Eli Woodruff Bruner

Blacksmith, husband of Polly Collins. The photograph, in an ornate case-style frame, is reproduced from a printed family history and captioned “Eli Woodruff Bruner”. The caption is in the same typewriter face as Polly’s in the 1997 Brunner/Bruner Picnic book (page), so the history is probably that book. The photograph uncropped is here.

The same photograph as the oval portrait in the family’s printed history, here uncropped: a bearded man in a broad-brimmed hat, a bow tie and a long coat with a row of buttons, seated, his hands in his lap.

The lodge’s return: 42 members, with Albert Bruce as Worshipful Master and Eli Bruner as Senior Warden, and H. Bruner among the members. The Bruner names are highlighted as they were posted.

“The body of Eli Bruner, who died at Colorado City, on the 27th inst., was buried yesterday with Masonic honors by the fraternity of this city.” From Molata, chapter nine.

The village of Somerset, laid out in 1856: “Within the next five or six years … Hickman Bruner, a wagon shop, and Eli Bruner, a blacksmith’s shop.”

A log house with a deep porch overgrown with vines, an older woman in a white apron seated on the steps and a man in a dark suit standing beside her. Captioned on Ancestry “Eli Woodruff Bruner & Polly’s House in Arkansas.” Polly was living in Benton County, Arkansas, in 1880, a widow; Eli had died in Colorado in 1879. The couple on the porch are not named, and when it was taken is not known.

“Henry Bruner,” with eleven in the household: six boys and four girls under twenty, a woman of 30 to 40 and a man of 40 to 50. Henry Hickman Bruner, born in 1806, would have been in the 20-30 column, which is empty. So the head may be an older Henry, and whose household this was is open. The FamilySearch tree attaches it to Henry Hickman Bruner.

The country in 1847, with its canals, railroads and stage routes, insets of Oregon and the cities, and the counties’ populations from the census of 1840. Iowa had become a state only the December before, and the Collinses and Bruners were gathering in Appanoose County on its Missouri line. From Molata, chapter eight.