A Handsome Dog: The Farm, Faith, and Family of Elmo and Jessie Peterman

1. The Wedding Photograph

In the spare bedroom of Jessie Gorley Thompson Peterman’s home, a wedding photograph remained on the wall long after the young groom in the picture was gone. Jessie did not often speak at length about Grandpa Peterman, but when the grandchildren noticed the photograph, she would point to him with affection and say, “He was a handsome dog, wasn’t he.”

The remark carried humor, pride, and grief all at once. To the grandchildren, he was Grandpa P. To Jessie, he was still the young man who had gone with her to Clarinda, Iowa, in October 1918, in the middle of war and influenza, and married her quietly before the world had settled down.

Jacob Elmo Peterman, known through much of his life as Elmo, was born February 8, 1897, in East River Township, Page County, Iowa. He was the youngest son of John Pierce Peterman and Mary Deliah Scarlett Peterman’s eight children. By the time Elmo was born, the Peterman family had already traveled a long road: from the German-speaking world to colonial Pennsylvania, from Pennsylvania to Ohio, and from Ohio into southwest Iowa. In Elmo’s generation, the family’s long migration settled into farm life—land, livestock, church, neighbors, children, and seasons.

Jessie Gorley Thompson was born three years later, on August 15, 1900, in Greeneville, Greene County, Tennessee. She was the seventh child of John Henry Thompson and Nancy Ann Bales Thompson. When Jessie was about two years old, her family moved to Iowa in 1902, bringing the Thompson and Bales story into the same rural world where the Petermans had already taken root. By 1910 Jessie was living in East River Township as a ten-year-old girl.

Elmo and Jessie grew up on nearby farms and attended High Prairie School, a one-room country schoolhouse where the children of neighboring families learned their lessons together. In such a place, school was more than reading, arithmetic, penmanship, and geography. It was where farm children learned who belonged to which family, who was dependable, who was mischievous, and who came from a household like their own. If Elmo and Jessie’s affection later surprised their friends, it likely did not arise from nowhere. It grew in the close geography of East River Township, where school, farm, family, and community overlapped.

The photograph on Jessie’s wall preserved only one moment: a young couple at the beginning. The chapter of their life would include pandemic, war, farming, Depression, infant loss, military service, widowhood, family humor, farm machinery, and the memories of grandchildren who could still hear Grandpa’s morning joke and smell the barn where he milked the cows.

2. Love in the Time of Influenza

By October 1918, the world into which Elmo and Jessie planned their future had become frighteningly uncertain. The First World War had not yet ended. Selective service had reached into rural communities, and young men of Elmo’s age lived under the expectation of duty. At the same time, the influenza pandemic was sweeping across the United States with terrifying force. More than 600,000 Americans would die, and rural Iowa was not spared the fear.

In the midst of those troubled times, the local Clarinda newspaper briefly documented the story of a young couple in love. The Clarinda Herald of October 31, 1918, reported:

Elmo Peterman and Miss Jessie Thompson surprised their friends by going to Clarinda Wednesday where they were quietly married. Their many friends join in extending congratulations.

Elmo was twenty-one. Jessie was eighteen. They had grown up near one another, attended the same one-room school, and knew the same rural world. Their decision to go to Clarinda and marry quietly suggests affection, resolve, and perhaps youthful impatience with waiting for a safer time. The world may have been unsettled, but they chose to begin.

In the same newspaper edition, another notice appeared:

Elmo Peterman is quite sick with influenza this week. Dr. Kitchen is caring for him.

The two items belong together. One records marriage; the other records illness. What might otherwise have been remembered as a charming quiet wedding became part of a larger story of danger and survival. According to family memory, Elmo was so ill that he could not make his selective service appointment. In a family where Peterman men had answered military calls across multiple generations, the absence was not unwillingness but sickness.

When Elmo and Jessie married on October 23, 1918, no one in rural Page County could know that less than three weeks later, on November 11, the Armistice would silence the guns in Europe. Their wedding took place in the final anxious days of the war, while influenza was still spreading through American communities and selective service still shaped the lives of young men.

The war ended within weeks of their marriage, but influenza did not end with the Armistice. Elmo still had to survive the illness that had overtaken him almost as soon as he and Jessie began married life. Under Dr. Kitchen’s care, he recovered, and the young couple moved from war and sickness into the long work of building a family.

