Edith Cicel Tibbetts

1877 - 1975  (97 years)

• Name	Edith Cicel Tibbetts
  Birth	12 Dec 1877	New Hartford Township, Winona County, Minnesota, USA   [1]
  Gender	Female
  _UID	2CF0A656919E435FA96C5B780D494C2B9E55
  Death	1 Jan 1975	La Crescent, Houston County, Minnesota, USA   [2]
  Burial	New Hartford Township, Winona County, Minnesota, USA, Dakota Village, Dakota "Brown" Cemetery
  Person ID	I453	Larry and Jane's Family Tree
  Last Modified	18 Feb 2016

  
  

  Father	Oliver Whitfield Tibbetts,   b. 28 Dec 1853, Mt. Vernon, Linn County, Iowa, USA d. 27 Dec 1941, New Hartford Township, Winona County, Minnesota, USA, Dakota Village (Age 87 years)
  Mother	Alice Mary Wilson,   b. 27 Sep 1855, New Hartford Township, Winona County, Minnesota, USA, Dakota Village d. 24 Sep 1885, New Hartford Township, Winona County, Minnesota, USA, Dakota Village (Age 29 years)
  Marriage	27 Dec 1874  [1]
  Family ID	F94	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	William Jacob Stanton,   b. 4 Oct 1875, , Rice County, Minnesota, USA d. 31 Aug 1952, , Winona County, Minnesota, USA (Age 76 years)
  Marriage	24 Jun 1904
  Children	1. Donald W. Stanton,   b. 14 Apr 1905   d. 25 Jun 1975 (Age 70 years)   2. Welford Lewis Stanton,   b. 24 May 1907, , Winona County, Minnesota, USA d. 8 Jul 1986, La Crescent, Houston County, Minnesota, USA (Age 79 years)
  Family ID	F240	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	27 Jul 2019

  
  

• Event Map

  Birth - 12 Dec 1877 - New Hartford Township, Winona County, Minnesota, USA Death - 1 Jan 1975 - La Crescent, Houston County, Minnesota, USA Burial - - New Hartford Township, Winona County, Minnesota, USA, Dakota Village, Dakota "Brown" Cemetery  = Link to Google Earth

  
  

