917.76
CcSGs
Spoon Rtuer Countru
j
Chandler
XI B RAR.Y
OF THE
UNIVERSITY
or ILLINOIS
2)17-73
CSGs
THE SPOON RIVER COUNTRY
BY
JOSEPHINE GRAVEN CHANDLER
Reprinted from
Journal of Illinois State Historical Society.
Volume 14, Nos. 3-4.
To
My Mother and the Memory of
My Father
CONTENTS.
I. The Valley of the Sangamon ...... 255
H. The Valley of the Spoon .......... 271
en
III. Old Lewistown.. . 284
rH
C3
IV. Old Lewistown Continued.. . 298
V. The McNeely Mansion 312
VI. The Church of St. James 316
VII. School Days of the Poet 320
VIII. Here and There.. , 326
PREFACE.
"Whatever is implied by that vague term the genius of
places is comprehended in all justness of conception by the
new collateral field of literary endeavor now coming into
such general recognition and appreciation the literature
of locality. How much it has enriched the field of letters
may be fully known only to the bookman who, denied the
opportunity for travel, for personal adventure and discovery
in regions made familiar during long evenings under the read-
ing lamp, is yet obsessed by that strange nostalgia the
"nostalgia of unknown lands."
Through the labors of the literary geographer he now
may come to know the London of Dickens almost as Dickens
knew it; he may traverse the Cevennes with Robert Louis,
the "well beloved," and his little ass, Modesta, or the long
lovely reaches of the Thames with Meredith; the Eliot coun-
try is as an open book, and who does not know his Wessex
is, of a certainty, innocent of Hardy. In America already
the "Thoreau Country," ' ' Whittier-Land, " and many other
localities have come to have a significance proportionate to
the deep interest which they hold for the literary pilgrim,
and sufficiently recognized even by the most illiterate driver
of the sight-seeing automobile; Indiana as the habitat of a
large and flourishing school of writers poets, novelists and
journalists is in the making; Bret Harte and Mark Twain
have bequeathed us fertile fields beyond the Mississippi ; but
Spoon Eiver, that small and tortuous stream lying like a bit
of negligible twist upon the map of Central Illinois Spoon
Eiver has arrived.
As comprehended by Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River is
both a river and a town. It is, in reality, a collective expres-
sion made to cover the several community groups which go
[252]
vol. xiv. NOS. 34 The Spoon River Country 253
to make up the social entity of his book. His material is
drawn from six or seven counties and includes the area
watered by two small rivers. A glance at the map of this
region will show how the various towns to which allusion is
made are grouped. To the valley of the Sangamon belong
Chandlerville, Winchester, Atterbury, Clary's Grove and
Mason City; while Ipava, Summum, Bernadotte and London
Mills are in the more or less immediate vicinity of the Spoon.
Between these two is the majestic and slowly flowing Illinois
receiving upon her placid bosom the turbulent outpourings
of the lesser streams. Strangely enough, the two chief focal
points round which the drama of "Anthology" ranges,
do not come by name into this remarkable collection
of epitaphs. They are Petersburg and Lewis town. They are
confessed to by Mr. Masters in the following words:
"I have lived in Illinois all my life save the first year
of my existence, which was spent in Kansas. I grew up to
twelve years of age in Petersburg, when we moved to Lewis-
town.
"Both Petersburg and Lewistown are full of quaint and
picturesque types of character, but of a dissimilar sort. Peters-
burg and its environs are noted for their high-bred Virginians,
their buoyant, zestful, rollicking Kentuckians, given to story-
telling, to fiddling, dancing and horse-racing. Every prank
and every burst of humor on the part of Lincoln had its
counterpart among the dozens of the oldtimers of this local-
ity. There are some of this class of people around Lewis-
town, but they lived on a less joyous level, while the town
itself took a more serious tone and even an intellectual one
from the New Englanders who divided the control of af-
fairs with the Liberals and threw each other into a clear re-
lief unknown to Petersburg. ^
"People ask me how I came to write 'The Spoon River
Anthology,' Well, they must look back to the days I have
just briefly sketched to get its origin."
254 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
It will be seen, by the foregoing, that Mr. Masters has
concerned himself not only with individuals but with com-
munities, and this is significant for it is only by relating the
individual to the community that one may come to an intelli-
gent comprehension of his relation to the country in which
he dwells, the soil from which he springs and to which he is,
in ways that are both alien and integral, related.
This volume is designed for the assistance of those whose
enthusiasm for the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters may inspire
them to visit the country which his genius has immortalized.
Although it concerns itself with those places compre-
hended by the "Spoon Kiver Anthology," its territory in-
cludes, incidentally, the locales of a number of poems of a
later issue by the same author. Of these "Christmas at In-
dian Point" and "Old Piery" belong to the Sangamon Val-
ley, "Steam Shovel Cut" to the Valley of the Spoon, and
"At Havana" to a point on the eastern bank of the Illinois,
and nearly opposite to the mouth of the Spoon the "house
and fish boats" of its allusion being the first sight
to greet the eye from the long bridge that spans the for-
mer river at that place.
My whole life having been lived, with the exception of
certain school years, in what I have chosen to call the Spoon
River Country, my knowledge of this region may, I think,
claim to be authoritative. In my youth, which was spent in
what I have broadly classified as the Sangamon Valley, I
had at my command the same resources of anecdote and
common allusion which gave to Mr. Masters his finest charac-
terizations; and with "Doug" Armstrong and Aaron Hatfield
I have sat at meat. In my later life my residence changed to
the northern portion of the region under consideration and
Lewistown, Bernadotte and other Spoon Kiver towns came
within my ken.
Such personal knowledge as I have of the people and
places coming within the compass of this work has been aug-
mented from manv outside sources. I have had recourse to
Vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 255
the Illinois State Historical Society Journals; the various
histories of Menard, Mason and Fulton Counties ; to Mr. T. J.
Onstot's " Lincoln & Salem;" to Mr. Harvey Ross' "The
Early Pioneers ;" to the files of the Fulton Democrat; to notes
which Mr. Francis Love made of an interview with Major
Walker in collecting certain data to be used in the Tarbell
"Life of Lincoln;" to various Lincolniana, and to infinite
correspondence and interviews with friends and family con-
nections of the characters coming under discussion. For all
such valuable assistance I wish to acknowledge my obligation
and to express my thanks.
I.
THE VALLEY OF THE SANGAMON.
Although this little river has found its way into litera-
ture through William Cullen Bryant and his "Painted Cup,"
and into history through its association with the young man-
hood of Abraham Lincoln; and although its neighborhood
has furnished the inspiration for no less than eight characters
of Mr. Masters' "Anthology,' yet its identity, for the uses
of that book, is lost under the collective title "Spoon River."
Physiographically speaking the Valley of the Sanga-
mon, though claiming one hundred and twenty miles in length,
scarcely exceeds two miles at its point of greatest width; so
that it may be regarded as a slight vicarious atonement for
the un-recognition of the "Anthology" that for the purposes
of this book which, of course, are merely those of com-
mentation the Valley of the Sangamon is allowed to stand
for all the Spoon River country lying south and southeast
of the Illinois River.
So considered, Petersburg must be regarded as the nu-
cleus. It was here that Masters spent most of those early
years before he moved to Lewistown; here he came to know
personally, and through the infinite resources of anecdote and
familiar allusion, that group of characters which are among
256 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
the most benign and ennobling of the collection; and here
he came beneath the spell of those two men who were to prove,
immediate family influences aside, the most constant sources
of inspiration in his life and art his grandfather, Mr. Squire
D. Masters, and Abraham Lincoln.
It was to the home of Mr. Squire D. Masters that Mr.
Hardin Masters the father of Edgar Lee brought his
wife and infant son on his return from the brief sojourn in
Kansas that gave to that state the honor of the poet's birth.
Here the boy lived with his parents during his tenderest
years, and here after his father abandoned the farm for the
profession of the law, many happy weeks were spent each
year. Even after the removal of the Hardin Masters family
to Lewistown the boy returned each summer to dream away
the happy days at the old place, to delve amongst the books of
his grandfather's library, to prowl his grandmother's attic
for treasure quaint old costumes, discarded furniture, faded
photographs and other joy-invoking "rulics," as he called
them (the usage of that word is still sacred to the memory of
that time). Care-free days lived under the apple trees with
Burns, in the great hay-barns, or on those joyous journeys
through woods and fields with the beloved grandmother which
are among the treasured memories of every grand-child of the
Masters clan.
The old Masters home still stands. It is now in posses-
sion of the poet's uncle, Mr. Wilbur Masters, though it has
been remodeled in recent years and its aspect is somewhat
changed. "The Squire" and his wife are both dead but their
deeds live after them and there are none in all the neighbor-
hood but do them honor. Their gifted grandson himself has
paid them tribute in the epitaphs of "Davis Matlock" and
"Lucinda Matlock." In these two characterizations he has
used the Christian name of his respective grandparents, al-
though the grandfather was invariably known by the first of
his two names, Squire being in this case both a cognomen and
a sign of office, so that his full signature would read Squire
SQUIRE DAVIS MASTERS.
