an Essay by

Judith Hayner

On a high shelf in my home sits a book once owned by my great-grandfather, John Lloyd Jones.  Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology, by James Freeman Clarke, bears my great-grandfather's elegant nineteenth century signature on the inside front cover, with the date "Dec 25th, 1872."   Was it was a Christmas gift from his famous minister brother, Jenkin?   That my ancestor once owned such book speaks to me of an open mind and an intellectual curiosity uncommon in his time.  Unfortunately, I know little about John from family lore.  He died in 1908, five years before my mother, Margaret Lloyd Jones Hayner, was born.  His son, my grandfather, Thomas Lloyd Jones, died 20 years before I was born.   My mother told me only a few stories about her father's family.   I am fortunate to have published accounts by family members, the eulogy and obituary written by his brother Jenkin, and contemporary newspaper articles to turn to. I am more fortunate to have had the opportunity to discover and to share the good life of this quiet farmer.  

John Lloyd Jones was the second son of Richard and Mary.  He was born October 20, 1832 at the family homestead in Llandysul, Wales.   The family's immigrant story has been told elsewhere.   We know that John and Thomas both worked as shepherds while still children in Wales.  Sister Jane (Jenny), in writing after her beloved mother's death, gives insight into this time.  Jane and the younger children loved to hear their mother tell of the days in Wales:  "tears would overflow the eyes when in imagination we saw the first out-going from the home nest of her little boys John and Thomas as shepherd lads to distant neighborhoods.  Her sadness at seeing them go.  Her longing for the promised land of opportunity - America - for her growing family.  Again and again her little children listeners saw the grandmother in Wales - who was so in sympathy with her daughter and grandchildren - saw in childish fancy this grandmother going with her knitting and some tidbit to eat in her basket - to spend half a day with the lonesome little John tending his sheep in distant pasture or on a rainy day seeking the shepherd Thomas with an extra cloak for the little shoulders.  Our love drawn forth by those stories made a reality of her in our little lives, and brothers John and Thomas were always a little dearer to their little brothers and sisters because of their mother's stories."   Thomas was 14 when the family immigrated, and John was 12.   As the family moved west and began to clear the wilderness that was then Wisconsin, these boys worked beside their father as men.

I found this brief summary in a copy of a county biographical record written around 1900 that I found in my mother's papers. "Richard Lloyd-Jones and Mary Thomas Lloyd-Jones emigrated with their seven children from Wales in 1844. This pioneer family spent that first winter of 1844 and '45 in Utica, N.Y., where they lost by death one of the children.  In the spring, Mr. Lloyd-Jones took his family into the then wilds of Jefferson county, Wis., and settled in Ixonia, where a home had been partly prepared for him by his brother, Jenkin Lloyd-Jones, who had preceded him by two years for that purpose.  Here the family lived the heroic, unselfish life of the pioneer, often facing need themselves, by sharing with those who had greater need, until the Lloyd-Jones homestead became the synonym of hospitable refuge for the needy.  The life of the family, like all pioneer life in the steamless age, was full of thrilling incidents, hardships and self-denial, but sweetened by the sympathetic, brotherly, almost communistic feeling, peculiar to the early settlers in a new country... In 1856 Mr. Lloyd-Jones moved his family, now numbering ten children, to Spring Green, Sauk county, where they remained for four years, when they moved into Helena Valley.  Richard Lloyd-Jones bought the homestead which is now the site of Hillside Home School.  Thomas L. and John L. each purchased an adjoining farm."

At the time of the 1860 census, Richard and both his adult sons were farming together in Sauk County. Thomas married in 1861, and was the first son to move to his own farm, the first to move across the river into the Valley.  John continued farming with his father for a few more years.  Chester Lloyd Jones mentions John several times in Youngest Son, his biography of his father Enos, and each time, John is in the fields with horse and plow.   While there was plenty of hard work in John's life, I don't think that he viewed it as mere drudgery.   His brother Jenkin spoke these words at John's funeral:  "Forty-five years ago John Lloyd Jones came into this valley to work; he looked for naught but the privilege of toiling; he welcomed the baptism of sweat."  It is easy for me to imagine the satisfaction with which John worked the fertile earth of that beautiful valley.     