A century later, during another pandemic, their grandson Greg reflected on that 1918 story with new understanding. His grandparents had survived the great influenza pandemic of their time. He hoped, God willing, to survive the pandemic of his own. Across a hundred years, family history had become personal again.

3. The Families Behind Them

Elmo Peterman belonged to the Iowa-born generation of a family that still carried the memory of movement. His father, John Pierce Peterman, had been born in Crawford County, Ohio, before the family’s move into Page County, Iowa. His mother, Mary Deliah Scarlett, brought the Scarlett family line into the Peterman household. Together they raised a large family in the rural Iowa borderlands, where Page and Taylor Counties formed a shared world of farms, small towns, churches, schools, cemeteries, and kinship networks.

Elmo’s siblings were Bertie Ellsworth, John Edward, Merrell William, Myrtle May, Cordelia Inez, Harlan Scarlett, Tammar Mills, and Elmo himself. As the youngest son, Elmo likely grew up with both protection and expectation. Older siblings had already helped shape the household before he was old enough to remember it. In a farm family, children learned early that everyone contributed.

The Peterman identity had changed over the generations. Earlier ancestors had been German-speaking Reformed farmers in Pennsylvania. By Elmo’s time, the family was English-speaking, Methodist-connected, and Midwestern. Yet beneath those changes, older patterns remained: land, migration, military service, family labor, and reputation among neighbors.

The Peterman side of the family also carried memories of Civil War service, Union loyalty, and the moral language of freedom. Earlier Petermans had settled in and around Hawleyville and East River Township during the years when southwest Iowa contained strong Union and anti-slavery currents. Wider family research connects the kinship network to Union service, including William Parker Peterman of Company F, 23rd Iowa Infantry, who was wounded at Big Black River Bridge. Nearby communities such as College Springs and Amity College were known for religious seriousness and anti-slavery commitments. The evidence should not be stretched beyond what records prove, but it is fair to say that Elmo inherited a Page County family memory shaped by service, Union feeling, rural faith, and attachment to the republic.

Jessie brought her own inheritance into the marriage. Through her mother, Nancy Ann Bales Thompson, she carried the Bales family’s memory of the Civil War. Jessie’s grandfather, Lewis R. Bales, was born in Tennessee in December 1841 or 1842. In the Civil War era, eastern Tennessee and nearby regions were divided places. Close neighbors could support opposite sides. Union loyalty in Confederate-leaning areas could be dangerous.

Family tradition, preserved by Mabel Roberts, a granddaughter of Lewis R. Bales, tells that when war came, men could be taken prisoner because of their sympathies. To avoid capture, Lewis hid for several days in a secret compartment of the barn. The hiding place in the hayloft was called “Kentucky.” If soldiers came asking where Lewis was, the family could say, “He went to Kentucky,” without directly betraying him.

Lewis eventually slipped out at night and walked to a place where he could enlist in the Union Army. His later obituary remembered that he enlisted in 1863 and “fought for freedom until victory was won.” The Bales family tradition also preserves the courage of women on the home front. After a small skirmish near the Bales home, a dead soldier was left on the ground. Mary Katherine Smith Bales and her mother-in-law, according to the family account, dug a grave and buried him. The record does not identify the soldier or his side, but the act itself speaks clearly. In a war that divided neighbors, these women performed a work of mercy.

Lewis R. Bales later came to Iowa. His obituary states that he arrived in Iowa in 1902 and lived thereafter in Clarinda. After his wife Mary Katherine died in January 1918, he made his home with his children. He died July 25, 1919, at the home of his daughter, Mrs. S. A. Thompson, in East River Township. In his later years, he carried the flag at Grand Army of the Republic functions, a visible act of remembrance by an old Union soldier.

This Bales history deepens the story of Jessie Gorley Thompson Peterman. Jessie was not simply the Tennessee-born girl who moved to Iowa and married a Peterman farmer. Through her mother’s line, she inherited memories of divided loyalties, hidden danger, Union service, Christian burial, and public remembrance. When she married Elmo in 1918, those Civil War memories were not ancient history. Her grandfather Lewis was still living. The stories of “Kentucky,” enlistment, and the G.A.R. flag belonged to living family memory.

