Thomas M. Redfield Biographical Review

THOMAS M. REDFIELD was born in Cayuga county, New York, August 27, 1816. His father was Richard Redfield, born in Connecticut in 1768. He was a blacksmith all his life. He had but one brother, Reuben. Richard was married twice and Thomas was a child of the second marriage. His mother’s name was Mrs. Lucy Brown, nee Main, daughter of Thomas and Lucy (Taylor) Main, of Connecticut, where she was born. Mr. Redfield had one brother, Charles, who died young, and a sister, Mrs. Charles Hulett, the mother of ten children who died in Brown county, aged forty-six: only two of these now survive. The father and mother of Thomas came to Illinois from Indiana with a hired team and wagon in the fall of 1830. They lived about a year at Rushville, where in 1827 he had bought eight lots. He sold these off and moved five miles southwest of Rushville and cleared up a farm on school lands. They moved from these lands to a new place in La Grange, then in Schuyler, but now in Brown. In 1836 they came to Brooklyn and obtained forty acres of Government land. Thomas lived at home until he was married, in 1839, to Mary Pyle, daughter of Nicholas and Mary Pyle, who came from Kentucky to Illinois about 1832. Mr. Redfield began married life on a farm of forty acres about one mile northeast of the village site, and in 1852 he moved to the village where they lived until 1869, when they sold the home and moved to his present place, September 15. He bought 120 aces of land at $3 an acre. Mr. Redfield lost his wife February 17, 1884. She was in her sixty-sixth year and left five living children. They buried four, Nancy, an infant; Lucy; Mrs. George W. Logan, who died in early married life, and her infant with her; and Melissa, who was Mrs. Daniel Gross; she was first married to George A. Brown, who was Lieutenant of Company A, Seventy-eighth Illinois Volunteer Infantry, and was killed during the war. Her second husband was also a soldier in the army. She died in 1873, aged about thirty-three, leaving five children. Sarah, Mrs. John Krieble, died at the age of twenty-seven, leaving two children. The living children are: Ovandea, at home with her father; George, in McDonough county; Lovis D. Camp, a widow. Mr. Redfield has been School Director, a life-long Republican and he is a Universalist. Mary, another of his daughters, now Mrs. Logan, lives in Sacramento, California; and Thomas, Jr., lives on part of the farm. Mr. Redfield has twenty-five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.