• Notes

  From the Winona Sunday News, Sunday, December 10, 1967, page 7A: She Stayed in House Despite Bulldozers By RUTH ROGERS Sunday News Area Editor LAMOILLE, Minn. - A for­mer Daily and Sunday News correspondent will be 90 years old Tuesday. If this newspaper were still publishing neighborhood news columns, Mrs. Edith Stanton might still be wilting for us from Richmond as she did for 25 years, but when the Winona Republican-Herald, forerunner of today's publication, discon­tinued the “local” news items in 1945, she resigned. THIS PRETTY little woman, however, could write a book about her experiences and those of her family. Her alert mind remembers everything about her forebears, the Tibbetts and Wilsons, without a glance at the manuscripts and letters that tell the same story. Words tumble out about her experiences as a 16-year-old star route mail carrier; about Cou­sin Luther who raised the first seedless (navel) oranges that made millionaires of California growers overnight; the 200 pounds of shelled nuts she sold each season; of being routed from her home by highway building; of 16 people all sick with smallpox in a tiny pio­neer home. She'll pause from her house­work-she lives alone and does her own cleaning and cooking-to sing all nine verses of a song written a century ago by a Tibbetts who left “Old Buck-eve” (Ohio) and sailed up the Mississippi River in a boat that “rang her bell at Catlin in the Minnesota Valley, the beauty of the West.” She'll bring out an old violin her father played. It's a Joseph Guarnerius, made in Italy in 1715. “Ole Bull (famous vio­linist) played a Guarnerius,” she'll have you to know. It's said only seven were made; Oliver Tibbetts picked it up from a blacksmith in Dakota. SHE NOT only knows the eastern part of Winona County, where she lives, but the west­ern part, too; she taught school at Lewiston and St. Charles. The former Edith Cicel Tib­betts, she was born Dec. 12, 1887, on a 60-acre farm in Da­kota Valley, New Hartford Township. to Oliver W. and Mary Alice Wilson Tibbetts. “My second name isn't Cecil,” she explained; “it's Cicel; the pronunciation is on the second syllable, with a long e.” The Tibbetts name is derived from the occupation of tip­pet making, a popular employ­ment in medieval days when tippets were worn by both sexes in the highest ranks of life, even by royalty. The tippet, a hat with a long scarf or tassel, has found its way into modern life; knitted versions of a similar type are popular among the younger set. VERSIONS OF her family name run far back in history, but the first of the Tibbetts from whom Edith is directly descended came to New Eng­land from old England in 1635 and have fought in all the wars of this land. The first of the family to come west settled in Ohio in 1807, in Indiana in 1816, in Iowa in 1843, and in Dakota, Minn., in 1847. Jeremiah Tibbetts of Waver­ly, Bremer County, Iowa, came to Southeastern Minnesota when he was 17 with his friends, the Dakotah Indians, who asked him to accompany them as in­terpreter. They camped on the present site of Dakota, which Jeremiah named for redskins. He built a shack, transported provisions up the Mississippi by Canoe from Prairie du Chien, and started a trading post, In 1848 Jeremiah accompa­nied the Indians to St. Paul. By this time he could speak six Indian dialects. Alexander Ram­say, territorial governor. sent him into the Big Wood country in Iowa to negotiate an agree­ment with hostile Indians. At first they were inclined to kill any messenger from the gov­ernor, but as they had known Jeremiah as a boy they agreed to accompany him to St. Paul; but before they left they held a dance in his honor. JEREMIAH stayed In St. Paul until 1849, then sold his land in the center of the preseant city and trekked back to Dakota with two yoke of oxen and a span of horses. At Dakota he found a trader, Peleau, in possession of his hut and repossessed it. Nathan Brown, who had settled north of him that year, was his only neighbor. This energetic and restless young man worked on the riv­er, in 1853 took a quarter sec­tion of land on the ridge south­west of Dakota which was called Tibbett's Hill and later Mark's Hill, and the same year married Catherine Isabel Mayn­ard (accent on the last syl­lable), whose French Canadian family came from Ottawa and settled at Dresbach. Theirs was the first wedding in Dresbach. He took his bride to Mt. Vernon, Iowa, to live with relatives, and there their son, Oliver, Mrs. Stanton's fa­ther, was born. JEREMIAH'S father, George, the first of the Tibbetts to come to Iowa, had followed his son to Dakota Valley in 1850 and took up a farm south of where George Zenke now lives. Jere­miah was back in Dakota look­ing after his holdings when smallpox broke out in the set­tlement where his family was staying. When the head of the household died, he went back to get his family and the remain­ing four relatives, bringing them up the Mississippi on the Gray Eagle which landed at La Crescent, and thence to the house 16 by 20 feet that George had built. The smallpox came with them, and the 16 people living in this tiny house fell ill. George died there in 1855 at 56, and one of the children from Iowa died. They were buried on the hillside hack of the house, where panthers, common in those days, molested their little cemetery. The others recovered, and Dr. Lynch of Winona took Jere­miah's wife with him on his rounds to help other victims of the pox since she now was im­mune. LATER THE hillside coffins were moved to the Wilson Cemetery in Dakota Valley, land which was donated by James Wilson, who had mar­ried Sarah Brown, sister of