Thus, when Elmo and Jessie married, two moral inheritances joined. From the Peterman side came land, farming, migration, military service, and republican duty. From Jessie’s Thompson and Bales side came Tennessee roots, relocation to Iowa, Union loyalty, courage in a divided community, and faith expressed through mercy.

4. Building a Farm Household

Elmo and Jessie began married life in East River Township. Their first child, Wilma Wyleen Peterman, was born September 24, 1919, less than a year after the influenza-shadowed wedding. Their second daughter, Violet Mary Ann Peterman, was born September 28, 1921. Their son, Jacob Elmo Peterman Jr., was born March 12, 1924. These three children arrived within the first six years of marriage, giving the household the familiar shape of a young farm family.

By 1920, Elmo was recorded as head of household in East River Township, with Jessie as his wife and infant Wyleen in the home. In 1925, they were again recorded in East River Township. By 1930, the family was living in Mason Township, Taylor County, Iowa, where they remained through the 1935 and 1940 records. By 1950, Elmo and Jessie were still farming in Mason Township on a place identified in the census as the southeast quarter.

The 1950 census gives one of the clearest snapshots of their working partnership. Elmo was listed as a farmer, self-employed, living on a farm, and working sixty-six hours in the week before enumeration. Jessie was listed as a farm helper, working sixty hours without pay. That phrase “without pay” reflects the limits of official records more than the value of Jessie’s work. Her labor helped sustain the farm economy.

Faith formed another pillar of the household. Elmo’s obituary states that he professed faith in Jesus Christ, was baptized, and was received into the Methodist Church at New Market at age twenty-four. That would have been around 1921, when he was a young husband and father. The Methodist thread continued in the next generation, especially through Wyleen and Irvin Miller, who were remembered as long-time members of the New Market Methodist Church and active in serving their Lord and their neighbors.

The farm years of Elmo and Jessie crossed difficult decades in American rural life. They began marriage just after World War I, lived through the unstable farm economy of the 1920s, endured the Great Depression, saw World War II take their son’s generation into military service, and continued farming into the postwar years when agriculture became increasingly mechanized.

A fourth child, Margery Elaine Peterman, was born March 14, 1935, in Mason Township, Taylor County. She died two days later, on March 16, from congenital abnormalities of the stomach and bowels. Her life was brief, but she belongs fully in the family story. The long gap between Jacob Jr.’s birth in 1924 and Margery’s birth in 1935 may have made her arrival especially meaningful. Whatever hopes surrounded her birth ended almost immediately in grief. Margery Elaine was loved, lost, and remembered.

That remembrance did not remain abstract. In childhood memory, the family went each year to Memory Cemetery to cut flowers and decorate the graves. The ritual joined generations: older Petermans, lost children, husbands and wives, parents and grandparents, all remembered in the same sacred ground. But Margery’s grave was in a separate part of the cemetery, and when the family came to it, Grandma Peterman’s grief became visible. She would grow tearful, as though the loss had happened only recently. Decades had passed, but a mother’s sorrow had not obeyed the calendar. Margery had lived only two days, yet Jessie carried her for a lifetime.

Elmo and Jessie’s household raised three children to adulthood. Wyleen, the eldest, became a rural schoolteacher after graduating from New Market High School in 1937. She later married Charles Irvin Miller in 1939. Wyleen and Irvin farmed for several years and then operated Wayne Feed Store in New Market for more than twenty years. Wyleen’s later obituary remembered her as knowledgeable in all areas of farming. In the feed store, she knew livestock feed requirements, understood when antibiotics might be needed, and could answer farmers’ questions. Farmers who needed hayfield help called Wyleen because she knew which young men were available. She and Irvin provided part-time work for many high school students. One employee said Wyleen would never ask anyone to do anything she would not do herself.

Violet Mary Ann Peterman, born in 1921, married Everett LeRoy “Bus” Smith on May 17, 1939. Her life eventually carried her beyond Iowa to Colorado and Arizona. Her obituary later noted that she died on May 17, 2008, what would have been her sixty-ninth wedding anniversary. Through Violet, the family story moved westward, following a twentieth-century pattern of Midwestern families relocating to western states.

