Jane Gilbert (Tubbs) Apperson 1809-1859 — My three times great grandmother

Yesterday, our speaker at the Community Historians gathering was Irene Martin. Her topic dealt with the way early settlers along the Columbia got here – the men who jumped ship and the women who were mail order brides. The stories about the hardships the women faced really ‘spoke’ to me, although none of my direct forebears were of the mail order variety.

My great great grandmother, Matilda Jane Apperson was born in Tennessee in 1830 and, according to my Uncle Willard, had sat proudly beside her own mother Jane in 1847 as their ox team plodded into Oregon City. They had lost Jane’s husband Beverly to cholera at Hamsfork on the Oregon Trail. Delos Jefferson took the same trail a year later from Ohio, and married Matilda in 1850. Delos, though he lived by farming, was considered a cut above his neighbors, because he had an ear for music, and at one time even taught singing in Portland.

Julia Jefferson Espy 1851-1901 — My Great Grandmother

Delos and Matilda had eleven children, eight of whom lived to maturity. Two of the girls, Susannah and Clara died within a few days of each other of diphtheria (in those days called “putrid sore throat”) and were buried in one grave. Matilda never completely recovered from their deaths and was mentally unbalanced for many years, shuttling in an out of the mental hospital near Salem where they lived.

That left the much of the care of the younger children to Julia, the eldest, who left home in 1869 at the age of eighteen to teach here in Oysterville. The following summer, she married Robert Espy who was twenty-four years her senior and who was already well established in the Shoalwater Bay oyster business. No doubt she was happy to escape the domestic duties of her parents’ household. However, hers certainly was not the life of Riley.

When Julia was ready to deliver her first baby in 1871, there was only one doctor in the entire Shoalwater region. He was located across the bay in the Bruceport area and, by the time he was needed in Oysterville, he was off in the woods somewhere attending to a case of smallpox.

At the Oysterville Cemetery

It fell to the neighbor ladies to deliver Julia’s firstborn. They had to use “distressing methods” which meant, it was whispered in the family, that the infant had to be dismembered in the womb in order to save twenty-year-old Julia’s life. Over the next fifteen years, Julia would have seven more children, all healthy, and according to family lore, ever after that first experience, her husband Robert made arrangements for the services of a doctor or a midwife well in advance of her due dates.

I’ve often wondered if Julia was ‘made of sterner stuff’ than her mother. Or was it watching her mother’s long suffering that made her bound and determined to carry on for the sake of her husband and family. In any event, I take great pride in being descended from these women – and from their husbands, as well. It’s difficult to imagine the hardships they endured… just as a matter of course.