In the meantime, Cephas Hawks had married Chloe Chase and started what was to become a family of eleven children. Remarkably, the first six kids--Frank, Albert, Dwight, Cephas Jr., Eleazer, and Joel--were all boys, while the next five--Eliza, Calista, Sarah, Mary, and Harriet, who died as a child--were all girls. With prospects in the area unlikely to improve, Cephas moved the family in the early 1820s to the growing village of Ypsilanti, Michigan, fifteen miles east of Ann Arbor. Trying a new field, Cephas opened a distillery there in 1826 with four other men. Over time, he also became quite successful in the cattle business, accumulating enough capital to consider other enterprises. In 1835, he and his son Cephas Jr. undertook a prospecting tour of neighboring areas and bought two hundred acres of land near Middlebury, Indiana, just south of the Michigan line, about 125 miles southwest of Ypsilanti.
