Pre-Clan Munson: Tuttle Madness and Mayhem

Reenactment of settler colony

CAPT THOMAS MUNSON > HANNAH MUNSON m. Joseph Tuttle

This tale is of one of the two daughters of Capt Thomas Munson, Hannah Munson. She married into the storied Tuttle family of Massachusetts.

Hannah was the youngest child of Capt Thomas Munson, one of the earliest citizens of the New Haven Colony and a signator of the Fundamental Agreement of the New Haven Colony signed in 1639 and 1640. Hannah's future father-in-law, immigrant William Tuttle was also a signator. 

On 02 May 1667, Joseph Tuttle married Hannah in New Haven. His parents, William and Elizabeth, had come from England in 1635 on the ship Planter. I'm not quite sure Hannah knew what she was getting into marrying into this family, but she had at least nine children by Joseph. Joseph came from a large family, including sisters Mercy, Elizabeth, and brother Benjamin. 

Hannah's brother-in-law Benjamin got into a huge argument with his older sister Sarah, wife of John Slauson, on 17 Nov 1676. Benjamin shouted at her about her behavior from years before when Sarah and a young man were fined for kissing by the local magistrate. The story was somewhat longer, but it was scandalous to touch each other and oh, my goodness, kiss in those Puritan days. Was it a temper tantrum or madness that caused Benjamin to grab an ax and strike his sister until she was dead. Sarah left a baby girl and a bereft husband. Benjamin was tried and executed on 16 Jun 1677.

Sister Elizabeth married Richard Edwards in 1667. It is reported that the couple was fined because their first child arrived before the requisite nine months. The couple had many more children but after 20 years of marriage, Richard began to plan on a divorce.  He apparently discovered the first child was not his. He filed divorce and it was granted. Elizabeth was said to have gone mad and disappeared from the area, whereabouts and disposition unknown.

Mercy had married Samuel Brown of Wallingford in 1667 and they had children, included Samuel Brown, Jr. On 23 Jun 1691, Mercy inexplicably took an ax and struck her son three times in the head. He lingered some six days before succumbing to his injuries. At trial, the husband denied there was any sign of mental illness in Mercy, but neighbors and even Brown's son Joseph had seen odd behavior and language for some time before the murder. She was, however, found guilty and not insane at trial in Oct 1691 and was sentenced to death. Fortunately for Mercy, a strange confluence of events occurred, and she was saved from the executioner. She survived until at least 1695, most likely in a madhouse.

Watsonville Business District

Generations would pass and the Tuttles would survive and thrive. If there were further incidents, they were not saved for posterity. Some Tuttles moved to Morris, New Jersey and then on to Washington County, Pennsylvania, and then to Richland County, Ohio. 

Daniel Tuttle and his wife, Phebe Case, were married 21 Nov 1786 in Washington County, Pennsylvania. They had at least seven children, including son Hiram. Hiram and his family went west Iowa, settling in Van Horn County. 

Several of the Hiram Tuttle children went on to California and practiced in their various occupations. 

Morris Burns Tuttle hit the Pajaro Valley and purchased 300 acres and began raising fruit trees and farming hops for beer with one of his brothers. The Pacific Ocean has only the Santa Cruz Mountains between our Tuttles and the surf.

Morris Tuttle Mansion

Brother Iowa Tuttle also joined this endeavor. He was married with children. According to his brother Morris, he had talked about suicide before, so when Iowa did commit suicide in one of the outbuildings on the Morris Tuttle Mansion grounds in 1913, it was reportedly no surprise to Morris. Iowa loved his wife and children and many did not think his financial woes rose to the level of suicide. The thing was, Iowa had been shot twice in the head. The police talked to Morris quite seriously because  it was mighty odd that Iowa was able to fire two bullets into his head before dying, making it all quite suspicious. In the end, Iowa's death was declared a suicide by the coroner. Whether that had anything to do with Morris' affluence, we will never know.

