The Brown Township Property 4

The last post ended with the 1900 census locating Peter and Sarah Buller Dick on the north half of the northeast quarter of section 16 in Brown township of York County, the 80 acres that Peter D Buller leased and his surviving family members purchased shortly after his death in 1897. This leaves, for all practical purposes, only one question: Who lived on the Brown farm in the years between 1900 and the sale of the property in April 1920? Exploring the answer to this question will guide the course of this post.

We begin with the next available record: the 1910 census. What we discover here is that no member of our family lived in Brown township at that time. To be specific, not one of the 129 families listed in the 126 dwellings of Brown township was a member of our family. The names of neighbors we would expect still appear, such as Jacob and Henry Mireau and the Wiens family, but the only Buller in the immediate vicinity is one David F, who was a hired hand for Jacob Schmidt.

Clearly, Peter and Sarah Buller Dick left the Brown property sometime between 1900 and 1910, but when and why they did must remain a mystery. We do find them listed in the 1910 census, but they are now in the Henderson township. In fact, they are listed only three families away from Peter P and Margaretha Epp Buller, so they must have lived nearby. 

By coordinating the listings of the families in the 1910 census with the 1911 plat map shown to the right, we can even venture a reasonable guess about where exactly Peter and Sarah Dick lived. The three names listed before them were Gerhard Rempel, Ludwig Rich, and Peter Siebert. This corresponds to the sequence of names in sections 13 and, moving north, 12.

Following Peter and Sarah Dick in the census were Johann Epp, John Epp, Peter P Buller, and Jacob Epp, which fits a path from section 11 to the east side of section 10 and then back to section 11. The only name on the map not mentioned in the census is John Critel, in the northwest corner of section 12. In fact, the 1910 and 1920 censuses list no one by that name in all of York County, which implies to me that Critel may have been an absentee landlord. His tenants, in my view, were none other than Peter and Sarah Dick. If this is correct, then by 1910 Peter and Sarah Dick were living within a mile of Sarah’s older brother, Peter P.

The 1910 census also allows us to correct an earlier misstatement that was based on an error in GRANDMA. According to the GRANDMA database, Peter and Sarah’s second child, Abraham, was born near Mountain Lake, Minnesota. From this we deduced that Peter and Sarah must have moved there and back sometime between 1900 and 1910. However, the 1910 and the 1920 censuses list Abraham’s place of birth as Nebraska; in fact, all of the children in that family are recorded as born in Nebraska. In addition, further research reveals that GRANDMA’s listing of Minnesota as the place of birth confuses our Abraham Dick with another Abraham Dick who was born several days later. The names listed on the second Abraham’s birth record proves beyond doubt that he was not a member of our family. All that to say, at present we have no reason to think that Peter and Sarah Dick moved to Minnesota in the early 1900s.

To summarize, Peter and Sarah Dick married in March 1898 and apparently moved to the Brown property. The 1900 census indicates that they were still living on that farm at that time. Sometime between 1900 and 1910, they left the Brown property and moved to Henderson township, where they rented 80 acres less than a mile from Sarah’s brother, Peter P Buller. In 1907 (we do not know where they were living at that time), Peter and Sarah Dick lost their seven-month-old son (see here). In late 1917 or early 1918, Peter and Sarah moved from their farm north of Lushton (i.e., the one they rented from John Critel) to another farm near Henderson, which we discovered earlier was none other than Peter D and Sarah’s original family farm (see here). Presumably they lived there until the farm was sold at auction in 1922 (see here).

We have, I admit, wandered a bit from our question about the Brown township farm, so let me recap. According to the 1900 census, Peter and Sarah Buller Dick lived on the property at that time. The following census, in 1910, indicates beyond any doubt that no family member was living there ten years later. Moving ahead yet another decade, the 1920 census offers us a similar picture.

According to the 1920 census, Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller’s son Abraham and his family now lived in Brown township. However, their neighbors are not at all the ones we would expect if they lived on the Buller property there. That is, there are no Mireau or Wiens families listed nearby; those families still lived in Brown township, but they appear to be quite distant from Abraham and his family. This is really not surprising, since the land was sold to Heinrich E. Mireau in April 1920 (see here).

What are we to conclude? After Peter and Sarah Buller Dick moved from the Brown property sometime between 1900 and 1910, no other family member lived there. Apparently Peter D’s widow Sarah rented the land to someone outside of the family instead, until she finally sold the land only a few years before her own death.

To my knowledge, nothing remains of the farmstead that once housed members of our family on the Brown township property. Still, I think it will be worth a visit, even if only to look on the land where our ancestors walked and worked and lived.