My Genealogy Hound

BICKNELL D. FENTON, an industrious farmer and respected citizen of the town of Ellicott, was a son of Captain Berry B. and Fanny (Demming) Fenton, and was born in the town of Ellery, Chautauqua county, New York, September 12, 1816. The Fentons are of English extraction, and are descended from four Fenton brothers who were Puritans and came from England to New England, where they settled in a very early day. Berry B. Fenton (paternal grandfather), a descendant of one of these brothers, was a life-long resident of Saratoga county, this State. He was a democrat, married, and had two sons, Captain Berry B. and Thomas, and four daughters. Captain Berry B. Fenton, in all probability, was born in the town of Greenfield, Saratoga county, and in February, 1816, came to the town of Ellery, where he purchased fifty acres of land of the Holland Land company, near Chautauqua Lake. He was a farmer by occupation, a democrat in politics, and commanded a company in the State militia for several years. He married Fanny Demming, and reared a family of four sons and three daughters: Bicknell, Almira, Lodica, Hibbard, Daniel, Barry and Fannie.

Bicknell D. Fenton obtained a practical English education for himself in the primitive backwoods schools of his day, and was engaged in farming until 1852, excepting three years spent in the mercantile business at De Wittville. He then went back to Ellery, and owned a farm of two hundred and fifty acres, kept a dairy of from thirty to forty cows, living there till 1867; then came to Jamestown, and remained here until 1870, when he purchased the farm of seventy-six acres in the town of Ellicott, upon which his widow now resides. Mr. Fenton was a republican in politics, and had been a member of the Patrons of Husbandry for some years. He was frugal, industrious and careful. He was prosperous as a farmer, and successful as a business man. He died on July 11, 1889.

He married Cordelia A. Ide, daughter of Thomas and Laura (Chamberlain) Ide. To Mr. and Mrs. Fenton were born five children: George T., formerly a hardware dealer, but now treasurer of a loan association in Jamestown, who married Lelia Yates, and has two children, — Louis G. and Lucy; Laura, born in 1847, and died in 1854; Fannie, who married O. H. Carpenter, a farmer and dairyman of Ellery, and has four children, — Belle A., Edith C., Janie and Lelia; Eugene S. and Edward L., who both died in childhood, and Hibbard, who died in 1876, aged nineteen years.

Mrs. Cordelia A. Fenton’s father, Thomas Ide, was a native of the town of Milton in Saratoga county, and came in 1820 to the town of Aurora, Erie county; in 1834 came to Ellery, where he died in 1851. He was a prosperous farmer and good citizen. He was married three times. His first wife was Deborah Eldridge, who bore him four children, and after her death he married Sarah Howe, by whom he had one daughter. For his third wife, he married Mrs. Laura (Chamberlain) Scofield, widow of Seth Scofield. By his third marriage he had five children: Chauncey, Cordelia A. (Mrs. Fenton), George, Henry and Seth, who died in infancy. Mrs. Fenton resides on the farm owned by her husband at his death, where she lives in comfort, and intelligently and successfully manages all of her farming operations and business affairs.