In January of 1859, Jacob Peterman sat down in Hawleyville, Iowa, and wrote to his brother David back in Bucyrus, Ohio. The spelling was rough, the feeling was not. He had received David’s letter after years of silence, and the old distance between brothers had suddenly become painful again.
Jacob wrote of crops, weather, money, hard times, snow, wheat rust, corn, and the feverish talk of gold at Pike’s Peak. He told David that many men were leaving their families and going west to try their luck in the mines. He even wondered whether he might go himself if another man backed out.
Then the letter turned from weather and crops to something deeper. Jacob liked Iowa, he said, but the difficulty was distance. If only they lived close enough to visit once in a while. Then came the sentence that gives this chapter its heart:
Those words were not written by a man who hated the place he had chosen. They were written by a man who understood the price of migration. Jacob and Mary Ann Cornman Peterman had carried their family from Pennsylvania to Ohio and then from Ohio to Iowa. They had followed land, hope, children, and opportunity. But in that one sentence Jacob admitted the cost. To move west was not only to gain land. It was to risk being buried far from the people who had known your beginning.
A Son of John and Barbara
Jacob Peterman was born on December 16, 1802, in York County, Pennsylvania, the son of John Peterman and Barbara Eckert. He belonged to the generation that would turn the Peterman family from a Pennsylvania household into a westering American family. His father and mother had come from the German-speaking world of York County, and Jacob’s childhood began within that older Pennsylvania inheritance of church, kinship, fields, and family names.
He was baptized on April 10, 1803, at Christ Lutheran Church, with Jacob and Catherine Peterman serving as sponsors. Such a record may seem small, but in family history it is a hinge between private life and public memory. It places a child within a community: parents, sponsors, congregation, and record.
Jacob was the fifth child of John Peterman and Barbara Eckert. His siblings included Michael, John, Johann Henrich, Margaretha, Elizabeth, Mary “Polly,” Samuel, David, Violet, and Sarah Ann. He grew up in a large family at a time when land, labor, and kinship were inseparable. Boys learned work early. Girls did too. A farm family survived because every hand mattered.
Mary Ann Cornman of Cumberland County
Mary Ann Magdalena Cornman was born on July 29, 1811, in North Middleton Township, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of Johannes Jacob Cornman and M. Anna “Nancy” Brownawell. Like Jacob, she came from a Pennsylvania world of German-rooted families, church records, land, and rural labor.
On February 23, 1832, Jacob Peterman married Mary Ann Cornman in Carlisle, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. A notice in the Carlisle Herald recorded the marriage: “Married on 23rd of February by Rev. J. S. Ebaugh, Mr. Jacob Peterman to Miss Ann Cornman of North Middleton.” It was a brief newspaper line, but behind it stood a major turning point. Jacob was twenty-nine; Mary Ann was twenty. Their marriage joined two Pennsylvania families just as the young couple’s life was about to move westward.
For Mary Ann, marriage meant more than a change of name. It meant a lifetime of migration, pregnancy, childbearing, household labor, cooking, washing, sewing, nursing, gardening, preserving, grieving, and rebuilding. The records usually name Jacob as farmer, carpenter, mill-builder, and landholder. But the family’s migrations would not have been possible without Mary Ann’s work. She carried the household as surely as Jacob carried the tools.
The Ohio Years: Houses, Mills, and Children
By the 1830s, Jacob and Mary Ann were part of the Peterman settlement in Crawford County, Ohio. Their lives there were tied to Liberty Township, Bucyrus, Annapolis, Sulphur Springs, and the wider Sandusky River country where John and Barbara Peterman had established the family’s Ohio base.
In 1834, Jacob was among the men associated with the first houses in Annapolis, later known as Sulphur Springs. Early local history remembered that houses were erected there by men including James L. Gurwell, John Bolinger, and Jacob Peterman. This places Jacob not merely as a farmer, but as one of the practical builders of a new village landscape.
About 1839, James Gurwell and Jacob Peterman started a linseed oil mill in Sulphur Springs. Linseed oil came from flaxseed and was used in paint, wood finishing, and other practical applications. A mill required investment, equipment, skill, and confidence that a growing community needed such work. Jacob’s role in the oil mill fits the larger picture of frontier settlement: first cabins and fields, then roads, mills, stores, churches, schools, and trades.
