Section One	Index	Section Three

Hammond Ancestors

Section Two

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Charles Newell Hammond (b. 25 June 1835 in Medina Co., Ill., d. 1891) was the sixth child of Ward K. and Sophronia. He served with the 96th Volunteer Illinois Infantry in Kentucky and Tennessee in the Civil War and later volunteered for a Pioneer Corps that later became the First Organized Army Engineer Unit. The Engineer group was to aid in construction projects, forts, bridges and roads and to reconstruct the railroads the Army needed. At his post in Chattanooga, TN he served as a quarter master in ordering, receiving and dispatching building materials to the projects of the War in 1863-65 as the Federal Army moved on to Atlanta, Ga., and beyond. Several notes and letters from him were preserved by his family and relatives.

After his discharge from service Charles N. returned to Hanover, Ill., married Miss Edna C. Dean of that place and returned to farming. They were comfortably situated and their first three children were born in Illinois before they sold their farm and moved to Madison Co., Tenn. about 1877. His brother Edwin O. had served with the Federal Forces there in 1862 after the Battles of Shiloh and Corinth, Miss. Charles and Edna bought near Jackson, Tenn. about 900 acres of timbered and farming land and harvested timber there for the next several years. They had been well received there and they encouraged Charles' youngest brother, Orson Ward Hammond, to come from Texas and join him in his venture, which he did in 1886. However Orson had worked at carpentry since 1873 in varios places and preferred to try his hand at farming. More capital was needed to pursue Charles and Edna's dreams and was hard to find. Charles N. died in an incident (1891) on his farm as he protected his chickens from robbery. They had five young children and Edna and the children continued on the property and prospered. Descendants are now prominent leaders in the city of Jackson and Memphis, Tenn.

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Lt. Edwin O. Hammond, (1838--1893), son of Ward K. and Sophronia Hammond, was an early volunteer in the War of the Rebellion. A farmer with his brothers in 1861, he enlisted July 23, 1861 and renewed his enlistment in 1864 after being in some terrible battles with his unit at Pittsburg Landing, near Savannah, Miss., at Corinth, Miss. and later in the siege of Vicksburg, Miss. He enlisted as a private and was in command of his company of 96 men at Pocataligo, So. Carolina when he was wounded and sent to a hospital in New York by ship from South Carolina which they had recently captured. He married Adeline Bostwick on March 13th, 1864, while home on a Veterans furlough. After the war ended he returned to Hanover with a severely limited right arm, and returned to farm work in Lena, Ill. He received a disability pension from the U. S. Military which aided him and his family of four children. He died in Lena in 1893, at 54 years of age.

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Royal Cornelius Hammond (19 Oct. 1843 -- 22 Oct. 1870) was born as the ninth child of Sophronia Hale and Ward K. Hammond during a year or more spent in Delaware, Ohio, before making the long river boat trip to Knox Co., Ill., where many Hammond relatives had already moved for new lands and opportunities. About a year later the family traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, on the Ohio River and then had steamboats to help them down the Ohio and up north again on the Mississippi River to the Illinois River above St. Louis, Mo. and thence up the Illinois River as far as Peoria. From there they traveled overland to Galesburg and Ontario township where Ward K's mother and brother Royal Hammond and wife Emeline Rogers Hammond lived. Ward took out settlement papers on a farm in or near Ontario township and they lived two years in Knox Co., where several Hammond and Burt kinfolks lived. They were hard years for the family and by late 1846 they moved on to a more settled area in Jo Daviess Co., Illinois, but kept in contact with these families.

Royal C. Hammond served in the Civil War with the 96th Illinois Voluntary Infantry Regiment but must have served under an assumed name as he was under age as he signed up. He was in battles in Kentucky and Tennessee before joining the battle for Atlanta in 1864--65. After the war he married a Miss Susan Irwin and settled in Rome, Ga. where he had served during the Civil War.

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Susan Irwin became Royal C. Hammond's wife after his military service. They lived some years in Rome, Ga., where they had two girls before his sudden death on Oct. 22, 1870. Susan and the girls remained in Georgia which makes one wonder if his wife was not a Southern girl. Little is known of them. There were Irwin families in Jo Daviess Co. at this time.

