ROMANCE AND MARRIAGE
Eleven year old Mellie was sent down to the Daketown school because her mother thought the environment would be better for her carefully reared daughter than that of the Coy school.
Mellie and Starks got well acquainted during the three years she attended this school. And when the Lymans moved way out west to Minnesota and from there to Iowa, Starks wrote letters to Mellie that were enclosed with those his cousin Julia wrote to Mellie. And likewise her answers were mailed to Julia.
Mellie was sixteen when she had typhoid fever, and lost all her hair, that [then] came in curly. Then her mother was sick for several weeks and [was] up and around before she was stricken with a paralytic stroke on Christmas Day and died on New Years Day. Soon after, Mellie, who missed her dear mother veiy much, and her further gave up housekeeping to board in a private family [home] so that Mellie could go to school, practice her piano lessons two hours a day, and have time for her needlework and a restricted social life.
The following summer they came back to visit their Greenfield friends. Starks being then grown-up, everyone knew "Mel" was his sweetheart. And before she left for home they became engaged. But when she went to Terra Haute, Indiana, to a girls boarding school that wouldn't allow its students to correspond with a boy friend, it was broken off. Their engagement renewed after she finished this school, was again broken by Mellie because Starks lived so far away and she wanted to date her home town admirers. In the meantime her father married Jennie Angevine, a stepdaughter of his first wife's sister Kate, the matchmaker. Mellie being only ten years younger than her stepmother, she continued to call her Jennie. And the home life of the three of them was congenial.
During the winter of 1873 Starks wrote Mellie he was now able to support a wife and he wanted to marty her in the spring. Eventually Millie made up her mind. And in late summer he went to Iowa to see her and plan for their wedding.
There was no ready to wear trousseaus back in those days, when a bride included enough complete outfits of white toilet needfuls to last several years. For well she knew a wife would be ashamed to have a husband buy her anything to wear the first year. In the meantime, while waiting for Mellie's sewing to be done, Starks visited his widowed maternal Aunt Susan, who supported her family by baking bread to test flour for a milling company that let her keep the bread. And while there Starks bought each of her teen age daughters a ring.
Mellie's Aunt Kate being determined to give her a wedding, the Lyman family went to the Angevine home near Gasport N. Y. where Mellie and Starks were married Oct. 13, 1874. Mellie's wedding dress was a light grey poplin (linen and silk) trimmed with maroon corded ruffles. And she wore attached to her mother's long gold chain, the watch Starks gave her for a wedding present. But as no guest felt obligated to give a present in those days, she had only a few wedding presents. And the silver butter dish the Angevines gave her is the only one now in existence.
Starks' plan of settling in the west being frustrated because he couldn't meet the expense of a trip to New York state and back to Iowa without financial embarrassment, he decided to return to Greenfield. But he didn't mention his marriage, when he wrote his mother to have some [one] meet him at Ballston when the train came in from the west on the fourteenth, and to come with a wagon that can carry a trunk.
Everyone, who came to the reception Mother Dake gave for them at her home, voiced their approval of the bonny bride she said was just a pretty girl.
Mellie was a music teacher. And when her father shipped the square piano he'd given her on her twentieth birthday, it was crated with a feather bed to protect its rosewood case.
When Starks bought from his father's estate the ninety acre farm with a back lot in the Coy District that joined the Rye-lot on his father's homestead farm with little more than the width of a barway, their buildings in Daketown were a long half mile apart.
The old house on Starks property having been moved westward and joined to the barn for a wagon house and granary with winter sheep and pig pens underneath, he built a new house directly across the road from the barn before he left his mother's with his wife to set up housekeeping in the full.