West 200 Acres- Lewis Family & John Graham (2 Jan 1870 Jahr – 1 Jan 1890 Jahr)

Beschreibung:

All of the West 200 acres was owned by a land speculator named John Graham when the Lewis family seems to have acquired part of it during the 1870’s. Their homestead was less than a mile to the south, where Jesse Lewis worked as a farmer and carpenter. Jesse died young, leaving his wife Martha and their eleven children to run the farm for many years. The Portrait and Biographical Album of Washington County, Iowa makes a point of how effectively she ran business and maintained the farm, eventually expanding their property when her son Samuel bought some of this land in the 1870’s.

John Graham continually bought and sold land throughout Washington County after he first arrived shortly before 1940, amassing up to 15,00 acres at one point. Most of it he did not keep for long, like the piece of land the Lewis family bought from him, but John Graham and his family continued to own some land in what would become the West 200 acres of Camp for over 50 years until shortly after his death in th 1890’s.