Person:Luther Cole (1)

From what our oldest people say, the snakes, especially rattlesnakes, were the greatest dread of anything....Henry DYSON, a fine-looking old pioneer still living, tells us that his mother, Polly DYSON, kept a hoe hanging on the outside of her cabin with which to kill snakes, and many were the rattlers she dispatched. The famous rattlesnake den is south of "Big Hollow," a rocky ravine on the west side of the road near the watering trough. There they wintered by the hundreds. One fall John DYSON and Luther COLE fastened them in and kept them there several years till their rattling ceased. ^[3]

BLM records show he purchased 40 acres 7/10/1844 in Daviess Co. Later purchases in surrounding area in 1853, 1854, 1859.

A Mormon descendent of Luther’s son Oren wove some of her ancestry into a “testimony” story.^[4] The dates don’t really work, but the story is that the family left Vermont shortly after the Revolutionary War [actually, the Coles left Ct in 1811, the Loomises left Vt in 1818]. Luther Cole brought a large wagon train to Portage County, where there was a large Indian population. The population was descimated by smallpox in the late 1790s, and they were in need of medical help. Oren’s grandmother Mrs. Cole - Luther’s mother Mary, unless she means the family from Vermont, then Olive Hatch Loomis - spent six weeks caring for the sick in their camp.

Whatever the story, his children all consistently and correctly reported their parents birthplaces on the census, so there was probably a family story or two. Oldin, Edmond, Olive, Charles, William and Mehitable stayed in the Daviess County area. Loomis went early to California, and Oren moved around the Northwest. Solomon disappeared and has not been found in 1880.

Text References

1. ↑ Sterling Vital Records (Barbour Collection).
2. ↑ Winston Cemetery Transcriptions, Missouri Cemetery Records, MO Gen. Records Committee Reports, 1972.

   Also available transcribed at http://www.rootsweb.com/~mocemete/daviess/winston.htm.

3. ↑ "Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve," edited by Mrs. Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham, Woman's Department of the Cleveland Centennial Commission, 1896. ftp://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/oh/portage/history/Hiram.txt
4. ↑ http://www.centerplace.org/library/testmny/bofmtst1.htm