Life on the farm - A Sesquicentennial Feature

The story of the Ensley Heritage Farm

While researching this story I was struck by how typical our story is. Inspired by the promise of fertile land, these early pioneers hunted game while they cut trees, drained ponds, built roads, homes, barns. Without the help of the machinery we take for granted today, they did this with handsaws and horses, strong backs and elbow grease. There were no lazy farmers (nor are there today).

Of course, Boone County’s earliest residents were the Native Americans- Fox, Sauk (Sac), Ioway and many other. The first documented arrival of whites in Ogden’s Yell Township was in 1835, just 11 years before Iowa Statehood was celebrated, when three companies of the First Regiment of the United States Dragoons camped at Bluff Creek, which now feeds Don Williams Lake (built on some of the original Gasson Land).

By 1850 the census population of Boone County was 735, in 1860 it had grown to 4,232. After the Civil War, settlers poured into the county and by the 1870 census had grown to 14,581. Those pioneers have many families still here: Good, Merriam, Heldt, Gasson, Junck, Swanson, McCaskey, Reutter to name a very few.

How we got to now

This story starts with several Lutheran families leaving German Prussia in the 1850s for a better life in Australia while escaping creeping religious persecution. 

Edith Junck Ensley’s grandparents, George and Anna Gasson, sailed from Hamburg in 1850, landing in Australia and eventually settling in Hamilton, Victoria.  Farming wasn’t as good as anticipated and George and Anna set sail for America. They got on the train in New York with their six children and went west to the end of the line, Ogden, Iowa. By then it was 1866, the Civil War was over and the Boone County land rush was in full swing. Land was purchased from what is now referred to as a “flipper”, who bought it from the Railroad and held it for three months. 

Around 1863, Henry and Margaret Junck emigrated from Germany to America. In 1873 at the age of 28, Detlef Junck, followed his older brother, Henry, across the Atlantic from Hamburg, Germany. Henry and Detlef moved to Ogden and began farming. There Detlef met Mary Gasson and they wed in 1880.

Deltef bought Gasson land from his in-laws and continued farming north of Ogden. Mary and Detlef raised six children: Matilda (Arnold Zwald). Ed, Hattie, Edith (George Ensley), Bill, and Bertha (Warner).

All those children remained in the area for most of their lives and when Detlef died, his property was divided equally between his four daughters and two sons who all continued farming.

Read more in the Sept. 28 issue of The Ogden Reporter.