(Grandfather of the poet.)
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 257
Davis Masters, Esquire. The surname is also a matter of fam-
ily history, Elizabeth Matlock being the name of Mr. Squire
Masters' mother.
Although a farmer, Squire Masters was a man of excel-
lent education; an intelligent, well-rounded man and one
given to the acquisition of "material things as well as culture
and wisdom," having a fine presence and dominating per-
sonality. A neighbor of his said to me: "No matter what
day of the week it was. Squire Masters always impressed me
as being just ready to start to church. ' ' Indeed the allusion
was a typical one, for his deeply spiritual nature seems to
have found its fullest expression in religious exercise. Not
only was he a leader in all church activities in his neighbor-
hood, but his private devotions were so earnest and so full
of dignity that one of the family who knew stenography was
induced to take down one of the "blessings" invariably in-
voked before meat. It was a perilous undertaking, for dis-
covery would have involved the almost certain displeasure of
the dignified old man, but the task was accomplished success-
fully and the various copies which were made from it are re-
garded by those possessing them as among the most treasured
mementoes of the beloved grandparent.
The devotion of the poet's grandfather to the cause of tem-
perance once suggested to the youthful Edgar Lee who was
granted many pranks being the favorite grandson a joke
that nearly brought him to confusion. He had found in the
wood shed a can of bright red paint. He solidly covered a
board with it and when it was dry made with white the pic-
ture of a foaming glass over the legend "Beer 5c a glass,"
and the further embellishment of a hand with a pointing
index finger. He placed the sign at the near by cross road,
with the hand pointing toward the Masters house.
That evening the "Squire" was busying himself about
the chores and had started to the barnyard with a pail of
swill when the first "customer" arrived. He was bleary eyed
and somewhat unstable as he approached. "I see you've
258 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
something to sell," he essayed. ''Where 'bouts do you keep
it, Squire?" Mr. Masters had a cider mill on his farm and
supposed the remark to constitute an insinuation that he
kept "hard" cider on the place. His wrath was superb.
He set down his pail of swill and stood back from it with
elaborate dignity. "Now, sir," he said, "that's all I have
to offer you about this place. If that suits your taste, just
help yourself and no charge."
How the visitor contrived Ms exit is not known, but a cer-
tain small boy made a cautious escape from the scene and re-
covered the sign board without loss of time. It is still num-
bered among the "properties" of the woodshed, but the true
history of its brief usefulness was never explained by him to
the master of the house.
"Lucinda Matlock" so essentially characterizes the life
and philosophy of Lucinda Masters that the analogy is un-
mistakable :
I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle
June,
And then I found Davis.
We married and lived together for seventy
years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve chil-
dren,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed
the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Eambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathered many a shell,
And manv a flower and medicinal weed
LUCINDA MASTERS
Grandmother of Poet.
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 259
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the
green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent, and drooping hopes'?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you
It takes life to love life.
The incident of the dance at Winchester, except that it oc-
curred not in "middle June" but sleighing time, is one that
Mrs. Masters delighted to relate to her children and grand-
children. The story always finished in the same way, refer-
ring to the change of partners: "And after that we stayed
ged " ; or if by any chance it ended differently this
romance of Grandfathers and Grandmothers there was al-
ways a demand for the old version. "And Grandmother, did
you stay changed after that?" And she would answer, "Yes,
after that we just stayed changed".
It is true that the twain were married and lived together
for seventy years ; that she bore twelve children, though three
died in infancy ; that she wove, and spun, and kept the house,
and nursed the sick, and made the garden -jthis splendid vital
woman and most notably it is true that for holiday she
"rambled over the hills where sang the larks." Her intense
L^pve of nature was the attribute which above all others en-
deared her to her family.
Across a portion of the farm runs a littlk-ereek, a tribu-
tary of the Sangamon, and this was theCobjective of many de-
lightful journeys^jOn these occasions it is said that her
joyousness and elation _ transcended every difficulty and that
she freed herself to the great gladness of the universal mood,
her knowledge of plants and animals was amazing and added
to this was a fund of folk lore that made these trips an in-
finite delight. She lived, in truth, to the age of ninety-six
and from "Anger, discontent and drooping hopes" she was
260 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
delivered/ through lo, those many years, by her superb love
of Hfg^J
Edgar Lee has attested his respect and love for his
grandparents by the further tribute of the dedicatory inscrip-
tion which appears on the fly-leaf of the volume of his poems
called * ' The Great Valley ' ' which reads :
To the Memory of
SQUIRE DAVIS AND LUCINDA MASTERS
who, close to nature, one in deep religious faith, the other in
(^pantheistic rapture and heroism, lived nearly a
Hundred years in the land of Illinois
I inscribe
THE GREAT VALLEY
in admiration of their great-strength, mastery of. life, hope-
fulness, clear and beautiful jjemocracy^
EDGAR LEE MASTERS.
In that collection of poems the one "I Shall Never See
You Again" voices a grief and passionate regret that cannot
fail of appreciation among those who have known through
close association or intimate report the character of Lucinda
Masters, and of the close tie that united her to her grandson.
The farm of "Sevigne Houghton" adjoins the Masters
farm, and this is the neighborhood of the Kincaids.
Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towney Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
Goodpasture, Hoheimer, Trenary and Pantier are names
familiar to this region but no incident in their lives appears
to have connected them with the "Anthology". Apparently
their names alone have been made to serve ; but the character
of ''Aaron Hatfield" is authentic.
SEVIGNE HOUGHTON.
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 261
The Hatfield farm is twice referred to. That character
designated as ' ' The Unknown ' ' recalls how
As a boy, reckless and wanton,
Wandering with gun in hand thro' the field
Near the mansion of Aaron Hatfield
I shot a hawk perched on the top of a dead
tree;
and * ' Hare Drummer ' ' wonders :
Do the boys and girls still go to Siever's
For cider after school in summer?
Or gather hazelnuts among the thickets
On Aaron Hatfield 's farm when the frosts
begin?
The Hatfield mansion was, in its day, the most preten-
tious in the neighborhood. It has since burned, but the old
Menard County atlas has preserved it for us with all the
quaint dignity of the wood cut. To this period of his life
belongs the " memory-picture" of the pioneer:
Better than granite, Spoon Kiver,
Is the memory picture you keep of me
Standing before the pioneer men and women
There at Concord Church on communion day.
Speaking in broken voice of the peasant youth
Of Galilee who went to the city
And was killed by bankers and lawyers ;
My voice mingling with the June wind
That blew over the wheat fields from Atter-
bury;
While the white stones in the burying ground
Around the church shimmered in the summer
sun.
And there, though my own memories
Were too great to bear, were you, pioneers,
With bowed heads breathing forth your sor-
rows
262 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
For sons killed in battle and the daughters
And little children who vanished in life's
morning,
Or at the intolerable hour of noon.
But in those moments of tragic silence,
When the wine and bread were passed,
Came the reconciliation for us
Us the ploughmen and hewers of wood,
Us the peasants of Galilee
To us came the Comforter
And the consolation of the tongues of flame !
Concord church is three miles north of Petersburg. It
was established in 1830 and was the first church of the de-
nomination known as the Cumberland Presbyterian to be
established in the county. The building in which Aaron Hat-
field worshiped is now replaced by a modern structure but
the " white stones in the burying ground around the church"
still shimmer in the summer sun, and the June wind still
blows across the wheat fields from Atterbury three miles
away.
One wishes that he might have remained on his com-
fortable farm and might, eventually, have come to rest in
that old graveyard that is sweet with clover and odorous with
arbor vitae but history relates that in his latter years he sold
the farm and moved to Petersburg, investing his substance in
a home, a store, a lumber yard, a flouring mill and various en-
terprises. The guileless temperament of the kindly old man
made him unfit for commercial life, and partly through bad
management and partly through the contrivance of the un-
scrupulous he lost one after another of his various possessions
and came, in the end, almost to penury. His misfortunes so
preyed upon him that before his death his mind began to show
affection. He died at the age of eighty. One hopes that
sometimes in those later years to him also
came the comforter,
And the consolation of the tongues of flame !
HANNAH ARMSTRONG.
Vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 263
Miller 's Ferry, but a few miles north and east of Concord
Church, is the " Miller's Ford" of the " Anthology ". The
"deep woods" of " William Good's" allusion still cover the
hills on the right bank of the Sangamon at this point, and
doubtless you still can see .,. , ,
at twilight
The soft winged bats fly zig zag here and there.
Here " Thomas Ross" saw a cliff swallow make "her nest
in a hole in the high clay bank ' ' and drew from it an analogy
of his own life.
To "James Garber" the place had a symbolic meaning.
He bids the passer-by, after life shall have brought him "un-
derstandings, ' ' take thought of him and of his path
who walked therein and knew
That neither man or woman, neither toil,
No duty, gold nor power
Can ease the longing of the soul,
The loneliness of the soul!
