Zenas Bolton
Zenas Bolton was born on 27 February 1851 in Iowa, at Tipton in Cedar County by family accounts. His parents, Daniel Bolton and Elizabeth Jane Fulwider, were both Virginians. They had married in Cedar County on 4 December 1845. Zenas was their second child; his sister Nancy Harriet had been born in Iowa in 1848.
In the early 1850s the family crossed the plains to Oregon with ox teams. A sister, Ellen, was born in Utah in 1853, on the way west. The Boltons settled first in the Willamette valley, then moved to The Dalles in Wasco County. Zenas grew up there with a long run of younger brothers and sisters: Simeon, Wilbur, Grifford Virgil, Mitchell and several who died young. In 1870 the family was farming in the Hood River country of Wasco County, and Zenas was nineteen.
On 26 September 1875 he married Addie M. Miller in Polk County, Oregon. In 1880 they were farming near Salem, in Marion County, with Addie's sister Lulu Miller in the house. A portrait of him from about 1885 shows a well-dressed man with a full beard and a high collar; the family caption on it calls him Dr. Zenas Bolton. The 1880 census lists him as a farmer.
By 1886 he had moved north to the Yakima country of Washington Territory, where he held land under the federal land laws that year and again in 1903. On 4 August 1890 he married Nannie Kelley at Yakima. She was fourteen, the daughter of the Wenas valley pioneer Thomas Kelly, and her father signed his written consent to the marriage the same day. The Yakima Herald listed the license on 7 August among a run of summer weddings.
Zenas and Nannie raised their family in the Wenas valley. Their children were Claudie (1894-1895), Theresa Eunice (born 1896), Asa Simeon (born 1899), Wilbur Zenas (born 6 April 1902) and the twins Homer Daniel and Virgil Thomas (born about 1906). In 1910 he was farming in the Wenas valley with Nannie and five children. His brother Wilbur, a merchant at Antelope, Oregon, described him in 1905 as a farmer in Yakima County.
He died of apoplexy on 8 August 1918 in the Parker precinct of Yakima County, near Wapato, aged 64 by his death certificate. He was a rancher. Nannie, as Mrs. Zena Bolton of Wapato, gave the particulars. He was buried in the Wenas Cemetery on 10 August 1918. His stone there, shared with Nannie, reads FATHER ZENAS 1853 1918.
Sources
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Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Zenas Bolton (1851-1918)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/zenas-bolton-1851-1918-959d7c.