Dunn, Leslie C.

Almira Ames, born in Andover, Mass. in 1800, married John Farnham in 1825. She was widowed in 1839 and was left with 5 children. In 1846 the family moved to Lowell, Mass. where her children worked in the mills and Almira Farnham took in boarders. In 1855 Farnham moved to Minnesota, southwest of Red Wing, to homestead with several members of the family. The financial panic of 1857 caused a foreclosure on their homestead and the family, having decided to head for the.

gold fields of Pikes Peak, Colorado, left Minnesota in May of 1859. The group got as far as Cedar Rapids, Iowa and hearing reports of Indian uprisings west of the Missouri river, decided to settle where they were. The various family members eventually secured land and established their own farms in eastern Iowa. Almira Farnham lived the remainder of.

her life with her daughter, Mary Dunn, north of Anamosa, Iowa, or with her son, Hiram, near Morley, Iowa, alternating her seasonal visits between those two families. Almira Farnham had been a widow for 57 years when she died at her daughter's house in 1896.