Mary Hilda Hastings

Mary Hilda Hastings, seventh of the eight children of Mary Lena Brown and Frank Opal Hastings, was born 28 February 1910 in Martintown, Green County, WI, a village founded by her great-grandfather Nathaniel Martin. The place was her home throughout her childhood, as it had been for her grandmother Emma Ann Martin. Most of the females in her immediate family -- including her mother, her paternal grandmother, and both of her sisters -- were known chiefly by their middle names. However, Mary actually went by Mary.

Martintown is located a mile north of Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. Mary obtained her secondary education at Winslow High School, graduating 8 June 1927 as part of the Class of 1927. It would be the better part of seven more years until she married. As a young woman she lived for a spell with her older sister Ruth and brother-in-law Rolland Parsons in Wiota Township, Lafayette County, WI, helping care for the daughter Ruth gave birth to in the spring of 1930. However, this was not a situation that lasted long. Ruth and Rolland couldn’t pay much -- if anything -- and Mary wanted to earn real wages. She also wanted to more fully stretch her wings. That almost inevitably led her to Freeport. Located some twenty miles south of Martintown and Winslow, Freeport was the commercial and industrial heart of the immediate region, its city fathers having deliberately crafted a plan just prior to 1910 to entice manufacters and major distributors to erect their headquarters there. The plan had succeeded rather well, and local young folk in the early days of the Great Depression knew Freeport was a “place of first resort” if they wanted to land a job. It also happened to be pretty much the only spot in Stephenson County where a young lady of good reputation had a reasonable chance to find a room to rent, not be stuck boarding with a family with firm rules about when she could come and go. Mary found a job with Burgess Battery Company. The timing of that development was probably the winter of 1930-31.

It was through coworkers at Burgess Battery that Mary was introduced to Eggo Koning, the man who would become her husband. However, the circumstances weren’t quite right to immediately throw them together. For one thing, Mary did not stay in Freeport. In 1933, her father’s job with Illinois Central Railroad led to her parents relocating to the city of Rockford, Winnebago County, IL, where they would remain until 1937. The house at 445 Jilson Avenue had enough room for Mary, even though it also had to accommodate her siblings Ernie and Anna. Given the challenge of making a go of it in the 1930s, Mary decided she had given the independent life enough of a try for the time being. She cherished her family, so to have to “take a step back” was not the terrible development it would have represented to a more free-spirited sort of person.

Bit by bit, Eggo Koning became a fond presence in her life. The pair were wed 6 February 1936 in Pearl City, Stephenson County, IL. He was to be her one and only husband -- and in the fullness of time, her widower. Eggo (pronounced ego as in Freudian psychoanalysis, not Eggo as in the waffle) was a son of Dutch immigrants Eggo Koning and Frouwke (“Fannie”) Kerkhoff. His father had died in 1930 (and his mother in 1933), so no one called him Junior anymore, and that was just as well, because his official name was identical to his old man’s. Eggo was the next-to-the-youngest child of a large family. His parents and older siblings had resided in rural Stephenson County (Silver Creek Township) southeast of Freeport in the early part of the century, but by the time of his birth had temporarily shifted just south across the boundary into Ogle County, farming in Maryland Township east of the unincorporated village of Baileyville. Later in Eggo’s childhood, they had reversed their migration, and Eggo had finished his schooling in Freeport. He completed eighth grade, but did not go to high school. With a birthdate of 1 February 1911, Eggo was a year younger than Mary. She therefore could lay claim to being older and wiser, but she never did so without a smile. Eggo was no slouch in terms of intelligence. He made up for the lack of formal education through reading and other fallback methods. He was adept at accounting and most acquaintances who dealt with him over the years would not have guessed he had not gone beyond eighth grade.

Mary readily embraced the role of wife and homemaker. And soon, mother. The couple’s first child, a boy, was born fourteen months after the wedding. (Mary is shown at right holding her baby son.) Unfortunately during her second pregnancy, Mary took a bad fall. It caused the placenta to rupture and the infant was born dead 8 August 1939. The attending physician, N.C. Phillips, judged the child had been full-term, making the circumstances all the more cruel because a joyful birth had been so imminent. She was given a name, Lois Elaine Koning, received a headstone, and even today keeps her place in the tally of offspring. Mary would never know what it was like to raise a daughter. Her remaining children, born in the 1940s, were male. She would however never have to endure the grief of losing another child. All three sons were healthy and all three would ultimately survive her.

