Nathaniel Martin

Nathaniel Martin, first of the four children of Horatio Woodman Martin and Laura Martha Ann Hart, was born 21 October 1885 in Martintown, Green County, WI. He was one of several grandchildren of village founder Nathaniel Martin to be named after the prominent patriarch, but was the only one who bore both his first name and surname. In this biography he is referred to as Nate to conveniently distinguish him from his namesake. It was a nickname he was often known by -- he is even described as Nate Martin in newspaper articles. He was also sometimes called Nathan and was known affectionately to his elders and peers as Natie. However, it should be mentioned that he did not use any of the shortened forms on official documents. On those, his name is consistently rendered as Nathaniel Martin. He did not, by the way, have a middle name. (The lack of one is specifically noted on his World War II-era draft card.) In this he was again like his grandfather.

Nate spent his whole childhood in Martintown in a house next door to grandparents Nathaniel and Hannah Strader Martin. During this time his father was the main boss of the Martin family flour mill. His siblings came into the world at a somewhat leisurely rate and he did not get to enjoy having them as contemporaries, but Martintown was well stocked with first cousins almost precisely his age. He and they attended the Martin School, located right across the Pecatonica River from his home. (He is surely one of the pupils in the Martin School class photograph on the webpage devoted to scenes of Martintown, though he has only been tentatively identified in that image. Click here to go straight to the page.) He probably did not attend high school. His younger siblings would go to Winslow High School a little south over the state border in Stephenson County, IL. Nate would ultimately have an extensive association with Winslow High. His children would attend. He himself would serve on the institution’s board of trustees. However, when he was the right age to be a student, the school had not quite been founded.

Several Martintown-based relatives of his generation, upon finishing eighth grade locally, went on to state normal schools or to business schools or even to universities in Chicago. But Nate was among those who chose to go to work straight off. At sixteen he was hired by Illinois Central Railroad. This was one of the main employers of young men of the area and he would have a connection to the company until he was an old man. However, in the short term, the situation was not especially gainful. He was little more than a day laborer. He was part of a track-maintenance “section gang” -- which is to say, he spent quite a bit of each shift with his hands wrapped around the handle of a shovel or a maul. It was not glamorous work and was about as menial as could be -- the sort of thing done by convicts in other parts of the nation. He was content to give up the independence it represented and switch to a job back home, even if it meant his days were once again spent within “apron string” proximity to his parents. He became a worker at the creamery in Martintown. This business was housed in a building right in the midst of the village and directly across from the family homes and the mills and only a short walk from Martin School. His boss was Thomas Devlin, a brother-in-law of Elwood Bucher, the widower of Nate’s late aunt Mary Lincoln “Tinty” Martin. (The creamery is shown at right. This photo -- which unfortunately had to be scanned from a photocopy of a faded print -- appears to have been taken in the early 1900s, i.e. the very period when Nate worked there. He may be one of the people you see standing in front of the structure.)

In approximately 1904, the family acquired new neighbors, the Bolenders, consisting of Allen F. Bolender, his wife Martha Z. (probably for Zada) Black, and their children Kittie and Robert. Allen was part of the pioneering Bolender clan of Rock Grove Township not far south of Martintown in Stephenson County. Martha (aka Mattie) was a daughter of John Andrew Black and Charlotte Tryphena Lathrop, long-time residents of Cadiz Township about a mile north of Martintown, where they had been close neighbors of Nate’s great-grandparents John Hart and Ruth Marsh. Allen became a butter maker at the Martintown creamery, assisting Thomas Devlin. The stage was set for Nate to get to know the new arrivals, and before long, he and Kittie B. Bolender developed a liking for one another. They were married 1 Jun 1905. (Allen Bolender’s name appears as Bolander in many public sources. It is possible that up through Allen’s generation, and back in Germany, the name was spelled that way. However, Kittie herself used the Bolender version when she signed her marriage certificate, and that example has been followed here. Her middle name is almost sure to have been Black but this has yet to be directly documented.)

