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Pioneer Family
Emigrants of 1847 |
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| Jon Baker, first cousin to General Robert E. Lee, was born on September 28, 1816 in Wheeling, Virginia (now Wheeling, West Virginia). His family owned a large tobacco plantation in Wheeling, but Jon was not the eldest son and stood to inherit no land. Plantation life didn't provide Jon with much of an education, so he felt that his best chance of making his fortune in the world was to head west. He moved to Illinois, where he met fifteen-year-old Nancy Haley, a young woman suffering under the tyranny of an uncaring stepmother. The couple were married in January, 1839, and later moved to Missouri.
The Bakers and their three children jumped off for Oregon from Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1847. Jon was elected captain of the wagon train, and as a result he was known as Captain Baker for the rest of his life. Nancy packed her most treasured family possessions in three large oak casks, cushioning the heirlooms with straw. In one of the barrels was the Haley family china, which Nancy's great great grandmother had brought west when she emigrated from England. While crossing a waterless stretch in the eastern Oregon Country, the emigrants in the wagon train began throwing away everything they could to spare their weary oxen. Jon rolled Nancy's three oak barrels off the wagon, but she drew the line at losing the family china. Proclaiming that, "if this barrel is to remain here in this godforsaken plot of wasteland, then I remain as well," she sat down on the cask containing the china and refused to be moved. Jon pleaded with her to move and begged her to come to her senses, but in the end Nancy won out. Jon loaded the last barrel back on the wagon, and the china coffee service and meat platter which Nancy's ancestor brought across the Atlantic Ocean are family heirlooms to the present day. Once safely in the Willamette Valley, the family spent about two years in Oregon City. After scouting business opportunities downriver, Jon decided to stay in Oregon City and manage Sidney Moss' hotel. This put a roof over his family and allowed him to save enough money to get the family started in Oregon. Among the guests who stayed at the hotel while Baker was managing it was Ulysses S. Grant, who would take Vicksburg and eventually defeat Baker's cousin, General Robert E. Lee, during the Civil War fifteen years later.
Captain Baker was a staunch Democrat throughout his life, and he was active in civic and political organizations and the Baptist Church. During constitutional convention for the soon-to-be State of Oregon, he served as sergeant-at-arms. Several years later, he won brief infamy among his neighbors for displaying lit candles in all the windows of the new Baker home -- a spacious affair for the times and built of brick, rather than wood -- in a show of celebration at the news of President Lincoln's assassination. Jon and Nancy had ten children together, of whom eight lived to maturity. Nancy, who was ill in her last years, vowed that she would live to see all her daughters married. This she did: her youngest daughter, Orilla, married in 1880, and Nancy passed away on January 18, 1881, three months shy of her 58th birthday. Jon survived her by more than 25 years, passing away at the family home on December 28, 1908, at the age of 92.
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In the fall of 1849, Jon rented a barge and transported the family and their possessions to the small town of Salem. They were only the sixteenth white family to settle there. After a brief stint running a sawmill, Jon took out a land claim and started the first brickyard in Salem. The Baker brick works supplied the bricks that went into most of the major structures in the Salem area -- including the Baker family home and St. Mary's Catholic School, for which Jon provided the bricks in exchange for educating his four daughters. The Baker family claim was perfected in 1866, when Captain Baker received legal title to the 640 acres he claimed under the Donation Land Act of 1850.