As his father had done, Eggo farmed. He and Mary did not have the means to own a farm, but that was not crippling to his pride. His parents had always rented the farms his father managed. Eggo would observe that same pattern throughout his career. When Mary and Eggo became husband and wife, he was in the midst of a two-year stint as a resident hired hand on a farm near Stockton, Jo Daviess County, IL. In the spring of 1937, just before Mary became a mother for the first time, the couple moved to acreage in Loran Township, Stephenson County, west of Freeport. Loran Township was highly rural then and is still so even in the 21st Century, its one incorporated village being Pearl City. Eggo’s employer was Oltman P. Janssen, a middle-aged widower who had chosen to live in the village of Shannon, Carroll County, IL. Mr. Janssen had more than one farm, having acquired extra land as less wealthy neighbors went bankrupt in the harsh economic conditions of the decade. Eggo was therefore not under the thumb of an owner-in-residence and spent large amounts of time unsupervised, able to use his own judgment as situations arose. The Konings remained on the Janssen farm for five years.

The type of farming Eggo was asked to do for the various landowners who employed him was typical of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, i.e. it was general farming, not all that different than what pioneers of the upper Midwest had engaged in, aside from the changes wrought by modern equipment and global systems of distribution. Elsewhere in the nation, an entire farm might be dedicated to a single commodity. Picture corn fields in Iowa, apple orchards in Washington, trays of raisins drying in the California sun. In Loran Township, one would see a patchwork of fields planted in corn, oats, wheat, and hay amid a backdrop of clover pastures, corrals, stands of timber, berry brambles, pig wallows, farmhouses, and outbuildings. Many farms had a small herd of dairy cattle and if enough spare pasture existed, one might see steers grazing, destined to be rendered into beef. It was common to keep a brood sow and bring up a litter of pigs on a regular basis. A few farms had some sheep. Virtually every tenant farm family -- the Konings being no exception -- kept chickens and raised their own garden produce. In terms of agricultural skills, Eggo needed to be adaptable. It was hard work. Eggo was so strong that on an occasion when he helped out his father-in-law and his brother-in-law Ernie doing railroad track maintenance, they asked him to scale back his level of effort because they couldn’t keep up!

Mary had excellent role models to give her a sense of what it was to be a housewife, but she was also a younger child and in the immediate years after the wedding did not have the advantage of living next door to her mother or other female relatives. In particular, she had not quite mastered every aspect of baking. Her first attempt as a new wife to bake a pie was a flop. When Eggo finished his work day and showed up for supper, he found Mary in tears. “I’m never going to make another pie in my life,” she declared. She of course went on to be known by friends, kinfolk, and neighbors as a fine baker, even to a level worthy of county-fair competitions. Whenever someone complimented her on the excellence of one of her pies, Eggo took great satisfaction in reminding her of what she had said on that occasion back in 1936.

Mary persevered with baking. She did not do so with driving. Early in the marriage, at lunchtime, Eggo was busy so far from the house that she decided she was bold enough to drive his lunch out to him, rather than make him trudge all the way back or force herself to hike across the fields with a picnic basket. On the way, while gazing out across the rows trying to spot him, she ran right into a fence post. She was so embarrassed she refused to get behind the wheel again. Many -- even most -- women of her mother’s generation left the driving to their husbands. So it was with Mary. Permanently. Eggo was delighted when their eldest son reached driving age and could serve as a chauffeur to take Mary out when she needed to buy groceries or run errands.

In 1942, Eggo was hired by Webster Drake, another well-to-do landowner who owned more acreage than he could personally manage, and the Konings moved into a house on a Drake parcel near Baileyville, putting Eggo back in terrritory he knew well. Mr. Drake was a good employer, something that was especially important in the troubled period of World War II. He was generous as well, and in the spring of 1944 helped get Eggo set up as a tenant farmer of the Frisbee farm about a mile north, near Florence Station -- which happened to put Mary and Eggo back into Stephenson County. As for this point, Eggo was no longer a hired hand. The yield from the crops and the litters of pigs, et al, belonged to him, minus a share paid to the landowner. This brought Eggo a step closer to being his own boss. It was even better after a 1947 move to the Timmer farm in Ogle County near Forreston. Now Eggo and Mary only had to pay cash rent. Having a predetermined level of overhead meant that if Eggo chose to put in extra effort or if commodity prices happened to rise, the Koning household received the full benefit of that hard work and good luck and no longer had to cough up a percentage to an owner.

