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DOWN ON THE RIDGE,
EEMINISCENCES OF THE OLD DAYS IN COAL-
PORT AND DOWN ON THE RIDGE ;
MARION COUNTY, IOWA.
BY
ALFRED B. McCOWN.
1909.
1 ' i. i i
) ) 1 >
. ^ t ■)■)■)■> ■)
THE NEW YOBK
CLIBRARY
355A
A9T0R, LENOX A?4S
TILDSN rOUNQAttONS
. * • « • ♦ «
DEDICATION.
To the friends of my youthtime, the boys and girls
down in that old homeland, those bright joyous spirits
who lent sunshine to the morning twilight of my exist-
ence; to those who shared with me the hardships, the
toil, the gladsome hours in the home, the schoolroom,
the field of sport and play, and to the sacred memory of
those who ministered to our wants and fain would have
guided our young feet in the paths of right, this little
volume is dedicated.
Alfred B. McCown.
Des Moines, Iowa,
May 28, 1909.
^
FOREVYORD.
This little book has not been thrust upon the world
to bring the writer into prominence. Such an attempt
would and should meet with dismal failure .
Prompted by the memory of the goodly people who
were the pioneers of that far off time, and the pride we
all feel in the great work they did in the life they lived
and the splendid examples left behind to guide succeeding
generations, the fond hope that even the coming people
in that goodly land down there may know something of
the heroes and heroines, the kindly Christian fathers and
mothers who played their parts so well in that homeland,
that the children and children's children of those early
toilers may not forget who planted and harvested and
labored and prayed in the struggling days of the olden
time, this little book has been given to the interested
ones as a memorial of loved ones long since gone to their
reward .
In bringing up the scenes of the past and in touching
the lives of, and the parts played by these pioneers, the
writer, so needful of charity of thought, has dropped the
mantle of love over every life and every act and every
deed, making up the story of the old world's work in that
old community so full of history and love and disappoint-
ment and joy.
It is altogether proper we should have some kind of a
record of this people, their struggles, their service to the
world, a word of praise so oft denied when in the midst of
life and struggle and toil.
This brief story, though coming from a mind un-
trained and a hand unskilled, may be the last and only
tale of the places, of the people, of the incidents coming
in the morning of life, to the boys and girls of fifty years
ago, of the vanished hands that so gently led us along the
way when life was new, and the old world so strange.
A. B. M.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I Keminiscences 1
n The Strenuous Life 14
III Notable Pioneers 23
IV Pioneer Preachers 33
V About the Old Boys 44
VI Ridge Boy Life 50
VII Old Familiar Scenes 62
VIII Two Uncle Billies 75
IX Aunt Minerva Reynolds 86
X The Boys and Girls 97
XI Two Pioneer Families 109
XII Reuben and Julia Coffman 121
XIII Other Notable Characters 134
DOWX OX THE RIDGE
CHAPTER I
RE31IXISCEXCES OF THE OLD DAYS IN COALPORT AND
DOWN OX THE RIDGE
More than a half-century ago, when Iowa, the
"Beautiful Land," was new I came with my parents,
when a little boy, from our home town in the sunny
southland to Marion County, this state, there to begin an
untried and unknown future in what was then the new
west.
Then the beautiful prairies spread out before my
youthful gaze, and also the great forests of timber in all
their primitive grandeur, the same as gladdened the
hearts of the untutored children of the forests years and
years before.
The Sac and Fox tribes not many years before had
taken down their tepees and departed from the scenes
that were fragrant with the recollections of the hunt and
the chase. In many places their beaten patlrway could
be traced, telling of their journey from the hunting-
grounds where their camp-tires had gone out forever;
telling of the sad, sad look upon the place of their last
war-dance and upon the bleaching bones of their dead,
strewn here and there as solemn witnesses of the advanc-
ing tide of the white man.
nOWKON THE BIDGE
In those good old daj's we had Coalport in the
valley and Coal Eidge on the hill. The former was a
little steamboat town situated on the west bank of the
Des Moines River, as at that time it pursued its course
seaward bearing upon its silvery bosom the burdens of
men ; the latter was a seat of learning, situated in the
midst of a small settlement of God's noble men and
women, driven there no doubt by the flood of the Des
Moines River, w^hich flood has never been equaled since
the time Noah made that memorable voyage to the top of
the mountain in that far aw ay eastern land.
Coalport was a famous village. It had one little
store, a saw and grist mill, a potter shop and a black-
smith shop. It had no postoffice, because of the strange
stories that had reached the department at Washington
that wild Indians were still in the neighborhood and that
an occasional white man was burned at the stake. So the
rural delivery man, like the priest and Levite, passed by
on the other side .
But this town had a very rich bank in which very
large deposits were made several years before, and, the
depositors having long since died and their heirs been gob-
bled up by the Indians, some enterprising settler conceived
the idea of drawing upon this bank for the benefit of the
steamboats that twisted their way up the river from
Keokuk to Fort Des Moines during the high stages of
water following the rains incident to the early spring
months. Hence these little steamers "coaled up" in the
spring. During the summer months the banker sat on the
bank and lished, and in the winter months he supplied
the limited demand and tilled in the time coon-hunting.
The notoriety of this little place was a matter of
pride to its population, whicli consisted of about a half-
dozen families, each of which boasted its large accumula-
tion of children: for, in those good old days, there was
BEMINISCENCES 3
little else to do. The women had no clubs or reading-
circles, and so far as cards go not one of them knew the
jack rrom the king; their only diversion was a wool-
picking or a quilting bee, and as a rule one of these
functions invariably ended in a tight, and a special meet-
ing followed for the purpose of "churching " the principals
in the scrap .
As to the male population they had no lodges to
attend, and the only clubs they were familiar with were
those with which they killed rattlesnakes that crept out
of the "Snake Den" on the approach of v/arm spring
days. If they ever went to a shooting match or a house-
raising the event was sure to close with prayer.
Oh , the charm of a steamboat town ! The Des Moines
Belle, Ad Hines, Clara Hines, Charley Rogers and the
Detiance— how their long hoarse whistles used to echo
over hill and dale ! To the young generation the music
of these whistles was as sweet as the notes of the dinner
horn. How the boys, big and little, used to run the old
path from the school house over the hill and down the
beaten trail, passing the old potter shop on the way to the
landing, when they heard the "steamboat blow." They
always yearned for a landing during the noon hour.
Time, and the railroad train ! Time, and the shining
mouldboard of the farmer's plow that tore loose the sod
from the virgin soil, aided by the weeping clouds above,
so filled the channel of God's highway that these floating
palaces ceased to disturb the waters. It was then this
struggling town lay down and died, since which time it
stands like a candle with the light blown out.
Even the old river has now deserted its well-worn
path that curved around against the big coal bank. It
has stolen quietly away from the historic grounds of
other days and years and centuries, and has taken a
DOWN ON THE RIDGE
shorter road on its way to the old ocean that surrounds
our land.
Though the swift-running waters may forsake the
scenes of other days, yet every inch of that old way, with
its sand-bar and willow growth above, its deep bank
below, with bar and dense old forests just over the way,
its ferry-boat securely fastened to a great cable secured to
either shore, the rocks and steep-faced hill below, the
pottery under the hill, where good old Uncle Tom, a
friend to every boy, fashioned tiny jugs for us, to add to
the gladness of our boy life— all these tell a sad and joyous
story of the coming and going, here and there, of those
who played their part in this wide world's work.
They tell of the old swimming holewiiere we boys held
clandestine gatherings and performed the most daring
stunts. There we used to crawl out on the sunny bar and
dry our hair before returning home. Among those old rocks
when a little boy I lured the shy and cautious sunfish
from his haunts. There on more than one occasion have
I seen that goodly current transformed, as it were,
into a modern Jordan, and it seems even at this distant
day I can see a little company of God's people standing
on the shore, and hear their glad songs go up to heaven,
while one after another goes calmly out into the stream
and gently and reverently lay themselves down with the
Christ, and come up out of the water into newness of life.
There, fifty long and eventful j'ears ago, a wondering
boy, I saw my father and mother, together with several
others, in a watery grave typify the burial and resurrec-
tion of the Master, There they stood in the middle of
life. To me life was an untried road. To-day, of that
little company, both on the shore and in the stream,
every one of adult age has passed form the scenes of earth.
A mother, patient and good and kind, surrounded by
strange dead, sleeps in the midst of the mountains of
BEJIIXISCEXCES
Montana : a father who labored and toiled and prayed,
together with others of that little company, is resting
near the scenes of his struggles : one. a little further on,
clothed in his country's blue, went forth in defense of its
flag twenty-five years later and, after an eventful life,
full of tragedies, met a violent death and now sleeps in
T{^ansas' southern soil.
Those scenes along that well-remembered bank came
and went, until one day in the early springtime, a beauti-
ful April morning, a harbinger of May-time with her sun-
shine and flowers and singing birds, another generation,
save here and there those to whom God had been kind,
gathered at the river where the same good old songs were
sung, while one after another with whom we had lived
and loved, and played "hide and seek," and "ring around
rosy," and all those innocent games which go to brighten
and sweeten the life of the young, yet unscarred in life's
battle — they, too, waded out into this typicalJordan while
glad hearts sent their prayerful songs to God.
O , the changes since that beautiful scene I The long,
long story of toil and laughter and tears, a funeral here,
a wedding there, far-away scenes in strange and distant
lands, tired hands and hearts struggling in the fierce heat
of life's hard battle must not be told by me. It may be
some day, sometime and somewhere, when there are no
hearts to ache nor eyes to weep, the story will be told how
those bovs and girls, so full of fun and love and ambition,
drifted apart, drifted into joy, drifted into sorrow, and, I
hope, drifted into heaven above.
I said awhile ago that Coal Ridge was a seat of learn-
ing. The very name is associated with a little frame
building about eighteen by twenty feet. It was made of
native lumber. In the center of the room stood a wood
stove whicli at that time was up-to-date, but in this day
and age would be crude, indeed. I remember that on cold
6 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
days the boys were kept busy chopping wood, which they
did by turns, lil^e going to mill. The writing desks were
wide boards attached to the wall by hinges and, when the
copies were all "set" and the hour for writing had arrived,
these boards were elevated to their proper positions where
they were supported by sticks, leg fashion.
I shall never forget one copy my teacher prepared for
me. He was always original, but his originality on this
occasion almost provoked me. It ran like this: "Alfred
Brown McCown : Do you do your work up brown ? " That
little sentence meant more than our youthful minds
could comprehend. The boys and girls looked upon the
whole proposition as a joke. So did I.
There is one thing I learned trying to write after copy.
The first line or two was a pretty fair imitation of the
original but the farther away I got from the copy the
worse the writing, so by the time I had reached the bottom
of my foolscap sheet the work was so poorly executed
that a blind man could see that my work lacked a whole
lot of being "brown." Just so in life's requirements
and life's work. The farther we get away from those
high ideals which shine out like beacon lights to guide
our wandering feet into a better and sweeter life, the
greater and more miserable our failure to do the things
that bring joy and gladness into the heart.
For seats in this "deestrict" college we had slabs,
flat sides up . These slabs were held up with legs, a la
bench. For backs we employed the ones God gave u.s
when we came into this forest. These seats and benches
were made of the same height for both large and
small. We little fellows climbed upon our benches where
we sat humped up like Texas steers in a blizzard, our feet
swinging in space. The big boys and girls sat with their
chins on their knees. In this pitiable and torturing posi-
tion these boys were expected to shoot paper wads at the
\^>^\^>^
SYLVESTER McCOWN.
J
BEMIXISCEXCES
teacher when his or her back was turned, or for diversion
write notes to their best girls. I venture to assert that
that old schoolhouse sent out more curved spines into
the busy world than any seat of learning in Marion
County.
We always had our Friday afternoon "doin's" —
recitations and stand-up-and-spell-down, etc. It was
remarkable how many Marys had little lambs, while the
number of boys who stood on the burning decks would
make a small army, and
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
How I wonder what you are ;
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the skv,
was repeated by every boy and girl who had courage to
pass through the ordeal .
My first and perhaps last great oratorical effort was pull-
ed off in the presence of a large number of invited guests,
they being the fathers and mothers and grown brothers
and sisters in the neighborhood. Having inherited a
timidity that would drive a full-grown man through a
knot hole, it required every ounce of sand I could muster
to bring myself into the performance of the stunts
assigned me. However, I finally gained the platform on
this occasion, when I proceeded to let these lines loose :
You'd scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage ;
But if I should chance to fall below
Demosthenes or Cicero,
Don't view me with a critic's eye,
But pass my imperfections by.
I could go no further. With this effort I collapsed
and sought refuge in a neighboring hazel brush. And now,
more than forty years have come and gone, even a bloody
8 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
war came and went, leaving a trail of blood and tears,
broken homes and wounded hearts; I have wandered in
strange and distant lands, and still I am asking that the
mantle of charity be thrown over my imperfections.
Sometimes we had commencements at the close of
school. That is, after school was out we commenced to
swim every day but Saturdays. I verily believe those
little swimming holes, yes, even the leeches that lived
in the mud, got lonesome when the gang was lured to
other haunts. I know they were green with rage at
times, because we had to make a hole in the skum to
dive through.
I could even mention girls who were strangely infat-
uated with these old swimming holes. Many times we
boys have watched them, at a safe distance, slide, otter
fashion, from the top of the bank to the green scum
below.
That old Coal Ridge schoolhouse could have told a long,
long story ; told how the young people came together
to sing, when Jim and "Brud" and Nellie and others
sang and whiled the joyous hours away: how they, like
others before them, and in the good old days since, walked
two by two, sometimes a long ways apart, down to the
old "Snake Den, " not to kill snakes, not to draw close to
the great kingdom of nature, not to look with one broad
sweep over a great stretch of country and with wonder
contemplate the mighty handiwork of God, but with
Cupid's fateful and sometimes fickle arrow to wound and
kill an unsuspecting heart: to draw close together and
with the strong arm of youthful love and the nimljle lin-
ger of devotion weave the warp and woof of a new and
untried existence, full of the sweet flowers that help to
make the world a place where man can dwell, that cheer
the life that would be only hard and toilsome, that
awaken and cultivate and sweeten human existence, that
L.
iM ARIETTA A. McCOWN.
%/S^N/N/O
EE2IIXISCEXCES 9
bring the bridal hour awa\^ up into the higher and more
beautiful ideals of home, or bring a long, long train of
disappointments, of sorrow, and more than a single share
of the earth's woes and the old world's tears.
No days like those old days, no trysting place like the
old "Snake Den," no more lovers strolling two by two,
hand in hand, along the old, well-worn road; but, high up
on the rocks are the chisled names of some whose mission
there was for the purpose of killing the snakes that so
frightened their sweethearts when the good old Sunday
came.
The old schoolhouse could have told of God's harvest
of human souls. O, the prayers that went to heaven
there 1 O, the flood of tears because a wandering soul re-
fused that salvation so free, and yet purchased at such a
fearful cost I Even now at this far distant day I can
almost hear those pitiful petitions that went up to the
hill of God and see those bitter tears that so long ago
made sacred the very ground upon which the little house
stood. When the prayers were all made, and the tears all
shed, and the benediction had fallen over all, the big boys
lined themselves up near the door, waiting for the girls to
come out, so they could go home with them. Sometimes
they did, and sometimes they got left, riglit in full view
of the whole crowd. Poor boys 1
And there was the literary society, with its paper
edited by some wise "guy" who was supposed to tell all
the happenings and some things that didn't happen in the
community. Then a few of the orators took up these
propositions: "Which is the most useful to man— a dog
or a gun?" The dog usually won out, because when all
else in this big wide world forsakes us God and the dog
are our friends. Then again: "There is more pleasure
in pursuit than in possession." Then it was that posses-
sion gained the day, for some of the very best debaters
10 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
were in red-hot pursuit of some prettj'^ girls whom to win
would be heaven, indeed. So tinahy the meetings closed
and the boys went home with the girls, if they could, and
if they couldn't at the next meeting of the society they
took the other side of the question.
And then when the war-dogs were let loose, when the
shriek of shot and shell brought human woe to the homes
of the north and the south land, too, a soldier, dressed in
tlie uniform of a captain, stood up in that old schoolhouse
the and told the story of the country's needs. Then young
men yet in their "teens" and bound to homes by the
strongest ties between earth and heaven went forth to de-
fend their country's flag. It was then that the military
spirit seized every boy in the school. Some one of the
mothers made a flag, and I, being the son of a coop-
er, made a little barrel, open at both ends, over which I
stretched a sheepskin. This served as a drum. We elect-
ed a little fellow ( who afterwards became my brother-in-
law ) captain, all because of his wonderful knowledge of
military tactics, and then it was march, march, to the
music of a home-made drum, a home-made fife and behind
a home-made flag. It was march, march, and charge on
an imaginary foe, until many a "Johnnie came marching
home, " feeling that he had been shot in the leg.
Little we appreciated the dread ravages of real, cruel
war ; little we knew what was doing under the southern
skies. And then when Appomattox had come, and the
returning soldier boys were welcomed hom.e, how little
we knew how torn and sore were the hearts whose very
hopes and loves reached over a great country until they
hovered like a wounded dove over the lonely graves of the
ones who would never return.
That old schoolhouse long years ago gave way to
another near by, but my school days were now over.
The old schoolhouse I Even tlie ground on whicli it stood
is sacred to me. There I have seen weddings and won-
REJIIXISCEXCES 11
dered what they meant ; there I have heard funeral
sermons and my boyish heart could not comprehend why
those tears. But a time was reserved for me, when the
arrow of desolation pierced my own heart and let loose as
it were a crimson flood of grief. Then I could see and
know that this old world is indeed a vale of tears and this
earth is full of woes.
This little schoolhouse by the roadside was to me my
alma mater. In it [ passed through the primary branches,
then out into the field of strife for clothes, for food, for
seven long years, when I returned to its friendly shelter
to finish up in geography and the "'three R's — reading,
'riting and 'rithmetic," two months one winter and three
the next. No grammar, no rhetoric, no burnt wood, no
foot ball ; my school life was over.
Since then the world has been my schoolhouse and
its people my teachers. For me strange but friendly
hands have planted rich and fragrant flowers in the gar-
den of my heart. Though it may be that I have received
from ungrateful hands instead of the rose, the sharp
thorn and the cactus, yet God and this big old world have
been kind to me. I have an army of friends among whom
I number men of standing and influence. I have a happy
home, children and flowers and music, and when the
springtime comes in addition to all of these I have the
green fields, the pleasing foliage of the forest and the
singing birds. After all, God is good.
I could go on, telling of a struggle here and a
battle there in the world's wide way; of how we
could almost hear the cannon's roar on the southern
battlefields where men and even boys had gone, leaving
bo3's and girls and mothers to till the soil and gather
the corn. I could tell of many joyous seasons; the
little parties where "Blind Man's Buff," and "Frog
in the Meadow, " brought joy and laughter from boy and
12 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
girl, while the mother dropped here and there a silent tear
because of an absent one dressed in blue far away under the
southern sky. I could tell the story of our growth as boys
and girls: of how we grew into friendship and love ; of how
we in after years took our sweethearts to the ' ' Fourth of
July " at Knoxville, where we gave them red lemonade, fed
them on crackers, dried apples and cheese, and watered them
at the town pump, and watched them grow. I could tell
of how the fateful hand led one here and another there,
up and down this wide, wide world ; of estrangements and
affections, some of which have been blessings in disguise,
while others came to wound and make the heart cry out
in its desolation.
I could take you along with the rushing years and
permit you with me to behold the havoc that time
has wrought. The girls and boys, the heroes and
heroines of those days, so full of tender and loving recol-
lections, are boys and girls no more. Streaks of gray are
here and there, telling of the rushing tempest of years.
Even some of them are grandmas and "granddaddies."
Some have drifted away out on life's sea and their little
ships are lost to the world, while some have floated away
and away into the summer land of God. Yes, the graveyards
grow, but they are God's. Who is it that shall read these
lines that does not recall some buoyant, engaging friend-
ship of long ago? There were hours of sweet, confiden-
tial, heart-thrilling converse, when each was strong in the
hope-inspiring friendship of the other, and when each be-
lieved that this happy state would never end. Alas for
the evanescence of all earthly things I Some of these
friendships long ago have died, and those who were such
warm and loving friends have drifted apart. Love that
came in radiant with the heart's gentle, softening dew :
love that like the morning dawn gilds life's horizon and
sends floods of light into every recess of the heart I Even
some of those who one sweet dav swore that love should live
REMIXISCEXCES 13
forever find in the coming years tliat it does not endure.
Even the old trysting places are forgotten, and the happy
hours that sped so swiftly by in the old, old days are no
longer cherished.
As I look back on those happy days I realize how little
I knew then of life. The world was here w^ith all its sin,
but I saw it not. And no one could have shown it to me
then. One of the saddest facts in life is that each one of
us must go down into its dark depths and taste its bitter
waters for himself. The great sea of human prejudice
and passion surged at my feet as it does now, and I heard
the lashing of its waves, but their discordant sounds were
so blended wath the symphonies of a happy youth that I
thought it all entrancing music.
As I stand to-day on Life's mountain peak and look
back upon the scenes of the years that are gone, my eyes
are wet with tears because in a world of such overwhelm-
ing need I have done so little. In a world that is sick
unto death for the bread of life I have not raised a voice
above the clash and din and bedlam of the world's sad
strife. I have lingered on the shore of the world's great
sea of want and woe and picked up here and there a
pebble with wiiich I have slain no giant of error. 1 have
stemmed the world's sinful tide, but have never plunged
into its raging waters to save even one of the millions
that go down each year to rise no more.
If it shall be mine in future years to leave some token
here and there to guide vrandering feet to paths of right,
and cheer the fainting hearts of those who grow weary in
the heat of life's tierce battle, I shall be glad.
CHAPTER II
THE STRENUOUS LIFE OF THE BOYS OF FIFTY YEARS AGO.
I do not believe that a person who is constantly look-
ing back, a life which is content to live over and over
again all of the yesterdays of its existence, ever fills that
place in the activities of human usefulness intended by
the master hand which moulds and shapes the destinies
of individuals and nations. But, I do believe that an
occasional glance over the scenes of other days, that a
little note whispered here and there on the breezes that
come from away over the hill, bring to us a softening
and restraining influence. I believe tlie good things in
the days away back yonder, crystallized by time, have
very much to do with making the heart more tender,
more kind, and life sweeter and the old world better.
As Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and all the scenes of Bible
lands have been the mecca of the Christian world for
years and years, so the old home and the old scenes
have in the long, long past pulled and will continue to
pull on the threads of memory and to thrill and throb
the heart of some one, everywhere and every day, so
long as humanity lives.
Don't you know that to the most of us these memories
of other days away down on the old farm, where the
cream was so thick and rich, the fruit so juicy, all tinted
with the summer sunbeam and flavored with nature's
THE STBENUOUS LIFE 15
extract fresh from the laboratorj^ of the unseen world ;
where every home held sacred its household gods ; where
no domestic altars were thrown down and destroj'ed by
the slimy touch of an " affinity ; " where young- manhood
was rugged and honest and true ; where the girls were
taught in the art of domestic economy, and their willing
hands could make and serve hot biscuits that would
tempt the taste of the most fastidious : whose rosy cheeks
and winning manners ravished the heart of every young
man— don't you know that through all these things and
over that great stretch of time we cling only to the good
things that come to us here and there like streams of
sunshine, only the kindly words here and there pointing
us through the cypress branches of despair to the bright
star of hope ? The evil things have from us only a pass-
ing thought; memory's wardrobe has room only for the
good and the beautiful.
To-night, while I am writing— to-night, when the old
world is still— I find the chords of memory lugging away
at my very heartstrings as I run over the paths of the
past, as I call up the familiar, kindly faces, and trace the
names on memory's page of the pioneer moth.ers, who,
down on the Ridge, labored and loved and builded in the
long ago.
On memory's photograph I can see here and there
their humble but contented, happy homes— the hawn log
house, with only one room, a bed (sometimes two) closely
fitted in the farther end, and a "trundle bed" under
one, and in the other end a great big fireplace. I can
see the old "backlog" and the blazing "forestick." In
the corner is a ladder by which the attic was reached, where
the popcorn and nuts were kept, and where sometimes
the children slept, Near the fire stands a little table on
which a tallow candle, molded by mother's hands, is
struggling its very best to penetrate the gloom. A
16 DOWN ON THE BIBGE
pioneer father is reading Aj^er's Almanac, because books
were scarce, and, besides, he must know what kind of
weatlier the morrow will bring forth, or in its fruitful
pages discover a remedy for every ill to which man is
subject. Just across the table is mother, her tired and
weary lingers dancing to the tune of her smooth, bright
knitting needles with which stitch by stitch she shapes
and builds the little stocking for Kannie or the mitten
for John from the yarn her own busy hands have carded
and spun. It seems I can see her now, as slie goes forward
and back again alongside the flying wheel, and can hear
her softly humming an accompaniment to the music of
the buzzing spindle on which the yarn piles higher and
higher with each forward and backward move. Tlie
children have tired of cracking nuts and have thrown
some popcorn in the hot ashes under the "forestick" and
are witnessing with delight the snow-white caps jump-
ing hither and 3'on on the old stone hearth. And then
when all is still the cricket under the big warm stone
sends forth his rasping song. The little tallow-dip is
still struggling away, while in the farther recesses of
that little room all is darkness and desolation. But don't
you know we thought it was light because it beat the
grease lamp and old pine-knot ?
Oh, vou mushv bovs of the twentieth centurv I Oh,
you soft doughsticks 1 Born and reared in your modern
houses, with every comfort the inventive mind of man
can bring forth to comfort and please and soothe, you
don't know what high life is; you don't know what
toughens and hardens the sinews and prepares one for
the fierce heat of life's struggle unless you have lived in
a log house down on the farm, chopped the wood and
rolled in the big "backlogs," eaten big white "corn
dodgers," country sausage and spareribs and backbones
that have never been submitted to the sandpapering
process; and besides, with all these modern conveniences
THE STEENUOUS LIFE 17
3^011 think you must bathe every day, while we kids, who
lived convenient to the river, bathed only in the
swimminof season, and those who lived at an inconvenient
distance from the river came forth like a flower and in
the fulness of time were cut down, having but one real
bath, which was not of their own choosing, and which
was given at a time when they in their weak Liiid
helpless condition could not prevent.
