ACROSS TWO CENTURIES

JENNE’S FAMILY HISTORY

WRITTEN BY JOHN

AS TOLD BY JENNE


Published on August 31, 1993

Jenne's 100th Birthday Anniversary




Shortly after the Civil War, many people in northern Ohio and northern Indiana heard the word, originally popularized by Horace Greeley, saying: "Go west young man; that is where the opportunities lie." The people dreamed of this, and thousands of them did decide to go west, a lot of them flocking to states within the territory west of the Mississippi, which was part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.
Missouri, in particular, experienced rapid growth during this time, stimulated in part by its being the jumping-off point for further western migration, and partly because land could be acquired for a small amount per acre.
Some of these immigrants came to the prairies of Livingston and Grundy counties. This is a land of rolling hills, wandering creeks and a few rivers, lying in the north central part of the state, north of the Missouri River and west of the Mississippi, midway between the towns of Hannibal and St. Joseph.
Missouri had become a state on August 10, 1821, and early settlers in this area had already surveyed farms, organized counties, laid out townships of thirty- six square miles, and school districts of four square miles. They had settled down to homestead, and to be good neighbors to persons who had land near theirs.
In each school district, a school, usually ungraded, for pupils aged six through sixteen, was established, and a school house was built in a convenient central location, depending upon the local topography. These schools were called common branches, and served the primary education needs of the community. At this time also, many of these schools were so called subscription schools. That is, the parents of the children were obliged to pay a sum of money per month for each child who attended the school, Some parents discharged their obligation by boarding the teacher.
Many of the early settlers had ague, a kind of malaria. They called it the chills because chills preceded the fever, Some said it was caused by the mold or mildew on the tall prairie grass stems near the ground. As soon as the grass was all plowed up there was no more ague. Maybe it was really caused by mosquitoes living in the grass, who knows?
In April 1866, my paternal grandfather, Jacob Gruber, and my grandmother, Nancy Jane, along with their son, Orange Lemon, age eleven (who was to become my father), and their other children, migrated to this country from Butler, Indiana, near Lake Erie.
Orange Lemon, the youngest of Jacob's ten children, was born September 22, 1854. He was named for a Methodist preacher, Orange Lemon, and for obvious reasons, was always called O.L.
Jacob's ancestors had emigrated to Northampton county in the William Penn Colony (which is now Pennsylvania) from the Palatinate in Germany, in the early seventeen hundreds. The earliest known member is Gottfried, born 1700 or earlier. Jacob's Grandfather, John, was a blacksmith who lived in Bedford county, Pennsylvania. He served in the Continental Army in Captain Davidson's Company, from Bedford county. Jacob's father, John, was also a blacksmith. He lived in Washington county, Pennsylvania, and Tuscarawas county, Ohio. Jacob was born April 2, 1811, the last of ten children. He enlisted in the Union army in June of 1861, and served as a Private in Company K, 44th Indiana Infantry [Regiment], during the Great Rebellion. While in the army he suffered from bronchitis, and was wounded in the battle of Shiloh on April 6th 1862, by a musket ball which passed through his canteen strap, his haversack, and finally hit him in the abdomen. As a result he was in and out of hospitals for months, and was finally discharged in January 1863. He eventually obtained a pension which gave him half pay. A total of four dollars per month.
The family settled in Livingston county, which was organized in 1841. They first lived near Niantic, (which no longer exists, but was very near Laredo) then relocated to a farm in Grundy county, close to Laredo, a town which had been designated as a railroad refueling stop on the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad, then being built. Jacob was a short man, about five feet four inches in height, and weighed around 120 pounds. He was a dedicated lay minister and a skillful carpenter. He was a charter member of the Marion Center Methodist Episcopal Church, which was organized in the spring of 1875. Later he helped build a Methodist church near Laredo on land owned by the Milwaukee Railroad. This church was formally called the Methodist Episcopal Church of Laredo. It was organized in the year 1888, but church meetings were held in the schoolhouse until the church building was constructed in 1892. Charter members included Jacob, his wife Nancy Jane, and his daughters, Samantha, and Emiline. The church building has been remodeled twice, and was still in use in 1941.
Also in 1865, Giles, my maternal grandfather, and my grandmother, Mary Jane, along with their four children, including their daughter Sylvia, ten years old at the time ( who was to become my mother), came here from the town of Bryan, in Williams county, in northwestern Ohio, near Lake Erie. They had moved there some years earlier from Stryker, Ohio.
Giles' father, Joseph, and his wife, Sylvia Jenney, had been Quakers. They had lived in New York state until Giles, their eldest son, was six years old, at which time they moved to Huron county, Ohio. Joseph was a farmer and was extremely honest. When wheat prices were higher than he thought they should be, he would not take the high price, even though the family was large and poor. Sylvia was a beautiful woman with brown hair and very dark brown eyes. She died of injuries caused when a rocking chair she was sitting in, on the back of a wagon, pitched backward, causing her to hit the back of her head on the ground.
Giles wife, Mary Jane, had a keen mind and a curiosity to know about new events and scientific inventions. She was persevering, diligent, and devoted. She was also generally optimistic and had a keen sense of humor. She liked to travel and in cities she often went sight seeing alone to places that interested her. She liked to wear good clothes, which were always well chosen, fitting her age and position in life. Some may have thought she was stand offish because she was always neat and immaculately dressed, and stood and sat erect at all times. Her beautiful auburn hair, which became white early in her life, was always neatly curled. She usually wore a stylish little velvet bonnet, with a bit of bright colored trimming. It was held in place with ties of black ribbon. Some of Mary Jane's favorite sayings were; "Make hay while the sun shines.", "Many hands make light work.", "Plain food and fruit are the best medicine.", and "Clever people never get in the way."
Mary Jane's father had been captain of a boat that plied Lake Erie till his craft was lost in a storm. Mary Jane and Giles both had presidential blood. Her grandparents had been Noah and Rachel Grant, making her a first cousin to President Ulysses S. Grant, while Giles was a distant relative of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America.
Giles’ family joined the Mays, Wards, Bakers, and many others immigrating to Livingston County and purchasing land there. But let me tell you the story in my mother, Sylvia’s own words:
Up in the Great Lakes region spring thaw comes late, and it was in mid April 1865 that our family set forth on frozen roads to make a new home in the West. We had a covered wagon with essentials for cooking and camping during the journey. A water barrel was fastened to the side of the wagon, and wooden boxes and trunks were placed inside the wagon bed. These trunks and boxes contained clothing, a few keepsakes, as well as tools, seeds, and other things which would be needed at the new home. Bedding was spread atop the boxes.
One thing that accompanied us on this journey, and that mother particularly treasured, was a wooden box made by my father soon after they were married. It was a work of art. The corners were dovetailed together, a shallow tray was fitted into the top of the box, and a small lock mortised into the hinged lid. The family bible was ensconced in this box for the move. The family records were recorded in this bible, a farewell gift from the Quaker Church in Williams County.
Besides my Mother and Father, there were four of us children: George, Charles, Elmina, and myself, Sylvia. I was ten years old when the journey started. The women and girls slept in the wagon, the men on the ground. Along with the wagon we drove 675 head of sheep. My father had a good team of horses, and an extra pony for George, our scout, to ride. George's job was very interesting. He would ride ahead, looking for the easiest route, finding where we could get water for the animals, and picking a good camp spot for the night.
Travel was slow, of course. The sheep were allowed to graze, and we had to get them to water, a creek or small stream, every evening. We would stop at or near a village store to get food for ourselves and the horses, while the flock grazed on the open plains. My two brothers did most of the herding, but sister Elmina and I helped when needed. My mother would say, "Many hands make light work."
Cooking and carrying water were the big items when we stopped for the night. One day while at a spring getting water, we met twin girls about my own age. We talked with them and they said that they would meet us there the next day. Next morning Elmina said , "Can you tell the twins apart, Myrtle from Maria?" "Yes, of course", I said, "Myrtle had a tear in her right sleeve."
A boy we met at that stop teased my brother Charles about his red hair. He said,"Jerry Simpson's come to town, one sock up and one sock down".
In Illinois we stopped at a convenient place to shear the sheep. This was done by hand and was hard work. The wool was then sent to Chicago to be sold. The price of wool was down after the war, and the wool was stored temporarily awaiting a better price. While the wool was in storage, a fire broke out in the building, and the wool was burned. Father went to Chicago to see if anything was left, but it was a total loss. There was no insurance.
It was during this delay that we got word that President Lincoln had been assassinated three weeks earlier. Mother and Father were very sad when they got the news.
Finally we broke camp and continued westward. We crossed the Mississippi River on a ferry boat. Nothing exciting happened to us but one sheep jumped overboard and was drowned.
Now in Missouri, my father began looking for an improved farm. He finally found and purchased a beautiful place in Livingston county, located midway between Chillicothe and Trenton.
This farm that they purchased, which had two previous owners, included pasture, cleared fields, and woodland. It consisted of 110 contiguous acres, and one other non contiguous parcel. The previous owners had planted a walnut tree, several maples, some hackberry trees and an apple orchard.
The farm house was a two room affair of log construction, with a lean-to addition on the north side. The house was not built centrally on the property, but rather in the northwest corner of the section, one quarter mile from either boundary road. There was a dug well about ten feet in diameter and thirty feet deep, lined with brick, with a constant stream of water, flowing from a bed of limestone, which was plenty for home use. What clear and cool pure water it was.
Again, let us hear about life on the farm, from Mother in her own words:
It was about August fifteenth, 1865, when we got settled in our new home, and how we loved it. In low moist places prairie grass grew tall, sometimes tall enough to hide a man on horseback. On the hills and around the house bluegrass was native, and there were no weeds. The only spot of bare ground was the place where the people before us poured out their buttermilk.
We were ten miles from the nearest town, Chillicothe, but we were near a stage line. The stage brought the mail once a week when the roads were passable. The post office, Grassy Creek, was kept in the home of a neighbor named Selby, about one half mile away, on the old Chillicothe/Trenton road. Later this road (which is now U.S. Highway 65) was relocated to about one quarter of a mile west of our house.
Osage hedge was set on the property lines for fence. It made a good stock fence but required trimming several times a year. We also had some rail fence called "stake and rider". I thought that these rail fences were very picturesque, especially in winter when snow covered everything.
We had an apple orchard, which produced lots of good apples. I remember that when we picked them, we would put them into the farm wagon, and the next morning take them to Chillicothe to be sold.
We milked fourteen head of cows and made butter to sell. Father built an ice house and put up ice from a large pond. The ice was packed in sawdust, and was used to keep the milk and butter sweet,
We later built a cellar with a large room over it, called logically enough, the cellar room. One corner of this room was partitioned off for a smoke house, and there we smoked the hams, (shoulders and side meat), after the meat had been in strong brine for several weeks. We used hickory wood to make a smouldering fire under the meat, which hung from the rafters.
Mother was a good planner, and would manage to have two or three jars of butter and several dozen eggs, plus anything else that was surplus, to sell at the same time, as the ten-mile trip in a farm wagon over rough, rutty roads was a long, tiresome journey.
About a mile west was a timbered tract of land with a creek, called Honey Creek, which provided water for the sheep. They would graze in the morning and then lie in the shade during the heat of the day. It was Charles and I who took the sheep to Honey Creek each morning, and brought them back when the sun was low, letting them graze as we went. I sure did dread that daily trip, especially when autumn came and the mornings were frosty.
I remember that we used to take along a short piece of board to stand on. We would run a few yards then stop and stand on the board to warm our shoes. I took along a hymn book and my New Testament, so that I could memorize verses. There was a prize to be given at our Ward Church Sunday school for learning the most verses, and I won the prize. A bible with gilt edges and a clasp.
We raised a big garden which had all kinds of vegetables. Some we ate and some we sold, and the surplus we dried for winter use. Much of our fruit was dried also. Plenty of apple butter, potatoes, pumpkins, apples, squash, and onions were stored in the root cellar.
Mother had all of us working at an early age. I remember that I once drove a team of oxen all day to harrow the ground in preparation for planting, because of the need to get on with this work.
