3. Meeting Mr. Bemis
We are given a charming glimpse into the first meeting between Mr. and Mrs. Bemis in some interesting reminiscences Mr. Bemis has recently written for his grandchildren. He had been settled in business in St. Louis for some years when Alice Cogswell, shortly after her sister's marriage, went there to visit a very dear aunt, "Aunt Lucy Smyth." The occasion of their meeting came through Mr. Bemis's first visit to Boston in 1865, which, in his own words, "resulted in an important occurrence." He met there a business connection, Mr. Zenas Cushing, who had become Alice Cogswell's guardian on the death of her father; knowing that Mr. Bemis was from St. Louis, Mr. Cushing gave him a letter of introduction to his ward and bespoke his interest in her and his help in any business advice she might need. Mr. Bemis tells his story thus: "Some three weeks after my return from Boston I gave myself the pleasure of calling one evening and presenting the letter. As I am writing these lines I can see 'Miss Cogswell' coming into the parlor where I was awaiting her. She was dressed in the fashion of the day, having on a silk dress with a very full skirt held out by a hoop-skirt of large dimensions. She met me cordially and asked me to be seated and we talked for an hour of my first trip to Boston, of her guardian and others. As I was leaving and closing the gate I heard myself saying that I might marry that girl if I could win her. It was not so-called 'love at first sight,' but it ripened into love with a few subsequent calls. I think it was a very fortunate circumstance that I met Alice Cogswell when I did." And very fortunate for many others did this union prove. The outward condition of their early lives was very different, but the two families from which they came were alike in the standards which they held for themselves and instilled into their children.
The story of Mr. Bemis's early years is the familiar one of that type of western pioneer to whom the whole country is deeply indebted. He was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, on May 18, 1833, of parents who had all the best inheritance to give their children, but few material possessions. When he was an infant the family moved to a small village in Chemung County, New York, where his mother's brother, Henry Farwell, lived with his family. The relation between the two families was a close one, and five years later it was decided that they should move together to Illinois. Reports of its fertile soil and what it promised for the future had come back to them by the slow and uncertain mails. They knew that it offered more for themselves, and what was far more important to them, for their children, than they could ever have in their present surroundings. When they made the great change they knew well the dangers and difficulties that must be met on the journey when taken under the most favorable conditions. They knew, too, how these would be increased in their case, as they were taking so many young children, eight in all; but the courageous band to which they belonged were men and women of industry and personal integrity, with a strong sense of real values, who, having made their decision, took no reckoning of obstacles to the end before them.
It was a long, difficult journey. In a pleasant sketch of this that Mr. Bemis has given, we have only the remembrance of such incidents as stay in the memory of a child. There is no mention of hardships. He recalls the covered wagon, but knows only from others of the slow journey to Buffalo, thence by boat to Detroit, and the continued journey to Chicago, then Fort Dearborn, where they did not remain for fear of being eaten by mosquitoes or of having fever and ague, and so camped at what is now Oak Park. Thence they moved on to Lighthouse Point, Ogle County, Illinois, where the Bemis family found a temporary lodging in a log cabin and the others lived in covered wagons until they had built a comfortable cabin for themselves.
From the beginning of the making of the new home on the empty prairie, the children took their full share in the work it involved. Mr. Bemis has told us that he was doing from one-half to two-thirds of a man's work on the farm when he was twelve years old, the year in which his wife was born into the well-established life of a fine old New England town, rich for her in all the inheritances that seven generations gave; all the way before her made as smooth as love and ample means could make it.
At the age of nineteen Mr. Bemis left the farm and began his business career in Chicago as clerk to a shipping firm. After six years, with only his own savings for his capital, and helped by the loan of some machinery supplied by a cousin, he went to St. Louis and began the business which has borne his name for over sixty years, a name that is a synonym in all the business world for ability and integrity. His success did not come by accident, or by any so-called good fortune, but as the result of patience and perseverance, steadily following the principles and the rules he laid down for himself very early in life. He speaks with gratitude of the fact that he had to learn by force of circumstances "the blessedness of drudgery and the value of time and money in his long hours of work and in the closest practice of economy."
We have seen how different were the outward circumstances of their early lives. In temperament also Mr. and Mrs. Bemis differed much; but in sympathy on all great matters, in their ideals of life, and their unfailing recognition of their own personal obligation and duty, they were always one. In the reminiscences he has written for his grandchildren, Mr. Bemis says: "Parents can lay the foundation for each child by their own life. They are giving daily examples by their actions and by word of mouth. If parents are living well-ordered and Christian lives, their children will be likely to follow their example. They will know nothing else. Good boys and girls make good men and women. An educated and scientific carpenter will hew and mortise the timbers to fit the keys that bind the frame to a complete and solid house, so that storm and winds pass it by unharmed. So with boys and girls; if their characters are moulded in truth, mortised and keyed together with obedience to God and man, when they become men and women they will withstand the environment of bad persons and escape unscathed. Hence their young lives, founded on the bedrock of Christian characters, are well qualified to work out their own destiny and make their lives whatever they will."