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Bits and pieces from Ezra Trim and Trim Cemetery

The grave of Adam Engle at Trim Cemetery.

These stories continue to shake more information loose that I didn’t necessarily foresee.

And that’s just fun.

This came from Margaret Lay-Dopyera, who had family that lived in the area. She shared with me a letter her uncle, Keith Smith, who wrote about Ezra Trim, who I’ve written about the last couple weeks and who donated his Eldred Township farm to the betterment of the poor of Eldred Twp.

“My Father Archie Smith who died in 1939 told of working for Ezra Trim at Trim’s Corners on the road from Titusville to Spring Creek,” Smith wrote in that letter.

“This may not be fact but as I remember Mr. Trim had told my father he settled there when it was all woods, carried wheat or corn on his back to Garland to have it ground into flour or cornmeal; was just a path through the woods at that time. He told of hauling oil and having to unload the barrel and rolling them through mudholes then loading them again.

“In the Warren County history which I sold some years ago they mention a brother of Mr. Trim who lived near him for a few years.”

More on who I think that is in a bit.

More from Smith: “He (Ezra) expected it (his estate) to be used for the poor to live on but it was sold and the money used at the Warren County home. A neighbor said Mr. Trim couldn’t read or write but kept books … on a window sill in his farm. He carried on quite a lot of business and I think loaned money. No one could read the marks on his shingles but no one ever questioned his word.”

Lay-Dopyera told me that the letter was written in response to an inquiry associated with the Trim Cemetery, where Ezra is buried.

An article in the “Transactions of the Warren Academy of Sciences – Volume 1” (yes, that’s a thing and it’s now on my list for future stories) also seemed to benefit from the estate and wrote about Trim: “The parents of Ezra Trimm came from the state of New York and settled in what is now Eldred Township, Warren County, Pennsylvania. Ezra was then a boy; He was married to Louisa Green, a resident of New York….”

“He was a man of large frame and great strength and of a stern and eccentric character.”

Lay-Dopyera also shared a 1984 article from a county paper on the story of the Trim family told in ‘American Heritage’ magazine.

“Once upon a time there was a man named Warren P. Trimm. He and his family lived along the Titusville-Spring Creek road a little more than nine miles northeast of Titusville and about eight miles southwest of Spring Creek,” the local paper reported. “The place is now known as Trimm’s Corners. At 1,750 feet above sea level, 500 feet higher than Titusville, it is the highest place on the Spring Creek road. To the southwest by hill and dale about two miles is Grand Valley.”

More from that article: In 1877 Warren Trimm decided to take up the federal government’s offer of free land in Kansas to any man who would homestead it. He wrote in his diary: ‘So I sold my Pennsylvania farm with its stumps and stones and stingy so that yielded so grudgingly to the toil I had given it.’ They moved to Kansas with its constant wind, treeless landscape, rainstorms, drought and plague of grasshoppers – but with rich and unplowed soil – to take up a government claim and make their home. Homesteaders had to live on the land and stay five years to get their deeds and become taxpaying citizens of Kansas…. The Trimm family decided after two years to go back east for a visit. When they got to Grand Valley they found that Trimm’s sisters had bought back the farm that he had sold and had it waiting for the family on their ‘visit.’ Grand Valley had become a booming oil town, work was plentiful so the Trimms put their roots down in Pennsylvania soil for good.”

A “W.P. Trimm” challenged Ezra’s will all the way to the state Supreme Court and I wonder – it seems quite likely – that this was him.

As for his brother, the name can be found as “Simon” and “Simeon.” He appears to have owned land in the area but caught my eye as he served in “Baldwin’s Company, Pennsylvania Militia Infantry,” a nine-month outfit in 1862-1863.

This outfit was organized in Garland and this also goes on my list for future stories in this space.

Trim was a sergeant in that organization.

The markers that denote Civil War soldiers unsurprisingly always catch my eye. Many of the stones at the Trim Cemetery that date to the 1800s and early 1900s are difficult to read so the plaques help.

One is for Andrew W. Engle, whose career in the Union Army also hits on an area I previously didn’t know about. Rather than being assigned to a regiment, he’s listed in the National Park Service’s database as “Unassigned Pennsylvania Volunteers.”

According to 47thpennsylvaniavolunteers.com, there are several reasons a man might be listed as unassigned: They may have been awaiting assignment to a typical numbered regiment; some may have been misclassified by a clerk or updated after the war where names are spelled differently from one document to the next; others stayed unclassified for their entire term performing “general duties for the central operations functions of their regiments without ever being assigned to specific companies within those regiments.” Others – obviously not the case here – are dead and buried as unknows or in unmarked graves.

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