Joshua Simmons III
The following is an excerpt from Durant’s History of Oakland County, 1811 to 1877, and serves as the resume of Joshua and Hannah’s lives:
Joshua Simmons III was born in Dighton, Bristol County, Massachusetts, on the 12th of April, 1801.
In the same year, his parents moved to Bristol, Ontario County, New York, where Joshua remained with his father. He attended the common school and engaged in duties of the farm until he reached the age of twenty-one years, when he obtained employment on his own account and worked at thirteen dollars per month until he had realized the sum of two hundred and twenty-five dollars.
Then at the age of twenty-three, he came to Michigan and bought 160 acres of land in section 6 in the Township of Livonia, Wayne County. Having accomplished this, he returned to Ontario County and labored for two years longer; then on the 13th of January 1826, married Hannah Macomber of Bristol, and in September following again left for Michigan, taking with him his wife, to commence life in the wilderness.
They came by the steamboat ‘Superior’ on Lake Erie to Detroit and were three days (19 miles) from their destination, but in reality had to travel 30 miles before arriving there. The teamsters who brought them out were Leland Green and Wardwell Green, who he was unable to pay in full for services, lacking five dollars of the requisite amount. The household goods were unloaded upon the ground, and Joshua remained there through the long hours of the drizzling rainy night.
His wife had been left at a Mr. Thayer’s, a mile distant, with arrangement that in the morning he would fire a gun to notify her that all was safe and right. Anxiously she listened, and joyously she heard it, and before another night had closed in she was in occupation of their own cabin by the kind assistance of pioneer neighbors built during the day and securely roofed in with basswood boughs. The log shanty had three side of logs and one side left open was closed by a blanket.
Check out next week's edition for Part 2 of this story!
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