How Mrs Worsley Went to Oregon

The family story was that in the spring of 1863 Barbara Worsley and her five children and some workers engaged to work for her husband in the mill he was founding in Brownsville, Oregon, sailed from New York to Panama, crossed the Isthmus by mule, and sailed up the Pacific Coast to Oregon. But I was reading a David McCullough book, Brave Companions, in which one chapter treats the Panama Railroad, a subject that I definitely read about in his great book The Path Between the Seas, and only just now did the penny drop; I realized that because the railroad was finished in 1855, of course Barbara and her party did not ride mules across the Isthmus after all.

So I started researching online records and found some facts upon which to hang my suppositions.

Barbara Worsley left Trenton, New Jersey, in June 1863 with her children, 13-year-old William, 11-year-old Benjamin, 6-year-old Sarah, 4-year-old Joseph, and 6-month-old Laura. On June 13th they embarked on the SS America, a steamship on The People’s Line, under Captain Jeff Maury. The ship’s passenger list shows “Mrs. Worsley and two children,” which probably meant that she paid the passage for herself, for Sarah, and for Joseph, and baby Laura went free because she had to be carried. Either the two older boys went with their father overland the summer before this, or they were among the 300 “other passengers” not named.

In 1863 the Panama Railroad had been operating for eight years, so Barbara and the children must have ridden the train from Colon to Panama City. The fare was exorbitant, $25 per person for first class, $10 per person for second class, with personal baggage costing 5 cents per pound. I don’t find that there were children’s rates or special fares, but there could have been something to mitigate the cost. Perhaps she had the money for the first class fares; I don’t know the Worsley family’s financial state in those years. The train ride took only four to five hours to cross the Isthmus rather than the four to eight days that the mule trains used to take (mules were used only for the final 20 miles of the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific; the first part of the journey was in native dugout canoes navigating up the dangerous Chagres River). The railway, initially completed with nearly two hundred wooden bridges, had immediately been in the process of being upgraded so that all those bridges were rebuilt with iron. All the wooden trestles and all the pine ties had to be replaced with more permanent materials as well to withstand the tropical rains and heat. Passengers would have looked out on amazing jungle vistas in some places and in other places would have felt that they were traveling through tight green tunnels, so closely did the workers cut the vegetation so that the train cars barely fit. The noise, heat, clouds of mosquitoes and other insects, coal smoke, and intense humidity would have made their time in the tropics uncomfortable under the best conditions.

In Panama City they connected with the SS Moses Taylor, and in this ship they steamed up the Pacific coast, arriving in San Francisco on July 12, 1863. Despite their relatively short time down in Panama, Barbara was bitten by an infected mosquito and was incubating malaria. The disease can take from a week to a month before symptoms appear, depending on the health of the infected person and on the type of malaria it is. The CDC website says, “The shorter periods are observed most frequently with P. falciparum and the longer ones with P. malariae.” The malaria parasite infects blood cells and causes the production of substances that produce the fevers and chills that are the most common symptoms of the disease. Sometimes the infected cells no longer circulate freely but collect against walls of veins and cause other problems.

By the time they arrived in San Francisco, Barbara may have been suffering the first wave of the disease’s attack, with chills and fever, headaches and possible vomiting. These attacks classically recur every two to three days. She might have thought she had caught the flu and tried to wait until she was better. Otherwise, she might have still been symptom-free and could have immediately set sail for Oregon. As soon as she became ill, it must have become a nightmarish journey for her, trying to look after a growing baby and two small children. She would have had to rely on her six-year-old daughter Sarah to help as much as the little girl could.

She and her children arrived at the port of Marshfield in July or August 1863. Looking at the possibilities, I see that the Brother Jonathan was arriving in San Francisco from the northern ports every couple of weeks, which means it was regularly traveling back and forth; that could well be the steamer that let Mrs. Worsley and her children off at old Coos Bay. The mail would have allowed her to inform her husband of exactly when they were arriving, so he could well have met her at the city of Marshfield on the shores of Coos Bay. I hope he did meet her when they came off the boat!

(A sad note about the Brother Jonathan, in 1865 against her captain’s advice, by order of her owners she was overloaded at the port in San Francisco, and enroute to Portland, she struck a reef at Crescent City and sank with all 166 on board.)

