Pioneering Women – Part 2

Hannah Butler was a true pioneer. The first half of her life was spent moving to land that was just opening to settlers and caring for her family. Mary, the oldest of her children, no doubt played an important role in taking care of her younger siblings.

Mary Polly Wheeler was born April 23, 1788 in Vermont, probably near Fairfield which is in Franklin County. By the time she was 10 she had 4 brothers and a sister. Her father died the following year. Her mother came from a large family that was living in Hinesburg, Vermont so perhaps the family returned there for a couple of years. Or they could have remained in Fairfield until her mother remarried a couple of years later and moved about 10 miles south to Fairfax, Vermont.




Shortly after arriving in Fairfax, when she was 16 years old, Mary Polly married Samuel Johnson on November 11, 1804. He was a farmer who lived a few miles east in Fletcher, Vermont. She had the first of her 8 children in 1805. Mary and her mother had several children that were close in age and I can imagine that family get-togethers were hectic. Mary and her husband stayed in Vermont a few years longer than her mother, but they too moved to Licking County, Ohio around the year 1816. Mary’s last three children were born there.

 In 1820 Mary and Samuel lived in Newark Township and in 1830 they were in Granville Township. A township is a subdivision of a county that is common in the Midwest and used for census and other records. In the early 1800’s these townships would have been mostly forested land that was being cleared for farming. There would have been a few small villages nearby.

In 1850 they were living few miles north in Burlington Township. Samuel was 73 and did not list an occupation, but all of his neighbors were farmers so no doubt they lived in the country. Their children lived in the area, though that was about to change. By the time Samuel died in 1859, most if not all of their living children had moved west.

Mary was living with her 88 year old mother in 1860. But she must have felt torn. Her younger son Joel and his wife Sarah had died within a few months of each other in 1857. The 1856 Iowa state census shows that they had 8 children under the age of 16 years old. On the 1860 census those children were living with different families in the area. Mary was 72 years old but must have felt the need to help. She left her mother and went to Iowa. I don’t know how much time she got to spend with her grandchildren, but at least she got to see them before she died in 1873. Mary is buried in the New York Cemetery, Millerton Township, Wayne County, Iowa.