The story of the Logans and the Hobsons is a Taylorville story above all — the tale of families who came to a raw Illinois prairie town, put down roots at the corner of Clay and Market streets, and stayed there through the generations. It begins with a blacksmith's forge and carries forward to the daughter who would join this line to the McWards.
The Conner Forge and the First Plow
Before the Logans, there were the Conners. Abel Conner was born about 1819 at Owingsville, in Bath County, Kentucky, the son of parents who came at an early date to Sangamon County, Illinois, part of the steady westward drift that carried families out of Kentucky and Tennessee into the newly opened prairies. Abel learned the blacksmith's trade at Pleasant Plains, then at Breckenridge, and in an age when a smith forged practically everything made of metal for his neighbors, the trade was a passport to any settlement in need of a man who could work iron.
At Springfield in April 1840, Abel married Martha "Patsy" Washington Jones, a native of Tennessee and the daughter of a farmer near Breckenridge. Together they raised seven children — Mary, Paul, George B., Elmyra, John Jacob, William H., and Alice. Several made their own marks: Paul became a printer and editor, one of the earliest publishers of the Taylorville Flag; John Jacob became a physician at Pana; and Elmyra would carry the family's line forward.
Abel's path to Taylorville ran along the mail road. He held the contract to ride the stage stands of the Springfield–Vandalia mail route, shoeing the horses kept at each station, and in this work he saw an opening for a shop in the new town. In 1845 he went by stage to Vandalia and on to Taylorville, where he opened the first blacksmith shop the place had ever known. His first shop was a half-dugout on the ground where the city water tower would later stand near the city hall; in time he moved to the lot at the northeast corner of Clay and Market streets. About 1845 he built and lived for years in a house at the corner of Vine and Walnut.
Around 1848 he removed to Wisconsin, selling the Vine and Walnut house to John Logan on his departure north, drawn by the lead mining that was then pulling many families north to the diggings around Lafayette and Grant counties. The 1850 census found him in Grant County and the 1855 census at Shullsburg, in Lafayette County. He returned to Taylorville in 1854 and re-entered the blacksmith business. In October 1856, at the first annual cattle show and agricultural fair of the Christian County Agricultural Society, Abel was awarded a diploma as first premium for the six best horseshoes — a certificate his son William still kept in 1925. Among his wares was something remembered long after his death: the first steel share plow ever fashioned in Christian County, shaped by his own hands. Thought impractical in his lifetime, it was never patented, and neither he nor his heirs ever realized anything from it.
Abel's return to Illinois was brief. He died about 1857 in Wisconsin, not yet forty; his wife Patsy died the same year. Both were buried at Springfield.
Elmyra Conner and the House at Vine and Walnut
Elmyra Walker Conner belonged to Taylorville from her first breath. She was born on 14 September 1845 in the house her father had built at the corner of Vine and Walnut — one of the earliest homes in a town itself only a young settlement on the prairie. She grew up among her brothers Paul, William H., and John Jacob. That childhood ended abruptly in 1857, when both her parents died within the year and Elmyra, not yet a teenager, was orphaned. The circumstances of her upbringing after that loss go unrecorded, but the death of both parents in a single year would have thrown her and her brothers onto the care of relatives or the wider community.
On 9 May 1864, Elmyra married Samuel C. Logan at Taylorville. Rather than leave the place of her birth, she brought her marriage into it: the couple lived in the very house where she had been born, and there, in 1867, her daughter Zua came into the world — a striking continuity of three generations of family life unfolding within the same walls at Vine and Walnut.
Elmyra's long residence made her a familiar figure in the town's civic and religious life. She was a charter member of the Woman's Relief Corps, the auxiliary that tied Civil War veterans and their communities together in the decades after the war, and at her death she was the oldest member of the Baptist congregation at Taylorville. The successive federal censuses from 1870 through 1910 record her steadily present in Christian County, a fixed point as the town grew up around her.
