Born December 23, 1897. One hundred years later, to the weekend, the whole family gathered on the ranch — golf tournament, fun run, Mass, and wagon rides.
Jessie Jane Crowley was born in Kandiyohi, Minnesota, two days before Christmas, 1897. The Crowleys reached Eureka in 1912; her father Thomas — 'Pa' Crowley — proved up a 320-acre homestead in 1919. She married Lynn Purdy in January 1918 and spent the rest of her century on this ground.
She never milked a cow — and was happy to tell the Tobacco Plains Journal why: “Lynn's mother, she'd rather work in the barn than in the house. So my husband never encouraged me to do anything in the barn. He didn't ask me once.” Her domain was the house, the garden, and the family — and everyone who ever sat at her table for Sunday breakfast, which regularly fed twenty to thirty.
We started out with pails and then bottles and then we got milking machines — and even delivered with a sled.— Jessie Purdy, Tobacco Plains Journal
Her memory held the whole valley. Dances at the Lost Hall down along the river — “we had to walk down a big long hill.” The community at Jungletown, started by her aunt and uncle, the Downses, named “because they figured it was way out.” Her brother-in-law Comet, “born when the Comet was around.” The barn she and Lynn had freshly painted in November 1943, its MEADOW HOME DAIRY lettering still faintly there today.
In the summer of 1997 — her hundredth year — the family threw a centennial weekend on the ranch: a wedding at Peaceful Lodge, a golf tournament on the ten-hole 'Purdy Good Golf Course' they mowed near Joe's house, a fun run, Mass, and wagon rides. Jessie marked her actual hundredth birthday that December 23rd with her children around her. She passed in the spring of 1999, at 101, having seen the ranch pass safely to its fourth generation.