[or-roots] Theophilus Magruder - 1860

[Bob Casebeer]

Bill, I have never tried to find out much about the Aikins who operated the ferry at Winchester.  However, although I taught high school for eight years in Riddle during my salad days, I don't think I ever ran across your Jenny McKay.
    One of my great aunt's married one of the Riddles however, and one of the family also married the son (a Chapman) of one of the Riddle family (a woman who married back east but came west as a widow with the original Riddle tribe) and moved to Cody, Wyoming with him in the 1870s.  As you probably know some of the Riddles also settled on the northern portion of the Steens mountains....a couple of the sons of Stilly Riddle, the man who married Almarine Chapman, my great aunt. 
Bob Casebeer
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Chris & Bill Strickland 
  To: or-roots mail list 
  Cc: sunny5197 at yahoo.com ; casebeer at jeffnet.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 9:51 PM
  Subject: Re: [or-roots] Theophilus Magruder - 1860


  Bob Casebeer wrote: 
    Bill, David Aikins,one of my former students, ...

  Isn't that interesting!  But yup, depending on who's asking or what he's done lately,  Dave is (or is not) my first cousin -- a guy could spend all day talking about Dave. Oregon has one other Dave Aikins (in Bend), also related, but far more distantly. Dave's younger brother, Jerry, is also living in Ashland. I'm Dave's senior by about three years. His dad was Best Man at my folk's wedding, and vice versa.  Likewise, I'm fairly close to Dave and his siblings.

    That great grandfather probably was the Aikins who operated the ferry at Winchester

  Alva Leroy "A.L." Aikins, b 1857 IL, d 1947, Ashland -- his son, my namesake grandfather (I'm really Harold William Strickland), died early, 1943, and I never saw him, but A L and I overlapped for about six months, and although I have no memory of him, I do have a couple pictures of us together.

  Probably not your ferry guy -- A L left Illinois in August 1887 via train and established a brick foundry in Chehalis / Centralia, a hardware store and farm in Yakima in the late 1890's, and moved to Ashland, OR in 1903 where he bought a piece of ground on Main Street in Ashland, built a two story brick and stone building 50 x 75 feet  and rented the lower floor to be used as a furniture store -- the first masonry building on Main St in Ashland, still in service as the Rexall Drug store. Later he moved to 142 acres in Riddle, and after building a home there, moved to Roseburg and built a garage on Rose Street around the time of WWI (now if the ferry operation is around that time, there may be a connection to A.L., but that is not what I call "pioneer")  After the war, his son, Ray, homesteaded in Tulelake, CA, and A.L. spent most of his time at his son's ranch and his wife stayed with a daughter in Portland. He moved around between Tulelake, a cabin on Crescent Lake, Riddle, and Ashland, where he built a concrete block home (still standing & occupied) just above the Ashland Hotel (whatever it is called now) when he had a run-in with hotel staff about smoking in the lobby while he was a resident there.

  Now I do have some Aikins' that I can't account for, and another branch of the family that was in Roseburg, but no recollection of any ferry business, so that doesn't mean that that the folks you speak of aren't connected, so maybe you could tell me a bit more at your leisure, but it probably wasn't A.L.  A L was probably the first of the identifiable family to come to Oregon.

  Viginia "Jenny" McKay of Riddle is a third cousin.

  So far, there seems to be no connection to the other early Aikins family in eastern Washington.

  Bill Strickland



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