Reflections of the Past  

Milancie Leach (1836 - 1919)

Rev. Ellsworth Jerome Hill (1833-1917)

• Birth: 1 DEC 1833 in Pavilion, Genesee, New York
• Death: 22 JAN 1917 in Chicago, Cook, Illinois

Ellsworth was son of William Hill and Orphanna Webb. Ellsworth Hill (my great grandfather) was born in a log cabin in Pavilion and attended cross-road school from the ages 4 to 12. After this he helped on the farm but attended winter sessions at the Academy in Le Roy. Here he began the study of the classics, supplemented by his life long reading of good books.

After completing classes Ellsworth briefly taught in a country school. Then he went to Mississippi to farther his studies at the university where his uncle, Warren Webb, was professor/president and took a degree there.

The following are recollections of Albert Hill and his son Scott Hill of EJ and Milancie and their life:

" To a great extent Grandpa Hill (Ellsworth J) was self taught in most subjects. Quoting my father, as a young man he became convinced that where one had gone before, it was possible for another to follow, with or without a teacher, if every step was mastered as one went along. And so he was in command of the wide range of facts his reading covered, and it was in this way that he learned, mastered, and established his reputation in the field of botany. Ill health to the point where he could barely walk bothered him a large part of his life, but in spite of this he struggled to make field trips, gather species; feng,. and organize what he learned directly from nature.

 In 1860 he entered Union Theological Seminary in New York and graduated in 1863. Then on August 27, 1863, Ellsworth married Milancie Leach (1836-1919) in Dansville, New York. Milancie Leach was highly intelligent and an very avid reader and perhaps the real strength of the marriage. He was a quiet, soft spoken man.

 From there on they had serious money problems and it was largely due to Great Grandmother Hill they pulled through.  Unable often to find work, friends and relatives took them in.  Milancie kept a diary which she never expected would be seen.  In it she told how they had nothing to go on, nothing to eat and how she hated to take charity.  They left New York and traveled to Illinois by horse cart, barely surviving.”  

Here they became parents to three children Ada (1868-1953) , Frederick (1871-1948) and Albert (1874-1955). For the first six years in Illinois, Ellsworth served as the pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Kankakee, but then due to ill health he returned to teaching.  He taught languages, botany, and geology at Kankakee High School. Due in a great part to the help of his wife, who gathered plants for his dissertations, when he was too lame and weak to do so, he soon gained notoriety as a botanist.  In 1888, when Fred (my Grandfather) was seventeen, the family moved to Chicago. 

Grandma Hill was very short, perhaps less than five feet, and slight. She was highly intelligent, a continuous reader, and had perhaps an even keener mind that her husband, although she always kept in the background. As a child I spent much time at their house, only a few streets away from where we lived. For all the time I knew them they lived in a fairly large house at 7200 Eggleston Ave, on the south side of Chicago. My chief recollection of her in those days was seeing her sitting either in the kitchen at a table by the window where she would be reading, or if not there in a near by pantry which had a huge old barrel with a square board on top, also by a window with a different light, and again reading. Aunt Ada, the oldest daughter or child, lived with the family all her life, but I do not recall ever seeing her eat with the others since she took her food into her bedroom. And one of them would carry Grandpa Hill's tray up to his big front room facing east, for there is where he. read, wrote, and had his very fine collection of plants, a herbarium.

To return to Grandpa Hill, he gave up teaching in 1888, and with money from some property inherited from his father, devoted the remainder of his life to study and to the science of botany. He was a distinguished looking man, rather ascetic, with side and chin whiskers, kind eyes, and a soft voice. His upstairs room was his work room and sitting room, and at the end of his life his bedroom. A hushed atmosphere always prevailed there. But he did make many field trips and the results of these established his reputation.

He was known for his great knowledge of the plants of the Chicago area, especially the send dune country to the south. In 1899 he first described a separate species of the black oak family, which is now known as Hill's Oak, Quercus ellipsoidalis E.J.Hill. On pages 144-45 of the Handbook of Trees by Hough, 1907, these words appear: This interesting and distinct Oak has only recently been made known to science hears through the keen observation Of its discoverer whose name it Again, in a 1937 article by Frank Ridgway, there is this comment: ---named for the late E.J.Hill of Chicago---etc. It is commonly referred to as Hill's oak,----The Northern Pin oak is among the 16,000 specimens of trees, vines, shrubs, and flowers in the Hill herbarium at the University of Illinois (Urbana). Up until Hill described the Northern Pin it was confused with the ordin,ry black oak and the scarlet oak. (It is only found around Chicago and Wisc.)

Grandpa Hill took many trips aside from those into the dunes. He visited the Saguenay region of Quebec, the Menominee iron region in upper Michigan as well as locations around Lake Superior and northern Wisconsin. His last ten years were devoted to a study of the mosses and at his death he left in manuscript,detailed descriptions of 133 species. Agnes Chase, in writing about him for Rhodora in April 1917 said: "He never lost his early love of the Greek and Latin classics and often had a copy of Virgil in his pocket to read aloud during resting periods'.  Albert Hill, his son, wrote, "He maintained to the end his hold on Hebrew and the Latin and Greek classics. He had a good knowledge of French and German literature as well as that of his own tongue." Following a bad case of pneumonia in the spring of 1915 he grew very weak and died in Jan. 1917