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Orson Ward Hammond was photographed thus on his 22nd birthday. This is our Tennessee Hammond grandfather who was born on June 6, 1846 in the log house that served the growing family on a small homestead in Knox Co., Illinois just north of Galesburg which the writer Carl Sandburg later called home. His grandmother, Roxana Field Hammond, widow of Calvin Hammond lived in Ontario and Galesburg with his now prosperous Uncle Royal and Aunt Emeline, who had no children. Orson lived in Hanover, Illinois, with his mother Sophronia and near his brother Julius A. Hammond during the Civil War years. As he finished his public school education there was now an upper school in Hanover and a rail line into Chicago and points nearby. He taught school for a year or so and worked a year or more as apprentice to an accomplished cabinet maker carpenter.

He continued living with his mother until her death in 1873 and he then followed the railways into Texas where he labored for ten years with a construction company building railway stations and section houses in over thirty Texas counties from 1873 to 1883. He visited Hanover from year to year and found there his wife, Mary Eliza Jameson (b. 1858, d. 1918) daughter of Matilda Craig and the older Samuel Jameson who was one of the early settlers at Hanover. In 1883 the couple moved to Texas to try sheep raising and farming there. But Charles N. was in Tennessee and invited them to come work with him where there was more rain. They moved in 1886 to Jackson, Tenn., and settled there.

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Clara Edgerton was a daughter of Julia Hammond Edgerton.

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Frederick Edgerton was a son of Julia Hammond Edgerton.

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Mercy Jane Hammond Steffens with one of her daughters, probably Alice Vienna Steffens, one of the family's early genealogists. Alice V. married but divorced later and worked as a business woman in Minneapolis, Minn. She secured, extended and had printed about 1929 the Hale/Hammond ancestor chart that was circulated among this Hammond family and is still available. Mercy Jane Hammond, at the request of her son, Dr. Orson Richard Steffens, wrote a memory resume of her life and memories of the family ancestors in 1902 at her home in Spring Valley, Minn. This gave insight into the migration from Ohio to Peoria, Ill., by primitive steamboats of the early 1840's, and of the life in Knox County prior to life in Jo Daviess County. The family passed these items on to Charles Hammond Steffens who later lived at Hubbard, Iowa, and his daughters Alice Mercy Steffens and Charlotte Steffens passed them on to us. Alice Mercy also brought together the older pictures of her family in a pictorial album that has now become "lost" to much of the family. This photo album would greatly aid family researchers should it come to light through descendents in 2002. Alice Mercy Hammond also wrote of the extended Steffens/Hammond relatives at 83 years of age in 1974.

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Dora Etta and Ina Dell Hammond were daughters of Charles N. and Edna Dean. They were born in Jo Daviess County, Ill., but grew up in Madison Co., Tenn.

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Frederic Hammond, Sr. (b. 1873, in Illinois) was a son of Charles N. and Edna Dean Hammond. He grew up in Madison Co., Tenn., and married Lottie Young, daughter of the Bemis Mill superintendent. They raised a family in Bemis, Tenn.

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Rollie Hammond was the son of Susan and Royal C. Hammond. This photograph was taken in September 1872 in Belleview, Iowa, when he was 3 years old. Rollie was a nickname for Royal so his proper name was likely Royal as was his father's.

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Una S. Hammond was a daughter of Susan and Royal C. Hammond. This photograph was taken in Sept. in Rome, GA.

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Emeline Rogers Hammond was the wife of Royal Hammond of Ontario, Ill., and later Galesburg, Knox County. Royal Hammond was a brother to Ward K. Hammond. There were five children of Calvin and Rachel Field Hammond of Connecticut, Vermont and Ohio. (See article and picture of Royal in Knox Co. Ill. Historical Biography, ca. 1890.)

