Butte County
Biographies
MRS. ANNIE L. BENNETT
MRS. ANNIE L. BENNETT--To northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin belongs the honor of having produced two of the world’s most noted women, Jane Addams, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. While not having attained to the eminence of either of these women, Mrs. Annie Louise Bennett has in large measure the same qualities of soul enthusiasm and desire to do good. Her father, William Peters, a stone mason, was a native of Wales, born in the historic old city of St. Davids, in the County of Pembroke, from whence he came to St. Thomas, Canada, and from there to Roscoe, Ill., to build the first woolen mill ever built on Rock River. Her mother, Susan (Dunn) Peters, was a native of Pennsylvania, born in Crawford County, twenty-five miles from Meadville. Mrs. Bennett was born January 4, 1845, in northern Illinois, north of the town of Roscoe, Winnebago County. Her father settled on a farm one and one half miles from Rockton, in Winnebago County, where his daughter grew up and attended the country school near Rockton; later she attended the Female College in Racine, Wis., finishing her education at the Rockford High School and becoming a teacher. In those days the occupation of a pedagogue was not as remunerative as at the present day. She received the munificent sum of three dollars per week for her efforts in this line of work, boarding around and staying the longest at those homes which had the greatest number of children. In 1863 she was married to her first husband, Jacob Bevens, a native of New York and a Union soldier. Later he became a commercial traveler, having the wholesale agency for the J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company for the state of Iowa. They lived at the old farm home one mile east of Rockton, Ill., where their three children were born and where the husband died and was buried. The children are: Ella, wife of Arthur Sweetser, a farmer at Honcut; Edna, now Mrs. Edna Bevens, living with her mother; and William Bevens, residing at Honcut.
Mrs. Annie Louise Bevens came to California in October 1871, with her three children. She was married in Sacramento to M. S. Bennett, who was a native of Quincy, Ill., and who came to California in 1852, across the plains on foot and horseback. He was a stockman and farmer in Sacramento. In 1882 they came to Honcut, where Mr. Bennett died in 1910 at the advanced age of seventy-two. He was a most excellent man, well liked by those who knew him. Three children were born to Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, namely: Samuel B., born in 1872, who died in British Columbia; Lydia, the wife of J. J. Malone, a mine-owner at Nelson, British Columbia, and the mother of one child, Edna M.; and Roscoe, who died at the age of thirty-two years.
Mrs. Bennett has attained the age of seventy-four, and she is an invalid and patient sufferer at her comfortable home in Honcut. She is a high-minded woman of fine disposition, a loving mother and possessed of all the womanly virtues. Her children have largely acquired the same characteristics and are highly regarded in the community.
Transcribed
by Joyce Rugeroni.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 1073-1074, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2008 Joyce Rugeroni.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte
County Biographies