The Tuttles of 1847 Iowa
Lake Prairie Township, the location of the town of Pella in Southern Iowa, has a pioneer story of its own. The main characters in this story are Thomas and Nancy Tuttle. Along with several other families in the township, they sold their land to the Dutch when the colony arrived in the summer of 1847.
In researching the Tuttle couple, I’ve concluded that they were quiet farmers who worked the land with hopes of establishing a farm. Their reasons for selling out remain a mystery, but my imagination has created all sorts of possibilities. Maybe they had family inviting them to move or maybe they had encountered drought or disease or insects. Maybe the prices weren’t what they hoped, or maybe the work of farming was harder than they expected.
Thomas and Nancy traveled to Lake Prairie Township from Fairfield. They were married in Fairfield in 1842, and then moved farther west in 1843. History books claim they were among the first to settle this area of the state with their closest neighbor living twenty miles away.
Nancy was twenty-five years old when she and her husband started farming. She’d been born in Virginia in 1822 and gradually moved west with her family until meeting Thomas. He was quite a bit older than Nancy since he was thirty-five when he married her, and forty years old at the time he sold his farm to the Dutch.
I’ve wondered if perhaps he was married previously and Nancy was his second wife. Little information exists on his life prior to his marriage to Nancy, so I haven’t been able to learn about the people he might have known. Thomas was Canadian but his parents were citizens of the United States. With origins in Canada, Thomas apparently drifted south with his family while Nancy’s drifted west, eventually bringing them both to Iowa.
Two years after the Tuttles arrived on the newly opened prairie, Marion County was organized. This took place in 1845, and Iowa became a state one year later in 1846. Marion County was formed from the western portion of Mahaksa County. The town of Knoxville, which serves as the county seat, was founded in 1845, and then became incorporated ten years later.
Other settlers listed in Pella and Marion County history books include Green T. Clark and his wife Nancy, John B. Hamilton and Robert Hamilton, Wellington and Levi Nossaman and their wives and children, and William and Elizabeth Welch and their children.
Thomas and Nancy built a cabin of walnut on the edge of a patch of timber. The land was believed to be easier to work nearer to a treed area, so it makes sense that Thomas would want to put his farm there. The Tuttle cabin was the location of the sale of land to the Dutch. Dominee Scholte and a land committee of five or six other men arrived at the Tuttle farm late in July, led there by Baptist minister Moses Post.
Scholte bought the land and buildings from the Tuttles as well as from several other families. Scholte used the Tuttle cabin as his own accommodations while the town of Pella was getting settled and while he waited for his own home to be built.
This cabin still stands, and it is located just a couple blocks north of Pella’s downtown square. A sidewalk connects it to Sunken Garden Park, and along the sidewalk are displays with information on them about the Tuttles and the Dutch settlement in Marion County.
Records show that the Tuttles moved farther west and farmed in the area of what is now Prairie City. The couple never had any children. A local historian recently told me that Thomas and Nancy are buried in Illinois. This pioneer couple would have remained completely unknown except for their connection to Dominee Scholte. They fell under the spotlight for that brief era in their lives and then faded from the attention of history.
My speculations about them might be inaccurate, and farming may not have been too difficult of work or disappointing in profit. Perhaps their willingness to sell came from a similar desire to that of Charles Ingalls. They might have wanted to be the first to settle in undisturbed land, and to see it and know it before railroads or fences or powerlines broke it up. Their life and their experience as the earliest farmers in Iowa help us understand the authentic pioneer experience.
