Sarah McClaflin Tooley born March 18, 1840, daughter of William and Judith Sprague McClaflin in North Royalton, Kyhaug County, Ohio at the home of her grandfather, Knight Sprague, a successful lawyer. Her parents immigrated from Ohio to Illinois in a covered wagon then to the wilds of the Michigan forest by ox team. Mrs. Tooley's first school was a log house with no desks. Her first teacher was Ann Eliza Kirkendal, who started each school session with a prayer and the hymn "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I stand." They sang their A B Cs. There were no schools when they went to Michigan. She married a young neighbor Joseph Tooley of Calhoun County Michigan; they were married by Elder Elwood, a Baptist in the minister's house June 16, 1859. They had been married a little over a year and their baby was three weeks old when Lincoln called the home guards and then the three year men; Joseph went with the 12th Michigan Regiment. She was paid $4.00 a month to live on. The landlord took her last dollar for rent; she borrowed a half bushel of corn which she had ground for meal, and made coffee from the nubbins, her garden kept her. Her husband was gone two years when she got word of his serious illness from sun stroke. She left her baby with the mother-in-law and took the journey to the southern hospital which was an old mill on a plantation. She was on the road for three weeks and traveled in every kind of vehicle; the last lap by government hack with military escort, a military train was going through with three hundred mules hitched to one hundred wagons Mrs. Tooley remained south in the union hospital for two years as her husband was not able to travel and was never entirely well. She nursed her husband and hundreds of soldier boys, wrote letters and prayed for them. Her descriptions of the journey south and life in the hospitals is another story.
Mr. and Mrs. Tooley came to North Dakota in the early eighties and settled on a farm southwest of Valley City. In Dakota Territory she met the primitive conditions of the pioneers, nursed the sick, helped bring the children into the world and laid out the dead. Two son were born to this couple: Elmer and Ellsworth.
Sarah McClaflin Tooley died April 13, 1942 at the age of 102.
Source: Barnes County History 1976 Page 250