with Fox Valley residents).

Waubonsee, principal war chief of the Prairie Band of the Potawatomi Tribe. (Little White School Museum collection)

I haven’t been able to track down the origin of the Wabaunasee boys’ surname, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility they might have some distant relationship to our Chief Waubonsee, even if he was a Potawatomi and they weren’t. “Our” Chief Waubonsee was the primary war chief of the Prairie Potawatomi Band and a confidant of the famed Native American leader Tecumseh and was at the Battle of the Thames in Canada during the War of 1812 where Tecumseh was killed in action. Waubonsee and his friend Shabbona returned to the Fox Valley where they both lived until the region’s Native People were forcibly removed west of the Mississippi in 1836 and 1837.

In our area, a creek, a high school, and a junior college all honor Chief Waubonsee.

After training in Louisiana, the men of the 34th Division were loaded aboard transports and sailed to Northern Ireland where they received more training, before being assigned to the invasion of North Africa.

The 34^th Division went ashore at Algiers and then moved on into Tunisia where they collided with Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in some of the U.S. Army’s first heavy land warfare of World War II. In fact, the Fox and Sac boys from Tama became the first code talkers to find themselves in combat.

And it didn’t go well. At the battles of Faid and Kasserine passes in February 1943 the inexperience and sometimes downright incompetence of the U.S. Army’s commanders became all too apparent, as the Germans and Italians chewed up both the 1st Armored Division’s unwieldy Grant tanks and the badly deployed men in the 168th Infantry.

And given their positions as communications scouts, three of the Sac and Fox code talkers were captured, Frank Sanache by the Italians, and Dewey Youngbear and Judy Wayne Wabaunasee by the Germans. All three spent the rest of the war in German prisoner of war camps, only liberated at the end of the conflict. Youngbear, though, escaped several times during his captivity, only to be recaptured.

Seminole Code Talker Edmund Harjo wasn’t honored for his World War II service until 2013.

Although the code talkers served with distinction, and were vital parts of the war effort, their service was considered a military secret until the 1960s and so they never received the recognition they so richly deserved. Not until 2001 were the Navajo code talkers honored by President George H.W. Bush, but even then they received non-military Congressional Gold Medals.

Former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, learning that Iowa had also produced code talkers, got the ball rolling to honor all the code talkers. But government being what it is these days, they weren’t all finally recognized for their service until 2013, long after most had died. Youngbear, for instance, died in 1948 of tuberculosis contracted as a result of his captivity.

As Edmond Harjo, 96, an Oklahoma Seminole code talker and one of the few who lived to be honored, noted, the honor was a long time—too long a time—coming.

 “If I was young, I would enjoy it,” he mused.

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Everyone thought these local landmarks would be around forever, but they’ve completely disappeared…

One of my favorite local history topics through the years has been the changes our small corner of northern Illinois has undergone. In particular, I’ve been interested in those businesses and industries that were once major players in the area’s economy of which there is no longer any tangible evidence.

That doesn’t mean there is no evidence, of course, only that you have to, first of all, know there was something there in the first place, and then that you have to recognize the evidence you’re seeing but which might not register.

For instance, here in our little town of Oswego, Illinois, we once had three water-powered mills. One of them, the Hopkins Sawmill, was located on Waubonsie Creek very close to the village’s downtown business district. The other two were located at the dam that was once situated on the Fox River about a half-mile north of Oswego’s downtown.

Of the Hopkins mill, nothing at all remains—except for notations on legal papers created when the Oswego Public Library District bought the parcel of land along Waubonsie Creek on which the old mill once stood. When that happened, they found that a portion of the property had never been surveyed, presumably because it was covered with the mill pond’s water, and so had become a tiny island of real estate in the middle of town owned by no one. It took the library district’s lawyers a few months to figure out what had happened and why, and then fix it. For me, it once again proved that actions taken around these parts in the 1830s continue to have modern implications.

