Annie Johnson

Eight year old Annie Johnson came to Hancock County aboard the Orphan Train in 1885.  She was taken in by Dwight and Mary (Ellison) Whitcomb of Powellton, Illinois.  The Ellison Family History states that the fostering of Annie was intended as balm for Mary, who was “bereaved of so many children and having no daughters.”  The Whitcombs were the parents of 17 children, of whom only five sons reached adulthood;  their youngest, Lewis, was the same age as Annie.

I take this little lamb, said He, and lay it on my breast. — inscription from one of the Whitcomb children’s tombstones at Rosseter Cemetery.

In an 1893 letter to the Children’s Aid Society, when Annie was sixteen, Dwight Whitcomb writes:

Your letter of  August 2d, giving Annie good advice, was received, and she has done much better ever since.  She obeys us well, and is a good girl when not influenced by bad company.  She is good in her studies at school, but she does not like school.  She has good health, and is getting to be a nice young lady, and she is quite a help to me.  She gets Youth Companion, and enjoys it very much, and she has received the Asylum Report and your letter, and she seemed to enjoy them.  I have urged her to write to you, but she thinks she cannot.  — 42nd Annual Report of the New York Juvenile Asylum, for the year 1893.

Her foster parents were one of the earliest settlers of Hancock County, clearing a considerable amount of land southeast of Nauvoo.  Dwight Whitcomb was a “man of prominence in his township, and held many of the offices for his neighbors had faith in his judgment and ability, and he justified this confidence.” (History of Hancock County, 1921).

Annie Johnson married William Collopy of Burnside and LaHarpe, Illinois on 6 November, 1901.  They lived in Hancock County until after 1910; by 1920 they were farming in Wapello County, Iowa.  They subsequently moved several times, but remained in the southeast Iowa vicinity the remainder of their lives.  They had three children:  Loy William, John Edwin, and Dorothy M. Collopy.

Her daughter, Dorothy, in recounting her mother’s memories, “….often lamented the fact that she had become separated from her mother at a very young age…when they were cleaning houses in New York.  Anna could never locate her mother again and was very sad about that.  ….Anna was extremely grateful for the kindness of Mary Whitcomb.”