Anson Baldwin

Anson Baldwin, born in New York in 1835 to Lydia Root and John Baldwin, traveled by covered wagon to Illinois with his family in 1844. They bought government land near Deer Grove and built a log cabin. Their farm was where the Palatine Golf Course on Northwest Hwy. is now. Anson enlisted in Co. E of the 113th Illinois Volunteer Infantry in 1862 and fought in the Civil War for three years. Shortly after he returned home he went to a party where he met Maryette Castle who had come here from Michigan to visit a cousin. They were married that August and spent the rest of their lives on the Baldwin farm. They had four children: Ernest, Edson, Edna, and Elode. Along with other church and village service, Anson helped form the Palatine Memorial Association. This group worked to beautify local cemeteries and organized Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) services. For many years Baldwin read the roll of the dead and then walked in the parade to the cemeteries to decorate the graves of those soldiers. He died in 1926, one of the last Civil War veterans in Palatine. — Connie Rawa