# The McKean Frontier Cooper • Lanphere • Grow • Fitch Along the high, wooded plateau of northwestern Pennsylvania, where cold streams cut through rounded hills toward the Allegheny River, three families — the Coopers, the Lanpheres, and the Grows — took up land in the earliest days of McKean County's settlement. They arrived in the 1830s to a country still blanketed in old-growth pine and hemlock, and they made their homes not so much in towns as in the scattered clearings strung along the runs and creeks: Annin, Ceres, Bell's Run, King's Run, Myrtle, Turtle Point. For the better part of a century, from those first arrivals to descendants still living in Ceres as late as 1940, this corner of the county straddling the Pennsylvania–New York line was home. ## The Country They Settled When the first settlers came, the work of the axe was the work of settlement itself. A pioneer family did not buy a farm so much as make one, felling timber, burning brush, and coaxing crops from stumpy ground between the standing trees. The log houses built in the 1830s were the ordinary architecture of a frontier where sawn lumber and finished goods were luxuries hauled in over rough roads. Winters were long, the growing season short, and subsistence rather than surplus was the measure of a good year. The economy ran first on the forest. The men were both farmers and lumbermen, clearing land for crops while the felled timber itself became a source of income — the great pine and hemlock floated down the creeks in rafts and drives during the high water of spring, carried toward mills and markets downstream. A man might spend the winter cutting logs, the spring running them to water, and the summer tending fields and stock. Farming here was modest and mixed: hay, oats, potatoes, buckwheat, a few cattle and sheep, a woodlot, a garden. Prosperity, when it came, was the quiet kind — a frame house replacing a log one, a barn raised, a homestead purchased outright and passed to a son. Small commerce grew up alongside the farms; at one point a grocery was kept in a Cooper home, the sort of informal store that served a thin, dispersed population. The people of this district were overwhelmingly of old New England and New York stock, part of the great Yankee drift that had pushed from New England into western New York and then spilled south across the line. They were church folk of the Protestant mainstream — Baptist and Methodist Episcopal congregations anchored community life — and they held the small offices that ran a rural township. Membership in the Sons of Temperance signals a community that took its moral order seriously. It was also, for a frontier settlement, a place capable of quiet decency. When a Black couple, James Ward and his wife, settled and cleared land here around 1840, they were remembered as a worthy pair who received much kindness through long sickness, cared for by neighbors when illness came. The wider world eventually pressed in. The 1840s and 1850s were the years of consolidation, when raw clearings became working farms and the first generation grew old on the land they had broken. Then came the Civil War, which reached even into these remote valleys — the county sent its men to the front, some of them to the famous "Bucktails." The most dramatic change came after the war, when in the 1870s and 1880s McKean County became one of the great centers of the American oil boom, throwing up derricks across the hills and drawing thousands of speculators and laborers. The quiet farming districts of Ceres and Annin lay somewhat apart from the wildest of this frenzy, but no one in the county was untouched by it, and the same restlessness that had carried Yankee families west kept working on the next generation, sending sons and daughters to Dakota Territory even as the older folk remained in the hills. ## The Coopers The Cooper family reaches back into eighteenth-century New England. **Peter Cooper** was born around 1740 in North Providence, Rhode Island, and lived for a time in Killingly, Connecticut, before the line returned to its Rhode Island roots. It was there that **Samuel Cooper** was born on 16 September 1774. Samuel married **Mary "Polly" Russell**, and together they carried the family westward and then south into the timber country of Pennsylvania. Several of their sons came first — brothers Ira, Cyrus, and Russell reached the Ceres neighborhood as early as 1833, when the region was still raw forest awaiting the axe. By 1838 Samuel and Mary had settled in Annin township, followed by their sons Theron and Silas, who took up land along Annin Creek. Samuel lived out his years in Ceres, where he died on 12 October 1857 at the age of eighty-three. Among Samuel's sons was **Cyrus W. Cooper**, born in 1804 at Canandaigua in Ontario County, New York, and one of the first Coopers to establish himself in Ceres. If there was one constant in his Pennsylvania life, it was movement — not the wandering of a man without purpose, but the practical churn of a frontier settler who bought, cleared, and sold land as opportunity allowed. He sold his first holding to a man named Dedrick and bought land on King's Run, where he lived for a decade or more before removing to the village. There he built a home near where Dr. Place later lived, sold it, and at last relocated to Myrtle. The census years traced his residences within a single county — Ceres in 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880, Mapleton in 1876, Myrtle in 1879 — the outline of a man who spent his whole adult life within the bounds of one Pennsylvania county yet rarely long under one roof. In 1832 Cyrus married **Harriet "Fann" Fitch**, born in 1811 in New York. Harriet