It was a boom town, complete with an opera house, saloons, restaurants, dance halls, and union halls. Eureka's population had reached almost 9000 by 1878 and it was second only to Virginia City. What the trip west was like with the two small girls, we can only imagine. A narrow-gauge spur line, the Eureka Palisade Railroad, opened October 1875, connecting Eureka, 'The Pittsburgh of the West,' with the main line, twenty-some miles west of Elko. The transcontinental Central Pacific Railroad, completed in 1869, ran next to the Humbolt River, eighty miles to the north. In the later 1870's, they moved their young family to the mining boom town of Eureka in eastern Nevada. They were in Augusta, Kennebec County, in July 1875 when daughter Christine was born. The young couple, Donald and Emma, were living in Maine when their daughter Mary was born October 1873. After Amelia died in 1858, Emma's father Osmond married Mary Martha Bond and John Cunliff, his daughter's employer in 1871, was a witness to that marriage. These two names, Osmond and Amelia, will be repeated in the naming of the children of Emma and Donald. Internet family trees list her parents as Osmond Tapley and Amelia Stockers. In the 1871 census Emma Tapley was counted as a servant in the John Cunliff household, in Woodstock Parrish, Carlton County, Brunswick. Wife Christina MacLeod 14 July 1886 age 70 yrs The tombstone inscription at Goose Cove Cemetery which readsĪngus MacAskill, Native of Harris, Scotland, who came to this country in 1828. In the same household were Christy, also 52 years, also born in Scotland, also United Presbyterian Sarah age 24 Mary age 19 Angus age 13 John age 8 all born in Nova Scotia. Fifty-two year old Angus listed his place of birth as Scotland, his occupation as farmer and fisherman, his religion as United Presbyterian. The year before their marriage, in the 1871 census, twenty-six year old Donald MacAskill was counted in Munro's Point, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in the household of Angus MacAskill. side, the Baptist Church on the Canadian side. French' - so reads my mother's worn family history notebook, writing of her father's parents, and so began my MacAskill family history quest.įorest City straddles the international border formed by the Saint Croix River, known locally simply as 'The Stream.' As the name indicates, it was a logging town. 'Father Donald Angus MacAskill, born March 10, 1845, in Nova Scotia mother Emma Augusta Tapley, born January 5, 1852, in Brunswick married in Forest City, Maine, on November 12, 1872, minister, Rev.

Emma taply