Finally, cousin William Tuttle came down to Santa Cruz County from Rocklin, California in 1911 to stay in Morris' carriage house while he worked out his marital difficulties with his wife Hazel. Hazel was his first cousin and the couple had been wildly in love - at least until their marriage. It was downhill from there, despite the fact they were new parents of daughter Alice. William, a former employee of Southern Pacific railroad, had been unemployed for months. As the New Year of 1912 loomed, he returned home from Santa Cruz County, bought the baby some belated Christmas presents, talked to his wife in the kitchen, and after following her to the bedroom, shot her dead with two shots to the heart. He then shot himself. The baby was found unharmed.

Morris built a beautiful mansion in in south Santa Cruz County in 1899 that still exists today as a private residence. There are those who say the mansion is filled with the ghosts of Iowa and all the Morris Tuttle descendants who would die tragically young. 

Sources:

1. Babe Smiles at Tragedy, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, California, 31 Dec 1911, p 6
2. Trainman Kills Wife and Self, Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, California, 30 Dec 1911, p 1
3. Divorce, Murder, and Madness: The Puritan Tuttles of New Haven Colony, New England Historical Society, 2017
4. Tuttle Mansion: a haunted piece of history, The Pajoronian, by Johanna Miller, 30 Oct 2017
5. Haunted Santa Cruz, by Marianne Porter, History Press, 2016
6. Biography of William Tuttle, Access Genealogy
7. Had Threatened Suicide Before Saturday's Act, Santa Cruz Evening News, 30 Jun 1913, Mon, p 2
8. Widow of Late Iowa Tuttle is Left the Estate, Santa Cruz Evening News, 23 Jul 1913, Wed, p 1
9. A Brutal Murder, Ava Chamberlain, NYU Press, 2012

More Coopery: George Emrick & Family

AMOS COOPER > CHALKELY JARED COOPER, SR >  MARGARET ANNA "ANNIE"

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COOPER m George Emrick

You can read earlier information about Alice here. The Emrick's resided in Stephenson County, Illinois when George and Annie married. In 1892, the couple, joined other Cooper relations in Seward, Nebraska. George plied a variety of businesses, among them a restaurant and later, a long-lasting florist shop he opened in 1917. In 1914, his wife Annie had died, leaving son Bert and daughter Cora Alice "Alice" along with her husband to carry on without her. Bert (b. 13 Aug 1879) and Alice (b. 03 Oct 1882) had both been born in Stephenson County, Illinois.

George was named Justice of the Peace by the county and Justice of Police by the City of Seward in 1917. He seemed to keep busy. The family was fairly well off, owning a 9-room home in town. Alice worked as a clerk for one of the county superintendents, EH Koch, who also encouraged her and put her forth for the additional job as County Truant and Attendance Officer for Seward County in 1923. Nice of him, since she got no more pay for the extra work. Long a spinster woman, Alice surprised the townsfolk when she married widower Ira Moler, a man from Litchfield, who once lived near Bee in Seward County, but now farmed in the western side of the state. The wedding took place in Seward 01 Sep 1926 in Seward, with JP G. A. Emrick, her father, presiding as officiant.

The couple took off for Litchfield and spent a lot of time visiting Seward. On 31 Oct 1927, Ira was walking back from town to the Emrick residence when he fell over dead of a heart attack. He was predeceased by his first wife, Vada Church, and was survived by his daughter Ruby Margaret Deifenbach.

In May of 1927, Alice's brother Bert and his family made the big decision to head West, packing up and moving to Glendale, Los Angeles, California. Almost immediately after their arrival, their youngest daughter Marion became gravely ill and remained ill for many months. Soon after their removal, George and Alice made their first steps to moving west themselves.

In June 1927, George sold off the fixtures of his floral shop and retired. Alice and George held a sale of their property and in November, their household goods. George resigned from his position with the county and right before Thanksgiving of 1927, the two headed west to join Bert and his family in Glendale.

Love would strike Alice again and on 03 Oct 1936, she married widower Robert John Breen. When she died at the age of 57, he survived her by mere months, dying 17 Nov 1941.

