John Franklin Eesley

The older brief framing put John Franklin Eesley as Albert Robert’s brother, both of them emigrants from Old Stratford going in different directions. Dale’s tree settles a different relationship: John Franklin is Albert’s son and the eldest of the ten children, born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1859, two years before his parents’ Ontario marriage record. The milling thread runs not John (1799) → Albert and John F. as parallel emigrants but John (1799) → Albert (the emigrant to Canada) → John Franklin (the next-generation emigrant from Canada to Michigan).

On the “J. R.” in William Eesley’s c. 1916 obituary

William Eesley’s c. 1916 obituary names the eldest brother as “J. R., who follows milling.” A separate entry for “John R. Eesley” was briefly maintained in this archive while the obituary text and the GEDCOM appeared to disagree. The GEDCOM resolves the matter: Dale’s tree has no John R. Eesley in this generation, only John Franklin. The “J. R.” in the obituary is a transcription error or local family-memory variant for “J. F.” — the same person whose Plainwell mill became the J. F. Eesley Milling Co.

Born 11 December 1859 in Hamilton, Ontario, he made his way south and west across the international border to Plainwell, Allegan County, Michigan by 1887. There he bought the 1869 roller rink on West Bridge Street, converted it into the Sunshine Flour Mill under the Sunshine Brand Flour label, and made it the nation’s second-largest producer of buckwheat flour at its peak. In 1903–04 he physically split the timber-frame mill building, moved it to East Bridge Street, and merged it with a grain elevator to create a unified mill-and-elevator landmark.

He married Kittie Belle Scott in Plainwell on 8 September 1885 — Kittie had been born across the township line in Gun Plain Township, Allegan County. They had no children recorded in Dale’s tree, and the Plainwell mill’s Eesley line ends at John Franklin himself.

He ran the operation until his death — 9 July 1929 in Kalamazoo, Michigan; buried in Plainwell two days later. The mill outlasted him by a century: the building is on the National Register of Historic Places and now operates as The Old Mill Brewpub. He is the wealthiest member of the documented family — see Notable Family Members.

His Plainwell grave marker — carved FATHER · JOHN F. EESLEY · 1859–1929 — confirms his dates in stone. The “Father” designation is a small puzzle, since Dale’s tree records no children for John Franklin and Kittie Belle Scott; it is a wrinkle worth a second look against the Plainwell records (the companion “Mother” stone would presumably be Kittie’s).

See also — family threads

John F. Eesley is an anchor for two of the ten threads in the Family threads synthesis essay:

• Thread #9 — Crossing for what’s next — the Stratford → America crossing in the 19th century.
• Thread #10 — Building things (entrepreneurship across four generations) — the canonical historical instance: bought a roller rink in Plainwell, Michigan in 1887, converted it into the Sunshine Flour Mill, grew it to the second-largest buckwheat-flour producer in the U.S., physically divided and moved the building in 1903–04. The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places — the family surname on a building, on a federal register.

Source: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — John Franklin Eesley (LQY3-K8S); J. F. Eesley Milling Co., Wikipedia.