Even as a grown man, John occasionally took time for play as this passage from Youngest Son indicates: “The boy [Enos was 20 years younger than John] went to call his brother John from the field where he was ploughing and to enjoy a ride home of the great brown horse Kate, the family favorite among the farm animals.  The day had been warm.  John was tired and hot as were the horses.  They took a path leading toward an arm of the river, "the slough" where a great sand bar shelved off into the water, first into shallows which at the far side became deep enough for swimming. Here John and Enos would have some fun before returning home for supper.  The cool water would be good for the horses too, they thought, thus easing their consciences for being late for the meal."  That day Enos almost drowned, sucked under the horse, but was quickly saved by his watchful older brother.”

As the Civil War approached, it found the family firmly on the side of the abolitionists.  Chester Lloyd Jones discussed this in Youngest Son:  "Richard's family, old and young, were enthusiasts in the 'antislavery' movement.  John, already an ardent antislavery man, had taken an active part in the local election, the first presidential choice in which he had a share.  With many other citizens of Wisconsin, he 'went up Salt river with Fremont' by voting the straight Republican ticket, a practice which he continued thereafter to follow with Roman consistency for the fifty-two years remaining to him."  John wanted to enlist when the Spring Green Guards were organized in 1861.  He was near thirty at the time, unmarried, strong from a lifetime's hard work, and passionate about the cause.  But, according to Youngest Son, John was rejected from military service because of a "stiffened index finger."  It was young brother Jenkin who would serve.  This must have caused John great anguish.  Jenkin stated that the only "strain" that ever came between the brothers was over who was to serve, John or Jenkin.

John was 33 when he married Hannah Reese (known as Nettie) in 1865.  The 1870 census shows he and Hannah held 115 acres of land. They raised dairy cows, cattle, sheep, and swine.  Like his father and Thomas, John grew wheat, corn, oats, barley, potatoes, hay, and produced wool and dairy products as well.   The year 1870 was the year the family lost its beloved mother, Mary.   Jane wrote:  "In her quiet way and gentle management she welded a family of strong-willed boys and girls to be so united in love to one another and devotion to the home and loving deference to the parents that, looking back upon it from the standpoint of years - made the home life ideal."

John carried those lessons on to his own family.  He and Nettie had four children: Richard, Mary, Thomas, and Jenkin.  John's original home was near Lowery Creek, below Midway hill.  This eventually became the site of Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Farm.  The larger home that John built in 1893, down the hill and across the road from the original homestead, still stands off Highway 23.  My mother told me during a visit to the farm in 1990 that it had changed little since her childhood.  She was touched to note that the hollyhocks she loved as a child still remained.  

John dammed Lowery creek, built a mill, and became the miller for the entire area.  Reports in the Spring Green Weekly Home News from the 1880s indicate that this was a thriving business.  At least some of the time John had help.  A brief item in the Home News in 1885 indicates he hired an experienced miller.   John's mill work was made even harder for a period of years in the ‘80s and ‘90s when heavy rainwater frequently washed out the dam. The Dodgeville Eye and Star newspaper gave this account of a close call on July 2, 1891 (quoted in the booklet "Midway Farm at Taliesin" by Frances Nemtin, 2003):  "He [John] awoke early that morning and fearing the heavy rain falling at the time would take out his mill dam, he hurriedly dressed and went to the mill to open the flood gates.  He attempted to cross the stream on an old bridge but it was already washed away and he walked directly into a raging torrent, was carried to the opposite bank where his hand came in contact with a root by which he attempted to climb out, but it was rotten and he fell back headlong into the water.  He was then carried across the stream, when his hand touched some willow twigs which he grasped and with great presence of mind drew himself out on the bank.  He was then on the opposite side of the stream from the house and was forced to go home by way of the bluff, arriving in a deplorable conditions before the family had missed him from the house.  It was a lucky and probably miraculous escape."  

Despite the difficulty of this work, John was able to take time to patiently watch over his children and their many cousins who often congregated at his mill.  In her poignant book, The Valley Of the God Almighty Joneses, Maginel Barney Wright remembered watching her Uncle John run his mill.  "This was a fascinating place to us children.  The immense water wheels turning and turning with their chains of rubber cups going round and round, the fearful swiftness of the mill race, where, under careful protection, we were sometimes allowed to stand and receive the deluge.  Uncle John would come to the door of his mill and watch and greet us, a spectral figure whitened with flour from head to foot.  We loved to go inside and watch fearfully the grain whirl and twirl in the great hopper, sifting it through to the grinding millstones below.  Sometimes we would be given kernels of seed-wheat to chew."