But let us back to the night scene in the old log
house, down on the Ridge. Aye, there was more
than one log house down there, yet they were all much
alike, and the scenes around those old firesides were very
much the same. The little tallow candle has burned
low. Father has learned when the next change in the
moon occurs and the type of weather we are to have
during the following month. Mother has "narrowed"
off the toe of the stocking and securely locked the stitches.
The crickets under the hearth have screeched Johnnie
and Nannie into drowsy land. Papa prepares Johnnie and
mamma slips the clean " nightie " on Nannie. The low
"trundle " is pulled out from its hiding place under the
bed, then come the good-night kisses, and those four
life-lamps are handed into the keeping of their God while
the sleepers go out and out on the great ocean of sweet,
peaceful sleep, undisturbed by the prices on the stock
market. The fire has burned low and is covered to
preserve it for the morning. All is dark and still within,
save the soft and gentle breathing of the sleepers, secure
in that rest which comes to those who are at peace with
God and all mankind.
Then when the morning sun comes and all nature is
astir I see a pioneer father go forth to do his " chores. "
The hogs are in the woods, the sheep and cattle in the
brush. I hear the clear ringing bell on the trusty old cow.
I hear the familiar call, "Suke, Blackie I " " Suke ,
18 nOWX ox THE BIDGE
Blackie I " and it is " Poohooie I " "Poohooiel" until
the stock are all fed.
In those old days all stock had to he marked, every
man having- his own and distinctly different mark. If one
cropped the right ear no one else in the township could
use the same mark. One had a crop off the right ear and
a hole in the left. My father's stock mark was a crop off
the right ear and an under bit. or notch, in the left. It
would have been an easy matter to have changed some of
these marks on a hog or sheep found astray in the forest,
but I am not sure that such a thing was ever attempted
in those good old days. Why, if \ou had mentioned
"graft " to those of God's noble men and women who laid
the foundation so deep and sure under the social and
religious life down on the Ridge, they would have taken
from their resting place over the door their old tried
and trusty long-barreled muzzle-loading rifles, thinking
all the while you were speaking of a species of wild game.
Well, the feeding is all done, and here come mother
and Mary and Martha, dressed in home made * ' linsey-
woolsie," and calico bonnets, armed with buckets and
gourds, for the milking must be done. Then it is "So,
Blackie I " "So, Brindle !" and " Whackchebang !" and up
with the gourd and after Blackie, over the hill and away
to the woods, for it is fly time, you know. While all this
is going on father is yoking up the cattle. He has gone
cautiously up to old Buck and slipped the bow on the neck,
inserted it into the yoke and turned the key, made of
seasoned hickory wood. Buck stands like a lamb bound
for the slaughter while father steps back and calls to
Berry, Buck's old mate, "Come under. Berry I" and the
gentle old ox sadly but patiently marches under the yoke
that was not always light nor its burden easy. But the
strong arm of this sturdy pioneer in the very midst of
rugged manhood had grubbed out the hard, knotty "jack-
THE STBEXrOUS LIFE 19
oaks," had cut, piled and burned the thick mass of hazel
brush. With the same strong- arms he had made the
rails and builded his fence, six rails high, with stakes
and riders, and now the virgin soil must be disturbed,
the sod must turn its blackened face full up to the world's
brig-ht sunshine. Then God and the pioneer (who, I
firmly believe, lived and walked together then more than
men and God do now in man's mad race for gold and
power), one sowing the seed and tilling the ground, the
other sending the sunshine and the rain : one giving the
other a home and love and life and strength and the har-
vest time, the other sowing in hope and faith, and then
thrusting his shining sickle into the golden grain with a
heart overflowing with praise to the God of love.
^ Then, when the sun had " reclined behind yon jut-
ting knoll," the boys must go and drive home the cows.
Their location must be determined by the familiar sound
of the old cow bell, and
When the summer da\'s grew cool and late,
We went for the cows when the work was done ;
Down in the woods where the paths were straight,
We saw them coming, one by one.
Brindle and Blackie, Speckle and Bess,
Shaking their horns in the evening wind ;
Cropping the buttercups out of the grass
While we followed them close behind.
I only wish I had space to tell of all these pioneers,
naming them one by one. I wish I might tell of their
struggles for home and country and men ; of how some of
them left their temples unfinished and went forth to grim
old war; of how the shot and shell way down yonder under
the southern skies shattered the altars in the home of
the northland, and how, through all these years, scalding
tears have never ceased to flow because of the temple
unfinished.
20 DOWX ON THE BIBGE
Listen : I will tell you this much, if no more, that
many and many a soul has been torn with grief as one by
one these g-oodly people who walked with God every day
went down into that quiet, narrow home in God's lonely
acre. Of all that goodly company, the early pioneers down
on the Ridge, all have answered the roll call of heaven
save three: one of these now resides in a neighboring
state ; the other two have grown old and gray, and still
live amidst the scenes of old days gone, only waiting and
listening for the calling voice of God.
There were times in the history of the Ridge when
it was. and with some reason, called a "tough old place."
Indeed, there Vvcre seasons in the life of that community
when it seemed that the ark of the covenant had fallen
Into the hands of the Philistines. Tliere were times
when it appeared that the fires which had heretofore
burned on C'hristian altars had been forever quenched ;
that the fury of war had destroyed the pillars of peace
and torn heart from heart and men from God. Even though
at times it seemed that our Heavenly Father had with-
drawn every visible symbol of his pleasure from the old
place, yet after all it may be that some gentle guiding
hand led its people on and on, that some master boatman
safely anchored each little craft in the deep, silent waters
of honest living and rectitude of conduct, for, during all
the three score years that have come and gone, the coming
and going of more than two generations of people, a
people subject to all the trials and hardships, labor and
toil and disappointments that come to vex humanity,
though there have been times down there wlien the voice
of prayer was no longer heard, when the songs of praise
that in other days went up to the throne on high had died
away in the stillness of night, yet in all this long, long
time tliat good old Ridge has furnished the Marion
County court no murder trial, produced no train robbers,
no slander or breach-of-promise suits, and no divorce or
THE STBEXrorS LIFE 21
blighting betrayal cases have been recorded against her.
No one has been Ij'nched, no one has been tarred and
feathered or carried out of the neighborhood "straddle
of a rail." While there may have been hearts severely
cracked, 3'et there has never been an elopement, nor has
anybody's wife ran away with another man, down on
the Ridge.
While looking away down the long line of neighbors
and friends who furnished the activities in the old home
place I see no angels, but I see a people, though some-
times estrayed from him whom Peter said he loved yet
after all had not forgotten God, and every one, save those
who are waiting in the silent vestibule that links earth
to heaven, have made gallant soldiers in the wide, wide
world's warfare. To-night while I write of the old days
on the Ridge, I know, my friendly reader, that you with
me are thinking of the old times and the old friends down
there, or somewhere in this wide old world. To-night,
while the winds outside beat against the walls of my
city home. I am thinking of the scenes of by-gone days
and months and years which with time's mighty tempest
have made up all the yesterdays in our short lives. I
think of those kindred souls who shared our jo\'s and
sorrows down in the country home when life was new
and hope was as fresh and pure as the dewdrop on the
rosebud kissed by the morning sunbeam : those pioneer
fathers and mothers whose kindly cheer and wholesome
advice pointed our young feet to the paths of right, paths
that lead to God and heaven : those old pioneers down in
the land of the old log house and the high rail fence, the
blazing logs in the old fireplace, all come to me as a
joyous starting place in life's strenuous race. They are
to me like the "shadow of a great rock in a wearv land."
But where are those pioneers? They fought a good
fight . Pioneer life put iron in their blood and muscle in
22 1)0 WX OX THE RIDGE
their arms. No wonder, then, they returned from a
victorious fight against oppression, wrong and human
suffering, and at last lay down in their narrow homes,
where the ever-returning rosebuds tell of a life beyond.
"After life's titful fever they sleep well. "
f
LGE
GEORGE W. AND MRS. MARTIN. f
CHAPTER III
"squire" GEORGE W. MARTIN AND " UNCLE" JOHN
EVERETr NOTABLE PIONEER CHARACTERS
Tlie sun has sunk beneath the distant hihs. Toihng
men have been called away from their accumulated labors,
and all the kingdom of nature seems hushed in the still-
ness of nig-ht. The bright old sun that rules the day is
now shining on another land and on other people. Even
the old moon has hid its smiling face, and the curtains of
night are securely pinned down by the stars.
Now, while nature sleeps and dreams the hours
away, while the old world is gradually but surely swing-
ing away from the grasp of the old winter king into the
zone of beautiful flowers, green fields and singing birds,
let us draw our chairs close together and in the deep
silence of the night listen to the story of the pioneer
fathers and mothers who labored and toiled and builded,
down on the Ridge in the long ago.
I would tell in simple words how thej" wrought with
skill, industry and zeal: how these men and women
builded for time and eternity and men. I would whisper
into willing, listening ears something of their character-
istics, and even at this far distant day catch the echo of
a kindly word and take up the refrain of a cheering song
as they come floating down and through the years.
24 DOWN OX THE BIBGE
Every one of that goodly company of men and women
down there told you and me, in word and act and deed,
how to live and think and do, but life was new with us
then and we heeded them not. But after all, now that
the swift current has carried us down the stream of life,
how our thoug^hts go leaping and bounding back through
the years until w^e stand in full view of the kindly hands
that sowed here and there in the soil of our young hearts
the seeds of the ever-blooming acacia which speaks so
eloquently of that life that never dies.
They lived the simple life. Life though strenuous
was to them a duty and not a task. Their implements
w^ere crude, their wants easily supplied. They shunned
the mad, fierce race for gold. Then love's kiss fell light
on every brow, and every home was strongly fortified
against the siege of an affinity's wicked fight.
In this short story, telling of those who furnished the
activities down on the Ridge in the long years ago, I shall
speak more particulary of those who first came into the
morning twilight of my life, the first of whom, with per-
haps one exception, impressed my young life more than
all the rest. This was George W. Martin, who had pre-
ceded my father a year or two into what was then the
"far west," having come from the same neighborhood in
what is now Mason County, West Virginia.
More than fifty years ago I lived with my parents in
the very dooryard of my father's old friend, Mr. Martin,
-in a little log house about twelve feet wide and fourteen
feet long^ the first cabin built at the head or upper end of
what was known as the Coal port Bottom, then a dense
forest of magnificent timber, and known for years as the Day
Everett place. This little ' ' shanty " had been deserted by
the Martin's for a more commodious and palatial residence
builtof hewn logs all "pointed" with lime mortar. It
was about eighteen by twenty feet, with a little dark attic
ROTABLE PIOXEEBS 25
lighted only by streams of light stealing through the knot
holes and cracks in the daytime, and a tallow candle in
the stillness of the night, when the boys, sometimes my-
self in the bunch, would take possession of this little dor-
mitory by the ladder route which stood in the corner.
So the little "hut" was billed "For Rent," and into
it we went, father, mother, and four children. It, like
King Solomon's temple, was situated due east and west.
A chimney and lireplace graced the east so that the
morning sun could dart no raj's into it. In the west end
was a door, in the north a window. A table and a bed
with a trundle bed underneath stood along the south wall.
There may have been a small window in the south through
which could have been seen the sun at its meridian height,
which is the glory and beauty of the day ; I do not know.
Even if there was we could not have seen it, for then we
had the ague so much we could not look anything in the
face. In this little house we lived that cold winter of
1856. The snow was more than two feet deep.
M}" father chopped sawlogs in the timber which was
so abundant then for seventy-five cents a day, taking his
pay in meat and meal. Thinly clad and unused to the
rigors of an Iowa winter, his hands and ears arid feet
were pierced and bruised by the icy hand of the old win-
ter king. If he complained I never heard him ; if in the
midst of sickness and wounded by the cruel spear of pov-
erty my mother walked in the deep valley of regret I
knew it not ; but years and years afterward she told how
father longed, and how, when the old world saw it not,
she wept and longed, for the old Virginia home where the
sky was so blue, the sun so bright and the songs of the
birds so sweet and friendships were so many and true.
No wonder, then, an ocean shell, a tiny thing, borne
miles and miles away, will still whisper into the ear a
sad, sad song of its home so far away by the sea.
26 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
My father was also a member of the Coal Ridg-e Bap-
tist Church, for which he served as clerk for a great many
years. He was a fine penman and made a most excellent
clerk, but he couldn't sing a bit more than a tree toad.
However, he was a good father, worked every day, early
and late, and nobody had any better to eat and wear than
did we. My mother's hands, though weak and always
weary until God, forty-six years afterwards, away out in
the mountains of Montana, laid them tenderly across her
faithful breast, helped my father day by day, and away
after the supper hour, down by the old grease lamp, she
stitch after stitch made our stockings and our clothes,
humming the while some sweet little song telling of
heaven and rest in the spring and summer land of God.
During the summer "Squire" Martin, as he was
familiarly known far and wide, tended a small field of
corn, raised his own vegetables, "hogs and hominy," was
always content with the plain and healthful food, and kept
a little flocks of sheep which furnished the wool from which
his good wife carded and spun the yarn which when woven
into cloth she patterned and cut and made, with needle
and thread, with her own hands into garments of blue and
checked for man and boys and girls.
The "Squire " employed the winter months either in
teaching school, or in the capa.city of township assessor
or justice of the peace. He owed no one, envied no one.
He was a self-made man in every sense of the term, and
until the very last day of his life he never threw up the
job, but kept ou making. He burned wood in a great,
big fireplace, big backlogs behind, a forestick and a little
wood in front, and on a cold winter day one could warm
on one side at a time just as many times as he cared to
turn around. In the winter time on nights and morn-
ings and Saturdays he chopped his wood for the fireplace.
There were no cook stoves In those days. The "crane,"
NOTABLE PIOXEEBS 27
with kettle of pork and beans, homin}- or big greasy '* back
bones," or a great covered skillet or oven sitting over a
heap of red-hot coals could be seen in nearl}' every home.
The "Squire" was supremely rich in physical
treasures, and his heart and brain were fertile soil for
the growth of anything good and beautiful. I used to
watch from our little shanty with more than childish
delight the big chips go hither and yon as tlie bright,
keen-cutting blade of his axe sank deeper and deeper into
the big log on which he stood. And now it almost seems
I can hear that old familiar grunt, following each
successive stroke of the axe.
And then, when a great big boy, I went to school and
he was my teacher, and I heard him grunt again and
again, following each successive stroke of a long birch
rod, applied where it would do me the most good, for
fighting a big overgrown boy named John Johnson, whose
father was O. J. J. Johnson, who made axe handles for a
living, while the boys. Bill, John and Steve, and ' 'Patsy,''
the old woman, hunted the young-grown hickory wher-
ever dispersed throughout the land, for the world was
theirs and all the timber therein. And when the
summer had come and the picnic was on, the old handle-
maker shaved and scraped away on his clean hickory
sticks while '"Patsy" and the boys went to picnics, tak-
ing a large basket and a "measly" small cake, and
returned in the evening bearing enough of the loaves and
fishes to last until the next picnic. Well, this big John
always licked me to the queen's taste: then, after all
that, I had to stand up and take the finishing touches
with a rod gathered with my own hands : and these finish-
ing scenes were always intensified by those hearty old
grunts, like those I heard from the little old house down
under the hill when a little boy.
28 DOWN OX THE RIDGE
Well, I needed them then, but the "Squire" liad a
hard time convincing me of the fact. Now I sometimes
wish, when this poor clay of mine goes wrong, my teacher
away back on the Ridge could send me out again for a
still longer and tougher rod (for I was a little particular
away back there), and I know I should stand right up,
if needs be with back even bare, and cry out, ' ' Lay on
iSIcDuff, and damned be he who cries enough I "
The tirst trial in law I ever heard was tried befor
" Squire " Martin . This w^as a case of assault and battery
That sounded so funny to me. I didn't know any more
than a mink what these terms implied. I had these words
all mixed up with a barrel of salt and a ball bat. This
case came before the "Squire" on a change of venue from
a justice court in Knoxville Township, where it was
claimed the plaintiff could not get justice. Yan Bennett,
whom many of my readers perhaps will remember,
appeared for the plaintiff : the name of the attorney for
the defense I have forgotten, but I think it was O. B.
Ayres, a young attorney who afterwards became judge in
his district. The case was ably foughc on both sides,
and as near as I can remember the "Squire" gave a full
measure of justice t© both.
George W. and Louisa Martin were both devoted
members of the Coal Ridge Baptist Church, having been
admitted by letter granted by the Harmony Baptist in
Mason County, West Virginia, in 1854-, signed by George
Long, church clerk. During the seasons of religious
revivals in that little old schoolhouse down on the Ridge
these two people were always there. They came early
to the meetings, which in those days were called for
" early candle-lighting." The candles were sometimes
stuck into a block of wood suspended against the wall.
While the congregation were gathering these two people
would sing. AVhy, I can hear them right now, singing
that hymn they loved:
NOTABLE PIOXEEBS 29
How happy are they
Who their Saviour obey
And have laid up their treasures above ;
Tongue cannot express
Tlie sweet comfort and peace
Of a soul in its earliest love.
Mr. Martin was a good man. His ideals were high
and his life was clean and wholesome. He was passion-
ate and impulsive, and no one knew it better than he.
Once in a moment of passion I saw him lose himself.
In less than one short hour I saw him again and he was
crying like achil'd, like one whose very soul was torn with
sorrow, as he hurried along, almost ran, to lay the bright-
est and the best jewels on the altar of another heart he
felt, in a moment of passion, he had wronged. Give me
the man, big or little, high or low, who can laugh and cry,
one who can revel in sunshine and weep under the cloud.
Such was the life and character and influence of my old
teacher down on the Ridge in the days of old. ]S^o boy
who came under his influence in that old schoolhoiise
down there ever went very far wrong, or stayed wrong
very long.
Don't get tired, my friends: let us talk a little longer.
Let us talk low and earnestly while we tell the story of
another pioneer and his good wife, — J. S. Everett. He
was "Uncle John" to people far and near. To those on
beds of pain he was more than that ; he was a father, a
friend, yea, a saviour of lives stricken with disease.
Though the passing generations may erase that kindly,
helpful presence from the memory of men. yet every visit
of Uncle John, in answer to the beckoning call of the sick,
is entered up to his credit in God's old ledger in heaven.
He visited and assisted the sick every day, furnished
his own medicine and never made a charge, or asked for
cash.
30 . DOWN ON THE BIDGE
He, too, like "Squire" Martin, came from Virginia
to the new west. He and liis life companion, Eliza-
beth E. McCown Everett, feasted day after day upon the
bitter and sweet incidents of pioneer life. They, like all
the rest then, lived in a log house, and had only two rooms
with a hallway between. When the elements had worn
and beaten the "pointing" here and there from the
cracks in that old house, my father, mother, and their
four little ones quietly seated in a rough wagon box on an
old wooden-skein, linch-pin wagon, drawn by a yoke of
oxen, drove by on their way to the little hut under the
hill. That was tifty-two years ago, but I remember we
stopped for a little call and to get a drink of water, freshly
drawn with a pole balanced in a forked post set near the
well. This was my tirst introduction to Uncle John and
Aunt "Betty."
Little did I know then the important part these good
people would play in my life and the lives of so very many
of those who made up the activities of that community.
He was one of God's noblemen. He builded him a home.
He knew nothing of nor cared for the tierce battle for
gold, but every day he made a small deposit in heaven.
John S. Everett loved God and served him every day.
He was a deacon in the Coal Ridge Baptist Church, in
which capacity he served for many years. He never
tried to approach the throne of his God without, in bitter
tears and with pitiful pleadings, asking for mercy,
forgiveness and love.
Many a time have 1 seen him on a bright Sunday
morning in the spring time walking out on the farm, his
arms apparently at rest, crossed behind his back, with old
Prince, his faithful dog, close behind. He loved nature.
He loved to walk in the woods and fields where God loves
to meet and talk with his people. But one time this
good man walked along down the rows of waving corn
when his heart was sad and sore. It had been pierced
NOTABLE PIOXEEBS 31
by the arrow of desolation, for a messag-e had winged its
way from tlie south saying- that his firstborn, an only boy,
had laid down his life under the southern skies, and,
wrapped onl}' in his country's blue, he slept.
Uncle John was passionate and impulsive, but at
the same time he had a heart as tender as a child's.
Like all good men he, too, could join in the chase and
laugh and weep like a woman.
To-night while telling the simple story of these two
men who laid the foundation v<>o deep and strong under
everything that is good down on the Ridge, I am wonder-
ing and thinking why my teacher of the long ago and
Uncle John, everybody's friend, were not spared for more
and more years in the old world's work. And then I close
with the thought that it may have been they fell under
the weight of life's awful tragedies. But, after all, God
knows just wiien to call his workers home.
And now, as I look back over the short story so sim-
ply told, I see the traces of a vanished hand. A pang of
sorrow mingles with my story as I write the words tell-
ing of the scenes and incidents and people of so long ago.
I dare not stop to count the graves of those who have
"crossed over the river " and are resting under the trees
on the other side. Yet after all these years tirm and se-
cure this old world stands and guards Ihe tombs of those
who gave the old Ridge its birth and place a;nong men.
Among all my neighbors and friends and foes who have
come upon the stage down there, and, like the fleeting
swallow fluttered by, I, too, while my heart feels young
and full of hope, must confess that I am slowly but surely
passing over the hill. As I look back along the vista of
years I cannot say that if some power would resurrect the
past and place again upon tlie boards of my life the for-
gotten plays of the old days down there I would be
a player. Life's road through this world is too full of
32 DOWX ON THE BIDGE
stones for our tender feet : there are too many keen and
hungr}' thorns to tear and wound to make us desire the
trip twice along the paths of this old earth.
CHAPTER IV
RECOLLECTIONS OF SOME OF THE PIONEER PREACHERS
THAT LABORED IN THAT VINEYARD HALF A
CENTURY AGO
Three times have we sat around the evening lamp
and talked over the incidents in the old homeland. We
have listened to the story of the old swimming hole, and
the old schoolhouse by the side of the road ; we have
listened to the tale of the early pioneers and their strug-
gles ; we have seen tears there, and heard joyous laughter
here ; we have stood by the side of the narrow vestibule
of heaven and closed the door on the dearest objects God
ever gave and then took away ; we have been silent
witnesses to the growth of youth into manhood and
womanhood, down there in the old home place; we have
seen fruit ripen on the tree of never-dying love, and also
plighted vows here and there crushed like a dry leaf and
scattered by the four winds of heaven ; we have witnessed
the passing of the pioneer fathers and mothers who laid
the foundation so deep and strong and secure under the
religious and social structure in the old neighborhood that
knew the boys and girls down there half-a-hundred years
ago ; we have seen it recorded here and there along the
paths of the past how these dear friendships of my youth
and of yours fell in the thick strife of life's tierce battle,
and to-day in silent wonder we witness the tracings of the
34 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
brush in the hands of the invisible painter, liow he
touches tlie crown of tliose with wliom we played and
frolicked in the morning time of life, when the unknown
years, so full of labors and trials and sorrows, were yet an
unsolved problem.
When we think of all these things, when we see what
the rushing tempest of years has done, we stand appalled
at the very problem of life. What an enigma ! What a
mystery in this thing that brings us into an unknown
and unheard-of world, and then a shower and sunshine,
then a laugh and a tear, then love and hate and broken
vows, and a last sad look upon the world, and the great
unknown again !
I have tried to tell in simple story how these pioneers,
with their brawny arms and hearts and nerves of steel
felled the forest trees, builded their humble, happy
homes, tilled the soil and helped one another. The}''
helped to build the house, the barn. They helped to sew
and spin and weave and knit and make the quilts. They
helped to roll the logs, to chop the wood and husk the corn.
They gave no "pink teas" nor played six-handed euchre
for prizes. They gave no afternoon receptions for
the display of fine jewelry, rich gowns and peekaboo
waists. But these men and women down there lived for
their husbands, their wives, their children, their homes,
their friends and their God.
When I called you around my evening lamp this night
I was intent on telling you something of the boys and
girls who with me have been carried along with life's
mighty tempest, something of life's battles, victories and
defeats. But I reserve this thought for another quiet
night, when the bright old moon breaks here and there
through the silver. I will whisper into your willing ears
the story of liow they fought and won and lost.
PIOXEEB PREACHERS 35
Now, while 3*ou listen, I want to call up the spirits
of those who were "hewers of wood and drawers of water "
in laying- the foundation of that spiritual temple, that
character-building, down on the Ridge.
If Joseph and Mary had not dwelt there, no good
thing like the Christ could have come out of IS'azareth.
Had not John S. Everett, Francis Everett, David Durham,
James Caldwell and Henry Morthorn met on the first day
of May, 1851, and in the house of Mr. Morthorn there
erected the ark of the covenant and dedicated it to God ;
had it not been for the g-uiding hands of the above-named
Christian men and their good wives ; had it not been for the
spiritual assistance of the Rev. Z. Ball, Deborah, Margaret
and Mary Ball, Anthony Kesler, Stephen, Elizabeth and
Susan Kesler, in 1853, W. F. and L. N. Amsberry and George
W. Martin and their good wives, in 1851 ; had it not been for
these people, who lived and prayed and preached the
word, from whence would have come the good that has
blessed that old home place, that long line of honest
toilers in the old world's work ? Whence the church house
at the old cross-roads, the music of whose bell week
after week still rings out the liour of meeting V These pio-
neer Christians sowed the seed of a spiritual life with-
out which we could have had only moral death.
The first pastor of the Coal Ridge Baptist Churcli was
Warren D. Everett. At the first business meeting of the
church, held in 1852, W. D. Everett, David Durham and
J. S. Everett were elected delegates to the Central Iowa
Baptist Association. I am not able to inform you
where the association met, but wherever it met the
delegates had to walk or go on horseback; and, besides,
the trip must have been one of danger and suspense, for
the church had, by unanimous consent, voted a donation
of $1.50, all in cash, as a contribution to the expenses of
the association. I have heard, and I rather suspect it is
36 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
true, that the first pastor of that good old church
attended the cong-regation barefooted. I saw but little of
him, for in a very early day he moved with his family to
Corydon, Wayne County, where, after a long and useful
life, he was gathered into the land where his father had
gone before.
In those good old days this little band of God's people
met and set up their altars in private houses or in the ad-
jacent groves, God's temples, and there, under the shade
of the trees ; there where the thrush with its sweet, war-
bling notes turned the dense hazel thicket into music : there
where the beautiful oriole whispered and chattered his
story of love to his mate in the top of the wild cherry tree
while they were building their swinging castles in the air;
there, where the tuneful mocking bird, here on his short
stay from the sunny southland, chuckled and laughed in
the evening twilight, where the saucy bluejay screamed
out his challenge to fierce combat, where every night tlie
summer long the singing birds and the sweet wild flowers
nodded their good-night to God ; there these good people
prayed and sang and worshiped the God of their fathers.
