# Zua Ella (Logan) Hobson (1867–1940) When a local columnist wrote in 1934 that "no cause was believed to be half-right, / Unless Zua was there and led the fight," he was distilling into a couplet what everyone in Taylorville already knew. For more than half a century Zua Ella Logan stood on platforms, organized committees, decorated auditoriums, and lectured her neighbors on temperance and patriotism. She was, by her own proud description, "a Taylorville product," and she meant to be laid to rest in the town that had made her. ## Origins and Early Life Zua Ella Lynn Logan was born on 9 June 1867 in Taylorville, Christian County, Illinois — not merely in the town but in a particular house steeped in family history, her grandmother's home at the corner of Walnut and Vine streets. Her grandfather, Abel Conner, had built that house about 1844, and her mother, Elmyra Conner, had been born within its walls. Zua herself later recorded these details in a memoir of the town's early days, tracing how the Conner family eventually sold the house and removed to Platteville, Wisconsin, and how John Logan, who had come to Taylorville from Ohio in 1838 or 1839, bought it. Her mother's father, she recalled with evident pride, "made the first plow in Christian county in his blacksmith shop, corner of Clay and Market streets." She was the daughter of Samuel C. Logan and Elmyra (Conner) Logan, and grew up in a Taylorville still close to its frontier origins. The 1870 census found the family in Township 13, Range 2, and the 1880 census again placed her at home in the town. Her recollections preserved the vanished landmarks of that childhood world: the Powell lumber yard, the Globe hotel, the Long House, George Torrence's livery stable, the old county fair grounds at Manners park, the Chautauqua tents, and the circus ground at Market and Madison. Central Illinois in these decades was a country of new courthouses and railroad excursions, of Grand Army veterans and revival campaigns, and Zua would spend her life woven into all of it. ## Family On 16 October 1884, at the age of seventeen, Zua married Edward F. Meader in Christian County. Two children came of that marriage — Samuel L. Meader, who later settled in Pana, Illinois, and Eva, who became Mrs. Hood of Coulterville. The record is silent on what became of Edward Meader; whether by death or dissolution, the marriage ended, and on 19 September 1895 Zua married again, this time to Truman Ellsworth Hobson at Taylorville. From the second union came two daughters. Helen married Elmer McWard of Taylorville and gave Zua several of her nine grandchildren, among them Gail and Robert McWard. Myra, later Mrs. Januchowsky, died young on 16 June 1930 — a loss that plainly stayed with her mother, for the letter of funeral instructions Zua left behind was written on Myra's birthday in 1933. Zua kept ties, too, with a wider family: a brother, E. R. Logan; a sister, Mrs. A. R. Black of distant Philadelphia; an aunt, Mrs. D. T. Michael of Taylorville; and a cousin she named in her memoir, Flora Long Dorrah. ## Place For a woman whose life stretched from the Reconstruction era to the eve of the Second World War, Zua's geography was remarkable for its constancy. She was born in Taylorville, lived her whole life there — by the 1930s at 713 West Market Street — and died there. Census after census, from 1870 through 1940, records her in the same town, and she declared her rootedness openly: "By birth I am a Taylorville product and claim a part and an interest in all the good things that belong to it." Where others of her generation joined the westward tide, Zua chose depth over distance. ## Community and Public Life If Zua stayed in one place, she made that place her whole field of work. She was a charter member of the Taylorville Woman's Relief Corps, the auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic, and rose steadily through its ranks. By 1907 she served as Patriotic Instructor, writing the town's Memorial Day report over her own byline; in November 1909 she was elected president of the twenty-first district at the Pana convention; by 1910 she was press correspondent for the Illinois department; and in September 1921 she went as state delegate to the national encampment at Indianapolis. She issued the certificates that secured excursion railroad rates for local G.A.R. veterans — practical labor on behalf of aging soldiers. Her patriotism could turn fierce: in August 1918, with the country at war, she rose from the audience at the Taylorville Chautauqua, branded the Alhambra Players German sympathizers for telling a story in German dialect, and demanded they stop. Temperance was her other great cause. A platform speaker for the South Fork Anti-Saloon League, she lectured at the Miners' hall in Jeisyville in April 1915 and was a leader of the dry forces through Taylorville's wet-and-dry campaigns, a longtime worker in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Her politics ran alongside her principles rather than beneath them. She served as chairman of the Republican Women's Central Committee of Christian County about 1924, yet in October 1928 she broke ranks to stump Illinois for the Democrat Al Smith, telling Democratic women at Centralia that she was "tired of fake prohibition" and believed Smith would enforce the law more effectively than Hoover. Her civic memberships filled a page: the Christian Church, the Royal Neighbors of America, the civic department of the Taylorville Woman's Club, the town library board, and for many years the office of official decorator of the Chautauqua auditorium at Manners park. In March 1925 she addressed sixteen newly naturalized citizens at the circuit court and presented each with an American flag. ## A Chronicler of Her Town In 1939, for Taylorville's centennial edition, Zua wrote down her recollections of the town's early days — the very memoir that preserves the story of the Conner house, the first plow forged in Christian County, and the lost hotels and livery stables of her youth. Reprinted in 1991, the piece stands as her own contribution to the history she had lived through. ## Later Life and Death Zua Ella (Logan) Hobson died at nine o'clock on the evening of 16 August 1940 at St. Vincent hospital in Taylorville, aged seventy-three. She was buried at Oak Hill cemetery, exactly as she had wished: "I want no better tribute paid me when I leave Taylorville than to have it said I spent my life here, and know I will be laid to rest in one of the most beautiful spots in Illinois, Oak Hill Cemetery." Her funeral, on the afternoon of 18 August at the Chesnut and Pearce funeral chapel, followed to the letter the written instructions she had left in her 1933 letter. Attorney Harry B. Hershey and the Rev. Ralph Yeakley of the Bethel Baptist church were in charge; Hershey read a poem she had chosen, and the service opened with "Crossing the Bar," her favorite, sung by Mrs. Helen Humphrey. Eight men she had known carried her — Homer Long, A. N. Slatten, Bennie Jones, Dr. G. L. Armstrong, William Larkin, Lawrence Wilson, Charles Jewett, and Rex Haner — bearing her the short distance to the beautiful ground she had claimed as her own.