The Sequence of Family Ownership:         

My great-great aunt, Edith Ellen Watkins Dailey (known in the family as Aunt Edie and to friends and neighbors as Edie), and her husband, Fleming W. Dailey, purchased the Centennial Farm I now live on from John Reed, in Cambria Township, on Nov. 1, 1901. Fleming W. Dailey, (known to my family as Uncle Flem and to his friends and  neighbors as Flem), died from pneumonia in 1933, and, following his death, Aunt Edie became the sole owner, but she was fully blind by 1947. She was cared for in my family’s home around the corner. My parents, Edith Ann Watkins Worley (Aunt Edie’s great niece) and Virgil Worley, purchased the farm on Jan. 14, 1949. My dad, Virgil, and my brothers, Vincent and Roy, did the farming.   When my father died in 1962, ownership of the farm reverted to my mother, Edith Worley, who two years later married my dad’s best friend, a widower named Loren Ash, so she became known as Edith Ash. She rented out the farm for crop farming. When my husband, Floyd C. Webb, and I returned to the Hillsdale area in 1976, we rented the house on the farm from her in return for work done to restore and renovate the house. On Oct. 31, 1989, we purchased the farm from my mother. We continued to rent the acreage to outside farmers. When Floyd and I were divorced in 1999, ownership of the farm reverted to my mother, Edith Watkins Worley Ash, on April 26, 2000. I bought it back from her on May 4, 2000, and retain ownership today. Roy Worley, my younger brother, currently farms the property.

The farm in the early days following 1901:

The type of farming done here has changed through the years. Flem and Edith Dailey raised cows, pigs, sheep and chickens. They grew apples, corn, wheat, hay and oats to feed the livestock and sold any extra.  Flem farmed with his beloved team of horses, Dick and Tom.  

Flem owned a Nichols and Shepherd steam threshing machine and did the threshing for miles around. The steam whistle often went off at 4:30 a.m. (which meant he had started much earlier to get the steam up), alerting the neighborhood that it was time to get over to the farm where the threshing was happening to get the work started. When he became old enough, Almon David Watkins, Edith Watkins Worley Ash’s beloved brother, became the first assistant on the threshing machine.

“The four-acre apple orchard on the farm produced snow apples, Cayugo red streaks, northern spies, bellflowers, maiden blush, greenings, strawberry pippins and Baldwins.  Pickers emptied their sacks into barrow-shaped piles under the trees. Choice apples were shipped by train to the Palmer House in Chicago. The culls were taken to the cider mill.” Reynolds, p. 358.

 Aunt Edie stored a hefty supply of those apples for the pies she baked every morning. Her mother-in-law had warned Flem not to marry a teacher because he would never  have any pie to eat. Aunt Edie resolved to prove the prediction false and baked three pies every morning so Flem could eat pie at every meal – and the lumberjack-thresher-farmer-hunter did.

“When winter came, Flem, their nephews, and Aunt Edie’s brothers harvested wild rabbits with the assistance of ferrets, hung the carcasses on apple tree boughs to freeze, then packed them in barrels, again to be shipped to Chicago’s noted Palmer House.”  Reynolds, p. 358. 

Flem, being very inventive, also engineered running water to the farmhouse. He rigged the windmill that stood between the barn and the house to a pipe that flowed to the house filling a huge drainpipe cemented upright in the kitchen. The overflow pipe ran underground to fill the stock tank down by the barn and to the inside of the milk house where the flowing water cooled the morning’s milk. (I remember this as a child. I also remember the beginning renovation of the house when we had to remove that orange drainpipe from the kitchen. What a job!)

Subsequent generations:                        

By the time Virgil and Edith Ann Watkins Worley took over the farm, the orchard had been removed, but raising livestock (cows, pigs, chickens and sheep) and crop farming, continued. The barn was always used to store hay and straw in the lofts and to milk and pen animals in the basement. When Edith was widowed and her sons, Vincent and Roy Worley, were no longer available to farm, she rented the acreage on quarters, and the crops raised were wheat, hay, soybeans and corn. When Floyd Webb and I owned the farm, the crop rental continued.  In the last few years, Roy Worley, my brother, has resumed farming the land on quarters, with the crops raised being a rotation of soybeans, corn and wheat. The barn stores farm equipment and building materials.  

Edith Dailey always had vegetable and flower gardens, as do I. Many of my flowers came from the “Eighty” where I grew up just around the corner from this farm on Card Road. My mother’s peonies, her daffodils, her lilacs and a shoot off of her redbud tree grace my yard. I have added other flowers such as iris, scarlet bee balm, asters, hydrangeas, azaleas and hardy hibiscus.

Local history:

The most interesting story regarding the farm in a historical sense regards the bones of a young woman found buried on the property. The barn was originally very close to Foust Road. Aunt Edie suggested to Uncle Flem that “it would be nice if the whole barn could be moved back from the road so she could see up the road to know who might be coming.” He acquiesced, (Can you ima-gine?!) and when he was digging to create the slope for the new barn grade, he found the bones of human remains. He took those bones to the authorities in Hillsdale, where they were determined to be female. They were kept until the renovation of City Hall in the late 1990s. They were apparently moved into storage and later discarded.  