Jacob Elmo Peterman Jr., born in 1924, carried the Peterman surname into the next generation. He grew up in the farm household of Elmo and Jessie, came of age during the Depression, registered for military service in 1942, served in the United States Navy during World War II, and later returned to southwest Iowa. His life would join farming, machinery, transportation, and business.

5. War, Work, and Turning Points

Elmo’s own life included a brief record in South Dakota in 1915, when he was about eighteen. The South Dakota state census places Jacob E. Peterman in Hand County. The reason for his presence there is not fully documented. He may have gone for work, harvest labor, family connection, or opportunity. Elmo ultimately returned to southwest Iowa, but that record suggests a young man testing the wider world before marriage settled him firmly into farm and family life.

The major turning points of his adult life came in sequence: marriage and influenza in 1918; profession of faith and entry into the Methodist Church; the movement into Mason Township; Depression-era farming; the birth and loss of Margery Elaine; and World War II.

Elmo registered for the military draft in 1942 at age forty-five. His physical description recorded blue eyes, brown hair, height of six feet two inches, and weight of 175 pounds. His son Jacob Jr., however, was of military age. Born in 1924, Junior registered in 1942 and later served in the United States Navy. His discharge was recorded in 1946. The supplied record does not preserve letters or detailed accounts of his Navy service, so we should not invent them. But through Junior, Elmo and Jessie’s household was drawn into the global war.

The war years changed rural America. Young men left farms. Machinery became more important. Women and older men carried additional burdens. In Junior’s life, the old farm inheritance would later merge with tractors, dealership work, and a more mechanized agricultural world.

In 1950, the household record shows Elmo and Jessie still working hard. He was farming full time; she was recorded as a farm helper. Their children were grown or nearly grown. Their marriage had passed through war, pandemic, Depression, and grief. Yet the work continued.

6. The Grandchildren Remember

For descendants, Jacob Elmo Peterman was not only a name in records or an obituary. He was Grandpa P. His grandson Greg had only just turned six when Grandpa P died in 1959, so his memories are brief, early-childhood impressions. His sister Dee remembered many of the same things, adding her own details of the barn, the cows, the cats, the milk, the homemade candy, the popcorn, and the language of the house.

Greg remembered that he and Dee sometimes went out to stay with their grandparents on the farm for a few days. Grandpa P was up at the crack of dawn, stoking the furnace, always dressed in overalls. The morning announcement was unforgettable. After a loud bodily “whistle,” Grandpa would cheerfully declare, “There’s the 6 o’clock whistle, time to get up!” Dee remembered it too, saying they both thought it was the funniest thing. It was farm humor: earthy, affectionate, and perfectly suited to waking children who might otherwise have slept past the beginning of the day.

Grandma P’s house had its own quiet comedy. Near the back door hung a “Family Dog House” key holder, with little dogs labeled by family names, tracking who was “in the doghouse” on any given day. A similar version later seen by the family read, “To stay out—obey the rules. To get in—try some shenanigans.” It was a small household object, but it says something about Jessie’s home: rules existed, mischief was expected, and humor helped manage both.

Breakfast was part of the memory too. Grandma P was remembered as a good cook. Dee especially remembered Kix cereal in a bowl of heavy, creamy milk. The milk had first come from the barn, then gone up to the house for Grandma P to run through the reddish-colored separator on the enclosed back porch. Dee later joked that she did not know whether the separator had the capacity to pasteurize the milk and doubted it would pass modern FDA regulations, “and still we lived.”

The barn itself was a place of adventure. Dee remembered the warm smell of hay and cow manure, a smell that might sound unpleasant to others but somehow felt comforting to a child. Grandpa would let the milk cows into the barn, each going to her own spot, where her head was held in place by a wooden stanchion so she would not back away. Then he would take a small homemade milking stool—two small pieces of two-by-four nailed into a short T shape—and balance himself on it to milk. He would position the stool, elbow the cow gently into place, call to her by name, and set the tin bucket beneath her to catch the warm milk.

If barn cats were nearby, and there always seemed to be barn cats, Grandpa would squirt a stream of warm milk directly into the kittens’ mouths. In Dee’s memory, the work of milking became almost a performance: cow, stool, bucket, milk, kittens, laughter, and the steady competence of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

Greg remembered the barnyard from a child’s eye view as well. There were baby banty chickens to chase, and a banty rooster ready to peck and chase the children in return. One memory carried more tenderness. Grandpa once brought a runt baby pig into the house because it was too weak to feed. The children named her Rosie and tried to nurse her back to health. Rosie did not live through the night. In that small episode, the realities of farm life were made plain. Children learned early that care did not always overcome frailty, and affection did not always prevent loss.

