And Mary McAlpine too? 

Well, sadly we learned from her daughter-in-law, Eliza Hitchcock Candee, that Mary made the trip from Oswego, New York all the way to the new family homestead near the now-Monroe, but she had contracted disease and though the family hurried about to establish "home" and so all those conditions of safety families require for prosperity in health and wealth, Mary died.

Eliza writes, "But what was their dismay to find the children surrounding the bed in which their sick brother lay, their mother lying on the other bed, having died of cholera morbus a few hours before." This comes from an account of the Candee family in Talcott's HISTORY OF MONROE COUNTY MICHIGAN (published in 1890).

This was in the late spring of 1834.

Eliza tells us two stories from that spring, that of her husband--Caius and  her husband's mother, Mary McAlpine, and, that of her own father moving his people to Monroe, too.

Her father was Elisha Bardow Hitchcock and we can pick up the story almost as if we are reading a diary...

"May  1, 1834, found us equipped and underway for Michigan, father having been the year before and selected a place for home.  Arriving in Albany, 363 miles on the Erie Canal took us to Buffalo, where we remained seven days, windbound, but came to Vistula, now Toledo, on the 17th, in time to learn that the man engaged to build a log house for us failed to  fulfill the contract; however, he met us with 2 teams to convey us to a  place within 2 miles of our own, where we might find shelter until one could be prepared for us...."
                          --The Hitchcock Family

The Candees were en route from Oswego, New York...


Eliza writes, "In the spring of 1834, the whole family having decided to go west, two brothers, next younger than Caius, came on with a span of horses, and a wagon, purchased a lot of land, now in Whiteford, Monroe County, Michigan, still known as 'Candee  Place,' and commenced making improvements.  They built a shanty fourteen feet square of poles, such as they could raise, covered it with elm bark, except for one corner for smoke to escape.  They planted a few potatoes and sowed some buckwheat" (599 Talcott's  HISTORY).

 Caius had gone west the year before in 1833 and spent the winter and spring in Waterville, Ohio.  But when he got word of his sick brother, he rushed for the woods more north in what would become Michigan.

Those forks in the road at Vistula (now Toledo) and at Sylvania came to represent for the family the many paths that people traverse in life.  And how we sometimes only travel so far with someone before those someones take that other fork and pass on to the next life.


The Candee family found themselves parting with their matriarch, Mary  McAlpine in that spring of 1834, and, as there was no cemetery closer than the forks and "the  report [of death from cholera] had made people fearful of spreading the  disease"...the family and a few men secured to help, made a coffin and buried Mary right near the new homestead.

"One offered prayer, and then the coffin was forever hidden from their view," Eliza tells of funeral.

Of the Hitchcocks that spring she tells, "The house was one room, made of  logs, the home of five persons, and with our family of eleven persons, made us pretty thickly settled!"

As the Candee family had stayed briefly with General White in their time of just arriving and in great need of sorting out what to do in "critical moments," the  Hitchcocks, too, had briefly teamed up with neighbors and this was an important part of first steps of what to do next.


Elisha Barstow Hitchcock "bought a yoke of oxen and two cows from a drove near  Monroe.  A wagon and farm implements we brought with us.  A man was  hired, and at the end of four weeks we moved into our own house, if  house it might be called, without door, window, roof or chimney.  Oak  boards had been procured from a saw mill nearly twenty miles distant"  (482 Talcott's HISTORY).


Twenty miles distant is pretty far on foot, horse, and especially by wagon.  Perhaps this was why Grandpa Asa Candee appendaged a saw mill to his homestead our notes on Asa say (back in Oswego?) and how his eldest son Caius had learned the management of saw milling.  Caius also knew tanning and he'd learned the shoemaker's trade. 

By the time he was a man, Caius would've been quite the catch!