Hannah Strader

Hannah Strader is the matriarch of the clan this website is devoted to, and it is logical to expect an extensive biography here, but instead you will find only a few paragraphs. Like most women of the 19th Century, Hannah Strader led a non-public existence. Few traces remain that would allow us to fully “see” her today. Also, most of what is available to say about Hannah’s life has already been covered elsewhere on this website. If you have not already done so, please proceed to the page devoted to her ancestry (click here) and the page devoted to the biography of her husband, Nathaniel Martin (click here). The text below was written assuming you have read those two essays, and tries to avoid repeating things that are dealt with there. Here the topic is largely limited to those aspects of Hannah that pertain to her as an individual.

Hannah was born 30 June 1829 in Vermilion County, IL, the fifth of what would eventually be ten children. She came into the world only a year or two at most after her parents and older siblings had reached this frontier region. For the previous twenty years, since their own childhoods, her parents Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr had resided in Preble County, OH, after having both been born in Guilford County, NC. The Straders were part of a large migration of friends, relatives, and/or neighbors from Preble County to the Indiana/Illinois border region in the late 1820s. Hannah spent her first eight years in Vermilion County, then her parents yielded to a fresh “homesteading itch” and pulled up stakes, apparently having decided they could do even better on the new lands opening up along the Pecatonica River. In 1837 (or about then), they came to Stephenson County, IL, and farmed near Waddams Grove. The household is listed at that locale in the 1840 census. In approximately 1845, when Hannah was about sixteen years old, the family moved one more time, settling on a farm within the bounds of Jordan Township, Green County, WI. This would be her home for only a year or so, because she soon became the wife of Nathaniel Martin -- someone she may have met back in Waddams Grove, as he seems to have spent the 1840s in Stephenson County.

The wedding took place 25 February 1847 in Jordan Center, conducted by John Kennedy, a justice of the peace. This means Hannah was only seventeen when she left home. She was not an underage bride by the standards of the era -- her own sister Margaret was also seventeen when she married, and two other sisters were only eighteen -- but there is little question Hannah never had an opportunity to establish herself as a career woman or get much formal education. In fact, it is quite likely she was illiterate lifelong. Females of her generation on the frontier were often not accorded even the most basic of schooling, and it is a known fact that her sister Katie Anne (Anna Catherine Strader Frame Rush) had to go out of her way to learn to read and write when she was about sixty years of age (meaning not until the 1880s). Hannah was furthermore a middle child of her family and therefore not someone who was urged toward leadership, nor indulged as the “baby” of the bunch. She had enjoyed few chances to shine. It is tempting therefore to imagine Hannah, particularly in her youth, was unassertive and easily dominated. This does not seem to be the case. It is quite possible her early departure from her parents’ household and her choice of mate was a carefully reasoned method of seizing her destiny and expressing her independence. She was rare among her kin in that she did not choose a Frame man or other partner from the nearer parts of Green County or Lafayette County. Her daughter Juliette wrote in a 1944 letter that such a path had been laid out for Hannah. She was urged to marry Thomas Alexander Frame -- and yes, Thomas was a brother of the three men who married Hannah’s sisters Polly, Elizabeth, and Katie Anne. But Hannah rejected that idea (a development that Nathaniel would refer to with amusement in his later years). Thomas had to settle for Sarah Devoe, an older sister of the Loren Brewster Devoe who would come to marry Hannah’s niece Mary Jane Swearingen (and later Thomas and Sarah’s daughter Lucinda would marry Hannah’s nephew Millard Eveland!). Instead Hannah chose a man of different background. Among his distinguishing characteristics, Nathaniel was a Virginian of Irish and English extraction, not a German-American whose clan had dwelled in North Carolina and Ohio. Nathaniel was artistically inclined (he was noted for his fiddle-playing), a fellow with the boldness to set out alone as a youth to carve a life from the frontier, a man not content to be just a farmer or a miner. Nathaniel was his own man, whereas Hannah’s kin had come as a group amid other like-minded former neighbors and fellow parishioners. Nathaniel was also at that time a Winslow man, and this meant that Hannah was able to settle into a home half a county away from her parents. These few miles may seem like a trivial distance to those of us who live in the 21st Century and can travel from one spot to the other in a few minutes in an automobile over paved highways, but in 1847 the distance from Jordan to Winslow by horse and buggy required a good couple of hours over rutted dirt lanes -- in other words, though her relatives might have been close enough to be available for family weddings and holiday gatherings, they weren’t looking over her shoulder day in and day out. (Which is not to say she strived to enforce a separation. In fact, over the next three decades some of her siblings would end up residing quite near her. For example, Katie Anne lived right in Martintown with second husband Henry Rush, and her little brother Daniel boarded with her and Nathaniel during the late 1850s and early 1860s, while still a bachelor.)

