Isabella Elizabeth Brown

Born December 13/15, 1841, in Hudson, Walworth County, Wisconsin. She married December 22, 1861, in Linn, Walworth County, Wisconsin. She died Abt in Frank Tobey James Retirement Home in Tacoma, Washington.

A Covered-Wagon Childhood

Isabella Elizabeth Brown was born on December 13, 1841, in Hudson, Walworth County, Wisconsin, and married Isaac Horace Brown on December 22, 1861, in nearby Linn. In June 1863 the young couple set out for Iowa by covered wagon, packing salt pork, beans, and dried apples, with Isabella keeping a rifle close at hand for the journey. She bought a small fourteen-by-fourteen-foot log cabin near Spring Creek, Iowa, from a homesick settler leaving the frontier, and the family lived there for a time before moving on to New York State in the 1870s and then to Nebraska and Colorado.

Saint Paul, Nebraska

By 1880 the family had settled in Saint Paul, Howard County, Nebraska, where Isabella worked variously as a hired maid, a house-to-house saleswoman, and a seller of homemade butter, cheese, mittens, and socks to support the household. In February 1882 she briefly left Isaac and traveled to Iowa; she returned the following month with her disabled sister, Mrs. Ferguson, who went on to recover unexpectedly well. Isabella and Isaac remained active travelers throughout their later years in Nebraska, making repeated trips to visit their children in Fort Morgan, Colorado, nursing each other through a shared bout of influenza in February 1904, and hosting a rotating cast of relatives. In 1900 Isabella cooked what one visitor called “bountiful well-cooked meals” for boarders in her home, and by 1914 she was raising Black Minorca chickens and selling their eggs.

Tacoma

In 1909 Isabella set out with Isaac on a trip meant to reach the Pacific Coast, but continued on alone to Seattle after he turned back for Nebraska, planning for him to rejoin her that fall. By 1910 the couple had settled at Joe's Bay on the Puget Sound near Lakebay, Washington. After Isaac's death, Isabella stayed on at nearby Fox Island to help her son-in-law manage his property, but eventually the work proved too much, and around 1926 she moved to Tacoma to be near her grandchildren, taking an apartment at the Cambridge Apartments with her granddaughters Fern and Ethel living below. In the spring of 1927 she moved into the Frank Tobey Jones Home for the Aged, where she celebrated her ninetieth birthday with her whole family in December 1931 and lived until her death around 1941, at nearly a hundred years old. Her granddaughter Beulah remembered her as “an avid reader, especially of religious matters,” who “could quote verse after verse from the bible,” and “the most energetic person I have ever known”; another granddaughter, Fern, called her “a wonderful person, very fast with her work, thrifty, ambitious, and good to everyone she knew.”