All the associations of this place are sad, and saddest of
all perhaps are the musings of "Russell Kincaid" in those
last days of his life when he sat in the
forsaken orchard
Where beyond the fields of greenery shimmered
The hills of Miller's Ford;
voicing an atavistic longing that he might have been a tree,
Then I had fallen in the cyclone
Which swept me out of the soul's suspense
Where it's neither earth nor heaven.
One character, at least, of this group may be identified.
"James Garber" is the same who "wrote beautifully," and
whose letter, written for "Hannah Armstrong" was, maybe,
"lost in the mails". His real name was Jacob Garber and
the letter incident is authentic. He was, at one time, a
neighbor of Hannah Armstrong, though she belonged, at an
earlier period, in the Clary's Grove group.
Mr. T. J. Onstot says in his "Lincoln & Salem": "Mil-
ler's Ferry was * * * once surveyed for a town and was called
264 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
Huron. My brother K. J. Onstot has a plat of it in Lincoln's
own handwriting and prizes it very highly. The town looks
very fine on paper, though there was only one house in it in
its earlier days".
Walter Pater, writing of Leonardo da Vinci, says that
"two ideas were especially confirmed in him as reflexes of
things that had touched his life in childhood beyond the
depths of other impressions the smiling of women and the
motion of great waters."
It is so that all true biography should be written. In this
sense all art is autobiographic, since in creative work alone
man records the " adventure of his soul". It is in the study
of those impressions "especially confirmed in him" as a re-
flex that we come to the life of Abraham Lincoln and its in-
fluence upon the life and art of Masters through its immediate
association with the Spoon River country.
Three characters of the "Anthology" are concerned with
Lincoln: "Anne Rutledge", "Hannah Armstrong" and
"William H. Herndon"; four poems of the collection,
"The Great Valley", "The Lincoln and Douglas Debates",
"Autochthon", "Gobineau to Tree" and "Old Peiry", and
not less than four poems from the volume called * ' The Open
Sea" are written around him.
New Salem, the home of Lincoln from 1831 to 1837 is two
miles south of Petersburg, and just southwest of Salem is
Clary's Grove. Clary's Grove is, in fact, exactly what the
name implies, a grove. It is not found on any map but Lin-
colniana has comprehended it too completely to require fur-
ther proof of authenticity. There is no history treating of
these early years of Lincoln that does not speak of the
Clary's Grove boys and their staunch adherence to him from
his initiation among them in the famous wrestling match with
Jack Armstrong till their final dramatic appearance in 1859
at the hall of the convention which gave him the nomination
that ultimately placed him in the Executive Chair.
Clary's Grove was one of the first neighborhoods to be
FIDDLER JONES.
vol. xiv. NOB. 3-4 y^ e Spoon River Country 265
inhabited by the whites. Most of the settlers came from Ken-
tucky and Tennessee. Among the prominent families were
the Clarys, Armstrongs, Watkinses, Potters, Jones and
Greens ; all fine staunch people, but whose boys were typical
sons of the frontier; fond of drinking, hard riding, horse-
racing, dancing, fiddling and all rude sports, particularly
those which constituted tests of strength. Among the Wat-
kinses and Armstrongs, especially, there persists to this day a
tradition of horse-racing and fiddling. There is, as there has
always been, a "Fiddler Watkins" and a "Fiddler Arm-
strong", and a race track is a common adjunct of their ample
farms.
Where is old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife
nor kin,
Nor gold nor love nor heaven?
Lo ! He babbles of the fish-fries of long ago,
Of the horse-races long ago at Clary's Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.
"Fiddler Jones" was the brother of "Hannah Arm-
strong". All of that family were "first class fighting men",
tall and fine looking. The family came from Green County,
Kentucky, and John, who was never addressed or spoken of
by any other name than "Fid" or "Fiddler", had, while in
that state, received considerable education. He played "by
note", composed, and even wrote music for his violin. He
was a dancing master as well and was distinguished by a
manner and bearing quite at variance with the crude behavior
of his period. Many of his pupils still recall him clearly and
his name is associated with nearly all of the festivities of his
day. His fiddle, which was really a viola, is still the cher-
ished possession of the family. He died a few years ago in
Fairbury, Nebraska, leaving behind him a comfortable estate.
His mantle has, happily, fallen upon the shoulders of his
266 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
nephew, Mr. John Armstrong of Oakford, Illinois, son of
Hannah Armstrong. His music is still in requisition and his
clear memory makes him one of the few living men connecting
the present generation with the Great Emancipator.
The friendship between Lincoln and the Armstrongs
began just as history relates, with a wrestling match between
Jack Armstrong and Lincoln an affair in which the latter
came out victor. Thereafter Lincoln lived with the Arm-
strongs for a time and always, one is told, regarded their
house as his home ; indeed the motherly Hannah treated him
as one of her own sons. The opportunity for requital of her
great kindness came to Lincoln when he undertook the de-
fense of William Armstrong (better known as "Duff"), the
youngest son of the family, in the famous "almanac trial"
which ended in his acquittal.
It is the same son who, in the epitaph, "Hannah
Armstrong," is called "Doug." Mr. John Armstrong has
told me the letter incident referred to in the "Anthology."
Duff, he said, had asked for his discharge from the army,
having become painfully affected by sciatic rheumatism. The
discharge had been granted but the papers, for some reason,
withheld for a time and the boy kept on guard duty though
his suffering was considerable. He wrote his mother asking
her to appeal personally to "Abe" to urge matters, so Mrs.
Armstrong got "Uncle Jakey" Garber to write the letter.
Soon a telegram came from the President saying that Duff
would be home immediately and so, presently, he was, anol
one is glad to know that "Aunt Hannah" did not have to
travel all the way to Washington as demanded by the ex-
igencies of art. She was one of the fine old women of her
generation, living into the nineties and dying in Winterset,
Iowa. As for Duff, he became, after the war, a veterinarian
and has eaten many a meal in my father's house as he went
from one point to another about the countryside.
The town of New Salem, which declined with the build-
ing up of Petersburg, has been rebuilt within the last sev-
eral summers. The Old Salem League was formed for this
.
DOUG. ARMSTRONG
Better known as "Duff.'
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 267
express purpose, and the plan is to make the village a per-
manent memorial to him who for a season lingered there.
William Randolph Hearst had previously bought the site and
donated it for the purpose. Several log houses have been
constructed, some of them exactly, and all of them approxi-
mately upon the sites of the buildings that formerly com-
prised the village.*
The splendid pageant written and directed by Florence
McGill Wallace and staged on the New Salem common on the
2nd and 3rd of September, 1918, as a part of the Centennial
observance of the State of Illinois, brought those who saw it
strangely close to that period of Lincoln's life. All those
taking part in the performance were, wherever possible,
members of the families of those involved in the history so
revivified. Some of the cabins were occupied by descendants
of the very people who built the originals, and this personal
element in the participation of the Menard County folk gave
to the enterprise a spirit unique in pageantry.
Four episodes from the life of Lincoln while at New
Salem constituted the dramatic theme. 1. The coming of the
Big Brother (the arrival of Lincoln at Salem on a flat-boat).
2. Arrival of Clary's Grove boys (the initiation of Lincoln
among them by way of a wrestling match). 3. " Captain Lin-
coln" (the incident of the Clary's Grove boys choosing a cap-
tain for the New Salem contingent for the Black Hawk war) .
4. Sunday afternoon in Salem. The village belle, Anne Rut-
ledge.
The last mentioned episode comprehends Lincoln's woo-
ing as well as his great grief after the death of her who was
his first sweetheart. It was, as it might well have been, the
most stirring and significant of them all, for there can be no
doubt that his love for Anne Rutledge was the greatest of
the shaping forces that touched that soul already starred
by destiny.
*Since made a State Park by Act of the Legislature, approved April
3, 1919. Contains museum where Lincoln memorials and relics will be
preserved.
268 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music:
"With malice toward none, with charity
for all."
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward
millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleeps beneath
these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, Republic,
From the dust of my bosom !
Anne Rutledge! A fragrance hangs about the name
the "Fragrance of things destined for immortality." Al-
ready the hand of the iconoclast has been at work, but he has
anticipated his hour, and the affirmation of history, based
upon the authentic testimony of those yet living, has made
her place secure. No myth, no "legend", may obscure her
claim who has inspired to great purpose the heart of a great
man.
Her body was laid to rest in the old Concord cemetery.
Not the one adjacent to the church in which Aaron Hatfield
worshipped, but one about a mile away, lost, not only to the
view, but almost to the memory, and which no longer has
even a road by way of approach. Her ashes have since been
removed to Oakland cemetery which is on a beautiful wooded
hill near Petersburg. Within the year a great granite boul-
der has been erected to her memory, having the Masters'
epitaphic poem, taken from the "Anthology," graved upon
its face, but prior to the placing of this monument a rough
stone taken from the dam of the old Rutledge mill at New
Salem most appropriately marked the grave of this sweet
girl whose unostentatious nature sought no exaltation but
Vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 269
the exaltation of the spirit. Even to approach that spot is
to feel the recrudescence of old pain. One is tense with the
agony that searched the heart of Lincoln on that storm-torn
night when he cried out to his friend: "Oh, I cannot sleep
while the rain is falling on her grave ! ' ' One is sad with the
denials of her youth and of her tender passion. But to visit
the little town where she has lived, and where, near-by, her
kinsfolk go about their daily rounds, where the drama of her
brief life was enacted, is to feel the dignity of life and the
great peace of soul-quietness.