Her final year brought difficulty. In April 1917 she was committed to the State Hospital at Jacksonville, and from 30 April she was a patient at St. Vincent hospital in Taylorville. There she died on the afternoon of 19 August 1917, aged seventy-three. Two days later her funeral was held at the West Market Street home of her daughter Zua Hobson, with the Rev. J. H. Spidler officiating. She was buried at Oak Hill cemetery — laid to rest in the town where she had been born, married, and lived out the whole of her long life.
Samuel C. Logan, the Soldier of the Hornet's Nest
Elmyra's husband, Samuel C. Logan, came from another branch of the westward migration. His people traced back to James A. Logan, born in Maryland around 1801, who later settled at Taylorville and established his family in the frontier community. Samuel himself was born on 26 December 1838 at Jeromesville, in Ashland County, Ohio, the son of James Logan and Mary Ann (Charlton) Logan. The 1850 census found him in Vermillion township, Ashland County, among the settled farming country of north-central Ohio. In 1857 the family made the westward move that so many Ohioans of their generation undertook, traveling by covered wagon to Christian County, Illinois, where the open prairie was drawing settlers to its rich, level land. Taylorville would remain the center of Samuel's world for the rest of his days.
When the war came in 1861, Samuel was among the first men of Christian County to answer President Lincoln's call. He joined a company organized at Taylorville under Captain Andrew Simpson and mustered into the 14th Illinois Infantry at Jacksonville, serving as a private in Company H. His regiment saw hard fighting in the western theater — Shiloh and the Siege of Vicksburg among its campaigns — and at Shiloh he was shot through the ribs. He was one of eight men left in the Hornet's Nest during that terrible engagement, a stand memorialized by a monument on which the eight names are inscribed. He was discharged with his company at Springfield on 18 June 1864, just before the depleted 14th was consolidated with the 15th. Some sixty years later, about 1924, he returned to walk the Shiloh field once more.
It was on 9 May 1864, while home on furlough, that Samuel married Elmyra Walker Conner at Taylorville, the ceremony performed at the home of his brother by the Rev. Paris Pray of the Baptist church. The couple raised four children, though one son died in infancy. Their daughter Zua married T. E. Hobson of Taylorville; another daughter became Mrs. A. R. Black; and their son Roy made his home in the North. Samuel and Elmyra observed their golden wedding anniversary in May 1914, three years before her death left him a widower.
A painter by trade both before and after the war, Samuel spent virtually his entire working life in Taylorville, the single exception being a year of service as a guard at the state prison at Joliet. He kept the habit, treasured by old soldiers, of returning to Taylorville every Christmas. Around 1920 he took up residence at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Home in Quincy, and the 1920 census recorded him in nearby Riverside, Adams County.
Samuel remained a staunch Republican to the end. So devoted was he to his home county's ballot that he declined to vote in the Quincy primary of April 1924, preferring to cast his vote on the Christian County ticket that autumn; that same spring he attended the Republican state caucus at Springfield. At eighty-five he still walked at least three miles daily, crediting his vigor to his early military discipline and plain living. "Out of door living, fishing, hunting and taking daily hikes in the fresh air will do more than anything else to build up a strong, healthy constitution," he advised, adding: "Don't worry, get plenty of exercise in the open air, lay off patent medicines, this is my recipe for longevity."
For the last six months of his life Samuel made his home with his daughter Mrs. Black. He died on the evening of 19 July 1926 at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, while on an automobile tour — a fitting end for a restless traveler. His funeral was held on the evening of 22 July at the home of his daughter Zua Hobson, with the Rev. E. J. Campbell of the Methodist church officiating and members of the American Legion serving as pallbearers. He was buried at Oak Hill cemetery in Taylorville, at the age of eighty-seven.
Zua Ella Logan
Samuel and Elmyra's daughter, Zua Ella Lynn Logan, was born on 9 June 1867 in the house at the corner of Walnut and Vine — the same walls in which her mother had been born, and which her grandfather Abel Conner had built about 1845 Zua herself later recorded these details in a memoir of the town's early days, tracing how the Conner family eventually sold the house and how John Logan, who had come to Taylorville from Ohio in 1838 or 1839, bought it. Her mother's father, she recalled with evident pride, "made the first plow in Christian county in his blacksmith shop, corner of Clay and Market streets."
