Anna Dickson, McLean County
Anna Dickson (1881 - 1973) was born in Liverpool England and came to America with her mother, Jane, on November 23, 1883. She had three brothers, Alexander, Thomas and William and was just three years old. The family thinks that perhaps that Thomas, Jane's father, was already in the States, because he was not on the "SS Nevada" when it came to New York harbor. Seeing the Statue of Liberty was an emotional moment for the young Anna, and one she did not forget. Eleven years later Anna was placed on a train for Illinois and ended up in Randolph, Illinois. Anna's descendants know part of her story, and I learned it from Anna's own daughter, Hazel, who is 103 years young. (Thank you, thank you, I can't express how thrilled I was to meet Hazel!)
Jane Dickson, Anna's mother died soon after the family arrived in New York in 1883, beginning a chain of events that would separate Anna from her father and brothers. But Jane was well enough to have this photo taken in New York at some point, and Anna managed to keep the photo throughout her life and must have treasured it.
Hazel had a photo of Anna that Anna had marked as being herself at age 16, but it looks more as if she was eight or ten years old. She came to Illinois at age 14, starting off in Kankakee, according to the family. Eventually, Anna was indentured to the Fisher family in Randolph, where she would put down roots and spend the rest of her life with her large family.
But Anna did not complete her indenture -- because she was married on October 9, 1897, less than three years after she arrived in Illinois and a year before she would legally be released from her indenture. Her husband was William C. Smith, a farmer from a farm just one field away from the Fisher's farm. Anna's letter hints that her guardians, the Fishers, were less than generous to her, but marriage to William seemed to have made up for any slights in the past. She was a very happy new bride, and her family says Anna was a very happy woman with her William!
Anna and William had nine children, only five of whom were living when Anna died at the age of 91 on June 5, 1973. Her first son died of brain fever at the age of six months, and three other sons died as adults. Her children who were living in 1973 all lived in Heyworth or Leroy, and she had many grandchildren. Sadly, her husband had died in 1965.
As seen in her letter, Anna's father was still living when she came West. All of Anna's brothers stayed in New York and although Anna never visited New York they kept in contact. Anna was visited once by the daughter of one of her brothers.
When Hazel was born Anna developed a condition called milk leg, which troubled her the rest of her life. The first six months of Hazel's life Anna was bed ridden with milk leg and her eleven year old daughter, Florence, had to take care of the entire family during that time. Anna's leg had to be bandaged every day of her life after Hazel's birth, until it was finally healed two years before her death. Hazel never complained of her medical problems, but just kept on cheerfully enjoying her life.
Hazel remembered her mother always telling her children to forget about arguments with each other, "because tomorrow will be another day." Hazel didn't hold onto her worries -- her granddaughter said that she never saw Anna upset or angry over anything. Anna loved to sing and was often called upon to sing at celebrations and meetings as a soloist or with Hazel. They both loved singing, and Anna taught Hazel a song she had learned in New York -- the "I had but Fifty Cents" song. Anna wrote down all the songs she knew in a tablet. (Hazel sang this song for me when I visited her!)
Hazel's father's favorite form of entertainment was to go to the stockyards in Bloomington, so Hazel would drive them all in the family car, (which she thought was a Model T). William would stay at the stockyards, and Anna and Hazel would go to the Montgomery Wards on Center Street until they judged the auction was over.
Anna and William had a rather small farm of twenty acres, but they raised a family of eight children on the farm, growing and preserving their own food and selling milk and crops. William used large draft horses to till the soil, and Anna had the chickens she had dreamed of for eggs and meat. Hazel recalled milking the cows twice a day and preparing the milk for the dairy company to pick up the large milkcan every morning. She described stirring it to remove the animal heat from the milk and then storing the can in a barrel buried in the cool ground until it was picked up. Hazel also helped to take care of her grandmother, who lived with her son's family for many years.
Anna's family is curious as to what was happening to her between the time she arrived in the United States and the time she came to Illinois. Today we cannot imagine the conditions in which immigrants lived in New York. They lived in tiny two room apartments which they shared with boarders and other families to make ends meet.Without a mother, the children would be left in this tiny apartment, or pushed out of the apartment during the day because occupants would often sleep in shifts. Once Anna's brothers began to work (at a very young age), she would have been alone, or working herself, and her father may have decided that a working life in New York was not what he wanted for his daughter. The West, with its clean air and wide open spaces seemed a better option to the parents of Orphan Train riders -- if they couldn't live in a clean place with plenty of food, perhaps through sacrificing their own feelings, the parents could give their children a better life.
Anna told her family that she lived in Kankakee for a short time after arriving in Illinois and then came to Randolph, but she did not talk much about her experiences as an Orphan Train rider or life at the Asylum. She knew that she was living a good life in the present and did not worry about the past, as she so often instructed her children to do. Still, the family wondered why the place Anna came from was called an asylum -- a term that has less than happy connotations now -- we have to remember that for the Victorians, "asylum" meant a safe place, a haven, like the haven that Anna and William built together on their little farm in McLean County.