According to Spring Green Weekly Home News accounts, John opened a cheese factory in 1888.  His brother Thomas was also a cheesemaker.  John was involved in the Hillside Creamery cooperative, which was established in the fall of 1896.  This group of Valley entrepreneurs sold their products directly to retailers in Chicago.  In 1901, the Home News notes that the "Annual meeting of the Hillside Creamery held at home of John L. Jones.  James Philip declined reelection.  John elected in his place.  Have more private orders than they can supply."  According to the county biographical sketch, the cooperative members took steps "toward a co-operative laundry and bakery."  

Despite these many ventures, John found time to become very involved in the civic life of his community.  In 1889 John opened a post office in Wyoming Valley from a small outbuilding on his property that operated until 1919.   The biographical report stated that  "John Lloyd-Jones was for eight years a member of the county board, and seven years superintendent of the poor.  During these years he served on many important committees appertaining to county affairs.  He was census enumerator in 1880.  During the time of his public service, as in his private life, he won the reputation of possessing incorruptible integrity." Jenkin wrote in John's obituary:  " His highest service to the country, one to which he gave great consecration and which brought to him sweetest reward was that which as a county commissioner he gave for many years to the county wards, the dependent at the Poor Farm and the asylum for those defective in mind.  Maginel Wright Barney also mentioned this aspect of John's life:  "He was an august man, this uncle.  My mother always said, 'John should have been on a judge's bench.'  I used to hear him discussing politics with his neighbors. I gathered at least he was a Republican of the staunchest Republicans"  

In his eulogy of his brother, Jenkin told at length how John's deep religious faith and his political conviction came together, his "unspeakable faith in the brotherhood of man, his consecration to the ideals of freedom."  Jenkin noted that John was "ever loyal to what he understood to be the party of liberty; to what he understood to be the life commission of John C. Fremont and Abraham Lincoln.  He believed in man, all and any rag of humanity, black or white, bond or free, was sacred to him, because he believed in God and was willing to accept all of God's children as such.  He would take counsel of no side issues, he knew nothing of the refinings and the confusions of later day planning and plottings.  He only knew that the black man was a man, he only knew that freedom was the birthright of all men; he only knew that God was the God of all, and that history ever makes for more freedom and more brotherhood."

John was passionate about temperance.  Jenkin said that this was of such extreme importance to John, that even as he lay dying in pain, he refused any painkiller, saying "No anesthetics.  They will blur my mind.  I will have none of them."  Jenkin was emphatic on this:  "The second point in Brother John's creed was the creed of the pure life and the sober habit."

John was a patient and gentle parent and he supported his children in whatever life path they chose.  He had considerable affection for his nieces and nephews as well, as evidenced by the memories of Maginel Wright Barney.  His parenting skills were no doubt learned at the knee of his mother.  Jane credits her success with children's development as being "largely due to that mother's training."  I have but one story to offer about John as a parent, told to me by my mother:

John was said to be quite a horseman.  One day when son Tom was around 12, he was thrown by his horse in a pasture and seriously injured.   The family found him, but the protective horse stood guard, refusing to let them close to him.  He lay there for quite some time before John returned home, for only John was able to get the horse to move aside so he could rescue his injured son.   Tom's leg was broken in several places and the doctors urged amputation.  The boy pleaded to save his leg, and John convinced the doctors to try setting the leg, instead of taking it off.   Thomas endured months of traction, with a heavy iron weight suspended from a contraption attached to his leg.  This was extremely painful, and Thomas would often cut the iron free.  It would drop with a telltale thud and his father would patiently come upstairs and put it back on, without a word about the cutting. 

John and Hannah suffered the greatest tragedy that can befall a parent when their youngest son, Jenkin, died at age 14.  Maginel reports the loss of her favorite cousin and playmate:  "He had a shock of red curly hair and a freckled merry countenance.  He was also one of the first great griefs of my life; he died of scarlet fever at the age of fourteen."  The Home News gives the cause of death as heart disease.  I'm sure the arms of the aunts and uncles reached out to the family in their grief and their deep faith helped see them through.  