In "William H. Herndon" Masters has crystalized the
long retrospect of the man who, better than any other, knew
the character of Lincoln after its nature had reached its full
maturity and during the period of his professional life. The
law-partnership of the two men began in 1843. Lincoln was
then thirty-four and Herndon was nine years his junior.
Their partnership was dissolved only by the death of the
senior member in Ford's Theater in 1865.
Horace White in his introduction to the second edition
of the Herndon "Life of Abraham Lincoln" says of the
author: "What Mr. Lincoln was after he became President
can best be understood by knowing what he was before. The
world owes more to Wm. H. Herndon for this particular
knowledge than to all other persons taken together. It is no
exaggeration to say that his death .... removed from the
earth the person who of all others had most thoroughly
searched the sources of Mr. Lincoln's biography and had
most attentively, intelligently and also lovingly studied his
character."
Mr. Herndon spent his declining years on his farm. The
old house, which is, as described, "perched on a bluff," over-
looks the Sangamon. It is on what is known thereabout as
the Menard County Eoad. He was seventy-three at the time
of his death. He had lived in great times and had seen much
history in the making ; moreover his last great task had been
the preparation, with the assistance of Mr. Jesse W. Weik,
of the three volume biography of the man who had engaged
270 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
first his admiration, then his love, and afterwards his sense
of the patriotic responsibility which his knowledge dictated
towards the coming generation.
No line of "Herndon" may be omitted from this work;
not the poet's vision of the old man gazing into the shining
glass of his memory; nor his vision of the old man's vision;
nor the strangely Japanese comprehension of the whole in
the association of natural phenomenon :
There by the window in the old house
Perched on the bluff, overlooking miles of
valley,
My days of labor closed, sitting out life's
decline,
Day by day did I look in my memory,
As one who gazes in an enchantress' crystal
globe,
And I saw the figures of the past,
As if in a pageant glassed in a shining
dream,
Move through the incredible sphere of time.
And I saw a man rise from the soil like a
fabled giant
And throw himself over a deathless destiny,
Master of great armies, head of the republic,
Bringing together in a dithyramb of recreat-
ive song
The epic hopes of a people ;
At the same time vulcan of sovereign fires,
Where imperishable shields and swords are
beaten out
From spirits tempered in heaven.
Look in the Crystal ! See how he hastens on
To the place where his path comes up to
the path
Of a child of Plutarch and Shakespeare.
Lincoln, actor indeed, playing well your
part,
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 271
And Booth, who strode in a mimic play
within a play,
Often and often I saw you,
As the cawing crows winged their way to
the woods
Over my house-top at solemn sunsets,
There by my window,
Alone.
II.
THE VALLEY OF THE SPOON.
It is interesting to conjecture in considering the geo-
graphic nomenclature of the country from which Mr. Mas-
ters drew the material for his "Anthology" just why he
should have chosen " Spoon River" for the title of his book.
There was, for alternative, that lovely Indian name of
Sangamon; and Lewistown is a town so closely associated,
serving as prototype in fact, that to all intents and purposes
Lewistown is "Spoon River." It is true that the characters
drawn from this section enormously preponderate numer-
ically; that the name holds in an exceptional degree, by the
very fact of its strangeness, what Amy Lowell calls the
"pungency of place;" and there is the matter of phonetic
syzygy ! Is there not a story concerned with Margaret Fuller
and her awakened appreciation of the beauties of her own
tongue through the admiration of an Italian friend, for that
word so homely of association and so beautiful for the dis-
posal of its consonants and vowels cellar door? And cer-
tainly the name Spoon River, once one has come to love it,
whether from the felicity which it confers upon the ear or
through the divining vision of its great interpreter Spoon
River is exquisite to say.
Although four or five generations suffice to tell the tale
of the Englishman's association with this river, already there
has grown up about it, as about those brilliant figures that
have passed from the realm of history to high romance, that
mass of incident which unconsciously has been shaped by the
272 Josephine "Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
synthetic tendencies of the imagination to what the French
biographer delights to call a legend. Something of evil is
implicit, a "power of sinister presence," but withal a loveli-
ness so intimate and compelling that it must lie forever like
a mistress upon the heart-memory of those who love her. Cer-
tain adjectives inhere: the "classic" Spoon, the "turbid"
Spoon, the "treacherous," the "lovely;" but more significant
than these, and harking back to an ancienter tradition the
"raging" Spoon. The women have a saying, those old women
who sit at windows, that every year the river takes one hu-
man life as toll.
It lies in the heart of that rich region embraced by the
Mississippi and the Illinois rivers and flowing south and
southeast enters, after many sinuations, the latter
stream. It has measured, perhaps, in its turnings one hun-
dred and fifty miles, and there is evidence that, with the per-
verse selection of inanimate things, it has not disdained
sometimes to change its course. Three lovely loops of water,
reached from the southern end of Thompson's Lake, known
as The Horseshoes from the physiographic term applied to
such formation, attest that years ago the river approached
its point of confluence with the Illinois through closely con-
voluted turns, reminding one, somehow, of the aesthetic phe-
nomenon involved by certain musical endings w T here the stress
of the impetus is eased by the crashing of conventional
chords.
Whatever dramatic moment laid its imperative command
upon the genius of the Spoon in that time long past may not
definitely be ascertained, but less than a score of years ago
the sudden movement of a gigantic ice-pack, opposing exi-
gence to indirection made a third channel outward enter-
ing the Illinois farther to the north by half a mile and ap-
proximating to what must have been an earlier estuary. So
does the old order forever change and the will of nature, like
the will of man, reverse the decision of yesterday.
Although the occupation of the Sangamon and the Spoon
River valleys by people from the east and south was contem-
Vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 273
poraneous, the latter region would seem to have offered su-
perior inducements, for it lies in the heart of what is known
as the " Military Tract." This tract constitutes all the land
embraced by the Mississippi and Illinois Eivers as far
as the northern line of Bureau and Henry counties and in-
cludes a region of great fertility. By an act of Congress
each soldier who had participated in the War of 1812 was
entitled to a quarter section and as soon as the provision was
made the hardier souls ventured thither to claim their new
possessions. Revolutionary soldiers, some of them. Men like
"John Wasson":
Oh! the dew-wet grass of the meadow in
North Carolina
Through which Rebecca followed me wail-
ing, wailing,
Lengthening out the farewell to me off to
the war with the British,
And then the long, hard years down to the
day at Yorktown.
And then my search for Rebecca,
Finding her at last in Virginia,
Two children dead in the meanwhile.
We went by oxen to Tennessee,
Thence after years to Illinois,
At last to Spoon River.
We cut the buffalo grass,
We felled the forests,
We built the school-houses, built the bridges,
Leveled the roads and tilled the fields
Alone with poverty, scourges, death. . . .
But if they found hardship here they found a land offer-
ing a hospitality that had not failed of the appreciation of
their predecessors, for the Indians from the earliest time
seem to have shown a predilection for this locality. Al-
though they have not been awarded their just dues at the
hands of the state or by its men of science, and much that
might constitute a source of intelligence and information
274 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
regarding the prehistoric inhabitants of this region has been
wasted through agrarian thrift and the wanton plunder of
relic hunters, yet there are still visible a number of Indian
mounds throughout the valley which the investigation of
archeologlsts has shown to be important. Chapman's "His-
tory of Fulton County ' ' says :
There is not a township in the county which
does not contain more or less of these traces, and
in some of them are works which in extent and char-
acter will compare with any in the West.
On a farm in Kerton township, which lies to the right
of the mouth of Spoon Eiver, is a field known as Mound
Field, containing about twenty-five acres. It is located on
the summit of a high bluff. To quote again from Chapman:
In this field is a level space of five or six acres
inclosed by two rows of circular, cup-shaped depres-
sions, inside of which are large mounds which must
originally have been thirty or forty feet high. To the
south of this level the bluff line with its indentations
forms the border of the field, and here are the re-
mains of not less than one hundred and fifty thou-
sand human beings buried literally by the cord!
Where the bluff begins to descend it appears as
though a step had been cut with the bluff face not
less than ten feet high, and here were corded skele-
tons, laid as one would cord wood, but with the bodies
arranged just as one would preserve the level of
the file best without regard to direction. This burial
place follows the bluff line for some distance where
skeletons appear to have been covered by some light-
colored clay which must have been brought from
considerable distance, as it is not found in the local-
ity. There are also two pits near the brow of the
bluff on the side hill, which appear to have been
originally about forty feet in diameter and of
great depth and which have been walled up by plac-
ing skeletons around the outside as one would wall
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 275
a well, covering the work with the same clay as the
other burial place. These skeletons are excellently
preserved, in many places the smallest processes of
bone being in as good condition as though buried
a year ago. Over the entire surface of the field
which is in cultivation the human hand cannot be
placed without putting it on broken pottery, bones
and shells.