I also remember a neighbor farm girl, about fourteen I suppose, who was supporting her mother and blind father. These people really needed a cow but had no money. When this girl asked my mother to sell her a cow, saying that she would pay when she could, my mother said; " Go pick out the cow you want." Later the girl did come back and pay my mother fourteen dollars.
My sister Elmina did much of the housework, the sewing, and a great deal of the cooking. I was the outdoor girl. I did the chores, took care of the chickens, fed the pet lambs, took care of the cats, and worked in the garden or with the flowers.
In the fall we (Elmina, Charles, and I) went to school in the old log Ward School, which stood on the corner of the John Bell farm. We walked one and one-half miles across the fields from our home every day. In summer the grass was high; in winter we walked in rain and snow.
One year Mr. Bell taught the school. He inspired us to do our best and to be friendly and courteous at all times. He said, "Say good morning when you come into the room. If no one is there, then say good morning to the stove." I remember being so eager to be the best speller that I went to a cold, quiet corner of the school room to study my spelling. I soon was able to spell down all the other pupils, and in contests with other schools, I could usually win the prize.
One November day that first year (1865), we came home and found we had a tiny baby sister. How proud we were of her. Although father named her Florence Mary, we all called her Pet, and she was known by that name all over the neighborhood, even after she was grown up. I had the care of Pet a great deal. I carried her to Sunday school, which was held in the schoolhouse . Later when she was school age, I often carried her to school on my back.
My father had never been healthy or strong, and one year the doctor told him to leave the farm and see if he could regain his health. (He was probably suffering from asthma.) All that summer he peddled "notions", driving a horse hitched to a cart, and calling on farm homes all over the county. Unfortunately his health never did improve, and in 1872 he died of a fever. I was seventeen years old at the time.
So much for a first hand view of farm life in the 1860s and 1870s. Anyway, Sylvia grew up on the farm and in 1874 she and Elmina went to school at the Avalon Academy, which was a few miles southeast of Chillicothe. Then the next year, they changed to State Teachers College at Kirksville, Missouri. Elmina went home that spring and taught a short subscription term at the Ward School. Sylvia also taught part of that year, then returned to Kirksville and finished the course, graduating in 1878. Altogether Sylvia taught school for three years. Among her assignments were Tolle School in 1874, Center School in 1877 (for twenty-five dollars a month), and Gordonville School for three months.
She was still teaching school in the late 1870s when she met Orange Lemon. O.L. was by then a successful farmer who enjoyed his church, singing, and writing poetry. A courtship ensued, and O.L. and Sylvia married on September 6, 1881. (See Appendix four for a poem by O. L., and Appendix two for a letter from O. L. to Sylvia.)
After living near Laredo, in Grundy county, for three years, they moved to the old homestead in Livingston county, which had been Sylvia's girlhood home. By this time ownership of the farm had been divided among the heirs, so O.L. and Sylvia bought out the others, moved in, and began farming. (Interestingly enough, Jacob, O.L.'s father, had built a barn on this farm sometime in the eighteen seventies.)
The crops which they farmed were corn, wheat, oats, rye, and timothy hay. Crop rotation was practiced as required. Soil was tilled by horse drawn machinery. The binder that cut grain and bound it into bundles required five horses to pull. Harrows used a team of three, and plows usually had three horses also. Cultivators used two horses.
O. L. dealt in cattle, hogs and sheep. He studied livestock markets so that he could make wise decisions on when to buy and when to sell. Sometimes, for example, when grass was in short supply in eastern Kansas, O.L. would buy carloads of calves and feed them for two years, then ship them back to market in Kansas City, as baby beef.
All of this livestock, which usually included twelve horses, eight cows, many calves, about a hundred sheep, and one hundred hogs, required a lot of work and overseeing.
The reason for keeping sheep was two fold: year round for food, and in the spring for a cash crop of wool. The wool sold by the "fleece" according to weight. In preparation for sale, a fleece was laid out on a large table, where the children over ten years old, and the women, looked over every square inch for bits of sticks, cockle burrs, thorns and the like, and anything else which wasn't wool.
I don't believe that the sheep enjoyed the shearing process and they seemed relieved when it was finished. O.L. sheared when he thought the cold weather was over, usually in April.
Over the years the house underwent two major remodelings. The first effort was to tear off the lean-to and build a kitchen and three other small rooms. Then in 1903 these last rooms built were given a quarter turn to the right and four more rooms added in front. Two on the first floor, a dining room and parlor, and two bedrooms on the second floor. During this period also, O.L. and Sylvia were continually saving money to enlarge the acreage of the farm. They lived in this house until 1919, when they rented out the farm and moved to Chula.
What was North Central Missouri like in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? To put this in perspective it must be noted that there were two kinds of settlers who migrated to Missouri just after the Civil War. Some purchased land and stayed put, while many others, with itchy feet, stayed awhile and then moved on. In the early eighteen nineties, for example, when the Indian Territories were opened up for settlement, many opted to move on to Oklahoma, lured by free or inexpensive land.
This resulted in considerable shifting around, but the permanent settlers put down roots, and by 1900 a complete infrastructure had been built up, consisting of schools, city government buildings, churches, and so forth, along with civil works such as roads, railroads and bridges.
The town of Farmersville, two and one half miles north of our place, in Livingston county, was typical of those in that area. A wide place in the road, it was settled in the mid eighteen hundreds, and was platted in January 1880 by Joseph King and others. It was populated by about one hundred people. It had two general stores, one kept by Mr. William Price, and the other operated by the Helf brothers. Also a school, under the supervision of Miss Annie Stewart, two physicians, a blacksmith shop, and a post office, managed by Mr. Fred Helf, which was utilized till the advent of rural free delivery in 1899. (The post office had been moved to the Farmersville site after the original post office at Grassy Creek, about one half mile from our place, was burned by renegade Yankees.) Finally, there were two churches: One, a Disciples of Christ, was housed in a neat frame building built in 1877 at a cost of $1300, and the other, a Methodist Episcopal, which was organized in 1867 and housed in a large frame building built in 1872 at a cost of $1000.
The doctors were efficient and competent, working out of offices in their homes, and believe it or not, they would make house calls. One doctor's name, as I recall, was Dr. Huff. He had a wife who had grown up in the local area, and had no children. The other doctor's name was Batdorf. He had a daughter who became a public school teacher.
Before the advent of rural free delivery, one of our family members would ride a horse into Farmersville three days a week or so to pick up the mail, often stopping long enough to gather the latest local news, of illnesses, accidents, births and so on.
Chula, which was four miles east, boasted of a post office, two efficient physicians, three general merchandise stores, and other assorted businesses. The post office was in one of the general merchandise stores, which also sold non prescription medicines. One doctor was Dr. Alexander, and the other, who come later, was Dr. Broyles. They were both excellent physicians, and no one heard any remarks about inefficiency.
A watering trough, providing drinking water for horses, was placed prominently on the main street, It was about ten feet in diameter and could accommodate several horses simultaneously. It was served by a windmill driven pump, and had an automatic valve which held the water at a constant level in the trough. This, of course, was before the advent of automobiles, although telephones (with party lines) arrived in the early nineteen hundreds.
Chillicothe, ten miles south, was the Livingston county seat. The Court House was in the central square, in typical southern fashion, with stores and other establishments on the surrounding streets. I remember a milliner, three or four general mercantile stores, a couple of drug stores, at least eight saloons, a music store, and several restaurants. Chillicothe was also the site of the county four-year high school, with a faculty of fourteen and a student body of 200.
There were eight doctors in town. It seemed to me that when a person was really sick, a Chillicothe doctor was called, rather than one of our local doctors, or the patient was taken to a Chillicothe doctor's office. There was also a hospital in Chillicothe. It was generally considered to be inefficient, and I thought of it as a place to go to die. This must have made a terrific impression on me, because I was in my late twenties before I realized that hospitals were really meant to be places where sick people went to get well.
The people in that part of Missouri were to a large degree religious. In our area, for example, there were eight protestant churches within a four to five mile radius of our farm. Two Methodist Episcopal, one of which was in Farmersville, one Methodist Episcopal South, two Southern Baptist, two Cumberland Presbyterian, and one Disciples of Christ, also in Farmersville.
The Disciples of Christ church had very few members, a non resident pastor, and no local activity or groups. The minister came one Sunday a month for a morning sermon. The Methodist Episcopal Church in Farmersville likewise had a non-resident minister performing services once a month. A weekly Sunday school, with a small enrollment, was carried on from April through December.
At the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which was called St. Paul's Church, a Sunday school was held every Sunday afternoon at three PM, and one Sunday afternoon a month a minister drove out the ten miles from Chillicothe to preach a sermon. Three miles away stood the Methodist Episcopal church, which had services every Sunday. Why two Methodist churches so close together? Because back before the Civil War, some Methodist bishops were pro slavery and some were not. Eventually the ones who were pro slavery broke off and formed a new church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South. This arrangement still held forty five years after the end of the Civil War (and for many years after that, till 1937), even though the reason for the split had long since disappeared.
About one third of the people attended the two Cumberland Presbyterian churches, although in my opinion, many Presbyterians did not know what the word Cumberland meant.
One of these Presbyterian churches was the largest in the area, but was otherwise typical of churches during that period. This church was organized in 1855, but the church building was not built until 1876. Up until that time services had been held in the school. The church was originally called New Providence, but was known locally as the Ward Church, perhaps because there were several families of Wards in the membership.
The church building was built on a donated site, approximately two hundred yards long and one hundred fifty yards wide. The setting was at the confluence of three drainages, with surrounding lush meadows and luxuriant fields of grain. The church yard had hitching rails, a well, watering troughs for the horses, and two toilets near the back. A fence separated the inner church yard from the outer property, and two stiles afforded places to conveniently unload buggies and spring wagons. The church building itself was only one room, and since almost all usage was in the daytime, there was no permanent lighting. About once a year, evening evangelistic services were held, in the hopes of increasing membership. Lanterns furnished the light for these meetings. (The church has been kept in good condition and was still being used for services in 1957.)
Social life was rooted within the membership of the churches. After church on Sundays, some people had acquaintances over for dinner, and visited back and forth. Many of of the earlier settlers visited each other occasionally. There were two German families in the neighborhood, however, who never hobnobbed with any other family.
Probably something less than fifty percent of the people held memberships in various fraternal organizations such as Masons, Modern Woodsmen of the World, Odd Fellows, etc, and their associated women's groups, such as Eastern Star, and Rebeccas. To join one of these lodges, of course, one had to have an invitation from a member. Lodge groups usually met Saturday evenings, but occasionally had additional scheduled events.
On Saturdays, most farmers and their families went into the small towns, did their shopping, and hobnobbed with folks on the streets. Some came in the morning and ate lunch at a restaurant. Others came later in the day and perhaps had an afternoon snack, or maybe a bracer in the local saloon.
A saloon was the official place to buy whisky, beer and other intoxicants. Liquor was relatively free flowing and there were few qualms by most people against its use, although the churches and the Masonic order did not approve of imbibing. In Chillicothe in the late eighteen hundreds there were at least eight of these saloons on the public square surrounding the Court House, four of them on the south side.
But times were changing, and sentiment grew in the early nineteen hundreds against the use of intoxicating liquor. This movement was spearheaded by a strong organization, called the Women's Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU for short, which had originated in Cleveland in 1884 but had quickly gained national prominence. These people, together with the churches, whose members generally did not use liquor or tobacco, wielded considerable influence against the use of alcohol and tobacco, and called vociferously for the total abolition of Demon Rum. Strong sentiment also developed, at this time, in favor of local option, which allowed a city or county to hold an election, with the voters deciding if liquor could be sold therein.
In 1909, I can remember, that there was a large rally in Chillicothe against the sale of liquor. I recall marching in a parade at that time, carrying a big banner against the use of liquor, saying that it was destructive to one's health.