Among the early pastors of the church I mention E.
O. Towne, of Pella, and Ball, who lived about two miles
north of Knoxville, who served the church in the latter
part of the " fifties." I remember it was in the spring
of 1857, the Des Moines River had gone beyond its banks
in the low land near where Uncle " Billy" Welch then
lived, that the Rev. Mr. Ball waded out into the turbulent
waters, and, raising his hands toward heaven, asked
God to bless and make sacred that spot, even as he mani-
fested his approval of a life scene away back yonder in
Jordan's stream . Then while the waiting congregation
on the shore sang
Oh, happy day, happy day.
When Jesus washed my shis away,
PIOXEER FREACUEBS 37
this good old servant of God led down into the water
one after another, among- whom were my father and
mother, who in observance of that beautiful rite laid
themselves down with Christ in a water}- grave to arise
in the newness and glories of a life dedicated to the Mas-
ter's service.
Another one of the early pastors of that old church
was, as he was called. "Tom Arnold." He was a man
of most splendid ph.vsique, young and dashing in appear-
ance, tall and straight as an arrow, hair as black as a
crow and eyes made of the same material, while his voice
was full and round and loud. In the winter of 1858-1859
this dashing young minister conducted a "protracted"
meeting in the old schoolhouse which has already been
described in these reminiscences.
In those days Christian ministers and church mem-
bers instead of standing up got right down on their knees
alongside the old slab benches to pray ; and such prayers
as went up to heaven there ! While their bones ached
when applied to that old puncheon floor, they wasted no
time in telling God of things he already knew, nor what
he had already done or intended to do, but right there,
gathered around that old wood stove, while the storm king
growled and grumbled outside and beat against the walls
of that little old house, those people just simply went to
their God like a trusting, loving child goes to his parents,
told their Heavenly Father what they wanted, and asked
only for hearts full of love and mercy, forgiveness, peace,
and, some sweetday, a home in heaven.
When "Brother Arnold" doubled down on the hard,
cold floor, hands clenched, head thrown back, and began to
pray, he grew louder and louder until he could easily have
been heard half-a-mile away. He prayed and preached
as if God were deaf. But, after all, he was a successful
preacher, and a baptising of converts was sure to follow
38 DOWN ON THE BIBGE
his meetings. These scenes usually occurred in mid-
winter, when tlie ice was thick and heavy on the river.
Where tlie water was the proper depth a hole was cut, and
into this hole the candidates for baptism, one after
another, were led by the big- preacher. As a matter of
fact I remember persons who, it seemed, took advantage
of these occasions for their annual baths, or else they
enjoyed the ceremony, because they were on hand and
ready to be served every time a fresh hole was cut.
Another of the preachers of that time who served
the people on the Ridge was the Rev. Mr. Sperry, father
of E. F. Sperry, formerly of Knoxville, but now a resident
of Des Moines, where he is an active member of the First
Baptist Church.
1 now call to mind another of the "divines" who
exercised a pastoral care over that little flock down on
the Ridge — the Rev. Mr. Whitehead, who lived tlien in
Knoxville, where he owned and operated a woolen mill
and had in his employ almost the entire Fee family and
myself besides. But I played with the kid too much for
a business proposition, and the preacher "fired" me.
You ought to have heard this fellow preach "hell-
tire I " Don't you know when he got warmed up to his
subject he would step to the front of that little two-by-
four rostrum, like a star actor advancing to the footlights,
and, looking down, would draw such a picture of that
horrible place that we imagined we could see old "Beelze-
bub" tearing around down there, throwing dry wood on
the flames. My 1 we kids lay awake the next two nights
thinking about what that preacher said ; and even when
we shut our eyes we could see the dreadful picture he
drew.
In telling of the many incidents which were a part
of the religious activities of that far-off time down
there, I would not throw in a single thought of jest or
PIONUEE FBEACHEBS 39
humor on a subject so sacred and sweet and uplifting as
prayer and song and sermon. I only mention these things
as a matter of fact. And when I tell you this night of a
preacher down there, not one whose rhetoric, oratory or
power of expression swayed the little company, but whose
high pitch of excitement so aroused the passions of the
people that some of them would break into shouting and
dancing with joy, refusing to be restrained until securely
resting in the branwy arms of some young farmer whose
soothing influence had a very restraining effect, you will
have caught a vision of the different type of preachers,
who came that way. Don't you know I knew some folks
down there in Marion County who, during seasons of
this kind, just before sailing their little crafts, always
located, in advance, a place to anchor, where they safely
rested, secure from war's alarms. I remember one
preacher ( now, I don't want you to press me for a name,
for I shall not tell you ), who, when warmed up to
this subject, would become so excited that he simply
tore the air with his arms, shook his head like an
old African lion shaking the morning dew from his mane,
and in the delirium of his excitement made gestures
with his feet, and, to cap the climax, after the storm
had subsided he quietly laid one leg across the pulpit and
while talking low and earnestly took a shot at a knot-hole,
missed it, and expectorated on the floor.
I won't say to you that all the preachers who came to
the Ridge were called to be pastors of that church. Some
of them were itinerant shepherds seeking the lost sheep
of Israel and as many yellow-legged chickens as they
might devour.
Home had its C<esar great and brave, but stain was
on his wreath. But I saw many of the old-time ministers
down in the old homeland, whose very presence was like
a halo of sweet perfume, and whose very lives were a
storehouse of heavenly things, rich and sweet and joyous.
40 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
among whom I would not forget the Rev. E. H. Scharf,
who afterward became president of the Central University
at Pella. This pure, kind, scholarly Christian man
believed in God and worked in His vineyard day after day.
For a long time, he came every month over to the Ridge
to bring cheer and hope to the people there, to tell them
of God. Many times he walked from his home through
dust or mud or snow, to tell the people of Christ and His
love. He came away over there without script or purse
or price. He humbly and thankfully accepted whatever
was given, of money, meat or molasses. How sad, indeed,
to those who knew this servant of God best, to remem-
ber the pitiful afflictions which fell upon him and tried
him for days and months and years ere God made him
well in leading him gently into the summer land of
heaven.
Another saintly servant of his Master I must not
forget. He journeyed this way only at long intervals and
at the urgent request of the friends he knew down in the
southland, and when he came among that people he
always brought a message cheering to those who knew
God, and telling those who knew him not of His wondrous
love and power to save. Every time he preached he
delivered two sermons. One was his clean. Christian
life, the other his earnest, heartfelt sympathy in the great
work to which he had dedicated his life. And when his
work was done and God said one day, "Will Barnet, come
and walk with me in the ever-blooming garden," he was
ready to go. Though his people rejoiced to know that he
had gone to such a goodly land, even 3'et there was a
stream of tears *along the way from Wayne to Marion
when the good man lay down and died.
In telling this story of the past, in reviewing the
splendid Christian work and character-building so faith-
fully and well executed by those kindly hearts and willing
hands in the days of long ago, I sometimes wonder why
PIONEER PREACHERS 41
we, then, so little appreciated what they were doing in
love and prayer and tears for us. But now that their
life's work is long- since done and the good seed
sowed down there in these long and toilsome days, since
added to the unnumbered years gone by, we see, all along
the past, milestones telling how these goodly men and
women marched around and around the walls of sin
and shame and deceit and wrong until the old walls
crumbled and fell, and above the noise of tlie crushed and
tumbling stones was heard the still, small voice of God,
saying, ' Men and women, be of good cheer, for the record-
ing angel has counted my people down there and enough
yet remain to guard the shrines you have erected.'
As the sun setting in the west at the close of the day
calls mankind to rest from his accumulated and diversified
labors and leaves a trail of light behind to guide the
belated laborer home, so these good poeple down there on
the Kidge, who labored and prayed and preached and
loved and wept for us, though dead, and the homes they
builded in the tierce battle of toil and tears have long
since become the citadels of men and women and romp-
ing, laughing children who neither knew nor cared for
the life story and sacritice and labor of those pioneer
farmers and preachers, who, with tlieir strong arms and
their abiding faith in their God wrested those early
homes from the tangled thickets and forests of nature
and erected altars here and there in that goodly
land from which burning incense went up to lieaven day
by day — though dead they speak, and the writing angel
in heaven through all the yesterdays of the days long ago
has written and written and is still writing their thoughts,
their acts and their deeds.
It is well, then, now while the old kitchen clock is
about to toll the hour of low twelve, to go back and back
along the years and refresh our fading memory with those
42 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
thing's that come to us over the way, sweet with the
fragrance that is shed from the many-colored flowers that
grow in the beautiful and ever-blooming garden of God.
To-night, as we wend our way on memory's path back
over the hill of life and take one more fond look at the
old home spot and in fancy listen to the happy voices of
the long ago, we see the same dear fathers and motliers
and preachers who prayed and sang and wept, who labored
and laughed and were glad. We look beyond the desolate
and deserted hearthstones that once glowed with light
and happiness and love. We can almost see those kindly
faces as they come across the flood of vanished years and
sing once more the same sweet old songs they used to sing
in the faded past .
These simple reminiscences of mine are not the
dreams of childhood thought out on the banks of the
river of song, where no blight ever destroys the blossom-
ing fields and no storm ever beats our life craft
against the rocky shore. They are not the dreams of
youth, where lazy flocks bleat and herds of cattle low and
tangle their voices with the songs of the birds, ' ' the
rippling of the waters, the murmuring of the breezes, the
roaring of the rivers and the great waters of the deep; "
where singing brooks leap far away from some bubbling
spring and come romping and galloping through the
flowery fields and tangled groves and then break into
silvery pearls at our feet. But they are the rekindled
memory of middle age, looking back on the phantom
boats with tinted sails as they come floating down the
river of life from the distant parts of memory-land . Now
while we watch the pearly white sails dip in the rippling
stream we loiter and rest in the shade with those we
loved so dearly in the faded years, and feel once more the
touch of vanished hands and the rapturous thrill of the
songs and prayers of those who dared the desert waste of
death to taste the sweets of glory.
PIONEER PREACHERS 43
It may be true that the brig-ht morning star shall
burn out in the sky, that men may follow the seasons into
the limbo of forgetfulness, that some sad day in the coming-
to-morrows the names of these pioneer preachers and de-
voted, praying- men and women down there in the old
homeland shall be erased from human memory, but their
gospel of brotherly helping, spiritual building and kindly
influence shall live beyond the wreck of this world and
the dismal crash of human creeds. Though their voices
in prayer and song and sermon shall wake the echoes no
more in the old schoolhouse, nor around the happy fire-
sides where friends and brothers and Christian spirits
mingled and loved and died, though their sermons and
songs and prayers should die away in the stillness of ever-
lasting night, though their life story should lie amid the
ashes of their shattered hopes, yet to-night it seems to me
I can feel the soft and gentle touch of their helpful hands
as they return from that bright land above to comfort and
to bless. Ah ! the very thought of their presence brings a
balm to our wounded hearts. God speaks to those of us
who lived down there and tenderly reminds us that the
influence of these goodly people whom we have this night
brought back from the aisles of memory shall live as long
as the earth has sorrows and tears, as long as this wide
world has joy and gladness and sorrow, beautiful flowers
and singing birds.
CHAPTER V
SOMETHING ABOUT THE OLD BOYS WHO WERE YOUNG
MEN FIFTY YEARS AGO
I want to talk to you a little while to-night of the bo.ys
near my own age, or. perhaps, a little older, who mingled
in the joyous throng down on the Ridge in the days long
ago. To tell of the struggles of all these boys who grew
to manhood's estate and went out into the world to tight
life's battle single-handed and alone ; to tell how they,
every day, stood upon the "tiring line" of life: how some
of them climbed over the breast works of the enemy to at
last fall, but with their faces to the foe ; to tell how they
grew up and went out from the old homeland; to tell
how the rushing years have hurled them over the moun-
tain peak of life ; to tell how hard the struggle has been
to some, and how rapidly the hand of misfortune has
written the story of joy and sorrow and affliction in the
sad old book of fate, would require volumes of space.
Of the older boys who came more closely into my young
life I would remember " Sena" Everett, my own cousin,
John S. Everett Jr., Monroe Martin, Pratt Cotfman,
' ' Lum " CofEman and Cass Smith. Sena's many visits to our
home were always hailed with delight. He had a happy
faculty of adapting himself to company both old and
young. He was happy ; care rested lightly on his yourtg
brow\ He loved the templed hills, the streams and the
ABOUT THE OLD BOYS 45
forests. I remember, though now more than forty-six
years ago, when only a boy, he placed, his name on the
soldier's roll and awaited the summons to the southland,
where beneath heaven's unfading blue the mellow south-
ern sun shone upon winding streams red with the blood of
those who fought in the blue and gray and fell under the
stars and stripes and the stars and bars. When the order
came to move southward he came to our home to say
goodbye, and as he went away, over the hill on the old
path so familiar to him, he tossed a stone carelessly at a
passing bird, and dressed in his suit of blue he passed out
of my sight forever ; and to this day no one knows where
he sleeps under the southern grass and the dew, for, fol-
lowing a long, hard march under the southern sun, he
laid liis young life upon the altar of his country near
Vicksburg's bloody field.
John S. Everett Jr. was a studious boy. He was one
of the most inveterate readers among the young men of
his age. So deeply would he become engaged in a book
that during the corn-plowing season his noon hour often
lasted until two or three o'clock, and he was sometimes
found under the shade of a tree out in the field pouring
over the pages of history or biography, while old ' ' Fan, "
the faithful mare, nodded and stamped and fought the
big liorseflies. "Little John," as he was familiarly
called, was a live character in the debating societies of
that neighborhood, and was a valiant foe when met on the
hustings. He, too, while yet in his "teens" enlisted in
the service of his country and went south with his cousin,
Sena, and others of the neighborhood, leaving his widowed
mother and three sisters alone upon the little farm his
father had carved from the bosom of nature in the early
days. With the straggling remnant of these young fellows
who went into the southland he returned at the close of
the war, and soon afterward he entered the office of H.
G. Curtis, of Pella, where he read law and was afterward
46 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
admitted to the bar. Following his admission he was
married and began the practice of law in Mt. Ayr, Eing-
gold County. There he also served the people in other
positions of trust until his death, which occurred several
years ago.
Another coming very closely into my boy life was
Monroe Martin. He was of course older than I, but he
never grew big enough or old enough to turn down the
little boys. He used to help with my little, simple lessons
which seemed so hard to me, and sometimes carried me
over a deep mud hole on the way to school. The winter
snows have fallen and covered the ugly places of this old
earth many and many a time since, but I can, this very
night, looking back over the great stretch of years, see
him as he used to look, so fair and straight and tall and
clean, and on his face that little, playful smile that seemed
to never wear away. Previous to his enlistment in the
army he was examining a small revolver belonging to a
friend, one of those guns that is "never loaded," when
he accidently discharged it, resulting in a painful flesh
wound. I was very much alarmed when they passed our
place with him on the way to the home of his parents.
Soon afterward ] ran all the way to his home to ascertain
how badly he was hurt, and wondered if he would ever
get well. But he soon recovered and went away with his
regiment, and I never saw him again. Another bright,
promising young man sacrificed upon the altar of factional
strife. I can now understand why so many hearts down
there were torn with grief, and why the weeping willow
cast its branches across the threshold of so many places in
that old homeland.
Pratt Coflfman, though older than my class, was prac-
tically a boy with us. He was one of the "betwixt" and
"betweens." Those a little older than he had gone into
the army, and so it was merely a "ground-hog case" witli
ABOUT THE OLD BOYS 47
Pratt ; he had to mix with us j^ounger fellows or go it
alone, and that wasnot his nature. It was not only a custom
among us boys during the school term but a delightful
privilege to go home with each other and stay all night.
Pratt urged me to spend the night at his home on that
old historic spot near the east branch of Competine Creek,
to which I shall refer in a future paper. My parents
having agreed to my going home with Pratt, I gladly
accepted his kind invitation. I had to sleep in what we
children called a "big bed." Either Pratt helped me to
perform the "stunt" or in a restless moment I rolled out
of bed. I had been used to sleeping in a trundle bed.
However, I had a great story to tell the children at home
the next evening. Pratt was tall and rather lean and
big, and he had a heart just as long and big. He was a
stationary engineer, was married to an Indiana girl, came
back to Iowa and lived a short time in Des Moines and
then returned to Hoosierdom, where he now lives.
Columbus Coffman, or "Lum," as he was known then,
but in modern times "Daddy, " was another one of the go-
betweens, so it fell to him to either associate with us
3^ounger fellows or play with the big girls: that being
out of the question, so far as the girls were concerned,
he ran with us. Lum and Zack, whose good traits I shall
speak of some other night while we sit around the evening
lamp, surely knew something of the deep pathos of boy life
without the kindly sheltering, restraining love and influ-
ence of a mother. To those poor boys a home without a
mother was being lived and experienced day by day while
the faithful father cooked and washed and mended and
worked and toiled for them. Poor old Uncle Zack! His road
seemed rough and hard, and his burdens many and heavy,
but he fought a good tight and when four score years had
marked their joys and tragedies upon his trestle- board of
life he laid himself down in eternal sleep amid the wav-
ing fields of Monona County.
48 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
In the year 1872 probably, Lum, who had a short time
before married Miss Panthy Clad well, one of the Ridge
singers and best girls, went to Monona County where,
down in the Soldier Valley, then forty miles from no-
where, he purchased land and made for himself and fam-
ily a home. He pioneered there. I do not know, but I
have often wondered if their going to Eagene, Oregon, a
few years ago, to make a home in a strange land and
among strange faces, grew out of the afflictions that rent
the hearts of tliese good people so sorely, down in the
Soldier Valley.
Another of the older set was Cass Smith. If I should
leave off the Christian name you would all know whom I
mean. Cass was the son of a potter, and in due time
followed the trade himself. It was a caution to see him
make a jug. I imagine he found few, if any one, who
could turn out as many pieces of vvare as he could. Before
he took up the potter trade he, among other odd jobs, baled
shingles at the Welch factory, and he was the sv»iftest
peddler of shingles I ever ran up against. He and
I had the championship in that line of work down there.
For the sake of peace I will agree that he and I won a
draw in the race. Cass was industrious, always had the
" mon, " was neat as a pin, and if there was a girl in that
community belonging to about three generations that Cass
had not " gone with " I should like to see the color of her
hair. He roamed around in so many "pastures green"
that it seemed he was hard to please and would probably
revel in bachelor hall for the rest of his life, but long
after he had grown bald and forty he married, and lives
in Grundy Center, this state.
In a little while when the spirit moves me, and the
muses come and kindle in my soul the warm, bright blaze
of the cherished past, I want to call around my little
table the real boys who with me. chased the bright-wing-
ABOUT THE OLD BOYS 49
ed butterfly, and with them talk over the old days, when
the pendulum in the clock of time seemed to us so slow,
so low, as we waited and watched, while we builded cas-
tles in the air, down on the Ridge.
CHAPTER VI
BOY LIFE. THE DAYS AVHEN THE BLOOM WAS
ON THE PEACH.
I want to talk to 3^ou a little while to-night about the
real boys of more than forty years ago. I would call
around me for a brief period Frank and Charley Crouch,
Tell and Zach. , Gus and Mont, Lark and Joe and Dick,
and while we are thus assembled and all the world is shut
out, and the stars in their twinkling glee are making merry
in the arching sky, and the new moon, like a huge powder-
horn all polished and clean, hangs in the western sky,
while the noise of the rushing multitude in their mad
race for gold is hushed, all I crave, just for to-night, is
that each be once more his own true self, free from the
mask that all men wear, while we unfold and rehearse
the plays put upon the boards away back yonder when
life with us was new.
I am sure it will do you and me good, now that the
blinds are securely drawn and the gazing world shut out,
to go back to memory-land and bring out from the
buried past those little incidents, little dreams, little
tragedies and little bright spots that reached out their
beckoning hands to us all along the way, lending cheer
and sunshine to our young lives, and that now come to
us as beautiful golden settings in the way back yonder of
our life journey.
^
L,
PRATT. S. andR. T COFFMAN
AND L. M. MARTIN.
J
BIDGE BOY LIFE 51
Don't 3'ou know the pictures of bojiiood painted on
memorj-'s canvas are the most beautiful in this old
world's gallery ? Sometimes there is a tinge of sadness in
their coloring, but they are sacred to us and we love them.
Say, boys, don't you see that little schoolhouse just
on the brow of the hill ? the road near by ? here and
there great stretches of hazel brush and scrubby oaks
with now and then a wild cherry tree off which we used
to lunch? the slippery elms up in Aunt Mary's grove
we, when the sap was up, skinned from the ground to the
very top, and the long, white, fresh ribbons we made a
full meal on, and the short, thick pieces we dried and
played they were tobacco ?
I know you lads will remember how we used to go,
two by two, up to Aunt Mary's well for water, and how
we drank from the old moss-covered bucket which hung in
the well, suspended from a long pole sweep, and how,
with a stick run through the bail of the bucket, we
returned with the object of our mission. Time was use-
less to us. We stopped on our way both going and
coming to make strict search in every hazel bush for a
stray bird's nest, stopping the while to make with our
naked toes the appearance of a snake track in the dust
where an imaginary snake had wiggled across the road.
When the schoolhouse was finally reached one of us
would pass the wa;ter to the thirsty throng, remembering
the big girls first, and, after all, be kept in after school
for being nearly a half day going after water.
Now, I am not going to tell anything bad about any one
of you boys, but I am going to tell you how because one time
I put ink on my forehead, cheeks and chin, a punishment
was inflicted to me then most severe, but would not be so
now. The teacher put an old splint sunbonnet on me and set
me down between two big girls, where for a full hour or
two nothing was more fascinating to me than a small
52 DOWN ON THE RIBGE
knot-hole in the schoolhouse floor : and then you. devilish
boys called me "sissy boy " for a week.
It will be remembered how we played "blackman,"
and how we used to employ relay races in our efforts to
catch Gus Everett, who had wind and endurance like a fox-
hound ; and even after Gus was finally captured it took the
whole bunch to turn him over so as to give him the required
number of taps on the back. We plaj^ed " rollie-hole " and
"leapfrog" and "blindman,*' and then we would gather up
a bunch of the little girls and play " ring-around-rosy " and
"frog in the meadow, " and then it was a game of " mum-
ble-peg," and to wind up we would "crack the whip,"
big boys at the head and the little tads on the tale end.
You know what happened.
We used to slip away and meet at some agreed spot
and go to the river for a swim, and when our lust for
water had been satisfied we quietly crawled out on the
sand-bar and dried our hair in the sun. Uncle Tom Smith
in his seeing days said he kaew tliose McCown and Cofl-
man boys a mile away by their red, sun-blistered backs.
How can we ever forget the old, green, scum-covered
swimming holes down on Competine, and the time we found
a bunch of girls enjoying one of those resorts, all naked
as new-born babies fresli from storkland? They were
playing baptizing. One of them was an expert in the
play, and "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost," down she sent them under the
scum and up they popped, each witli an old, mud leech
fastened to her back.
The days and weeks leaped into months and months
into years, and as we boys grew older we unconsciously
drifted into larger and different sports. During the winter
season we would get our last spring calves together in
yokes and break them to draw wood, and it just beat all
what monstrous loads we imagined we were hauling as
BIDGE BOY LIFE 53
we distributed them here and there among the "war-
widows" and in our own wood piles. Oh! the wild,
joyous fun we had breaking- those calves to the bow and
j^oke !
Now we began to turn our attention to the girls.
The older boys being in the army, we fellows had our own
way at our little parties and " tafly-pullings," and it was
nothing to see one of these youngsters prancing around
with a girl nearly old enough to be his mother. We
thought we were heavy, and of course the girls were
lonesome.
Then the dance craze struck the Eidge, and away we
went. Of course the dancing in our community was
merely of a local character and just among ourselves. If
the gathering, which was always informal, at which no
boys wore ''claw-hammer'' coats nor girls dressed a la
decollette, happened to be in a fairly pious place we
whistled for the dance ; but if not a pious place, the tiddle
was tuned up and the " nigger hoe-down," as the father
of one of us called it, was installed, and it was ' ' on with
the dance and let joy be unconfined" until a late hour.
After all, there was not much real dancing done on
the Ridge. But those of us who were real anxious to dance
could be accommodated over on " Whitebreast Prairie,"
or up in the woods, or south in the "English" neigh-
borhood. I remember one of you boys with me, went
to a dance down there one time at which there were only
about eight women, all of whom were married, grass
or sod widows (mostly grass), and old maids, seventy-
live per cent, of whom smoked " long green " in clay pipes.
They smoked between dances and carefully laid their
pipes away when asked to join in a dance, and at the con-
clusion of each change and sometimes while swinging
them "on the corner" they would retreat to some se-
cluded spot in the room to expectorate ; and very often
54 DOWN ON THE BILGE
accentuated by the little clay pipe and "long green,"
quantity cut a large figure in these evacuations.
I remember one time Pratt and I were at a dance in
the same vicinity, and also Mel Fry, who lived in an adjoin-
ing neighborhood. From some imaginary cause the bunch
down there were about to enter into a conspiracy to retire
us three from active circulation, but, seeing we were des-
perate characters, even though in the minority, after due
consideration concluded to allow us to roam in this forest
a little while longer. Well, this little incident and one
other pretty much like it settled the dance business with
me, so far as I was concerned.
I now want to leave this testimony with you, my
kind reader, that there is nothing good nor uplifting nor
helpful, nothing that satisfies the soul nor polishes the
mind nor makes the world better, in the dance. It never
made a woman nobler or better. It never bound up a
broken heart or wiped away a single tear. It never
soothed a troubled breast or satisfied the longing of the
human heart. The dance has never been a blessing to a
human soul. It is the foe of happy homes and the foul
destroyer of virtue. We danced in the face of open protest
from those who sought to guide our feet in the right
path. We enjoyed the dance, or thought we did. Joe
and Lark and I thought we were reveling in delight every
time Dick or Mont led out and balanced to their partners.
Mont in these seances favored one foot and made the
other do all the work, while Dick, though one of the very
best of fellows, while in these stunts went at it like a
Leghorn hen searching for worms for her young and ten-
der brood. But as to the rest of us we were regular
Chesterfields when in the giddy mazes of the dance.