The barn also offered treasures that only a child would think to collect. Sometimes when they went out to do chores, Grandpa boosted Greg up so he could reach baby sparrows tucked into nests in the eaves of the barn. Greg carried them home in a paper bag as his new pets. Dee remembered those sparrows more vividly and less romantically: ugly little, bulgy-eyed baby birds with bald pink bodies, covered with tiny white spots that crawled over them. Their mother’s suspicion that the birds probably had lice was not unreasonable. The birds were put out on the back porch and released as soon as the children were not looking.

Greg remembered one scene of field labor: Grandpa, his son Jacob Elmo Jr., and Irvin picking corn by hand and throwing the ears into a wagon. Dee did not remember the corn picking, but she did remember Dad, Grandpa P, and probably Uncle Irvin stripping grass seed. They used a wooden box-like tool with teeth across the front edge and a handle. As they ran it through tall grass in the pasture, the teeth stripped seed from the tops of the plants and deposited it into the box. Whether corn or grass seed, both memories preserve the same world: men working by hand, using simple tools, saving what the land produced, and teaching children, without formal lessons, that farm work required patience, strength, and attention.

Grandma P’s household held its own sensory world. She had a big walk-in closet she called the “wardrobe,” and every year she stored homemade Christmas candy in the back of it. Dee remembered homemade divinity and another brown, slightly sticky candy, possibly something like pinwheels cut from a roll and perhaps made with prunes.

Grandma also kept a can of salve that came out for cuts, scratches, and burns. Dee remembered it as a big green metal can kept in the bathroom cabinet, though she suspected its original purpose may have been to treat chafing on milk cows’ teats. That small detail belongs completely to farm life, where remedies often moved between barn and house, animal care and human care, practical necessity and family tradition.

Evenings brought quieter rituals. When Greg and Dee stayed overnight, Grandma P sometimes brought in a pan of homegrown popcorn ears. Everyone would sit together and shell the kernels by hand into a bowl. Then she took the bowl to the kitchen and popped the corn in a pan on top of the stove. Sometimes she cooked corn syrup and sugar, possibly with butter, into a thick syrup to pour over the popped corn.

Before television became the center of evening entertainment, they played games around the dining room table. Dee remembered “Button, button, who has the button?” and another homemade game in which Grandma drew a circle on paper, divided it into pie-like sections, and wrote a number in each section. Each player closed their eyes, held a pencil over the paper, and recited: “Round and round I go. Hit or miss, I land on this.” Wherever the pencil landed became the score, and the highest total won.

Grandma P also loved playing cards and table games more generally, and those gatherings around the table were part of the warmth of her home. She enjoyed knitting and crochet, the kind of handwork that turned quiet hours into useful and beautiful things. Her kitchen was remembered with equal affection. Jessie was an excellent cook, especially known for pies and cakes, and those skills later served her beyond the family home when she baked for the café in New Market. To the grandchildren, these were not separate talents. Cards, games, crochet, pies, cakes, popcorn, candy, and prayers all belonged to the same world of Grandma P—practical, sociable, skilled, and loving.

Grandma P’s gentler world survived in another memory. She loved her glazed figurines and called them her “pretties.” Among them were two tiny Dutch figures, a boy and a girl, made of ceramic and about two and a half inches tall. Dee later still had those figures. When the children stayed overnight, Grandma allowed Dee and Greg to hold them while they slept. In the back bedroom, which apparently received little heat from the big furnace Grandpa stoked in the basement, Grandma covered the children with many flannel-sheet blankets and quilts, so many that Dee remembered feeling as though she could hardly move under their weight. Then Grandma handed them the “pretties,” the children said their “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayers, and Grandma and Grandpa retired to the next room to watch television.

Dee also preserved the language of the house. Grandma had a “wardrobe.” The woods or forest was “timber.” Anything down the road or out back was “out yonder.” If Grandpa referred to something that belonged to you, it was “that’s your’un.” If someone asked a question requiring an affirmative answer, the reply was often, “I reckon.” These words and phrases preserve the sound of Elmo and Jessie’s world, a blend of rural Iowa, older family speech, and perhaps Jessie’s Tennessee inheritance.