Even though the Great Rebellion had been over for some years , the aftermath was still definitely felt. The people, for example, mostly voted Democratic, a tradition which held for almost one hundred years after the Civil War. The parishioners of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, for another example, were mostly folk who had been on the Confederate side or offspring of those people. Although the words 'Northerner' and 'Southerner' were not often used, it was always understood that Southerners were those who had been on the Confederate side, and Northerners were all others. Although the family’s roots had been in the North, they generally thought of Southerners as warm-hearted and kind people
Most people who had actually experienced the war wanted to forget it and seldom discussed it except with persons whom they knew well. The young people who had not experienced the war first-hand, however, sometimes seemed to have stronger opinions than the oldsters, and some of these people were not averse to voicing them.
My mother had personal experience with slavery, as her childhood home in northwest Ohio, near Lake Erie, was on a major Underground Railroad route. This was neither underground nor a railroad, but rather an informal system which helped slaves escape to the Northern states and Canada in the period up to 1860. She remembered well how families in the Northern and border states set up night routes and daytime sanctuaries, so that negroes who were slaves and were seeking freedom from their owners in the South could make their way to Canada, where slavery was not legal. But again, let us hear about it in mother's own words:
While we were living in our home near Bryan, Ohio, the Civil War broke out. The women met at our house in the afternoons to make bandages for the soldiers. We children helped by raveling out cloth, any kind of material, to make pads to staunch the flow of blood from wounds. My mother read the war news to the women while they worked, and I recall hearing discussions of the Fugitive Slave Laws. We were much opposed to slavery.
About this time, Uncle Tom's Cabin (actually written in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe) became famous. All were anxious to hear this story, so my mother read it aloud to the women as they worked;
My father was a Quaker, and the Quakers did not believe in war or slavery. So he helped the anti slavery cause by participating in the Underground Railroad. It went something like this: Father would see a negro and would give his coat-tail a pull. That meant that father was a friend and the negro should follow him home. Father would then hide the runaway slave and next morning would give him food, and aid him on his way to the next town. Sometimes my father told the slave to get into a wagon and cover up with hay. Then he would drive the slave outside of town so he would not be discovered by the men who were hunting such fugitive slaves.
Secret understandings had been established between anti slavery men from town to town, and slaves were secretly passed along from one protector to another till they eventually reached Canada.
But back to the family. In the due course of time O.L. and Sylvia were blessed with six children: four boys and two girls. The oldest one was Ernest, whose head was always in the clouds. The second one was Lawrence, eight years older than I, who always liked girls and music. Next was Amy who was seven years older, a real self starter who could bake pies and cakes, as well as make candy, all with superior end results. Next came Raymond, five years older, who always seemed to have lots of facts about my boy friends. Finally there was Wilbur, three years older, who was the comedian of the family. He was happy go lucky, friendly and smart. He did well in school, and never appeared to worry about needing to know what he had not already learned.
I was born in 1893 and was named Jenny Lind, after the singer, but that was too auspicious to carry around, so they just called me Jenny. I didn't like that, because a female mule was a jenny, and there also was a spinning jenny. The boys always made big sport of this, particularly the lady mule, so I eventually changed the Y to an E, and pronounced it Jean. Incidentally, I didn't like Jenny Lind anyway.
(Editor's note: Jenne's great grandmother was of the Jenney family. Jenney is the English derivative of the French name Jenne. Probably no connection, but an interesting point nevertheless.)
Since it was a mile and a half from our home to the neighborhood school building, and my mother had been a public school teacher, she felt that it would be better to teach me at home the first year, so I didn't go to the public school until I was ready for the second grade. My siblings were going to that school at the time, and I could have walked with them, but that was not my mother's choice.
Six kids really kept my mother hopping, because along with taking care of them, she tended the garden, planned and cooked meals, canned upwards of two hundred quarts of fruit each year, visited neighbors who were ill, taught an adult Sunday school class on Sunday morning, and managed to keep up with the news in our triweekly newspaper. She also loved to teach and always had a curiosity to learn. The many verses, poems, and songs she had stored in her memory made her teaching interesting, and were a great satisfaction to her. (See Appendix Three for one of Mother's favorite poems.)
I was eternally asking Mother questions. Why this, why that? She never turned away from one, and always tried to provide an answer, but the number of satisfactory answers I got, compared with the number of questions I asked, was probably about ten percent.
After I did start going to school I generally walked back and forth with a group of about six or eight boys and girls from nearby farms. In this group was Neelie, a little five-year-old girl whose mother had died when she was born. She wasn't really old enough to legally attend public school, but she lived with her middle aged aunt and it was believed that being with the other children would be a social benefit.
One day we started out for home, just after four PM as usual, walking along a rutty clay road, with the boys running ahead throwing clods at fence posts. Effie, Neelie's sixteen year old cousin, whose hearing was defective, walked ahead. It was difficult to communicate with Effie because of her handicap, and nobody tried too hard. Neelie should have been under Effie's care but communication would have been too difficult.
I remembered times when one of my older brothers had taken my hand when there was deep snow on the fields we crossed, and I thought why not take Neelie's hand as we walked. So I offered my hand and she accepted it. We walked together that way for more than half a mile, gabbing about this and that. When we said good night in front of her aunt's porch I felt light hearted, as I experienced the joy that comes from knowing I had been helpful.
Most of the time we had women teachers, and some excellent ones at that, although I did have two men teachers in the first eight grades. The public school anatomy and physiology text books in seventh and eighth grade had a chapter entitled "The Effect of Alcohol and Tobacco on Various Organs" It discussed the effect of alcohol on the nervous system, the circulatory system, the respiratory system, and so on through all of the organs. It then went on to discuss the effects of tobacco in the same way.
The school was governed by a school board consisting of three members, who were elected each year for an annual term. It seems that there may also have been an appointed member, but I am not sure about that. There were several men in the district who were capable of serving satisfactorily, and I remember well that the people in our district elected men who cared about the ability and the quality of our teachers, and who also had courage.
One example of this I remember well. When I was about ten years old, there were two sixteen-year-old toughs enrolled in our school. One day they decided that they would give the teacher a bad time, and perhaps run him out. It was Friday about three PM and we were having a ciphering contest. (Ciphering was a fancy name for arithmetic.) It was my turn at the blackboard, and as I had beaten all of the younger pupils I decided to try these two delinquents on for size. The ciphering contest was judged on both speed and accuracy, but these two knew that they could not be competitive in either so they refused to come to the blackboard when I called their names. When the teacher repeated my summons they defied him and ran to get clubs. At this point the teacher wisely called it a day. He said that he would meet with the school board and see that the matter was taken care of on Monday morning.
You can guess what happened from there. The school board members, the regular students, the two delinquents, and the teacher were all at the school on Monday morning. The school board was called into session with the president of the board presiding. The president repeated the rules. "Students not obeying the teacher would be expelled."
At this point the two sixteen-year-olds admitted their failure to obey the rules. They left the building, and everybody drew a long sigh of relief. The president closed the board meeting, and classes resumed. I never heard of any further discipline trouble in that school. By the way, one of the troublemakers was the son of one of the board members, but was shown no leniency.
As early as I can remember, every Sunday morning from April through December, my mother, in a two wheeled cart drawn by one horse, took me, my sister, and my brothers Wilbur and Raymond, to Ward Church. There we attended Sunday school, and once a month heard an elderly seminary graduate who served as the minister.


