Surnames: Tripp, Marsh, Norris, Alderman

----Source: Neillsville Press (Neillsville, Clark County, Wis.) Thursday, 09/24/1925

Tripp, Celia E. ( 1838 - 8 Sept. 1925)

Mrs. Celia Tripp died in San Diego, California, September 8, 1925. Her funeral took place at her home Sept. 10. The following sketch of her life, written by her daughter, Mrs. S. M. Marsh, was read at the funeral services:

"Westward the star of Empire takes it way".

Born in 1838 her life has spanned much of her country’s life covering the great bank failures of Van Buren’s time in her babyhood, the Mexican War of her early childhood, the Civil War of her young womanhood, the Spanish War of her maturity, the World War of her later years. There have been periods of normal life in her nation’s life during which there has been normal progress, but surely enough of storm to wreck complacency and keep one struggling for a higher civilization.

The pioneer spirit was born with Mother back on the Western Reserve, for her parents, Almon and Lucy Alderman had followed their parents from then far off Connecticut to carve out a home in the Ohio wilderness. The rich farms developed, and the children, of whom Celia was the fourth, found joy in the beautiful woodlands, played along the winding streams, and in winter coasted down the steep hills or skated on the mill ponds.

While a little girl of eight, the father must follow his star, and in the covered wagon with his wife and five young children, journeyed to the new and much advertised state of Michigan, there to take up rich land with bright hope of fortune, but the fevers going with the opening of new lands overcame the stout hearts, and the father resolved to take his family back to Ohio, where he must begin again, with an invalid wife.

During the years that followed, the little girl Celia and her older sister had to care for the family and take turns in going to school, where Celia spelled down the classes and flitted to the head. There was but scant chance for attendance at a neighboring academy, as the mother remained an invalid all through Celia’s maidenhood. Meanwhile, the mind was eager, grasping at every opportunity, and absorbing everything within reach.

In young womanhood, after the great slavery agitation and after Lincoln’s election, came the war with its crushing sorrows. Three brothers and a young husband responded to the call. One brother died in the Louisburg hospital, one was brought back from Camp Chase with a life time disability, and the madcap younger brother survived four years of battle, but carried a bullet through life. The husband survived the war, but only a few years.

After the war, again the father led westward that his sons and sons-in-laws might find wider opportunity in the great West. Wisconsin had been carved out of the Northwest Territory and was offering untold wealth and opportunity to those who would go to find. This time the covered wagon was not invoked. They were able to come by steamer on the Great Lakes, and by rail to Sparta, from where they took an ox team to Clark County. There the father bought land at the foot of a beautiful bluff with a tiny stream below and again a new life was started.

Left a widow and two young children, in 1870 Celia Norris married Orlando Tripp, and began another new life immediately identified with the life of Clark County, Wisconsin, and later with Florida.

There was ever a reaching out of the unknown, and finally, several years after Mr. Tripp’s passing, her star of empire led her to follow her daughter to the far west to live by the Western ocean. Her life here is too well known to need mention.

The land bought by her father at the foot of the bluff in Wisconsin became a rich farm, but when the railroad was built through, part of the land was sold as a town site and became the village of Humbird. There, west of the village, nestling at the foot of a bluff in one of Wisconsin’s beauty spots, is the little cemetery, Mother will join her father and mother, her husband and three children, while a baby boy sleeps in Ohio, and a daughter in Iowa.