She grew up in a Taylorville still close to its frontier origins. The 1870 census found the family in Township 13, Range 2, and the 1880 census again placed her at home in the town. Her recollections preserved the vanished landmarks of that childhood world: the Powell lumber yard, the Globe hotel, the Long House, George Torrence's livery stable, the old county fair grounds at Manners park, the Chautauqua tents, and the circus ground at Market and Madison.
On 16 October 1884, at the age of seventeen, Zua married Edward F. Meader in Christian County. Two children came of that marriage — Samuel L. Meader, who later settled in Pana, and Eva, who became Mrs. Hood of Coulterville. The record is silent on what became of Edward Meader; whether by death or dissolution, the marriage ended, and on 19 September 1895 Zua married again, this time to Truman Ellsworth Hobson at Taylorville. From that second union came two daughters, Helen and Myra.
For a woman whose life stretched from the Reconstruction era to the eve of the Second World War, Zua's geography was remarkable for its constancy. She was born in Taylorville, lived her whole life there — by the 1930s at 713 West Market Street — and died there. She declared her rootedness openly: "By birth I am a Taylorville product and claim a part and an interest in all the good things that belong to it."
If Zua stayed in one place, she made that place her whole field of work. She was a charter member of the Taylorville Woman's Relief Corps, the auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic, and rose steadily through its ranks. By 1907 she served as Patriotic Instructor, writing the town's Memorial Day report over her own byline; in November 1909 she was elected president of the twenty-first district at the Pana convention; by 1910 she was press correspondent for the Illinois department; and in September 1921 she went as state delegate to the national encampment at Indianapolis. She issued the certificates that secured excursion railroad rates for local G.A.R. veterans. Her patriotism could turn fierce: in August 1918, with the country at war, she rose from the audience at the Taylorville Chautauqua, branded the Alhambra Players German sympathizers for telling a story in German dialect, and demanded they stop.
Temperance was her other great cause. A platform speaker for the South Fork Anti-Saloon League, she lectured at the Miners' hall in Jeisyville in April 1915 and was a leader of the dry forces through Taylorville's wet-and-dry campaigns, a longtime worker in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Her politics ran alongside her principles rather than beneath them. She served as chairman of the Republican Women's Central Committee of Christian County about 1924, yet in October 1928 she broke ranks to stump Illinois for the Democrat Al Smith, telling Democratic women at Centralia that she was "tired of fake prohibition" and believed Smith would enforce the law more effectively than Hoover. Her civic memberships filled a page: the Christian Church, the Royal Neighbors of America, the civic department of the Taylorville Woman's Club, the town library board, and for many years the office of official decorator of the Chautauqua auditorium at Manners park. In March 1925 she addressed sixteen newly naturalized citizens at the circuit court and presented each with an American flag.
In 1939, for Taylorville's centennial edition, Zua wrote down her recollections of the town's early days — the very memoir that preserves the story of the Conner house, the first plow forged in Christian County, and the lost hotels and livery stables of her youth. A local columnist had already caught her spirit in 1934, writing that "no cause was believed to be half-right, / Unless Zua was there and led the fight."
Zua Ella (Logan) Hobson died at nine o'clock on the evening of 16 August 1940 at St. Vincent hospital in Taylorville, aged seventy-three. She was buried at Oak Hill cemetery, exactly as she had wished: "I want no better tribute paid me when I leave Taylorville than to have it said I spent my life here, and know I will be laid to rest in one of the most beautiful spots in Illinois, Oak Hill Cemetery." Her funeral, on the afternoon of 18 August at the Chesnut and Pearce funeral chapel, followed to the letter the written instructions she had left in a 1933 letter. The service opened with "Crossing the Bar," her favorite. Eight men she had known carried her — Homer Long, A. N. Slatten, Bennie Jones, Dr. G. L. Armstrong, William Larkin, Lawrence Wilson, Charles Jewett, and Rex Haner.