Also on Sunday mornings, my father and my two teen aged brothers, Lawrence and Ernest, traveled to Farmersville in a spring wagon drawn by two horses, to attend the Methodist Episcopal Church there. Once a month they heard a sermon by a young college student from a Wesleyan College in Cameron, about sixty miles to the west. On the other Sundays, there was Sunday school and Bible study.
My parents gave this student preacher board and room on the one Sunday a month that he came to hold services. Then on Monday morning, he walked the four miles to the nearest railroad station to take the train back to Cameron.
My mother invited the Presbyterian minister for dinner once a year. On one of these occasions, after dinner was over, the minister walked out back behind the smokehouse. We kids peeked to see what he was doing, and we could hardly believe it; he was smoking a corn cob pipe. We were shocked, as no one in our family used either tobacco or alcohol. The minister was embarrassed. We had occasionally seen old ladies smoking corn cob pipes in secluded places, but a minister, that was something else.
Revival meetings drew large crowds at all the churches. I can remember that at the Farmersville Methodist Episcopal Church, Father would lead the hymns for these meetings, while a young matron played the reed organ. The ministers holding these revivals had years of experience at this sort of thing, preached very interesting sermons, and really knew how to stir up a crowd. Also, since we did not have radio, movies, or TV, these revivals served as entertainment.
The St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church South, which we sometimes attended, (the services being in the afternoon), was one and one half miles from our house, diagonally across the road from the school which we and the neighbor children attended.
During these services, audience participation was common. One old man in particular, with a moustache and long beard, always volunteered a prayer. This man's prayers were long and involved, and the longer he prayed the more emotional he became, till finally he was practically weeping. I was four or five years old at the time, and this spectacle scared me. What did this old man see which made him react so strangely? I didn't see anything unusual and could not understand what made him act the way he did. I hated the experience.
A prominent person in this church was a lady from a grand old southern family. Her name was Dixie Amanda and she had married Zachary Taylor, who was a St. Paul's Church parishioner. She was, incidentally, the mother of my good friend Hattie, who later married my brother Raymond.
Dixie knew the Bible stories well, and since she had a choice of what class she would teach in Sunday school, she chose the pre-school class. The children in her class sat on the front pew, and before them on an easel were pictures in color, of the characters in a Bible story. These pictures were published by the Methodist Episcopal Church South for use in their church schools. As the children looked at the picture, Dixie told the appropriate Bible story. But guess who listened to these stories for pre-school kids. The pre- school children, of course, and every other person in the church as well. The intermediates and the adults, although both seated in their age groups farther back in the room, stopped what they were doing and listened intently to Dixie's stories. She certainly was a marvelous story teller. She spoke slowly and distinctly, and made the story seem to become a part of everyday life experience. It was said that her precise delivery was developed to correct a stutter which she had been afflicted with since childhood.
At the St. Paul's Church services, a young matron usually played the reed organ, She played gospel songs and hymns, and played them quite well. Some of these songs were centuries old and had been first used in England. One of these gospel hymns has stayed in my mind all of these years. The first verse went like this:
"On Sunday I am happy, on Monday full of joy. On Tuesday I have peace within that nothing can destroy. On Wednesday and on Thursday, I am walking in the light, And Friday is like heaven below and Saturday always bright."
The tune was jazzy, and the words catchy. This song was only used when an evangelist was conducting the service.
There were always Christmas programs at the church, and I can remember having a small part at least once.
Even though we attended services at the Ward Presbyterian Church in the morning, and sometimes also at St. Paul's, on Sunday evenings we would hurry through the chores and then go back to Ward Church for a youth group meeting. There were only six or eight of us, and it was not terribly exciting, but we were with friends. At one time a man whose property adjoined ours on the south was the counselor of the group. When we became older, my brother Raymond would sometimes take his girl friend Hattie along. She and I were friends, but I liked adventure more than she did. Unfortunately since childhood she had crossed eyes, but after marriage she had them straightened.
Funerals were another church activity which all, including small kids and little girls, were expected to attend. Although we would only be involved in a funeral about three times per year, they were traumatic experiences which I would dream about for weeks afterward. In those days mourners in the immediate family of the deceased would put on a real scene. Young women in particular would pretend to faint, either from sadness or shock. It would seem to us children that these grieving young women could faint at any minute, which would surely cause them to pitch forward and fall into the grave. Of course they never did, because there was always a strong man nearby to catch them at the last second. We of course did not realize this, and for weeks after a funeral, I would dream of one of these young women falling into a grave. It was horrible to expect an impressionable young girl to attend these kinds of activities.
Speaking of dreams, I often dreamed of being chased by sows or bulls, or of being on a high roof and not being able to climb down. None of these things ever happened to me in real life, but I had the dreams nevertheless.
There were no neighbors closer to us than one half-mile, and none with children our ages for about one and a half miles. We had no human day to day playmates, so horses, dogs and cats provided a fill-in. I remember particularly sitting and talking to my cats, telling them my troubles, and so forth.
I preferred tabby cats to toms, as they seemed to me to be more loving. I had one tabby, in fact, who was so loving that I named her Love. I would lay on the grass with my head next to Love, talk to her, and listen to her purr. My mother thought that Love was a dumb name for a cat, but I didn't care.
Our horses were draft animals, except two which were bred for trotting. Often, if one was in the barn, I would mount it from a nearby stile, and ride it bareback to pick up mail at the rural free delivery box on the county road, about three eights of a mile from our house. Sometimes I also rode a horse to take cows a mile or so to and from pasture. A real cowgirl, no less.
Let me tell you though about one time when it didn't work out so well. I had tied the horse's reins to the gate post while I went to empty the mailbox. Returning with the mail sack, I climbed part way up the gate to untie the reins, and then pushed my foot against one of the boards to get leverage to mount the horse. Unfortunately, the board my foot was pushing against had a weak spot, and promptly broke into two pieces, causing me to slip and fall hard against the bare frozen earth. The resulting injury gave me occasional twinges of pain for several months, particularly when I had the whooping cough, but I thought nothing about it. Only the next summer, while I was rubbing a flea bite, did I find that the rib bone was enlarged where the pain had been, and concluded that I had broken a rib. All in all, I felt lucky that I was not more seriously injured.
One day that really stands out in my memory is the day that President McKinley was shot. We were visiting Father's sister Emiline Newton, near Laredo, when the word came by telegraph to the railroad station, and thence by word of mouth to the neighborhood. I remember well the blankness and solemnity of the adult faces and the questions which were asked. "What does this mean?" "Is there a sinister power at work in our country?" "Will he live?" I was nine years old at the time, and as children were to be seen and not heard, I listened and asked no questions.
In 1902 my father and brother Ernest had an interesting adventure. An uncle of mine had been farming in Cedar or Vernon county, near Montevalla, about 170 miles south from our home. When his wife died he abandoned the farm, and after some time Father went down to set things right and to sell it. It took longer than expected. He and my brother were there from about March 5th to December 23rd of that year. He described some of his experiences in letters to my mother and sister, as follows:
...I will tell you about crossing the Missouri River. We got there Thursday evening. It was raining that evening when we got there. The boat was on the other side. We waited about twenty minutes and it steamed over to our side. The river was running very swift and pieces of broken ice was floating down stream. The horses saw those cakes of ice and they wanted to get away from there right quick. And the steamboat also scared them. We could hardly get them down the bank. I drove and Ernest and the boatman took them by the bits and led them on. Then Ernest and I held them while we crossed over. Now and then a cake of ice would grind against the boat. It did make it look rather scary. But we finally got across to the other bank. And then we had to pull about one quarter of a mile through the sand before we got out of the bed of the river. The water was low. I was about as glad as the horses was when I got through....
....We arrived safely at the farm about three o'clock Friday. It took us a long time to get through. The roads were very bad most of the way; but one day of good roads and that was the last days travel north of the river. Then the storm came and we had it. Mud and ruts the rest of the way. We traveled slow and rested the team on the hills. The team stood the trip well and are ready to jump and run. They seem to feel as lively as ever. Things are about as I expected. Fences all need fixing; gates all down or no gates at all.
He took the wire from along the road and put it around the orchard so he could pasture it. I think his stock has been running in there all winter. The house is in bad shape and dirty. The kitchen looks like it had not been cleaned for five years. Floors all covered with mud crusted hard. There is nothing overhead but the roof. It will take me a good while to get it in any kind of shape.
Well we are getting settled to batching in good shape. I made the first batch of biscuit today. Now don't ask how good they were. They were eaten all right without a word.
We got our stove at Eldorado (Springs). Paid $4.50 for it at second hand store; also two chairs, one kettle, bread pan, stovepipe, and galvanized washtub and wash board, making a total cost of $66.40.
We went to Montevalla Saturday and got some provisions. We got some pork shoulder for ten cents per pound, one half bushel of apples for 25 cents, one peck of potatoes for 30 cents. Then we got a little rice, prunes, and butter. Mr. Elliot thinks we can get seed corn at Eldorado for $1.00 per bushel. I will try and find out certain in a few days.
My money purse is getting lean and I would like to have some money as soon as you can send it. If I buy a corn planter will have to have about fifty dollars. Can get along with twenty five dollars to buy plow and harrow. Have you sold those three hogs yet? In buying a horse, buy something that will sell again if you came....
We were sure glad when Father and Ernest came home two days before Christmas. I can still remember that when the lumber wagon and team Father was driving got within a half mile of our house, the dogs put up a terrible commotion, barking and whining, and ran down the road to meet them.
As the above anecdote suggests, life when I was a ten year old girl, was quite different than later on in the twentieth century. The year 1903, for example, saw the first feature movie, The Great Train Robbery, the invention of Rayon (which was the first synthetic fabric), the first wireless (radio) transmission, the opening of the Panama Canal, and the Wright brothers first flight.
There were also signs of stirring social consciences, with the disclosures of muckrakers appearing in Collier's, McClure's, and other contemporary magazines.
The songs, "On the Banks of the Wabish", and "My Gal Sal", were approaching the crest of their popularity , and "The Stars and Stripes Forever" was composed in that year by John Philip 'Sousa. Small boys wore celluloid buttons picturing military heroes, warships, flags, or jingoistic mottoes, and Fourth of July picnics were the stage for seemingly endless patriotic oratory.
In their hammocks and deck chairs, which were as symbolic of the time as mandolins and cigar store Indians, literate Missourians that summer were reading Kipling's Just So Stories, George McCutcheon's Brewster's Millions, and Harold Bell Wright's That Printer of Udell's.
Well to do women, if unmarried, were accompanied everywhere by chaperons or maids. If married, they went about in whalebone corsets, corset covers, chemises, drawers, shirtwaists, petticoats, and two piece dresses; the whole ensemble topped by a hat featuring a dead bird of brilliant plumage. Women farther down the social scale were little more than drudges. Only one in five had a job, for which she received six to eight dollars a week in exchange for sixty hours in a store, or perhaps a place of business where she worked as a "typewriter". Teachers were paid about the same, but had somewhat better working conditions.
The housewife's lot, though, was even harder. Household gadgets did not exist, Electricity brightened the lives of only the most prosperous in the cities. Otherwise the cities, and almost all of the towns were gas lit, and rural Missouri lived by the light of kerosene lanterns. Gossiping on the telephone was out, as there were less than a million and a half phones in the whole country, mostly in offices, public places and the homes of the rich. Wives had no fancy cleaning agents or soaps to help clean the family's painted cast iron bathtub. In fact, they were lucky if they had a bathtub. On the farms, bathrooms and indoor toilets were luxuries as rare as automobiles, of which there were less than fourteen thousand in the entire United States. Transportation was sometimes by railroads, particularly for relatively long distances, but most commonly by horses, which were as numerous as gasoline engines are now. Horses pulled surreys, buggies, sleighs, wagons, and even fire engines. On the farm they were harnessed to plows, mowers, binders, and all manner of other machinery.
Roads were unpaved and mobility was glacial. A five mile shopping trip was a day's excursion. I never saw an automobile in Missouri until I was a teenager.
Like their wives, the husbands of 1903 put in long hours in fields, shops, and offices. Their average annual wage was about five hundred dollars, and when contrasted with the income of a tycoon like Andrew Carnege, who was making twenty eight million dollars a year, one might expect mass resentment . But nothing of the sort happened, at least in Missouri. The typical Missouri male was proud of the country's "self-made men" and "Captains of Industry" . He believed that with pluck and gumption his son could wind up like J. P. Morgan, sitting in his mansion counting his millions, or even become President of the United States.
That was the dream, reinforced by Horatio Alger and W. H. McGuffey's readers. Reality, however, was usually quite different. Anyway, enough of that, and back to my childhood.
When I was eleven or twelve, I was cautioned by my mother about proper speech. She said that people are judged by the words they use to transmit thoughts: "If a girl used ill chosen words, for example, people who met her would assume that she was a careless person." I kept this in mind and used great care in choosing proper words.
At about that time, Father had a subscription to a triweekly farm journal that quoted live stock sales prices. A feature in each issue of this magazine was a four line rhyme by a Kansas writer. Some were pithy, some weighty, and some were humorous, and memorizing them was some fun. In this way I incorporated many new words into my vocabulary, and was able to use them in my daily conversation.
Also when I was about eleven, I learned the hard way about keeping secrets. This is what happened:
Even though a doll was not a favorite playtime object for me, I did, like most little girls, have one or two, and I was ever hoping that Santa would bring a bigger one. At that time and place little girls in winter always wore a jumper dress with two petticoats, and one day, about a week before Christmas, one of my petticoats was missing. Because mother was not a particularly orderly housekeeper, and the available dresser drawers were too few to hold all the family clothing, there were many places that a petticoat might hide. After a short search, I found the errant petticoat with the freshly washed laundry, and neatly wrapped inside the petticoat was a beautiful blond doll about fifteen inches high. What a surprise! It was too good a secret to keep so I told my thirteen-year-old brother. He hit the ceiling. "You've been snooping," he said. "The doll was intended for you but now that you have found it I will give it to your sister." And he did! She kept it standing on a shelf, because at sixteen she was too old for dolls. I was disappointed and I was hurt because I was falsely accused, and I could never convince my brother that I found the doll when I was looking for my petticoat. The lesson I learned from this incident was that it is wise to keep secrets and not to share them.
My mother could have rightly been called a domestic engineer. During the week she catalogued in her mind Saturday work assignments for me, Raymond, and Wilbur. A morning job for me was to wash the glass chimneys of the kerosene-burning lamps that lit the eight rooms of our house. "Your hands are small," I was told, "and the cleaning cloth will slide in and out of the chimney's ends with ease." So every Saturday morning I gathered the glass chimneys, which were dulled and blackened from usage, made warm sudsy water, and then washed them. Later, when the lamps were lit on Saturday night, the freshly cleaned chimneys glistened brightly . Seeing the lamps glisten was my reward for work well done.
In the afternoon it was my assignment to polish the family's "Sunday go to meeting" shoes. I would collect all the black leather shoes that were to be worn to church on Sunday, take them to the back porch, clean them, and then polish them. Again, to see a glossy shine on the shoes each of us wore, was my pay.
