In 1866, after the Pierce farm at Loon Lake had been sold and the money distributed, father and mother took Eudora, a baby of two, to Michigan where mother's sister Jane then lived. They intended to buy a farm where there were not so many hills and stones as there were in the county of Steuben.

Father acquired the rights in a patented fence with moveable posts, to be taken into the barn in winter, and so, ostensibly selling this, he visited many farmers in Michigan, took a look at their land without any suspicion of his motive, but found nothing that suited him. Winter came on, and he would buy no land covered with snow as his judgment of fertility was based on how big bull-thistles the soil would grow. Mother became homesick for her father and sisters back in Steuben County, so they returned for a "visit."

They rented a house across from the farm of Myron Patchin, who had married mother's sister, Rozilla, and by the time spring came, mother had persuaded father to stay in good old Steuben.

And so it happened that in 1868, I was born at Patchinsville, two miles south of Wayland.

Soon afterward father bought my grandfather Parmenter's farm, a mile south of Wayland, and there my brother Adin was born in 1869.