The William Clifford Gamble Homestead (1821-1865?)
William Clifford was the father nine children, borne by three different wives. He married a fourth time, but there were no children of this union. By 1860, his oldest son, George Washington Columbus Gamble, (known more easily as “Cee” Gamble, was beginning his life as a doctor in the town of X. Of all the Gamble children, he, the eldest, would outlive the rest, dying in 1921. Margaret, Martha and Isabelle seem to have left home, but still living on the farm were William’s sons William, then about seventeen, and his younger brother Wilson, then about sixteen. as well as his teen aged sons William and Wilson, along with their younger half siblings David Wesley, and girls Frances and little Jerusha.
Young William and Wilson were both listed on the census of that year as farm laborers, as was their first cousin, Alexander’s son, also named William too. He was a little older, at twenty two, in the late spring of 1860.
In that spring, William Gamble’s farm was situated about a mile and a half west of the village of Bowerston. Known as The Tunnel Farm, Willam’s farm included sixty acres of improved land, as well as forty acres of unimproved land. The new Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad (commonly known as the Pan Handle Route in those days ) had bored a tunnel through a hill on their land that was visible from the house . in the early 1850’s. Around 1855, when the first steam locomotive had burst through the tunnel opening, Wilson’s little brother David, then about five, had run in terror for the farm house, to the great entertainment of the family.
William Clifford Gamble’s farm, it seems, would have been the S.E. ¼ of Section 3, Township 14 North, Range 7 West. This quarter section adjoined his father's original home farm (1815) on the north, and was not far from George Gamble's farm on Section 9. These lands (2 miles) are just west of Bowerston, Ohio.
The cash value of his Tunnel farm was $2,600. About middling on the value of adjacent lands. There were farming implements valued at forty dollars. He had three horses and five milch cows. He owned two working oxen, five other cattle, thirteen sheep and five swine, for a combined value of $500. William’s farm had produced five bushels of wheat, 125 bushels of Indian Corn, 20 bushels of oats and forty pounds of wool. The Tunnel farm produced eighty bushels of Irish potatoes, twenty five bushels of buckwheat, three hundred pounds of butter, two tons of hay, fifty pounds of flax, three pounds of flax seed, and the value of animals slaughtered on the farm was reported at sixty dollars.
A map showing the location of William C. Gamble's land (probably the birthplace of Wilson M. Gamble.