Next in the series of postcards from 1908-1914 is No. 26, Scene on Fox River, Aurora, Ill. These postcards were discovered last year in the Sierra Madre, California home of Warren Brown after his death. They were saved by his maternal grandparents, Edith Amy Duffield (1864-1926) and Charles Herman Sisson (1868-1927), and passed down to Warren, my husband’s cousin. Charles and Edith were married in Ottawa, Illinois in 1895 and remained there until the early 1920s when they moved west to Los Angeles, California.
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| Scene on Fox River, Aurora, Ill. No. 4219 |
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| Postmarked in Aurora, Ill. 22 Apr 1910 |
Addressed to:
Mrs. Charles Sisson
Ottawa
Illinois
408 Marcy St.
Message:
I got your card yesterday
will come down as soon as
I can. Lyles' mother is taking
care of things for me to-day
and I guess we won't get
home till to-morrow we are going to
Chicago. -Eva.
Eva Grace Duffield, younger sister to Edith, married Lyle Green in 1908. They rented and worked a dairy farm in Dayton, LaSalle County. Dayton isn't far from Ottawa, less than 10 miles, but the time it would take to travel anywhere would mean doing as Eva did here, having someone else come over to take care of the chores. Farm work, especially on a dairy farm, isn't an easy thing to get away from even today. Not only did the cows have to be milked every single day, but it's likely that there were other farm animals requiring daily care.
Eva mailed this card from Aurora, a town about halfway between her home in Dayton and Chicago. The train to Chicago would have taken them through Aurora. It seems that they stopped at least for a rest and maybe a meal, certainly long enough to purchase and post a card. The Fox River, pictured on the postcard, was a familiar one to both Eva and Edith. It continued past Aurora into LaSalle County, bordered Dayton and met the Illinois River at Ottawa. The familiar river and cows to remind her of home may have guided Eva's choice of this particular card to send her sister.
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