During these Ohio years, Jacob and Mary Ann’s family grew rapidly. Their children were born into the work and uncertainty of a developing farm community. Ann Elizabeth was born in 1835; Emeline in 1836; Violet Ellen in 1837, dying as an infant; William Parker in 1838; Violet Hinebaugh in 1839; Henrietta Ellen in 1841; George Washington in 1842, dying in infancy; Eliza Jane in 1843; Amanda Catherine in 1845; Matthew Sawyer in 1847; David Milo in 1849, dying in 1851; Jacob Manuel in 1851; and John Pierce in 1852.
That list is not just genealogy. It is the rhythm of Mary Ann’s adult life. Birth, nursing, toddlers, older children, illness, burial, pregnancy again, and the daily management of a crowded household. The family’s story is filled with movement, but for Mary Ann much of that movement was lived inside the home: from bed to cradle, from hearth to garden, from wash water to sick child, from cemetery back to kitchen.
A River of Wagons, 1854
By the early 1850s, the Peterman family was again looking west. Land in Ohio was no longer the same kind of opportunity it had been when John and Barbara arrived in 1827. Children were growing. Married daughters and sons were beginning households of their own. Iowa, still drawing families from older states, promised land and new beginnings.
The family moved in 1854, traveling by ox team from Crawford County, Ohio, to Taylor County, Iowa. Family material remembers that they were on the road forty-eight days. They did not make that journey alone. The migration to Hawleyville included a cluster of Crawford County families — Petermans, Hellers, Cunnings, Bebouts, Fishers, and Evanses. Hawleyville was therefore not only a destination. It was a transplanted neighborhood of relatives, in-laws, friends, and familiar names.
That matters. A single family could be swallowed by distance. A cluster could build community. The same people who had known one another in Ohio could share the labor of the road, the risks of river crossings, the search for water and grass, the care of livestock, the cooking at camp, the looking after children, and the grief of leaving behind farms, graves, houses, and roads that had once felt permanent.
The Iowa they entered was not empty land. Native people had lived, traveled, camped, hunted, and made use of the same rivers, timber, prairie grass, and bottomland that drew white settlers. Family research notes that Pottawatomie and Meskwaki people were remembered as encamped along both branches of the Nodaway River and along Buchanan Creek as late as 1854, before removal westward toward Kanesville, now Council Bluffs. The Petermans’ Iowa beginning, like the Pennsylvania and Ohio beginnings before it, belongs inside that larger American story of migration, opportunity, land hunger, and Indigenous displacement.
Hawleyville Begins
Hawleyville was barely a town when Jacob and Mary Ann arrived. James M. Hawley, for whom the place was named, had come from Missouri in 1853 and opened the first store in Page County. Family research describes the first store counter as a slab or plank laid across two barrels. That image captures the raw beginning of the place: commerce before comfort, trade before polish.
In 1854, the same year the Peterman party arrived, the first school and church log cabin was built. William Cunning taught school during the first two winters. C. G. Hinman became the blacksmith and wagon maker. A settlement becomes a community one practical institution at a time: store, school, church, blacksmith, mill, post office, cemetery, roads, and farms.
The early years were difficult. The “wet year” of 1858 lived long in local memory. Rain made roads nearly impassable. Wheat shocks sprouted green in the fields. Flour could be dark and poor. Corn became the safer food. Such details help explain Jacob’s 1859 letter. His complaint that rust had ruined wheat, oats had failed, and corn alone had ripened was not merely a private complaint. It belonged to a wider prairie pattern of wet seasons, fragile crops, scarce cash, and constant adaptation.
The Peterman Brothers: Letters Across the Miles
The deepest evidence for Jacob and Mary Ann’s Iowa years comes from Jacob’s own letters to his brother David Peterman in Ohio. They are not polished. Jacob spelled words as he heard them and wrote with the plainness of a working farmer. Yet that is exactly what makes them powerful. Through them we hear not only what happened, but how it felt.
On January 2, 1859, Jacob told David that he had received his December 22 letter and was happy to hear from him after years of silence. He wrote of twelve acres of wheat damaged by rust, nine bushels of oats that would not return their seed, and corn that had done well when other parts of Iowa had almost none. Money was scarce. Men were talking of Pike’s Peak, hoping gold might solve what farming had not.
