He left behind Lizzie, his wife of 32 years, and their children, who all lived in Pemberville or nearby Oak Harbor. The youngest was eight years old. None of them ever heard from him again.
Heman was my great great grandfather. My own father spent several years trying to figure out what happened to Heman. The only clue was Heman's civil war pension records, which showed that he had gone to Kansas and died there in 1921. After my father died I inherited the mystery and determined to track down Heman Allen.
Heman's parents, Dennis and Eleanor, were born in New York state. In the mid 1840s they left for Iowa, stopping long enough in Berrien County, Michigan, for Heman to be born there in 1845. In 1863 Heman enlisted with the Eighth Iowa Cavalry. Less than a year later he was taken prisoner at Newnan, Georgia, sent to Andersonville prison, was exchanged, and spent some time in hospitals before being mustered out on July 24, 1865 at Davenport. A year later he was married to Eunice Elizabeth Ford, who we called Lizzie. They lived in Des Moines until 1878 when they moved to Pemberville.
Whatever happened in 1898 that compelled Heman to leave town was never talked about in my family in the following years. Apparently Heman and his wife Lizzie were not on the best terms, as the house in Pemberville was in her name only and he was not mentioned in her will, written in 1894.
At this point the trail goes cold. My father never found any information about Heman's life in Kansas. So in August 2021 I set off on a road trip to Kansas to see what I could find. I started at the State Archives in Topeka. Kansas was settled during the heyday of the Linotype machine, which made it possible for every town in Kansas to have at least one daily newspaper. Most of these papers have been scanned and indexed by the State Archives.
With a few hours work I was able to locate a death notice and it became clear why my father had no luck finding him. Heman had changed his name to John H. Allen. He never changed it legally, so there was no record of that. "Heman" is often misspelled "Herman" in the records, and John Allen is a very common name, so it would have been almost impossible to find him in Kansas in the 1890s. He also did a good job of keeping his name out of the papers, and put his property in his new wife's name. He obviously did not want to be found.
In June 1898 Heman (now John) arrived in Willis, Kansas, population 187, with his new 27 year old bride Laura B, who was born in Pennsylvania. Willis is northwest of Kansas City on the Missouri Pacific Railroad and next to the Kickapoo reservation. The 1883 History of the State of Kansas says Willis is "a thriving young town with a number of enterprising citizens, who do a great deal of business." I don't know how they met but the short time frame between his departure from Pemberville and arrival in Willis, along with his occupation as a traveling salesman, makes me think they knew each other before going to Kansas. There is no marriage record in Kansas, and Heman was still married in Ohio.
Laura and Helen were active in the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Willis. In 1911 Laura and Helen, with another woman and her daughter, went the six miles to Horton to buy new wallpaper for the church.
In 1908 Laura went as a delegate to the Wesleyan Methodist annual conference in Keene. One of the topics of discussion at the conference was the establishment of Wesleyan College in Miltonvale, which opened the following year. At that time there was no high school in Willis (it opened in 1917) and I believe Heman and Laura moved to Miltonvale in June 1912 so Helen could go to Wesleyan College.
Miltonvale had been founded in 1881 but there was not much there until the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway came through in 1887. Electric lights and running water came to town the year after Heman and Laura arrived. They bought two properties and put them in Laura's name. One was a blacksmith shop at Ash and Starr. The other was a house they lived in at Railroad and 1st. They bought both properties from Joseph Benoit, who owned an illegal saloon. (Kansas had Prohibition starting in 1881, but there were two saloons in Miltonvale. They were both raided by Carrie Nation in 1898.)
Helen attended Cloud County Common School for two years, then at 16 graduated from Wesleyan College, which was more like a high school than a modern college.
Laura died in 1917 and Heman remarried the next year to Martha Jane Hampton of nearby Clifton. Heman died in 1921 at the age of 76. His funeral was held in the auditorium at the college, the largest venue in town, so he must have been a popular man. He and Laura are buried in Miltonvale cemetery. Heman's first wife, Lizzie, died in 1900 and is buried in Pemberville.
Heman's blacksmith shop in Willis is still there but is abandoned. Wesleyan Methodist Church is a vacant lot with only a wellhead. Today Willis has a population of 24 and no schools, businesses, or churches. The railroad still goes through town but no longer carries passengers. The road to Horton, where Laura and Helen bought wallpaper, is still unpaved.
I visited Miltonvale 100 years and 5 weeks after Heman's death. Heman's house is still occupied. His blacksmith shop was torn down and replaced with the town's first gas station shortly before his death in 1921. Wesleyan College closed in 1972.
Helen married a Mr. Tribby (first name unknown) within a couple of years and moved to Oklahoma. I'm not sure what happened to her, but there was a Tribby family in Miltonvale, and one of the sons ended up in Michigan, near where I grew up. I should follow up on this.
Read more about the early days in Willis at Willis, Kansas – Extinct in Brown County on the Legends of Kansas website.
The Concordia Blade-Empire, Tuesday, July 19, 1921
J. H. Allen passed away Friday night at his home in Miltonvale after several weeks of illness. When Mr. Allen first came to Miltonvale he worked as a blacksmith in the shop which he afterward sold, and where the filling station is located. A few years after locating here, Mrs. Allen died. He married again a few years ago. Mr. Allen was a Civil War veteran and an honest Christian gentleman, a good husband and father, and will be greatly missed by his wife and daughter, Mrs. Helen Tribby, of Oklahoma, as well as a host of friends. Funeral services were conducted at Wesleyan Auditorium by the pastor, Rev. DeWitt, Sunday at 2:30. Interment was in the city cemetery.
Jim Rees, Yucatán, Mexico, 2024