(Picture: EDWIN, about 15 years old)
Edwin Vincent Hughes, (1872-1908), was born in Searsboro, Iowa. He was the oldest of the eight children born to John Wesley and Sarah Vincent Hughes. Since Edwin never married, had no descendants, and died at age 36, the meager information we have about his life comes from memories provided by his younger brothers and sisters. Especially valuable were insights from his sisters who remembered their oldest brother Ed as being the man of the house. What they portrayed is a picture of Ed staying at home and helping mother Sarah take care of the family during the times that his dad’s (J. W Hughes - 1.0 ) construction and contracting business took him away for extended periods of time.
His sister Ina (1.3) noted in one of her papers that Ed was the only brown-eyed male in that generation of Hugheses.
Our information indicates that Edwin went west, with his brother William (1.20, in either 1898 or early 1899. 'Tom Vincent, their mother's brother, had gone to Montana earlier; he and his wife (Lora) owned a ranch in the Meadow Creek area of Madison County (i.e., ownera ofd the T. V. Ranch). The two Hughes boys from Iowa made Uncle Tom Vicient's ranch their objective. Probably they worked for Uncle Tom upon arrival, as it was the Vincent's custom to provide work and board, maybe not much wages, for relatives when they arrived.
Ed's ambition, apparently, was to be a rancher as he was the first of the Hughes family to procure land for a ranch in Montana. Records in Virginia City show that he purchased railroad land in Madison County in 1905. Ed's land purchase could have been part of a larger plan for a Hughes Family Ranch as Ed's brothers, Ira (1.3) and Thomas (1.6), soon homesteaded nearby acreage. However, Ed's property and the homesteads, passed into other ownership soon after Edwin's death.
Edwin severely smoke damaged his lungs while working in the Revenue Mine about 1902. A premature blast and cave in had trapped some of the miners and Uncle Ed sacrificed his own health to help save them. He died in the Sheridan Hospital of pneumonia six years later, April 26, 1908. His brothers, William (1.2) and Thomas (1.6), brought his body back to Meadow Creek with team and wagon over the stagecoach road that went up Fletcher Creek. He is buried in the McAllister cemetery. (His tombstone, listing the year of his death as 1904, is in error.)
More about the family, see the article, "Memories of a Plain Little Girl"; click on Martha Hughes Rich