Robert was born in a sod house south of Virgin Lake, Iowa. At the age of seven his family moved to the Campbell farm one mile north and two and a half miles west of Ayrshire, Iowa. Ten years later the family moved into Ayrshire but continued to farm the Campbell farm.

Robert and his brothers cut prairie hay and stacked it, then in winter they would bale it with a stationary baler and the hay would be shipped to Chicago by boxcar.

He married Edna Rouse in 1904 and set up housekeeping on the Campbell farm where they lived for forty-eight years. Always in the fall Robert and Edna would sit down with the Sears and Roebuck catalog and order the winter clothing along with groceries; 5 lb containers of coffee, 3 lb pkgs of tea, boxes of dried raisins, prunes, apricots and peaches, sacks of rice, jars of jam, and also canned peaches, etc. When the order came there would be almost a triple box wagon load. These were stored upstairs with four hundred-pound sacks of suger, ten to fifteen fifty-pound sacks of flour, along with the seed corn. In the basement were bins of potatoes, squash, pumpkins, big crocks of kraut and salted cucumbers and the canned goods. They had an apple orchard, so there were also apples stored there.

One year Santa never came until January because the Sears order never came in time.

Robert was deacon in the Baptist church and trustee of Silver Lake Township.