Emeline Rogers was born to Rufus Rogers and Evangelia Booth Rogers in Chesterfield, Massachusetts. There were six sons and two daughters in the family. In 1837 the family moved to Bath, Ohio where many from New England had settled. Being Congregationalists they encountered the Hammonds in that church in Bath, and Royal Hammond and Emeline were married on May 24, 1838. They continued to live for six years at Bath, Ohio, and then moved to Ontario Township, Knox Co., Illinois. As Royal's father Calvin (1775-1826) had died, Mrs. Roxana Hammond moved with them to Knox Co. and lived with them until her death in 1850. Emeline and Royal shared sixty two years of married comfort before his death, six years on the homestead at Ontario township and then in Galesburg as he operated a very successful grocery store there. They had no children but helped many.

Apart from Royal's household, John Burt who married Lucinda Hammond (1801-1840) moved to Knox Co. with their five children in the early 1840's also. These children were cousins to the Hammond Hale family at Hanover and kept in touch with them.

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Andrew Hale, of Bath, Ohio, son of Jonathan Hale and Mercy J. Piper, was a brother to Sophronia Hale Hammond of Hammonds Corners, Medina Co., Ill., and after 1846 of Jo Daviess Co., Ill. Andrew Hale lived with his family in "Old Brick", home of his father and continued farming with him on the homestead until he married and later built a wing onto Old Brick for his family as it grew. It was he rather than his father who carried most of the burden of farming the homestead after the death of Jonathan's wife Mercy J. Piper Hammond in 1829. It was Andrew who purchased from other members of the family from time to time to reassemble the rather large holding of his father Jonathan. In effect, Andrew held the Old Homestead together for another generation and his daughter Sophronia J. Ritchie and granddaughter Clara Belle Ritchie who later purchased the entire farm and gave it and a million dollars to develop it into a preservation and teaching park for the Western Reserve of Connecticut in Ohio. Samuel Ritchie, Sophronia's husband was ingenious enough to earn a fortune of such size in developing industry and mining as well as lumber in this part of Ohio in the 1880's and 1890's which the family protected and increased until the 1950's when the gift was realized.

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Jane Mather Hale, daughter of Sarah Cozad Mather, who married Jonathan Hale after the death of his first wife Mercy J. Piper of Connecticut. Mrs. Mather was known as a teacher and able widow by people in Bath, Ohio though she lived in Euclid, which has long since become a part of Cleveland, Ohio. She was an educated, able person who had children of her own by her former marriage. The blended family was sufficiently harmonious for one son to choose Mrs. Mather's daughter Jane as his wife and the oldest son William Hale married Mrs. Mather's orphaned niece and adopted daughter, Harriet Carlton, who had come to live with Mrs. Sarah Hale in her new home and to help with the house and family.

Both younger marriages were successful and so was Jonathan's second marriage, as Sarah Hale joined into family and community activities and bore three more Hale children to make a total of ten for Jonathan. Andrew and Jane Mather Hale had six children.

Jane and Andrew Hale had possession of the "Old Brick" home of Jonathan and most of the farm from about 1844 until his death and then his son Charles Oviatt Hale until about 1935. Jane's daughter Sophronia J. Hale Ritchie and granddaughter Clara Bell Ritchie arranged for use of the home and farm as a Pioneer Museum and Village Center by 1956.

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William Charles Oviatt married Sophronia Hale's sister Pamelia. They made their home off the farm as he was a business man but kept close ties with Jonathan Hale and the homeplace. When it became a vacation place in the summer they were frequent guests. Having no children of their own they adopted two: Generva and Charles. This W. Charles later married Pamelia L. Hale, a daughter of Andrew and Jane Hale. William C. Oviatt evidently was a prominent business man near present day Akron, Ohio and was greatly appreciated by the Hales.

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Pamelia Hale Oviatt married William C. Oviatt. The Oviatt's were able to travel and visited the Jo Daviess County Illinois kinfolks. Being a highly literate family the Hales and Hammonds kept in touch with one another surprisingly well. The Oviatts often visited Florida in the winters.

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Pamelia L. (Millie) Hale was the older of Andrew and Jane Hale's children included in this album. Photos before 1871 were a relatively costly item, and these pictures reveal Andrew and Jane's family as not only "good looking " but rather prosperous. Pamelia L. (Millie) corresponded with Charles N. Hammond while he was a soldier in Tennessee and some of his letters to "Millie" are still with the Charles N. Hammond family.

Section One	Index	Section Three