Na­than Brown. The cemetery is still there, bypassed by new I-90 grading. James Wilson was the father of Alice Wilson, later Mrs. Oliver Tibbetts and of Dr. Clar­ence Wilson, who became a doctor at Dakota. Dr. T. H. Wilson, retired Winona physici­an now living at Catlin's Rock, Richmond Township is a son of Dr. Clarence Wilson. By 1881 Oliver Tibbetts had purchased lots from Nathan Brown in Dakota, which he had platted, and built a home. There his wife died at 29 a few months after giving birth to her fourth child. Edith Cicel was then seven years old. Edith attended the Dakota school, took the teacher's exam­ination at the courthouse in Winona under Supt. L. V. Wil­bur. and taught in the Firth District, Lewiston; Koepsel District north of St. Charles near Elba; Dick School on the ridge above Dakota; two years in the primary school at Dakota, and was teaching at the Richmond school when she coaxed a handsome young man named William Jacob Stanton to play the violin at school programs, EDITH AND young Stanton were married June 25, 1904. They first lived in Miller's Valley west of the present Twin Bluffs Motel on the farm his father, Lewis Stanton, had set-tied in 1887. It remained in the family until this year when it was sold to Franklin Krause of Winona. Edith's experiences, closely linked with roads, began when she was 16; occasionally she covered her father's 26-mile star mail route with a horse and buggy. The long day began at 8:45 a.m. at the Dakota post office. First stop, Ashton station on the right to the south-west. Second stop, Ridgeway, where she rested and fed her horse and ate her packed lunch. Third stop New Hartford, and then back to Dakota by 6 p.m. In 1910 Edith and her husband moved onto a farm fronting the Mississippi River a short distance southeast of Millers Valley. The first dirt road the built up Mississippi River Valley in 1854 ran through their farm just under the Twin Bluffs; signs of it still are vis­ible on the property where she lives. THEIR berry-growing and pasture farm began disappear­ing in the early 1920s when the state paid them $500 an acre for 2½ acres of frontage along the river for the first two-lane concrete slab from La Crescent to Winona - U.S. 61. Mr. Stanton, Richmond Town clerk 28 years, winner of achievement awards for sale of Liberty Bonds during World War I and for serving on the Selective Service Board in World War II, did not live to see the rest of the land taken for the four-lane highway; he died of a heart attack in l952. Through some misunderstand­ing the road graders moved onto her land before it had been purchased and Mrs. Stanton re­fused to leave her home even though the earth-moving ma­chinery roared around her and she was left literally high and dry. When she finally settled for $25 000, she climbed down out of her back door on a lad­der Sept. 6, 1957, and went to live with her sons until her lit­tle home on the service road, at the foot of King's Bluff, was ready. THE DAYS when she sold carefully packed sacks of nut-meats at Kindts, Dorn's and Pletke's groceries and to individuals like Judge Loobv in Winona and to the Bodega restaurant m La Crosse are over but not forgotten. She's busy writing Christmas notes to relatives and friends all over the country. There are Tibbetts in Portland. Ore.; grandfather George's brother, Gideon, lived here. Gideon and Mary streets are named for him and his wife, and Tibbetts Street bisects the Waverly-Richmond District named for him and perhaps for that Wav­erly in Iowa and Richmond in Winona County. One of Edith's favorite stories is about Luther Tibbett, who like her father, was a seventh generation descendant from the Henry Tibbett who came to this country in 1635. FROM HIS FARM in what is now Riverside. Calif., he drove horses 65 miles to Los Angeles in December 1873, to get a small parcel containing three little orange trees which the U.S. Department of Agriculture had secured from Bahia, Brazil. for experimental purposes. Luther got them be­cause his wife was a relative of Gen. Butler in Congress. Luther planted them beside his cabin. One was chewed up by a cow. By 1877, the other two each bore two oranges-the first seedless oranges grown outside the Amazon swamps. This started what has been called the most remarkable real estate boom in the history of this country; land which had gone begging at $30 an acre sold readily at $800 to $l,000 an acre for the planting of the new crop. The two parent trees plant­ed by Tibbetts now are fenced in on the grounds of Mission Inn, Riverside. With them is a marker telling the story and bearing the Tibbetts name. MRS. STANTON has two sons: Donald W., Lamoille, maintenance foreman with the state Highway Department, and Welford, also employed by the state Highway, who lives near Queen's Bluff. She has five grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. Donald's sons are Robert L., La Crescent, diesel engineer with Kertzman Dredging, La­moille, and Tom W., lineman with Northern States Power Co., Winona. Welford has three children: Bruce, Winona County deputy sheriff; Richard, teacher at Washington-Kosciusko school, Winona, and Mrs. Rolland (Jean) Smith, Dakota. Wearing a hearing aid does­n't bother this sprightly woman who'll be 90 this week; she has a loud speaker on her tele­vision set. She's had a cataract removed from one eye but sees handily through her magnified glasses. She's worried a bit about her high blood pressure. but nothing interferes with her interest in life and her good spirits.

  
  

• Sources

  [S33] Portrait & Biographical Record. [S511] Minnesota Death Index, 24 Mar 2005 (Reliability: 3).