One childhood memory which stands out is my sister and I driving ten miles in a buggy for my piano lessons. At about this time two neighbors, both close friends, bought pianos for their daughters. One paid $300, one $400. Father paid $300 for ours. I believe also that my parents had earlier paid for piano lessons for my sister Amy.
Another memory is the time we saw a rather dilapidated carriage on the main road. This vehicle, which had a canvas top, looked worn with age and use, and carried both men and women. It was summer, as I recall, and the women's dresses were of some flimsy material with large flower designs all over. Although I had heard about such people, only once did I see this sight. The adults who were with me thought these people were Gypsies from Europe, who were said to travel up and down the main roads in hopes of kidnapping children. I really didn't understand this, as they seemed to have enough children of their own. In any event, our house was at least a quarter of a mile from any public road, so we felt relatively safe. Looking back, however, I remember that my parents never left my sister and I at home alone, without the protection of Father or an older brother.
When hay was put in a stack or in the loft of a barn, horse power, guided by a boy or a girl, was used. At about twelve I began to help with this activity, harvesting timothy hay, with red clover mixed in. Sometimes, when a snake fell out of a fork full of hay, we would call the dog, and he would quickly shake the snake into immobility. These were exciting moments.
At about fourteen I began helping with farm tasks, managing two very large draft horses hitched to a sweep rake. Also, on occasion, I would ride one of the two lead horses pulling the binder. This was all great fun as long as bumblebees were scarce. When a wheel disturbed a bumblebee nest, however, things got very interesting, until the men came running with their straw hats in their hands, and knocked the bees out of action.
One time, however, riding the horses pulling the binder was not so much fun, and I would like to tell you about that incident. As usual I was sitting side saddle on the inside lead horse of the five horse team pulling the binder. Nominally, all five horses were controlled by reins running from their bridles to the driver riding the binder, in this case my father. In practice, however, it was helpful to have someone riding one of the lead horses to help turn the team in the corners, and this is what I was doing. Everything was going well, when we made a stop at the corner of the field to rest the horses and to meet my brother Ernest, who was fetching a jug of cool water from a neighbor's well across the public road. The fencing along the road was osage hedge, and to facilitate getting to the neighbors a stile had been built over the hedge. (A stile is a kind of stairway going over a fence or hedge, which was used in place of a gate.) Ernest was wearing a straw hat with a very broad brim, and when he bounded up the stile on his way back to us, his flopping hat panicked the team. Rightly so, I might add, because for a moment all they could see was a yellowish circular flapping object coming out of nowhere. Anyway, the horse nearest the stile jumped sideways against the horse I was riding, causing me to fall against the other horse. This caused another fright, and both horses reared, causing me to fall to the ground between them. I was almost petrified with fear, laying there with horses hooves on all sides. I scrambled out quickly however, and no hooves touched me. It happened so fast that there was nothing my father could do to help. It gave us both the fright of our lives.
There was certainly no lack of work to be done on a farm. Weeds had to be pulled, and the osage hedge fences had to be trimmed more than once during the summer. Harvesting started in late July, and depending upon the crops, ran till early September.
In my community, boys began working in the fields in their low teens. By age fourteen to sixteen they were able to manage a two horse team hitched to farm machinery, if the horses were gentle. At fifteen or sixteen they graduated to more complicated machinery. Perhaps a three horse team hitched to a harrow. Over the age of sixteen they were expected to do all kinds of assignments, and they were considered men at twenty-one years of age. Girls were considered grown up at eighteen. Don't ask me why, but my parents led me to believe that girls developed more mature judgment earlier.
Farmers who were blessed with teen aged boys sometimes found themselves with a temporary surplus of man (boy) power. In such cases they often "loaned" their boys to work with other farmers who might be short handed. But this help was not free. The receiving farmer had to provide, in return, either an equivalent amount of labor, or other agreed compensation.
The womenfolk in some farm families also worked in the fields. Particularly at haying time, when they might drive a team hitched to a rake, or handle another such activity.
What did we do for fun? Lawrence and Ernest, the two oldest, enjoyed tying tin cans to cow's tails. The tin cans had small stones inside, which made a satisfying noise. The boys also raced the two horses which were bred for trotting, to see how fast they could run. Another sport was to climb to the very top of a maple tree and then drop earthward through the branches without grabbing any limbs, an activity that was really fun, but also quite dangerous.
My folks sometimes went visiting on Sundays, but I remember best the times when a neighbor would visit us. Amy's task was always to bake pies or cakes on the Saturday before such occasions. I still remember that the menfolk always wiped the dishes on such a Sunday, while the women stacked and put them away. Then in summertime we got out the croquet set and played croquet. When we tired of that it was anti-over. We also played a game which used a rubber ball fastened to a paddle with a long rubber string. One player would bat the ball and the other players were supposed to catch it. This was lots of fun. In the winter we would walk to the neighbors' houses to play table games, and perhaps have a taffy pull. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons Amy played the organ or piano and we all sang songs. After I was fourteen, I would play popular music on the piano while everyone sang. That was fun, too.
When young men reached the age of eighteen to twenty, their fathers provided them with a buggy and team. Finances permitting, the buggy was shiny black, and the horses a matched team. (That is, the colors and markings on both horses were the same.) Percherons were a popular breed, because they could also be used for general farm work. These were tall horses, fifteen to seventeen hands high. They weighed sixteen hundred to twenty one hundred pounds, and were very lively for their size. (The buggy and team were as important to a young man in those days as an automobile is today, and were treated as such.)
Thus equipped, the young man could now properly begin dating. Country girls, particularly in the age groups of my brothers, were scarce, so the boys first dated school acquaintances, with Raymond dating a girl his age from his school class. Then it was girls from their church, and as the boys' acquaintance grew broader and they met youth from adjoining districts or areas, the selection of girls to date grew accordingly.
Some people evidently never married. In the communities I knew, there always seemed to be at least one unmarried middle aged woman labeled an "old maid". Most of these people were living with and helping to care for an elderly relative.
Our family social life was mostly with members of either the Methodist Episcopal Church, The Methodist Episcopal Church South, or the Presbyterian Church. I remember that we had no close friends in Odd Fellows or the Modern Woodsmen fraternal orders, but did have friends in a Masonic group. Our family did not belong to these or any other lodges.
In the Presbyterian Church there were the Ward families: the Joseph Wards with six children, and the William Wards with two sons. Dandy Ward with two sons and a daughter, and finally Tiny, with one son and one daughter. Also in the Presbyterian Church were the Smiths; Bob, John, and Jim, each with a family. Bob was a comedian, always joking. One of John's daughters bore a baby out of wedlock. A teacher whom they kept as a roomer was the father. What a big deal the community made of this. When the child reached eighteen years of age she moved to Colorado and lived with an aunt. What trouble the neighboring citizens were reported to have made for this child. The child was much younger than I and lived in the eastern side of the neighborhood, so I usually only saw her sitting in church. Years later, however, we by chance rode a passenger train the ten miles between Chula and Chillicothe together. On this journey I tried to make it clear to her that, because we attended the same church, I was her friend.
Students who completed the eight grades in our rural school went to the county seat town of Chillicothe if they wished to continue their schooling. When I finished the eighth grade, however, my folks thought that I was too young to live away from home to attend high school in Chillicothe, which was ten miles away by horse and buggy, so they kept me in the rural school another year. This second year I studied real hard and really learned what was in the eighth grade. As a result I was top scholar in the county, winning a scholarship to high school for three years. Cash value $67.50. I was real proud.
Many of the students who came from these rural schools set a goal to complete the four year high school course in three years, and some did. This might have been the reason that my father said I could use the scholarship only if I promised to complete the four years in three, as the others had done. I said, "I'm willing to try." I started with the thought that the whole sixteen credits were going to be finished at the end of the third year, and they were. My favorite subjects were English and Mathematics. I enjoyed physical geography, but detested Latin. We had excellent teachers, and my parents always expected me to make As or Bs.
My brother Wilbur went to freshman class with me and we set up housekeeping together, but when spring came my father took him out of school to work in the fields. The second year I lived with an attorney's family and the third year with Hattie Hooker. We lived upstairs in a minister's house near the school, and did light housekeeping for board and room. Hattie went on to college in Fayette, Missouri, and eventually married my brother Raymond.
Automobiles began to be on the roads in some numbers about this time. Before, from about 1908, some city dwellers had used gasoline powered vehicles with solid rubber tires glued onto the metal rims. These were mainly professional people, and the cars were driven mostly on paved streets. Now the vehicles were considerably improved, and farmers cautiously began purchasing Fords, although some adventurous ones bought other makes. Physicians generally bought Buicks or Reos. Roads were gravel, and travelling speeds were twenty five to thirty miles per hour.
My brothers chose to be tillers of the soil, and accordingly had little schooling after common school, or through eighth grade. Ernest went a short time to a business college, and Wilbur went for two quarters to State Teachers College in Kirksville, Missouri,. Raymond attended the University of Missouri for two eight week courses in agriculture, and experimented with alfalfa plantings in about 1910. I don't recall Lawrence having had any higher schooling.
My brother Ernest had a serious gun accident which came about while herding sheep along a ravine. As he was standing watching turtle doves, the muzzle of his shotgun was pointing to the sky, and his hands were resting on the muzzle. We think he moved a foot, a loose patch on his pant leg caught the trigger, and the gun discharged. He lost all his right hand except the forefinger and thumb, and also lost the third finger of his left hand.
He was devastated by the appearance of his hands and by the fact that he himself was responsible for the accident. His personality changed dramatically and in 19l7 he committed suicide, a terrible blow to our parents.
A few years earlier Lawrence, who had pursued farming, passed away with diabetes. He left a daughter, Jenni Lorene, three years old. She grew up, became a teacher, and then married. For several years she worked in politics and enjoyed it very much. She and her husband, Winston Flentje, who was a skilled farmer, lived on a farm near Trenton, Missouri. There they raised two boys; Lawrence Franklin, and William Winston.
Amy went to State Teachers College in Kirksville, Missouri, for teacher education, the same college where my mother had earned a life certificate. After receiving her certificate from Kirksville, Amy became a career teacher, alternately teaching elementary school and attending college, until finally receiving her baccalaureate degree in education, at Kirksville in 1929. She then specialized in elementary school teaching, and taught for many years in Kansas City, Kansas. Amy never married, waiting in vain for her "Prince Charming" to show up and sweep her off her feet.
As mentioned previously, Raymond married Hattie, his childhood sweetheart. For a few years he farmed a place which she had inherited , and was picked as a Master Farmer by the Missouri Ruralist, and the University of Missouri Extension Service, in 1929. They had seven children; David, Lawrence, Oran Taylor, John Stanton, Mary Ruth, Margaret, and Charles, Raymond later became an orchardist in Howard and Lafayette Counties, returning to Livingston County in 1949.
Wilbur was living with a sister-in-law who had lost her husband, and he was farming her land. One day, while working in the fields, he met a girl who was carrying a cold drink to her father, who was farming an adjacent field. Wilbur eventually married the girl and she inherited part of the farm. They had five children. Donald, Woodson, Naomi, Anabelle, and Dwight. Wilbur later lost a hand in a popcorn sheller, and at the beginning of the Second World War, he went to Portland, Oregon to work in a shipyard. It is amazing how many operations he was able to handle with his articulated hook.
After the war, it being difficult to farm with only one hand, he found employment on golf courses. His wife found work as a masseuse, a trade which she learned on the job.
In choosing my vocation, I thought that if Mother could teach, why couldn't I? Also, I liked to see the sparkle in children's eyes when they explored new ideas. However, after I graduated from high school my mother wasn't very well, so she wanted me to stay home and help her. I did so until January, and then I took a test to see if I had the knowledge to teach. I wrote that examination well and received a second-grade certificate of which I was very proud.
Anyway, I was now nineteen and one half years old, and had my certification, but needed employment. I also had friends four miles away who needed a teacher, so they made me a proposition: If you will underbid the other applicants, by saying that you will teach three months for one hundred dollars, we will push your application. So that is what I did, and that is what they did, and I taught three months of school there, the year after I graduated from high school.
During this time, I boarded with a Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Baker. He had attended the State University at Columbia, and when he finished the four years, he got married and returned to his father's farm, the place where he had been born. I lived with them Mondays through Fridays, paying three dollars per week board. We talked about everything, no subjects were taboo. After this I knew that I must get off the farm and get exposed to knowledge.
Perhaps at this point, we should digress for a moment to explain a little about the rural schools of the period, and what was involved in teaching in this environment.
These were ungraded one room neighborhood schools, usually with twenty to thirty students, ages six to sixteen. The teacher taught whatever grades were called for, although the curriculum did not go past the eighth grade. There usually were no library books, so all reading was from "readers". These were graded reading books, and many times the teacher would place each student (in a grade) based upon what reader he was told the student had been using the previous term. Arithmetic was taught in the same manner, with the teaching level being based upon the pupil's perceived previous performance.
By about 1907, this system had became so chaotic that the State prescribed a specific curriculum for each grade, and the County Superintendent of Schools directed that each student be tested for knowledge of their particular grade's curriculum before school was out for the summer. Grades were then assigned the next fall based upon the results of these tests.
In these schools, the school year consisted of two terms. The first, or fall term, started the first week of September and ran twenty one weeks, with a week off for Christmas. This gave a total of one hundred days. Then there was a pause until spring term, which started on April first and ran for sixty days, till late June. The reason for the mid winter vacation was the weather. Even though Missouri is in the "South", the weather can get cold and nasty, with temperatures to thirty below (Fahrenheit). The children lived up to two miles distant, which was too far to walk in inclement weather. If the weather turned bad during the fall term, the older children were driven to school, and the younger ones stayed home. If the weather became too severe, the school closed and the lost days were made up at the end of the term. (State law required one hundred sixty days of instruction.) Sometimes the same teacher taught both terms. A more usual arrangement was to hire a man teacher for the fall term and a woman for spring term. The teacher often boarded with a local family willing to provide that service.
I knew, after this first teaching experience, that I wanted to go to college and get more doors opened, so I taught in another nearby school for a year, saving enough money to go to a girls boarding school in Fayette, Missouri. This school was two miles southwest of our place, and I was paid forty dollars per month to teach forty students. I particularly remember two ambitious girls about sixteen years old who were in the seventh or eighth grade. The school district was composed mostly of flood plain. Water covered it once or twice a year and it was difficult to produce crops. As a result the school district had little tax money and had not held a full year of school for several years.
