A Family History of Joseph and Jane Dalton
Compiled by Tina Marie Culbertson (Click here to return to the Table of Contents)
From an Upland newspaper - December 1878
Mr. And Mrs. Joseph Dalton - Just south of the Solway Firth and Cheviot Hills in the extreme northwest of England, is the county of Cumberland. The battles of the border were often fought on its fields, and the crumbling ruins remain of the wall which Hadrian built from the Frith to the German ocean to protect its people from Piet and Scot. Cumberland is the most picturesque region in all of England. Derwentwater, Ulleswater, Thirsmere, Crummock and Eunerdale are a few of its many romantic lakes. Salldaw, Saddleback and Llelvellyn are among its famous mountains, while intervales abound of whose wondrous beauty the whole world is said hardly to the equal.
Many years ago, a young man and his wife, bringing with them as the chief of their wealth five little boys and girls, came from this charming county of Cumberland to seek their fortune in America. After several removals in the year 1847 they settled in Upland. No. 1 mill was just then about completed and the young man found employment there. That was thirty odd years ago. During the years that have come and gone since then, Joseph Dalton - for that was the young man's name - has continued to live at Upland, and remained in the employ of the same family - fifteen years as a weaver and for sixteen years in the responsible position of night watchman. Any day during the last period he might be seen a little before six o'clock p.m. going to his post, and a little before six o'clock a.m. returning attended by a faithful dog which he kept as the sole companion of his vigils.
The young man is an old man now, warned by the infirmities of advancing years to relinquish the round of duties to which he has for so long been devoted. And beside, a great sorrow has overtaken him. As the readers of this paper will remember, among recent obituary notices was the following:
Mrs. Jane Whitman Dalton was the same woman who, as a young wife, came with her husband and those five children so many years ago to America. She passed away as a sheaf of grain fully ripe. Few women have spent a more peaceful and useful Christian life. She sweetly fell asleep, as far as the writer knows, without an enemy, honored and loved, and having lived to see her five sons and daughters all settled, themselves parents, and without exception occupying highly respectable social positions.
This little story of real life would not be complete were mention omitted of the fact that those sons and daughters, with a single exception - that of a widowed daughter who resides in Chester - all remain at Upland. They are all, the sons directly and the daughter indirectly, employed by the same family with which their father was connected for a term coeval with a whole generation of men. It is not often that in the purest of American life such a case as this occurs, and it is worthy of record as evidence of stirling virtues and their reward.
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