was remembered as a woman of quiet generosity, always frail and burdened with much care, yet capable of a striking charity. When James Ward lay dying, she took his ailing wife into her own home and nursed her through a serious sickness — the Wards' youngest child was born there — and she did this without any sense that she had done more than her duty. She died young, in November 1849, while the family lived at King's Run. Cyrus married a second time around 1850; that wife died at Myrtle in 1882. His two marriages produced several children — Omer, Artemus, Eveline, Juliaetta, Ruth Adalaide, and **Oscar** — of whom three survived to carry the family forward: Evaline, long a resident of Plainfield, New Jersey, as the wife of J. C. Dyer; Ruth Adelaide, who became the second wife of C. A. Warner of Ceres; and Oscar, who settled in South Dakota. Cyrus lived out his final years at Myrtle, a widower once more, and died on 29 April 1888 at Ceres, aged eighty-four, having outlived by more than half a century the wilderness he had helped to clear. ## The Lanpheres The family into which Cyrus's son Oscar would marry had followed the same westward path. It begins with **George W. Lanphere**, born on 4 September 1786 in New York, a native of New England along with his wife, **Hannah Haskins**. Tradition names his parents as Benjamin Lanphere and Elizabeth Dye, though that connection has never been proven. In 1835 George and Hannah left the settled districts and took up land in Ceres township, on the farm later owned by William Worden, where they cleared the ground and remained until their deaths. Five of their children grew to maturity — John, Lois, **Nimrod**, Esther, and Martha — and the daughters married into local families, Lois to John Chapman, Esther to Clark Wells, and Martha to Joseph Trumbull. George died on 2 October 1849 in Little Genesee, Allegany County, New York, and was buried in the Wells Cemetery there. His son **Nimrod Lanphere**, born 21 April 1817 in Almond, Allegany County, New York, was eighteen when he came with his parents to Ceres in 1835, and he spent nearly his entire life on the farm he cleared with his own hands. His was the settled life of a pioneering farmer who put down roots and stayed, watching a raw frontier township mature around him. On 2 June 1840 he married **Sally Grow**, daughter of **George W. Grow** and **Ruth Cornell** of Ceres township — a union of two families already rooted in the same corner of the county. Census after census, from 1850 through 1900, found him in Ceres, a rare constancy in an era of perpetual movement. His mail came through the post office at Myrtle, and the labor of turning forest into fields defined his daily world. Nimrod was counted among the leading citizens of his community, holding in turn the offices of supervisor, judge of election, assessor, and school director — the kind of practical public service that fell to men trusted by their neighbors. He was a member of the Seventh-Day Baptist Church and a Republican in politics. A second marriage is recorded in 1891, following the arc of a long life that had already spanned the settlement of the township. Nimrod died on 27 July 1903 in McKean County, aged eighty-six, and was buried in Bradford, having lived long enough to see the wilderness of his youth become a country of established farms and villages. ## The War and Its Cost The Civil War reached the Lanphere household through its two eldest sons, and both were tested in the field. George Washington Lanphere, born 27 January 1841 at Bell's Run, enlisted in the 58th Pennsylvania Infantry, Company F, on 2 February 1862 at Ceres. While on drill soon after, he slipped on the ice and injured a knee so badly that he was discharged for disability that April. Undaunted, he re-enlisted in September 1864 in the 85th New York Infantry and served until the close of the war, by then eligible to the rank of sergeant. In later years he moved steadily westward, living in New York, South Dakota, Nebraska, and finally Wisconsin, where he died on 13 July 1924 in Milton, Rock County, at the age of eighty-three. His brother Albert Leroy Lanphere, born 16 December 1842, went out with the Pennsylvania Bucktails — the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry, Company G, known as the "Third Bucktails," which fought alongside the 149th in Colonel Roy Stone's famous brigade. He enlisted on 18 August 1862 as a private and served two years, nine months, and seven days, rising to corporal before his discharge on 25 June 1865. His regiment's path ran through the hardest fighting of the war in the East: from guard duty in the defenses of Washington through Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and the long siege of Petersburg. Albert was wounded on the first day at Gettysburg — where one-third of the Union force consisted of Pennsylvania troops — and, considering the casualties of that battle, may have counted himself lucky to survive. He was wounded a second time in 1864 at Spotsylvania Court House, in the vicious rain-soaked fighting of that campaign where Grant, as one Confederate wrote, proved himself a man "who either does not know when he is whipped, or who cares not if he loses his whole Army." That both sons returned home from their wounds would have been no small mercy to their father. Unlike his brother, Albert remained close to the family's Pennsylvania roots, and he died on 2 August 1910 in Ceres, the township where he had been raised. Nimrod and Sally's other children carried the family through both continuity and sorrow. Hyalmer Lanphere, born 17 June 1845, lived his life in and around Ceres and Annin and died on 31 March 1886, not yet forty-one. Winfield