NOW YOU KNOW
The Phillips Family – From Humble Beginnings by Debbie Neece, Bartlesville Area History Museum
Ohio born, Lewis “Lew” Franklin Phillips was the son of Daniel and Marilla (Standish) Phillips. About 1856, the Phillips family relocated to a farm near Des Moines where Marilla became the school teacher for her own children and the children in the area of their Iowa country home.
sor and county judge, and helped found the town of Scotia, where their son Frank was born in 1873…their only Nebraska born child.
Thunder was rumbling and talk of Civil War filled the air. At just 17 years of age, the war took Lew as a boy and sent him home a man. At the close of the war, Lew returned to Iowa and became a farmer and carpenter. On July 3, 1867 he and Lucinda Josephine Faucett were married at Des Moines and they parented ten children: Etta, Mary Jane, Frank, Lee Eldas, Edward, Wiate, Waite, Nellie, Fred and Lura.
There came a dusty cloud of devouring Rocky Mountain locust that devastated everything Lew’s sweat equity had planted. Noted in Nebraska history as a “plague of biblical proportions,” the storm of grasshoppers left nothing in its wake. Beyond eating crops to the roots, the creatures invaded homes and ate clothes off the backs of pioneers. The crunched grasshopper bodies left an Lucinda Phillips oily substance on every surface including train tracks which prevented escaping the insanity of the insatiable gnawing jaws and roaring flapping wings. The trains just couldn’t get traction on the oily tracks.
Lewis Phillips in the Civil War 40
bmonthly | OCTOBER 2020
Shortly after their second daughter was born in 1871, the Phillipses relocated to Nebraska seeking opportunities under the Homestead Act. After clearing their land and building a log home, Lew Phillips helped organize Nebraska’s Greeley County where he served as tax asses-
Faced with a polluted water supply, tainted livestock and very little food supply, the Phillips’ family goods were packed into their oxen-pulled covered wagon for the 260-mile trip back to Iowa. About a year after they settled in Conway, six year old Etta