The Parker Mills about 1900 in a photo taken by Irvin Haines. The sawmill and furniture factory is in the foreground on the east bank of the Fox River. The gristmill is on the west bank with the miller’s house behind it and to the left. (Little White School Museum collection)

Of the other two mills on the river and the dam that provided the water power for them, there is at least some evidence they once existed—provided you know what you’re looking at. Both are now the sites of parks maintained by the Oswegoland Park District, one on either side of the Fox River. Millstone Park, site of the old Parker Gristmill, is on the river’s west bank, while Troy Park, the sawmill and furniture factory site, is on the east side of the river, directly opposite the old gristmill.

Both mills were built right at the dam that spanned the river, with their short millraces running underneath the mills. No tall overshot mill wheels for Fox River mills—at least not this far upstream. Instead these mills were powered first by horizontal tub wheels and then soon after by horizontal turbines. If you’re interested in what a turbine wheel of the era looked like, head up a few miles north to Montgomery and you can inspect one that sits as a sort of unmarked memorial on the river’s west bank just a couple yards above Montgomery’s Fox River bridge.

Turbines like this one on display in Montgomery ran most of the mills on the Fox River.

The mill sites are still marked with quite a bit of limestone flagging that provided the two mills’ foundations, especially around the sawmill site on the east bank of the river. Some of the limestone blocks used to wall the two millraces are still visible on both sides of the river.

Of the dam, not much is visible except the riffle caused by the rubble left behind when the dam crumbled early in the 20^th Century. However, if a person looks closely, they can still make out, especially during periods of low water, some of the original timber from the cribs that made up the old dam’s structure. Timber cribs were fastened to the bottom of the river with huge wrought iron stakes before the cribs were filled with gravel and limestone rubble. The dam was finished by being sheathed with thick boards on the downstream side.

Just upstream from the old dam site was another industry that no longer exists, and of which there is no longer, unlike the mills, any evidence at all. Esch Brothers & Rabe built their first giant ice house in 1874, finishing it in time for the 1875 ice harvest. The company gradually added more ice storage houses to the riverbank north of Parker’s dam and mills until there were 20 of them to fill with ice. The northern group of 14 houses each measured 30×100 feet, while the southern group of six houses each measured 30 by 150 feet. Ice in the houses was stored in thick layers, each layer insulated with a thick layer of sawdust.

A lot of ice was harvested, too. Generally the ice harvesting crew consisted of 75 men who worked with horse-drawn ice plows to score 200 lb. ice blocks that were then broken off the frozen surface of the river and floated to the steam-powered elevator that lifted the blocks up to the scaffolds to be skidded to storage. In August 1880 alone, the company shipped 124 railcar loads of ice from the firm’s siding. In total that year, 581 railcar loads of ice were shipped to market from Oswego.

Esch Brothers & Rabe’s giant ice houses above the Parker Mill dam at Oswego. The operation produced hundreds of rail cars of ice annually. (Little White School Museum collection)

What was all that ice used for? Some of it went to homes for food preservation in those new-fangled iceboxes and some went to various businesses for use in soda fountains and to freeze ice cream. But most of it went to the meatpacking industry to keep railcar loads of dressed beef and pork carcasses cool while being shipped to eastern markets.

Gradually, the ice harvest declined due to a number of factors. Pollution of the Fox River prevented its ice from being used in food preparation. Warmer winters resulted in poor harvests, and spring floods damaged the old Parker dam. Then in March 1891, the northern group of 14 ice houses caught fire, probably by a lightning strike, and were destroyed. The southern group of houses was destroyed by fire in 1904. Today, there’s nary a trace of this once-thriving industry.

There is, however, a trace of another once-thriving business, and that’s the depot, sidings, and other facilities once used by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad’s Fox River Branch Line at Oswego.

The Oswego Stockyards. The Waubonsie Creek bridge on Adams Street is visible upper center, and the old feed mill, later a home on the north side of the creek is visible just to the right–upstream–from the bridge. (Little White School Museum collection)

The line reached Oswego in 1870. At one time, there were two sidings at Oswego, one that served the lumber yard and coal storage sheds (there were four of them) west of the main tracks, and another that served the grain elevators on the east side of the tracks just south of the depot. The depot was located on the east side of the tracks at Jackson and South Adams Street. In addition, there was a livestock loading yard and loading chute between the tracks and South Adams Street just south of the Waubonsie Creek bridge. The west siding not only served the stockyard, but also served the lumber company that had been located at Jackson and South Adams since the rail line was built.