The wedding took place at the county offices in Freeport, Stephenson County, IL, and was conducted by a Freeport justice of the peace. That may have been because the couple were determined to “get it done” before anyone told them they couldn’t. There was in fact an obvious reason why maybe the marriage wasn’t a good idea -- at least not one done so precipitously. Kittie’s birthdate was 19 September 1891. A quick bit of arithmetic reveals that even though the groom claimed on the license application to be twenty-two years old and the bride claimed to be seventeen, the reality was that they were nineteen and thirteen. Thirteen seems awfully young to those of us looking back from the perspective of the 21st Century. Although we all realize social mores were different then (though not that different, or they would have been truthful about their ages), it is all too easy to worry that Kittie may have been coerced by her much-older suitor -- that she may have been led into a union that left her at his mercy due to her lack of savvy and worldliness. To address that concern head on, it should be noted that Kittie and Nate’s life together began in a highly chaperoned way. Her parents and younger brother Robert lived with the young couple over the next few years. This is evidenced by the Wisconsin state census for 1 June 1905 (the same date as the wedding), which not only shows these family members as co-occupants, but reveals that Nate and Kittie were living next door to his parents and widowed grandmother Hannah -- no doubt in one of several houses owned by the Martin family. In the 1910 Federal Census, Nate and Kittie’s household still includes Mattie Bolender, by then a divorcée. (She would soon marry second husband James M. Cunningham.) So Kittie was no abandoned waif. She and Nate did not have offspring until she was seventeen and a half. In coming to the marriage at not quite fourteen, she was only slightly exaggerating the example set by her mother-in-law Laura, who had been fifteen when she married Horatio Martin, and by her mother. Mattie had been seventeen when she married Allen Bolender.

Six months before Nate and Kitte’s wedding, Nate’s namesake grandfather had died of old age. This was only the first of a number of transformative occurrences to descend upon Martintown over the span from 1905 to 1907. Nate was there to witness the whole series. Two that affected him in a particularly close fashion were 1) the death of his father from tuberculosis in the spring of 1906, and 2) the marriage of his mother to Elwood Bucher in the spring of 1907. Thanks to the latter development, Elwood was suddenly not just Nate’s uncle, but his stepfather, too. It is perhaps significant that it was at this juncture that Nate chose to head out again into the world beyond his tiny home village. He and Kittie relocated to Freeport. This community -- the seat of Stephenson County -- was rapidly acquiring a solid array of factories and it is likely Nate was counting on that activity to ensure employment. And indeed, he may have picked up some hours for a few weeks at one place or another. In weighing his career options, though, he decided he would give Illinois Central Railroad another chance to do right by him. In Martintown, he had occasionally filled in at the Martintown depot for regular stationmaster E.B. Lund (Edwin Boyington Lund) -- for example over Christmas, 1905. This was proof he was good at depot work. That, along with a recommendation letter from E.B. Lund, and was probably instrumental in landing him a position in the transportation department. No more riding the rails to hard-labor worksites as a member of a section gang. He could stay put in far more comfortable circumstances.

Nate’s duties included selling tickets, helping load luggage, assisting passengers on-and-off the trains, but most important, he was a telegrapher. In many small communities, the only place to obtain telegraphic services was at a train depot. Railroad telegraphers and their function were part of the glue that kept American society going on a day-by-day basis, and the income springing from telegraphy was one of the main reasons railroad companies bothered to staff their smaller depots throughout the day -- they would otherwise have made do with employees who rode the trains. Thus far not enough people in the nation had telephones to render telegraphy superfluous. This was true even though telephone service was beginning to gain a foothold in the hinterlands. For example, the first telephones in Martintown had been installed in April, 1905, even as Nate and Kittie were in the midst of their courtship. But calls depended upon human operators sitting at every exchange and the fees for both installation and the calls themselves was prohibitive. To use Martintown again as an example, less than a dozen phones were in place by 1907. Among them was the unit in the village general store that the proprietor, Nate’s first cousin John Martin Warner, kept on the premises as a means to lure in customers. Illinois Central was confident it would have the need for plenty of station agents for a long time to come, and so they were glad to offer Nate a job. This time he did not walk away. In 1957, he would be among eighty-two I.C.R.R. employees who reached their fifty-years-of-steady-employment mark and were honored with special pins and treated to a luncheon reception in Chicago.

