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1 Farm Boy During the nineteenth century, many advancements in technology, energy, and communications revolutionized the production of goods and transportation . These innovations, however, scarcely affected the lives of Americans living in isolated rural communities throughout the country. During the last decade of the 1800s, the georgic rhythms and methods of cultivation continued very much as they had when Thomas Jefferson was president. To break the soil one still guided a plow behind draft animals and planted seed by hand. Most travel was on foot or horseback, although longer distances could be traversed by railroad or boat. Into this world, on a small farm in southeastern Missouri, Rush Hudson Limbaugh was born on September 27, 1891 to Joseph and Susan Limbaugh. While the particulars of his birth are unknown, without a hospital nearby and with only a few doctors in the region, a local woman probably assisted Susan when her time came. Whatever the circumstances of his birth, the boy was the last of the couple’s children. While by today’s standard the family was large, Rush being the seventh surviving child, the size of their family was not unusual for the era. The boy was named in part to please his maternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Hudson, and in part because his father Joseph liked the sound of Rush Hudson, a name borne by a distant relative.1 The family, although poor, was well-respected and hardworking, maintaining a farm of just over 400 acres. While half the land was arable, the bottom land was the most fertile and was situated “in parcels along the creek” amounting to a little more than 30 acres in all. On this and other less productive land, “row crops” such as beans, wheat, and corn, were cultivated. The rest of the farm was composed of “ridge land,” which was used as pasture to graze stock, and of timber along the Little Muddy Creek. This small waterway, which sometimes flooded the bottom land, cut through the middle of the farm in a northwesterly to a southeasterly direction. At different times it had been called Anthony or Limbaugh Creek as well. Rush lived his first fifteen years upon this farm learning to cultivate crops, tend livestock, and to accomplish many other tasks necessary for the family’s livelihood. His father, Joseph, had bought out his brothers’ stakes in the farm, and while still a bachelor lived with his mother in the log cabin constructed by Rush’s paternal grandfather, Daniel R. Limbaugh.2 Chapter One 2 The Original Rush Limbaugh Apparently, until two generations before Rush’s birth, the line of the Limbaugh clan from which he descended had filled important judicial, political, and military positions in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Missouri. The first of the clan to journey to North America was Johannes Michael Limbaugh— who originally spelled his surname Limbach. Born in Germany in 1708, Johannes was the great-great-great grandfather of Rush. Johannes had immigrated with his wife Maria Margaret and their son Frederick, arriving in Philadelphia on the ship Brothers probably in 1752. Unfortunately, little is known about Johannes, who settled in Pennsylvania and died in 1769 at Upper Milford and was followed in death five years later by his wife. More, however, is known about Frederick, who had been born in Baden-Baden, Germany in 1737. He became a prominent member of his community, serving as a justice of the peace, a major in the second battalion of the Northampton County Militia , was elected to the state assembly, and was a judge in the county court. In the late 1780s he moved to Mecklinburg County, North Carolina. Later Frederick with his son Michael, at the urging of Frederick Bollinger, moved west crossing the Mississippi River into Missouri, then part of French territory, on January 1, 1800. Other family members followed them settling nearby in the Whitewater region of southeastern Missouri. At the town of Cape Girardeau, situated on the Mississippi River, Frederick served as one of the territorial judges with Louis Lorimier, the town’s founder. Thus in Frederick began a family tradition of employment in the law in different capacities, which was resumed by Rush and is continued by some of his descendants to this day. Frederick died in 1815.3 Frederick’s son Henry, born in 1775, remained in North Carolina until 1811 when he followed his father to southeastern Missouri. Little is known about Henry’s circumstances in North Carolina and why he had...

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