Like all of the Lloyd-Joneses, John was an avid proponent of education.  At a time when this was very unusual, John sent two children to college.  Jenkin said:  "He wanted the best privileges that the college and the university could give to his children and to others’ children but John, with a clearness of vision too rare, saw far beyond these a preparation for life and an equipment of the soul which text-books and the training connected therewith can never adequately give [He] saw that there was a training of the spirit, that there was a tuition of the conscience, a growth of heart and a humility of spirit which no smart accomplishments, no successful "career" could supplant or make good." 

His son Thomas graduated from the University of Wisconsin.   His loss to the farm was difficult, but in the end, John supported his decision.  He became a teacher, then a principal, and ended his career as an administrator who traveled the state to accredit schools for the University of Wisconsin.  Maginel notes that Cousin Tom "came as a mathematics instructor" to the Hillside School.  He didn't teach there long.   By 1900, he was principal of the high school in Hartford.  Thomas met Calla Phoebe Westover at the University and they married in 1900.  Calla loved her husband's family, and an especially strong friendship was forged between her and her sister-in-law, Mary.  In one of her diary entries, she says "What times we used •to have, Tom, Mary, and I.  Seems like times like that have gone out of this world."  My grandfather died unexpectedly at age 54.  My grandmother kept a scrapbook of the letters and telegrams of condolence she received.  They indicate that he, like his father, was admired by his peers for his contributions to society.  Thomas and Calla had two children, John and Margaret.  

Mary began her career as a teacher in Superior, Wisconsin in 1900 (Home News, 2/8/1900). Her aunts Nell and Jenny, teachers and founders of the Hillside School, wrote her a note of encouragement:  "We have been where you are, leaving your dear ones for the long journey northward - But it brings its own rewards."  Mary never married, but ever remained the loving "Aunt Mary" to her many nieces and nephews, and to their children as well.  Everyone I've ever spoken to who knew her remembered her with fondness.  She carried the family passion for education to countless children.   Although I was a young child when she died, I remember Aunt Mary as a pretty, white haired lady who was always smiling.  She gave her nieces and nephews books nearly every Christmas, and I still have a  number of them.   Mary spent the last of her years in her childhood home in her beloved Valley.

Only the eldest son, Richard, remained to help John on the family farm.   He married Grace Green, who died shortly after giving birth to their only child, Jenkin.  Dick remained on the farm his entire life and never remarried.  Continuing in the tradition of the older generation, he was known fondly as "Uncle Dick" to his many young relatives, and possibly to others in the valley as well.  He was widely known for his good humor, kindness, and generosity.   When Dick became unable to make a go of the farm, he had to sell.  His only son had moved away and had no interest in farming.  Fortunately, the family that bought the farm allowed Dick and Mary to live out their lives in a front apartment in the old farmhouse.  

My mother often spent time on the farm.  Since John had died before her birth, the stories she told were about her grandmother, Uncle Dick, and Aunt Mary.   When my mother was a child, in the teens and twenties, there were hired men on the farm, as well as a hired woman to help Nettie. My mother often told me about the massive farm breakfasts that were served up when the men came in from their morning's chores: bacon, ham, eggs, freshly baked bread, and pies.  Pies for breakfast!  My mother explained that the family arose before dawn, the men to see to the animals and the women to do the baking of the day's bread and to prepare that huge meal for the hungry men's return.   My mother also recalled, with distaste even then, the fresh, warm, raw milk she had to drink while at the farm.   

My mother always told stories about her grandmother's culinary skills.  She apparently made the world's best sugar cookies, the likes of which were never equaled in my mother's long life.  My mother and I used to make Christmas cookies, but every year she said they paled in comparison to her grandmother's cookies.

I suspect one thing that made these cookies so delicious to my mother was the fact that she was not allowed to eat between meals at home.  A visit to the farm meant that this rule would be broken, and so sweetly.

My mother was not the only one who fondly recalled Nettie's cooking.  Maginel Wright Barney also remembered it:  "But all Aunt Nettie's food was good, and the atmosphere was happy.  I loved this family and I loved the times when my mother and I were quartered there." Barney wrote that John milled a delicious cereal and his sister Anna encouraged him to package and market it.  She concluded that John "had little interest in making money, as had most of them".  He wanted a good product and had it.  That was enough." However, after reading about the success of the Creamery coop and his mill, I am not sure that John was above marketing a good product.  Considering John's many varied and time consuming endeavors, I wonder if he simply had no time to even consider another business venture.   Maginel recounted how both she and her brother Frank "wished, later on, that we could taste again that bread, that porridge."  If you have ever been fortunate enough to taste bread made of freshly ground wheat flour, you can understand that longing. 

