The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Chapman (1880), pp. 679–680; 1875 atlas footnote and directory
Jacob Eaton was born in Maryland on 1 May 1819, son of Isaac and Margaret (Metzger) Eaton — his father a native of Virginia who died in the township 25 December 1869 aged ninety-four, his mother a Marylander who died 23 April 1863 aged eighty-one. "His parents came to this county in September, 1831, and first settled in this tp., afterward entering land on sec. 17"; Jacob's own farm was Section 13, 225 acres. He married Elizabeth Barnes in 1846; seven children, six living in 1880. He was township trustee for seventeen years. Chapman's closing line for him is the settlement era's own epitaph: "He is the oldest permanent living settler in the tp. at present; he fished and swam in the lakes of this tp. with ex-Judge Stanfield, and helped to clear the ground on which St. Mary's Academy now stands." His father Isaac has a separate sketch of his own elsewhere in Chapman (p. 505). The Eatons came the year after the Cripes and McCombses had settled in, and Jacob's life — 1819 to the record's edge — spans the township from its first clearings to its brick schoolhouses.