Passing up the river one finds a great mound near Sepo,
observable from the train; the Bernadotte country furnishes
interesting terraces of artificial character; and in the region
of London Mills are several extensive earth works undoubt-
edly pre-historic that have received little or no attention.
Hereabouts, too, is a burying ground of the modern tribe of
Pottawatomi, and several Indian skeletons have been found
in trees.
Sac, Fox, Chippewa, Kickapoo and Pottawatomi, often
mere off-shoots of these nations and lacking tribal cohe-
rence, were found here when the pioneers arrived. The rich
bottom between California Bend on Spoon Eiver and Liver-
pool on the Illinois " constituted, " says Dr. Strode, of whom
I shall speak later, "almost one continuous camp site of an-
cient as well as modern Indians." The reason for the great
popularity of this location he thinks apparent, for as he
points out, "the river furnished fish, turtle, water fowl and
fur-bearing animals; great forests gave them game, nuts,
honey and so forth; and in every ravine were fine springs
of water." One township further up the river came to be
known as Deerfield because it was literally "the field of the
deer" the habitat of thousands.
The advent of the Frenchman, though unfruitful ot
much that has made for permanence in America, is still elo-
quently reminiscent in its nomenclature. In the valley of
the Spoon, however, it is nearly lost. Maquon, deriving from
a term meaning "big," which is the name they gave to this
little river, and "Petite," one of the tributaries, are no more
heard; only the lovely "prairie," the "meadow" of our Eng-
276 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
lish tongue, persists. "Reeves Prairie," one hears, and
"Toten's Prairie," and the names have a pleasant native
sound; but "Maquon" first passed into "Mequeen" before
an accident fastened its present name upon it, and "Petite"
has suffered a like degeneration and is known upon the maps
as "Potato Creek."
The legend that concerned itself with the changing of the
river 's name is to the effect that on a day when a great party
of men were rafting on the river a dinner had been prepared
beforehand in a great iron pot which should serve to hold the
heat until the noon hour. Utensils were limited, and one can
imagine the consternation of those hungry men when the
spoon the one spoon which was to serve them all was some-
how dropped overboard. From that small perversity of fate
the river's name was changed and it is not the least of the
amusing incidents that have changed the face of history.
One feels instinctively that there never would have been a
"Maquon Anthology". How much, one comes to wonder,
how much of destiny is hazard?
The migrations of the pioneers, like those of the Indians,
tended always to follow watercourses and progress was
marked by the erection of mills. Sawmills and mills for the
grinding of grist were established all along the Spoon in the
decade denoted by the twenties, the last to be erected repre-
senting always the farthest outpost of civilization. At Water-
ford, Duncan Mills, Bernadotte, Ellisville, Seville and London
Mills the turning of the great wheels performed enormous
labors and served as social nuclei around which towns in-
variably were built. Some of those mills still stand, though
fallen into decay, and always the riffles in the stream establish
hypothetically their location. Not only was the operation of
a mill a thriving business in that early day but the capital re-
quired for its establishment argued a man of substance. The
miller was usually the wealthy man of his community ; one of
considerable influence, and if, indeed, success came late for
the gratification of his own ambitions, he might still hope for
their fulfillment through the greater opportunities which his
vol. xiv. NOB. 3-4 ^he Spoon River Country 277
wealth would give to his boys and girls ; nor, in the case of
' ' Oak Tutts ', ' ' father does one feel these aspirations to have
been touched with the ignoble :
My mother was for women's rights
And my father was the rich miller of Lon-
don Mills.
I dreamed of the wrongs of the world and
wanted to right them.
When my father died I set out to see peoples
and countries
In order to learn how to reform the world.
I traveled through many lands.
I saw the ruins of Eome,
And the ruins of Athens,
And the ruins of Thebes.
And I sat by moonlight amid the necropolis
of Memphis.
There I was caught up by wings of flame,
And a voice from heaven said to me:
" Injustice, Untruth destroyed them. Go
forth!
Preach justice! Preach truth!"
And I hastened back to Spoon River
To say farewell to my mother before be-
ginning my work.
But see how the Nemesis of fanaticism finds out this vil-
lage Hamlet, for:
They all saw a strange light in my eye.
And by and by, when I talked, they dis-
covered
What had come into my mind.
Then Jonathan Swift Somers challenged me
to debate
The subject (I taking the negative) ;
"Pontius Pilot, the Greatest Philosopher
of the World".
And he won the debate by saying at last,
278 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
"Before you reform the world, Mr. Tutt,
Please answer the question of Pontius Pilate ;
'What is truth?' "
London Mills is the northermost town of what we have
chosen to designate as the Spoon River Country. It lies in a
bend of the river whose bank is so thickly wooded that it
seems a great green arm about the thriving little town. The
trees of London Mills, like all those in this bottom, make a
marvelously luxuriant growth, and stand about the lawns and
streets with all the dignity that a forest heritage bestows.
Across the river from the town I particularly recall one giant
elm, conveying by its prodigious height, the great reach of its
extended arms and the enormous thickness of its trunk such
a look of power and significance that it seemed the number
of its centuries alone could not account for its "eternal look",
the sense of history it conferred upon the landscape ; one felt
it to be "part of and related to a mighty past", linked with
great destinies and high emprise. It is in the nature of elms
to seem to wait but this great patriarch, bearing within it stir-
ring memories of the past, must find it long, with only the
vagrancies of fishermen, the whispering of lovers and the
small business of the nesting birds, patiently to bide its hour.
Following down the stream from London Mills, passing
Ellisville, Babylon and Seville, slipping between the terraced
hills that rim the river on the right and the mani-patterned
grain-fields on the left, one comes to Bernadotte.
At Bernadotte one lingers with delight, for here one
savors in the little drowsing town, so obviously fallen upon
the period of its decline, remote in time and place from the
bustling life around her, "an aroma, as from wine that has
been many years in bottle." Perhaps because her tragedy
is the tragedy of arrested growth one senses here more keenly
than at any other place along the river the spirit of the pio-
neers whose ambrotypes "Eutherford McDowell" used to
enlarge. Men who were . , .
m being
When giant hands from the womb of the world
Tore the republic.
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 279
William Walters, who was the first settler of Bernadotte
township, arrived in 1826. Within five years three mills were
built along the Spoon in close proximity, suggesting the feas-
ability of platting off a town. It is said that Mr. Walters
bought the present town-site of Bernadotte for fifty deer
skins, but this was, by no means, his most important trans-
action with the Indians for, though they were fairly treated
by the whites, their pilfering, their restlessness, and the lurk-
ing spirit of treachery they betrayed made them dangerous
neighbors in the end, and their expulsion became a matter of
necessity. It was in the curve of the river just above Berna-
dotte known as Great Bend that they were finally rounded
up by the whites under the informal but efficient captaincy of
Mr. Walters, driven across the state, across the Mississippi
at the point then known as Yellow Banks, the present site of
Oquawka and bidden never to return.
For many years Bernadotte throve mightily, for not only
was she situated in the heart of a rich farming district but
the timber on her surrounding hills, the limestone under them,
her fishing industry, her two packing houses and many other
small, thriving enterprises gave her a commercial life that
promised well. Furthermore the natural beauty of her situ-
ation upon the river, surrounded by her seven verdant hills
made her a pleasure place for all the neighboring towns, and
visitors came to her by hundreds on holidays and Sundays
through the summer.
It was the coming of the railroad through the country
that worked her ruin. For her situation, which had been to
her advantage when the river was the chief means of trans-
portation, now proved to be her undoing and her prosperity
passed to the towns that were more fortunate.
These were the thorough-going days when the life of
trade was sustained by its own resources and the last monu-
ment to this period, perhaps, passed with the tearing down of
the old covered bridge a few years ago. This bridge, which
spanned the Spoon, was put up entirely without the use of
steel or iron. The stone for the abutments was quarried
280 Josephine Craven Chandler J. I. s. H. s.
from the vicinity ; the selected timber that went to the making
of the superstructure was brought from the woods near by
having been hewed into shape where it fell; wooden pins
bound together the remarkable trusses. A thorough-going
bridge, I say, that stood for seventy years and might have
stood for seventy more had not the spirit of the times that
strange haunter of men searched out even this quiet place
and demanded fresh tribute, this time of concrete and steel
and iron.
The old mill which still stands has lately been put into
repair and is now in operation. Above it looms the hill,
Mount Pleasant, which commands the town and between them
is the ancient hostelry that has served the village for so many
years. Together they form the background for that figure
touched with pathos and with dignity, "Isaiah Beethoven":
They told me I had three months to live,
So I crept to Bernadotte,
And sat by the mill for hours and hours
Where the gathered waters deeply moving
Seem not to move :
world, that 's you !