To reach their new home in Brownsville, just north of Eugene, the Worsleys would have traveled by horse-drawn wagon. Today the drive is 142 miles; back then, it may have been about the same distance depending on which way the roads went, but of course what roads there were would have been quite primitive. Surely by the time they were in the wagon traveling to Brownsville, Mrs. Worsley was getting seriously sick.

Malaria had few treatments at that time and place. Quinine was known, but it was probably hard to come by in that area, if they even correctly diagnosed what was wrong with Barbara. The rigors of the journey surely sapped her strength, and without being able to rest and get better, she may have suffered from one of the common complications such as pneumonia or sepsis, or perhaps she had the more virulent form of malaria that attacks the brain and causes seizures, coma, and death. She suffered for several weeks at least, and probably for a little more than a month. By the end of the first week of September in Brownsville, she was dead, and the family was devastated.

What Was Katharina Doing There?

We just returned from a vacation trip through the Sierras, up I-5, over to the coast at Cannon Beach, then home along I-84 and down I-15 . . . and one of the things we did was to look for the graves of my grandmother Beatrice Boedefeld’s two grandmothers. 

Barbara Oliphant Worsley, the maternal grandmother, we knew was buried in Brownsville, Oregon. Just past Eugene we left I-5 and drove east into Brownsville, a tiny place with incredible charm. The cemetery is all the way through town on a hillside overlooking a valley to the southeast. My parents had located the stone in the 1980s and, finding it broken in two, they had taken the pieces home with them where my father set them into a cement frame, and when it was cured, he had taken the stone back and set it against its former base. We were looking for a slab flat on the ground and, parked practically next to the grave, we never looked at it the entire hour we scoured the cemetery for a flat slab with the name “Barbara” on it. 

Giving up, we had driven back into town thinking to leave, but the town is so tiny that there in front of us was the City Hall, so we parked and I went in. An incredibly helpful lady got out the old cemetery map, a huge roll of parchment paper, and spread it on a table for me. She zipped over to her computer to see if Barbara was in the database while I scanned the map. She found Barbara and helped me match her to the right place on the map. For further help, we wrote down the names of all the people buried around Barbara. Then we had to figure out the orientation and changes the decades had made in the actual landscape, and we figured out where the roads still run. 

Driving back up the hill, I realized quickly that we had been parked extremely near where Barbara had to have been buried. We all looked one more time, but this time for the prominent monument with the Kirk name on it, a landmark and a well-known member of the community. Then we scanned the ground around it, still looking for a flat stone. But the map showed that Barbara had to be . . . this slanted slab leaning almost upright against a broken base . . . and across the top, the name Barbara! We felt pretty foolish and were elated at the same time.  

My mother admired my dad’s handiwork and we took a photograph. Then my husband found me a tool that I could use to gently scrape away the lichen from parts of the wording on the stone, and we took more pictures. 


A week or so later we were on the way home from the coast, staying in The Dalles, which is one of my favorite cities. Four years before this, we located the graves of Beatrice’s maternal uncles in the I.O.O.F. cemetery here, and then we had been successful in tracking down the old pioneer cemetery with its gravestone monument to Beatrice’s maternal grandfather, the husband of Barbara: John Worsley.

We had thought that Beatrice’s paternal grandmother, Katharina Selgrath Boedefeld, was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery too. But when we returned there and asked at the office, the kind worker there could not find her in any of his databases, and he said that they were very much complete. He referred us to the Catholic Cemetery across the road. We scoured that cemetery, each of us taking a row in turn, until we felt we had walked two miles each. My mother went back to the car to lean against it and rest. We checked every single stone (the office was locked for the day) and were unsuccessful. 

Late at night when I was almost asleep I realized that we had the wrong place. I was suddenly sure she had died in Pendleton, so why should she be buried in The Dalles? There were no Boedefeld relatives that I knew of in that area. The next morning I looked up her records, and sure enough, she had died in Pendleton in February 1904. Pendleton cemetery records were online and I found a “Catherine Bodenfeldt” in the Olney Cemetery. Thankfully, there was a good map too, showing exactly where in the huge cemetery her grave was located. 

We arrived around lunchtime. A quick drive through the cemetery located the right place, but the sprinklers were going full blast right on the spot. Not feeling like a shower, we all opted to have lunch and then return. When we got back, the sprinklers were just turning off in the right location. I took off my shoes and walked through the wet grass to find her. I could not find her. I searched every row of that block, and then we decided to ask at the office. 