To those in the adolescent age many things come and
go that neither make nor mar their future lives. Most,
if not all, of that goodly little company of boys and girls
BIBGE BOY LIFE 55
down there passed through the fiery furnace of tempta-
tion with no smell upon their garments. Every one of
them has been a valiant worker in the old world^s work.
I cherish the memory of every one of that splendid group
wiio were the boys and girls then.
Now, boys, the hour is not too late, and perhaps I
shall never talk to you all together again. I am thinking
of all our comrades of those distant days— the boys and
girls with whom we rambled and played on the ne\\-mown
hay or on the stack of clean, bright straw\ We remem-
ber the little girls we used to think so lovely and pretty
or the boy who seemed so manly and brave, and now we
wonder what has become of those youthful playmates,
and where are the dreams we dreamed in those old
days of happiness, which never came to us.
Of Frank and Charlie Crouch, only Charlie lives.
Frank married Sallie Everett, one of the singers of the
Kidge. Two boys, Harry and Emmet, cemented this
home into one solid mass until one day, after a successful,
winning battle in the world, while jet in the very
harness, the working tools of life fell from Frank's palsied
hands and he went into the over yonder land. Charlie
lives in Knoxville. His children have never brought a
gray hair to his head, and will never bring him in sorrow
to his grave. He is a jolly man, serves God, and is a
good citizen. Physically he is a monster. He moves
among men like a huge ocean liner among a lot of little
tug boats.
Tell left the Ridge rather early in his young man-
hood and entered a printing office where he learned
the printer's trade, since which time I liave seen little
of him. It will be remembered that he returned to
the Ridge sometime after his going away, bringing with
him liis pretty young bride. She was a sweet, little
56 DOWK ON THE BIDGE
woman, daintily dressed in a not flashy but pretty green
color. Only a few years at least did this boy enjoy his
new home with its sweet binding- ties, coming as it were
from the sky land. She, like a rose plucked from the
stem, perished and went out into the unknow^n. This
boy's home gods were thrown down, and with only their
remembrance burned deep into his sore heart he drifted
here and there, and only a little while ago died in the
Home for Printers at Colorado Springs.
Zach was the real chum of my young manhood down
on the Ridge. He, a few years before, took supreme
delight in calling me "Mr. McCoon, " in pure derision,
while I sat peacefully on a cane pile, intently waiting for
the " stirring off " time when the lickings would begin.
He licked me when I made for him, and on repeating the
name was attacked and unmercifully skinned by me. He
one time dragged liis dirty big toe through the dust in
the road and dared me to toe the line. I did it, and
skinned him again. He of all the rest down there has
been my true and tried friend through all the years. In
our courting combats up and down the land he knew all my
battles and 1 knew his. He came and in perfect trust
poured out his heart to me, while with the same abiding
faith I told him of my victories and defeats in that war-
fare in which most young men rush bravely up to the
firing line, win or lose, sink or swim, survive or perish.
Zach early in the '70's went to Monona County and
now owns a good farm right up against the town of Ute. He
married Miss Ella Cummins, of that neighborhood, a most
excellent woman, belonging to one of the best families of
the county. For more than thirty years he and I have
carried on a regular correspondence. Once in a great
wiiile our paths cross, but the tomahawk is deep in the
earth's cold bosom buried ; no more its thirsty edge shall
taste the life-inspiring current, nor in dread conflict
•■Afjt
y<y:.U^^X''i,:
RIBGE BOY LIFE 57
cleave the proud citadel where reason sits enthroned ; no
more will his hands tear my eyes, nor my finger nails
claw out his, but henceforth shall our mission be one of
peace and good-will to all upon the earth.
Gus I How well I remember that chubby, fat cousin
of mine, more than fifty-one years ago ! The old Des
Moines River was out of its banks most of the summer of
1857, and the consequence was my father's family had to
live among the '" scholars," or roost on top of Mt. Ararat,
which stood just over against the potter shop . I stayed at
Uncle John's as long as I could at one time . Gus and I were
like ducks for water and mud. We made dams in the
branch below the house and raised merry Cain. Some-
times we were water and mud from head to foot. Then
Uncle John would threaten to lick both of us, when I
would make a break for Uncle William Crouch's, just
over the way. Then Frank and Charlie and I would go
to the creek and have a roiind-up and sometimes get into
a scrap, usually Charlie and I against poor Frank ; then
away I would hike to my grandmother's, down in the
Eamey neighborhood. There she would get out her old
"canthook" and yank out a tooth if one should ache,
telling me all the while it wouldn't hurt, or set me to
pulling weeds in the garden, and away I would go to
Uncle John's again.
Gus loved fun. He loved to dance and sing and have
a good time. Of all the singers down on the Ridge Gus
stood at the head of the list. It is said that " music hath
charms to soothe the savage beast. " If so, and I know
it is true, when Larry and Gus and "Panty" and Sallie
sang hearts were softened that language could never
have touched, never would have responded with an
answering echo.
Gus, after arriving at his majority, graduated from
the College of Medicine at Keokuk. He entered upon
58 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
the practice of medicine at once and established an
enviable reputation. He practiced a number of years,
during- which time he married Miss Ella Momyer, an
amiable, splendid girl. The fates were unkind to poor
Gus. Disease came into his earthly house, locked the
door and refused to retire. This cruel king- with wanton
glee numbered his days. He suffered on and on until
with the scythe of time his merciless foe cut him down in
the meridian of life, and to-day just a few words chiseled
in granite tell the story of his birth and death. Mrs.
Everett and Margaret, now blooming into sweet, young
womanhood, still live in Knoxville.
Mont was one of the boys down there. We both
remember how in the fall of 1862, after his father had gone
south with his regiment, he and "Lade" and "Meek"
and I gathered corn ; how we rushed the team along and
left the girls away behind, and how his good mother
threatened to take the girls off the job if we didn't let up
with our "tomfoolery" and imposition. We remember
having gone to Knoxville one day where Mont bought a
little juvenile book entitled, "Lord Bateman," and how
that night, in the little old log cabin in the lane, seated
around the old grease lamp, Mont read to Sandy and John,
which was Mead and Lala, the wonderful story of that
celebrated lord. How we used to pop corn down in front
of the forestick in the old fireplace! Mont will remember
that when we had gathered all his corn we, with Charlie
Crouch, gathered Martha Hegwood's corn down on the
river bottom, near the first Welch mill, and how we ran
away from Charlie when taking the down row, and liow
mad he got. He would cry out "You daggoned fools!"
Yes, he even "bellered" like a calf. Poor Charlie! We
should ask his pardon even at this late day. I should
dislike to do such a thing to him now, because if he
should sit down on me there wouldn't be even a sign of
where I went.
BIDGE BOY LIFE 59
Mont dreamed of other fieJds than those of corn and
wheat and hay. He longed for music sweeter than the
lowing of the cattle and the bleating of the sheep,
so he went to peddling pills and salve and colic remedies
for the Baker Company of Keokuk. It was real refresh-
ing to see him with his old gray mare and the little old
buggy "hiking" about the country, perhaps saying to
himself, *'The more colic, the greater the sales." But,
like the children of Israel longing for the fleshpots of
Egypt, Mont longed for the music of the lowing herds,
while a pen of hogs, to him, smelled like a bunch of bride's
roses. He got married, made money farming, and now
lives in Knoxville, sitting every day on the shady side of
Easy Street. Mont is an honest Christian man, the
atmosphere of whose home-, under his protection, and
presided over by his good wife, is surely refreshing and
uplifting.
I remember how Lark and I when little fellows, even
in our early " teens," used to ride stick horses. We held
them up good and tight, whipped them and made them
kick up. We galloped them down to the shore of the
river and made them drink. We made them kick up again
and squeal, and when tired of tliis sport we tied them to
the old rail fence and played we were swimming in the
tall smart-weeds that grew on the flat down near the old
log barn built away back in the ' * forties " by Day Everett;
and then for two days our eyes looked very much like
balls of tire from playing in the weeds. Sometimes we
would crawl into the loft of the old barn and help shell
corn to take to mill, and then with the cobs we built
houses and knocked them down, just like the many castles
in the air we have built since which one after another
have been cast down and destroyed by the gods of cruel
fate. At school we used to have to stand at the liead of
the spelling class a full week to be entitled to a "head
mark." Lark would be at the head of the class and I
60 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
would work up to him, and he would hold me right there
till the end of the week. Then it was his time to climb the
ladder when I would hold him off until my week was up.
Lark plowed corn with a single-shovel plow, covered
corn with a hoe, fed pig-s and sheep and did about the
same kind of stunts we other boys did, until one day he
went to Pella and took up the study of telegraphy in actual
work with Murray Cox, agent for the railway company in
that town. He soon mastered that branch of railroad
work and became agent for the company at Prairie Citj^
if I remember correctly. His rise in the railroad work was
made in leaps and bounds. He came to Des Moines where
he soon became superintendent of the D. M. N. & W. Ry.,
now the C. M. & St. P. to Fonda and Boone. Later he became
general manager of the Iowa Central Pailroad, with head-
quarters in Marshalltown. He found this road in deplor-
able condition; its road bed was little better than a wagon
road, its rolling stock was on the "bum;'" the engines
were light and absolutely unfit to haul the traffic coming
to the company. Lark dove into the work with all the
energy he could muster. He improved the road ; he put
on new engines and equipped the road with first-class roll-
ing stock. The road seemed to have entered into a larger
and more useful field. But, when a man thinks liis
honors are still aspiring, he falls like autumn leaves.
While Lark lay sick for weeks, entirely unconscious of the
old world's strife, of wrong, of deceit, of treachery, he
was, in my judgment, pulled down from the pinnacle he
had so nobly won by the very hand he had held up and
trained in those days gone by.
Though Lark and I seem to have drifted apart since
the old days, yet I have always rejoiced in his victories.
I despise the hand that inflicted the wounds, coming as
they did from the very house of his friends.
RIDGE BOY LIFE 61
Lark married Miss Ella Cox, sister of Murray Cox, so
widely known. Two sons and a daug-hter blessed this
union, all of whom are married and doing well. Mrs.
Martin died a few years ago. After tlie sad breaking
up of this boy's home he made his headquarters mostly
in Chicago, where, after a hard fight in the old world's
battles, in wliich he won many signal victories, and in a
moment when it seemed that new trophies were already
liis, on tlie eighteentli day of September, 1909, he unex-
pectedly faded into eternal sleep.
CHAPTER Vn
OLD FAMILIAR SCENES AND THE RAVAGES OF TIME
Let us talk a little while of another character ; another
one of the real bo3^s, one who was an active part of the
Ridge life back there — Joe, nicknamed "Joe Baleel."
His 3'oimg- life, like those common to the times and
community, began in the midst of toil and hardships and
privations, yet his disposition was bright and sunny, and
he was a general favorite among the boys. He shared the
sports so common with the young fellows of the commu-
nity. He was not extremely fond of the dance, still he
rarely missed going, far and near. It was his supreme
delight to be a wall-flower and watch the boys and girls
in the giddy mazes of the dance, and, if he saw anything
funny, go out doors and laugh. He and Mont and I used
to meet at Granny's in the little log house down the lane,
where, sitting around the old tlreplace, we tilled our pipes
with "long green," dipped them under the forestick, and
then smoked to the four corners of the earth. We blew
rings in the clouds as they ascended toward the low
ceiling or curved up the little stone chimney and went
out in the stillness of the night, and while the cold north
wind whistled and moaned and beat upon the little log
cabin we three builded and builded castles in the air, and
listened to fairy stories as they came out from memory's
storehouse, unfolded and told by "Granny." She would
OLD FAMILIAB SCENES. 63
tell us of her old Kentucky home, of her girlhood days,
of her jourjiey to Illinois down on the Sang-amon, where
Lincoln grew and toiled and builded for the highest honor
this land can give. She told of the early days down on
the Ridge, of how she, with her own hands, helped to
carve from the very bosom of nature the old home farm.
We boys drifted away from that old log house; the
glowing coals on the warm hearth. One sad day the old
place passed into other hands, and "Granny" made her
home in a strange, new place. But it was never home to
her; no place like the old home with the sacred ties of
years agone, no home like that, all hallowed with jo3'S
and tears and laughter and song; no spot so warm and
cheerful and bright as the one which sheltered from the
world's fierce storms her growing children, and from
w^hose friendly shelter some went to war and never came
back; no home like that with its four little walls where
the angel of death came in and went out in the days long
ago. "Granny's" old home, like Babylon, has fallen.
The well and the old moss-covered bucket have dis-
appeared ; nothing remains to tell the passer-by of the sad
havoc time has wrought save the remnant of an old
shade tree, planted there by " Granny's" own hands more
than three-score years ago.
About 1873 Joe went to Monona County, where, buoyed
up by the promise of better days and a home of his own,
he wrought and planned and toiled. There he found a
mate. One day she promised him she would help him
build a home. Joe said, "Kate, I have nothing;" and
Kate said, "IS'either have I," and so they started even
away out there in western Iowa, and together they pros-
pered and were happy. Long years afterwards, when my
wandering days had, like the bursting of the golden rays of
the early morning sun which kisses the dewdrops from
the flowers, melted into that peace and quiet and joy
64 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
which nothing but a home can give, Joe visited me in
my own Des Moines home. The following month I visited
him at his home in Onawa. The next day we lived over
again the faded years gone by. When the eventide had
come we said good by, and in a few short months poor
Joe, my boy friend and companion, laid himself down in
that long, long dreamless sleep.
Now I am going to tell you something of "Dick," as
we boys called him back there. I used to love to go
home with him to stay all night. If it were in the winter
time we slept upstairs: one whole big room, not plastered.
But we nestled down in a big feather bed, under great
woolen comforters, and it was some sleeping we did there.
We did not think it was cold outside. If it were sum-
mer time we would crawl up in the barn loft and there
on the new-mown hay we talked and talked until we
unconsciously drifted away and away into the deep forest
of dreamland. One time Dick's mother wanted some
kind of work done, and Dick said that with my help he
was sure we could do the job, for, said he, "Alf is as
stout as a bear." Presently I said to Dick, "Do you
know what makes me so strong?" "IS'o," he said, "I
really do not know." "Well," said I, "you will always
lind me at my best when I have a ' chaw of tobacker ' in
my mouth. Kow, Dick, if you want to be a big, stout man
right away, just chaw tobacker," But Dick did not
propose to rush into manhood by the "long green" route.
I soon found that the road that leads to the physical
stature of a man does not run through a plug of "Battle
Axe" or a twist of long green. I call to memory these
lines I had heard " Lum " recite in school :
I'll never chew tobacco, no;
It is a filthy weed :
I'll never put it in my mouth,
Said little Eobert Read.
< DARIUS M.AMS
BERRY.
OLD FAMILIAB SCENES. 65
Dick and I went to Knoxville to a show once on a
time. We had the money to pay the admission to the
main show, but had nothing to buy our dinners with.
Yv'e were crazy to see tlie side sliow, so we agreed to carry
water from one of the wehs in tlie west part of the town
for the privilege of seeing the stunts in these side grafts.
After that, it was sliow life for us: nothing else would
satisfy us. We dickered for enough rope to build a tra-
peze down in the ravine below the house by suspending it
from the branches of a tree. We indulged in all the
daring stunts incident to trapeze life. Then we got down
on the bosom of old Mother Earth and went through con-
tortions that were wonderful ; why, even the saucy blue
jays on the branches near by clapped their wings and
cheered us long and loud 1
'O
Well, we soon began to peep over the laudscape of boy-
hood into the distant horizon of a larger life. There had
been little, indeed, in our boy life to stimulate us to
higher thoughts, to nobler deeds and greater achivements.
While we both knew that upon our own efforts alone
must depend the measure of our success, yet we counted
not the weary rounds that quarry the stone in its crude
and natural state and then finish and polish it for the
builders' use. Like Mary of old, Dick chose that "good
part " which could not be taken away from him. He de-
cided to enter Central University at Pella, and came
pleading for me to go with him, but his pleadings were
in vain.
Me go to college! Me, a great big young man,
my highest grade next to the primary class in a two-by-
four sclioolhouse ; its furnishings, back-slab benches, a
little old home-made desk for the teacher, one old smoky
stove, an old water pail and rusty tin cup with a hole in
the bottom, and every time one took a drink he had to
put on a Grecian bend; where I got more "itch" than
66 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
education, and had to be greased every ni^ht and stood
up before the fireplace to dry it in, and when it was all
over wear a sulphur bag hanging down my front porch, sus-
pended on a string, and nine times out of ten the sulphur
didn't work and we had to go through the grease act again !
Me, having grown up down in the deep woods among the
old "hoot owls," the bats and the ring-tailed raccoons, go
to Pella to school ! Not me ; I was afraid of the " Dutch!"
But Dick went to school. He studied, he fought and he
won. He went to teaching school and I went to digging
coal. He became as gentle and peaceful and useful as a
Homer pigeon, while I sailed at the very point of the apex
with the honking geese in their wild nocturnal flight.
Once on sailing away on one of these aerial tours I had
gone down the old beaten road two-hundred yards, my
earthly possessions in a fifty-cent satchel, when I heard
my father's voice calling. I stopped, and on looking back
saw him running toward me. I waited, because I never
in my wandering days went out from my old home with-
out carrying with me a sore and bewildered heart. I
loved my home, though poor and humble, I will never
know how many prayers went up to God nor how many
tears were poured out for me by Christian parents while
roaming away from the home fold. My father soon
caught up with me and handed me a copy of the New
Testament and asked me when far away to read it, and
above all things never, never to gamble. Ten long wasted
years I saw the world and sometimes fed on husks, but
my promise I kept. 1 was thrown into all m.inner of
temptations and among all kinds of people. I retained
their friendship and their confidence, yet I never touched
a gambling table nor dared to enter where I could not
have taken my mother and sister with me.
Dick and I drifted apart. Once in my flight west-
ward I was an hungered and thirsty when I settled down
OLD FAMILIAR SCEXES.
in his Grand Island home, more then a generation ago
and he gave me food and drink : since which time I have
known little of him and man}-, many times wondered if he
ever thought of me.
It was in October, the orchard month of the j^ear.
The golden sun looked through the hazy sky, and the
busy rounds of a week of toil were drawing to a happy
finish when a short, rather stout, fairly gray man
approached my desk. I thought I was in the presence
of a stranger, so many of whom come into my place of
business. The leaping, bounding years, had done their
work. The burden of proof was on him. ' ' Amsberry,
is my name," said he. Then we clasped hands across
the faded years and I called him "Dick," as of old
down on the Ridge. He went with me to my home.
When he and we had gathered around the dinner table
we lifted our thankful hearts to God in earnest praise
for having brought our paths together once more this side
of that broad, strange river.
After a joyful, refreshing hour we took the train for
Knox vi lie on our way for one more day down in that old
homeland— one day among faces mostly new and strange,
yet upon the ground made sacred to us by ties of long ago.
About nine o'clock found us in Knoxville where we imme-
diately took the trail for Charlie Crouch's. We found
Charlie still able to laugh, as well as delighted to see
us. especially Darius, whom we had not seen for more than
thirty years. We spent the night with Charlie and Lou,
and the next morning went for a call on Mont and
Martha.
After we had secured a team at the livery stable we
were soon speeding along over the old familiar road,
bound for Coal llidge, the Cooper place near town, the
old McClain farm, the Zugg place, the Luther Fast home,
wall of which e saw developed and builded up so long ago;
68 BOWX ON THE RIDGE
then came the Compentine bottoms with its woods, its
rippling streams, the bridge, the great bhiff near by
grown bald with age, the winding road along the foot of
the hill, the little corn field nestled down near the creek,
and here and there a stately elm or a sturdy old oak
against whose sides the winds of more than a hundred
y^ears have beaten and driven the roots deeper and deeper
into the earth. Then the old home spot where Lud and
Adelaide in the early and middle daytime of life labored
and toiled and loved. A little further on we passed the
old spot where the little log house, ''Granny's" pioneer
home, gave shelter and cheer in the faded past, and then
came the old home of those good people, John and Mrs.
Hegwood, though changed in its outward appearance,
yet the same home with its wondrous story of love and
sorrow, of sunshine and shadow, of wedding feasts and
the gloom and tears that come when a life goes out, tears
for the little ones whose prattling voices were stilled
down here but are full of laughter and song up yonder,
real soul sorrow because a life-long companion has gone
to a better land, yet cheered with the joyous thought of
meeting some sweet day in the spring and summer land
of God.
We drove on toward the old church at the cross-
roads just beyond, to find that only one short week before
the hungry fire gods had fallen upon it, and, save a few
stones and charred timbers, nothing remained of that
dear old sanctuary but a sweet memory sanctified by the
tears and prayers and songs and sermons laid upon the
altar there so long ago. In the very silence of the hour
it seemed we could hear still voices coming up from
where John S. and Elizabeth Eterett, William and Emily
Crouch, Sylvester McCown, John Hegwood and many
others lay, calm and peaceful and still, saying, "Build I
build another house in which to worship your God and
ours, even as we builded away back yonder."
OLD FAMILIAB SCENES. 69
Then Dick and I drove to the little schoolhouse
in the grove near by, tied our horses to a tree, and,
Sunday school being in session, we entered and joined
that little company of men, women and children.
Although it was a joyous hour, yet our thoughts went
in leaps and bounds away back over a long stretch of
years to the same kind of a scene. We looked over
that little band and not one face — no, not one-
could we see who sat with us in Sunday school in the
good old days agone.
Following the Sunday school hour came church
services, with a sermon by the pastor, Jabez Beard, one
whom I remember as a tow-head and never thought
forty years hence I would tind him pastor of the Coal
Ridge Church. Jabez had one of the truest, one of
the best Christian mothers I ever saw.
After the services, if Dick and I could have dis-
tributed ourselves, we could have gone to a dozen
places for dinner, but we compromised by my going
one place and he to another with the understanding
that immediately after dinner we should meet and
stroll once more, but not on the same old road, down
to the old "snake den.'' Nearly forty years since
we visited that old trysting place. The shady grove
above which gave shelter to the singing birds, and
under whose friendly branches happy lovers built castles
in the air as they whiled the hours away, had been felled
by the woodman's axe, and old Mother Earth returns to
the husbandman with added interest everything com-
mitted to her care. The old well-worn path underneath
the rocks over which we used to help our youthful sweet-
hearts on a bright Sunday in the good old summer time,
when we held their hands and they held ours, has been
destroyed by fragments of stones thrown down by the
hand of time.
70 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
It was with difficulty we wended our way along-
that ancient ledge of piled-up stones in search of the
name of this dear friend and that, chiseled in the old
g-ray stone so long ago. The merciless tooth of time has
gnawed away the names of some until no more their
identity and date can be deciphered. Here and there on
the cold, silent rocks may be found the names of those
we had long since forgotten. We found inscriptions
down there on those old rocks serving as a tombstone for
some who sleep under the southern grass and dew. There
are lovers' names in couplets, telling the sweet story of
how two young hearts stood there side by side in the
faded past. Then we turned with a last fond look away
out over that great stretch of country round about, and
wondered how much of joy and sunshine has come to them
and how little of sorrow and heart burdens have beoi
theirs, all along their drifted paths. Darius' name we
could not find, while mine cut on that great rock of ages
thirty-nine years ago is still there, and no one has ever
chiseled his name so high on the face of that old rock.
We left this old spot probably never to be seen again
by us, and going away we carried with us all we could
gather up in memory-land, and then drove down the big
hill into the old river bottom. We passed the very spot
where, though the old home is gone, L. N. Amsberry,
one of the early settlers, and useful in the activities of
the church and neighborhood life, after a iiard-fought
battle in the old world's fierce strife, one day when the
roses of June were quietly sleeping in the snowdrifts of
winter, laid down the implements of warfare and went
home to the God he loved. We drove on down the way
and called on our old friends, Bailey and Neeley. There
we said "How do you do?" and saw the finest bunch of
babies at Joe's you ever saw. We said good by, and away
we went up the hill to see Jess and Gertie and Will and
OLB FAMILIAR SCENES. 71
Laura, and, last but not least, the best mother-in-law in
fourteen states. Grandma Hegwood. We then bade fare-
well to the old Ridge and away we went. Happy day !
Happy visit ! Blessed memory ! Kindly people !
Darius was not through with his visit in old Marion,
so I left him with Sallie and Emmet, who had kindly
volunteered to take him to visit other friends. 1 return-
ed home Monday. The next day Darius came over to the
State House to say goodby. We walked slowly down that
long, tiled corridor and out on the broad granite steps to
the north. Twice we said goodby and twice our hands
met in silent grasp, and when the last, word was spoken
we knew that his heart and mine had beaten in unison
with the hand. The dividing line fell and we found each
alone again. Darius returned to his home in Broken Bow,
Nebraska, where he holds a good government position,
and where he has lived a useful and happy life.
Don't think, my friends, that in unfolding the scenes
of the old days down on the Ridge we are content bo live
in the buried years back there. But it does seem to me
after all that :
There are no boys like the old boys
When we were boys together.
When the grass was sweet to our brown, bare feet
That dimpled the laughing heather ;
When the pewee sang in the summer dawn,
Or the bee in the billowy clover.
Or down under the hill the old whippoorwill
Echoed his song over and over.
There are no girls like the good old girls ;
Against the world I'd stake 'em ;
As rosy as a peach and clean of heart
As the Lord knew how to make 'em !
72 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
They were rich in spirit and common sense,
And piety all supportin' ;
They could bake and stew, and hoe the corn, too
And they made the finest courtin'.
Where are the girls of yesterday?
Pink-cheeked from the brush of morn,
Hoarding nature's rare wealth,
A bounding heart and good health.
Pulling shucks from the yellow corn.
It will do you and me no harm, but it may soften the
heart to go back just for to-night only to the scenes which
make the starting point in our young lives. Back to the
old churchyard, into that silent city along whose streets
reposes the sacred dust of the dead. Perhaps father and
mother sleep there side by side, with a single stone mark-
ing the place beneath which they rest. And may be father
waits for the heart he left behind, or mother peacefully
longs for the final reunion of all the sweet home links.
The grass has for years grown over their silent beds.
There are many neglected graves down there. On the
hillside overlooking the winding stream where once state-
ly oaks tossed their branches in the wind are sunken
graves overgrown with grass and heaped with debris,
that no eye has seen or friendly hand caressed for
years, and their names have long since dropped from
human speech. And then we turn aside to other scenes,
to other days down there, and plead again for the dear
old days, saying in our hearts :
Give me back the dear old days.
All the boys in line.
