​NOTE: Elizabeth & Sarah were twins & perhaps shared the same middle name.
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NOTE: My great, great grandfather, John Wesley Smith, and his brother Phillip Smith were the only 2 children of Peter Smith who did not go to Oregon but chose instead to remain in the Miller/Pulaski counties area of central Missouri. My ancestor, John Wesley, had married Nancy Stinnett and they were living in Pulaski County during the census of 1840....shortly thereafter, Peter, Ortha, and the other children moved westward to Oregon Territory.

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Peter's 2nd wife, Ortha (Dean), was 20 years younger than Peter and outlived him by about 35 years. He died in 1863 and she lived until 1898. He died at Carlton, Yamhill Co., Oregon and she died at the home of a granddaughter in Bandon, Coos County, Oregon. 

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According to a newspaper story written in the Yamhill Review in 1969, Peter and his family moved from a German settlement in Pennsylvania to Oregon in the early 1840s, but that is not the complete truth. He may have lived in Pennsylvania once upon a time, but he married Ortha in central Missouri and they lived in the Pulaski/Miller area for a while before moving northwest to Oregon. 

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He was listed as an old schoolteacher, farmer, blacksmith, and Methodist evangelist during his interesting lifetime......His way of thinking during this life carried on after death because he had a short sermon engraved on his old tombstone:
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"Remember, man, as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so must you be.
Prepare for death and follow me"

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He could speak the German language according to his granddaughter and perhaps taught it to his children as well. I would venture a guess that if he was of German ancestry, his name may have been spelled "Schmidt" before being changed to the English version of Smith. When many men were settling down to a quiet uneventful life, Peter Smith pulled up stakes and drove across the country in a covered wagon on a harsh, tiresome trip that took weeks that turned into months when he was well past middle-age.

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Wish I could have known this ancestor of mine but he died 72 years before I was born during the years that America's Civil War was raging across our nation...

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The following info I found in a newspaper report of the Peter Smith farm that was located near the town of Carlton, Yamhill Co., OR. A man named Karl Kooster, writer for the Valley News Register of Yamhill Co. wrote a story in May 2011 called "From Smith's Farm to Carl's Town".......

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​​Peter and Orpha (Dean) Smith left central MO in 1844 and traveled to Oregon Territory. They settled in Yamhill Co. and took up a land claim donation of several hundred acres in that county. Per the newspaper report, Peter Smith was a Methodist Episcopalian farmer and blacksmith originally from Pennsylvania. No where have I ever found he was a native of Penn....

 

According to census records he was a native of North Carolina. In the mid 1840s, Peter got the "Oregon fever" and pulled up stakes and moved his family to Oregon. Carlton, Yamhill Co., Oregon is in the northwest part of Oregon and a few miles southwest of Portland. The county was created as a District on 5 July 1843, so it was a new county when they settled there. It is a short distance northwest of Linn Co., Oregon where some other of my ancestors settled including the families of Bilyeu and Kinder.

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Peter Smith was born 1 Mar 1792 in either No. Carolina or Pennsylvania (I will continue looking for him in both states). He died on 5 June 1863 and was buried in the yard of the old Carlton Methodist Church. His grave is still there, adjacent to the old church (which is no longer in existence). He donated 2 acres of his land for the church to be built in 1855 and he presided over the services in the old church occasionally.

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A great-great grandson of Peter Smith (Gordon Zimmerman) is a Yamhill County historian and author and I hope to be in contact with him to learn more about our common ancestors......The families of Smith, Fryer, and Zimmerman share a close kinship.

 

Ortha June (sometimes her name was recorded as Martha Orpha/Orphelia) lived until 1899 and died at her daughter's home in Coquille, Oregon (Coos County) at the age of 90 years.......Coquille is the county seat of Coos County located in southwest Oregon on the Pacific coastline with a population of about 5,000 people during the last census taken.

NOTE: The newspaper article gave an interesting story of how Orpha traveled from Carlton, Yamhill Co., Oregon to Coquille, Coos County, when she was 89 years old. She had gotten word that a granddaughter was expecting triplet babies and she traveled by stagecoach, train, and boat to get there in time to help. Unfortunately the babies all died at birth........ Peggy Smith Hake  

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