The Metcalfs have traced their roots back to eleventh-century Yorkshire, England. Our branch of the family traces its American roots to Michael Metcalf, a weaver from Norwich, who landed in Massachusetts in 1637, on the British ship the John and Dorothy. He settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, which is some 15 miles inland from Boston.

Michael evidently prospered, and he and his descendants certainly multiplied, for some eleven generations later, here I am. But I digress.

In 1822, my great-grandfather Isaac Stevens Metcalf was born in Royalston, Massachusetts, the son of Isaac Metcalf, a school teacher, and Anna Mayo Stevens Rich. In 1831,after his father had died, he was taken by his mother to Milo, Maine. He lived there preparing for college, working on a farm, and teaching school until he entered Bowdoin College as a sophomore in 1844. He graduated from Bowdoin in 1847, having taught school in each of the three years. After completing college he joined a railroad surveying party and built railroads in the four northern New England states until the spring of 1850 when he became a division engineer on the southern section of the Illinois Central Railroad. He remained there until the railroad was completed in 1855.

Isaac Stevens Metcalf (click on any image for a larger view).

In 1852, Isaac Stevens Metcalf married Antoinette Putnam, of Dunbarton, New Hampshire. In 1855, ISM retired, and moved to Elyria, Ohio. He lived for over 41 years on a large place near the center of town doing what might be called subsistence farming and much of the time running a flour mill on the side. He took an active part in the affairs of Elyria and of Loraine County, serving among other things as county infirmary director, township trustee, colonel of the local militia during the Civil War, justice of the peace, member of the board of education and for a time its president, cemetery trustee, county school examiner, secretary of the county agricultural society, director of Elyria's Savings Deposit Bank from its organization, and for many years secretary, treasurer and deacon for life of the First Congregational Church of Elyria.

Antoinette died on August 14, 1875, leaving nine children: four girls and five boys; three other boys having predeceased her. Nearly three years after his first wife's death, Isaac Stevens Metcalf married Harriet Howes, from Northamptonshire, England. She had six boys in the nineteen years following their marriage, bringing the family to a grand total of eighteen children, of whom, fourteen survived into adulthood. Harriet and her eldest son Ralph died of pneumonia in 1894, and Isaac Stevens Metcalf died in 1898, at the age of 76.

Harriet Howes Metcalf

There are a couple of interesting points about this family. One is the emphasis on higher education. Of the fourteen surviving children, thirteen graduated from college, mostly from Oberlin, which is a few miles from Elyria. (Between the years 1874 and 1912, there was rarely a gap in which at least one of this generation of Metcalfs was not enrolled at Oberlin. And then the next generation of Metcalfs started going to Oberlin.) There were a number of schoolteachers (at the secondary and college levels) as well as librarians. Once the older kids finished up their educations, they would help out the younger kids with tuition.

To find out more about the Metcalfs, check out the links below.

The family in 1886