The "Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,"
And "Fair Bingen on the Rhine;"
" 'Twas midnight in his guarded tent, "
We spoke it high and low ;
While Mary trotted out her little lamb
Whose fleece was white as snow.
n
O-'^-^w^
CHARLES N. CROUCH.
■^y^^. Vi/N^O
OLD FAMILIAR SCENES. 73
Give us back the dear old da3's,
The pathway through the dells,
The old schoolhouse by the roadside,
The sound of the cow bells
Tinkling down in the woods :
The song of bird and brook.
The old McGuffev reader and
The blue-backed spelling book.
While you and I and everybody like to talk over the
incidents, joys, sorrows and tragedies of others days, we
must not, can not live altogether in the past. To-day is
ours : yesterday is already in eternity : while to-morrow
may never come. As we have looked over these boyhood
pictures perhaps tears have come, but they will do you or
me no harm. The road from our youth to this night may
have been long and toilsome. Perhaps it is strewn all
along with mistakes, with many heart burdens, but 1 am
sure it has done us good to go back to memory-land, back
to the times that touch the heart line, back to other
days of happiness, before the clouds and burdens of life
were known. But after w^e have counted the rough and
thorny places all along our life journey there are lots of
good and joyful things to cheer us in this queer old world.
There are those of our little company of boys down
there who have not gone down in that dreamless sleep,
yet we are going rapidly over the hill. We have lived to
know that this old world is not an enchanted isle in the
midst of the ocean blue, where no storm can ever come.
The lessons of the past have taught us to turn away from
the thorns and keep our eyes upon the beautiful flowers.
The past is only useful as a sweet memory and the lessons
it may bring to us that make for good. Yes, boys
and girls, there is lots of cheer in this big old world,
and though sometimes the storm has raged all day long
the rainbow comes after the showers. As for me, 1 know
74 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
not what the coming years may hold, of winter da3s and
summer clime, but this I know, when my misspent life
grows old I feel sure it shall be light at evening tide.
A little more work, a little more play, a few brief fly
ing 3'ears ; a little more joy and smiles and tears, and all
the little company of boys making up this story will
have gone beyond the gates. Just a little more toiling in
the w^orld's fierce strife : some j'ears of toil along the road
that leads to a loaf of bread ; some cheery words we said
unthinking, that made a sad heart light and the world so
bright ; while God, who never sleeps or wearies, is watch-
ing overhead ; a little more of laughter and love and song,
then we shall say ' ' Good-night. "
CHAPTER VIII
THE AMSBERKY AND CROUCH FAMILIES. TWO
UNCLE "billies"
There were so many good people who were a part of
the activities down on the Ridge that to take them up
one by one as they appear in the old galleries of memory
would, I fear, tire my readers: but I hope not. I feel,
just as sure as I live to-day, that I have not drawn back a
curtain revealing a single sacred spot, a stone, here and
there marking a place where once stood a pioneer home
in which love was so sweet, and the patter of innocent
feet so full of joy ; not a single turn in the old paths over
which we bounded in the glad old days ; not a girl or boy
of the happy past have I brought into the bright sunshine
of memory ; not an old pioneer whose toil and prayers and
songs and tears were the bright jewels in the uplift of that
old community down there, but has awakened a glad in-
terest in every one still remembering the old liomeland,
as well as a reproduction of similar life pictures to those
who treasure up like scenes and dear old spots, once their
old homeland.
I am thinking this very minute of Uncle Billy and
Aunt Polly Amsberry. Away back yonder William Ams-
berry and Polly Everett lived among the stone and wood-
capped hills of New York. I do not know when or where
these two people were married, but I do know the very
76 DOWN OJ^ THE BIDGE
spot on which they lived down between two hills away
back in West Virginia, whither they had gone many
years before emigrating to Marion County, this state.
They both sprang from splendid old families in the Em-
pire land. Down there on that creek, a branch of "Little
Sixteen, " which means it was sixteen miles from the
mouth of the Kanawha River in the then old Virginia,
these people gave to the world William F., L. N., Frank,
Almira, Allen and M. J. Amsberry.
Besides tilling the soil down there on the hillsides and
narrow little valleys. Uncle Billy worked at his trade as a
shoemaker while the boys hustled among the clods and
stones and briars and sassafras .
Uncle Billy was very popular, and knew everybody
for miles around. A public road wound its way from over
on the ' ' Big Sixteen " and other places as well, down the
little creek, passing alongside of the old woodyard in
front of Uncle Billy's house.
In those days back there everybody traveled on foot
or on horseback. Young men taking their girls to church
or other places took them on behind and sometimes rode
up the steepest hills so the girls would have to throw
their arms around them to keep from slipping off behind.
Very few young men down there had not been severely
hugged while on one of these journeys. The first horse-
back ride I ever enjoyed was behind my mother on the
way from my Grandmother Hayes' place, a few miles below
Uncle Billy Amsberry's home, down on the rim of the
river valley. This journey was made on ' ' Old Charlie,"
the gray horse brought to Iowa afterwards by Uncle AVil-
liam Crouch, about both of whom I shall have something
to say in this series of reminiscences.
As I was saying a moment ago. Uncle Billy was very
popular ; so much so, one after another riding by on the
TWO UNCLE BILLIES. 77
road described above would rein up his fiery steed and
hail Uncle Billy with "Hello I" while he pounded and
pegged away on an old cow-hide boot. This hailing him
so often while at work got to be a sign of distress, so
he gathered up his bench and tools and went out and
sat down by the roadside, where he stitched and pegged
and pegged and stiched, ready for the next "Hello!'"
man that came that way.
In 1855 Uncle Billy, Aunt Polly and all of the family
( except Frank ) were happily situated in the Ridge neigh-
borhood. Uncle Billy built a home which is now a part
of that recently owned and occupied by the late Lud
Reynolds, out near the brow of the hill overlooking the
valley of the Des Moines. Uncle Billy and part of his
family and Uncle William Crouch and his little family
came together from Virginia to Iowa, bringing with them
old Mike and old Charlie, two faithful gray horses.
Charlie was the larger of the two, and, besides being a
pacer from away back was addicted to the colic, which seiz-
ed him about every third day. Old Mike was a little trim-
mer made and as tough as an old pine-knot away back in
Virginia land, I remember how with old Mike, before
the advent of the real threshing machine, they used him
to tramp the wheat from the bright golden straw laid
like a big wheel on the ground, on which the old gray
horse went around and around. The wheat and chaff
were then gathered up and the chaff separated from the
wheat by the aid of the windmill. This was just a
little northeast of where Lud's house now stands.
Uncle Billy continued his work at the bench in his new
home in the Hawkeye state. This bench, in the win-
ter season at least, was situated in the southeast corner
of the living room near the old fireplace. Looking over
that great stretch of years to the way back there I see
an old home picture. I see the bright, red blaze flitting here
and there through the spaces in the old log fire; I hear a
78 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
stray cricket under the warm hearth singing- his good-night
song. Aunt Pohy, with snow-white frilled cap, sits knit-
ting by the light of the fire in the fireplace ; Uncle Billy
is pegging away on the sole of a shoe, working by the
light of a tallow candle. The old gray cat lies curled up
on the warm hearth near Aunt Polly, and while her
fingers are keeping time with the dancing needles the old
cat purrs and dreams and sleeps and purrs. This old cat
was peculiarly favored, having ingress and egress through
a half-circle hole made in the bottom of the door.
. H. A. Amsberry went back to Virginia, and, return-
ing, brought with him Mary Blain as his bride, and soon
was in his own home down in the Harney neighborhood,
wiiich place he still owns, where he and his good wife
have grown old and scarred in life's terrible fight.
" Jimmie" Amsberry with his parents lived in the old
home place, where he and old Mike with God's help made
corn and hominy, while Uncle Billy pegged and stitched
away. My father would send me to Uncle Billy to have
my boots repaired. I would sit by the old log fire and
wait while the repairing was being done. I would draw
my boots off in the old bootjack made to fit both little
and big boots, and hand them to him. He would look at
them and exclaim, "Humph! Burnt, burnt under the
forestick I Kice way for a boy to do 1 " and it was scold at
me until the job was completed.
I was at his place one time on a similar er-
rand, when I found Pratt Coffman having his boots
repaired. He had snagged a hole in one while running
after a rabbit across a piece of breaking full of hazel
roots; and with Uncle Billy it was growl, growl,
while he pegged away, "To think a boy could be
so thoughtless as to snag holes in his boots I " Poor old
man I He didn't mean anything by his scolding, but
simply wanted to impress upon the minds of the young-
TWO UNCLE BILLIES. 79
sters to be careful, as a matter of economy to their fathers.
But we could not see it that way then, so we always
approached Uncle Billy with fear and trembling when on
these errands.
The years of these two old people were long- and busy
and useful . When God had numbered his days and the
door in his life's highway was closed to the stream of
golden sunlight that kisses the dewdrops from the rose-
bud and the tender blade of grass, when Uncle Billy's
speechless form lay in the center of a large gathering of
neighbors and friends down in that old home, the Rev.
Mr. Whitehead stood up and read, "Man that is born of
woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh
forth as a flower and is cut down . Seeing his days are
determined, the number of his months is with thee."
Then they laid him away in the most forlorn, God-for-
saken spot in Marion County, where a rabbit never
dared to go nor even the song birds with their notes of
cheer ever came to sing the gloom away. In a few
more years Aunt Polly was carried down to the same
deserted spot, and there the bodies of these two good old
people went back to the dust from whence they came.
The last time I ever saw those two graves down there, side
by side, an old rail fence and a well-worn cow path ran
diagonally across the sunken roof of their narrow homes.
W. F. and Harriet Amsberry, early settlers on the
Ridge, were actively interested in church and school and
other useful activities in the community. I remember
when this family lived in a little log house in the shade
of a big Cottonwood tree just back and a little north of
the new frame house built later, nearer the road which
ran in front of this home. I know of no family in that
vicinity who entertained the minister preaching for the
Coal Ridge Baptist Church so often as those people.
Many, 'and many a time have I known of Will going and
80 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
returning- with the Eev. E. H. Scharff, of Pella, while
that good man preached the glad word in the little old
schoolhouse by the road. Few places down there seemed
so near to me as this good Christian home.
Will Amsberry did not care to join the mad chase for
gold, yet he looked carefully after the temporal needs of
his family. In the role of a Nimrod he was in his glory.
I believe he killed the last deer ever slain by a hunter in
Marion County. This was long after deer hunting was
abandoned down there. He heard or knew of the haunts
of one of these fellows, south of where Bussing's mill
used to be, down on English Creek, so he got down his old
rifle and went after him and brought him home. His
good wife, Harriet, remembered my father's family and
sent a liberal supply of this luxury for our table.
In addition to his hill farm , Will owned one of the first
river bottom farms wrested from the deep forest of native
timber which then covered that entire valley, with the
exception of here and there a little "clearing," in which
stood a small log house, a little field of corn surrounded by
a high rail fence, "staked and ridered." Here and there
could be heard the familiar tinkling of a cow bell, and
then a bunch of "razorback" hogs could be seen busily
engaged in piling high the rich black soil in their search
for nuts and sweet, tender roots : then a band of sheep at
rest on the green rug of nature, while the lambs skipped
and hopped about in joyful glee, and wherever the old
bell-wether went the sheep were sure to go.
What wonderful changes down there have the tooth
of time, the white man's axe, the firebrand and the plow
wrought ! Now that entire stretch of bottom land once
so dense with grand old trees is one vast farm, rich and
fertile as the valley of the Nile.
William F. Amsberry was, without any particular
effort, prosperous until the lean years following the panic
TWO UNCLE BILLIES. 81
of 1873, during which time the low prices of land and
products made many men poor, and robbed not a few of
their little homes purchased at a fearful cost of labor and
human sweat. This old pioneer, already marked with
the scars of pioneer strife, now standing on the w^estern
slope of life's strenuous old hill, found his home mort-
gaged fornearly its then value, left the old place which had
sheltered him and his loved ones so many years, bade a
long and forever farewell to the sv»eet and joyous associa-
tions of the years gone by, and with his family went to
Custer County, ^Xeb. There after a few more years of
toil and tears and tragedies these two good people laid
themselves down in that sweet, sweet sleep from which
none ever wake to w eep.
L. N. Amsberry and Jane Coffman Amsberry, his
good companion, were two more of the grand people of
the olden time down on the Ridge. I was young, and
probably for one of my age over-observant, but neverthe-
less honestly so. But, to-night, floating back in the old
swing of time to the days down there, pausing for a
moment under that familv tree, it seems that the ravs of
domestic sunshine never shone with a more dazzling
brightness than that which kept the blaze of love burning
so brightly upon the altar of these two hearts. Amid all
the joys that came to them, their hands and their hearts
were scarred with the cruel instruments of conflict all
along the \^ay of life.
Xort, no man ever made a fight more noble than he .
He was resourceful in methods. If one failed he buckled
on his armor and went again into the tierce battle, stout-
hearted and brave. His heart went out in deep sympathy,
and his hand and arm were nerved for action in times of
sickness, trials and tribulations which came into the
homes of his friends and neighbors. He fought too hard
in life's battles, and one day, all pierced and bleeding
82 JJOWX ON THE BIDGE
with wounds, he fell. I stood hy his side for a few
moments that day, although I knew it not, — it v^as a
strange presence to me, God's heavenly ambulance came
down, attended by ang-els who, with tender liands, bore his
body to that sweet hospital in the skies, where every
wound is healed and every tear is kissed away. A few
years afterwards Jane with her family of boys and girls
went to Custer County, Neb., where they all live save
one, Greene, who died a few years ago. Poor Jane,
— she who used to give me a nice big red apple or a cookie
back in the faded past,— weighted with years and sorrow,
is only awaiting the beckoning call over yonder.
Jimmie, as he was known so long, several years ago
sold his Ridge land and home and bought a farm in War-
ren County. He has since retired from active farm life,
and lives in the little town of Milo. To Jimmie the
tragedies and trials and afflictions of this world have come
thick and fast. Into few homes have the arrows of deso-
lation been shot with such sad results. Adeline, I re-
member the very day she came to his home a bride. I
know of the sweet ministrations that came from her
kindly hands through all the years until the "great white
plague" turned out her life lamp. With a very grateful
heart I look back over the eventful years now gone, and
pay a loving tribute to her memory for the many loving
ministrations and kindly help and cheer so freely given
my poor afflicted sister, who long years ago went into that
silent land and was tenderly laid away in the Garrison
cemetery, north of Knoxville, where she sleeps under the
grass and the dew.
My simple little story of those who down in that old,
old home land builded tor home, for humanity and for
God would not be complete without a feeble tribute,
at least, to the memory of that godly and kindly man and
woman, William Crouch and Emily Hayes Crouch, his
TWO UXCLE BILLIES. 83
faithful helpmeet down through all the years of joy and
tears which came to them since those two hearts were
joined, away back near where the chasing- waters of the
Kanawha join with the babbling song of the Ohio on its
journey to the sea. More than sixty-three years ago
these people side by side began the journey into a long
and unknown future. They were full of youth and
strength and vigor and hope . If they could have lifted the
curtains that shut out the view of the coming years with
all their heaping load of toil and care, they still would
have been brave. Never, like Saul, king of Israel, would
they have thrown their bodies upon the keen sword of
disappointment and fear. Two human hearts so com-
pletely and so sweetly united as were these could and would
have found, as did theirs, sweet content in the midst of
angry storms and rolling waves on life's old ocean,
because none of these could obscure the bright sunshine
of domestic bliss which, in these two hearts, every day
and all the time stood at its meridian height, which is
the glory and beauty of every true home. The highest
tribute I can pay my old uncle and aunt is this : Though
not blessed with an abundance of this world's goods, their
long married life was truly one grand sweet song.
William Crouch with his wife and little family, came
to Iowa in company with Uncle Billy Amsberry, having
made the trip on a steamboat from West Virginia, landing
at Keokuk, from which place they came by wagon route
to Marion County in the year 1855. He brought with him
the old gray horse Charley, an all-round animal for every-
thing,— a good saddle horse, easy pacer, trusty in every
respect : this old fellow was possessed of one defect and that
was purely physical, — he had periodical and severe attacks
of colic.
Uncle lived then in a little log house west of the
Everett home, standing near the road then running
84 DOWN ON THE EIDGE
diagonalh' across what is now the east part of the Poffen-
barg-er farm, beginning at the nortlieast corner near the
Aunt Mar}^ Everett home and crossing Competine Creek
west of the old Caldwell place. On the southwest corner
of this little pioneer house extended a log probably two
feet from the wall. This projecting log was used some-
times for hanging hogs for dressing when the butchering
season was on, and during the intermediate period was
used for "drenching" old Charley in his colicky spells, by
drawing his head up by the aid of a rope thrown over the
projecting log and then applying the various remedies
through a long-necked bottle kept for that purpose.
During one of these spells this good old horse, on whose
friendly back 1 rode, away back in A^irginia, laid down
and went where no colic ever comes.
William Crouch was one of the most industrious men
I ever knew. His hands were never idle, and Emily kept
pace with his industrious strides. I never saw two people
more honest, sincere and true. Uncle William built the
chimneys for many of the pioneer houses down there, and
laid many of the foundations for barns and later and
better homes: while Emily made the warm woolen cloth
a full yard wide, and many a good, soft blanket for
neighbors and friends. He laid the foundation of cut
stone for the Coal Ridge Baptist Church nearly forty years
ago. donating his labor. On the cornerstone he cut these
letters, " W. A. C." It is said that when that old temple of
worship was destroyed by fire in October 1908, most of, if
not all, the stones in that old wall save this one square
block cracked and crumbled with the heat. I rejoice
to-day to have the promise that that stone, hewn and
laid with his honest hand of toil so long ago in the
foundation of the old church, will be appropriately set in
the foundation of the new building rising. Phoenix-like,
out of the ashes on the sight of that so full of sacred
memories.
TWO UNCLE BILLIES. 85
No two people ever lived down there who, without
ostentatious display but in warm, true Christian kindness
loved away more tears and heart-aches than William A.
and Emily Crouch. When this kindly Christian man, so
full of years and toil, let fall the working- tools of life I
am just as certain that as the sun reclining now behind
the billowy clouds in the far-away west will rise again to
gild the morning with its golden tints this kind-hearted man
went straight home to God and heaven and eternal rest.
It was mine to witness the sadness that comes when two
hearts long bound together as one are torn asunder when
a life goes out. Emily never recovered from that awful
blow which left her alone with her God. No child could
cheer her back to joy and smiles, but one day God laid
his loving hand on her pale brow, then took her tired,
wrinkled hands in his and led her gently to William,
in the sweet fields of heaven, that enchanted isle some-
where, where no storms nor tears nor grief nor pain can
ever come .
CHAPTER IX
AUNT MINERVA REYNOLDS AND FAMILY. PIONEER
CHARACTERS OF EARLY" DAYS.
Of all the people who were a part of the activities of
the early days in that part of Marion County from whence
comes my story of the far-away past, of those earnest
hearts and striving-, toiling hands who laid the foundation
of the social, moral and religious life down there, none
deserve a greater meed of praise than Minerva Reynolds
and her stalwart sons and daughters.
"Aunt Minerva," as she was so long and familiarly
known, was the widow of Silas Eeynclds, who went into
the over-yonder land away back there amid the templed
hills, the rocks and rills of the western part of the then
unbroken state of Virginia, ere a stream of blood drawn
on the crest of the Blue Ridge mountains marked the
place that divided that grand old domain into two sovereign
states. She with all her children save Morty (who had
preceded her, coming to Muscatine County the year before,)
came to Marion County in the early part of 1846, where
they settled in the Des Moines River valley.
Most of the people making up the scattered commu-
nities of that time were southern folks, and there was
found in their make-up a train of hospitality not usually
found now, since the chase for gold and graft and place
and power have robbed men of so many of those little
amenities that sweeten life and bring so much of cheer
along the way.
L,
MINERVA REYNOLDS.
^\/%xO
A UNT MINER VA BE YNOLBS. 87
In those days most if not all of the doors opening
into the little cabin homes dotting here and there Iowa's
fair land were hung on heavj^ wooden hinges and fastened
with a latch of seasoned hickory, which was operated by
the aid of a leather or deerskin string through a hole in
the door. This string was operated from the outside, and
before the family retired for the night it was drawn in-
side, thus leaving the home secure from intruders. In
the old days when the wild Indians were on the warpath
these doors were barricaded on the inside for protection
from a possible attack of a war party of these dusky war-
riors, and an additional strength of defense was provided
by loop-holes through the heavy log walls, which not onl}'-
furnished an outlook through which the enemy could be
located but through which their trusty old rifles could be
brought into use when occasion required. But when the
tomahawk had been deep in the old earth's cold bosom
buried, and sweet peace with its victories had come to
these pioneer people, the tariicade v. as removed from
the door and the latchstring hung on the outside as a
token of welcome to the passer-by, the wayfaring man
seeking a home in the then new land.
The latchstring in the door of the pioneer home of
this goodly Widow Reynolds was alway^s on the outside.
Her home was a refuge for the stagglinghomeseekerand a
friendly hospital for the sick and homeless. One day a
newcomer with his wife and little family passed that way,
seeking a spot whereon to lay up three stones — one for
home, one for mother and one for heaven. Aunt ^Slinerva
had known these people away back where the winding
Kanawha bears upon its silvery bosom the burdens of men.
Uncle John Everett, his wife and little children, were tired
from their long and weary journey westward, and this
widow gave them rest ; they were thirsty and she gave
them drink ; hungry and she gave them food ; sick and
88 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
she ministered unto them. Although she knew it not,
this kindly widow gave her mite. She cast her scanty
food upon the waters ; and then in the long after years,
beside her bed of pain, Uncle John administered to her,
if not to relieve, yet to smoothe and ease her tired soul
away on the wings of peace and rest.
After the fashion of most 3'oung people Aunt Miner-
va's children soon began to leave the old home nest to
make homes for themselves, and in due time the old-fash-
ioned cradles rocked to and fro where those young home-
builders built castles in the air while their ambitious feet
raced joyously along on the paths toward coveted
achievements.
Morty married Miss Nancy Nossaman, belonging to a
good family, old and most favorably known in Pel la and vi-
cinity . Sometime afterwards Morty bought and improved
a farm beyond Whitebreast Creek, just west of the Coal
Ridge neighborhood, near the site of the Ross water mills.
The dam and the old mill have long since disappeared. I
have a very distinct recollection of tliat old mill. Once
upon a time in midwinter when the snow was deep and
the temperature nearly down to zero, though the sleighing
was fine, my brother and I went to that old mill, taking
a sack of corn on a little hand sled, going all the way
from the Coalport bottom.
On the farm described above Morty and " Nan " lived
a good many eventful years, saw their children come and
go out from the old home. Sometime in the early "eigh-
ties" Morty sold this place and moved to Missouri,
where, after a few more years of strife and toil, they laid
down the working tools of life and went to their well-
earned rest.
Carroll, after a short period of adventure, seeking gold
out on the Pacific's golden shore, returned to Iowa and
L,
JOHN AND MRS. HEGWOOD.
«^Si^O
AUNT MINERVA REYNOLDS. 89
married a Miss Eliza Karr, belonging- to a family of pio-
neers wlio had settled on Whitebreast prairie in an early
day. Together these people built a home in Appanoose
County, near Centerville. During the war period they
sold their farm down there and bought the place and
built the liouse now owned by Mont Plegwood, beyond
Competine. Tiring of this place, they soon afterward
sold and returned to Appanoose County where they pur-
chased another home in which they lived for a number of
years, when they linally went to Smithfield, Illinois.
There with his boys lie engaged in mercantile and banking
business. After a few more years of striving these two
old pioneers, surrounded by a successful group of sons,
laid themselves down in eternal sleep.
Jane Reynolds married Tapley Hegwood, an early
comer in the community. The early part of the married
life of these people was spent largely in the neighborhood
near where the town of Harvey now stands. After the
war they bought the James Caldwell place, east of Com-
petine Creek and west of the old Parks place. On this
place tliey lived for a number of years, after which they
sold out and went to Missouri where, near Stansberry,
they bought their last home in this world. There after
playing a part in the many tragedies which lay in hiding
for so many, many people Jane after days and months of
suffering took her pains and griefs to God and laid tliem
down in the happy forgetfulness of glorious things.
"Tap " now lives in Oklahoma.
Leah F. Reynolds and John Hegwood were married
in 1849. He came from Illinois, down on the Sangamon.
He knew Lincoln ; saw him in liis plain, humble way
building for the greatest honor that can come to an
American citizen. In a little log house, close to the
road near the Baptist Church building, these young folks
lived and loved and toiled. On the hearth of this little
90 DOWN ON THE BIBGE
log cabin home six cliildren came and plaj^ed. In this
liappy pioneer home the cradle rocked to and fro: here
mother's nimble fingers sliaped and fasliioned and built
the warm woolen stockings, or witli thimble and needle
made garments large and small, the little lullaby songs
were sung, and the cradle rocked away until little won-
dering eyes were closed to the world so strange to tliem.
John Hegwood was a picture of physical manliood,
tall and straight and big. No day too cold, no day too
hot for him to walk a long and weary way to work and
toil for fifty cents a day for food for wife and child. But
one balmy day in April, 1861, the leaping, bounding
breezes, fragrant with the blossoms of the southland,
freighted wath the sweet notes of the southern song-birds,
came dulled with forebodings of war and bloodshed and
tears, and then men everywhere went out to fight their
brother man . It was when this husband and father put
on his country's blue the first shadow fell upon the
threshold of this home. Then that mother with her
little band of children took up the weary rounds of life
alone. IS"o boy could then fathom the heart burdens
which laid their blighting weight upon so many, many
homes during those cruel years of war ; then when every
bit of longed-for news came upon the footsteps of dread,
fearing a life had gone out on a bloody southern field.
The breaking of this home circle and the dread of
war's avenging hand was not the only burden that came
into that little home. One time when all was Oh 1 so still,
an angel came into that lonely, waiting home, and when
this strange visitor had quietly slipped away little Morris,
too, was gone. On downy angel wings his little soul was
borne aw ay into the spring and summer land above. Then
this lonely mother with the sweet promises of God wiped
away her tears and fought on and on in the world's fierce
strife.