"Y ou are but a widened place in the river
Where life looks down and we rejoice for her
Mirrored in us, and so we dream
And turn away, but when again
We look for the face, behold the low-lands
And blasted cotton-wood trees where we
empty
Into the larger stream!
But here by the mill the castled clouds
Mocked themselves in the dizzy water ;
And over its agate floor at night
The flame of the moon ran under my eyes
Amid a forest stillness broken
By a flute in a hut on the hill.
At last when I came to lie in bed
Weak and in pain, with dreams about me,
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 281
The soul of the river entered my soul,
And the gathered power of my soul was
moving
So swiftly it seemed to be at rest
Under cities of cloud and under
Spheres of silver and changing worlds
Until I saw a flash of trumpets
Above the battlements of Time ! .
Mrs. Maude McCaughey, a fine intelligent women who
has kept the hotel for many years, who is familiar with the
"Anthology" and many of its characters, assures me that she
never had a guest of that strange name. No one in the vil-
lage had heard of Isaiah Beethoven; but I who have sat for
hours by the mill where the "gathered waters, deeply mov-
ing seem not to move," and have lain in that chaste room
whose hand-woven carpet and woolen quilt evoke the memory
of another day and heard the water falling over the dam all
through the quiet night I protest that verisimilitude begets
a strange conviction!
Bernadotte was until recent years the home of Dr. Wil-
liam Strode, who is the "William Jones" of the "Anthol-
ogy." Here, in the old square house upon the river bank,
he got together those amazing collections and compiled the
data deduced from his tireless researches in the fields of
ornithology, conchology and zoology in general. How it was
possible despite the demands of his profession and to add
to this, the demands of a large and growing family to satisfy
his scientific instincts and enthusiasms; to attend to his
large correspondence, that "converse afar with the great;"
for those many contributions to scientific journals; for lec-
tures ; for every public enterprise that claimed his sympathy
and co-operation all this is well nigh inconceivable. A
glance at the list of his collections fills one with astonish-
ment : Mounted birds, 225 ; scientific bird skins, 500 ; fresh
water clams or niads, 550 species; fresh water univalves,
400; and these are but the outstanding classifications.
282 Josephine Craven Chandler J - l - s - H - s -
Dr. Strode 's work in classifying the mussels of Spoon
Eiver is of considerable service, for here are found the larg-
est and finest fresh-water clams in the world, the unionidoae,
or niads, having sometimes been found to measure nine and
a half inches in length and to weigh nearly three pounds. In
recognition of his work in this particular field the United
States National Museum has done him the honor to name a
species of fresh-water mussel for him the Pleurobema Stro-
diana. The Strodiana is about the size of half of an English
walnut and has a beautiful amber colored shell with some
striated lines running through it.
Some years ago Dr. Strode sent a consignment of shells
to France. By comparison with the depauperate species
found in European countries these mussels must have caused
considerable astonishment, for the curator of one museum
wrote him with delightful hyperbole that his native city of
Bonn "was but a small walled town" and that he feared he
would not be able to get them into it.
An hour with this wizard of the Spoon spent among his
mussel shells is something to remember. There is a story I
have heard of a visit which the poet-naturalist Ernest Mc-
Gaffy once made with him to one of these great clam beds;
of Dr. Strode, his sleeves pushed up to his arm-pits, his legs
incased in rubber waders, standing for an hour or more in
the stream, tossing out one shell after another, fitting each
with its scientific name and discoursing familiarly on the
subject all the time. It was probably under the impulse of
the astonished admiration evoked by this and similar ex-
periences that the poet was moved to write on the fly-leaf of
the copy of his "Poems of Gun and Bod" which he presented
to his friend : " To Dr. Strode, whose knowledge of nature is
so comprehensive and various that the little I have learned
seems nothing in comparison."
The correspondence of this modest, almost retiring citi-
zen of Bernadotte, and later of Lewistown, brought the world
strangely close to this remote community, establishing with
points far and wide invisible lines of communication and
MARGARET GEORGE.
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 283
many a foreign postmark came to mingle its almost inde-
cipherable legend with * ' the stamp of Spoon River. ' ' In this
house was entertained, betimes, the "County Scientific As-
sociation" to which " Perry Qoll" so ardently desired admis-
sion before his
little brochure
On the intelligence of plants
Began to attract attention.
and an atmosphere more native to its interests scarcely
could have been found. I could find no history of Perry
Qoll, but a certain highly intelligent farmer in that commu-
nity by the name of Henry Qoll is well remembered. Whether
or not he ever applied for membership in that organization,
it is remembered that he was its occasional host. He used,
also, to operate a little steamer on the river an excursion
boat designed to serve the pleasure seekers who came to Ber-
nadotte in the summer time. His character doubtless offered
a suggestion to the creative mind of Masters.
But other interests than those of science were served
in the hospitable home of the Strodes. The mistress of the
house, by her deep and intelligent interest in letters and
ideas, and by the charm and magnetism of her personality,
drew about her a group of writers and thinkers who already
were beginning to find their way into the literature of
the day. Edgar Lee Masters and his sister Madeline;
Margaret George, whose verse was appearing in such maga-
zines as The Century, Lippincott's, The Atlantic Monthly;
W. T. Davidson, editor of the "Fulton Democrat," published
at Lewistown, a lecturer and writer known all over the state ;
that "Reverend Abner Peet" whose trunk containing "the
manuscript of a lifetime of sermons" suffered such ruth-
less destruction at the hands of "Burchard the grog-keeper,"
the Reverend Stephen Peet, in fact, a man of much distinc-
tion, editor of "The American Antiquarian and Oriental
Magazine"; Ernest McGaffy and his wife, and many others.
Mrs. Strode, herself a writer, was even during those busy
years contributing to such magazines as "The Youth's Com-
284 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
panion" and "The Boston Educator," and a more ambitious
enterprise was under way. One glimpses a social and intel-
lectual preoccupation that must have been surprisingly in-
spiring.
But lest the associations of Bernadotte leave us heavy
it is well to recall that from the country hereabouts that
"rugged nurse" the soil has produced many characters un-
trammeled by a too great rennement. There was, for in-
stance, that great bully of "The Spooniad"
hog-eyed Allen, terror of the hills,
That looked on Bernadotte
No man of this degenerate day could lift
The boulder which he threw, and when he
spoke
The windows rattled, and beneath his brows,
Thatched like a shed with bristling hairs of
black,
His small eyes glistened like a maddened
boar.
As he walked the boards creaked, as
he talked
A song of menace rumbled.
Yes, there were lusty spirits in the Valley of the Spoon!
III.
OLD LEWISTOWN.
Lewistown, the first town to be established in Fulton
County, was just turning its half century when there came
to bide within its gates that small uneasy guest a child who
wondered. What his welcome would have been had the citi-
zens of this place had intimation of his brooding genius is
an interesting point of speculation, for although the distinc-
tion which the author of the "Anthology" conferred upon the
town is indubitable, yet by its publication it cannot be de-
nied that, like "Percival Sharp," he "stirred certain vibra-
tions in Spoon Eiver." The plaint of "Zarathustra," "The
Vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 285
poets lie too much," has found its echo here in sad reversal.
Mr. Masters has told us that he was twelve years of age
when he came to Lewistown, and ten years of his life were
lived here, but whether the two hundred and fourteen char-
acters that went to the creation of the book which was to
herald him to fame some twenty-three years after his de-
parture from the town, were the result of conscious memory
or merely of "that inward shaping force" which psycho-
logists tell us is the tenure of the formative period, one
feels that these were years of tremendous significance; that
the moment that compassed the awakening of his intel-
lectual and of his sense life, in a community somewhat alien
to him, was precisely that which the virginal curiosity of the
child and the dream power of the poet should convert to
the ends of art. These years that were filled with wonder
and speculation; with Burns and Poe and Keats and Shelly;
with the infinite pains and experimentation that produced
four hundred poems these years gave him, if nothing else
as net result, that most delicate of all the materials of
genius, the very corner stone of his abounding fame, the
idiom of a people.
Though the spectacle that inspired the "Anthology"
grew out of the small trade and petty enterprise of those lean
years following the Civil War, the poet has paid tribute to
the pioneers and to that stalwart generation following them
as the epitaphs of "Judge Somers," "Washington Mc-
Neely," "Herndon" and many others show; and no poet
that America has produced, not even excepting Whitman,
has voiced so constantly a sense of the pageantry which an
intimate knowledge of her history inspires.
The period of Masters was contemporaneous with the
third generation in the life of Lewistown the shirt-sleeve
period if you will. It was his good fortune to arrive upon
a time rich in anecdote and through this medium he came to
an amazingly intimate comprehension of its historic back-
ground. His association with the people of the town and
country in his school and social life, his knowledge of the
286 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
petty political intrigues the scandals of the court-house
circle which his father's position as one of the leading
lawyers of the town opened to him, gave him the immediate
present; and the many intervening years between the inci-
dents that concern the lives of his characters and the "mo-
ment of invention" proved, no doubt, that very important
period of transition involving the phenomenon familiar in
all creative work the translation of the concrete into terms'
of the abstract, and back again, through the medium of art
to the concrete. A process implying a little loss compen-
sated by an enormous gain; a rediscovery of incident
touched only with significance; a fealty that concerns itself
with life, rather than with fact.
