Isaac Horace Brown

Born February 26, 183011, or February 20, 1831114, or March 20, 1831, 115, 117, in Richland, Oswego County, New York. He married December 22, 1861, in Linn, Walworth County, Wisconsin. He died April 27, 1914, at his home in Home/Joe’s Bay, Lakebay, Pierce County, Washington.

From New York to the Nebraska Prairie

Isaac Horace Brown was born around 1830–1831 in Richland, Oswego County, New York, and married Isabella Elizabeth Brown on December 22, 1861, in Linn, Walworth County, Wisconsin. The couple farmed in New York State through the early 1870s before moving to Saint Paul, in Howard County, Nebraska, around 1878, where Isaac built up a substantial farm — by 1880 assessed with over a hundred acres under cultivation, six horses, and dozens of head of livestock — that a local newspaper called a “model residence, half hid in a little forest of cottonwoods.” He was active in local Republican politics, serving as a delegate to county conventions and an election judge, and traded actively in Saint Paul real estate for decades, buying, improving, and reselling houses and lots throughout the town.

Liveryman and Restless Traveler

In the mid-1880s Isaac sold his farm and turned to running livery and feed stables in Saint Paul, a business that survived a catastrophic 1893 fire that destroyed his barn along with much of his livestock and equipment. Restless by nature, he repeatedly uprooted his family for new opportunities — trying his hand at Colorado farmland in the late 1880s and again in the 1890s, trading land back and forth between Nebraska and Colorado more than once, and briefly considering a hotel venture in Dannebrog, Nebraska, in 1898. He and Isabella made regular months-long trips to visit their children in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and by 1908 he had renewed his subscription to the Saint Paul Republican newspaper for the thirty-fourth consecutive year, evidence of how firmly Saint Paul remained home even as he wandered. His granddaughter Fern Grahm remembered that he “had wanderlust and was always on the move westward,” recalling that the family “traveled in a covered wagon with all of their belongings with them,” and that “grandfather was always ready to move on, and for some reason seemed to get his way.”

West to Puget Sound

In 1909, at around age seventy-nine, Isaac and Isabella set out on what became their final move: a trip meant to end with a summer on the Pacific Coast turned permanent when Isabella continued alone to Seattle and Isaac, after briefly returning to Nebraska on business, joined her there to make Washington their new home. By 1910 the couple had settled at Joe's Bay, near Lakebay on the Puget Sound, where Isaac worked a small fruit and poultry ranch in his final years. He died at his home there on April 27, 1914; his body was carried by steamer to Fox Island, where his funeral was held at the Sylvan church.