(Shown at left is a snapshot of Mary and Eggo and their three grown sons taken in 1976 on the day of the couple’s fortieth wedding anniversary. Unfortunately Mary was caught in the midst of blinking.) The family was based on the Forreston-area farm for five years -- a span equal in length to their tenure on the Janssen farm. Finally in the spring of 1953, Mary and Eggo were able to establish themselves in a truly long-term situation. They began renting from a widow a farm on Edwardsville Road in the southwestern part of Winnebago County, IL. The nearest community (just east of the farm) was Seward. They received their rural mail delivery from the slightly-more-distant village of Pecatonica. At 240 acres, this was the largest farm Eggo ever managed. They would stay for nineteen years. It was where all three surviving kids came of age, and so in a way Seward-Pecatonica was regarded by them in nostalgic terms as “where they were from” -- this applies even to the eldest, who was in high school at the time of the relocation. In some ways it also became the home of Mary’s mother. Lena kept her house in Martintown until the very end of her life, but increasingly throughout the 1950s she often stayed with one or another of her children because she was no longer robust enough to deal with the rigors of maintaining up her own house nor was it a good idea that she be left alone. Mary was the child Lena stayed with more than any other. This remained the case until not long before Lena’s death in 1961.

In 1972, Mary and Eggo had tucked away enough money to buy themselves a good house -- as in, buy it outright for cash, no mortgage involved. Eggo wanted Mary to have the best and it could be fairly said that he made the decision for both of them. Accordingly, they moved in at 1451 S. Rotzler in the city of Freeport. The house was indeed better than any the couple had ever occupied in terms of the criteria a real estate agent might tout -- condition, size, architecture, etc. The problem was that Mary was isolated. As mentioned, she did not drive, so she was stuck at home while Eggo was gone nearly all day every weekday continuing to engage in money-earning gigs despite the semi-retirement. She didn’t know her neighbors, was no longer near the homes of her sons, and grew increasingly lonely. Eggo ultimately agreed that living in Freeport just would not do, so in 1982, they purchased and moved into a house within the village of Seward, not far from the farm where they had once lived, and close enough to family members that Mary need not feel guilty about calling up one local teenaged granddaughter or another on short notice to take her shopping.

Eggo liked being active and being useful and kept working into his elder years, despite complaints such as back pain. He would say the one time his back did not hurt was when he was on a tractor or in his pick-up or riding his Cub Cadet lawnmower. During the Freeport years he often did farm work for Delmar Kampen, who happened to own the very farm on which Eggo had spent some of his childhood. For about a year during this period, he was employed as a courier for a Freeport bank -- a rare non-farm gig. After the move back to Seward, one of his regular employers was Roland Poppen, owner of the farm next door to the one Eggo and Mary had occupied from 1953 to 1972.

In the 1990s, Mary and Eggo both reached a point where age and frailty might have forced them to enter an old-folks facility. However, their eldest son, now a widower, and his grown daughter made a concerted effort to allow the couple to remain in their home. This was only possible thanks to in-home visits by professional caregivers, and ultimately that forced their son to mortgage their home to generate enough funding to cover the cost. The measures were however enough that Mary never had to move out, except in the sense that at the very end, she was admitted to Freeport Memorial Hospital, where she passed away 23 April 2000 at age ninety.

By the time he became a widower, Eggo was fading fast, and he would not make it to ninety himself. His last months were spent as a resident of Neighbors Nursing Home in Byron, Ogle County, IL, where he perished 17 December 2000. The grave of the couple is at North Grove Zion Reformed Cemetery, marked by a shared headstone, located in the large Koning family section that includes the grave of little Lois Elaine Koning.

Descendants of Mary Hilda Hastings with Eggo Koning

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