Burton Ayres

Burton Ayres (1805/1806–1870), often recorded as Ayers, was among the earliest settlers of La Salle County, Illinois. He arrived around 1830, before the town of La Salle was incorporated and before the Illinois and Michigan Canal was dug. Local accounts remember him as the area’s first blacksmith, and he also farmed and dug coal on his own land.

Origins and Settlement

Burton was born about 7 January 1805 or 1806. Family records point to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and to Ohio, from which he came west. He first settled on Section 14, where he built a log cabin about a half-mile northwest of the site later occupied by the Matthiessen & Hegeler Zinc Company.

Marriages

On 13 October 1836 Burton married Aurelia Drake Langworthy (1818–1853) in La Salle County. They established one of the first permanent farmsteads in the township. Aurelia died in 1853, after seventeen years of marriage. On 17 March 1863 Burton married Waitee Potter (1804–1877) in Knox County, Ohio.

Children

Burton and Aurelia raised a large family, and lost several children young:

• James Cyrus Ayres (1838–1920)
• Myron Downs Ayres (1840–1841)
• Elizabeth Ann Ayers (1842–1852)
• Franklin Langworthy Ayres (1844–1926)
• Warren Langworthy Ayers (1848–1849)
• Charlotte Aurela Ayres (1851–1946)

Two further children are recorded in the family tree: an infant daughter (died 1868) and Cora (died 1870). Their mother is not identified here, since Aurelia died in 1853.

Forge, Coal, and Farm

Burton set up his blacksmith shop at the “foot of the hill,” near the north end of what became the Illinois Central bridge. He shod horses and repaired farm tools for settlers and, by tradition, for local Native American communities during the years around the Black Hawk War. To fuel his forge, he opened a small coal bank on a bluff along the Little Vermilion River, years before coal became a major industry in the county. He also built up a sizable farm and appears in early Illinois Supreme Court records, including Clinefelter v. Ayres.

Kinship with the Gunns

The Ayres family was tied to another of the township’s earliest families, the line of Jasper Gunn through Aaron Gunn. Aaron arrived in La Salle in 1831 and built his homestead in early 1838. On 5 January 1868, at the First Baptist Church in La Salle, Burton’s son Franklin Langworthy Ayres married Aaron’s daughter Elizabeth Sarah “Lizzie” Gunn (1846–1923). Their descendants carry the blood of two families that settled La Salle County in the 1830s.

Death

Burton Ayres died on 23 September 1870. He lived to see the wilderness he entered in 1830 become a thriving canal and industrial town.