I have put much of this up on Ancestry, in addition to the obituaries for George Emrick and Ira Moler and other information on the Emrick's. I would very much like to track down the daughters of Bert Emrick, both gone now, but I'm sure there are family members somewhere. That's another project for the list.

Sideroad: George Woodington Heads to California

Gabrielino Indians who settled on land taken by the
Spanish and then by US pioneers. They were
nearly decimated by disease.

Johnathan Woodington (abt 1800 and Sarah Ann Wayman (abt 1818) had a very large family and lived primarily in the Philadelphia area for much of their lives. One son, Moses, married Henrietta Munson - the younger sister of my 2nd great grandmother, Mary Ann Munson, who moved with her family to the Eastern District of Wisconsin in the 1840s from Trumbull County, Ohio.

Moses' oldest brother George, left Pennsylvania as well. He headed down to the Woodbine in Jo Daviess County area of Illinois, near the great Mississippi River sometime after 1860 from Elizabeth in Bensalem Township, Bucks County where he had been living with a cousin's family and working as a day laborer.

A ranch in Los Angeles/Orange County in the 1880s

On 26 Jan 1865, he married Margaret Alice "Alice" Neal in Jo Daviess County. Three children would be born to them there: Edwin, William Wallace, and Harry. B. In 1870, he visited California for the first time. His dream became to move there permanently. In the meantime, the boys were born and he farmed.

It appears his westward migration to southern most Los Angeles County came before 1877, for his next child, Lulu Maus, was born in Westminster Township in 1877. Daughter Mabel would come along in 1880.Westminster Township is comprised of the entirety of Rancho Los Alamitos consisting of over 28,000 acres. Westminster and Westminster Township later became part of Orange County in 1889.

Spanish Ranchos

Over 8,000 years ago, the earliest known settler here were the Oak Grove people. They abandoned the area when food sources dwindled and the temps became too dry. According to the Westminster website:

"The area remained uninhabited until the Gabrieleno Indians moved in from the desert to this area and numbered over 200,000. Diseases such as measles, smallpox and diphtheria reduced the Indian population.

The next recorded history of the North Orange County area dates to 1492, when Pope Alexander IV decreed that all unclaimed land in the North American continent belonged to the King of Spain. Large land grants called ranchos were awarded by the King to induce colonization of the continent. The Spaniards cleared, surveyed and mapped their new land. In 1784 the Spanish Governor of California honored Manuel Nieto with a 21 mile square concession of land to be called the Rancho Las Bolsas. It covered most of what we know today as west Orange County. The Rancho prospered with large crops and fine herds, however, after Nieto’s death in 1804 his heirs quarreled and the Rancho was partitioned in 1834.

During the 1850’s with California’s admission to the Union, the U.S. Land Commission was set up to review claims that rose from original Spanish land grants. An American named Abel Stearns saw this as an opportunity to buy up shares from the disputing factions of the Rancho Las Bolsas. With the Commission’s acceptance, Stearns became the sole owner of the rancho changing the name to Stearns Rancho."

Westminster was set up in about 1870 as a "temperance colony" by a Presbyterian minister who purchased 6,000 acres. This is a community that prohibited the sale or use of alcohol. By 1872, the first school had opened and by 1874, the first general store. It was a brutal agricultural terrain (part of the reason many Indians left the area long before) with swamps, tulles, and flooding due to the lack of irrigation. By 1881, with the passage of the Irrigation Act, thousands of acres were turned into usable ag land. He had been engaged in farming the greater part of his life and during the fourteen years of his residence in California, he worked as a farm laborer in many quarters, most extensively on the Bixby Ranch and later raised grain on the San Joaquin (Irvine) ranch - two of the largest ranches in California. He never worked his own land while in California, beyond family sustenance.

George lived here until his death in 1905. Alamitos Cemetery would later become Magnolia Memorial Cemetery. His wife, Alice, would live on until 1920. His son Harry would stay on in the area and will be the subject of the next post (along with info on his long relationship with "The Celery King."