A Life Spent in One Place

Mary Emaline Munson was born 30 July 1841 in Richfield, Genesee County, Michigan, the daughter of Henry Munson and Elizabeth “Betsy” Foster.¹ Within a few years the family had moved into Saginaw County, settling in Bridgeport Township along the Cass River, where Mary spent her childhood among a growing circle of brothers and sisters that included her younger sister, Frances Jane.²

She came of age in a household that was part of the earliest wave of permanent settlement in the area. By 1850 she was living with her parents in Bridgeport, in a community still very much in the process of being built.³

Marriage and a household of her own

On 26 April 1858, Mary married Reuben Thomas Wickham in Tittabawassee Township.⁴ She was still in her teens, and like many young women of her generation moved directly from her father’s home into one of her own.

The couple remained in Tittabawassee Township for the rest of their lives. By 1860 they were established there with their first child, beginning a pattern of continuity that would define Mary’s story.⁵

Five children were born to Reuben and Mary between 1860 and 1876:

Isadora Wickham
Elizabeth Loella Wickham
William H. Wickham
Ettie I. Wickham
Alice Mary Wickham⁶

All were raised in the same township where Mary herself had grown up.

The center of a farm family

The 1880 census captures Mary in the busiest years of her life. Her husband was working as a farmer, and the household included two adult daughters, a teenage son, and two young girls. Mary’s occupation was recorded simply as “keeping house,” a phrase that understated the scale of the work required to manage a farm home and family in nineteenth-century Michigan.⁷

This was not a family that moved on in search of new land or new opportunities. Through every census from 1860 to 1900, Mary remained in Tittabawassee Township, surrounded by familiar roads, neighboring farms, and an extended network of Munson and Wickham relatives.⁵⁷⁸⁹

Family ties that remained close

Those connections deepened in the next generation. Mary’s youngest daughter, Alice Mary Wickham, married Gardner Rivers, the son of Mary’s sister Frances Jane Munson. The marriage joined the two Munson sisters’ families even more closely, ensuring that the bonds formed in their childhood home continued into the lives of their children and grandchildren.

Mary also lived to see the passing of her parents—Henry Munson in 1886 and Elizabeth Foster Munson in 1894—events that marked the end of the founding generation of the family in Saginaw County.¹⁰¹¹

Later years and widowhood

After nearly forty-five years of marriage, Mary was widowed when Reuben died on 16 January 1903.¹² The 1900 census, taken only a few years earlier, shows the couple still together in their longtime home, by then the parents of grown children.⁹

Death and burial

Mary died 23 May 1907 in Tittabawassee Township at the age of sixty-five.¹ Her death certificate records the cause as erysipelas, an acute infection that was often fatal in the years before antibiotics.¹

She was buried on 26 May 1907 in Owen Cemetery, beside the husband with whom she had shared her entire adult life.¹⁴ Her obituary in the Saginaw Evening News noted her long residence in the township and the family who survived her there.¹⁵

She had lived her entire adult life in the same community where she began it as a young bride, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and the extended Munson and Wickham families whose histories were inseparable from her own.

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Sources

1. Michigan Death Records, 1867–1950, Mary Emeline Wickham, death certificate, 23 May 1907, Tittabawassee Township, Saginaw County.
2. 1850 U.S. census, Saginaw County, Michigan, Bridgeport Township, Henry Munson household.
3. Ibid.
4. Saginaw County, Michigan, marriage records, Reuben T. Wickham and Mary E. Munson, 26 April 1858.
5. 1860 U.S. census, Saginaw County, Michigan, Tittabawassee Township, Reuben T. Wickham household.
6. Michigan birth records, children of Reuben T. and Mary E. Wickham.
7. 1880 U.S. census, Saginaw County, Michigan, Tittabawassee Township, Reuben T. Wickham household.
8. 1870 U.S. census, Saginaw County, Michigan, Tittabawassee Township, Reuben T. Wickham household.
9. 1900 U.S. census, Saginaw County, Michigan, Tittabawassee Township, Reuben T. Wickham household.
10. Michigan Death Records, Henry Munson, 12 December 1886.
11. Michigan Death Records, Elizabeth Foster Munson, 29 March 1894.
12. Michigan Death Records, Reuben T. Wickham, 16 January 1903.
13. Owen Cemetery, Saginaw County, Michigan, burial record and gravestone, Mary E. Wickham.
14. Saginaw Evening News, 24 May 1907, p. 10, obituary of Mary Wickham.