In all essential ways the characters of the "Anthology"
are re-created. It is true that nearly all of those two hun-
dred and fourteen names in the table of contents the in-
vention of which has elicited the astonished admiration of
his critics may be found on the tombstones, in the tele-
phone books, and on topographical maps of the Spoon Biver
country, but with the exception of perhaps a scant dozen,
they are names re-assembled, re-created in composite like
the characters they represent. The psychology involving
the relation of a name to the personality denoted by it is
not yet fully comprehended, but almost everyone has felt
the matter to have, significance. George Moore once pointed
out that all lyric poets have beautiful names names abound-
ing in vowels and liquids Alfred Tennyson, Charles Alger-
non Swinburne, Dante, Gabriel Eosetti; but Thackery!
Thackery is of course a novelist inspired by the acrid spirit
of the ironic a satirist by the very force of his name. A
whimsey of course, but an idea opening a field of specula-
tion that is not without its importance. It was his theory that
a man's work proceeds from his name.
Apparently to Mr. Masters names have stood, first of
all, for locality, but no fixed method of characterization is
discernable. Sometime by the substitution of a single let-
ter or by the transposition of one, a character true both to
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 287
fact and life seems clearly indicated; sometimes by the com-
bination of a distinctive Christian name and a surname two
characters will appear to be suggested and again, by an allu-
sion to some apparently unimportant incident a cage of
canaries or a cedar tree on the lawn the identity of the char-
acter involved will, to those long familiar with the town,
seem to be implied.
All such "identifications" are confusing and, for the
most part, misleading. Excepting a very limited number of
characters, only suggestions have been furnished by the peo-
ple of Spoon Eiver suggestions from which the creative
mind of the poet has evolved a community so genuine and
so significant that "Spoon Eiver" has been said to trans-
cend locality and to belong to the very "Comedie Humaine"
of life itself.
It is, perhaps, because the "Anthology" is so intensely
local that it may claim to be so largely universal, reminding
one of that paradox of Masters' applied to Lincoln in his
"Autochthon"
great patrician, therefore fit to be
Great democrat as well!
The people of Spoon River have, by inadvertence, paid
tribute to Mr. Masters' authenticity of vision by their
prompt and sometimes resentful recognition of the personnel
of his book. One is reminded of the situation in which
Charles Dickens found himself after having projected his
Yorkshire schoolmaster Mr. Squeers upon the pages of his
"Nicholas Nickelby." Mr. Squeers was, in fact, a creature
made from scraps of memory; from impressions received
when and here the analogy continues he was a "not very
robust child, sitting in by-places, ' ' and synthesized into a type
but a type so telling that more than one Yorkshire school-
master laid claim to being the original. One even consulted a
solicitor as to the grounds on which he might obtain redress,
as if he coveted the honor of establishing in that way the
association with his name of the ignorance and brutal cu-
pidity for which that character is synonym.
288 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
Such a predicament, though embarrassing, is, in a sense,
the highest praise. Mr. Masters' small town is the average
small town. His studies include ten or twelve social groups,
two doctors, half a dozen lawyers, ten or twelve politicians,
two editors, two bankers, several poets, artists and fiddlers,
four preachers, seven prostitutes, two nymphomaniacs and
a scattering of hypermorons beside the great number of
characters not lending themselves readily to classification.
An average grouping perhaps for a town of twenty-five
hundred.
It is unfortunate for the fair name of Lewistown that
the untutored mind is prone to oversensitiveness in the con-
templation of morbid psychology. There is no doubt that
such a character as "Henry Wilmans" infinitely outweighs
in its impressiveness a half dozen such characters as
"Thomas Trevelyan," "William and Emily," and "Aaron
Hatfield." Even so unprovincial a critic as Miss Lowell has
been impelled to wonder "if life in our little Western cities
is as bad as this why everyone does not commit suicide."
"Spoon River," she declares, "is one long chronicle of rapes,
seductions, liasons and perversions," and gravely adds that
"it is a great blot upon Mr. Masters' work. It is an obliquity
of vision, a morbidness of mind which distorts an otherwise
remarkable picture. ' '
That Miss Lowell believed herself to be discussing
"Hanover, Illinois," absolves her from imputation of
personal malice, but a careful scrutiny of the matter
reveals not more than sixty-five out of the two hundred
and fourteen characters in the book to be, according to
Shavian classification, "unpleasant." Mr. Masters is, with-
out doubt, in the "Anthology" as in his later books, pre-
occupied with pathology, but sixty-five out of two hundred
and fourteen does not, perhaps, represent a ratio dispropor-
tionate to the conditions of life itself and more than with
pathology, Mr. Masters is preoccupied with Life.
Lewistown by no means predisposes to suicide. Its
streets are tree-embowered and "wonderful for grass." Its
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 289
business houses are ranged about the square, in the center
of which stands the courthouse. A fountain splashes in a
park near by, and here and there about the town stand the
dignified old mansions of that steadfast second generation
that had its share and that no mean one in shaping the des-
tiny of the nation in the moment of her greatest peril. Beach-
ing out from it toward the east and south and west are
stretches of lovely hill country declining gently towards the
valleys of the Spoon and the Illinois ; while to the north are
great expanses of prairie, those fertile farmlands, ''fair as
the garden of the Lord." Decidedly, Lewistown does not
predispose to suicide.
If a town, like an institution, is "the lengthened shadow
of a man ' ' then Lewistown may be said to measure the moral
stature of Ossian M. Boss. He was the first soldier of the
War of 1812 to claim his quarter section in the Military Tract,
but he was not the first adventurer into this promised land. He
found there before him a certain John Eveland located upon
the banks of Spoon Biver and he, in turn, had been preceded
by a figure so vague in outline as to be almost legendary: a
Dr. Davison, a recluse and misanthrope whose one desire was
to be alone; a man of considerable culture as his speech and
the refinements of his cabin showed. He lingered only a little
while after the influx of people from the East began, moving
to the Starved Bock country, where, eventually, he died. So
romantic and mysterious a figure he seemed, so strangely
touched with tragedy that Mr. W. T. Davidson wrote a novel
founded on his character, called "The Hermit". He pub-
lished the story in his paper the Fulton Democrat, and within
the present year, his daughters who have continued the paper
since his death, at the instance of a number of the "faithful
readers ' ' have run it again in its columns. Strangely enough
an accident has discovered to them, within the last few
months, that the purely conjectural hypothesis upon which
Mr. Davidson based the hegira of his hero to the land of
wilderness a tragedy of his love life was correct.
290 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
The tale is chiefly valuable as a commentary upon the life
and manners of that early day. A description of Dr. Davi-
son's ascent of the Spoon may be of interest here and taken
as a fairly faithful picture of that wilding stream. It must
be remembered that Editor Davidson was writing in the
splendid adjectiverous nineties.
' * The sun was going down on a delicious summer
day going down beneath an enchanted western forest of
giant oaks, elms, sycamores and walnuts. The eastern
shore of the river was hills and sand ; a little way above
an emerald isle (the little detached strip of land that is
called Cuba) on the west, and beneath the arches of great
trees a smaller clear shining river.
" 'It is the River Mequeen', and the doctor stood up
hat in hand ; and bowing low he gently said, ' My queen ! '
"But four oars swept the boat forward swiftly, con-
stantly, round the bends of beautiful clear water; the
pebbles many feet below were plainly seen; the water
seemed full of fish; at every turn there was something
new to admire. The glistening white sandbanks; the great
trees drooping over the silvery stream as though to pro-
tect and bless it; through forest aisles an occasional
glimpse of the gorgeous prairies to the east or the bold
and glorious hills to the south and west the almost
deafening chorus of the birds ! There were no vandals
to shoot or stone them in those days. Every tree was
a song-bird's home. They passed many herds of red
deer and turkey."
This description, barring the deer and turkey, and possi-
bly the clearness of the water for the Spoon takes toll of
many farm lands is quite as true now as then, though no
mention is made of the luxuriant growth of vines that give
the river an almost tropical aspect. The place is still a para-
dise for birds : cardinals, orioles and prothonotory warblers
flash their gold and crimson back and forth across the stream ;
the red-winged blackbird flaunts his brilliant shoulders from
the topmost branch; the tanager, that velvet miracle, flits
from spray to spray of overhanging bough, holding you fast
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 291
with the tantalizing seduction of his black and scarlet. Many
curves of the river hold in a close embrace timbered thickets
so dense with vine and implicated undergrowth the haunt
of bats and owls and creeping things that they seem to offer
the challenge of the " Woods of Westermain",
Enter these enchanted woods
You who dare !