William Peterman, Josiah Heller, and Brad Fisher were planning to go. Jacob even considered going himself if Josiah backed out. The idea is startling: a middle-aged farmer, husband, and father, already transplanted once from Ohio to Iowa, still tempted by one more desperate chance. Yet the center of the letter is not gold. It is distance. Jacob wanted David and Catherine to have their likeness taken and send it. He promised that if he went to Pike’s Peak and came back, he would send one of himself and Mary Ann.
The younger children were growing. Jacob Manuel was “as fat as aver and as stout as a bare.” John Pierce was keeping up with him in size, though not in weight, and looked so much like David’s Benjamin that Jacob said seeing one was like seeing both. The girls wanted Eliza to write.
At the end, Mary Ann’s own voice peeks through. Jacob wrote that Mary Ann said if David and Eliza went to the grocery again, they should not leave until they drank to her health, and she would do the same. It is a brief, playful message from a woman whose own letters have not survived. In one sentence, Mary Ann becomes more than a name in a family chart. She becomes a wife, sister-in-law, mother, and frontier woman still able to send humor across the miles.
The War Reaches Hawleyville
The Civil War reached Jacob and Mary Ann’s household through their son William Parker Peterman. William had been a member of the Nodaway Rangers Home Guard at Hawleyville, then entered Union service. In March 1862 he wrote from Hawleyville to an uncle and aunt, reporting that he was “yet alive and in the land and with the living.” He had enlisted the previous August and, in his own words, “wasent in the servis three weeks” before the Battle of Lexington, Missouri.
William wrote that they fought for three days and nights before being overpowered and forced to surrender. He had been taken prisoner, hit twice — once in the heel and once in the hand — and survived the shooting of first his horse and then a mule. The letter is full of youthful bravado, relief, and plain-spoken shock. “Oh they ar the darndest,” he wrote of the enemy. But the letter also carries home news: “Father & Mother Brother & Sister ar well.”
That line is poignant because it catches Mary Ann still alive in 1862. Three years later, when the war had nearly ended for William, he would return home eight days after his mother’s death.
The war years changed Hawleyville. Men left farms for military service. A home missionary later described parts of Iowa where women drove teams and worked in the fields because so many men were gone. That context matters for Mary Ann and her daughters. While William and other young men marched, women kept farms alive. They planted gardens, fed children, nursed the sick, cooked, washed, sewed, managed households, and sometimes performed field work that war had left to them.
Eliza Jane Peterman, who had married James L. McGlency in 1859, died in 1863 while the war was still raging. William’s 1862 letter mentions Eliza and her husband in connection with St. Louis and Benton Barracks. The details need careful handling, but they show that the war touched more than the enlisted men. It reached wives, sisters, hospitals, letters, and the emotional life of the entire family.
“O I Ken Naver Forget My Dear Mary”
On September 3, 1865, less than a month after Mary Ann’s death, Jacob wrote again from Hawleyville to David and Catherine. “This plasend morning,” he began, “I take my pann in hand to write a few lines to you but I expect it will be poorly don as I am in much trouble.”
Mary Ann had died on August 8, 1865. Her illness had begun around the previous Christmas. Jacob described palpitations of the heart and then dropsy. She had taken medicine for more than a year, “all in vain.” Yet she remained able to walk about the house and yard until the day she died, and Jacob wrote that she had her senses to the last minute.
There is no need to improve that sentence. The spelling is part of its truth. Jacob wrote as a grieving farmer, not as a polished writer. He had crossed states, raised children, built houses, started a mill, broken prairie, survived weather, watched war take his son away, and buried children. But Mary Ann’s death broke something different. She had been his companion for more than thirty-three years.
And still he had to write about crops.
After pouring out grief, Jacob turned to rain, corn, grass, hay, cattle, horses, and the work ahead. Too much rain earlier in the summer had drowned corn on low ground, but the high-land corn was good. Grass was plentiful. He expected to have enough hay. The boys were all at home. William had come home eight days after his mother’s death and was helping cut grass. They had hay stacked, wild hay cut, and fifteen acres of corn to cut. There were twenty-three head of cattle and six horses and colts.