A UNT MINER YA RE YNOLDS. 91
The years dragged along on weary feet until Appomat-
tox came and with it the missing link, and together again
tliese people took up the battle of life. They built a new
home farther towards the west ; nestled on the bosom of a
friendly grove it stood. The little log house with its
sweet memories and seasons of childish glee and mirth
and joyous shout, that little home with its strange scenes
of bitter grief, was torn down, and now it stands only
as a memory in the castle halls of the past. In that new
home other children came. The patter of little feet again
was heard. Then came the solemn marriage vows that
united two hearts as one, the wedding feast and the going
out to begin a strange, new life. The footprints of Time
left his tracks upon the brow of these people, and, though
it seemed that the harvest was only in the bloom, yet one
day that friendly grove in which the song-birds, morning,
noon and night warbled their songs of cheer to burdened
men, was clothed in the deep hush of silence, for a soul
had gone home. John Hegwood, the pioneer boy, the
soldier man, the true friend, tlie kindly husband, the
gentle father, the sick one's tender nurse, was dead.
Lutisha, the youngest daughter of Aunt Minerva,
married John DeMoss, a son of one of tlie early settlers
on Whitebreast Prairie, in the neighborhood of which
tliey lived for a number of years, and there this pioneer
girl died.
Morris L., or Lud, as we all knew him, first came in-
to my life away back yonder. I remember the occasion
very well, indeed. He with Welch's boys was jumping
on tliat little plat of ground near where the old potter
shop stood. He wore a red woolen shirt, so common in
those days. In jumping Lud was hard to beat. However,
I saw little of him until after his marriage to Adelaide
Adams, a daughter of Simeon Adams, a native of Ken-
tucky and an early settler on the Ridge. Following their
92 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
marriage these people lived west of the road between the
church and the new schoolhouse as they now stand.
Later Lud bought the land adjoining the Plegvvood prop-
erties on the west, and there they made a home.
Of the younger set perhaps I knew Lud better than
any one else. My father, being in the milling business,
employed Lud with his team for quite a long while. With
Kit, a sorrel with flaxen mane and tail, and Gray, Lud
hauled logs and lumber and shingles. With his team he
furnished the power for the shingle factory. With Kit
hitched to one sweep and Gray to the other and Lud in
the center with his whip, they went round and round and
the faster the team and Lud went round the faster the
shingles flew from the keen knife as it danced up and down.
My father with a long " prod " lifted the steaming blocks
from the great boiling vat, my brother held the blocks to
the fluttering knife, while I with nimble fingers threw
the shingles into bales and securely bound them down.
I would go with Lud to help him plow his corn so he
could return to my father's work. I would plow with
Kit and Lud with Gray, each with a single-shovel plow,
both horses wearing muzzles made of hickory bark to pre-
vent their taking an occasional bite of corn blades as they
toiled along under the blazing sun. Kit was a proud old
nag and extremely jealous of her rights. To toucli her
when she was doing her share at the doubletree meant a
balk that was fierce in its results. At least half the load
liad to be unloaded, then haul part of it to the top of the
hill, unload that and return for tlie remainder of the load.
I helped Lud during one of these stunts. I was about
eighteen years old, and was then afflicted with asthma
and consequently wheezed like a leaky steam chest. On
accDunt of this defect Lud called me " Downing, " the
na ne of an old wheezy hardware dealer in Pella at that
time.
A UNT MINER VA BE YNOLBS. 93
Liid always when working for my father ate his
dinners with our family, consequently he came very much
into our liome life. A strong- cord of friendship was
woven around the hearts of each one of us that has stood
the test of all the years. Later Lud bought the Uncle
Billy Amsberry place near the brow of the hill over-
looking the rich fertile valley of the Des Moines River.
There he made his home with Addie by his side; there his
children grew to manhood and womanhood; their grand-
children came to greet grandpa and grandma; there my
father's old friend lived while the weight of years bore
down upon his failing shoulders and dragged the lines of
time upon his brow; there this pioneer boy of nine and
Christian man of ripe old age served his God and loved
his fellowmen; there his children watched while he took
a last fond, lingering look upon the things of earth and
those he loved so well, and when his light had gone out
here they knew he had only stopped just over the way
where no earthly day can be so full of sunshine and joy
and rest.
To-night my heart is sorely bruised while I pay a trib-
ute not to mine own alone but to my father's old friend.
While I look through tears to that little company down
there gathered round the open door through wliich this
husband, father, brother and friend has entered into his
eternal rest, how glad I am to know that near together in
the same church yard my father and his friend have gone
to a house purer and brighter and cleaner than the snow
that so gently caresses their silent homes.
John, the youngest of this pioneer family, I saw very
little of until his return from the war. He was tall and
very slender. We knew him as "Long John. " But I never
could quite make him out as tall as a certain fellow^ down
there would have him, who said he reminded him of a
' ' tall oak, twenty feet without a limb, knot or wood-
94 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
pecker hole." Not long- after his return from the army
John married Sarah Thompson, daughter of Garrison
Tliompson, an early settler in that community. John
was rather crafty in a business way, and could get along
in the world where anybody else could. He was kind of
heart, but withal queer and odd. He would fight with-
out coaxing", yet never went about with a chip on his
shoulder. He sold his land adjoining my father's place
and went to Nebraska and afterwards made liis home in
Oklahoma, where a short time ago he fell a victim of
heart trouble, and while away from home and wife and
children his life went out.
To-night I am filled with sad recollections of the many
changes that have come down there while these things
have been making history. Father, Lud's friend, has
long since gone down to his grave. Of the three little
tow-headed brothers who played about the old shingle
mill, the story of their lives can only be brief and sad.
One lives on Nevada's silver crest, one wandered away
and is lost to human speech, the other drifted away from
his drum, his little gnn and the toys I delighted to buy,
and at last lay down with the dreamless dead overlooking
the Golden Gate through which great ships go out on the
Paciric's tumbling waves. Mother, the best and truest
friend I ever had, sleeps in the gold and silver crested
city of Helena, Montana, where no tear of love can ever
fall upon her quiet home, nor friendly hand caress the
spot where her dear dust lies hid from the gazing, won-
dering world. Ah I Even now it seems I can hear her
sing those lullaby songs so soft and low .
No songs that come to me in dreams
In after years can bring
The same sweet memories as those
My mother used to sing.
A VNT MIXER VA RE YXOLDS. 95
And in those dreams I see her face
And catch the g"lad, sweet smile
Tliat drew my boyish love to her,
So free from sin or g"\ule.
I see her rocking- to and fro,
Her voice so sweet and low ;
In melodv the angels chant
The songs of long ago.
When evening's shades were gathering.
And shadows long would creep,
'Twas 'Hush, My child, lie still and slumber I'
Gently lulled me off to sleep.
And with these melodies I see
The old home fireside.
With mother seated in lier chair,
Before the hearth so wide.
But sweeter yet is borne to me.
As shadows dance and leap.
Those old-time songs my mother sang,
To lull me off to sleep.
In going back into memory-land I can but see what
dreadful havoc the great reaper has wrought on the lives
of the goodly men and women who laid the foundation
for the liomes down there. Of all that little company of
pioneers away back in the "forties" only Mrs. John Heg-
wood remains, standing as a living witness of God's good-
ness. She stands away up on the towering mountain top
of life, a gracious, kindly sheaf of ripened grain. Every
day she lifts her heart to God in humble prayer. Yv'ith-
out God and her children she might indeed cry out in her
loneliness. The reward she so richly deserves will some
sweet day be hers.
I now return to the heroine of this simple story,
Aunt Minerva Reynolds. She was robbed of her health
and strength for many weary, weary years, yet the force
98 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
of her guiding hand was ever felt and her wise counse
worked for good in tliat pioneer family of young men and
young women. Ah I slie was truly a "mother in Israel."
I never knew her when the blush of health rested upon
her cheek. Though bowed down with the hardships
incident to pioneer life and broken health, she was a
woman of high ideals and most noble purposes. Though
confined to her bed for many weary, tired months, her
time went on and on until nearly ninety years had heaped
upon her frail shoulders the burden of a long and useful
life ere she went home.
Some say that God employ's the accumulated \'ears
of pain of a suffering one to serve a purpose all his own.
I do not believe it. But I do believe that the Christian
forebearance, fortitude and patience of that good woman,
pained and tired though she was, comes to every one who
knew her, fragrant with beautiful lessons of patience, a
glorious example of submission. Hers was a very beauti-
ful old age, after all.
CHAPTER X
THE BOYS AND GIRLS OF THE RIDGE, AXD THE
SCENES OF BYGONE DAYS
I do not feel that I can close these reminiscences of
the old days down on the Ridge without taking- up the
thread of events and incidents touching more fully the
boyhood and girlhood stages in the lives of the boys and
girls of the period in which the plot of my story of the
olden time is laid.
I trust that I shall be pardoned when I say that even
the first paragraph of what I hope to tell you about the
scenes and incidents of those far-a^^ ay days threatens to
throw open the floodgates of grief, even in view of the
fact that most of the incidents connected with the early
life of the young people of the time that appeals to us so
forcibly now was full of joy and sunshine, notwithstand-
ing so many and many of us did not know it but insisted
on looking away through the fog of coming days and years,
which to our young lives seemed to stand between us and
the bright, golden goal of peace, contentment and delight.
I can not, neither would I if I could, prevent a train
of saddened thoughts as they come to me breaking over the
horizon of the good old days long gone. Though that old
homeland which furnished shelter and food and friends to
my parents in the noonday of their lives: there, where
children came, and young men went out into the world
to meet the enemy alone; there, where the sister and
98 Bowls'^ ON THE RIDGE
sweet, confiding companion of m\^ boy life one sad day in
Aiig-ust more than thirty years ago, wliile I was wander-
ing in strange and distant lands, just quietly and peace-
fully walked over the border-land of the world, which had
been to her so full of suffering and pain, into the ever-
blooming fields of heaven, and now only a modest marble
slab remains down there to tell the story of her short
life : though it was written in the book of fate that my
light in this old world's battles should be made in otlier
fields: though for all the years that make up a generation
of men, my home and shelter and joy, and my share of
the world's grief has been mine in another land:— yet,
after all, the hardships of my boy life, the mills of pov-
erty my parents trod in the early days, the graves of my
people down there, make tender and soft my very heart;
and though it may be many a day, if ever, I shall see
again those old roads and the dim outlines of the paths
over which I used to run and leap and play when a boy,
yet I am bound to that old homeland by ties too sacred
to be broken.
If, in this simple story of those who lived and loved
and labored and played in the days back there, I shall
refer briefly to a few of my personal experiences, I know I
shall be forgiven by j^ou. I have not whispered into your
ears this little story of other days and years, calling you
and me over into that dear old memory-land, to gain
notoriety. I would much rather live the simple, quiet
life. I would rather hide m.yself under some peaceful,
blooming bower, fragrant with the perfume of home,
sweet home, and revel in the tranquil stream of domestic
bliss than to wear the robes of office or mingle in the
mad race for gold, stabbing the innocent and even for-
getting the whiteness of tlie winding sheet, if only I
could win. I would rather be a little daisy, blooming
down in some quiet, peacefull, shady nook where the
goldan sunbeams could steal in and kiss from my cheek
THE BOYS AXB GIRLS. 99
the teardrops of the morning-, and listen to the music of
xhe singing birds and catch the refrain of true and honest
praise from the hps of tlie lowly woodman as he passes
by, than to be an American Beauty rose, blooming in a
public flower garden where the multitude pass by to
flatter, and then be plucked and my beauty laid low in
places of sin and shame. What I shall say of myself was
pretty much the experience of most of the boys who began
life with me, down on the Ridge.
I began to labor early in the game of life ; in fact,
I began to work before I had really commenced to play.
All the years of my life since have been a ceaseless round
of toil. The farm, the shop, the woods, the railroad sec-
tion, down in the deep mines digging "dusky diamonds"
and in the sunless office my life battles have been
fought. I have not grown rich, nor did I care to. I
have toiled too hard in this old world to finish up trying
to wiggle through a needle's eye to gain entrance into
the better world above. I only count it fortunate for
myself that I had to work. God intended that men
should labor when he said, "By the sweat of thy brow
shalt thou eat bread. " Though sometimes my bread has
been eaten at a fearful cost of sweat, yet the bread was
so much sweeter. A loafer is not only a poor excuse in
the economy of God's great plan, but he is a nuisance
everywhere in the paths of commerce and trade and labor.
When only eight years old I engaged to a Mrs.
Davenport, w^ho lived near by in a small field opened up
in the deep woods, to assist in making sorghum, my
recompense being a quart of the product per day, worth
probably ten cents. I remember how, when ten years old,
I gathered wild blackberries and carried them to Knox-
ville, where I sold them, and with the receipts bought a
straw hat to wear to Sunday school, \\hich, with a linen
coat and pants my mother made and the pair of shoes I
376355A
100 DOW^' ON THE EIDGE
wore into this world, completed my toilet. Really, when
I walked into the little old schoolhouse the next day 1 was
embarrassed. I thought I was the envy of all the boys.
But one of the happiest days 1 think I ever saw was
one bright winter day; the snow was deep, the sunshine
was so cheerful that all nature was glad. The plump
little quail was abroad in the land. Fortunately I was
prepared for the occasion, having had a trap already
made and set, so when the old sun had started on its
journey over the hill, down by the old "snake den," I
placed my pants down in my red-topped copper-toed boots
and waded the deep snow out to the back of the Held to
see how fortune had shuffled the cards, when to my
supreme delight I found the old figure-four triggers had
played fair tor me. There were fifteen birds in my trap,
and one trying to get in ; this lone bird, finding he could
not secure passage on that boat, and seeing me, made his
escape into the hill country.
The next day 1 carried my fifteen quails through the
snow to Knoxville, seven miles away, where I sold them
and with the proceeds bought a copy of McGuffey's
reader, and walked back home against a cold north wind,
where 1 arrived about sundown, tired, hungry and cold.
A short time in front of the blazing logs in the old fire-
place, where, turning around and around brought warmth
and cheer, then a good hot supper,— old-fashioned country
sausage, nice, sweet corn-bread and milk that would
make a city kid green with envy, and I was ready to
take up my new reader, and, with my smaller brothers
and little sister sitting close beside, aided by the light of
a tallow candle my mother with her tired hands had
moulded in the old tin mould, I read :
The lark is up to meet the sun.
The bee is on the wing :
The ant its labor has begun,
The woods with music ring.
THE BOYS AND GIRLS, 101
It has been many and many a day since I saw that
little reader, but the picture illustrating- the lesson I can
see now away back through all the years. It showed the
fields, the flowers and the happy, singing birds in the tree
and on the wing ; it showed a youth in the morning time
of life standing in the midst of the beautiful handi-
work of God. Out over a stretch of earth's fair landscape,
the sun with its myriad streaks of light was breaking
over the horizon and chasing away the stars.
It was down there on tlie Ridge where we boys and
girls learned the first lessons in love, laughter and song,
and read the first chapter in the world's great book of
tragedies. There we boys "broke " the yearling steers
to work in bow and yoke, and performed some of the most
wonderful teaming feats. There we boys, and girls, too,
dropped and covered and hoed the corn, buoyed up and
encouraged by the promise that when our work was done
those of us boys who were faithful might go to the old
" swimming hole " or go a-fishing, and the girls could each
have a new hair ribbon or sun-bonnet.
Down there we bound the sheaves of golden grain
beneath the harvest sun and at noon time nodded in the
shade to the tune of the harvest fly. And in the summer
twilight, while the birds were singing their retiring songs
and the old whip-poor-will was awakening the echoes in the
deep, dark woods, these same boys and girls, out under the
shade of the old apple tree, tied up hearts with a golden
thread drawn out on the spindle of love in old Cupid's
mill, where hearts flutter and beat while the spindles go
round and round. Of these sheaves so delicately bound
down there some were tied with the fickle ribbon of sport to
be untied before the spreading of another net ; some have
been loosened down by the water's edge, down by the shore
of that ever-rolling river none can see and live. Of the
ungrateful hands that unbound some of these life sheaves
some were stained with the heart's red blood and some
102 . J>OTFiY OJS' THE RIDGE
could not be seen, for grief had blinded the eyes of sorrow-
ing souls with tears: while one here and there went to
live with God.
It was there we saw the first railroad train, after the
old D. M. V. R. R. had stretched its long- streaks of rust
into Pel la, which town at once became the Mecca for
commerce far and near. The trains on that road then
probably made twelve or fifteen miles an hour, but to our
youthful imagination they simply flew like a wild pigeon
through the air. We boys would gladly have paid a dollar
a mile, had we had it, for a ride in one of those old
coaches which now would not be good enough for a
"smoker," but I heard an old lady say : " I wouldn't
attempt a ride in one of them cars for anything, because
I know I would be seasick. "
It was in Pellawe boys first had the exquisite pleasure
of seeing a show. How we did hang around that lone
elephant, and wonder why it was he had two tails, and
laugh right out every time he stuck one of them in his
mouth ! We were simply amazed at the monkeys, and
the girl in a great bunch of short skirts standing on one
big toe and the other foot pointing toward heaven, palm
outward, while the horse on which slie stood went gallop-
ing around and around, was a wonder to us. I could not
understand how she could stick to that horse, just what
mysterious power held heron, with only her toe touching,
while I, astride and with both hands firmly twisted into
his mane, would always fall off every time a horse went
out of a walk. But when the old clown came out with
his trick donkey hitched to a little cart and went through
a few stunts, we just simply went wild, and the Sunday
school lesson for the following Sunday all went glimmer-
ing in the circus ring.
Following that show someof us boys went immediately
into training. We tried somersaults backward and
THE BOYS AND GIRLS. 103
forward ; we erected a trapeze on a horizontal limb down
in a shady, secluded spot, and performed wonderful feats
on that. We made a hard fight and lost.
Some of us never missed a show. How w^e got the
price I do not know. We usually walked to town, carried
water to get to see the side grafts, and paid our way into
the big show. For dinner we usually filled up on dried
herring, crackers and water from the town pump. We
walked home in the evening, or begged a ride from some
farmer who had taken "Liza Jane" and all the children,
"just to see the animals," and ''blowed himself" for
two dollars and six-bits, collected for eggs his wife
had sold.
But I want to tell you now that in after years, when
riper, bolder days had come and fortune had shed her
smile upon us broad and deep, we boys hitched up to th
old farm wagon and with spring seats or boards for seats
went to Knoxville, saw the show and all the side grafts,
filled our girls up on crackers and cheese, candy and red
lemonade, stayed late and drove home in the night, drove
slow, and drove the fartherest way around, and had the
girls do the diiving because they liked to I Practice iiad
made some of these girls very proficient in the art.
My friends, seriously speaking our advantages were
very meagre. However, in most of the girls and boys
down there was an inherent love for music, for things
beautiful. How unfortunate, indeed, that some of them
couldn't have postponed their beginning in life until a
later period, so as to have enjoyed the privileges of to-day !
O how much faster and farther would they have marched
up the hill of life ! But this I know, we made the most
we could of the advantages, circumstances and oppor-
tunities the day and conditions then afforded. 1 lay
down tliis challenge, that no community in Iowa has
given to the world more professional men, more business
104 DOWN ON THE BIBGE
men, more successful farmers and teachers, more honest,
Christian people or better wives or mothers or mothers-in-
law than has that old neighborhood, down on the Ridge.
In a conversation with L. M. Martin one time on this
subject, he remarked: "Blood will tell." Now, I know
that the good old blood our pioneer fathers and mothers
brought from "Old Virginia" in the long ago was good,
blue blood.
I said awhile ago that love for music was inborn
in the most of the girls and boys down there, but
their opportunities for cultivating these faculties were
very limited. These musical instincts were natural,
because the only music the neighborhood afforded was the
song of the birds in the springtime and the awful squeak
of the old wooden cane mill in sorghum time : or, when
some old tiddler hauled down his fiddle and bow and gave
us "Money Musk," "The Arkansas Traveler," or "Pat
Mulligan's Wedding." There was not much dancing
down there unless we could dance these same pieces or
something else without the tiddle. Dancing was all
right, but the tiddle was off. If we could find some one,
and I was usually "it," who could whistle
Charlie, he's a good-natured lad ;
Charlie, he's a dandy ;
Charlie, he will use you well.
And treat you on good candy ;
or The Girl I Left Behind Me." A cotillion would be
made up at once and then it was :
O, the merry swings and whirls.
Of the happy boys and girls.
In the good old cotillion long ago.
O, they danced the Highland tling,
And they cut the pigeon wing,
To the music of the whistler long ago.
THE BOYS AND GIRLS. 105
It was " Swing your partners, and all promenade I" while
the whistler kept up his whistling :
If you love me as I love you
We'll have no time to tarry :
But will have the old folks fixing around
For you and me to marry.
I suspect, I know, some of them did get married and
many a " Susie" has not known the taste of candy since.
Some men think their wives' tastes pass through a sudden
and lasting change immediately following the wedding
ceremony.
Dancers are expected to pay the fiddler, but these
being whistling dances the whistler got nothing but dry
cracked lips ; and, besides, it took the balance of the night
to reduce the pucker in liis whistle.
The first organ we young folks ever saw was a little
bit of a dinky thing not much larger than a cracker box
which was brought into the neighborhood by one Dan
Van Ness, a music teacher from Eddyville, who had
secured a class on the Ridge who were anxious to cul-
tivate their musical talent. He brought with him his
daughter who played, and, besides, being pretty, we
thought she could sing. Anyway, every time she played
and sang we thought we were in heaven ajid were being
entertained by one of God's angels playing on a heavenly
instrument. There was, then, during the course of these
lessons, and for a long time afterwards, such a wave of
music as has never been equaled in any rural community
in this fair land of Iowa.
Show me the community where its young people come
together to sing and laugh and drive the clouds and tears
away, and I will show you a people whose ideals are
above and beyond the reach of the gross and sordid
things. The sweet strains of music have moved and
106 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
melted multitudes into tears. By its sweet notes tired
and weary armies have been marshalled into battle array.
Mus^'c will soften where language will fail us;
Feelings long buried 'twill often restore.
Don't you know that while we applaud the singer of
to-day and the musician who lets his hair grow a foot and
a half long, their singing or their playing does not appeal
to us like the music away back yonder ?
Oh I give me the old songs, the kind we used to sing ;
When the dew was on the flower and the bee was on
the wing.
O, say ! Don't ydu recollect :
Them ol' sweet hymns that used to float so high
'Peared like they shook the winders in the ever-
last in' sky ;
Fer, when we heard the preacher say : "Some brother
pitch the tune ! "
We alius knowed " Amazin' Grace" was comin'
mighty soon.
Then somehow or other the songs of to-day do not go
down into the heart like the old songs : not like the old
songs we heard at mother's knee before the evening prayer
^vas said ; not like the old songs our parents sung in the
early evening twilight, the sweet mellowing cadences of
which mounted round after round the mystic ladder that
reaches into the highlands of heaven. Don't you, my dear
friends, this very night, remember the good old songs we
used to sing away back on the old home plaj'ground ?
King William was King James' son,
And from a royal race he sprung.
How we bowed to the east and bowed to the west,
and then picked out the girl we loved the best ! And
while we kept going around in youthful bliss we knelt
beside a lassie there and stole the first sweet kiss. I'd
THE BOYS AND GIRLS. 107
like to sing " King William " now just like we used to sing-,
when life was like a primrose just bursting- into spring-.
Somehow I like those old song-s. Don't you ?
" The Old Elm Tree," " The Maple on the Hill,"
" Some Twenty Years Ag-o, Tom," and " Dear Old
Whip-poor-will ; "
" A Starry Night for a Ramble, " " The Miller and
His Mill."
"Mollie Darling" and "The Poor House Over the
Hill."
O my friends of the long ago, wherever you may be
this night, I tell it to you again and again, that as I look
back upon the scenes of my early recollections down there
in the old homeland I am softened and subdued into a
sweet, pensive sorrow which only the happiest and holiest
associations of bygone years can call into being. There
are times in my life and in yours, no doubt, when grief lies
heaviest on the soul, when memory weeps, when gather-
ing clouds of mournful melancholy pour out their floods
and drown our very hearts in tears.
O beautiful isle of memory, lighted by the morning
star of life, where roses bloom by the wayside, where the
robins sing among the cherry blossoms, where the old
river ripples along toward the sea I There are echoes of
songs that are sung no more, tender words spoken by lips
that are dust now, blessings from dear and kindly hearts
that are still ; there's a useless cradle and a broken doll,
a sunny tress and an empty garment carefully and tear-
fully folded and laid away; there's a lock of silver hair
and anunforgotten prayer : a mother and father, a brother
or sister, a friend of my boy life is sleeping in that
return less land.
There are few people who do not look back with more
or less pleasure upon the days of their childhood. Those
108 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
days may have been marked by poverty, by hardships, by
many privations, but childhood and youth care nothing
for these thing-s. There was a young life looking out
upon a world that was new and full of wonder; the great,
round, red sun sinking to his rest beyond the western
hills, the full or crescent moon, the glittering stars shin-
ing down from their lofty thrones, the cloud, the tempest,
the green grass and beautiful flowers, all living things —
these tilled our young lives down there with awe or glad-
ness. And then there was the trust of childhood which
lends to the young life its chief and most valued charm.
There are the loves of youth- time which come back to us
like perfume of fragrant flowers across the gulf of depart-
ed years. Those early loves may be broken, but scarcely,
if ever, entirely forgotten. Not many but think of their
sweetheart lassie or boy lover away back in the morning
of life, when every day was like the morning sunshine,
while they day by day builded castles in the air. All these
things make boyhood and girlhood beautiful as we look
upon it in the deepening twilight of memory.
And yet in spite of tlie charms that attended us in
the faded past few of us would be willing to go back and
begin our lives at the cradle and live them over again.
Too well we know the thorns that infest life's pathway
and the bitterness and grief and tears that are mingled in
the cup of joy. It was beautiful, indeed, to have been a
girl or boy once and to have had the experience of youth-
time, but we do not care to purchase this blessedness again
at the price of traveling once more life's rough and
thorny way.
CHAPTER XI
THE AVELCH AND DAVENPORT FAMILIES. PROMINENT
FIGURES IN PIONEER LIFE
Among the early settlers of the Ridge community I
am quite sure it would be of interest to a great many of
my friendly readers to bring out of the shadows of the past
the Welch family, who were a part of the pioneer life
down on Coalport bottom. These people came originally
from North Carolina. They settled near the west bank
of the Des Moines River. Being in the midst of a mighty
forest of magnificent timber they soon erected a saw mill
and began the manufacturing of lumber, a thing of neces-
sity then to the many newcomers.
