Anybody seen Asa?

We found this random envelope listed on ebay one day. 

Sold for it's postmark, we found it equally interesting that it was addressed to Seldon Candee...

That's who OUR great Asa Candee stayed with at the end of his life.

Notice the coincidence between the name of the post office in Iowa and the Candee Way Backs?

VOLNEY!

Asa Candee (born 1791 in Oxford Parish Connecticut) had moved to Oswego County (specifically what became VOLNEY, New York) when he was a teenager.

Of Volney, Iowa we learn in Ellery M. Hancock's PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY, IOWA:  A RECORD OF SETTLEMENT, ORGANIZATION, PROGRESS, AND ACHIEVEMENT (2 vols. _____), "Laid out on the northeast quarter section 13, hardly a mile down the river from Smithfield, by Samuel and Margaret ____________, 12 February 1856, according to a survey made in October previous.  Plot acknowledged before Thomas Crawford, Justice of the Peace.  There had been a settlement here for some years prior to this, and a post office was established in February 1852 which was kept until a few years ago, the vicinity now being supplied by rural delivery from Monona.  The Volney mills were widely known and patronized from a very early day..."

The mills of Yellow River Valley...

In 1869 there was Gurney's Mill/D. Tangerman Brothers who by 1872 established the Tangerman Brothers Saw & Flour Mill

And investigating Iowa from 1850-1872 gets us into learning about land grants, public lands, states, and railroads!

In the days of the Candees coming to Iowa, this was the BIG LANDS.  But in Seldon Candee's lifetime maps were having to be drawn with all kinds of modern symbols denoting boundary lines/legal jurisdictions, different kinds of categories for places (example, villages, cities), projected railroad paths and station stops/actual development of American projects, plattes, quarries and mines.

At the time that this letter came to Seldon...1877(?)...our Asa may still have been alive.  It seems Asa Candee inherited "the longevity gene" from his forefolk and he was eighty years old in the US CENSUS 1870.

But we don't find him listed on the US CENSUS 1880.  For a while we were envisioning him simply traveling on from Allamakee, as he had in so many previous decades...pioneered, settled, evolved a place, and left behind a legacy of establishment.

Then we heard that the Asa born in 1791 may be buried in the Council Hill Cemetery in Clayton County.  That Asa was 80 years old at the time of his death.