Hinkletown, Iowa

I came across the Hinkletown website because of a connection to my family tree. In 1846, Mordecai Suiter took his family to Iowa and settled in Hinkletown. Mordecai was a brother of my direct ancestor who lived in eastern Ohio. Two of Mordecai's sons wrote memoirs which were published in the Oskaloosa Globe in 1905, and part one and two of these narratives have been posted on the Hinkletown website.

• PIONEER LIFE Part I: Account of Early Settler Jeremiah Suiter
• PIONEER LIFE Part II by Jeremiah Suiter
• A PIONEER OF '49 by Berrimand Breeden, husband of Margaret Elizabeth Suiter
  

From the introduction:

In the spring of 1846, the family of Mordecai Y. Suiter, a 43 year old miller, left Ohio to move to Iowa. They made part of their trip by canoe to the Ohio River, and took a series of steamboats to the Mississippi River, where they landed at Le Claire, Iowa, and spent the winter. In the spring of 1847, they traveled by covered wagon to their claim on the Iowa - Keokuk county line.
The first year was marked by a house raising, bad weather and the struggles of preparing the prairie sod for its first planting.
The father died in the spring of 1852, in an unfortunate accident while trying to build a dam across the English River. One son, Jeremiah, became the blacksmith at Hinkletown through the 1880s.

If this doesn't interest you, check out the Hinkletown photo essay: the llama-riding goat