Throwback Thursday: Hattie (Moats) Jordan

Hattie Moats was not quite three years old in 1865 when she traveled with her mother to Cleveland for a visit with family. They took the train, which was filled with soldiers returning home from the recently-concluded Civil War.

"I was just sitting there with my mother, humming a little song she taught me," Hattie recalled 96 years later, shortly before her 98th birthday. Her tune caught the attention of a Union soldier sitting nearby.

"He came over and told me he had a little girl at home just like me,” she recalled. “He asked me if I could sing a song for him. I said I can sing: ‘We'll Hang Jeff Davis by a Sour Apple Tree.’”

She was a hit.

“This officer led me all through that long train full of Union soldiers and I sang about Jeff Davis in each car,” she remembered. “I came back just loaded down with money, candy, and gum.”

The 11th of 14 children, Harriet Jenietta Moats was born February 10, 1863, in Highland Township, Clayton County, Iowa. Her father valued the importance of education, especially for children. Hattie and her siblings spent their evenings reading and studying. They read a Bible chapter every morning before breakfast.

She attended country school, then studied music, playing in church services and giving lessons. In 1879 she earned $1 a week for millinery work. By the early 1900s she was making $25 a week in Des Moines, enough to save $7,000 of her own money (about $200,000 today) before her wedding in 1904.

Hattie was a lifelong entrepreneur. After a short stint as head trimmer with a wholesale milliner in St. Louis, she opened a store in Elgin March 10, 1904, but gave it up when she married contractor Joseph Butler on September 24. Her new role, the newspaper opined, would be “homemaker.”

That didn’t set well with Hattie. Within a year she took a job trimming hats in the shop she once owned, and in 1907 she again opened her own store in Elgin. She made regular trips to Chicago and Minneapolis, learning about the latest styles and bringing back new trends to her small-town Iowa shop. After these trips her store would open for “previews,” where ladies could come see the current fashions from wide brims to ostrich feathers.

Joe died in 1917, and Hattie moved to Dubuque a few years later, where she worked for a millinery wholesaler. She met and married widower Sam Jordan there in 1927. He died in 1942. She continued working and regularly visited Elgin, where her many nieces and nephews lived. She eventually retired, but never slowed down. She still lived at home when she turned 100 in 1963. Her hearing was great, and still cooked her own meals, cleaned her house, and made her bed. At age 106 she moved into a nursing home after a fall injured her hip. Even that couldn’t slow her down. At her 109th birthday in 1972, it was becoming expected that she’d always have one more.

“It’s grand,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of birthdays. We’ll do it again next year.”

True to her word, she celebrated her 110th birthday in 1973. She was thought to be the oldest resident of Iowa when she died a few months later on May 19. Her funeral was held in Elgin May 22 and she was laid to rest in the Elgin Cemetery.