Truman Ellsworth Hobson
The man Zua married in 1895 came to Taylorville from outside the Logan-Conner world, though he would settle at the very corner where Abel Conner had once forged his plows. Truman Ellsworth Hobson was born on 18 August 1864 in Morrow County, Ohio, the youngest of thirteen children. While still a small child he was brought west to Kokomo, in Howard County, Indiana, and it was there, in the flat gas-and-farm country of central Indiana, that he grew to manhood. The census of 1880 finds him in Monroe City, Howard County, on the eve of the region's celebrated natural-gas boom, and there he learned the blacksmith's trade that would carry him the rest of his life.
The Kokomo of Hobson's young manhood was a rough, energetic place, and his own passages through it were not always quiet. He worked there first as a blacksmith and, by 1892, as a gas-well driller. He was also drawn into the fierce partisan politics of the day. In October 1888, at a Democratic rally, an old soldier named Miller was knocked down and kicked and later died of his injuries. Hobson was arrested and charged with manslaughter. By his own account he had been drinking, had called out a reward for the sight of a Republican, and had run and hidden when someone cried "Kill him." He was acquitted in the spring of 1890, the trial finding that Miller had in fact been struck by a truck and had himself attacked Hobson. Two years later Hobson's Kokomo chapter closed abruptly, when in late February 1892 he left the town westbound in the company of a married woman recorded as Mrs. E. Philips. What became of that relationship is not documented.
In 1893 Hobson came to Taylorville, and there he remained for the fifty years that were left to him. On 19 September 1895 he married Zua Ella Logan, and with her built the settled life that his Kokomo years had not afforded. Their daughter Helen was born on 24 January 1897; another daughter, Myra, became Mrs. Januchowsky and died young, on 16 June 1930 — a loss that plainly stayed with Zua, whose letter of funeral instructions was written on Myra's birthday in 1933. The household also included Zua's children from her first marriage, Eva Hood of Coulterville and Samuel Meader of Pana. Truman's sisters, Amy Peacock and Mollie Alexander, remained westward — one at Kokomo, the other at Salina, Kansas.
Domestic life was not without its storms. In June 1916, after Helen and one Virgil Merritt returned from an attempted elopement, Hobson stabbed the young man three times, though the wounds proved slight — a father's fury flaring against a suitor who had tried to carry off his daughter.
For many years Hobson was the horseshoer of Taylorville, his shop standing at the corner of Clay and Market streets — the same corner where Abel Conner had opened the town's first blacksmith shop and forged the first plow in Christian County. In February 1902 he briefly extended his trade by buying a blacksmith shop at Peoria. As the motor age arrived, he adapted rather than retired: about 1925 he took the old blacksmith building at Clay and Market into a new enterprise, the Taylorville Tire Company, of which he became proprietor. It was a natural evolution for a tradesman whose whole working life had been bound to what moved people down the road — first shoeing the horses, then shodding the wheels that replaced them. He retired about 1940.
Hobson was a Democrat, active in party politics, and Taylorville returned him to office again and again. He served several terms as alderman, and three times he was mayor of the town. He first took the office in 1920 to complete the unexpired term of Mayor T. J. Downey, who had died in office, and the voters then re-elected him in 1921 and again in 1923. His mayoralty is preserved in a proclamation he issued on 7 August 1923, setting aside the hour of President Warren G. Harding's burial for a memorial service at Manners Park. Its opening words — "In the inscrutable wisdom of Divine Providence, Warren Gamaliel Harding, twenty-ninth president of the United States, has been taken from us" — show the solemn public voice he could summon for such occasions.
The successive census enumerations trace Hobson's long rootedness in Taylorville, a man who came in middle youth and never left. His wife Zua died on 16 August 1940, and from that time his daughter Helen and her husband, Elmer McWard, the Christian County treasurer, lived with him. After several months' illness, Truman E. Hobson died at Taylorville at 7:55 on the morning of 2 July 1943, aged seventy-eight. He was buried at Oak Hill cemetery in the town he had shod, served, and governed.
Helen Hobson, the Bridge to the McWards
Of Truman and Zua's two daughters, it was Helen — born on 24 January 1897 — who carried the line forward. She married Elmer Richard McWard of Taylorville, and through that marriage the Logan, Conner, and Hobson threads all gathered at last into the McWard family. It is with Elmer and Helen that a later chapter picks up the story.