The Sever Family
Allen Sever, son of New Jersey Quaker stock, was born in 1825, in Warren County, Ohio.
When Allen was a small boy his parents moved to Warren County, Indiana. Iron working was a skill passed down in the family, as an ancestor of his invented the first iron plow and another ancestor invented the Sharp�s needle. Allen himself was a blacksmith and wagon maker and his wagons were sturdily built, enough so that some of them survived the 1849 gold rush and got through to California.
Allen married Silvia Talbot, who died in the first year of marriage. In 1846, he was married/2, to Anne Rebecca Hurst, one of four children born to Gibson Hurst and Rebecca Ann Morris. Anne came from a long line of Delaware plantation owners and slaveholders. Her maternal grandfather and two great-grandfathers served in the Revolutionary War. Her parents moved to Indiana in 1834. Frontier conditions being rigorous, she was taught all necessary housekeeping skills and could spin and weave (on a loom Allen built.)
In the spring of 1856, when their eighth child was 6 weeks old, they moved to Warren County, Iowa, in a covered wagon. With them was Ann�s mother, who died the next year and is buried in Hartford Cemetery. Allen bought a farm about a mile southwest of Hartford which had a large log house on it.
He bought a large Bible, wrote the price, $6.00, on the flyleaf, and also recorded, under date of September 1865, �This day the boys of the 34th Regiment came home to Hartford.� Allen was a Blue Lodge Mason, an ardent student of history, and a skilled craftsman whose work helped to build Warren County.
When Allen and his wife were in their middle seventies, the bachelor sons, Morgan and Allen Jr., fell victim to the urge to move to Oklahoma, where promoters were selling land to unsuspecting customers. The old couple no doubt hated to leave the comfortable home and good neighbors, but others of the family had moved to Oklahoma and they were persuaded to go.
The sandy acres of the Panhandle country were beset by drought, dust storms, hail and tornadoes, and in a very few years the Severs were very poor. Allen was no longer able to ply his trade and there were no customers able to pay. They died in 1906, and were buried in Pleasant Hill Cemetery near May, Oklahoma.
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