Mary Ann was gone, but the farm still required numbers. That is one reason the letter is so powerful. It preserves a widower’s heart and a farmer’s ledger in the same hand.
Keeping House Without Mary
Mary Ann’s death changed the household immediately. Jacob wrote that he had no one to keep house but Ettie, and Ettie’s health was not very good. Catherine had left home and was expected to marry, though Jacob had not yet heard from her. A farm family could absorb many hardships, but the death of a wife and mother exposed how much of the household had depended on her unseen labor.
By November 1867, Jacob was still struggling to rearrange his life. He had planned to visit David in Ohio, perhaps to spend the winter there, but the plan collapsed. Ettie would not stay any longer to keep house. William advised him to sell off what he had and let William take the farm. Jacob did so and bought himself a good team, thinking he might finally make the long-postponed visit east.
Then William took it into his head to go to Kansas and left Jacob, as he wrote, “in the lurge.” The Kansas trip did not last long. William traveled through the new country, saw David’s son Samuel at Fort Scott, and then returned to Hawleyville. But the damage to Jacob’s plans had already been done.
That phrase deserves its own place in the family story. “Keeping batch” meant more than cooking for himself. It meant a widower’s household without the woman who had held it together. It meant boys, chores, meals, laundry, animals, travel plans abandoned, and a man in his sixties trying to manage the domestic world Mary Ann had once carried.
From Forty-Eight Days to Forty-Eight Hours
Jacob lived long enough to see the distance that had shaped his life begin to shrink. In 1854, he and Mary Ann had taken forty-eight days by ox team to reach Iowa. By 1869, after visiting Ohio and returning west, Jacob could hear the railroad whistle. The railroad was running within eight miles of him, and he told David that now he could come in forty-eight hours.
The contrast is almost too perfect: forty-eight days to move the family west; forty-eight hours for kin to come by rail. Yet the railroad did not undo the cost. Mary Ann was already buried in Hawleyville. The move had become permanent.
In January 1870, Jacob again tried to persuade David to consider Iowa. He described a “nice little hom” within a mile and a half of him: forty-seven acres, fenced and cultivated, with a middling good house, stable, fruit trees, timber near the house, and a place along the public road where anything raised could be sold at the door. The farm was six miles from Clarinda and a mile and a half from Memory. It could be bought for one thousand dollars.
This was more than a real estate suggestion. It was an old longing in a new form. In 1859 Jacob had lamented that he and David might die apart and be buried apart. Years later, he was still trying to close the distance.
Jacob’s Final Years and Mary Ann’s Legacy
Jacob lived more than a decade after Mary Ann’s death. In 1871, he married Almira Delano in Clarinda. There were no children from that marriage. The remarriage should not be read as replacing Mary Ann. In a nineteenth-century farm context, remarriage often answered practical needs as well as emotional ones: household work, companionship, age, health, and survival. Jacob had already written the measure of his first marriage in 1865: he would never forget his dear Mary as long as he lived.
Jacob died on September 17, 1876, in East River Township, Page County, Iowa, and was buried in Hawleyville Cemetery. He had traveled far from the York County world of his birth. He had moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio, from Ohio to Iowa. He had been a carpenter, farmer, builder, mill-starter, husband, father, widower, letter-writer, and old settler. His life measured the nineteenth-century Peterman migration in one man’s body.
Mary Ann’s documentary record is quieter than Jacob’s. We have her birth date, marriage, census entries, children, death, and burial. We hear her voice indirectly in Jacob’s 1859 letter, when she jokes about drinking to her health. We see her through Jacob’s grief in 1865. We see her through the children she bore, nursed, buried, married, and sent into the world. Quiet records should not be mistaken for a small life.
Mary Ann Magdalena Cornman Peterman helped carry a Pennsylvania family into Ohio and an Ohio family into Iowa. She gave birth to thirteen children. She endured infant deaths, frontier labor, disease, war, and migration. She lived long enough to see some children marry and begin households of their own, but not long enough to see the full shape of the Iowa Peterman line that would follow.
Her youngest son, John Pierce Peterman, was only twelve when she died. He would grow up to marry Mary Deliah Scarlett and become the next major figure in the family line. Through him, Mary Ann’s life continued into the East River Township farm world, into the children and grandchildren who rooted the Peterman name in southwest Iowa.
