Alpine Whenin Price

As printed in 1916

Alpine Whenin Price was born June loth, 1855, in a frame building on the new farm named "Alpine Grove" in section eleven, Jefferson township, Clayton county, Iowa, his parents having sold the old homestead "Glen Fruin" in 1854. The four youngest children went with their father, Eliphalet Price, to Colorado Springs, Colo., where Alpine went to school in the winter and with his mule team did freighting and other work in the spring. He had a contract with Uncle Sam (U. S. to cut and deliver fifteen cords of wood at the United States Signal Station on the very top of Pikes Peak, then in charge of Sergeant O'Kief, the signal and telegraph operator. He cut the wood on the south side of the mountain about one mile below the top, as no timber grows near the top of Pikes Peak. He said it was the hardest job of work he ever did. He then went to San Jose, Calif., and attended a commercial school and soon got a good position with his uncle who was doing a large commercial and banking business and is now well to do, besides owning a fifty-acre prune and apricot farm.

In selecting a name for this boy, Judge Price said: "For his first name, I will take the name of a beautiful flower which bears the nome Alpme, and grows profusely on the sunny side of the Arctic mountains. Before announcing his middle name I will read a part of the Declaration of Independence, which I regard as the greatest document that was ever written by man in defense of his country, his fellow men and posterity.

" 'When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinion of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

" 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'

"I will take the first two words of the Declaration of Independence for his middle name. His name shall be Alpine VVhenin Price."

Avalo Jersey Price was born on the Glen Fruin farm on January 12th, 1844. He enlisted as a private in Company H of the Twelfth Regiment of Iowa Volunteers. Henry J. Playtor was captain of the company, which was composed principally of young men of Dubuque and Delaware counties. He was in the battle at the taking of Fort Henry and assisted as guard in taking some of the confederates to the army prison in Ohio. Among them was the son of George W. Jones, who for many years was United States senator from Iowa, and a son of Mr. Lewis of the United States Land office at Dubuque, and others who went from Dubuque and joined the confederate army. He was at the battle of Fort Donelson, which was taken, but he was wounded and went home on a furlough, but returned in time to be in the battle of Shiloh, when the Twelfth, Eighth and Fourteenth Iowa regiments fought all day and until sunset, when they surrendered and were taken to Andersonville, where he and his brother Valmah remained about eight months, when paroled. He then came home and assisted in raising the Eighth Iowa Cavalry and received the appointment of major, which position he held until about the close of the war, when, owing to the severe wound received at Shiloh and the hardships of the cavalry service, he resigned and went to the Rocky Mountains and to New Mexico, where he became ill and started for his home in Iowa. On April 8th, 1871, he arrived at St. Vincent hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he died on April 11th,

As printed in History of Clayton County, Iowa : from the earliest historical times down to the present : including a genealogical and biographical record of many representative families, prepared from data obtained (1916). See the original pages. Wording is the original; obvious scanning errors have been corrected, and a few may remain.