One of the pioneer figures of early Maple Hill was Mary Caesare (Blanchet) Beaubien, wife of Edmond Augustine Beaubien. They met and married on June 14, 1864 at the Presbyterian Church in Kankakee, Illinois. Edmond Beaubien and his father-in-law, Alexis Blanchet, were both substantial farmers in Kankakee County, Illinois. Edmond’s health began to fail and his physician recommended that he move West. At that same time through a relative in Illinois, they learned that a member of the Bourassa Family had a farm for sale on the banks of Mill Creek. That family was the family of Jude W. Bourassa, who had died of small pox in 1857 and was buried at Uniontown. From the late 1840s through that time, Jude W. Bourassa had operated a griss mill for the Potawatomi Indians on Mill Creek on what is today known as the Brethour Ranch. The Bourassa family owned a large house in Uniontown, Shawnee County, Kansas where they welcomed traverlers on the Oregon Trail before they crossed the Kansas River. They also built a substantial log home on Mill Creek on what was best known as the Frank McClelland farm or the farm owned by Don McClelland and Hattie McClelland Wilson.

It was this farm, with land on both sides of Mill Creek, that Edmond and Mary C. (Blanchette) Beaubien moved to in 1870. They came with enough capital of purchase the farm and to provide improvements such as fencing. They were also able to pay for the plowing of native prairie ground so that cash crops could be planted.

Edmond A. Beaubien’s health did not improve and he passed away at the farm on January 8, 1874 as reported in the Maple Hill News Items in the Alma newspaper. Mary C. (Blanchet) Beaubien was left with a substantial farm of 240 acres and two small children to rear. In addition, Edmonds aged parents, Alexis and Margaret (Brown) Beaubien had moved to Kansas and were also living with Edmond’s widow.

Mary did not despair, she went to work!! She hired a man to help but through her own labors working in the fields and supervising the hired man, she was able to have one of the finest farms in Maple Hill Township. She added an additional 300 acres of property to her farm.

Nell (Beaubien) Nichols does not provide a date, but in her autobiography states that several years after Edmond’s death, the original log house burned taking with it Edmond’s French-Canadian military uniform and antique articles of furniture. Mary C. Beaubien had trees felled on her farm property along Mill Creek and sent them to the Blyton Sawmill for processing. Then she built a new farmhouse on the banks of Mill Creek on her farm. That is the house shown in the second photograph. The children are her son Hector C. Beaubien and daughter Mary Florence (Beaubien) Chapman-Bourassa.

When the Rock Island Railroad built through the Mill Creek Valley, Mary C. Beaubien owned an 80 acre parcel that was adjacent to the new townsite Fowler proposed. She decided to divide her Mill Creek Farm between her two children, Hector and Mary Florence (who was by then married to William W. Chapman) and built a new hotel/boarding house directly across the street north from the site of the Rock Island Depot. The children could farm and she would become a business lady in the new town. Again, she had trees felled on the farm, had them processed at the Blyton Sawmill on Mill Creek (across Mill Creek north from the Waterman/Haas/Smith/Romick farm, and build the hotel. The two additional photographs are of that hotel, known as The Beaubien Hotel. Mary C. Beaubien operated that hotel with the help of her family and various others from the community, until her death at age 90 in 1929. She is pictured in her late 80s standing in front of the hotel with her grandson, Edmond B. Chapman, who was a well-known newspaper writer and editor with Capper Publications in Topeka.

The farmhouse in the middle photograph is the same house the McClelland Family lived in until lit was torn down some 15 or more years ago by Claude and Paulina (McClelland) Arnold.