B. Lanphere, born 28 January 1855, remained in Ceres throughout his life and died there in 1923. Not all of the children survived their early years: Benjamin V. Lanphere, born 19 April 1846, died the same day, and two daughters were lost within days of one another in the spring of 1862 — Alzina E., born 18 January 1849, on 25 March, and Alvira D., born 24 February 1852, on 29 March — marking a season of deep sorrow for the household. ## Oscar and Rose, and the Move West The Cooper and Lanphere lines joined in the next generation. **Oscar F. Thaddeus Cooper**, son of Cyrus and Harriet, was born on 1 September 1844 in Ceres, and **Rosalthea "Rose" Angelia Lanphere**, daughter of Nimrod and Sally, was born 15 April 1847 in the same borderland country — her origins sometimes remembered as being on the New York side of the line. On 18 March 1867, in McKean County, the two were married. Rose was not quite twenty, and the marriage would endure more than forty years. For the first decades of their life together the couple stayed in Ceres, where the 1870 and 1880 censuses still found them rooted in the Pennsylvania hill country. But like so many of their generation, they eventually turned toward the newly opening lands of the West. By 1880 they had reached Milton, Rock County, Wisconsin, and the following year North Freedom in Sauk County — a natural first stage in the westward movement of eastern families. They did not linger. By 1883 they had pushed on into Dakota Territory, drawn like tens of thousands of others by the promise of cheap and abundant land, and their residences through the 1880s trace their settlement in Brown County, in the northeastern corner of what would become South Dakota, recorded there in 1884, 1889, and 1891. By 1900 the family had established itself at Hecla, near the state's northern border — flat, treeless country swept by fierce winters, utterly unlike the wooded hills of McKean County. Raising eight children through such a migration demanded considerable resourcefulness from both parents, and the household they held together was the through-line connecting their eastern origins to their western future. Around 1910 the family crossed the state line northward into North Dakota, settling at Cayuga in Sargent County, where Oscar died on 27 February 1911 at the age of sixty-six. He was buried at Cayuga. Rose outlived him by more than a quarter-century, appearing in the later censuses at Ransom in Sargent County and at Fairmount in Richland County — a matriarch who remained close to family into old age. She died on 27 September 1937 in Henning, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, at the age of ninety, and was recorded buried at Kingston in Sargent County, North Dakota, returned to the prairie she had known through her long later life. In naming her son Frank Nimrod, she had carried her own father's name forward across all those miles. ## The Children of Oscar and Rose Oscar and Rose's eight children were born on either side of the family's move, so that the older ones were Pennsylvanians by birth while the younger were shaped by the Dakota prairie, and as they came of age they scattered across the northern plains and beyond. Nora Alice, born 6 August 1869 in Ceres, married Julius Stabnow on 21 July 1889 and died in Clitherall, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, on 21 October 1936. Eva Luella, born in 1872 in Ceres, lived across South Dakota and Minnesota, with long residences near Fergus Falls and Battle Lake, and died in 1951 in Cass County, North Dakota. Sadie Harriet, born 12 May 1877 in Ceres, married Edwin Ross on 30 May 1899; from the family's North Dakota base at Fairmount her path led at last to Oregon, and she died on 1 October 1948 in Roseburg, Douglas County. **Charles Calvin Cooper**, born 19 August 1879 at Bell Run near Shingle House, moved with the family to Hecla, where on 17 October 1900 he married Bertha Clausen and had a son, Edwin. After that marriage ended in divorce, he married **Anna Elizabeth Bartosh** on 25 November 1913, and the couple had five children. He lived in North Dakota until the late 1920s, then moved to Minnesota, settling at last in Bemidji, where he died on 21 April 1948. Frank Nimrod, born 2 November 1884 in Hecla, married Myrtle Martin on 27 June 1906 and moved at last to Southern California, dying on 19 December 1958 in Norwalk, Los Angeles County. Nettie Belle, born 29 May 1886 in Hecla, spent her life largely in the James River Valley of Dickey County, North Dakota, and died on 27 February 1958 in Breckenridge, Wilkin County, Minnesota. Omar Hartley, born 9 February 1889 in Hecla, made his home for many years in Fargo before moving west to California, where he died on 15 April 1978 in Paradise, Butte County — the longest-lived of his generation. Gladys Aurine, born 24 November 1891 in Hecla, married Sven Pearson on 5 June 1912, lived in the Dakotas and Minnesota, and died on 12 December 1972 in Wahpeton, Richland County, North Dakota. By the early twentieth century the great timber of McKean County had largely been cut over and the oil excitement had cooled, and Ceres settled back into the small farming community it had always been at heart, its founding names still on the census rolls and in the churchyards a hundred years after the first Coopers came up the creeks. The Lanphere men who fought at Gettysburg and Spotsylvania lay at rest in Ceres and Milton and Bradford, while the sons and daughters of Oscar and Rose were scattered from Bemidji to Fargo to Roseburg and Paradise — one branch of the family holding to the Pennsylvania hills, the other carried west with the frontier their parents had followed onto the Dakota prairie.