| Notes |
- Clarinda's oldest resident, Mrs. M.E. Woods, about 97, died at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Mont McKee, early Wednesday after an illness of nearly a year. She had been a resident of Clarinda for 90 years. Funeral services will be held Friday at the Mont McKee home at 2:30 p.m. Mrs. Woods came to Page county and Clarinda in April, 1854, one year after Clarinda had been surveyed and named the county seat of Page county. She attended the first school, which was partly built when she arrived. Her education was finished in the Clarinda schools, where she later became a teacher. She was the daughter of Isaac and Margaret Van Arsdol. She was preceded in death by her husband, Wilson Woods, who died in November, 1889, and three children who died in infancy and two sons, Alger and Oliver. Surviving are four daughters Mrs. Roy Herren and Mrs. Mont McKee of Clarinda, Mrs. Alfred Jones of Shenandoah and Mrs. R.C. Baird of Santa Monica, Calif. She remained alert and active despite her age, and often remarked that she wanted an airplane someday. Reading occupied much of her time. Several years before her death, Mrs. Woods had written a short autobiography of her early life, which children and grandchildren have consented to be published. The autobiography contains her obituary, and the following information:
"I came with my parents and two brothers from Muncie, Delaware county, Indiana, to the old Fort Des Moines, Iowa, by way of the covered wagon in the autumn of 1853, where we spent the winter of 1853 and 1954 with friends who had preceded us two year before. They wished every much that we might find a home near them. The winter was an open one, and my father spent much time riding horseback over that section of the country without finding a suitable locations. Then he heard favorable reports of the extreme southwestern portion of the state. In February, he and the man who came west with him, made a horseback trip to that part of the country and found just what he wanted in Page county. The new town of Clarinda had been surveyed and located as the county seat in May of the previous year. He brought a farm adjoining the town limits and returned to Des Moines to arrange for the moving of the family to their new home. The only improvements on his new farm was 20 acres of sod ground broken the previous year. No house or accommodations of any kind were there for the family. In March 1854, my mother, brothers and I were left at a small settlement near the present site of Billisca, while he and his friend came to the farm, prepared logs for a sixteen-foot square building and with help of a few neighbors, (there were but few living here then) built the walls, covered them with clapboards, laid a punchion floor, and the house was ready for its intended inmates. On the fifteenth of April we left our camping place and arrived at Clarinda, which was then little more than a name, there being but one small residence building in the town, and the walls of a sixteen-foot square schoolhouse. The logs were of cottonwood. I attended the first school with the Clarinda corporate limits. Our teacher was Mr. Elijah Miller, who was one of the town's surveyors."
The cabin was the site of the A.A. Berry home and Willow avenue was the lane to town,. Mrs. Woods has related to her relatives.
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1847 - 1944 (96 years)
