MOSES FISH GATES

The subject of this review was for many years an honored citizen of Antrim county and an influential factor in promoting the material advancement and moral welfare of the community with which a considerable part of his life was very closely identified. Moses F. Gates was a native of New England and inherited in a marked degree the sturdy qualities and characteristics for which the people of that part of the union have been distinguished. He was born August 1, 1818, in the state of Vermont, but when eight years old was taken by his widowed mother to northern Ohio, where he grew to manhood. His early experience in the woods of the Western Reserve was calculated to develop his physical powers, as he was obliged to labor early and late cutting timber, burning logs, grubbing and the other hard work necessary to clear a farm in a new and undeveloped country. While thus engaged he attended a few months of the winter season such indifferent schools as the country afforded, but, notwithstanding poor teaching and the lack of proper educational facilities, he made such rapid progress in his studies that before his twentieth year he was sufficiently advanced to take charge of a school himself. After teaching several years Mr. Gates took a trip through the South, during which he taught a term at Memphis, Tennessee, also in the city of New Orleans, but later he returned to Ohio, and on October 24, 1850, was married to Miss Eunice Gore, whose birth occurred in Ohio August 18, 1829.  Mrs. Gates' parents, also natives of Vermont, were among the early pioneers of the Western Reserve, having moved to Geauga county shortly after the country was opened for settlement. They were people of sterling worth, energetic and industrious, and, like the majority of newcomers, experienced their full share of the hardships and grinding toil of the pioneer period. Immediately after his marriage Mr. Gates started for the west and in due time reached Muscatine county, Iowa, which was then on the remote outskirts of civilization. Seeing a favorable opening for teaching, he at once engaged in that line of work and continued the same during the ensuing ten years, the meanwhile earning a creditable reputation as an able and popular educator. In the year 1864 he enlisted in Company B, One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Iowa Infantry, but owing to ill health was not permitted to go to the front, having been discharged on account of physical disability shortly after entering the service. The climate of Iowa not agreeing with him, Mr. Gates finally decided to move to a country where his broken health could be recuperated, accordingly he disposed of his interests in Muscatine county and in the latter part of 1864 brought his family to northern Michigan and bought a tract of wild land two miles north of Elk Rapids, Antrim county, which he at once proceeded to improve. By persevering toil he soon succeeded in clearing and reducing to cultivation forty of his one hundred and sixty acres, and a few years later he not only had a good farm and a comfortable home, but had added to his real estate until his holdings amounted to four hundred acres of valuable land. Mr. Gates became one of the leading fruit growers of his section of the country and as a public spirited citizen, deeply interested in whatever made for the good of the community, he enjoyed the high esteem and unbounded confidence of his neighbors and friends. In his younger days Mr. Gates was an active member of the Sons of Temperance and as long as he lived he never ceased fighting the liquor traffic, considering it the crowning evil of the times and a plague spot upon the fair fame of the nation. He was strictly a temperate man, never having used intoxicants of any kind and tobacco in all of its forms was one of his especial abominations. He was a Republican in his political belief, but not a politician and he never sought office at the hands of his fellow citizens nor aspired to any kind of public honors. Mr. Gates was honest and upright in all his dealings and his character was always above reproach. He departed this life on the 5th of November, 1894, in his seventy-sixth year, and was followed to his last resting place by a large concourse of sorrowing friends and fellow citizens who deeply lamented his death.

To Mr. and Mrs. Gates were born ten children, eight of whom are living, namely: Ella, the wife of Levi Bixby, of Oakland, California; Ida, who married Claus Alpers, of Leland, Michigan; Alfred, a resident of Elk Rapids; Emma, now Mrs. Charles Dewey, of Pellston, this state; Howard, whose home is at Bliss, Michigan; Harlan, an enterprising farmer and stock raiser who superintends the homestead and looks after his mother's interests; Mina, formerly a teacher in the public schools of Antrim county, but now the wife of Delos Wilcox, who owns a farm adjoining the home place, and Paul, also a teacher who now holds an important position in the graded schools of Antrim county.