William R. Robison was born on February 12 in 1816 in Wayne County, Ohio, southeast of where Cleveland is now. Asenath (Asenetha) Mead was born on December 27, 1823 in Highgate, Franklin County, Vermont, into a family which had been in New England for generations.
William R. Robison’s father was also born in Ohio, when the non-Indian population must have numbered in only the hundreds. Our Robisons of this generation must therefore have been among the earliest American and European immigrants into the Ohio River valley. In 1797, after a peace treaty with the Indians concluded in 1795, there were deemed to be 5,000 white males in Ohio, allowing Congress to grant it status as a territory. Five years later, on March 1, 1803, Ohio became a state, with a population of about 45,000. By 1810, the Federal Census recorded a population well above 200,000.
The main point is this: huge numbers of people were on the move west, into a vast territory. New lands were continuously being opened up for settlement further to the west. With such a tide of new arrivals every year, it must not have been hard to sell cleared land and move on.
This is what William R. Robison and his wife Asenetha (also spelled Asenath) Mead did. They married on July 25, 1839, in Huntington, Lorain County, Ohio, when she would have been 16 and he 23. They had a son the next year — Nelson Gurley Robison, born on October 18, 1840, in nearby Medina County, Ohio. But very soon thereafter the family headed west — 200 miles west, to Wilmington Township, DeKalb County, Indiana, just over the state line from Ohio.
The Federal Census of 1850 shows them there in Indiana, on a farm worth $300 — don’t even try to figure out what this means in current dollars — with four more children:
- Julius Ceasar Robison (b. 1842, 7 years old);
- William O. Robison (b. 1844, 6);
- Andrew Smith Robison (b. 1847, 3); and
- Laura Atlissa (or Attalissa) Robison (b. 1849, 1).
All of these children subsequent to Nelson were born in Indiana. We also know that William R. and Asenath Robison acquired 40 acres in DeKalb County Indiana in 1844.
The family, however, was on the move west again around 1852, this time traveling fully 500 miles — surely quite an ordeal given the poor or non-existent roads at the time — to Nevada (pronounced nuh-VAY-duh), in Story County, Iowa, near the center of that state and not far from Ames.
A Story County (Iowa) census of 1856 recorded William R. Robison, 40 years old (and in the Militia) and Asenath, 37 (sic), as being in Iowa “for two years,” and that they had had another child, Horace Greeley Robison, in Indiana, and that he was now 5 years old (i.e., they had been in Indiana until sometime after February 4, 1851, when Horace was born there). With a census, as with any survey, everything depends upon what is meant by the question. If the 1856 Story County census were tallying everyone who had been in the county for “at least two years,” the Robisons could have answered the question this way even though they had immigrated from Indiana in 1851 or 1852. If the question meant “exactly two years” then it would mean they arrived in 1854.
In any case, sometime between 1851 and 1854 the family established itself in Nevada, Iowa.
This detail of Nevada Township on an 1875 map of Story County, Iowa, shows our “Wm. R. Robinson” along East Indian Creek, right in the center (which I have highlighted in yellow). Notwithstanding the misspelling, there is no question that these our our Robisons. There are three other Robison homesteads within a few miles: J. P. Robison, R. A. Robison, and W. Robison. Did all of these Robisons have common ancestors and move into the county from where they had been together in Ohio, Pennsylvania, or other places having a concentration of related Robison households?
By the time of the 1860 Federal Census, the household had a farm in Nevada worth $1,000 (and personal property worth $200). The family finally seemed to be settled.
Four more children were born in Nevada, Iowa, in addition to the five mentioned above:
- Harriet “Hattie” L. Robison, born September 11, 1856;
- Daniel W., born February 13, 1859;
- Elmer E., died before his first birthday in 1862; and
- Lettie, died in infancy in 1864.
All three boys of military age joined the Union army as soon as they could at the start of the Civil War: Nelson enlisted in 1861 in the 19th Illinois Infantry, a unit that did some recruiting in Iowa, and returned home honorably discharged when the regiment was disbanded in July 1864, before the end of the war; Julius joined the Second Iowa Cavalry in July of 1861; and William O. the 16th Iowa Infantry in January 1862, re-enlisting in the field two years later as a “veteran volunteer” and continuing for the duration of the war.
