John's Blissful Summers on Grand Island As A Boy

In his short autobiography, John Webb Kellogg spoke of idyllic summers as a little boy on Grand Island, NY, which was near Buffalo.  His mother, Esther Clara Webb Kellogg, was the granddaughter of Irish immigrants who journeyed to Canada and then upstate New York in the late 1840's.

Many Webbs farmed on Grand Island, as did Esther's family.  Born in 1899, John probably was an infant when his mother, Esther, began to take him to Grand Island to visit her parents and other Webb relatives in the summer.   The following quote is from
Pieces of a Life.  John's younger sister, Dorothy Helen Kellogg, was born in 1903
  
  "As John reminisces about Grand Island, he makes it sound as though that was where he grew up.  He was there only a few weeks in the summer, with his mother and sister and perhaps an occasional visit from his father.  Summer would have been the best season for the bridge-building
Kelloggs and their crews to be out of town."  

     "John probably enjoyed Grand Island where he could play with other children, see his grandparents, aunts, uncles as well as do chores.  It must have been much more relaxed than his time with his father and step-brother.  I wonder when he realized that the Irish -- his mother's many relatives on Grand Island -- were lower in social status than the English and Scottish in his father's line?"

   Here's a little of John's writing from "75 Years - Where Did They Go?.  "Where did one buy things?  Virtually everything we ate came from stuff raised on the farm or from basic raw materials they bought.  Flour came in barrel lots and each day or two one of the girls or Grandmother would bake bread.  That did not last long with a lot of hungry men to feed.  Farm machinery was scarce.  Most jobs were done by hand.  All were up and had finished breakfast before 6.  When the crops were ripe. they often worked until dark, which might mean 8 or 9 at night.  Suppose that the grain were ripe;  if not promptly harvested, rain would beat it to the ground where it was without 
worth."
  

The Kelloggs Travel to Ann Arbor and Buffalo in 1940

 The pictures show John, Diane (4) and Ken (9) standing by the Lincoln Zephyr in Lancaster NY and Ruth standing in front of the car, probably on the bridge between the US and Canada near Niagara Falls.

On Friday, Aug. 16, Ruth, Ken and Diane took the "streamlined Mercury train" to Ann Arbor to visit John's mother, Esther, and his step-father, G.A. (Guy Ashford Wood Sr.).  John joined them by car on Wed., Aug. 21, bringing gifts.  One was a GE Iron for half-sister Sara Jane, who had just surprised the family by marrying Ellis Tobey when her parents were out of town.  The others were an automatic toaster for G.A. and a juicer for his mother.  Maybe anniversary gifts?

On Aug. 23, the Kelloggs took off for Niagara Falls and Burlington Beach, Ontario.  They drove to Grand Island, where Esther Webb Kellogg Wood had grown up on a farm and where John spent part of every summer as a boy.  Esther was the granddaughter of Potato Famine Irish.  Many of her relatives lived on Grand Island.

Saturday, August 24, 1940 - Went on
The Kelloggs also saw the Falls from the American side and went into Buffalo to stay over night at the Graystone Hotel.  John had grown up in Lancaster and Buffalo. Before leaving, they drove by the home owned by John's much-older half-brother, George Kellogg. They didn't stop, I'm sure, nor make any attempt to see George and his family.

Blood isn't always thicker than water.   John felt early in his life that his Scottish-English Kellogg relatives looked down upon Charles Kellogg's young second wife, Esther, because she was Irish.  Perhaps John thought that he and sister Dorothy were regarded as a step below the other Kelloggs.  

John Speaks of Esther Clara Webb, His Mother

The quote below is from the beginning of my father's section in Pieces of a Life.  It's taken from the brief autobiography John Kellogg wrote in 1974 called 75 Years - Where Did They Go? 

The picture shows G.A. (Guy Ashford Wood) and his wife, Esther, in their home on Hamilton Ave., Detroit MI in 1922, both in their 40s.  This was after they'd moved from Buffalo NY as newlyweds and before they moved on to Walnut St. in Ann Arbor to buy and manage a rooming house for University of Michigan students. When this picture was taken, they had two young children, Junior (Guy) and Sara Jane.

I remember my grandmother saying that after trying both male and female students as roomers, she settled on only men because they were easier to deal with.  Like my father, she had strong, definite opinions - nothing wishy-washy about her!  Also like John, Esther was very interested in politics and current events.

Esther's first husband was Charles Kellogg, who had died in 1913.  She had been married at 18 and had two children with Charles as well - John Webb and Dorothy Helen.

"By luck I was born into a family which knew gracious living.   One of my earliest memories is my Mother, a young, attractive woman with a flat velvet ribbon around her hair to keep it in place.  One day I asked her why she wore that kind of decoration when none of the other ladies did.  The next day she appeared with her hair fluffed around a metal form called a 'rat.'  We have a 1907 picture of her dressed in that manner with her two children.

Actually she was much younger than the other women she knew.  As a farm girl, at an early age she learned to make her clothes.  Her next step was to do dressmaking in Buffalo NY.  At the age of 18 she married my Father, a widower about 44.  The farm was on Grand Island, which is in the Niagara River below Buffalo and above Niagara Falls."  

I recall a few early pictures of Grandmother Wood, but haven't seen them in years.  I'm sure that I saw the picture my father mentioned from 1907, but it may have been on a wall in Ann Arbor.  Sad that old pictures, letters, journals so often are lost in the dust of time.