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ORILLA AND ROSILLA MATTOON

 On February 22, 1845, twin daughters, Orilla and Rosilla, were born to Abel Mattoon and Sarah Lewis Mattoon in LaGrange County, Indiana. Abel was farming there, possibly with his father Philip, and brothers. Philip died in 1846, and the following March most of his nine adult children left LaGrange County to travel to Oregon. 

Abel and Sarah traveled with five children: John Prentiss age 14, Malinda age 8, Oliver Perry age 6, William Henry age 4, and the two-year-old twins, Orilla and Rosilla. Probably John Prentiss helped his father drive the ox teams pulling their wagons and Malinda helped her mother with the younger children. 

The family arrived in Oregon City in October. Abel received a land claim by 1849, in an area that came to be known as Hardens Precinct of Clackamas County. His brothers and sisters and their families settled nearby. Probably Orilla and Rosilla had plenty of opportunities to visit with aunts, uncles, and cousins. In 1860, Orilla was enumerated in the US Federal Census in the family of her aunt, Orilla Anne Mattoon Richardson.

Orilla married Civil War veteran Newton Walker in 1865. By 1870 they were living in the same neighborhood as her parents and the rest of the family. They raised five children and farmed there until sometime after 1900, Newton died in 1914 and Orilla died in Centralia, Washington, at the home of her son Carl, in 1917.

Rosilla was a schoolteacher in Oregon until she married William Hughes in 1869.  Mr. Hughes was in the cattle business in eastern Oregon until 1876, when the family relocated to Cottonwood Creek, about three miles south of the present town  of Thornton in Whitman County, Washington. "For many years, their home was a favorite camping ground for Indians going back and forth from the Lewiston country and  the Spokane and Colville districts."1 Rosilla died on her 86th birthday, February 22, 1932.






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1 "Rosilla Hughes Taken By Death," Spokane [Washington] Chronicle. 22 February 1932, page 1, column 2.   


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