The helpful lady there, whose name was Deb, got out the burial card for Catherine and located her on the map. Then she got out the block card and wrote down the names of the people buried in the same block. They were mostly infants, and we thought there might not be headstones for them. I thought I recognized one name though. She got out the block cards to the two sides and wrote those down too (Catherine was buried in the corner of her block). Back up the hill I took off my shoes again and this time found the right place in the wet grass, but there was no headstone, and no evidence there had ever been one. The spot was a little sunken, which was encouraging. Those wooden coffins disintegrated in this soil.

The place raised all kinds of questions and speculation that I had never thought about until seeing this lonely place with no marker of any kind. Her records in the cemetery office were spelled “Catherine Bodenfeldt” instead of “Katharina Bödefeld” as she used to sign her name herself, and as surely her relatives would have known to spell it. At least they would have put the Americanized version that they themselves had adopted: Boedefeld, wouldn’t they? And why did I have the date 13 February 1904 for her death, when the cemetery record showed her interment was 13 February 1907? Come to think of it, why would any of them bury their mother or grandmother way out here in Pendleton, away from all the rest of the family? 

• Her eldest son Jacob was probably dead by this time. 
• Her second son, John, and his wife, Magdalena, were living in Portland. Their daughter lived on the same street where I found Katharina living in 1900, but I don’t know the people Katharina was living with, even though she is listed as the mother-in-law of the head of the house. 
• Her third son, Joseph, was in a home for old soldiers and sailors back in Pennsylvania after living many years in Alaska.
• Her eldest daughter, who had been a nun but had left her order, was living in Portland.
• The next daughter, Catherine, lived with her husband in Pennsylvania.
• I can’t find the next two daughters, Agnes Boedefeld and Isabelle Hamilton.
• Son Ferdinand and his wife and daughters lived in Elkhart, Indiana.
• Daughter Mary Ann Zweibel lived back east in Pennsylvania or Ohio.
• Son Frank and his wife Mary were living in Tacoma, Washington.

Would the family have left her grave unmarked? I don’t think so. Would they have misspelled her name? No. There was no owner listed on the grave card (there was something typed in that space and white-out put over it; we scraped away the white-out to find the name of the girl buried in the next plot, typed there by mistake and then moved down to the line where her name belonged).

Why was Katharina by herself in Pendleton, Oregon, dying alone and apparently buried by strangers? We speculated that perhaps she was returning to her home in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and she was overtaken by something that proved fatal, and she dropped through the cracks in her family. Perhaps the family in the east did not know she was coming; perhaps the family in the west, with two other deaths a few months later (John and his wife, Magdalena), lost track of the fact that nobody had heard whether Grandma got home all right. And Grandma was lost until now. . .

We returned to the office and ordered a simple marker for Katharina’s grave. And we shelved the questions that cannot be answered.

Dying Branches and Family Trees

I can’t help myself—I have to write about this family I’ve been researching, even though I wrote about them just yesterday. They deserve a memorial, because this branch might be dying out. Here’s the story.

John and Barbara grew up a few streets apart in a suburb of Manchester, England. They were the same age and both sets of parents worked in the cloth manufacturing industry at the very dawn of the industrial age. Probably the parents had started as cottage weavers, but with the invention of steam power and things being mechanized as fast as inventors could figure out a way to do it, they moved into town and began to specialize. John and Barbara had a little schooling and by their mid-teens were working alongside their parents.

Money was probably pretty scarce for the families. John and Barbara were not able to marry until they were 23 years old, and within a few months they spent their hard-earned money to buy emigrants’ passage to New York. Their eldest son was born a few months after they had arrived and had gotten work in a cotton and woolen mill near Philadelphia. Barbara was busy with babies every two years for ten years, and John got work in various mills, moving the family within Pennsylvania, to Massachusetts, back to Pennsylvania, to Maryland, and finally to New Jersey. The boy born in Massachusetts had died when he was about ten months old, so they had four children. The Civil War came along, and John served as a First Lieutenant in the New Jersey 1st Cavalry Volunteers, Company D. Before the war was over, the last daughter was born, six years after her next older brother.