Nowadays, both the sidings have been removed, the stockyard is long gone, and Alexander Lumber, the last lumber company to occupy the site, closed down in 2006. That site is now occupied by the sprawling Reserve at Hudson Crossing apartment, retail business, and parking garage complex. The depot was demolished by the railroad in 1969, the site now paved over as parking for the Oswego Brewing Company’s parking lot.

Another business that made use of Oswego’s rail connection in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was the Fox River Butter Company. Operating out of their creamery between the railroad tracks and what’s now Ill. Route 25 about an eighth of a mile north of North Street, the creamery was once big business in Oswego with hundreds of dairy farmers sending their milk there to be processed.

The Fox River Butter Company’s creamery located on Ill. Route 25 just north of North Street and east of North Adams Street. (Aurora Historical Society photo)

The native limestone building began life as a brewery in 1870, but for whatever reason was not a success. Then on Oct. 5, 1876, Lorenzo Rank, the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent reported: “W.H. [William Huston “Hugh”] McConnell & Co., a new firm, have just commenced business in this town. They have bought the brewery and are converting it into a butter factory. The [steam] engine and other machinery for the establishment have arrived and they calculate to have it in running order by the first of December.”

McConnell made a success out of the creamery, the business growing as the number of local farmers milking cows increased. Business was so good, in fact, that another creamery operator, L.H. Partridge, moved to Oswego in 1881 to compete with McConnell from a new creamery located on the site of the old Armstrong Broom Factory on South Adams south of the grain elevator. The Partridge creamery was soon producing 400 pounds of butter a day, most of it shipped by rail to the New Orleans market. Partridge closed the creamery in the late 1880s and in 1892, the Farmers’ Mutual Benefit Association—a farmers’ cooperative—opened a new creamery apparently using the Partridge site and equipment. The cooperative eventually drove the Fox River Butter Company, then owned by C.S. Kilbourne, out of business.

Then a combination of factors, mostly competition by larger corporate butter and cheese makers, slowly drove all the small creameries—at one time there was at least one in every Kendall County community—out of business.

The final major business that once served Oswego was the interurban trolley line that ran from downtown Aurora through Montgomery and downtown Oswego to downtown Yorkville. Service in the line opened in 1900 and provided convenient passenger and light freight service for the next two decades. With trolleys on the line running hourly, Oswego residents could easily attend high school or college in Aurora, work there, or do their shopping in the city’s downtown.

A southbound interurban trolley crosses the 300-foot trestle taking it over the CB&Q tracks in Oswego around 1910. (Little White School Museum collection)

The trolley line also built an amusement park—all evidence of which has also disappeared—on a site across the Fox River from the huge Boulder Hill subdivision. Realizing ridership would probably lag on weekends, the company figured, rightly as it turned out, that an amusement park would boost weekend riders. The park included a rollercoaster, merry-go-round, shoot the chutes and featured boating on the Fox River, a huge auditorium, and a baseball diamond where semi-pro teams played.

The trolley line was finally killed off when hard-surfaced highways and affordable motor vehicles became common throughout the area in the early 1920s and along with it went the amusement park.

Humans tend to want to believe that the landscapes, services, and amenities they currently enjoy have not only always been around, but will continue to be around forever. But it doesn’t take much investigation to realize the old saying about the only sure things in life being death and taxes is true.

Heading west to Illinois in the 1830s: A little perspective on modern traffic problems

The earliest American settlers came to Kendall County starting in the late 1820s on foot, and by wagon, flatboat, and steamship on Lake Michigan via Chicago.