The frame of the saw mill building was of massive
square timbers mortised and pinned after the fashion of
the times. It had an upper and a lower story. Into the
upper story the logs were drawn on a heavy carriage run
on an incline of trestle work, the carriage being drawn by
the aid of a large rope and windlass. The method of saw-
ing lumber in those days would seem very unique compared
with our modern methods, by which many thousands
of feet of lumber are cut in a day. This old saw
was called a ' ' Muley." It looked very much like a large
cross-cut saw, worked straight up and down through the
log, and each and every board that fell from the surface
of the slowly-creeping timber told the story of a long and
tedious trip against the gnawing teeth of that old saw.
110 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
A little later a circular saw and proper machinery were
purchased and installed down on the ground floor, and a
set of millstones with hopper and spout and all the
necessary equipment for grinding corn and a kind of a
grind at wheat was put in place on the upper floor. To
this mill many of the pioneers brought their corn, carry-
ing it on horseback. In those days '*corn pone" and
" pioneers " were synonymous terms, and sometimes it was
hominy instead of corn pone.
I want to tell you right now, you latter-day saints and
sinners, 3^ou do not know what real life is unless three
times a day, day after day, you have sat down in front of
a plate loaded down with corn pones, made of meal,
a little salt and lard and perhaps a goodly supply of old-
fashioned saleratus. A real corn dodger is from four to
eight inches long, made something like a big goose egg,
then flattened down a little on the terrestial and celestial
sides, with deep impressions of the Angers therein, baked
in a heavy skillet or oven placed on a bed of coals and
covered with a heavy iron lid well heaped with the same
kind of fuel. These big brown boys taken out of the
skillet real hot and pulverized in g'ood rich milk and eaten
from an iron spoon produced the type of soldiers whose
physiques and endurance excited the admiration of
General Sherman, who, during the civil war when review-
ing a long line of western men, asked the colonel of his
regiment, ' ' Where did you get that flne bunch of men?"
the colonel said : ' ' Raised them out west on corn dodgers
and beans." But the youngster of this day and age must
have "cream puffs and pie and puddin'. As a matter of
fact, if one of the boys back there had landed on a fellow
like these, in just one minute there would not have been
enough left of him to make a square meal for a buffalo
gnat.
William Welch built, of native lumber, what for that
period was a very large and commodious home into which
TWO PIONEEE FAMILIES. Ill
Betsy and the boys and g"irls, of whom there were a goodly
number, went and set up the family altar. Just west
of this new house was a small log shanty about 10x10
feet in dimensions. It was entered by one small door and
lighted by one little pinched-up window of four panes,
8x10 inches, and in one end was a fireplace. In this
shanty lived Joe Kinney, reputed to be the laziest man
living, without the aid or consent of any other man on
earth. This man, if I may be allowed to call him such,
placed his bed alongside of the north wall with the bed
near the chimney. In the morning his wife would get
up and start the fire and old Joe would reach for his long-
stemmed pipe, load it up with long green, plunge it into
the red hot coals under the forestick, light it and lie there
and smoke like a steamboat.
On the north side of the Welch home was a long
narrow room in which were groceries, minus all the
modern health foods, one pound of which is guaranteed
to contain more actual nourishment than a ten-pound cut
of the best beef put on the market by the biggest beef
trust i)\ America. The merchandise kept in this little
room was shipped by boat from Keokuk. The boat land-
ing was at theendof " Western Avenue," which extended
from the Day Everett place on the west to ''River Street,"
fronting the waters of the classic Des iSIoines. Here
the ' ' Des Moines Belle," the ' ' Ad. Hines " and " Clara
Hines " and other floating palaces used to head in on their
way to Fort Des Moines.
This Welch house was originally intended for a large
merchantile stock, but, owing to the fact that of the small
number of people living in the community, nearly if not
quite all got their clothing from the sheep's back and
reveled in such substantial luxuries as corn dodgers and
bacon, Uncle Billy Welch was wise enough to confine his
stock largely to salt, saleratus and chewing tobacco. As
a matter of fact the tobacco trade was very dull, because
112 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
most of the men ( and some of the women ) chewed and
smoked long- green, while as to nails they went like tar
through a very small gimlet hole on a cold day in January,
for most of these pioneers when they wished to fasten a
rail or pole to a post " withed " it on with a young hickory
sprout twisted until it was as pliable as rope. So, in ad-
dition to the nail trade, the rope business was also para-
lyzed. He, however, kept a small roll of rope in stock for
the vigilance committee organized to hang horse thieves,
but to the best of my knowledge the only thing ever stolen
in that pioneer neighborhood was a ham of meat, and I
always had serious doubts about that little transaction.
The party missing the ham maintained from the very
beginning that he knew the color of the hair of the man
who got the ham by the size of his tracks left on the smoke-
house floor. That statement may have been true; but if
the supposed man who purloined that ham was hungry he
was certainly entitled to something to eat, because he that
hath shall have it taken away from him, and he tliat hath
not shall get all he can.
Uncle Billy Welch and his family were the most well-
to-do people in the entire community, and withall very
fine people. They were kind and thoughtful and helpful
to the poor, struggling- along trying to get a toehold in the
business activities of the county, which, owing to the
lack of shipping facilities, afforded no market for farm
products. Hence the farming activities of the neighbor-
hood were at an exceedingly low ebb. The farmers raised
just simply enough to afford food for themselves and for
their stock, which was few in number, so to get in all the
time they hunted deer and " coOns" and employed the
extra days shaking with ague. Why, I have seen people
down there trying their level best to keep from freezing
to death in the merry month of August.
TWO PIONEEB FAMILIES. 113
" In dog days," when every dog- has his day, I have
seen the ague victims go to bed about ten o'clock a.m.,
heard them call for all the bed clothes in the house, and
finish up vvath a feather bed on top, weighted down with
chairs and benches and three-legged stools, and even then
the old fashioned bed rattled like a "horse fiddle." When
the freezing frenzy had subsided the very fires of hades
seemed to be let loose and the suffering victim could drink
the river dry. Some of these poor pioneers down there
had the ague so long and so severely they grew so thin
that in these shaking seizures you could hear their ribs
rattle, while some carried oil cans to oil their knee joints.
In one family down there a young man had an annual chill
which lasted from New Year's Day until the week after
Christmas. If one should meet his father and enquire
after the health of the family he would invariably say,
" Oh, they're all well except Joe, and he has the damned
agie."
A way back there many of the pioneer fathers went to
Keokuk or Burlington to mill, or pounded their corn into
meal on a flat rock, or else boiled the corn until it was
soft and ate it like a cow. Aunt Betsy Welch used to
tell how over in Illinois they used to go many miles to
the mill and returning would bring back flour, shorts,
bran and corn meal. She said they always ate the best
first and finally wound up on bran. There came a time,
however, when those people lived on the fat of the land.
During the war period they purchased the L. N. Ams-
berry place on the hill. Sometime prior to this they
had, together with Jonas Leiter, bought and installed
a new and modern mill plant near where Joe Neely now
lives. Mr. Leiter soon after retired from the business
and went back to Pella, leaving the mill in full
control of the Welch families, then including Uncle
Johnnie Welch, a brother of William, and his boys. In
114 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
addition to the lumber productions they also made shingles
for both of which there had sprung up a ready demand
that continued until the advent of the railroad into Pella,
bringing the pine products from the great pineries of the
north .
In those days among the luxuries that were scarce,
and one which most boys crave, were nice big red apples.
Uncle Billy Welch, as was his custom, would send teams
down into Jefferson and Henry counties and bring back a
wagon load or two for the winter's use. Aunt Betsj'',
knowing the appetite of the average boy, never forgot to
give me a bountiful supply when I happened around, and
I never forgot to happen around good and plenty. By
reason of these little kindnesses on the part of Aunt Betsy
a few of the boys soon acquired a keen relish for that
kind of fruit.
In the course of time Uncle Jack Reynolds had suc-
ceeded in developing the only bearing orchard in that
community. Uncle Jack had also cultivated a very fine
taste for apples, and besides was very jealous of his rights.
It was said he enjoyed the game of taste or smell; that is,
he would select a very fine apple and was kind enough to
let the boys do the smell act while he would do the eating.
We boys submitted to this thing until we became raving
anarchists, so laying aside our moral rectitude, if we ever
had any of that article on hand, a few of us many a night
dragged ourselves on our bellies for more than two
hundred yards to a certain tree previously located, where
we proceeded to fill up on apples and carry some away for
future use. These we hid in the deep woods, buried with
leaves alongside of a log. Then when grim old winter had
come and covered up all the roses of June, when those
friendly old apple trees seemed so firmly held in the em-
brace of the old winter king that the blossoms 3,nd fruit
and song birds would never come again, we knew where
the old apple hole was.
TWO PIONEER FAMILIES. 115
Down in the orchard Uncle Jack would bury the
tempting fruit and leave a small opening through which
he could thrust his arm and hook out the fruit. This
opening he kept tilled with straw, and over all he piled
the pure white snow. We boj^s, like the pretty little
squirrel who, on a bright winter day ventures from his
tiny home in the heart of a big old oak and goes straight
to a nut hidden beneath the snow, knew where the old
apple hole with its juicy treasure was located, all covered
with the frozen tears of heaven, down there under the
leafless branches of an old apple tree. There with the aid
of a rod from the end-gate of a wagon, pointed for that
purpose, we quietly pulled those juicy old fellows from
their hiding place, one by one, and nobody saw us but
God and the man in the moon .
I want to say to you that there was one person down
there we boys would not have taken one single apple from
if they had been piled high in the road, and that was
good old Aunt Betsy AVelch. Uncle Billy Welch's family
were actively devoted to the things that furnish uplift to
human life; they catered to the aesthetic, the beautiful
things dedicated by the Creator for our use. They were
not satistied like so many are with any old thing, but be-
lieved that it was part of God's plan that his children
should strive. for the very best of everything; that they
should by honest methods lay hold of everything which
would add beauty to life and home, that would appeal to
higher ideals, and stimulate to higher thoughts and
greater achievements.
God himself set the pace and gave his approval to the
attainment of the best and most beautiful things of a
material kind that enhance pleasure, increase innocent
enjoyment, and lend a refreshing charm to all. He
never made anything that was not beautiful . Everything
shows that the touch of the brush was in the hands of
116 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
a skilful artist. The beautiful plumage with which he
clothes the singing- bird, whose sweet morning songs bring
so much of cheer, the beautiful flowers with their many-
tinted colorings and their many varieties of fragrance
growing all along man's pathway, the buds and blossoms
and fruits, the green fields of waving grain, the golden
harvests, the rosebud kissed by the morning sunbeam,
t^he blade of grass bearing upon its tender tip the silent
tears of night nodding a kindly welcome to the morning
sunshine— all, all appeal to us for the best we can give to
society of beautiful things, of kindly surroundings, of all
the material things which add to the pleasure and happi-
ness of mankind and enlarge and expand the aesthetic sense.
God furnished in detail the plan and sent the widow's
son, whose skilful hands beautified and adorned the first
temple erected to him as a place of worship. All of God's
"blueprints" tell of beautiful things. He emphasized
his disapproval of things distasteful when he said : " Thou
Shalt not plow with an ox and an ass." He knew that a
team of that character could plow, but he also knew that
a team of that kind would not be attractive. He knew
just what sort of a man would drive a team of that kind.
Then why should man be supremely contented with the
things which bring no awakening response for better
things, for the things which cultivate and enlarge the
mind and that fit the soul as a living stone for that temple
on high, that city whose very streets are said to be paved
with gold ?— a figurative illustration of things beautiful.
Our places erected for worship should be the very best we
can do for God. Think of the dazzling beauty of the
temple on Mount Moriah, whose magnificence and glory
came from God's own hand.
The Welch family were called proud because they
provided themselves with everything within their reach
which God had made for man's comfort. They were not
TWO PIOXEEB FAMILIES. 117
proud, they were not aristocratic. Tiieir hearts were
large and warm and kind, and their generous hands were
helpful in time of need. From their generous hands the
thirsty had drink, the hungry food, the sick their cheer-
ful presence. I speak feelingly of these people. It was
they who administered these things to my own people
away back there when cruel adversity wove hearts into
the warp and woof of a common sympathy; when not the
glitter of gold, nor hunger for popularity, nor strife for
place and power, prompted any man or woman to be
kind and gentle and good and true, but where the golden
rule was the only law, and the God of our fathers the only
God.
When profit no longer hovered over the operations of
that old mill the Welch family sold their home on the
hill and the old mill down in the valley and moved to
Pella, from which place Uncle Billy and Aunt Betsy long
since went over into that dreamless land. Their children
drifted around and around in the whirlpool of life's
tragedies, one here, another there. The old mill in its
declining state passed into other hands, but like men,
whose destinies are recorded on the page which tells of
decay, it, too, passed away. The cheering difference be-
tween the passing of this old mill, whose iron and steel
and wood crumbled a^^ay and sought shelter in the
friendly bosom of old Mother Earth and the old pioneer
fathers and mothers, who down there were awakened
from slumber in the early morning by the shrill
whistle of the mill calling mankind from refreshment
to labor, is the one beautiful thought that though
their flesh and bone went back to dust there was with in
a supreme intelligence, something called the soul, so full
of God and life that it can never, never die.
In these reminiscences I would not for many, many
reasons forget the Widow Davenport. This good old
woman and her children, of whom there was a goodly
118 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
number, lived down there in the strenuous daj^s of the
early fifties. Politicall}' she just suited my father, and
socially she came up to my measure. If I had acquired
the smoking habit Mrs. Davenport and I should certainly
have had a joyous time. She smoked long green and kept
it in a little cloth bag with a puckering string around the
top. This she kept hanging on the back post of an old-
fashion high splint-bottomed chair. She smoked only
once a day, and that v^as from "rosy morn until dewy
eve." Once I tried to get into her class by learning the
soothing habit of indulging in the pipe. My father also
smoked, so one day when he and mother had gone to church
out in the old schoolhouse mentioned so often in these
reminiscences, I proceeded to load up the fragrant old
thing, and soon the blue rings were chasing each other
on their way to the god of smoke. I simply reveled in
blissful ignorance of coming events. Soon my revelry was
hushed by the most hideous stomach-tearing spasms ever
visited upon a sinner here below. Then I learned early
in life that the world is round, for it simply went over
and over and me with it. I was under the impression I
was going to die, feeling all the while I would rather be
dead than endure that unholy existence long.
In due time my parents returned from church to find
me crucified, pierced in both hands and feet by my folly.
Great beads of cold sweat stood on my brow, while my
stomach felt like it was going up in the air like a kite.
My mother knelt down beside me and. with that kind,
sweet symphathy which only a mother can feel, placed her
tired hand on my clammy brow and begged me to show
her my tongue, which, though cold and palsied, I finally
succeeded in shooting through my teeth for her inspec-
tion. In her gentle, kindly way she asked me where I
felt the worst, when I raised my feeble hand and gently
laid it on my poor revolving stomach. She then diagnosed
the case, and I heard her say to my father, "Alfred has
TJVO PIOXEER FAMILIES. 119
eaten too many plums." I let it go at that. Through all
the remaining years of their toilsome lives'I held fast to
my secret.
I was then a little past eight years old, so went and
engaged to the Davenport people to assist in making
sorghum on a princely salary of one quart of the product
per day. This I carried home for the children to soak
their corn pone in. They extracted the juice from the
stalks by running them twice between two squeaky
wooden rollers run by a horse hitched to a sweep. My job
was to sit by the mill and receive the flattened stalks as
they came from the mill and to carefully lay them in a
nice straight pile, which when large enough Vvas carried
around and run through the mill again after the rollers
had been keyed up a little closer. So you see I had a juicy
as well as a very lucrative position. I had only one pair
of pants and they were made by mother of old " Kentucky
jeans." It was but a few days until those pants became
so thoroughly soaked with juice and "skimmin's" that
they were so stiff that on retiring for the night I simply
slipped them off and stood them against the wall till
morning. On getting up I stood them down by a chair on
which I climbed and jumped off into them, and then
walked away like and old armored Roman warrior.
Mary Davenport, daughter of the widow, was my
first school teacher. I have never forgotten that girl,
though it has been many, many years since I saw her.
This was a subscription school. My father subscribed
the required amount of tuition for myself and my oldest
brother, the amount to be paid in flour. My father was
then engineer at the Welch mill, for which services he
received any old thing to eat. I remember when Tom
Davenport came to our house for the flour, a hundred-
pound sack. When with the assistance of my father he
threw the sack over his shoulders to carry to his home, a
120 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
half-mile away, he joyfully exclaimed : "Now we shall
have a jubilee at our house." There were Pete and Tom
and Henry and John who have long since passed from
memory down there.
The Davenport family were good folks, people of more
than average intelligence and mental attainments. Their
ideals were high and their home life simple and pure.
The Widow Davenport was in many respects a most re-
markable woman. She came from a very good old
southern family. Her ambitions and ideals found lodging
in most if not all her children. Mary, my good " school-
ma'am," married L. O. Donley, a wealthy farmer and
once treasurer of Marion County. Parmelia was married
to a Mr. Forsythe, a druggist in Pella, now dead, and she
lives in Des Moines. Lj'dia— I can tell no more; let the
tragedies that came to this girl be forgotten. Nancy until
this very night seemed forgotten by me ; of her coming
and going if alive to-night [ know nothing. Maria is now
the wife of Judge George W. Crozier, of Knoxville, repre-
sentative to the Thirty-third General Assembly from
Marion County. These young men and women with their
mother moved to Pella just after the incidents told in this
story. There Mrs. Davenport, full of years and crowned
with faithful service in the cause of her master, went,
long years ago, into that rest she so richly deserved.
\
122 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
"Old Dominion." Cruel old war with its dripping sword
had not then severed the state in twain, nor were her beau-
tiful streams made red with the best blood of her people.
He was born on his father's plantation, known at that time
as the "White House." This stately old place was
situated on the James River. The staple product of this
plantation was tobacco, whicli was shipped in large
quantities to Richmond . Reuben Cotf man's father was a
native of Germany, and that thrift so peculiar to the
German people was possessed in a marked degree by
Uncle Reuben, as he was known to so many young people
down there. Later the family, under the hope of acquir-
ing sufficient land for all, moved over the Blue Ridge
Mountains into the western part of the state, down on the
Kanawha Valley. There young Rueben met and in 1823
married Julia de Robins Reynolds.
Miss Reynolds was said to have been a very pretty
girl, blessed with a vivacious temperament, full of sun-
shine and joy, all of which splendid virtues followed her
all along her lengthened years. The pent-up tragedies
and heart burdens of the leaping years and tlie fading,
passing family circle could not rob her of those charms
that let so much of sunshine in, even when more than
eighty years had heaped their accumulated burdens upon
her. Down on the Kanawha Valley those people lived,
where Reuben farmed and also engaged in boating on the
river. Boating was a great industry in those days. It
was customary to transport great cargoes of salt, tan bark,
hoop poles, etc., down the river to Cincinnati and other
Ohio ports, as well as to far-away New Orleans. Flat-
boats were used in this branch of commerce. Sometimes
these boats were sold at the end of the journey and the
boatman returned on steamboats or walked back home in
order to save their wages or profit.
To this Virginia home the gathering .years brought
sons, Clark, Morris, William, Shull, Lovell, Van, Pratt and
BEUBEX AND JULIA COFFMAN. 123
Tell, and daughters. Leah, Louise and Harriet, all of whom
grew to adult age, and cradles rocked in other homes ere
Time's reaper threw his sickle into the fields of wheat.
Conditions were such in that country that it was next to
impossible to acquire desirable land. So despairing was
the opportunity for becoming a landholder that having
heard favorable reports from Uncle Jack Reynolds, a
brother of Mrs. Coffman, who had gone to Iowa sometime
before, Mr. Coffman and his son Morris came to Iowa in
1853. Being favorably impressed they returned to Vir-
ginia and in the autumn of 1854 the entire family, which
then included two sons-in-law, George W. Martin and
Paschal Hopson, and their six children, set out in prairie
schooners on their long journey of eight hundred miles to
Iowa, the new west. They arrived in Marion County in
October and went at once to housekeeping in a hewn log
house known as the " Day Everett house," situated at the
extreme upper end of the Coalport bottom, then a vast
forest.
Mr. Martin and his little family were "at home " in
the smokehouse, a two-by-four log shanty, and when this
family vacated that palatial mansion under the northern
skies my father and his family, six in all, went in and
possessed it, and there for several long months it was
a willow upon which my parents hung their harps while
their bleeding hearts and calloused hands reached out and
out over that great stretchof country dividing them from
their old home and friends so far away. But in after
years when God had smiled upon us and our native land
was all baptized in blood they were glad that some friendly
guiding hand had led them out of the Egypt of their
birth ere they had seen with tear-dimmed eyes the awful
carnage of war.
Uncle Reuben acquired land situated on the east
branch of Competine Creek, where he and his boys pro-
24 DOWN ON THE BIBGE
ceded as quickly as possible to cut the timber and haul
the logs to Pella, where they were sawed into lumber and
hauled back to the Ridge for building- their new Iowa
home. They built this house to the north of the branch,
situated on the brow of the hill gently declining to the
south-west and north. This new western home was a
story-and-a-half building with a fireplace in the south end
and a kitchen addition on the west. Around this home
Uncle Reuben planted a grove which furnished shelter
for the song birds who with each returning springtime
came and set ' up housekeeping for themselves in its
friendly branches. Here these songsters soon learned that
to awaken Uncle Reuben and Aunt Julia they must
contract the habit of singing at an unusually early hour.
This house faced the main road running south, and in
the front yard here and there, in addition to the accumu-
lated duties coming to this pioneer v/oman, she found time
to plant seeds and to cultivate the growing, blooming
flowers, to lend fragrance and cheer to laughing health
and fevered brows. They painted this house white, and
it was the first new white house I ever saw in Marion
County. To wrest this new home from nature's lap meant
many w^eary days of toil and sacrifice. There were rails
to split and haul from the river bottom, and fences to
build, brush to grub out of the ground, hazel thickets to
cut down and the brush to pile and burn, and then the
unlocking of the virgin soil, then the planting season full
of promise. This breaking of the soil and hauling they
did with cattle. The hauling was done either on a sled in
the wintertime or on an old wooden skein, linch-pin wagon
in the summer. The fertile soil they turned over with a
huge breaking plow with massive beam to which were
hitched three or four yoke of oxen, turning over with
the soil myriads of hazel roots in great clusters. Then it
was harrow, harrow with a wooden harrow made like the
letter "A," filled with iron teeth made by the local
BJEUBJEJS- AND JULIA COFFMAN 125
blacksmith. The boys would follow after the harrow and
gather up the loosened roots and pile them heaping- high,
and when thoroughly dried they were burned.
Uncle Ruben's timber was situated on the river bottom
north of where the Welch people lived. To reach this
timber the Coffman boys went down the road to the river
and thence north. In doing so they passed the Barnes
house on Maint Street in Coalport. where my father lived
forty-nine years ago. I remember very distinctly their
passing our place on their way to the timber, just as the
morning sunbeams danced on the ice-clad brow of the hill
beyond, the oxen moving patiently along, crunching the
frozen snow beneath their feet, the whole scene occasion-
ally awakened by the crack of a big long whip plaited of
deer skin attached to a stoat, flexible hickory pole. Some
of these ox drivers were very expert in the use of the whip.
They prided themselves on being able, in the summer
season, to kill a fly on an ox in the lead team Ave times
out of six with the sharp cracker attached to the whip .
Each added year set with industry brought further
improvements, extended conveniences and richer promise
for declining age to these people who away back under
Virginia's blazing sunshine looked toward the new west
for a full realization of their happy dreams. With all of
their children here save Clark, and joyous, laughing
grandchildren nestled near, these two people, now happy
as they stood within reach of the castles they bulled with
such consummate care and hope, looked into the unborn
years for that com fort and cheer they had so nobly earned.
Clark, the oldest son, unused to the rigors of Iowa
winters, in 1856 returned to Virginia, and then for the
first time this father and mother began to realize what a
drifted family means, a broken, distorted chain.
Living morethan two miles distant from these people,
which in the days of ox teams was a long way otf, I was
126 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
denied the opportunity of letting them into my boy hfe,
yet I have a very vivid recollection of how these good old
people looked. Uncle Reuben was just a little past three
score years old, yet to him they were toilsome years.
Every day and every year he lay bound on the altar, a
sacrifice to those he loved. T digress to wonder and wonder
how many parents are martyrs even to those who call
them father and mother. But, after all, how willingly
we approach the sacrifice for those we love !
I shall never forget one occasion on which Uncle Eeu-
ben through a little event impressed himself on my memory.
To tell the story 1 must of necessity divulge the innocent
ignorance of the writer. It was the Fourth of July, 1861.
A big celebration was on in a little butternut grove in
Rousseau, just north of the Kent mill. Everybody was
there, big and little, old and young. Patsy Johnson witli
her bushel basket, in it a cake about the size of a saucer —
coming, and heaping full of loaves and lislies — going, was
there. An ox was roasted and many delicacies came in
baskets. The stars and stripes were everywhere, and fire-
crackers chirped and barked under every bush. Som.ebody
brought in an old fiddle. He twisted its ears, thumped on
the tightly-drawn strings, then drew liis bow and sent up a
call loud and long. Soon upon the green sward the sun-
burned bo3's and red-cheeked girls were gaily wliirling
around in the giddy mazes of the dance, while the old
fiddler weaved back and forth to the tune of old ' ' Money
Musk." From the platform somebody read the Declara-
tion of Independence, and some young orator, I think it
was Van Bennet, flew the American eagle. Among the
refreshments sold was icecream, but I did not know what
it was then. Uncle Reuben was a persistent patron of
the particular booth where this strange luxury was sold,
and every time I passed that way I found him busily
engaged eating that v.hite stuff, of which lie evidently
was very fond. I cautiously approached as nearly to him
BEUBEN AXD JULIA C0FF2fAN 127
as I could without intruding, in an attempt to relieve my
mind of the awful mj^stery which had settled down upon
it. Following a few moments of careful study I arrived
at the conclusion that I had never before seen a person
eat butter that way. I had always been taught to spread
it on bread with a knife and very little did me, but here
was Uncle Reuben eating dishful after dishful with a
spoon.
I never saw Uncle Eeuben when he was a .young man.
He came into this strange, happy, sad old world long before
I looked across the turnpike road into the placid waters
of the old Kanawha River whicli ran near that little West
Virginia town where I was born; but in his face, though
heavily marked with the pencil of Time, I could see behind
the faded scenes of years the outline of a young man of
becoming appearance, a tit soul and heartmate for one so
fair as Julia Reynolds when life was new and the world so
full of sunshine and promise.
