Nancy Osborn Johnsen

            I am a “birthright Quaker,” as the parlance goes, having both direct lines of my Osborn and Standing forebears as recorded Friends for at least ten generations.  I pretty much had taken my Quaker heritage for granted.  My direct connection to Bear Creek is that my great-great-grandparents, George & Deborah Standing, settled in the Earlham farming community as emigrants from England in 1870.  When they arrived, the Quakers of “Quaker Divide” had had a Bear Creek Meeting since 1854; however, not too long after their arrival, in 1877 there was a major separation in the Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends, and the Standings “stood” with the Conservative members and set themselves apart from the “Friends Church” or Progressive (pastoral) movement.

            George & Deborah Standing’s eldest son, Henry, married Eunice Peacock, a member of North Branch Friends Meeting.  After an eight-year attempt at homesteading in Dakota Territory, Henry & Eunice Standing and their family moved back to Iowa to live near his parents on a portion of the land on which the present Bear Creek Friends (Conservative) Meeting House sits.  In 1914, Henry had deeded a portion of his land to the Bear Creek Meeting for the purpose of re-locating their one-room school house there.  Two years later, the Bear Creek Meeting moved the present Meeting House out from Earlham and placed it to the north of the Quaker Cedar Grove School.  At that time, Gilbert Standing (son of Henry and Eunice, and my grandfather) and his wife Asenath had their home and acreage immediately east of the Meeting House and school.  My mother, Bertha Standing, was the third child of Gilbert & Asenath, and she grew up attending the Bear Creek Meeting next door and was a student at the Cedar Grove School until it closed in the spring of 1933.  In the late summer of 1944 Bertha married my father, Allen R. Osborn, in the Bear Creek Meeting House.  Allen was a Quaker from Winchester, Indiana and a conscientious objector in WWII; he was assigned to a CPS camp outside Ames, Iowa, where his future brother-in-law was the camp commander and that is where he and Bertha met.  [Allen’s great-great-grandfather was Charles Osborn, a well-known Indiana Quaker “minister” and outspoken Abolitionist.]  At my birth in 1945, Allen transferred his membership from Indiana to the Bear Creek Meeting, and then I was recorded as a member as well.

            Between 1950 and 1955, our family farmed on the original George & Deborah Standing homestead to the northeast of the Bear Creek Meeting House, and we attended both First Day and Fifth Day Meeting on a regular basis.  When we moved to the Ames, Iowa area in 1955 our family’s membership was transferred to the Ames Friends Meeting, where Allen several times served as Clerk of that Meeting.  After his death in 1978, our mother moved back to the land on which she had been born just east of the Bear Creek Meeting House, and into a new house we had built for her.  At this point, she and I and my brother Steve all transferred our memberships back to our “home” Meeting of Bear Creek.   Bertha and Steve continued to live in the Earlham community, while I continued to live in the Ames vicinity to work at Iowa State University.  On 12/22/1996 I was married under the care of the Bear Creek Friends Meeting to Harold A. Johnsen; however, after nearly a span of eight years that marriage was dissolved.  I retired from Iowa State University in the fall of 2015, and one of the “perks” of that action is that, although I’m still a member at a distance, I have been able to be more involved at Bear Creek Friends Meeting (Conservative).

Nancy Osborn Johnsen (1/15/2018)