John decided they must try the West, and he made his way across the country with a wagon train, ending up in Oregon. There he founded a woolen mill in Brownsville, and Barbara and the five children, and several friends who wanted to work in the mill, prepared to join him there. They sailed from New Jersey to Panama, crossed the Isthmus on mule back, and sailed up to Coos Bay, stopping at San Francisco on the way. Sadly, Barbara contracted malaria in Panama and died a few weeks after getting the children safely to their father in Brownsville, Oregon. She was only 38. John lost heart and left the mill. He moved the children to that little town on the Columbia River where eventually his three remaining sons would be buried. He became the town’s photographer. He lived only nine more years, dying when he was only 48.

His eldest son, William, never married. He is the one I talked about yesterday, who worked as a laborer until his death when he was 67.

The next son, Benjamin, had that very odd marriage to Felicia who left him after 31 years and married someone else (I found the second husband after writing about them). Ben and Felicia had two sons, Ralph and Paul. Paul died at the age of four. Ben died at the age of 75. His son Ralph died at the age of 58, leaving two sons. Ralph’s sons, Don and John, died at the ages of 50 and 54, respectively. Wow. Did these men have short-lived genes or what? I don’t know whether Don and John had children. I think at least one of them did, because in the hazy part of my memory when we used to visit Ralph’s widow once a year (our yearly trip across the Golden Gate Bridge!), I think I remember meeting her two grandchildren once, children about my age or a little older.

The next sibling was Sarah, who married Clark and had two daughters and then a son. The second daughter, Beatrice, died at the age of five. The eldest daughter, Claudia, became a music teacher and never married or had children. The son, Clint, was epileptic and cared for his widowed mother until she died at the age of 74. Clint died soon after their mother, when he was 45. He had not married nor had children. Claudia died when she was 79.

After Sarah came Joseph. He’s the one who married for the first time when he was 56, to a woman who was about 50, and they didn’t have children together. He died when he was 81 years old.

Finally there was Laura. She married Ferdinand, and they had two daughters, Beatrice and Ruth. The elder married when she was in her mid-thirties; the younger never married. Beatrice had one son and died when she was 49. Laura died ten years later, when she was nearly 83. Ruth was a nurse and lived to be 83. Beatrice’s son had six children. I’m one of them.

If Ben’s grandsons, Don and Ralph, had children, then they and we are the last of this family. There are probably only eight of us in my generation, and from six of us there are only four more in the next generation. A shrinking branch!

In summary, John and Barbara had six children, seven grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, eight great-great grandchildren, and four great-great-great grandchildren. The trend doesn’t seem to be toward growth in the family tree. Where are all the branches? This tree seems to be growing like a bumpy shrub or something. Maybe the next generation will have only two in it, full circle back to John and Barbara’s generation. And then the tree will disappear. Is that sad?

Naaaaah.

Speaking of dying trees, or not, you should see two of my trees in the front yard. A couple years ago, our next door neighbors left and the man who owned the house came and sprayed the weeds from time to time that summer. He used this powerful herbicide that is supposed to keep anything from growing for years. The wind blows all the time here, and that stuff blew over the little fence and through the west half of the Macintosh apple tree. It hit the new little honey locust tree that our daughter and granddaughter gave my husband for his birthday. By the end of the summer, the two trees looked pretty darned sick. A year ago in the spring, the honey locust looked dead, and the apple tree was having a very hard time of it. It put out sick-looking little leaves that withered but somehow didn’t quite die until winter. We cut off the honey locust and trained up one of the suckers out of the roots to make a new tree. It's skinny, but it's doing well. This spring only half the apple tree leafed out, and those leaves look sick. A local expert told my neighbor to tell us to cut out all the dead stuff and not give up hope. This week we cut out all the dead stuff, and now we have a half a Macintosh apple tree. It looks terrible! We’re hoping to train some suckers to become branches out the west side of the tree. I decided I’d better put fertilizer on it every week—talk to it encouragingly every morning after my walk—you know, whatever I can think of to give it every chance to recover.

Like we did with the apple tree and the honey locust when it looked like they were dead, when your family is severely stressed, you sometimes do something radical and you always pray. If your family is dying out, it might not matter at all. The thing is, families are eternal and so it doesn’t matter whether a tree branch here or there stops growing: you have a responsibility to do everything you can to keep your section healthy while it’s here and then pray that it will reach its full potential in the hereafter.

I’m pretty sure that John and Barbara are proud of the lot of us.