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Community Corner

Building a Village, House by House

Jim Yard's legacy is the homes he built before the turn of the 20th Century in Montgomery—including his own, which still stands on South River Street.

Jim Yard was 90 years old when Charles Pierce Burton interviewed him in 1937 for his Now and Then column. He talked about his birth in Oswego and about moving to Montgomery in 1869 when he was 22 years old.

His parents, John and Juliet, left London, England in 1842 hoping to pick up some of the gold rumored to be littering the streets in wonderful America. They came west from Chicago in a covered wagon driven by oxen and settled in Oswego, where Jim was born five years after their arrival, on St. Valentine’s Day of 1847. 

His father, disillusioned about the gold, hitched his oxen up to the wagon and went three miles to pick up a Mrs. Bean, the midwife. The trip took half a day because of the road conditions and the weather. The family did not own a clock, so they relied on the crowing of the roosters to tell them that a day had passed.

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Jim was the youngest of 10 children when his mother died in the 1850s, followed shortly by his father. In 1851 his sister Fanny married Ezra Pearce, and he went to live with them.

He worked on the Pearce farm and helped Ezra with the farm work. Ezra often traveled to doctor sick horses and while he was away from home, it was up to young Jim to keep the home fires burning, literally. 

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One day Ezra brought home a copy of Dr. James’ Almanac and young Jim was so fascinated by it, he asked if he could have it. Ezra brought him his own copy, and Jim, who never attended school, taught himself to read, spell and “cipher” from his copy of that book. Like Abraham Lincoln, he had to do it all by firelight, since there were no candles, and his days were taken with farm work.

He described his daily life on the farm:

“We had plenty of chickens, eggs and milk, but we did not have a nail, a piece of wire or string, and no tools except an axe and a grub-hoe. I began to work with the axe as soon as I could lift it. When I was five to seven, I cut all the wood for the fire except the large logs that I could not handle. We had no saw, but there was plenty of wood and water.

"I cut the wood and carried it to the house, placing it in a box back of the stove. In winter I got up early in the morning and started the fire. We had no washtub and used for that purpose a whiskey barrel, cut in two. Many a morning I had to cut through the ice in that tub to get water before I could wash in a wooden trough that had been hewn out with an axe. My hair would freeze stiff before I could get into the house.

"We kept two fires going, one in a cast-iron cook stove in the house and the other outdoors in a pit, with a flat stone over it. That was done so that if one fire should go out, we could get live coals from the other. That was before the invention of matches. When both fires went out, as sometimes happened, I had to walk, or run, three miles to borrow some live coals. I carried them in an iron kettle together with plenty of dry chips to keep the fire burning until I could get home.

“At the time Father decided to pick up gold in America,” he went on with a chuckle, “he was slated to succeed Lord Somebody or other—Uttermore, I think his name was. Maybe if he hadn’t come to America, I would be a lord instead of a nobody—just one of God’s common people.”

When Jim Yard first came to Montgomery, the Chicago-Galena Stage still crossed the river at the Jefferson Street Ford. It was called the horseshoe because the stage had to circle around in the river to avoid deep water. A large stone indicated to the driver when it was safe to cross; if the water was running over the top, the river could not safely be forded.

Jim Yard was a carpenter and no doubt built many of the homes in the village. In 1884, he was a village trustee. That year, he held the plow and Leander Keck drove the team that broke ground for the new Montgomery Methodist Church.

In 1902, he brought the first automobile (one of the first Tin Lizzies to roll off the assembly line) to town. From 1911 to 1917, he again served as a trustee for the village of Montgomery. 

He built his home at 218 South River St., on the site of the first schoolhouse, using the old schoolhouse as his workshop. The house is still there, a large sturdy home designed and built by a lifelong bachelor.  He lived there alone the rest of his life, cooking for himself and living independently. He was even seen repairing his roof when he was 90. 

Jim Yard died at the age of 92. It is safe to say that he witnessed vast changes during his lifetime, and no doubt he was responsible for many of them.

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