. HISTORY OF THE MCKEOWN FAMILY
HAYWARD, WISCONSIN 
1903-1917

In 1910 four McKeown brothers (Joseph, Henry, Arthur, and Edward) were living in Hayward, Wisconsin, but it would be almost impossible to discern that from the 1910 US Census because of the misspellings of the McKeown name in the census recording. A fifth brother Daniel McKeown was living in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The widowed matriarch of the family, Margaret Writt McKeown was also living in Hayward in 1910 with her oldest son Joseph, having emigrated from Canada along with a daughter Catherine (Kate) McKeown. Thus, in 1910, Margaret Writt McKeown and six of her ten children were all living in Wisconsin. (Two other married daughters and an unmarried daughter had immigrated to Buffalo, New York. The fifth married daughter was reported to have gone missing after the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.)

The story of this Writt-McKeown family has its roots in Ireland. Margaret Writt was born in Toronto, but her father Joseph and several Writt brothers had emigrated from County Cavan in the early 1830s. Two decades later, young James McKeown and a brother immigrated to Toronto from County Tyrone, Ireland, via Belfast. By that time, the Writts had left Toronto and moved to Ellice Township in southwest Ontario, where they settled in a small Irish farming community, called Kinkora. James McKeown eventually left his brother in Toronto and moved to Kinkora, where he married Margaret Writt in 1859. They farmed and raised ten children. James remained on that farm until his death in 1891, but this was not the case for his wife and children. 

As soon as Joseph McKeown, the first son born in 1859, reached adulthood, he began what would be a pilgrimage of all ten of the McKeown children to the United States. Joseph immigrated first to the Ludington, Michigan, area about 1879 and eventually was joined by brothers Henry and Arthur.  All three worked in Ludington’s logging industry, married, and began families. The three McKeown families eventually moved to the Upper Peninsula when the Danaher logging business, with whom they were employed, moved there from Ludington in the early 1890s. Just after the turn of the 20th century, the Danaher Company closed down its logging operations in the Upper Peninsula and the McKeowns were on the move again, this time to Hayward, Wisconsin. 

Joseph McKeown, and his wife Ellen, were first recorded by the Sawyer County Record newspaper as being in Hayward in 1903, sadly marked by the death of their seven- year old daughter to diphtheria. Soon after, Joseph, by then an experienced lumberman, had taken over as superintendent of the Hines Lumber Company sawmill operations in Hayward. Records show that three of his four brothers, Henry, Arthur, and Edward, were also working in Hayward by 1910. The fifth brother, Daniel, had settled in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Daniel was a carpenter by trade, as were a number of the Writts. Daniel had settled not far from Door County where several Writt families from Kinkora had immigrated. 

Based upon the newspaper accounts of the Sawyer County Record for 1903 - 1917, these were busy years for the McKeowns.

 
§ Joseph McKeown was traveling nonstop for the Hines Lumber Company, including trips to the southern United States where the Hines Company would expand. Sadly, Joseph’s wife Ellen Sullivan (stepfather O’Donnell) died in 1905 after a prolonged illness. Ellen went by the first name Jane in Hayward.
§  Catherine McKeown, who had been caring for her brother Henry’s two little children after the death of his first wife in Ludington, married William Lessard in Hayward in November of 1907, just a month after William’s sister Charlotte (Lottie) had married Gustav Hagen.
§  Henry McKeown traveled to Kinkora in January of 1909 and came back with a second wife.
§  In 1910 Joseph McKeown’s daughter Ellen (Nell), who had been a teacher’s assistant in Hayward, married Magloire (Mike) F. Beaudoin, and the following year Joseph himself took a second wife, Ellen Cotter, in 1911. 
§ Meanwhile, both Edward McKeown and his sister Catherine McKeown Lessard were expanding their families with the births of children in Hayward. Sadly, Catherine’s first-born son died in 1911.
§  The matriarch, Margaret Writt McKeown, died in 1913 after living ten years in Hayward.
§  Throughout the Hayward years, one of the sisters from Buffalo, New York, who had remained unmarried, Ellen “Nell” McKeown had made frequent visits to Hayward. The brothers Joseph, Arthur, and Henry McKeown likewise made visits back to Ludington to visit extended family and to Buffalo, New York to visit their sisters living there. 

However, the Hayward, Wisconsin days of the McKeowns were coming to an end, largely because of the decline of the operations of the Hines Lumber Company in this part of the country. 
 

§ About 1912 Joseph McKeown, his second wife, and his two unmarried children moved to Kiln, Mississippi, where Joseph was superintendent of the Hines Yellow Pine Lumber Company mill. Joseph’s oldest daughter, Nell, and her husband, Mike Beaudoin, lived in Duluth for a while, but then Mike began selling the cutover land for the Hines Farm Company, based out of Winter, Wisconsin, and Chicago. Mike Beaudoin would remain a presence in real estate in Northern Wisconsin until the late 1950s. Joseph’s adult son James II worked in Northern Wisconsin for a few more years doing lumber runs, working on the Omaha Railroad, and at the DuPont Powder Company in Barkdale, Wisconsin, making explosives just prior to WW I. However, by the time the U.S. entered into WW I, James II had also moved to Mississippi, where he joined the Navy. 
§ Arthur McKeown, his wife, and their four children moved to Milwaukee where he was employed by the railroads.
§ Henry McKeown, his wife, and Henry’s two children moved to Rice Lake, where Henry worked at the sawmill. Henry and his wife lived in Rice Lake for the rest of their lives. 
§ In 1912, Edward McKeown returned to Ellice Township, Ontario, with his wife and children. The family eventually settled in the Detroit area.
§ Catherine McKeown Lessard was the last McKeown to leave Hayward, moving with her husband, William, and family to Pontiac, Michigan in early 1917.
§ Daniel, his wife, and two children continued to live in Green Bay where Daniel died. His wife and children later lived in Albany, New York, but their remains were returned to Wisconsin for burial. 

The “Hayward Years” for the McKeowns of Kinkora, while brief, were very special ones. They marked the last time when so many of the Kinkora-born McKeowns would live in one area.

(Several photos of Joseph McKeown from this period are captured in the book, “A Pictorial History of the Sawyer County Region”, published in 2005). 

Submitted by descendants Margaret Writt McKeown and the five McKeown siblings and their children who resided in Hayward: Jane McKeown Neumeyer, Great-great-granddaughter of Margaret Writt McKeown, Great-granddaughter of Joseph McKeown, and Granddaughter of James McKeown II; James McKeown III, Grandson of Joseph McKeown, and son of James McKeown II; Judith Lessard, Great-granddaughter of Margaret Writt McKeown and Granddaughter of Catherine McKeown Lessard; Michael J. McKeown, Great-grandson of Margaret Writt McKeown, Grandson of Henry McKeown, and Son of William J. McKeown; Marion McKeown O’Rourke, Great-granddaughter of Margaret Writt McKeown, Granddaughter of Arthur McKeown I, and Daughter of Arthur McKeown II; and Rose Moormann Obloy, Great Granddaughter of Margaret Writt McKeown, and Granddaughter of Edward McKeown. 

January 14, 2008