Of the girls, both married locally in Nevada: Laura to a man named Henry Tetwiler (also a veteran of an Iowa cavalry unit) on November 1, 1866, and Hattie to David McAtee on January 26, 1876. After Hattie and David had their first child (Nora Ellenore McAtee) in Nevada on October 10, 1876, they left and settled in Viola, Mercer County, Illinois, where they had five other children.
The older boys came home briefly after the war, then scattered. Nelson to Colorado, Julius to Kansas, and William O. to Missouri (and later to Washington State). All of them had large families. (Julius married at least twice.)
Their brother Horace, who had been too young for the war, married in Nevada early in 1879, had two children there, then joined his brother William O. and sister-in-law Sarah Victor in Carthage, Missouri, sometime between 1881 and 1883, and had three more children. He and his family returned to Nevada when the Robison-Victor household left Carthage for Seattle in 1900.
I do not know what happened to Andrew Smith Robison. In the 1880 Federal Census he is shown as 33 years old, blind in one eye, a farmer living with his parents and younger brother Danny, also listed as a farmer.
That last boy, Daniel, died on the farm in Nevada of a gunshot wound from a service pistol in 1881. It was reported on March 23 of that year in an obituary in the Nevada Representative as a suicide, but in another source (which I have not been able to corroborate with any evidence) Daniel was said to have been “shot by his father in a fit of rage.” Danny is buried in “the Mullen cemetery” — a private burying ground adjoining the family farm owned by the Mullens, which later became Pleasant Run Cemetery.
After Danny’s death, either for reasons connected with this or because it was clear that Andrew alone was not going to take over the family farm, the Robison-Mead household, now reduced back down to two, made its final move. (I don’t know what happened to the then 35-year-old, one-eyed Andrew.) In February 1883, when William R. was 67 and Aseneth 60, they sold their 84 acres on East Indian Creek to a neighbor (named Cornelius Joor, I believe) and made their final move, over 700 miles west to Golden, Colorado. Their son Nelson and family were already living with his large family in Colorado at that time. Asenath died in Golden on April 15, 1891, at age 68. Upon his wife’s death, William R. Robison moved to his son Julius’s place in Kansas, and died there a few months later, on August 27, 1891, age 75.
Obituary notices appeared in 1891 in Story County (in The Nevada Representative) on April 29 for Asenath Robison and August 26 for William R. Robison. They illustrate the care with which newspaper announcements must be treated. Back when there were many local newspapers, such notices are sometimes the best or even the only source of data for us. That part is good. But mistakes and questionable data abound. Asenath Robison is said to be the wife of Wm. R. Robinson. (She is also spelled Robinson in the last sentence of this short piece.) William R. Robison, meanwhile, is listed as William O. Robison — his son, who was still very much alive at that time. As noted, there were lots of Robisons in Story County, many more prominent than our family, so it’s curious the newspapers didn’t get it right. Our Robisons always signed their names “Robison,” but seemed to be rather lax about correcting the official or printed record. The obituaries list two different arrival dates for the Robisons in Story County: “32 years” for Asenath (or 1859) and 1856 for William R. But as noted above, the actual arrival in the county must have been earlier, probably between 1851 and 1854. Also, the first real estate transaction in Story County involving William R. Robison was in June 1855.
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And so ends, in 1891, quite definitively and unambiguously, the Robison–Mead household. Its restless wanderlust influenced members of the next generation, and perhaps beyond. With Asenath Mead having been born in Vermont and making at least four major moves westward across the country, three of them with William R. Robison after their marriage, this was the most restless of the family generations documented so far.
The members of this household kept their secrets: why did William R. and Asenath choose to move to Indiana from where they married in Ohio? Why from there to Iowa? And why in each case the particular localities they settled in? What was the real reason they sold their property and left their home of more than thirty years in Iowa to go to Colorado? What did their children think of each other? We are left only to speculate. No statements from any of them have survived that I know of, statements beginning with “I believed…” or “I tried to…” or “I wanted…” or “I hoped…”