Frederick Horace Merrill c.1935
Father was born April 20, 1860 at Greenbush, Ill., and went to Avon with his parents at the age of 3 when they sold out in Greenbush. He passed away October 25, 1943 on an operating table in the Holy Cross Hospital in Calgary, Alta. while undergoing an operation for a ruptured appendix. He was 83 years old at the time of death.
As a/m he became a grocer in partnership with his brother, Giles, when they took over their father’s store in Avon. When mother received an inheritance from her parents’ estate he sold the Merrill store, which he had acquired the sole ownership of, and purchased a farm in Yankee Valley, 11 miles east of Airdrie, Alta.
He, with my brother Clement and Joe Bivens of Avon, brought a car of Settler’s effects from Avon which contained horses and farming machinery in 1913. He operated it with help of his sons, Clement and Kent, until 1927 when Louis and I rented it for the years of 1927–28-29 until Clement returned from Illinois to operate it until it was sold to Paul Nixdorff of that community in 1947. Father was the last descendant of Horace Merrill to start as a merchant and later change to some other pursuit.
On June 2, 1892 he married Mary Alice Belding at her parents’ home northeast of Avon. She, the youngest of 3 children, had been born in, grew up in and was married in that home. She had taken the country schoolteachers’ examination when she graduated from Avon high school, and passed, so taught several years until she married father. They established their home in Avon and lived there until 1915 when they moved to Airdrie.
During the summers of 1913–14 father and Clement had come from Illinois to the farm to seed, harvest and sell their crop and put up temporary buildings, then returned to Illinois to spend the winters leaving their horses in a neighbor’s stubble field around straw stacks. I had a 12 by 14 shack for myself which was one of a collection for temporary use. When the new house was built in 1918 these shacks were skidded to the fields to become granaries, but mine was kept near the house to be used as the easternmost room of the chicken house where it stands to this day.
Mother’s brother and sister should be mentioned in this history. They were Arthur Belding, a C.B. & Q. railroad stationmaster until retirement. He was born at the farm home near Avon and grew up there. He married Minna Casstle, formerly of Troy, N.Y., and became the stationmaster at Biggsville, Ill. He later changed to Avon, then Prairie City, Ill., from which station he was retired with 45 years service. His sister, Edith, was born September 10, 1866 and married Willis Stevens of Avon in 1887. He owned and published the Avon Sentinel for many years, a weekly newspaper. The brother and sister, and their spouses, are buried in the Avon cemetery.