Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 3.djvu/58

52 has now passed away; William D., formerly an attorney but now a real-estate man, who married Mollie Murphy; Frank, who is in partnership with his brother William and married Anna Wertz, by whom he has three children, Francis, Flavia and Robert P.; and Mary F., who is the widow of John T. McDonald and has four children, Joseph M., Edward, Meriam L. and Flavia. Mr. Sinnott gave his children excellent educational opportunities, all having graduated from St. Mary's College at San Francisco.

Mrs. Sinnott was born in county Donegal, Ireland, and came to Portland a half century ago by water. Mr. Sinnott was one of the early members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and he and his family are all communicants of the Catholic church. His political allegiance is given to the republican party. Few men of his years keep so closely in touch with the spirit of the times and the questions and issues of the day as does Mr. Sinnott—a well preserved man of eighty years, whose life has been an active and useful one. His public service has been characterized by the utmost loyalty and his business affairs have at all times been conducted with absolute regard for the rights of others.

The ancestral Bible of the Scott family records that I was born October 22, 1834. My honored father, John Tucker Scott, born in Kentucky, in 1809, of Scotch-Irish and English parentage, and my beloved mother, Ann Roelofson, born in 1811, of German, French and English stock, imparted to their old-fashioned Illinois family of a dozen sons and daughters, the combined ruggedness and elasticity of physique and temperament which the hardships and privations of pioneer life strengthened in a marked degree in some of us, and so weakened the constitutions of others that half of us died in infancy or youth, and the remainder lived, or are living, to a ripe old age.

Of this family the writer hereof was the third, born in a humble border cabin home, on the fourth anniversary of a (not in those days unusually) fruitful marriage; although my mother once informed me, in after years, that my father was cross, and she herself had wept bitterly, because I was a girl. Their first born, a boy, had died in infancy, bringing them their first great sorrow; and the second, being a daughter, was a serious disappointment to both parents, while I, who had the temerity to follow her as to sex, was a grievance, almost too burdensome to be borne.

The first home of my grandfather Scott, bearing any semblance to pretension, was built during my first year of bodily existence; and my grandmother Roelofson, having broken her leg in a fall and in the absence of proper surgery, being a cripple ever after, the household burdens of two ancestral border homes fell upon my faithful mother, who once told me sadly, that I sat on the floor during my first summer, complaining and neglected, soothed only by a piece of bacon, attached by a string to a bed-post, or a loom stanchion, until I would fall asleep from exhaustion, a prey to numerous house flies.

My first task, as I remember it, was washing dishes while standing on a chair to reach the table; my next was a seemingly overwhelming job of paring, quartering, coring and stringing apples, in long festoons for drying. Then followed the sleep-urging monotony of picking wool by hand; and after this came the spinning wheel, of which my elder sister and I became expert manipulators.

In the springtime, as I grew older, came always the work of the maple sugar camp, and after that, corn planting; then followed hoeing corn and potatoes. Milking the cows morning and evening was a regular duty, and I often wielded the dasher of an old-fashioned churn, while always, in emergencies, it fell to my lot to assist my late lamented brother, Harvey W. Scott, to chop.