Before I went to college at Fayette, I had plans to work in the dining room and earn a lot of the tuition fees thereby, and that is exactly what I did. There also was a high school associated with that college, and my second year I taught English to fourth-year high school students there. Following that I taught in another country school in Linn County, Missouri, for nine months at $80 per month, and then, in 1917, entered the University of Missouri at Columbia. As I had friends in that city, I saved on expenses by living with them. I entered in June and attended all that school year and through the next summer session. I still lacked five hours, however, which I completed by correspondence. I then found a teaching position in Brookfield, Missouri, twenty five miles east of Chillicothe, where I was paid eighty dollars a month. I stayed there for ten months, then moved to Boone County, Missouri for seven months. At about that time I heard that Iowa paid their teachers a better salary. I checked into that, and found it to be true, so in 1919 I obtained a position in Clements Grove, Iowa. This job paid $130 per month, for teaching six months, which was considerably better, I thought. I then moved to Des Moines, Iowa and taught home economics for two years, from 1920 to 1922, for a salary of $140 per month.
I tired of teaching home economics because we had a supervisor who wanted to make all the detail plans every day, as a stepping stone to success. Since she was the boss, it was her privilege. She had been divorced and that was a sad situation, as she was from a prominent family, so she had to succeed in teaching school. She thought that making all the decisions would assure her success, but the teachers who were under her (there were about ten of us) didn't feel that way about it at all, so most of us left.
In 1922 I received a work scholarship for the Teacher's College of Columbia University in New York City. The studies were social-religious work, and I entered the University in September of that year. The terms of the scholarship were half time field work, and for this I was assigned to Judson Neighborhood House on Sullivan Street in New York City. This was a settlement house that ministered to Italians who had come from Italy in the 1910 to 1920 time period. Most of the parents didn't speak English, but the children were learning it in the public schools. What we tried to do there, was to teach children the principles that we stand for in America. A good deal of the time what we were teaching did not mesh with the old Italian beliefs of the parents, and those of us who did not speak Italian were not of much help in that situation. We did, however, meet some lovely children.
The two years at Columbia were under the auspices of the New York City Baptist Missionary Association, and when I graduated they asked me to go to Central America. By this time, however, my parents were along in years, and they didn't want me to go so far from home. I finally settled for a position as director of youth work for a large Baptist church in Kansas City, Missouri. The minister had never worked with another staff member, and had no idea about to how to use a helper. He also did not really believe that anyone but an ordained minister could make a significant contribution to the work which needed to be done at the church. Anyway, I made some fine friends, and after about a year, I left.
I then, in 1925, moved to First Christian Church, also in Kansas City, as director of youth activities. This job, I believe, was possibly the outstanding achievement of my life. We were in a downtown low-rent area, just a block or so off the main drag, near a large public school. Our neighborhood had more than its share of single or irresponsible parents, and many of the children were not well looked after. We attempted to attend to these young people's with an aggressive seven day a week program which we had going for all ages. I was responsible for six-through fifteen-year olds, while others handled preschoolers, high school students, and college-age people. While I was there we worked day and night, you might say, and had a lot of excellent activities going on for the children. We had all sorts of arts and crafts, and field trips to a large park, where we played games and went boating in a circular lagoon, although I was not a swimmer. I also had a ukulele group that played over a city radio station, they were that good. (Editor's Note: The old ukulele is hanging on the wall over the computer as this is being typed.) The youth I worked with were well disciplined and there were no problems of control. The man who was responsible for combating delinquency in the public schools, in fact, came around and told us that since our program had been in effect, there was a perceptible decrease in delinquency in that area. That really made us happy.
One of the volunteer youth counselors had been a Rhodes scholar, studying overseas, in England, as I remember. Long hours of study, and an inferior diet had caused him to lose his health, and he was picking up some courses in a junior college across the street from our church while he was recuperating. He was in his late twenties, clean cut, intelligent, and had a desire to be useful. He was extremely helpful, and sometimes went with us when I took small groups on outings. His companionship to me was like a brother.
In 1928, our minister left for a new parish in Little Rock, Arkansas. He asked me to go with him but I declined, as Little Rock didn't hold any interest for me. I then started working at an employment office, and that is a whole story in itself. I wasn't too sharp, and didn't make them a lot of money, but they didn't throw me out. It was a good way to learn how the other half lives, and I was there until late in 1930.
During this time I was rooming with my sister Amy and another young woman who had a beautiful Persian cat. Eventually the young woman left and I inherited the cat. I named her Kitty Kat, and she was my companion for many years.
During my teaching career I had observed a lot of legal unions, and had felt that it was not the life for me. Circumstances change, however, and single life, even with Kitty Kat, was getting pretty lonesome. I finally decided in about 1926 or 1927 that if I wished to have a long time companion, marriage was probably the only answer. Of course marriage is a gamble, but I thought I would be willing to take the risk.
My problem was that most of the gentlemen of my age and acquaintance were only interested in a woman as a toy or playmate, a situation which had little appeal for me. I had two brothers whom I considered role models, but could I find any gentleman, anywhere, who would have these same desirable traits?
About that time, which was 1927 or 1928, there was an article in a national magazine that described the unmarried single man or woman's plight. The author was creating an agency to help people who thought marriage for keeps might be an answer, an agency to help single adults get together. This person was somewhere in the eastern part of the United States, and for a small sum she would enroll men and women, sending gentlemen's names to ladies, and ladies' names to gentlemen.
There were forms involved, with blanks to be filled in, describing height, weight, complexion, personal interests, education, and so forth.
I filled out the forms, sent them in, and with some trepidation, sat down to see what would happen. I didn't have long to wait. In the course of a year I heard from a mortician, an accountant and a minister. Living with a mortician didn't turn me on. Living with a five-foot-tall accountant didn't either. The minister, whose name was John, however, seemed to fit the situation perfectly. He had felt that he wanted to help people understand what the Bible taught and how to live by those teachings. He chose to do this by becoming a minister in the Methodist Church, and I felt that he was the kind of person with whom I wanted to share my life. Also, he had chosen to teach religious concepts from the Bible, and it seemed that my vocation of teaching in public schools would complement this.
John was born in Lake City Iowa, the son of John Walter and Maria Catherine. His mother was living there with his four sisters and two brothers near his aunt, Alice Cretzlar, while his father, who was a shoe and harness maker, was working in Leadville, Colorado during the Colorado gold rush. Several moves later a fifth sister was born in Ivanpah, Kansas. Finally the family moved to Hamilton, Kansas, where John's father set up a harness shop in the back of a hardware store, and built a home north of town. His family eventually had eight children. There were five girls; Clara, Emma, Elva, Florence, and Avis. And also three boys; William, Floyd, and John.
John went to school in Hamilton, where one of his grade-school teachers was a woman named Beulah, who later became a Deaconess in the Methodist Church. From what he told me, she had a tremendous influence on his life.
When John was twelve, his father died of lockjaw, leaving his mother with three boys and a daughter, the four oldest girls having been married by this time. Will, the oldest boy, dropped out of school to help his mother, and ultimately became an engineer on the Santa Fe. John's other brother, Floyd, became a clerk for Railway Express, while Avis, the baby of the family, continued to live with her mother. Others in John's extended family worked in the oil extraction, refining or distribution business.
After John's father died, his mother and family moved to Emporia, Kansas, which had a very good high school and was the home of Emporia College. The famous William Allen White and his Emporia Gazette also called that town home. John had completed grade school in Hamilton and went on to high school in Emporia . He was older than some of the other students and I believe that he graduated in three years.
During this period, he said that he joined a group of other young men, went off into the country with a minister, and did what they called "deposition". They would tell of their Christian experience, and hopefully their audience would find this inspiring and want to have a similar Christian experience themselves.
I think that originally my husband's family had been Disciples of Christ, or the Reformed Church, but for some reason his mother and father became Methodist, and John also became a member at about the age of twelve.
He was fortunate that during his teen years, his Methodist church in Emporia had very dedicated pastors. In addition to the influence of his previously mentioned grade-school teacher, he had the guidance of these Methodist pastors. John often spoke of his mother as being very devout, and having had a great Christian experience. She had not gone to public school further than the third or fourth grade, but she improved her reading skills by reading the Bible and newspapers. He was very proud of her and often mentioned her in his sermons, as someone who had been a great influence in his life. John's mother was always a regular attendant at the church services, and also sat in the Sunday school classes. I believe that the other children in his family attended as well.
When John finished high school in 1913, he worked for a while as a night clerk at the local Fred Harvey Hotel. (The Fred Harvey chain was then a subsidiary of the Santa Fe Railroad.) John said later that if he could have raised the money for a team of horses at that time, he would have taken up farming. Instead, he entered Emporia College, which was a Presbyterian school. In 1916 his mother died, and John and his youngest sister Avis made a home together. Also in 1916, the First World War came along, and in order to have some choice of what he might do while serving his country, he enlisted in the army, in December. He was sent to the East Coast where he trained for various things, and ended up as the traffic manager in a government gas mask factory, where he ultimately attained the rank of Sergeant First Class. Promotion to a commissioned officer, however, eluded him, as his commission to Second Lieutenant was submitted on November 6, 1918, too late to process before the war was over.
After leaving the army, John returned to Emporia, completed college, then enrolled in Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, New Jersey, about 1922. After graduating from Drew, John became an ordained Methodist minister and took up residence in Montana, where he migrated from one small town to another. (See Appendix 1 for more information on John's Montana ministry.)
But back to the story of our courtship. Our correspondence seemed to show that we had many shared interests and were both ready to pick our life partner, and after about a year he got up enough courage to visit me in Chula, Missouri. He stayed about three days, as I remember, and then went back to his parish in the town of St. Ignatius, in the Flathead Valley in Montana. We continued to correspond, and after John's second visit to Missouri, we decided to get married. It seemed silly for him to leave his parish for a third time to visit me, not to mention the expense, so we planned that I should go to Billings, Montana to the home of a minister I had known, a Rev. Henry Best. I met John there and Rev. Best performed the wedding ceremony for us. We were married on the rim rock of the Yellowstone River outside of Billings. The date was October 1930, and we were both 37 years old.
Rev. and Mrs. Best, my husband's superintendent, and two friends, were the members of the small wedding party. Rev. Best could prepare steak over a fire in a very fine way, so for our wedding dinner we had steak and all the things that go with it.
After our marriage we set up housekeeping at John's parish in Drummond, Montana. (John had been transferred to Drummond from St. Ignatius the previous June.) Drummond is in the valley of the Clark Fork River. It is quite a wide valley, with the river running through it westerly toward Missoula. The area had been settled as early as 1865, and had a fine class of people, who were very easy to serve. They had all the quality of character which one might expect to find in a fine church group. I, having been trained in the teaching of youth, worked with the young people, while John did the preaching and the calling. Even though we were away from relatives and old friends, our time there was a very happy experience, marred only by the death of my father in 1931.
I did find that one of my childhood acquaintances, Ozilla, had settled, with her husband Harry, in Missoula, about fifty miles to the west. Ozilla was about five years older than I, but we had both attended Ward Church while I was growing up. Her old boy friend and now husband, Harry, had lived across the Grundy county line, about three miles from her house. Harry had subsequently moved to Missoula, and found work as a street car conductor, He eventually went back to Missouri, married Ozilla, and they both returned to Missoula, where she worked in the drapery section of a department store. She had the soul of an artist. She turned out beautiful work, and their home was always tastefully decorated. We became fast friends with them and visited each other at least once a quarter. They never had children but showered affection on their many nieces and nephews in Missouri. Harry ultimately found a job in the financial world, helping people manage their money. They were faithful members of a large Presbyterian church, where he was elected deacon, and served well.
Also during this time, in 1932, John Junior was born, weighing in at seven pounds. Our doctor was in Butte, about eighty miles away over gravel roads, and that is where we had made plans to have the baby. However, on June 19th, about three weeks before the scheduled date, the baby showed definite signs of coming, so we headed for Butte. We got as far as Deer Lodge, about thirty five miles away, where there was a small but efficient hospital, and decided to stop there instead. Better to be safe than sorry. Anyway, John came the next day, June 20th, and I was kept in the hospital for a week. The day the baby was seven days old, twenty visitors from Drummond came to see him. I was almost done in from that much company.
John had wanted a son, and I had equipped myself to be a career person. Being a mother and a social worker at the same time, even though it was an unpaid ministers wife type of job, was something I had a little difficulty getting used to. For example, I remember the Sunday evening I was drafted to play the piano at church services. John Jr. was sixteen months old and there was no one available to care for him. The dilemma was, should I take him with me or leave him alone at home sleeping. I decided to leave him alone, and that turned out to have been the wrong decision. When I arrived back home, John was definitely not asleep. In fact, he was standing against the outside door sobbing. I learned a lesson then and there. Never leave a small child at home alone.
In June of 1934, we moved to Forsyth, Montana, and at about this time I became pregnant again. I got my medical care during pregnancy in Billings, Montana, because we had made a contact there. (There was no medical insurance in those days so one had to rely on a doctor who could be talked into a "ministerial discount", which meant free services.)
On April 20, 1935, when it seemed that the baby was going to make an appearance two months early, John drove me the 110 miles to Billings from Forsyth. When we got there they asked "Has the baby arrived yet?", but it was another couple of hours before that happened. The surprise was that there were two babies instead of one. One was only two pounds five ounces, and she did not survive. The other, Kathy, at two pounds ten ounces, was too frail for normal surroundings, but was able to manage life by living in a respirator for her first five weeks, and an incubator for an additional week.
What a picnic it was to go through that preemie situation! Kathy was not allowed to leave the hospital for three months, and I was required to stay in the city where the hospital was, so I could go to the hospital four times a day to feed her. During her time in the hospital, the nurse used to call me at midnight and tell me my baby was blue. I would ask if she would live, and she would say, "Well, I don't know." I told her I would pray, as that was all that any of us could do. That happened a good many times during the first three months.
In the meantime John (Jr.) was with his father part of the time, and then he caught chicken pox and had to stay with a friend. When he got well he came to stay with me, and I took him along to the hospital on my daily trips.
The people at the hospital were very understanding, except that the woman who was the acting superintendent was not too nice. Anyway, the district superintendent of the Methodist Church saw to it that she was transferred to Alaska, so things moved along more comfortably after that. Maybe her transfer was a coincidence, I don't know.
