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John Winthrop Sanborn (from last week’s story) and his sister Levina had a brother named Benjamin Franklin Sanborn. In 1922 Benjamin wrote, “My Statement”, which was published in the newspaper when he died and told the story of his life.
He was born August 29, 1847 in the Sanborn home on Wilmot Road. He also had two other sisters who died in 1863 of diphtheria. In September of that same year, when he was 16 years old, a horse ran away with him in the buggy and his leg was broken very badly. He became crippled and had to use a cane. He had been attending school on English Prairie, but stopped after the accident. But he was a life-long learner, gaining knowledge by reading newspapers and books.
In 1866, when he was nineteen his father died, and he was one of the heirs to receive the divided property. A couple of years later he built a house on a small farm on the west bank of the Fox River, not far from the original Sanborn homestead. He lived alone and raised “good traveling horses” and also bought and traded horses. In 1884, he rented his farm and moved to Walport, Oregon. He built a house on a hill that overlooked the Pacific Ocean, and planted this hill with strawberries, fruit trees and vines of varied sorts.
He liked to write poetry and some poems were written, “in memory of the years I lived on the bank of Fox River, …its green bank and the waving groves that I loved so well, and of my unnamed love.” With his family so far away, they wrote often, and he said, “my memory of my unnamed love and my pen are my only comrades”. In 1918, John Winthrop wrote to him about the death of Levina and traveling to Iowa to see his daughter Mable, who was so sick there was “no hope of her ever getting up” (she lived until 1942). John Winthrop also complained that the WWI draft was taking all the young men, so he was having trouble getting help at planting time.
In 1920, he returned to visit his friends and family. He viewed the school grounds and saw the little red school was replaced by a brick building and part of the old school was attached and used as a woodshed. He noticed may other changes in Illinois that had been made in his long absence. “A new generation is fast taking the places of the loved ones I knew, and I, too, seem fast getting old, but I say to my heart, ‘Be brave to meet the destiny, Fate has marked for me’”, he wrote.
He was never married and in 1922 felt he was, “too old to dare the deed”, but he was always “friendly to the dames and maids of his acquaintance”. He never divulged who his “unnamed love” was.
Benjamin died at home on his hill on April 1, 1931, at the age of 83. His niece, Lillian Sanborn, was at his bedside when he passed away and he was buried beside his mother in the Sanborn family Cemetery. His obituary said he was a noble man, an idealist who always lived in hope that his ideals would be realized in others to whom he wrote or talked.
Nephew Bryon penned this poem in remembrance: “His life was guided by nature’s strings, right and truth in his innermost heart; Writing of greater and better things, of which he was ever a part. He may be classed as a dreamer, dreaming of things to do; But he paved the way for the schemer, who makes his dreams come true…” Benjamin’s hand-carved hickory cane is still in possession of his descendants.
Story by Laura Frumet
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