These memories do not replace the records. They complete them. The census tells us Elmo farmed and Jessie worked beside him. The obituary tells us he was kind, loving, and a neighbor to everyone. But the grandchildren’s memories let us see the overalls, hear the furnace being stoked, smell the hay and manure in the barn, watch the cats catch streams of milk, taste the cream over breakfast cereal, chase the banty chickens, recoil at lice-covered baby sparrows, mourn a piglet named Rosie, shell popcorn by hand, play homemade games, and hold tiny Dutch figurines in the dark after prayers.

7. From Hand Labor to the Tractor Age

The grandchildren’s memories mark the edge of an era. Greg and Dee remembered hand milking, hand-shelled popcorn, hand-stripped grass seed, and men picking corn by hand into a wagon. Their father, Jacob Elmo Peterman Jr., would carry that same farm inheritance into a more mechanized world of tractors, buses, engines, and dealership work.

Elmo Sr. was not merely a witness to that change. He helped make it possible for his son. Family memory now preserves that Elmo loaned Jacob Elmo Jr. money to start the Peterman Ford Tractor Dealership in Clarinda. That act belongs in the heart of the family story. It was practical, paternal, and forward-looking. A farmer who had known the old world of hand labor helped his son enter the new world of engines, implements, and mechanized farming.

The connection was not only financial. Elmo Sr. owned a Ford 8N tractor, one of the small tractors that became familiar on American farms after World War II. That tractor later remained part of the family’s working life when Jacob Elmo Jr. bought the farm in East River Township. In that machine, the generations met: the father who had farmed through the horse-to-tractor transition, the son who operated a Ford tractor dealership, and the grandchildren who later knew the farm through the tools and memories left behind.

The Ford 8N was more than equipment. In this family context, it became a symbol of continuity and change. Earlier generations had cleared, built, hauled, planted, and harvested with hand tools, animal power, and muscle. Elmo Sr.’s generation stood at the turning point. Jacob Elmo Jr.’s generation stepped fully into the machine age. The loan that helped start the dealership and the Ford 8N that continued to work the family farm show how one generation invested in the next—not only with values and memory, but with money, machinery, and trust.

8. Death, Widowhood, and Memory

Elmo Peterman died January 15, 1959, at Municipal Hospital in Clarinda, Iowa. He was sixty-one years, eleven months, and seven days old. His death was caused by a stroke. He and Jessie had been married for forty-one years.

His obituary placed him within the relationships that had defined his life. He was born in Page County to John and Mary Peterman. He professed faith in Jesus Christ and joined the Methodist Church at New Market at age twenty-four. He married Jessie Thompson on October 23, 1918. To that union were born Wyleen, Violet, Elmo Jr., and infant Marjorie Elaine, who preceded him in death. He was survived by Jessie, three living children, eight grandchildren, siblings, and many relatives, friends, and neighbors.

The obituary’s final description was simple and powerful: he was “a kind and loving husband, father, and a neighbor to everyone.” In a rural community, those were not small words.

His funeral was held at Walker Funeral Home on January 18, 1959, with Rev. Lacy Thompson in charge and Preacher Clarence Potter assisting. Music was provided by a quartet, with Aletha Hutchings as organist. The casket bearers included Paul Peterman, Ivan Peterman, Ray Peterman, John Peterman, Albun Yearous, and Jack Woldruff. He was laid to rest in Old Memory Cemetery.

Greg had only just turned six when Grandpa P died, only a few days after his birthday. He remembered that day sadly, as if it were yesterday. For younger descendants, Grandpa P would be known through stories, photographs, objects, and the memories of others.

Jessie lived more than three decades after Elmo’s death. She moved to New Market and worked at the Hazelton Café for several years, where her reputation as an excellent cook found a public place. Her pies and cakes, already part of family memory, became part of the small-town life around her. For a woman born in 1900, raised in a farm world, and widowed after four decades of marriage, that work suggests practicality and resilience. A small-town café was a community crossroads, and Jessie remained useful and connected.