One local legend regarding the leader of the Potawatomi tribe of Native Americans, Chief Baw Beese, coincides with the location of these bones. It is well known that Chief Baw Beese’s daughter, Winona, had a dispute with her husband. He punished her by killing her beloved white horse that had been a gift from her father. She in turn killed her husband. Tribal law required that she be killed for the murder of her husband. The legend says that Chief Baw Beese carried her body approximately two miles south of Lake Baw Beese to bury her. The barn grade is approximately two miles south of Lake Baw Beese. It is certainly possible that the feminine bones found by Uncle Flem were those of Winona.

I’ve kept the barn right where it was when I first saw it as a child, long after Uncle Flem had passed away.

Caring for Family:

Aunt Edie and Uncle Flem were kind and generous people. They had no children, but loved and cared for children and widows in the Watkins family over many years.   

My grandfather, David William Watkins, their nephew, lived with them from the time he was six in 1898, and in 1907, Flem Dailey was named the legal guardian of David William and his brother, Clyde Watkins.  Young David (my  grandfather) had lost his mother and visited his Aunt Edie one day:   Swinging on the back of a sturdy kitchen chair, he looked up at her with a grin and announced, “Aunt Edie, I’ve come to live with ya.” They also provided a home for George Edward Stitt. Aileen Dora Watkins, a niece of Aunt Edie, lived with them from 1915 when her mother died until her father remarried in 1918. When Edith Ann and Almon David Watkins’ father, David William Watkins (the six-year-old boy in the story above), was drafted in WW I and was never heard from or seen again, Aunt Edie and Uncle Flem provided a home for Edith Ann and her brother Almon David Watkins as well as for their mother, Elnora Barnum Watkins. Once again, Fleming W. Dailey became the legal guardian of the children and provided a loving home for them through their college years. My mother lived in this house from 1918 through her graduation from Hillsdale College in 1932 and until she was married in 1937. My mother dedicated her Reynolds genealogy book to Aunt Edie:  “…who treasured family letters and lore and instilled in her grand niece the sense of family that made this book possible.”  Reynolds, p. 11.

Family Fun: 

Uncle Flem drove a seven-passenger Chandler for special occasions such as the annual three-week vacation excursions to the U.P. The side curtains had to be snapped on when a storm came up. Aunt Edie had made Edith Ann an ecru-hued linen coat out of an ankle-length duster that little Edith hated but always had to wear when in the Chandler to keep the dust off her clothes.  On one stormy day, she also wore “a favorite navy blue velvet Scottish-style tam.”  The car pulled to the side of the road and the adults started the process of snapping on the side curtains. Edith leaned out to watch and the rain on the blue tam “turned to shades of midnight before splattering down the hated coat, leaving permanent trails of blue.” 

Later, “In the fencerow between the  backyard and the garden east of the house, stood an old-fashioned tall, shapely Russet pear tree. Its full widespread branches cast a wide shady area, perfect for a child’s sand pile. Each spring Uncle Flem hitched Tom, a bay, and Dick, a black, to the dump wagon to bring a load of fresh sand from the sand hill  on the west side of the “Forty” to renew the sand pile under the pear tree for Edith and David. Edith always knew it was a beautiful spot to play: shady and cool. But she didn‘t realize until years later how convenient the spot was for Aunt Edie to keep her eyes on them.” Reynolds, pp. 268-269.

Edith somehow got the coat out of the house. She was “fully familiar with burying things: dead kittens, dead lambs. She apparently was convinced that once a thing was buried, it was gone. She remembered digging a hole in the sand pile for that coat with her little blue shovel. The hole wasn’t quite big enough, so she just profusely shoveled sand to cover it. But before she got that job done, out came her Aunt Edie, flying to rescue that durned coat. Laundered, it was ready to torment her another time.” Reynolds,  pp. 250-268.

I love my home on the “Fifty” as my family has always called it. (Aunt Edith and Uncle Flem added two other farms in close proximity—a “Forty” and an “Eighty,” which now belong to my brothers, Vincent and Roy Worley. My brothers and I grew up on the “Eighty.”) At this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m glad to be right where I am. I’m glad to enjoy that perfect week in May when my redbuds, my flowering crabs and the dogwoods are all blooming. I’m glad to wander the fencerows and the woods of these three farms to pick asparagus and hunt for morel mushrooms. And when spring comes, I have to dig in the dirt.

By Elisbeth (Liz) Worley Webb

* * *

Ash, Edith Watkins Worley.The Reynolds Pioneering Chronicles:  New York and Southern Michigan Sojourn. Printed and published by Ted McNaughton and the First National Bank of Fremont: Fremont, Indiana: 1995.

150 Years in the Hills and Dales:  

A Bicentennial History of Hillsdale County,

Michigan. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company.  1976. The Hillsdale County Historical Society.

Banner picture is of Edith Ash and Liz Webb