Oswego’s first settlers, William and Rebecca Wilson and their children, along with their extended family, the Daniel, John, and Walter Pearces, traveled here to the Illinois prairie by wagon to settle permanently in the summer of 1833. The four men had walked west the summer before prospecting for good land and decided the area at and near the mouth of Waubonsie Creek on the Fox River would be a good spot to settle. They brought their families the next year.

Oswego in 1838 showing Daniel Pearce’s claim circled in red and the southernmost lobe of the Big Woods on the east side of the Fox River shaded in light green. (Little White School Museum collection)

In 1834, John and William Wormley walked all the way to Oswego Township. According to Rev. E.W. Hicks, Kendall County’s first historian, they walked from New York State with nothing but their rifles and a change of clothing. The Wormleys said they averaged 36 miles per day on the trip. When you stop to think about it, that’s pretty good going. U.S. Cavalry standards usually called for a march by horse units of 20 miles per day.

When they got to the mid-Fox Valley, they decided this was the area in which they wanted to settle, so they walked all the way back and brought their families out by horse and wagon the next year. Like the Pearces, descendants of the Wormleys still live in the Oswego area.

Those who travelled by wagon had a longer trip, but they could also carry a good deal more equipment and household items with them. Plows and scythes were the main farming implements packed, while the women packed spinning wheels, quilts, candle molds, and seed for the first year’s crop. Sometimes treasured furniture was brought along to make the prairie cabin more comfortable and as a reminder of their former homes and lives.

An immigrant wagon in an 1833 illustration.

Pioneers who came by wagon sometimes brought livestock along with them, from chickens and cattle to milk cows. Cows not only could provide fresh milk and cream on the trip, as well as butter. Butter could be made after a fashion while traveling by putting cream in a covered bucket and hanging it from the rear axle of the wagon. The constant jolting and bumping and jouncing of the wagon over the prairie eventually churned the cream into butter.

Settlers who came by wagon from the settled East were in for a shock as they encountered what passed for roads farther west. Roads that were laid through wooded areas still had tree stumps left m the roadway in the 1830s and early 1840s. The stumps were generally cut within two feet of the road surface so that wagons could clear them.

Although the roads did exist, the western residents of the era didn’t seem to be real clear on the concept of government-owned roads. For instance, a traveler on the National Road from Wheeling, West Virginia to Vandalia reported during a journey to Illinois in the 1840’s that “On passing a house newly built we had to avoid a deep hole dug right in the middle of the road (this was the State Road be it remembered), from which the clay for daubing the chimney had evidently been taken. To be sure, the road was a mere track, but there was a good deal of passage on it, and it was the route of a stage carrying the mail.”

Settlers who wished to travel by flatboat first journeyed to Wheeling, Pittsburgh, or some other town on the Ohio River, where their wagon and team were exchanged in trade for a flatboat and usually some cash. The journey down the Ohio brought settlers to Shawneetown in southern Illinois where their flatboat would be traded, along with some cash, for another team and wagon for the trip to the prairies of northern Illinois. Flatboats had value because they were made of sawn lumber, something that was not overly common and so was of some value on the Illinois frontier.

Ten year-old Della Agusta Southworth and her family traveled on the Great Lakes to Chicago in 1838 aboard the schooner Detroit. Ironically, they sailed from Oswego, New York, and after arriving at Chicago, settled in the new village of Oswego, Illinois–named after the New York city. (Historical Collections of the Great Lakes – Bowling Green State University)

For settlers with enough money, and who didn’t want to bring a lot of personal possessions or livestock with them, the quickest way to get to Illinois from Eastern states was via the Great Lakes. Steamboat travel was finally becoming commonplace in the 1840’s as a method of traversing the lakes, but sailing ships still predominated. Settlers usually got to Albany as best they could and then took the Erie Canal to Buffalo on Lake Erie. From there, they would board a steamboat for a quick passage (which was also expensive), or would take a lake schooner for a less expensive, though more leisurely (depending on the weather), sailing voyage to Chicago.

Della Agusta Southworth—later Mrs. Lyell Aldrich—an early settler in Kendall County, left an interesting record of such a sailing voyage. Mrs. Aldrich’s family came west to Illinois in 1838 when she was a 10 year-old girl.

