Mary And I

Forty years ago this first day of June, 1877, MARY, and I came to Fort Snelling. She was from the Old Bay State, and I was a native-born Buckeye. Her ancestors were the Longley's and Taylor's of Hawley and Buckland, names honorable and honored in the western part of Massachusetts. Her father, Gen. Thomas Longley, was for many years a member of the General Court and had served in the war of 1812, while her grandfather, Col. Edmund Longley, had been a soldier of the Revolution, and had served under Washington. Her maternal grandfather, Taylor, had held a civil commission under George the Third. In an early day, both families had settled in the hill country west of the Connecticut River. They were the true and worthy representatives of New England. As it regards myself, my father, whose name was Stephen Riggs, was a blacksmith, and for many years an elder in the Presbyterian church of Steubenville, Ohio, where I was born. He had a brother, Cyrus, who was a preacher in Western Pennsylvania; and he traced his lineage back, through the Riggs families of New Jersey, a long line of godly men, ministers of the gospel and others, to Edward Riggs who came over from Wales in the first days of Colonial history. My mother was Anna Baird, a model Christian woman, as I think, of a Scotch Irish family, which in the early days settled in Fayette County, Pa. Of necessity, they were pioneers. When they had three children, they removed up into the wild wooded country of the Upper Allegheny. My mother could tell a good many bear stories. At one time, she and those first three children were left alone in an unfinished log cabin. The father was away hunting food for the family. When, at night, the fire was burning in the old-fashioned chimney, a large black bear pushed aside the quilt that served for the door, and sitting down on his haunches, surveyed the scared family within. But as God would have it, to their great relief, he retired without offering them any violence. Mary's education had been carefully conducted. She had not only the advantages of the common town school and home culture, but was a pupil of Mary Lyon, when she taught in Buckland, and afterward of Miss Grant, at Ipswich. At the age of sixteen, she taught her first school, in Williamstown, Mass. As she used to tell the story, she taught for a dollar a week, and, at the end of her first quarter, brought the $12 home and gave it to her father, as a recognition of what he had expended for her education.