My Genealogy Hound

GEORGE STULTS was born in Lincoln county, Ky., Aug. 25, 1813, although for the most part raised in Adair county. In 1847 he went to the comparatively unsettled state of Illinois, Macoupin county, residing there for some nine years; also later to Champaign county for a similar length of time. In May, 1866, he immigrated to Jasper county, Mo., where he has sojourned ever since, and resides on a farm just west of the town of Oronogo. He may be styled indeed a patriarch, having been the father of twenty children, and the husband of two wives. He was first married to Margaret R. Beard, of Adair county, Ky., Dec, 23, 1833. Her children are Margaret, Jane, John W., Charles M., George A., and Benjamin F. The death of Mrs. Margaret Stults occurred in January, 1847. With so large a family of children needing a mother’s love and care, he was again married July 3, 1849, to Hopstile Jayne, of Macoupin county, Ill., where she was born and raised. The names of her children are Richard, Sarah, Henry, Ormel, Robert, and Nettie. Of this unusually large family ten children are living and ten have passed away. Our subject has a farm of eighty acres about one mile west of Oronogo, where he at one time controlled a half section. Twenty-five acres sown to wheat in 1882 produced an average of twenty-four bushels, and twelve acres of corn had, the past season, a good crop. There is one of the finest orchards of the county on the farm of seven acres, which produced at least 500 bushels of apples in 1882. In his younger and palmy days, Mr. Stults was “the village blacksmith with strong and sinewy hands,” who made both welkin and the anvil ring for the bread of honest toil and sweat, for the yeomen who then came from Joplin, Carthage and Spring River. Times and custom in those days were strangely new. The subject of this sketch recalls being compelled to purchase corn and pay $15 per bushel in Dade county. George Raider, the first postmaster of Carthage, used to take a meal-bag and get the mail from Ft. Scott weekly. Wild game was plenty, and Mr. Stults used to go out and bring down a deer often in half an hour. Few men, indeed, live to raise so an unusually large family to usefulness and manhood. Being deprived of many school advantages, Mr. Stults loses no opportunity to secure the benefits of an education for his children, in which he is an enthusiast, being himself a great reader and a lover of public enterprise.