“We took passage on the schooner ‘Detroit’ at Oswego, N.Y., on July 6, 1838, and five weeks later arrived in Chicago on Aug. 12. The Welland Canal with its 25 locks, almost one to a mile, was than not constructed to admit easy passage for so large a vessel as ours. So frequent delays occurred from running around and getting stuck in the locks. The keel had been taken off the schooner to save space, which caused her to drift in all directions.

“At Mackinac Island head winds delayed us for more than a week giving us time to visit the places of interest. When we finally reached Chicago, we sailed up the river toward the west, landing on the bank opposite the old log fort.”

It never gets old for me to compare 19th Century travel to travel today. These days, it is about a day’s drive from here to Niagara Falls via four-lane highways—no more waiting a week up at the Straits for the wind to change or the entire trip taking more than a month.

I always think it’s valuable to keep such facts in mind to offer a bit of perspective as we complain about today’s heavy traffic, gasoline prices, or road construction delays.

‘Maggie’ Shepard Edwards: A local success story for Women’s History Month

Too often, local history is told from the viewpoint of the men who dominated local government and business. For all of its early history, after all, men were the only ones who could vote or hold local public office.

But even during pioneer times, while it wasn’t easy, women owned Kendall County businesses, farmed, and were property owners.

Life for women without husbands was not easy during the 19th Century, nor for most of the 20th century, for that matter. But some women, through shear ability, intelligence, and fortitude managed not only to survive but to thrive.

One of those successful women was Margaret “Maggie” Shepard Edwards, an Oswego property owner and successful entrepreneur. By the time she died in February 1929, Maggie Edwards was a respected and beloved member of the community.

Margaret Ruth Shepard was born March 8, 1846 in Kendall Township, Kendall County, Illinois, the daughter of a prosperous farmer and his wife, David and Susanna Mary (LeStourgeon) Shepard. Mary died in 1856, and in February 1857, David remarried Elizabeth H. Ewing.

Margaret, called Maggie by her family and friends, taught in one-room schools in NaAuSay Township here in Kendall County before moving on to Centralia to teach school, probably to make more money than local one-room school districts were willing to pay.

Margaret Ruth Shepard Edwards (Little White School Museum collection)

She arrived back in Kendall County in July 1874, apparently determined to go into business for herself.

After moving into Oswego from the family farm in 1875, then 29 years old, she went into millinery, the manufacture and sale of ladies’ hats and fashion accessories. A year later, she opened her own milliner shop in the old Smith Building at the northwest corner of Main and Washington. In the summer of 1878, she moved the business to the second floor of the Shaver Building on the east side of Main Street between Washington and Jackson. Five years after that, she moved the business yet again into a former private residence in downtown Oswego.

By that time she was a financial success, and she bought the home in which her business was located a few months later. Only a month after that, she moved the business again, this time to a home on Washington Street.

Maggie Shepard wasn’t just an active businesswoman, she was also active in local politics, even though women didn’t have the right to vote. An enthusiastic Republican, she was a strong supporter of Gen. James A. Garfield during his run for the presidency in 1880. Noted the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent on Oct. 28, 1880: “The Republican meeting Tuesday evening partook of the usual form, the street parade and music preceding the speaking; the youth’s Garfield guards (same might be called the Maggie Shepard company, as she is the funder of it) elicited much attention while on duty in forming the rear of the parade.”

During that era, political parties erected tall wooden victory poles from which they flew political flags and other decorations advertising their candidates. For the 1880 election, the Republicans raised their Garfield pole while local democrats raised their pole to honor their candidate, Winfield Scott Hancock. Wags would sometimes poke their political rivals by sabotaging each other’s victory poles. It appears Maggie Shepard was audacious enough to give Oswego’s Democrats a tweak after Garfield narrowly beat Hancock by less than 2,000 votes.

The week after the election, on Nov. 11, 1880, the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported that: “During one night of last week a black streamer was raised on the Hancock pole, and of course the presumption is that it was done by some one or more of the opposite party, and there are some that think it was Miss Maggie Shepard that did it, which, however, is not very likely to be the case. Maggie was extra zealous in the campaign, and she may have exhibited undue partisan spirit, but I don’t believe she hoisted that flag; no, I won’t believe it.”

