Moses E. Howard, 1810-1890

Moses E. Howard, the oldest son of Elijah and Eleanor (Sprague) Howard, was born on 16 October 1810, in Derby, Vermont. He spent his childhood years in Lisbon, New Hampshire, moving as a young adult to Walden, Vermont and then to Berlin, Vermont, where he would live for nearly fifty years. He was married twice, first to Caroline M. Harris (1816-1859) and, after her death, to Ann E. Barrows (1826-1892). He had six children from his first marriage and two from his second. He amassed a large farm on Crosstown Road, including some of the land that is currently part of the Boyer State Forest, and prospered there for many years. At the time of his death on 29 October 1890, however, he was living alone in Williamstown, Vermont, his second wife having been granted a bill of divorce on the grounds of intolerable cruelty, his property in Berlin lost or sold, his two surviving children from his first marriage living in the Midwest, and his sons with Ann supporting their mother.

Moses’s story in his later life is indeed one of loss; his first wife and one of their children died from consumption (tuberculosis) in 1859, two more of their adult children died from the same disease in the 1870s, and their eldest son died from typhoid fever in 1881. The loss of the farm that had been the setting for so much of his life, however, was rooted in the obsession for settling his differences in court that arose in those years. By the mid-1870s he had racked up significant legal debt, and mortgaged all of his property in Berlin to his lawyer, Joseph A. Wing, in exchange for Wing’s payment of the most pressing items. He continued, however, to run up legal bills over the next ten years, and to fall short of cash, spiraling almost inevitably toward foreclosure and eviction in the mid-1880s. He and Ann initially seem to have been sheltered by a young couple, Truman R. and Emma Foster, but in early 1886 Moses was asked to leave, apparently after some sort of act of abuse toward Ann. Ann’s petition for divorce was granted in October of 1887.

I’m currently working to understand the tangle of land and legal transactions that Moses was enmeshed in during the late ninteenth century and how that activity fits into both the local context and the story of his life. If you have any information about Moses or his descendants, or are interested in collaborating on this project, I’d love to hear from you via the Contact page.

Moses, and his encounters with Montpelier newspaper editor Hiram Atkins, feature in my blog post “A Tale of Two Obituaries.”