In The Prime of Their Lives
Young people in the prime of their lives are reflected in these undated portraits, c. 1870, from an album scanned by Steven Morse. The cigar-smoking men are cousins Eugene Crosby and William M. Bellows and the women are Will’s sisters, Sarah Idell Bellows and Orrie Bellows.
The Bellows siblings were children of Merrick and Amelia Morrison Bellows of Bedell. Eugene was a son of Thomas and Jemima Morrison Crosby. Their lives would diverge and come back together over the next 60 years. The Crosby family migrated to Illinois, Missouri (where Jemima died in 1877) and finally Nebraska, where Thomas died in 1906. Eugene, who never married, returned to Halcott in the 1870s and evidently had his portrait taken with his cousin Will.
Will Bellows married Lizzie Mead in the 1880s. She died tragically in 1908 when a kerosene lamp ignited her dress and, despite Will’s attempt to smother the flames, she succumbed to burns the next day. The young widower retreated in grief, leaving their seven-year-old daughter Ellen in the care of his sister, Orrie and husband Dewitt Avery. They lived in Armstrong Park, Fleischmanns, which Dewitt had subdivided and where he had several homes constructed.
Eugene and Will, both carpenters by trade, would later find themselves under the loving care of Idell, who had lost her husband Justus Fellows in 1915. She provided a home for several siblings and other relatives as they aged, including Will who was paralyzed for his last three years.
Eugene died in Oneonta in 1923, Will in 1930, Orrie in 1936 and Idell in 1938.
