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Michigan Select Michigan Counties
Lot Whiteomb, P. M. In 1834 Mr. Holcomb imported sixty sheep. The wolves had a great hankering for those sheep. Mr. Holcomb harvested a little wheat in 1832, and was thus employed when the cholera broke out among them. There were six victims of this dread disease-five in the family of Warren Nichols, and it constitued the entire family-father, mother and three children, and Isaac Crofoot, the other and last victim. The alarm occasioned by this epidemic was so universal, that medical and other aid was very difficult to obtain, and for weeks after it ceased to exist they were so completely cut off from all communication with the surrounding settlements that Mr. Holcomb, who was compelled to go to mill, was looked upon, almost, as one risen from the dead. In the absence of suitable lumber for coffins, the upper floor of Nichol's house was used for that purpose. Rough coffins were made, and the dead deposited therein immediately, and buried (in no cemetery), and without religious services, and with the least possible delay.
Mr. Holcomb's prairie farm of 200 acres is apparently as productive to-day as it was forty years ago, although it has neither been manured or seeded down to clover but two or three years. Oats sometimes attained nine feet and one inch in height. First crop of wheat, from poor seed, however, was smutty, chaffey and worthless. His second crop, from the sowing of Wabash pure wheat, was clean and plump. Average product some eighteen bushels. His average crop of oats is from sixty to seventy bushels per acre. Mr. Holcomb set out thirty apple trees in 1835, and one hundred in 1836.
Michigan Counties
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