I took Kathy home when she was just three days under three months old, about the Fourth of July in 1935. It was very hard for her to adjust from hospital care to home care. Then we decided on a trip to the mountains, and took her back to the hospital for the three days we were to be on the trip. They said that it was hard for her to adjust back to the hospital, and then, of course, she had to adjust back to home care after the three days.
During the years of 1929 to 1940 the country was deep in the Depression, with Forsyth (and our family) seeming to be particularly hard hit. I've never seen people with as little money as in that town. .
Nine hundred dollars in salary was all that we had coming in during some of those years. Fortunately, John and I were both experienced gardeners. I was also a seamstress, and had taught cooking and sewing. With these skills we somehow got by.
John raised rabbits (to eat, not for pets), and we sometimes swapped a rabbit with a neighbor for one of their chickens. This relieved the monotony which comes if either rabbits or chickens are the sole meat supply. We also made all of our own bread, everything from scratch.
John had a marvelous garden in Forsyth, near the Yellowstone River. This fortuitous combination of rich ground and John's gardening skills assured that we had plenty to eat. He and a friend also bought a number of surplus sheep from the Government for one dollar a head. We stored the meat in a freezer till we could make use of it.
During this period I made all of the children's clothes, and continued doing so until John (Jr.) was about eight years old. Also in this time, my husband bought a china closet for ten dollars. It has been the envy of my friends for years, and is now probably worth one hundred dollars or more.
Times in Forsyth were so bad that the Presbyterian preacher became financially overextended and had to send his wife and two small boys back home to her folks near Browning. They stayed there for two months while he lived and ate with another family, saving enough money so she and the boys could come home. His church building was somewhat of a white elephant. It had stained glass windows and was very large for that size town. They couldn't afford to have the stained glass windows fixed when they would have some breakage, so they would just stuff in rags. It was really sad to go by that fine church and see rags stuffed in the beautiful windows, but that was an aspect of the Depression.
Out-of-work men, including a good many college graduates, were riding the freight trains all the time, and many of them seemed to stop at Forsyth. We had a woodpile, so when the men (they were called hobos or 'bos) came looking for a handout, John would say, "Would you like to cut some wood?" They of course would say "yes", but when the next freight train whistle sounded, they would come to the door and say "I gotta go." I would then give them a sandwich, and they would be on their way. This was an everyday occurrence in that town, at that time.
There were unsubstantiated stories that these hobos would put an inconspicuous mark somewhere near the front of a house whose occupants would give them food. I believe our house must have had such a mark.
In September of 1935 we moved to Townsend, Montana. This hamlet was on the Missouri River about thirty miles north of the town of Three Forks, where three small rivers converged to create the Missouri River, and thirty five miles southeast of Helena, the capital of Montana.
We arrived just in time to experience the great Helena earthquake of 1935. Let me tell you about it. It was about eight forty PM by the clock. John had just washed John (Jr)'s face and hands prior to putting him to bed, and I was sitting near an outside door writing letters. First a low far away rumble sounded, then closer and closer. Then the shaking started, nails in the old house screeched louder and louder, and one felt like a pigmy in a box with a giant shaking it, jiggling it from corner to corner. John held John (Jr)'s hand in one of his, and together we clung to a door jamb. It was scary. Frightened and not knowing what to do, I wanted to run outside, but John insisted that we stay where we were. He just stood there like the rock of Gibralter, and later we learned that this was exactly the right thing to do.
Since we were about seventy miles from the quake's epicenter we were not as hard hit as Helena. The part of that city which had been built on dirt fill resembled a war zone, while the part built on solid rock fared somewhat better. There was, however, hardly a single chimney left standing on any house in town. The Catholic church, which was built on a hill of solid rock suffered almost no damage, while the Methodist church nearby suffered extensive damage and eventually had to be torn down. Many public buildings were severely damaged and private residences suffered collapsed walls. Two large new school buildings were damaged so badly they had to be destroyed. The aftershocks continued for three days, and then three weeks later there was another smaller quake which caused more damage. After one had lived through the big one, however, and heard of the experiences of others, the subsequent shocks caused little fear.
Anyway we made it through the quakes, and the next spring we found a fertile spot and put in a garden, which did very well. So well, in fact, that the high school agriculture teacher there, who happened to be a friend, told us that he had told his students, "I thought that a certain plant could not be grown here in this valley because the climate and conditions are not right. Then I visited Reverend Kuller's garden, and there I saw it growing in lush beauty."
On the other hand, this fertile valley also harbored some virulent germs that produced a deadly poison. These germs lurked in unexpected places: in irrigation ditch water, on the walls of the high school gymnasium, and in farm yards, for example. Before the medics realized that the germs were doing their deadly work, a high school student and a female physician had succumbed to their virulent poison. The lady doctor had injured herself while putting her instruments away after minor surgery, and died from the resultant infection. The school superintendent, who lived two doors from us, scraped some of the skin off a forearm against the gymnasium wall, and subsequently had to use hot packs soaked in a saturate solution of Epsom salts for a week, to get control of the infection. It would almost be cured but would then pop up again in the night.
Times were still hard. Farmers who could not sell livestock or crops at a profit certainly could not pay the minister money they did not have, but they could and did give him beef, pork or chickens, all of which were welcome. (But to this day, John Jr. cannot stand the sight of chicken). One parishioner even loaned us a cow, so we had plenty of milk. John also supplemented our food supply by fishing through the ice on the Missouri river for whitefish in winter, and flyfishing the many streams for trout in the summer. A retired parishioner, a wallpaper hanger by trade, used to accompany John on his winter fishing expeditions. When the ice was at least ten inches thick they would venture out onto it, build a fire, then chop a hole and put down their lines. Then they would sit on folding stools enjoying the mountain air, the scenery, and later the fish which they brought up through the opening. White fish made wonderful chowder. Fishing in the streams in summer was also usually done in pairs, it was safer that way. One could easily slip on a rock and fall into the current.
We developed some lifelong friends in Townsend, among them being Rose Sanz, a Basque sheepherder's daughter who lived with us while attending high school, and Morton and Livena Sperry
In 1938 we moved from Townsend to Chester, Montana, which was a town of about four hundred people. It was located on U. S. Highway 2, and on the Great Northern Railroad. It was very flat country, with some hills north of the highway as you came down from Canada. They were called the Sweet Grass Hills and covered an area about thirty miles east and west, and fifteen miles north and south. They were not much in altitude, sort of pimples on the countryside.
John (Jr.) started school in Chester, with a teacher who was from Great Falls. She was one of the most charming and ambitious teachers a child could ever have, and he had two grades with her. Then he had a teacher from South Dakota the next year. They weren't able to pay the teachers in South Dakota at that time, so many of the teachers left Dakota, and some of them came west to Montana.
The organization of the Methodist Church includes district superintendents, who directly supervise the local churches, and who report to a bishop. The bishop is elected by all the ministers in the conference, and he appoints the district superintendents. The district superintendents in Montana in the nineteen thirties generally didn't seem to be fountains of wisdom, but one of the best was a minister I had met when I was going to college in Fayette, Missouri. It was a pleasure to be acquainted with him again, along with his charming wife, who had been a teacher at Intermountain College in Billings. As for bishops, elevating a minister to that exalted level did not automatically give him possession of all the required strengths and abilities. One bishop, for example, displayed an exceedingly quick temper, while another was too tolerant of ministers who made hasty and sometimes unwise decisions. On the other hand one of the bishops was extremely skillful at melding widely divergent views into a consensus, and Bishop Titus Lowe preached impressive sermons, painting word pictures that one could remember for years. Bishop Lowe also had an excellent memory. Fifteen years after my difficulty having my first child, he met me at a church function, and inquired about my health.
By 1941, when John (Jr.) was ready for the fourth grade, John had been in Montana nineteen years and I had been there eleven years. We thought it time for a change, and after much consideration, we decided to take a sabbatical year, moving to St. Helens, Oregon. This town was about thirty miles downstream on the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon, where my brother Wilbur was living, so we were not totally alone.
We had an interesting time in that year, with John trying different vocations. Then the war broke out and pay began to rise for manual labor. As a consequence John found that he could go to work in a factory for a good deal more money than he could get for other work, so he went to work in the local Fir-Tex factory. His job was applying glue to plywood, and he said that the first night he worked there he thought he would go crazy just pushing a brush back and forth with nothing else to do, but finally he learned from the other men that you just have to find something else to think about while pushing the brush through the glue. A minister doing that type of work was quite a novelty. The other men called him "Deacon", and treated him with some respect.
Meanwhile, I looked after son John and daughter Kathy, by then a first grader. We also found a Methodist church and set about to make friends. That's never been hard, but it does take time. John was a member of the Masons, having joined in Montana, and this helped.
Strawberries ripened in June or early July. I padded the knees of a pair of denim slacks with cotton batting and became a berry picker, moving along on my knees. I did not move fast enough, or put in enough hours, to earn more than three dollars a day. Pickers who had their own transportation and who worked from seven AM through four PM, or later, could earn ten dollars a day. We, however, relied on a truck which picked up women and children at about eight AM, drove us four or six miles down the Columbia River valley to the fields, then took us home between three and four PM. During the day, we took an hour off for lunch. I will never forget some children pickers from a Baptist minister's home. They had been indoctrinated to believe that cities had many very sinful and dangerous people in them, and that country people were much safer to be with.
In September our children enrolled in a rural school about a mile from our home. John (Jr.) in third grade, and Kathy, who was six years old, in first. They went together in the morning for a nine o'clock opening. Kathy was the only first grader. The teacher held her on her lap while she taught her the elements of reading, writing and arithmetic.
John's work was shift work, changing every two weeks. Some days he drove, other days he caught a ride. On days when he took the car, I would walk to the school house, then accompany Kathy home, as her school day ended at two PM, which was one hour and a half before John's ended at three-thirty. One day I miscalculated the time and met Kathy half way home. A black cloud had come in behind her from the northwest and big drops of rain were falling. Her raincoat was open and she was sobbing. What a horrible experience for both of us.
At the beginning of our second year in Oregon, John joined the Pacific Northwest Conference of the Methodist Church, and in September of 1942 was offered a church at Prosser, Washington. The children entered school there, and again they had excellent schools and teachers. Prosser is in the Yakima Valley and was settled about 1890. Those old timers were a marvelous class of people, and many of them were still there in 1942. They were well along in years by then, but they were marvelous neighbors and very interesting to be with. We stayed in Prosser for five years, and became good friends with an elementary teacher and the high school principal.
John (Jr.) was ready for his sophomore year, and Kathy was in seventh grade when we moved west of the Cascade Mountains to the community of Allen, in Washington state near Burlington, to the north of Seattle. Burlington had just had a union of two school districts, Burlington and Edison, and there had been a great deal of rivalry and some ill will between the patrons and students of the two schools. This situation still hadn't subsided by the time we moved there, so the school situation was not as comfortable for parents as we would have liked. While there, however, we made good friends with the Clarence E, and Mrs. E's sister.
Allen is in the Skagit Valley, one of the richest, most fertile valleys in the United States. The Skagit River is not long, but so much sedimentary material had come down that the soil was very deep, and grew excellent crops. There were many fertile pastures, and a great many seeds were grown there as well. Cabbage seeds were grown, as were many kinds of vegetable and flower seed. The farmers had contracts with seed companies, and did very well. There were also many dairy cattle, making for considerable production of milk and cream. Some of the breeding bulls which the farmers bought cost $15,000 per head, and this was in 1947. That seemed like a lot of money for one animal. They weren't practicing artificial insemination so much at that time, but it soon took over and it wasn't necessary to own so many of those high priced bulls.
Flower bulbs were also another big cash crop. People from Holland shipped over bulbs which were planted in the Skagit Valley fields. Then the crop was harvested and the new bulbs shipped back to Holland. It seems that bulbs one might buy in Holland came there by a long route. High school students were hired to dig the bulbs, and how they hated it. Potatoes were also grown in that valley, in mile long fields.
This was a very interesting community, in that it had been settled by many different nationalities. Scandinavians were predominant, however, and they were a clannish lot. They stuck together socially, and others who were not Scandinavian weren't always welcome. Usually, if there was part time work to be had they made sure that a Scandinavian boy got the job, making it difficult for someone who was not Scandinavian to get work. Despite this, our son John (Jr.) finally found work in a newspaper office after school hours.
Kathy spent her seventh, eighth, and ninth grades in the Burlington schools, and John (Jr.) found that because of different scholastic requirements in Prosser and Burlington, he could finish high school in three years if he took some correspondence work.
He decided to do this, taking courses in automobile engine theory to get his required number of credits. He graduated from high school in 1949 and in the fall of that year he enrolled in the University of Puget Sound. He spent a year there, but at the beginning of his second year financial and other pressures forced him out and into the work force, where he found employment as an experimental aircraft mechanic at the Boeing Company. Later he was with the U. S. Air Force in Europe as an intelligence agent, then returned to the Boeing Company, where he ultimately became a senior manager in their Commercial Airplane Group. He married Patricia and had four wonderful children, LaRene, Michelle, Mark, and Whalen, and at the time of this writing, three grandchildren (of Mark's family), Erika, Ryan, and Kaitlin.
From the Skagit valley we moved to Fall City, Washington, which was at the confluence of the Snoqualmie and Raging rivers. The Raging River certainly did rage when there was a heavy rain storm, and there were also floods aplenty on the Snoqualmie River. Fall City was a bedroom community for Seattle, and many people seemed to come home only to sleep. There were many people in this valley who had been residents for many years, but many more had left than had stayed.
Finding people who wanted to work and help with things around a church was difficult. One young man, whose grandmother had taught him to play the organ, became our organist, and he did a beautiful job. He and his grandmother came in every morning before school, and she listened while he practiced. I don't know why they didn't freeze in that church that wasn't heated. There was another organist also, but she only played part of the time.
Kathy rode a bus to her classes in Snoqualmie High School, and at the end of her junior year we moved to Bellingham, Washington. Bellingham had a delightful high school with exceptionally well trained and gracious teachers. There Kathy had a math teacher and a social studies teacher who were just out of this world. In Bellingham also, she really had her first social life. People in Fall City generally had been there quite a while, had only their own set of people whom they associated with, and would not let a new person break in. But Bellingham had groups that were open, and ready to accept newcomers. Kathy had a very happy senior year in high school there.
She went on to attend the University of Puget Sound, graduated, moved to California, and married Roy. She had two children, Chrystal and Frank. Later, after Roy's death, she married Lewis.
From Bellingham we moved to the town of Satsop, near Gray's Harbor in the state of Washington, and while there I taught high school, in nearby Elma, from 1956 to 1958. We then retired to a house in the country ten miles south of Everett, Washington, where we spent many happy years.















































NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Written by John (Jr.), as told by Jenne in 1990, 1991, and 1992.

Incorporating a writing by Gerry K. Ghormley, as told by Jenne in 1982, and excerpts from a Jenne letter to her granddaughters, 1991.

Reminiscences of Sylvia are as told to Amy in 1948, and recorded in the book "Gifford, Mitchell Family Records", published by Amy and Harriet in 1959. Early information on the family is from the same source.

Further information on the family was obtained from the book "Descendents of John ", published by Hattie and Margaret in 1975.

Some historical facts, early information on the family, some photographs, and other miscellaneous data, were obtained from old newspaper clippings, and John’s (Jr.) family papers.

Some information about the town of Farmersville is from the book "History of Caldwell and Livingston Counties" published in 1886 by St.Louis National Historical Company.

Descriptions of life in Missouri in 1903 are in part from the book "American Caeser", Written by William Manchester in 1978.

Some biographical information on John’s family was by Walt and Gerry, who also provided some photographs.

Special thanks to Margaret, who provided much of the information on the family, including O.L's letters. She also furnished many of the documents and maps, and most of the photographs reproduced herein, researched many dates and places, and reviewed the manuscript for historical accuracy.

Proofreading, and assistance on the Grant genealogy, by Laurie Capek, was of great help.

Many thanks to Ren Phillips for his help in editing and proofreading.

Technical assistance with computing, proofreading, layout, and art work, by Whalen is gratefully acknowledged.

It should be noted that the computer on which this manuscript was composed has a bad habit of deliberately mispelling words which have been properly typed. Also, it sometimes, even after correction, changes spelling back to the original incorrect version. Accordingly, any misspelings are the fault of the computer, not the writer, editors, or proofreaders.









APPENDIX 1
EULOGY for Rev. JOHN

John was born in Lake City, Iowa on January ll, 1894, and grew up in the towns of Hamilton and Emporia, in the Flint Hills of Kansas. While his father crafted custom shoes and harness in his small shop, John roamed the hills and streams, gaining an appreciation of the great outdoors and an understanding of the working man's life, which never left him.
John once mentioned that if in his teens he could have raised two hundred dollars he would have bought a team and gone to farming, but when that didn't work out he decided to get an education. Some of us think that the world is a little better place today because of that decision.
After graduation from Emporia High School he enlisted in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of Sergeant First Class. At war's end he finished work for a B.A. at the College of Emporia and having decided upon his life's work, completed his education at Drew Theological Seminary.
Intrigued with tales of the wild west spun by Reverend Charlie Cole, John hit the trail for Montana and in 1923 he accepted an appointment with the Montana Conference in the north east part of that state. If he was looking for adventure and a chance to serve he wasn't disappointed. A series of back woods parishes served by automobile in summer, a team and sleigh in winter, and a horse in spring and fall. kept him busy for the next seven years. During this time his activities came to the attention of that great missionary, the Reverend Doctor Ezra Cox. Dr. Cox visited his parish, and later felt moved to eulogize John's work as a latter day circuit rider.
In 1930 John married Jenne (outdoors incidentally) and they were soon blessed with two children, John and Kathryn. A series of parishes in the depression years tested his will and faith, but he stuck by his calling and his Montana friends. Among Montana parishes he served in those years were Drummond-Hall, Forsyth, Townsend, and Chester.
In 1942 he transferred to the Pacific Northwest Conference where he served a series of small town parishes during the war years and until his retirement seventeen years later. Among parishes he served were Prosser, Allen, Eureka-North Bellingham, and Satsop.
John was the country preacher personified, equally at home behind the pulpit, chatting with the boys down at the store, or helping a parishioner get in the hay. He was extremely effective in setting a weak struggling church on its feet, He understood the average man and could motivate him to work with his fellows in effective group action.
John was an excellent teacher as well as a preacher, In classes on the Bible, adults sat expectantly, as people, places, and actions came alive. He knew the esoteric words, but didn't need them to get his message across.
John loved and understood young people, He wasn't turned off by their newfangled ideas, and they in turn didn't turn him off. In fact, he turned several to them on to the extent that they followed him into the ministry.
It was his love of people that gave zest to his message. He could listen to endless talk about problems, and finally, when talk subsided for a moment, he would comment with a sense of conviction, of authority and dedication. He was tenacious in holding to his convictions, but with this tenaciousness he did not offend, but rather he won others to his viewpoint.
His dedication to his call to the ministry could not be swayed by other events. During the Hanford-Richland development when men and women were needed for secular jobs with wages beyond belief and in a honorable cause, John, encouraged by his wife and family, continued to share with a small group of dedicated laymen and women in holding high the cross of Christ. Out of this dedication a debt ridden church at Prosser gained strength and emerged as a thriving congregation. Likewise, Benton City, discouraged and weak, emerged as a self sustaining group.
John loved the out of doors. His vegetable gardens attracted wide attention and his flowers he shared with great pride. One of his chief joys was working with youth camps; counseling, teaching, and managing. He gave many years of such service to camps in both Montana and Washington.
Perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay to the man is that he did his life's work as best he knew how, and inspired others to continue in that work in the days to follow. We thank God for John's life and our memories of him. We dedicate ourselves anew to continuing to build on earth the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of our common Father.

John died on February 19, 1971 at Wesley Gardens in Des Moines, Washington. Memorial services were conducted February 27, 1971 at the First United Methodist Church in Everett, with the Reverend G. Richard Tuttle, Dr. Frederick L. Pederson and Fr. John Fearon, O.P. officiating.

The above eulogy was read at these services by Dr. Frederick L Pederson, and excerpts were published in the minutes of the United Methodist Church, Pacific Northwest Annual Conference, June 1971.


















APPENDIX 2
LETTER FROM O.L.
TO SYLVIA.

MISS SYLVIA,

Esteemed Friend,

In reply to yours of the first, I will say that I think that delays are very profitable, especially in letter writing. Taking the Universalist view that your present enjoyment consists wholly in anticipation of future enjoyment, therefore the longer we are in anticipation of anything we desire the more enjoyment there is to be derived from it. And then to receive a letter entirely different in sentiment from what was anticipated, renders it so much more surprising and amusing, and originates new ideas to meditate upon in spare moments during the ensuing fortnight. Perhaps you will think I am attempting to ridicule, but I mean no offense.
I suppose you will have a happy time during the holidays as you say you are expecting your sister and mother to make you a visit. And then being in town, I suppose you will have plenty of places to go for amusement.

As Ever, Your Friend
O. L.

























APPENDIX 3
A Favorite poem of Sylvia

GOSHEN

By Edward Fink

How can you live in Goshen?
Said a friend from far away.


This wretched country town;
Where folks talk little things all year,
And plant their cabbage by the moon:

Said I:

I do not live in Goshen;
I eat here, sleep here, work here.

I live in Greece where Plato taught;
And Phidias carved, and Epictetus wrote.

I dwell in Rome where Michalangelo wrought;
Where Cicero penned immortal lines;
And Dante sang immortal songs.

Think not my life is small;
Because you see a puny place.

I have my dreams, I have my books;
A thousand souls have left for me;
Thoughts that transcend both time and place.

And so I live in Paradise;
Not here.


Note: Goshen is a very small farm town north of Trenton, Missouri.










APPENDIX 4
A POEM BY O. L.
A BIRTHDAY GREETING TO GRANDMOTHER


As time keeps moving round and round;
In its encircling way.
Whenever it completes it's course;
There comes a new birthday.

The three score ten has long since past;
And four score gone before.
King Providence still smiling on;
The milestones eighty four.

Accept this greeting from your friends;
Of love and friendship free.
Your cup of love may it be full;
And blessings given thee.

You have stood the storms of many years;
With courage strong and true.
We trust that there will still be more;
Yet given unto you.

As down the stream of life you glide;
Toward the setting sun.
May your day be full of joy and peace;
With the race so nearly run.

No doubt you've had your share of care;
Of toil and sorrow too.
Yet, trusting in a guiding hand;
That brought you safely through.

Then when your task on earth is done;
The Master calls "Come home".
With time and talents well improved;
The Lord shall say "Well Done".


By O. L.