His first major posting as a station agent was in the Bloomington area in the heart of Illinois. Nate worked at the depot in the small suburb of Kerrick, slightly north of Bloomington and that town is where the family lived, though they appear to have had at least two addresses during this phase of their lives and the first house, judging by the 1910 census, was actually located within the adjacent suburb of Normal. The young couple spent less than ten years in McLean County, but the place looms somewhat large in a genealogical sense because the sojourn there just about completely covers the period when their kids were being born. Nate and Kittie had four children altogether -- Kenneth Nathaniel Martin, Roscoe Maxwell Martin (known as Max), Alice Zada Martin, and Katherine Eunice Martin (known as Katy). It could be all four were born in Kerrick, though the best-guess scenario is that Katy was not. Katy was born in late 1916. By that time, the family had probably aready come back north. Probably at his request, I.C.R.R. had reassigned Nate to his home region. He served briefly at a depot in southeastern Wisconsin along the Dodgeville line, or perhaps at more than one along that stretch. This was followed by another brief assignment to the depot at the tiny hamlet of Scioto Mills in the woods north of Freeport. Both postings would have served to remind him he was getting close to home -- one of the track supervisors along the Dodgeville line was Frank Hastings, husband of his first cousin Lena Brown, and Scioto Mills had been the place of residence of some of his Warner first cousins in the first few years of the Twentieth Century. However, by no later than the summer of 1918 -- as confirmed by his World War I draft card, filed 12 September 1918, Nate assumed his role as the stationmaster at the depot in the Stephenson County village of McConnell, a few miles southeast of Winslow and Martintown.

It was during the period when his kids were high school age that Nate was motivated to become a trustee of the board of directors of Winslow High. He held that post from 1925 to 1931. He had plenty of cause to want the school to be well run. Not only were his own kids there during those years, but so were his nephews Leon and Lyle Smith and the offspring of his first cousin and step-brother, the late Dr. Claude Earl Bucher, plus some of the children of his first cousin Lena Brown Hastings and the youngest daughter of his first cousin Emma Warner Hastings. Altogether the extended Martin-Strader clan accounted for over a tenth of the student body.

The family stayed in McConnell through the mid-1930s. By that point, the boom times of the railroad industry were fading. Roads and trucks had come to handle most short-distance freight hauling, and automobiles most passenger transport. More critical to the fate of small depots was that the American public had embraced telephones as their default means of quick communication over long distances, and depot telegraph offices were no longer needed. As a consequence, depots were closed. It happened at Martintown in 1936. In some cases even the tracks between smaller communities began to be pulled up. This happened at McConnell after its depot was closed in 1941. Nate must have seen the writing on the wall and accepted a transfer to Orangeville in 1935, 1936, or 1937. Fortunately Orangeville was only a few miles to the northeast of McConnell, and almost due east of Winslow, and still in Stephenson County. The relocation was therefore a relatively small adjustment as far as things went, made easier by the fact that Kenneth was already out of the house and, as far as can be determined, so was Max.

Nate and Kittie continued to reside in Orangeville until the very end of their lives. Nate’s twice-widowed mother Laura came to the community at about the same time they did along with her third husband Henry Hopkins. When Henry passed away, Laura and her fourth husband Samuel Heise also made Orangeville their place of residence. Laura died in 1947.

Even in Nate and Kittie’s old age, they had the companionship of offspring in their daily lives. In the mid-1920s, at age eight, their youngest daughter Katy suffered brain damage as a result of scarlet fever and could never live an independent life. She therefore stayed with her parents until they died -- and in fact remained in the Orangeville house even after their deaths, until she came down with the cancer that took her life in the mid-1980s. Nate and Kittie’s other daughter Alice also lived with them from 1943 onward, after being on her own for a few years in her late twenties. Alice was a single mother and her child was raised in that same home.

Nate suffered from emphysema for the final five years of his life and this ultimately led to his demise at St. Francis Hospital in Freeport, Stephenson County, IL during the wee hours of 20 May 1960. Kittie survived him, passing away 7 February 1963 of cardiac arrest following removal of a cancerous thyroid gland. Her death also took place in Freeport, but at Freeport Memorial Hospital. The graves of both husband and wife are to be found at Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens of Freeport.

The Nathaniel Martin/Kittie Bolender family. From left to right, Katherine Eunice “Katy” Martin, Kenneth Nathaniel Martin, Kittie B. Bolender Martin, Nathaniel Martin, Alice Zada Martin, and Roscoe Maxwell “Max” Martin. This photograph appears to have been taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

Children of Nathaniel Martin with Kittie B. Bolender

Kenneth Nathaniel Martin

Roscoe Maxwell Martin

Alice Zada Martin

Katherine Eunice Martin

To go back one generation, click here. To return to the Martin/Strader Family main page, click here.