The passing of the old world's soldiers tells the story
of how men toil and strive andflglit in life's fierce strife,
and how, when the battle seems almost won, almost ready
to sit down in the peace and quiet of an undisturbed old
age, surrounded by children and friends and love, they
just quietly pass over the river that divides this from
that strange country over there. So passed Reuben
Coffman when sixty-three years liad left their wounds
upon him. This man, upright in his life, a good, quiet,
peaceful citizen, a man who builded for the world, a man
who left no scar of wrong upon the old world's face, a man
so full of love and sympathy, one day in 1865 went down
to that rest he so richly deserved, and now he sleeps on
the brow of a hill on his old pioneer farm near the home
for which he gave so much of toil, now long since gnawed
down by the tooth of Time, and the friendly soil which
yielded to him so much of interest on everything com-
128 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
mitted to its care has gone into strange hands, and the
birds, wliicli sang so sweetly in the springtime in the
shad}' groves where life and hope had a dwelling place
are startled away by the strange sadness which envelops
that sacred spot.
Uncle Reuben and Aunt Julia surely builded for the
world. Besides the new homes that came out from theirs,
four sons they gave to the country's service. Clark, the
oldest, volunteered in a West Virginia regiment, and
Morris, Lovell and Van went into Iowa regiments. The
tragedies of war fell heavily on this family. Morris, wiio
had been so much of help in the old days, on returning
from the soutli was never Morris again . How strangely
sad the changes on the throne where intellect so brightly
sat supreme ! Van never recovered from the ravages
wliicli befell him under the southern skies. He sought
relief amid the hill where he first saw God's sunshine and
first heard the warbling of the southern thrush bird, but
the book of fate held the story of his short life, and there
amids the hill of his native land he went out into the
other w^orld.
The two sons-in-law of Uncle Reuben coming west
were George W. Martin, a goodly man of whom I have
had something to say in these reminiscences, and Paschal
Hopson. "Pack," as he was known, was a blacksmitii,
liaving learned the trade back in Virginia where he mar-
ried Leah Coflman. This family lived in the village
of Coalport, where Pack worked at his trade in those
primitive days, when by hand lie would make horseshoes
from bar iron and also the nails witli which lie fastened
them on. I used to watch him in his long leathern apron,
his sleeves rolled up above his elbows showing his strong,
round, muscled arms. I watched him with tlie lever
work the big leather bellows and saw the flames shoot
high on the forge while the increasing heat prepared the
BE U BEN AND JULIA COFFMAN 129
iron for the tongs and hammer and anvil, then with
wonder I saw the bright hot sparks fly like shooting stars
here and there while the "village blacksmith" shaped
the horseshoe around the anvil horn .
I shall always remember an incident which happened
in this shop. It was in the early spring of 1859. In
those days boys, if they were fortunate enough to have a
pair of shoes must make them do until the barefoot season
returned again. My winter shoes had gone out of busi-
ness sometime, and if I ventured out in the village I
must skirmish around for something to wear. On this
particular occasion, it being a rainj'^ day and the mud
rather deep, I found a pair of my father's old boots in
which I hustled over to Pack's shop to watch the sparks
fly. There I found a strange visitor. To those who knew
him he was "Uncle Jimmie Karr." This character lived
on Whitebreast Prairie. He was a lover of tobacco and
began early in the morning with an ordinary chew ; to
this he kept adding a little now and then during the day
to freshen it iip, laying it aside during the noon hour,
repeating the process during the afternoon. By the time
the evening shades had drawn nigh his jaw looked like it
had a well developed cancer on it. Then he would remove
this accumulation of the chewed weed and carefully lay
it away to dry for Hetty, an old maiden daughter, to
smoke. Uncle Jimmie had been married several times,
and seemed to never grow tired of the job. On this oc-
casion he pretended to be in search of cabbage plants.
Everybody knew that there were plenty of these plants
over on the Prairie, but Uncle Jimmie thought a widow
living a few miles beyond had the only plants in Marion
County. Well, he soon observed me in my usual place,
when, taking his knife from his old jean pants, he said :
"See here, youngster, I guess I will take your ears off!"
Upon which I made a dash for home, and when I hit the
130 DOWN ON' THE BIDGE
deep mud I ran right out of my boots and left them
sticking there.
After a few years Mr. and Mrs. Hopson moved into
the lola neighborhood and afterwards went to Peha.
Pack was always a money-maker, and with his good wife
Leah they gave to the world a splendid family, all girls
except one. Ann and Mary lived in Kansas. Ann married
Will Lee and Mary married Warren Whaley, while Flora
is married and lives in Des Moines. Frank, long since a
grown man, has drifted out of my knowledge. Pack and
Leah moved, a number of years ago, to Kansas, where,
full of years and weighted down with the old world's
service, they closed their eyes to the scenes of this life and
went to a better world beyond.
Louise, wife of George W. Martin, whom I have
mentioned before, I knew far better than any of the
Coffman women. Having lived near this family so many
eventful years, their family life and our own came very
close together. Our parents were friends down in old
Virginia, so out in the new west they were friends again.
Many a long winter evening this good man and woman
spent around our blazing fire in the old fireplace, and
there talked over the events of the faded past away back
yonder, talked of the present, talked of the future, not
of the accumulation of gold but of the bounteous treasures
waiting for them in that better world above.
I remember Louise Martin as one of those splendid
mothers, one who made life and home and church and
society worth while. To the world, to God, and to her
children she gave valiant service, and when lier good
husband had quit the Held, the schoolroom and the home
for that sweet lest above, she gave her remaining years
to her children, yet living all the time full of confidence
in the promises of Him whose praises she sang so many,
many times in that little old schoolhouse down on the
BEUBEN AND JULIA COFFMAN 131
Kidge. So one sad day— no, one sweet day— full of years,
weighted down with life's tragedies, yet full of faith, she
went into a world radiant with never-ending sunshine.
Harriet Welch was a sweet and charming girl when
Uncle Reuben and Aunt Julia brought her to the Ridge.
I remember the very house she lived in as a bride. I
remember her home in the village of Coalport. After
that she did not come much into my life, yet I think of
her as a kindly woman, earnestly devoted to her husband
and little ones. Beadle seemed devoted to her. It seemed
that her very wish was anticipated. Children laughed
a;Qd played down there, every sunbeam stole in on a happy
home, and every star twinkled in glee as they peeped in on
the scene. I can not, neither would the angels, tell more.
Harriet, so quiet, so uncomplaining, so patient and so
kind, has all these years been beautifying and adorning a
home away above the stars, and some day it will be hers.
Will Coffman I knew better than either of the Coff-
man boys. There never was a man of better native quali-
ties of heart and mind than Will, plain, open, unaffected,
kind and trusting. To me it always seemed too bad that
his lines in life should fall in such sad, sad places. I saw
much of him in his last days. He always seemed glad to
see me, and always felt better after having dropped a
kindly word of cheer into his life, so full of sorrow and
disappointment. I always carried to him some of the
luxuries the world had denied him which he always
accepted so gratefully. I do believe that God, after
those sad years and his tragic end, has already recom-
pensed Will with better and sweeter things.
Shull Coffman was always a home boy and then a
home man. He was married to Nancy Davis, daughter of
Aunt Polly Davis, one of the best women in this world.
"Nan," as we called her, was one of the best girls that
ever went into a home of her own down there, and when
132 DOWN OJSr THE RIDGE
ShuU and she went to liousekeeping both took up the
work of homemaking as well. He was industrious and
thrifty and kind in his home. They lived on the extreme
south end of the CofEman homestead, where together these
people labored and loved and looked forward to easier
days when, by industry and economy, they would come
with the fruits of their toil to enjoy their hard-earned
reward. But in the midst of childish joy and laughter,
when looking away down the road of life to coming
castles built in happy pleasing mood, we lose sight of the
tragedies and afflictions which lie hidden along the way.
How glad a thought it is that this is true ! So while these
• people, Shull and Nan, were planning for material reward,
a resting season in life's hard strife, Shull was taken
away and poor Nan was left to endure coming afflictions
which have been hers. She now lives in Knoxville.
Lovell Coffman, after returning from the war, married
Eliza Bodine, a daughter of Peter and Amanda Everett
Bodine. This newly married couple shortly afterwards
moved to Bella, where Lovell was employed in the mercan-
tile business. They afterwards made their home in Des
Moines, whence after a number of years they moved to
southern California. Lovell was never very strong after
the war service he gave to his country, so the battles of
life were always hard ones to him. Not long ago, worn
and weary, he gave up the light, and away out there on
the golden coast he sleeps the sleep that knows no waking.
Don't you think, my kind reader, that in telling of
this pioneer family who played so much a part of the social
and religious life down there my simple story shall end
without a parting word about Aunt Julia, who saw so
much of life and in her always happy mood did so much
to bring sunshine and cheer to heart and home. Her
sunny disposition, like the sun's golden rays, brought
light far in advance of the full-born day, so the cheering
BEUBEN AND JULIA COFFMAN 133
influence of that kindly, happy woman always heralded
her approach. To all who knew her her presence was an
inspiration. She laughed away sorrow. She led and
compelled her associates to gallop away from care. Yet
she was never frivolous nor unmindful of serious things ;
while her heart had often been torn with grief, yet she
never cared to hang her woes on the hearts of others. It
was a part of her world work to make others glad. She
played her part on the stage of life and played it well.
She never wounded a single heart nor looked lightly upon
another's woes. God, it may be, prolonged her life for
the example it furnished and when eighty-eight years had
written their story of joy and gladness and tears upon
her life page, when the evening twilight had sent a fare-
well salute to the departing day, Julia Reynolds Coffman
was with God.
CHAPTER XIII
MENTION OF SOME NOTABLE CHARACTERS OF THE RIDGE
WHOSE NAjMES have NOT PREVIOUSLY APPEARED
In the beginning I had intended to tell only the story
of the boys of my own class who became a part of the com-
munity life on the Ridge After doing this I found it
extremely difficult to relieve myself of the connecting
links running back into the lives of the people who back
there brought the community from primeval life into a
busy useful workaday world. So I have taken up and
briefly told the story of those whose part in the activities
of those far-away days were more prominent in my
memory.
I sometimes wish I had undertaken to tell more than
I have related concerning these people; something more
of the girls of whom there certainly were a goodly number ;
of Lois Martin, who " spelled everybody down " for miles
around, and how she and Sallie later devoted so much of
their lives to the moulding of thought and character and
usefulness in life ; of this one and that one who found
here and there a life mate, either for weal or woe, and
drifted here and there in the great tangled forest of life :
and how some of them have lived in sunshine and others
in the shadow, and of others who have gone into that
eternal sleep. But I had a lingering thought that if I
undertook to tell of the girls 1 might get myself into
trouble, not on account of any wrong I might tell, because
OTHER NOTABLE CHARACTERS 135
as a whole no purer girls BA^er ming-led with the birds
and flowers in their mission of love and helpfulness in the
old world's work than the g-ood old-fashioned girls down
on the Ridge; but in telling of their part of the life
down there it would have been necessary to divulge,
among other things, their ages !
It would require a large volume to contain what I
should like to have said of the people of whom I have
written, and a much larger one to contain what could
have been said in relation to the early settlers down there,
their sacrifices, their life work, and their growing aspira-
tions for better things and more of the emoluments of
ease and comfort growing out of their labors, freely
bestowed upon their children. So, in the summing up of
my story of the people who lived down there in the long
ago, I shall only briefly allude to those not heretofore
mentioned, that some day, when this simple story of mine
is in book form and illustrated with the pictures of those
pioneer people we think of in such loving memory, most
if not all of that pioneer group may be recorded and not
lost to human speech.
There was the Bodine family, who came to that com-
munity about 1857, when they took up their temporary
residence in a little house at the foot of the hill near
the old potter shop. Here they lived until a home was
prepared on land " Uncle Peter" had acquired adjoining
the Uncle Jack Reynolds place on the south. These
people were born, grew up and were married in New
York state where some of their children were born.
In this new western home these people lived and gave a
family to the world. Uncle Peter was a typical Yankee,
industrious and thrifty. " Aunt Mandy " was a sister of
J. S. Everett. She was a woman of strong character
and of rare intelligence, of good education and high ideals.
She was always active in religious work, and her influence
136 DOWN ON THE BIDGE
for good was felt through all the years of her active life.
In this farm home they lived until worn out in life's
conflicts they laid themselves down in dreamless sleep.
The Davis family came from Virginia in an early day,
and though they made a home not exactly in the Ridge
neighborhood, yet they became a part of its life. Mr.
Davis died soon after coming to Iowa, and left "Aunt
Polly " a lone widow in a new land with seven children to
call her mother. Mr. and Mrs. Davis were religious folks,
•'Aunt Polly" being over-zealous in the Master's work.
Back in Virginia this good woman lived close to the
Methodist creed. These people believed sprinkling to be
the proper mode of baptism. Mrs. Davis arranged with
her pastor back there to sprinkle James and Henry,
bounding, mischievous twins, the solemn ceremony to
take place at her home. These chaps caught on to the
arrangement and determined to make trouble ; so, laying
in wait, they observed the minister approaching when
like rats they crawled under the house, from which
hiding place they were coaxed out with Jong poles. I am
not vouching for the truth of this story, but will refer
you to Jim if you care to have it verified. This good
woman down to a ripe old age lived a Christian life, and
was in waiting when God took her home .
James Caldwell and Maria, his wife, were early set-
tlers on the Ridge. I do not know whence Mr. Caldwell
came, but I do know he was a good man and came to
Marion County in a very early day. He was one of the
organizers of the Coal Ridge Baptist Church more than
sixty years ago. When I first knew these people they
lived on a farm lying south of the Uncle John Everett
place, near Competine creek. Mr. Caldwell was a patient,
easy going, honest man. He worked hard but lived at
the wrong time to accumulate a competency on his little
arm. He was an ardent lover of the rod andli ne, and
OTHER NOTABLE CHABACTERS 137
was a most devoted disciple of "Izaak Walton." I
think he could sit on a bank longer, fish pole in hand,
without a ' ' bite," than any man I ever knew. His prayers
in church were eloquent only in their sincerity, and
the burden of every prayer was that his children should
be reared in the love and admonition of the Lord. Mrs.
Caldwell was born in Virginia, and was a relative of the
Greenlees and also the Everetts. They had a large family
of children, and, besides, Mrs. Caldwell was more or less
ill all the time, so theirs was indeed a hard struggle in
life. The last years of their lives on the Ridge were spent
in the Nort Amsberry home on the hill, purchased by
them from the Welches, and then the place where Lud
and Adelaide lived so long and where Lud died. The
arrow of desolation was shot into the hearts of this father
and mother many, many times down there. More than
one time the angel of death came in that home. No won-
der then that frail mother's heart was torn and wounded
and life seemed almost a burden to her and pain her
constant guest. She in her frail condition was bowed
down under the weight of sorrow and misfortune, while
he, being stronger and more philosophical, bore his burdens
just between himself and God alone. These people left
the Ridge in the latter part of the seventies and went
to Monona County, where Joe had already established
himself, and out there under the winter's snow and the
summer's grass and dew these pioneers sleep, and while
they sleep they rest.
Of the Uncle Jack Reynolds family I know of only one
living— Jim, as we called him— who now is ripening for
the harvest. Uncle Jack was a brother of Aunt Julia
Coffman, and was a pioneer on the Ridge. Both he and
his faithful wife, Ruth, long years ago went into that
dreamless land. Two sons these people gave to their
country's service, John and James. When tlie war was
138 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
over and peace had come to bless our land these young
men returned to their old home by the side of the road.
But the awful sacrifice had already been made ; thoug-h
some guiding hand had brought him home to his old father
and mother and friends, fate's cruel decree had gone forth
and so John, fresh from the blood-stained southland,
withered away like a passing rose, and his soldier
comrades bore his wasted body away, and laid it down in
"God's Acre " out among the green growing oaks.
The Hardings were also among the early settlers there.
They owned the farm where Wes Poffenbarger now lives,
the east part of the farm then being prairie grass and
hazel brush through which ran the road leading to Knox-
ville by way of the old Breese neighborhood on the big
"hog-back." I played with the Harding boys at school
in the old playground. Bill and John and Joe were great
boys, rugged and strong. Bill and John went into the
army, where John died. These boys were too young for
war, but their country needed their services and they
gladly went. About the close of the war Mason Harding
sold the old farm and bought another home near Knox-
ville, southwest of town. Joe lives in Knoxville, and in
many respects is the same old Joe of former years,
although Time is leaving his footprints upon his brow.
While I have mentioned Simeon Adams in these
reminiscences, yet I must make special mention of this
old pioneer and his estimable wife. Aunt Mary. The first
I ever heard of this family was when they lived on the
Taylor place on the hill. The sad incident which brought
this family into my life then was the death of their little
daughter, who had met a tragic end by being burned
by exposure to the flames of a burning brush heap.
These folks were Kentucky people, but came from Indiana
to Iowa more than fifty years ago.
OTHER NOTABLE CHARACTERS 139
Uncle Simeon was a typical pioneer character. He
loved the woods. In nature's kingdom he took supreme
delight, and his trusty old rifle was the idol of his heart.
When a boy I was afraid of him, but when I grew up
and had an opportunity to draw near to him and learn his
nature it was then I learned the tenderness of his heart.
Though a man of sudden impulse and passionate temper,
yet after all his heart was warm and true, and no cry for
help ever went up to him in vain. In his last sickness I
saw him. He laid his fingers on the very spot where he in
his suffering said the fateful arrow of the unseen archer
had buried its poisoied barb.
Aunt Mary ! Good old soul, harmless as one of God's
angels, everybody liked her. She came from a good old
Kentucky family. Her name was Mary Fossee, a favorite
daughter of Colonel Fossee, once a prominent figure in the
political and social life of his state. A goodly number of
years ago Colonel Fossee moved to southern California,
where I had the pleasure of visiting him, out some miles
from Los Angeles. He was then ninety-two years old,
tall, straight and dignified. He was a man of great
intelligence, and for one of his years very entertaining.
The old colonel asked many questions concerning his Mary,
and then his eyes, so bright for one so full of years, would
be dimmed with tears. Now, several years ago, after so
many years of struggle, Uncle Simeon and Aunt Mary are
resting in the old churchyard down on the Ridge, where
loving hands have marked with enduring granite the spot
where side by side they rest.
Two more characters I would bring up from the faded
past, and then my story is told : Lewis M . Woodyard and
Lawrence G. Kimberling. Much alike and yet widely
different were these two men. Both of these men came
from Virginia when young fellows hardly old enough to
go into the wide, \\ide world alone. " Lew,'' as he was
always known in the early pioneer days, lived very much
140 nOWX ox THE BIDGE
with Francis Everett, a brother of J. S., and an uncle of
Lew. Lew married Sarah Hayes, a sister of my mother,
who liad come from Virginia with I*^ellie Hayes, my grand-
mother, and family, who had settled on land in an adjoin-
ing neighborhood. Aunt Sarah was a pretty woman, but
in a few short months consumption faded the roses from
her cheeks and her life went out, leaving the young hus-
band and a sweet little babe homeless and motherless.
Grandmother took the motherless baby and tenderly
cared for it.
Left without a home Lew, on the discovery of gold in
Pike's Peak, was seized with the gold fever and fitted up
a team, and with others ready for gold, went to the newly-
found Eldorado. Going it was "Pike's Peak or bust!"
and returning it was both. Lew was not what you call
shiftless, but he was manageless. He was always dig-
ging into something, but accomplished nothing. He was
naturally honest, but often powerless in the practice of
that commendable virtue. His word was as good as gold
if he could get the gold. The poor fellow made a mint
of money in his time and died poor, but, better than all
else, honest at heart. Lew was a great, big, stout, tender-
hearted man. Adversity slashed him with a cruel blade
for more than seventy long and eventful years, and then,
covered with wounds, he fell.
Larry I I wish I could tell you the brief story of this
man just like God would have me tell it. In a great many
respects he was a remarkable man. Unstability was the
distinguishing feature which robbed him of an influence
in the world unparalleled as a messenger of God. Twice
baptized and received into the church down there, with
an earnest yearning to do the things God would have
him do, yet, Peter-like, he always warmed by the fire and
let the cock crow on and on and repented every time.
Unschooled though he was, yet ordained a minister, I
OTHER Is^OTABLE CHARACTERS 141
have never heard a flow of prettier language, filled with
more rhetoric and easy, natural oratory than that which
fell from this man's lips. He had a winning manner and
everybody liked him. He married Elizabeth Reynolds, a
daughter of Jack and Ruth Reynolds, and they lived in
the beginning of their married life in Coalport, in a little
frame house facing the river. It was painted white and
trimmed in blue. It was a teenty little house, but it
made a home for him and Betty. Once they lived near
the roadside just north of the Bodine home, where Larry
farmed a little patch of ground and worked at the car-
penter's trade at odd spells. Larry was popular with the
young element of the community. He was actively in-
terested in music, and through his influence and efi'orts
music became a prominent feature of church and social
life in the neighborhood.
Poor Larry knew his weakness as well as anybody else.
In his work as a preacher, in his pleadings for a higher
and a better life, he often admonished his audience to do
the things lie told them to do rather than the things he
did. After all he did nothing very bad. He was a preacher
and still a human being, made of the same yielding
material as other men; yet a standard of righteousness
was prescribed for him by which none else w^as tested.
His heart was as susceptible to the tender impulses as the
heavenly harp to the sweep of an angel's wing. After all
the powerful sermons he preached, after all the tender
pleading prayers he sent up to heaven down there, after
all the beautiful pictures hung on the riverside where he
buried so many of the young people with their Christ in
the flowing stream of that modern Jordan, after all the
hands and hearts he bound with that beautiful tasseled
cord that circles round the sacred altar where two lives
are joined, after all the songs he sang that seemed to
waft one's very soul to the throne above, after all the
messages of cheer and hope and comfort he brought in
142 DOW^' ON THE RIDGE
the hour of gloom when a life had gone out — God tells
me to say that after all these things the Ilidge is better
for his having lived there.
I should have been happy indeed if in these reminis-
cences I could have given much more space, telling in
detail of the old pioneer people who did much for God
and humanity. In bringing up from the shadow land
the characters of the past I have necessarily brought in
my life pictures both the sunshine and the shadow of
human existence. While sadness did come into those
quiet rural shades, yet joy and gladness were regnant in
woods and fields and glades. Somehow there was a
simple honesty and faith that reigned down there.
Men trusted men, religion was of the old "Simon pure"
kind, each to the other seemed good and true, and God
w^as served by truly upright and trusting hearts. Ko
man in those glad days could have made me believe that
any man was other than what he seemed to be, and to
me all women were as pure and true and unsullied as the
virgin flowers that so gaily decked the woods and hills
and fields.
While we note the many changes that the rushing
years have made in that old home-land, what a glad
thought comes to us that, after all, this thing we call life
in its varied influences for good or ill does not end at the
grave. There leap from the silent villages of the dead
down there beautiful lessons and splendid examples that
mould a world and make mankind better. Out from the
silent homes where our people sw^eetly sleep can never come
the glad and cherished words as of yore, yet from out their
quiet rest comes a helpful remembrance that no interven-
ing years shall ever chase away. These people took life
like men and women whose hearts w^ere brave and strong
and good. They took it as though it was — as it is — aa
earnest, vital affair. They took up their work just as
OTHER NOTABLE CHARACTERS 143
though they were born to the task of performing a glad
part in the old world's battles.
The achievements of our fathers and mothers down
there who builded so well bring this thought to me
to-night, that the richest legacy we can bequeath to the
generations succeeding us is an honorable life and a
worthy example which sanctify and increase all other
bequests. What are millions of dollars and libraries and
other gifts without virtue and Christian life to sustain
them ? If the lives, the motives and the methods of the
philanthrophist do not stand the test of time, the verdict
of history, the buildings they have bestowed will mock
them after they are gone and be their condemnation and
not their praise. Those with pure hearts and Christian
lives and clean hands, like George W. Martin, the Ever-
etts, W. D., J. S. and Francis, and their good wives, as
well as scores of others, alone can make sacrifices to their
God and their f ellowmen .
A letter received recently from L. M. Martin, one
of my boy companions of the good old long ago, says:
' ' The longer I live to study men and women the more I
am convinced the place to lay the foundation for not
only physical, but moral strength, is in places like the
'Ridge.' The early days had their hardships, but on the
other hand we certainly had our full measure of innocent
amusements and joys. The old-fashioned spelling contest,
the school picnics, the singing-school, the neighborhood
parties, and, last but not least, the old-fashioned dances,
all contributed to our pleasure while we were building a
physical foundation that has stood us well in hand for the
many years of both physical and mental work."
These well said words of Lark's confirm what I have
claimed concerning that people and that homeland and
their influence upon the generations following them. I
shall be very glad, indeed, if what little time I have taken
out of my busy life to tell of joyous boyhood days down in
144 DOWN ON THE RIDGE
the old homeland and of the dear dead who come in the
twilight of the land of the faded past with their kindly,
gentle presence, and of those who have drifted away
somewhere under the stars, has brought out of memory
land only the very best we ever knew of all that group
of people who did so much for humanity, finished their
work and then went to their eternal reward.
To-night, in full view of the dead and buried years,
let me leave this parting thought, a testimony of my
gratitude to our God for a childhood home, though hum-
ble and poor it was, yet hallowed by a Christian mother's
love and a father's restraining influence and care. With-
in old Marion's border three score years ago there were no
palaces. The hardy pioneers who had come from other
lands to carve out for themselves a name in the new west
were not rich, but most of them trod the wine-press of
adversity and toil, yet they were rich in bravery, honest
and true, and were happy in the greatest wealth that
ever crowned a human life.
Only a few more words and my story of the Ridge is
forever closed. Each of us has but one earthly life to
live. It will do no good now to stop and bemoan our
losses, our failures and our sad mistakes of the past ; our
only chance lies in the future. If I do not live to write
another line, I want these words to linger with you long
after I am no more. M> mistakes are mine, and for
them I have suffered. My disappointments and failures
have been mine, and for them I have paid the bitter debt.
I have no enemy on earth that I do not now forgive. How-
ever cruel have been the wrongs done me I lay them down
in sweet forgetfulness, and remember not the hand that
inflicted the wounds. If we linger along the shore of
peace and forgetfulness and love, there will be sunshine
in our hearts in life's darkest storms, and angels will
hover around our beds when love's last gentle kisses come
with the final good by.
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