In 1885 at the age of 39, probably fearing she would never find a husband, Maggie adopted a five year-old girl, Stella, from the Chicago Orphan Asylum. It is unclear how common it was for single women to adopt children in the 1880s—I suspect it was pretty uncommon—but it’s probably fair to suggest it was also uncommon for a single woman of that era to own her own business and house, not to mention adopt a child.

Then in March 1888, Maggie moved her millinery business one last time, renting the home formerly occupied, and owned, by Oswego pioneer Marcius C. Richards. As a business location, it was a good one, right on one of Oswego’s main thoroughfares.

Maggie (second from left) and Tom Edwards and Maggie’s daughter, Stella (with bicycle) pose outside their newly remodeled home in Oswego about 1891. The home, on Washington Street opposite the Church of the Good Shepherd, still stands as a local landmark to pioneer women business owners. (Little White School Museum photo)

The house was—and still is—situated on Washington Street across from the Church of the Good Shepherd, adjoining the alley paralleling Main Street from Washington to Jackson Street behind the Main Street brick block. On Jan. 23, 1889, the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported that: “Maggie R. Shepard, Oswego’s successful and popular milliner, has bought the M.C. Richards’ place, of which she was the tenant, and by the way that sagacious new clever correspondent for the Herald has thrown out the hint that Maggie may take in a partner; she is now well fixed for such a step.”

Maggie based her success on hard work and on making sure she always had the latest in women’s fashions available for her customers. Reported the Record from Oswego on Sept. 18, 1889: “Maggie Shepard went Monday to Chicago and will spend several days there selecting goods for the fall stock.”

Proving that love doesn’t come only to the young, Maggie, then 44, married Thomas C. Edwards, a native of Wales and an Oswego hardware merchant, in July 1890. The couple lived in Maggie’s house and milliner shop on Washington Street where she continued to carry on her business. Shortly after the marriage, they remodeled and enlarged the home, including adding a new, fashionable, bay window.

In the fall of 1897, Maggie decided to retire. As the Record’s Oswego correspondent put it: “Mrs. Maggie Edwards, after carrying on most successfully the millinery business here for 20 years, proposes now to sell out and retire. It is the only establishment of the kind in town and hence a good opening for some one to get into a profitable business.”

Maggie’s adopted daughter, meanwhile, grew up in Oswego and kept the name Shepard until her marriage. As the Record reported on June 26, 1901: “One of the prettiest weddings of the season occurred Wednesday evening June 19 at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Edwards when their daughter, Miss Stella Shepard, became the wife of Mr. Albert L. Woolley, oldest son of Mr. and Mrs. George Woolley. A beautiful new house is being erected about a mile east of town where Mr. and Mrs. Woolley will be at home to their friends after Aug. 1.”

Tom Edwards died Dec. 23, 1911. On Jan. 3, 1912, the Record’s “Tamarack and Wheatland” correspondent remembered Edwards: “A number from here attended the funeral of Thomas Edwards in Oswego. Deceased formerly owned property about a mile and a half west of Tamarack and at one time lived here and had many friends who were shocked to hear of his death.”

With Tom’s death, Maggie continued to live in Oswego where she traveled and enjoyed her daughter and her Woolley grandchildren. She died at 82 years of age on Feb. 17, 1929 in Oswego.

As the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported: “Mrs. Edwards will be remembered as a woman of an especially bright and sunny disposition, which she maintained to the last. She had been failing in health and strength for the last few years and this winter made her home with her daughter, Stella. Gradually, she grew weaker and while not confined to her bed, fell asleep Saturday night to awaken on the other shore.”

Maggie was buried in the Oswego Township Cemetery, bringing to a close a successful, eventful, and well-lived life.

It wasn’t easy for single women to be successful business owners in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it was possible given sufficient drive and talent. Which, come to think of it, still pretty much holds true today.