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Compiled by John H. Wheeler Published in 1903 by B. F. Bowen Biography Page 126 |
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HENRY B. HUFF
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The conditions which prevailed throughout the state of Michigan fifty or more years ago were by no means what they are today. The face of the entire country has undergone wonderful changes since then. The state, having been admitted in 1837, was only about thirteen years old and the population was small, with settlements widely scattered. The states of the Union in 1850 numbered thirty and Michigan was the twentieth in population, but most of the people resided in the southern and eastern counties. Kent county, where Henry B. Huff, the subject of this review, was born, was then practically an unbroken wilderness. His parents had settled there some years previous and were among the early pioneers of the locality. There they endured all of the hardships of the early settler and there their children were born and reared and learned their first industrial lessons. Henry B. Huff, now a resident of Cedar Creek township, was born on his father's farm in Kent county, Michigan, April 28, 1850. His parents were James S. and Phoebe (Blackall) Huff, the father being a native of the state of New Jersey and the mother of New York. They had come to Michigan, where homes were cheap and where the expense of existence was less burdensome than in their native commonwealths. It is doubtful if they realized the trials, inconveniences and privations that always are to be encountered in every new country, but having once crossed the Rubicon return was not to be thought of. They were the parents of eight children, six sons and two daughters, and these they reared and instructed to lives of usefulness. About 1870 the family moved to Cedar Creek township and there the latter years of the lives of the sturdy old couple were passed. Both were in the seventy-third year of their age at the time of their death. Of their eight children, Henry B. Huff was the second. His youth was spent in the woods, the clearing and in the fields when the forest had been transformed into tracts of land which permitted of cultivation. He was about five years in Wexford county before the removal of the family from Kent county, and with that exception the first twenty years of his life were spent at the place of his birth. In September, 1870, he located on a tract of eighty acres of land in section 6, Cedar Creek township, and there he has remained ever since, clearing the land, improving the farm and cultivating the soil. Farming has been the business of his life and although he has not accumulated a great amount of money he has made a comfortable living and laid by something for his declining years. He is the owner of eighty acres, on part of which he originally settled, and fifty-five acres of it are cleared and the place well improved. May 15, 1872, Henry B. Huff was united in marriage to Miss Sarah Smith, a native of Ohio, who, when a little girl, accompanied her parents to Michigan when they decided to settle in the wilderness. They located in Kent county and there the little girl was reared to womanhood. She and Henry B. Huff had known each other many years and when he established a home in Cedar Creek township made it comfortable and had lived there some two years, he sought out the girl of his boyhood's love and hastened to make her his wife. Since then they have lived modestly, but comfortably, upon their little farm and there are thousands of rich and opulent people throughout the land who have lived less happily, less usefully and less worthily than they have. Both are active members of the Freewill Baptist church, of which he is deacon and a trustee. |