One of the pleasures of those later years was seeing Jessie with her older sister Stella. Their interaction preserved something the grandchildren could sense even if they did not fully understand it at the time: the ease, teasing, memory, and shorthand of sisters who had known each other since childhood. In Jessie’s life, family did not exist only in solemn records of births, marriages, and deaths. It was also there in the way sisters talked across a table, played cards, worked yarn through their fingers, remembered old stories, and kept one another company.

Jessie also became, in quiet ways, a keeper of family objects. After Grandpa P’s death, she gave her grandson Greg a small steel hammerhead, remembered in family tradition as possibly having belonged to the earlier Jacob Peterman, the nineteenth-century farmer and carpenter whose life had carried the family from Ohio into Iowa. Whether every link in that chain can be documented or not, the act itself is meaningful. Jessie placed into a grandson’s hands not merely an old tool, but a symbol of the Peterman inheritance: building, repairing, farming, moving, and remembering.

Jessie died September 11, 1992, in Clarinda, Iowa, at the age of ninety-two. Her obituary stated that she had lived at Bethesda Care Center for the previous four years. She was survived by three children: Mrs. Irvin “Wyleen” Miller of New Market, Mrs. Everett “Violet” Smith of Gilbert, Arizona, and Jacob Elmo Peterman of Harlingen, Texas. She was also survived by grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her parents, husband, daughter Marjorie, four brothers, and three sisters. Her funeral was held September 14 at Walker-Merrick Funeral Home, with burial in Memory Cemetery at New Market.

One detail in Jessie’s obituary conflicts with Elmo’s obituary and other family records. Jessie’s obituary states that her husband died in 1961, while Elmo’s own obituary and family records give his death as January 15, 1959. The stronger evidence supports 1959. Such discrepancies are common in later obituaries and should be noted rather than ignored.

Jessie’s long life made her one of the great bridges in the family. She was born in Tennessee in 1900, moved to Iowa as a child, married during the influenza pandemic, raised children through the Depression, lost an infant daughter, watched a son serve in World War II, buried her husband, worked in New Market, and lived into the 1990s.

The wedding photograph on her spare-bedroom wall gave that long life a center. She did not need to speak often about Elmo for the grandchildren to know that he remained beloved. Her brief comment—“He was a handsome dog, wasn’t he”—said enough. It held courtship, marriage, humor, memory, and longing in one sentence.

A handsome dog indeed.

9. Bridge to the Next Generation: Jacob Elmo Peterman Jr.

The son who carried the next chapter was born March 12, 1924, in East River Township, Page County, Iowa. Named Jacob Elmo Peterman like his father, he became known as Junior. His birth placed him at the meeting point of two eras. Behind him stood the long Peterman tradition of farming and land. Ahead of him stood war, machinery, tractor dealerships, highways, and a more mobile America.

Junior grew up first in East River Township and then in Mason Township. He was six years old in 1930, sixteen in 1940, and eighteen in 1942 when he registered for military service. He graduated from New Market High School and served in the United States Navy during World War II. His discharge was recorded in 1946.

His adult life would not be simple. He married Myrtle Michele Lewis on March 12, 1943, in Maryville, Missouri, and they had a daughter, Glenda Eilleen Peterman. In 1947, he married Zesta Gertrude Corkle in Raton, New Mexico. With Zesta, he became father to Dalaina, Gregory Craig, and Galen Leon Peterman.

In 1950, Junior was living in Clarinda on East Chestnut Street and working as a school bus driver for the public school. Later he returned to farming 300 acres in East River Township and operated Peterman Ford Tractor Dealership in Clarinda. Family memory adds an important detail: his father, Elmo Sr., loaned him money to help start that dealership. In that act, the older farmer invested directly in the son who would carry the Peterman farm tradition into the tractor age.

Elmo Sr. also owned a Ford 8N tractor, a machine that later remained in family use when Junior bought the East River Township farm. The tractor itself became part of the bridge between generations. Grandpa P had known the world of hand milking, homemade stools, corn picked by hand, and long hours of physical labor. Junior would inherit that work ethic, but he would apply it in a world increasingly shaped by engines, implements, and mechanized agriculture.

Through Junior, the Peterman story moved from the farm household of Elmo and Jessie into the modern age. The next chapter begins with a boy raised in Depression-era Iowa, tested by war, helped by his father’s trust, shaped by tractors and business, and tied always to the fields and family memories of southwest Iowa.