Hannah must have had a core of strength in her character, because she faced a great deal of tragedy and stress and seems to have done so without faltering. Her husband was repeatedly declared insane and incapable of managing his financial assets. By the time she finally passed away, Hannah had buried eleven of her fourteen children -- six babies/toddlers during her childbearing years, two more when she was in her early fifties, and three more after she had become elderly. Although she does not appear to have materially participated in the operation of the mills, she could only have been resolute and steady or the Martins would not have been able to stay in their big white house on the hill above the Pecatonica for more than half a century, and Nathaniel would not have been able to play such a major role as the founder of a prosperous village. In short, her contribution, though quiet, was essential.

Hannah was about five foot three inches in height as an adult, about two to three inches shorter than her husband. One set of family notes states she was blue-eyed and tended toward blonde hair, though “blonde” may have been in comparison to her siblings, who were alleged to have all been dark-haired, and even light brown hair would have been remarked upon as unusually fair. Though her offspring seemed inclined toward health problems, she herself was robust. Her lifespan stretched across nine full decades and she survived all of her siblings except her much-younger brother John.

When Nathaniel had his worst episode of dementia and was committed to Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Hannah was the one family member who the doctors permitted to be with him. Her steadfastness was surely a key factor in his ability to avoid long-term institutionalization.

Hannah was widowed in early 1905. Then seventy-four years old, she was by no means ready to go quietly to her own grave, and lived on in the big house. Her determination was tested on a number of occasions, however. First, barely more than a year into her widowhood, her son Horatio died of tuberculosis. Horatio had been the one child who had never left Martintown and had been the operator of the grist mill. For her remaining decade and a half of life, she would never have that sort of secure and permanent presence from any other child. Juliette and husband Ed Savage returned from the Pacific Northwest and moved in with Hannah in the early months of 1905 at the latest (they may have come back before the death of Nathaniel). They stayed at least six years, but then they left in the early 1910s for Bangor, ME, where Ed had been born and raised. Elias had become a miner in Colorado in the early 1890s and came back rarely and only for brief visits. Nellie moved to Sanger, CA in 1906. Emma had long since put down roots in DeQueen, AR. Hannah therefore came to depend on local grandchildren -- Lena Brown Hastings, Emma Warner Hastings, Vivian Martin Smith, Rose Bucher Buss, and probably others -- and some of her former children-in-law. The latter included in particular Elwood Bucher, who had been married to Mary Lincoln Martin, and Laura Hart, who had been married to Horatio. Elwood and Laura married each other, and Elwood became the guiding force of the mill complex in place of his deceased brother-in-law.

Concerned over her mother’s age and increasing frailty, Emma Ann Martin Brown came up from Arkansas in September, 1916 to care for Hannah. However, Emma developed some sort of condition that required surgery. She went to Chicago for an operation in the summer of 1917 (perhaps to Cook County Hospital, a facility where Hannah’s granddaughter Blanche Bradford Martin could have been found earlier in the decade, while her husband John Bruner Colwell had been a doctor there, and she a nurse). Emma did not survive the procedure. Hannah, however, lingered on. Granddaughter Lena Hastings assumed the role of primary caregiver for the final two years or so. The picture at the left is Hannah in her extreme old age. By this point, she was still a resident of Martintown, but may no longer have been dwelling in the big house; residing instead with Lena or whichever other granddaughter stepped forward to give Lena a breather from time to time. It was at Lena’s home that Hannah finally passed away 12 November 1919 at age ninety -- demonstrating a longevity that may have eluded her children, but would manifest richly in the lifespans of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a sixth of whom would live even longer than she had. She became the last person buried in the family cemetery, with the exception of her grandson Fay Horatio Martin, who at the end of his life -- most of it spent near Martintown -- expressed the desire that he be buried there as well, and that wish was granted after his death in 1965.

This is the only portrait available of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader posing together. The original is a ferrotype, also known as a tintype, photograph, i.e. a positive image etched onto a metal plate. This sort of photography became widely used beginning in the mid-1850s and remained the standard until the mid-1880s, when it was supplanted by film-negative photography. Ferrotypes from 1855-1870 were usually grey as shown here. Ones taken 1870-1885 were usually sepia-toned. (The absence of smiles in ferrotypes is because they required the subject to remain motionless for forty-five seconds or more, too long to maintain a steady smile.) Crude though the photographic industry was back then, the method could capture fine detail in the hands of a professional. This one has suffered some corrosion as tintypes often do over time, but it still retains an astonishing fidelity considering that the original is only two inches tall by one-and-a-half inches wide. Judging by their apparent ages, Nathaniel and Hannah probably sat for this picture in the mid to late 1860s. It resembles the wedding portrait photograph of their daughter Nellie and her bridegroom John Warner, taken in 1869.