John died at age 76.  According to Barney,  "Uncle John lived a long life, and died as the result of an accident; a piece of steel from a broken tool became embedded in his hand.  I remember my mother begging him:  'John, have it taken out,' but he made light of it and would not.  Eventually the hand became infected and then cancerous; and this is what killed him."  

In his obituary Jenkin wrote:  “This Wisconsin farmer was every inch of him an American.  No member of the family, perhaps no man of his countryside, kept such close tabs on current affairs, was so intimately acquainted with the details of public administration in state or nation as this ardent citizen who believed with all his heart in the democracy of God.  He was on the liberal, the freedom side in religion and politics."  

John Lloyd Jones was an incredibly hard working man who took his civic duty as a sacred responsibility. He had a generous spirit and great compassion for those less fortunate than himself.  He believed in the God-given right of every man to be free.  Although there is not much written about my grandfather, what stands out from the few documents we have is that John was a man of deeds.   I believe it was his unshakable faith that encouraged him to work tirelessly for the greater good of his family, his community, and his country.

Frank Lloyd Wright begins his Autobiography with a memory of a seemingly insignificant childhood walk with my great grandfather.   It is winter, and Uncle John takes his nine year old nephew's hand to walk across a snow covered field.    John walks "neither to right nor to left, straight forward intent upon his goal - possessed."  The boy runs here and there, gathering weeds, delighting in everything around him.  When Frank returns to his uncle, John looks back at his own track, "straight as any string could be straight."  The boy shows his uncle the treasures he found, but his uncle simply points to the boy's tracks, "the wavering, searching, heedful line embroidering the straight one" with "gentle reproof."  Wright goes on to sum up what this encounter meant to him:  "Uncle John's meaning was plain - NEITHER TO THE RIGHT NOR TO THE LEFT, BUT STRAIGHT, IS THE WAY.  The boy looked at his treasure and then at Uncle John's pride, comprehending more than Uncle John meant he should. The boy was troubled.  Uncle John had left out something - something that made all the difference to the boy."

It is fortunate that young Frank Lloyd Wright preferred his own path, and had the self-assuredness even at a young age to know it.  Our world would be quite different without his independent-minded brilliance.  However, in this story, while it was not intended, I find a verification of my great-grandfather's character.  John didn't tell his young nephew to knock it off, as many a parent even today might be tempted to do, nor did he insist his nephew follow his trail.  He simply pointed out the difference, wordlessly, according the Wright's memories.  John was patient and gentle in his lesson, as he seemed to have been in much of his life.  I believe John meant to instruct his nephew in the ways of the world he knew: the farm.  His purposeful stride was no doubt learned through a lifetime's toil at work he found deeply meaningful. John did walk the straight path of hard work, temperance, commitment to God, family, community, and country.   By doing so, he created a life filled with love, service, and, about this I have no doubt, great satisfaction.

My Sources

An Autobiography by Frank Lloyd Wright

The Valley of the God-Almighty Jonses by Maginel Wright Barney

Youngest Son by Chester Lloyd Wright

The Spring Green Weekly Home News - selected items provided to me by Georgia Snoke

"Midway Farm at Taliesin" by Frances Nemtin, 2003

Jane Lloyd Jones's  memories of her mother, written October 1870, printed in the March, 2000 issue of the Unity Chapel, Inc. Newsletter

"Thomas Lloyd Jones" by Thomas Graham, article in the March 2001 issue of the Unity Chapel News

The obituary for John written by Jenkin Lloyd Jones and published in the June 18, 1908 issue of Unity Magazine, and the eulogy by Jenkin given at John's funeral on June 7, 1908.

"Commemorative Biographical Record of the Counties of Rock, Green, Grant, Iowa and Lafayette, Wisconsin - Biographical sketches of prominent and representative citizens and of many of the early settled families."  Information in this report indicate it was written after Thomas died in 1894, but before the death of James in 1907, and after the establishment of the Hillside School in 1887.