In 1859, Jacob had written that if they died in Iowa, they would be buried there while David and Catherine remained in Ohio, and they might not see one another again. Six years later, that fear became partly true. Mary Ann died in Iowa. She was buried in Hawleyville Cemetery, far from the Pennsylvania birthplace of her childhood and the Ohio graves of some of her children. Jacob would be buried there too.
The words he wrote before her death became the prophecy of their settlement: “If we die here we will have to be baried.” They did die there. They were buried there. And by being buried there, they made Iowa no longer merely a frontier destination. They made it home.
Bridge to the Next Generation
Jacob and Mary Ann’s youngest son, John Pierce Peterman, inherited more than a name. He inherited the Iowa place his parents had chosen, the memory of their migration, and the land-and-family burden that came with staying. Born in Ohio in 1852 and carried west as a child, John Pierce belonged to the generation that would no longer remember Pennsylvania as home and would barely remember Ohio. For him, Iowa became the center.
That is Jacob and Mary Ann’s legacy. They were the crossing generation between the Ohio cabin world of John and Barbara and the Iowa farm world of John Pierce and Mary Deliah. They took the risk. They paid the price of distance. They endured loss. They made the move permanent.
The Peterman family would keep moving in later ways — through marriage, war, work, business, and memory — but after Jacob and Mary Ann, the family had a new resting place.
Hawleyville was no longer just where they had gone. It was where they stayed.
Children of Jacob Peterman and Mary Ann Magdalena Cornman
- Ann Elizabeth Peterman, born July 4, 1835; died 1856; married John H. Evans.
- Emeline Peterman, born September 18, 1836; died February 9, 1889; married Josiah Heller.
- Violet Ellen Peterman, born February 28, 1837; died April 1837.
- William Parker Peterman, born April 28, 1838; Civil War soldier; died July 31, 1920; married Margaret Jane Kelley and later Sarah Elizabeth Westwood.
- Violet Hinebaugh Peterman, born September 13, 1839; died September 26, 1883; married John H. Evans.
- Henrietta Ellen Peterman, born March 12, 1841; died May 30, 1872; married John V. Evans and later Patrick Devlin.
- George Washington Peterman, born August 24, 1842; died October 1, 1842.
- Eliza Jane Peterman, born November 24, 1843; died July 31, 1863; married James L. McGlency.
- Amanda Catherine Peterman, born September 14, 1845; died June 14, 1872.
- Matthew Sawyer Peterman, born May 1, 1847; died August 6, 1867.
- David Milo Peterman, born July 31, 1849; died May 11, 1851.
- Jacob Manuel Peterman, born March 16, 1851; died January 15, 1926; married Alice R. Hakes.
- John Pierce Peterman, born September 16, 1852; died June 5, 1929; married Mary Deliah Scarlett.
Sources and Notes for Final Verification
- Family profiles and research notes for Jacob Peterman, Mary Ann Magdalena Cornman, and their children.
- Christ Lutheran Church baptism record for Jacob Petermann, baptized April 10, 1803, sponsors Jacob and Catherine Peterman.
- Carlisle Herald, Carlisle, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, March 8, 1832, marriage notice of Jacob Peterman and Ann Cornman.
- History of Crawford County, Ohio, 1881, for early Annapolis/Sulphur Springs houses and Jacob Peterman’s association with James Gurwell in the linseed oil mill.
- Peterman family migration material: Crawford County, Ohio, to Hawleyville, Iowa, 1854, including the forty-eight-day ox-team journey and the Crawford County family cluster.
- Hawleyville and Page/Taylor County notes concerning James M. Hawley, the early store, school/church log cabin, blacksmith, mill, local roads, and early settlement life.
- Jacob Peterman letters to David and Catherine Peterman, January 2, 1859; September 3, 1865; November 16, 1867; September 4, 1869; January 31, 1870.
- William Parker Peterman Civil War letter, Hawleyville, Iowa, March 28/29, 1862; John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection, University of Virginia Small Special Collections Library.
- William Parker Peterman military and obituary material, including service in the 25th Missouri and 23rd Iowa Infantry, wounding at Big Black River Bridge, and discharge July 26, 1865.
- John Pierce Peterman family and obituary material for the bridge to the next generation.