Ossian M. Ross came to Illinois from Seneca, New York,
in 1820. He brought with him, besides his family a wife
and three children a blacksmith, a carpenter, a shoemaker
and several other workmen and their families. His first pause
was at Alton on the Mississippi but after a year spent at that
place he decided to push on toward the ultimate objective,
followed the Mississippi northward to the Illinois, ascended
that river as far as the mouth of the Spoon, and penetrated
inland on the waters of that stream to a point adjacent to the
section to which he was entitled in the " bounty lands'*.
Mr. Harvey Ross, a son of Ossian Ross, who published in
his declining years a book called "The Early Pioneers and
Pioneer Events of the State of Illinois" has written with de-
lightful attention to the importance of minutiae:
"My father on examining his map found that his land
was about six miles north of Mr. Eveland 's place. He
took some of his men, and with his compass, chain and
field notes had no trouble in locating his land. Father
selected the quarter section north of Lewistown for our
home, and built a log house on the north side of a little
creek that ran through the land, and near a fine clear
spring of water. The location was sixty rods northeast
from Major Walker's present residence."
Writing of Mr. Eveland, who was the first to welcome
them to the country, and incidentally glimpsing the crudity
and hardship of these early days, he says :
"Mr. Eveland had a large family of ten or twelve
children, part of them grown. They had some twenty
acres in cultivation, and were engaged in raising stock.
They had come into this country from Calhoun county,
292 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
making the trip up the Illinois and Spoon Eiver partly
by land and partly by water. Before leaving Calhoun
county they constructed a pirogue (a large canoe). It
was hewed out of a cottonwood tree. The length of the
boat was forty feet, and was about four feet wide. It
was run by sail and also by oars. On this craft they
shipped their hogs and also their goods.
"This pirogue is entitled to more particular atten-
tion, because it was put to many uses of convenience and
utility among the early settlers. It was the first craft
used to carry people across the Illinois Eiver at the
mouth of Spoon Eiver, and it was the first craft that
the Phelpses used" (we shall come to the Phelpses later
on) "in shipping their first stock of goods from St. Louis
to Lewistown, and this was the first stock of goods ever
brought to Fulton County. This pirogue was also used
by the early settlers to run down Spoon Eiver to the Illi-
nois Eiver, and thence down the Illinois Eiver to the
mouth of the Sangamon Eiver, and then up the Sanga-
mon to Sangamon town, where there was a watermill to
which our people took their grain to be ground into
breadstuff. A great deal of skill had been used in dig-
ging out and constructing this pirogue. For years it
took the place of the magnificient steamboat and railway
trains that later generations employed."
When Mr. Eoss came to the present site of Lewistown, all
that country lying between the Mississippi and the Illinois
rivers and extending to the northern boundary of the state
was included in the county of Pike. Mr. Eoss immediately
took steps to effect the organization of Fulton County, and
by 1823 he had accomplished not only this but the town of
Lewistown had been platted from the quarter section which
came to him from the government, and had been established
as the county seat. In 1825 Peoria county also was carved
out of this great territory, but until that time the whole north-
ern portion of the state, including people from Ft. Dearborn
(now Chicago) had had to come to Lewistown for marriage,
tavern, and ferry licenses ; to pay their taxes, and do all the
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 293
county business. The old court record book for 1823 gives
under the date of June 6th:
"On motion it was ordered that Ossian M. Eoss have
license to keep an inn or tavern in the house where he
now resides in said county by paying the sum of ten dol-
lars in state paper.
' ' On motion it was ordered that the following be the
list of tavern rates, to-wit: victuals 25c, horsekeeping
per night 37 1 /oc, lodging per night 12%c, whiskey per half
pint. 12^0, rum and gin per half pint 25c ; French brandy
per half pint 50c, wine per half pint 37Mjc, and all other
liquors in like proportion."
On the record book for January 27th, 1823, we find three
county commissioners "having been appointed agreeable to
the act of Congress ' ' reporting among other matters, the dona-
tion by Ossian M. Ross to "said County of Fulton a good war-
rantee deed in fee simple for the following town lots for pub-
lic buildings. ' ' These lots are for the site of a court house
and jail, for a "burying yard", for a meeting house, a school
house, a Masonic Hall and not less than six lots for a "public
Squear."
Having thus generously dowered the town which he had
named for his little son Lewis, and helped to put in motion
the machinery of civilization in this new country, Mr. Eoss,
at the end of the decade, moved to new pastures across the
Illinois, and there, at a point just opposite to the mouth of
Spoon Eiver, gave himself afresh to the labors of organiza-
tion and established the town of Havana, at which place he
lived until his death.
The first merchant to open a store in the newly platted
town was Judge Stephen Phelps. He came with his five sons
from Sangamon County in 1824, to which place they had ar-
rived from Palmyra, New York, four years earlier. A few
months later he was joined by his son-in-law John W. Proctor
and his wife. The Phelps and Proctor families have been
closely associated ever since, through marriage and business
affiliations. When Judge Phelps was established he took his
294 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
son Myron into partnership with him and the store came to
be known under the name of "Phelps and Son". In time the
daughter of Myron Phelps married Charles Proctor, a relative
of John W. Proctor, and he became a member of the firm;
Henry, the son of Myron Phelps, ultimately succeeded to his
father's place and the firm name became "Phelps and Proc-
tor"; and finally, on the retirement of Mr. Phelps, Mr. Proc-
tor took his son Charles, Jr., now grown to manhood, into
partnership and he is now in active management of the store
which is approaching its centennial.
The sons of Judge Phelps were, like their father, natur-
ally adapted to the mercantile business. Charles and Myron
remained with him in the store at Lewistown; Sumner and
Alexis went to Yellow Banks now Oquawka on the Mississ-
ippi where they established a Trading Post, but William, in
whom the spirit of adventure predominated, found abundant
opportunity for its exercise in the operation of the Indian
trade about Lewistown. Much of the Phelps' business, both
at Lewistown and at Yellow Banks was Indian trade and the
preeminence of their success in dealing with the red-skins was
due to their honesty and their unfailing kindness to them.
Although the valleys of both the Spoon and the Illinois Eivers
were thickly populated with the Indians, yet many came from
great distances, and Judge Phelps kept a house for the ex-
clusive accommodation of such. Mrs. Phelps, too, had a
motherly eye upon them and no squaw or papoose ever lacked
for care or food while within her province.
But especially beloved among these people was the
young son of the Judge and Mrs. Phelps, William. Al-
though he was but sixteen when he first arrived in Lewis-
town, he had attained the height and proportion of a full-
sized man; his great strength, together with his athletic
taste and skill, won the admiration of the young braves and
he entered with them into their games, wrestling, running
and target practice and sometimes joined them on hunting
and fishing trips. They gave him the name of Che-che-pin-
e-quah, meaning powerful shoulders, arms and neck. His
CAPTAIN WILLIAM PHELPS.
"Che-che-pin-e-quah."
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 295
hands, they said, were like a woman's but having the grip of
a bear.
Che-che-pin-e-quah 's popularity with the Indians stood
him in good stead when his father allotted him their trade for
his portion of the business. So impatient he was to prove him~
self that instead of waiting for the furs and other peltry to
be brought to him he went out among the Indian villages and
collected it from them and soon had a great shipment, and
was off without delay to St. Louis to market it.
At first a canoe was used for transportation; then a
raft was requisitioned and poles and sails were employed;
but afterwards as the trade became more extensive and the
values of the furs increased, better transportation facilities
became necessary, so this intrepid youth, now arrived at the
age of nineteen, purchased a first class river boat which he
christened "The Pavilion," and which he anchored at Ha-
vana.
His cargoes by this time were considerable. Mr. Harvey
Boss tells of seeing the boat loaded at one time. He says:
1 ' The cargo consisted of barrels of pork and honey, packages
of deer-skins and furs, barrels of dried venison, hams, bees-
wax and tallow, sacks of pecans, hickory nuts, ginseng,
feathers and dry hides." Ordinarily four days were re-
quired to make the trip to St. Louis, but adverse conditions
of weather and high water so increased the difficulties of
transportation that several weeks were occupied with the trip.
The brothers at Oquawka patronized the boat and the return
trip brought supplies to the Lewistown store. In his twenty-
fourth year Mr. Phelps who was now and always afterward
known as Captain Phelps married Miss Caroline Kelsey of
Lewistown, and went with her into the wilds of Iowa, where
he established a trading point near the present site of Des
Moines a post which he maintained for sixteen years. It
was from this period of his life that Mr. "W. T. Davidson and
Miss Margaret George drew the material for their novel called
"The Yellow Rose," taking their title from the name which
the Indians gave to the lovely blond woman who was the Cap-
tain's wife.
296 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
These years on the frontier were filled with adventure
and enterprise. No fur trader of his time was more favor-
ably nor better known than Captain Phelps. The volume of
his business was enormous, his customers among the Indians
extending as far as the Rocky Mountains. He was univer-
sally trusted by the people among whom he dealt and the con-
fidence which he gained at this time made him of signal serv-
ice to the Government at the time of the Black Hawk war. He
was a warm personal friend not only of Black Hawk but of the
chief who was to succeed him, Keokuk, and although he joined
Captain Gains' company of Illinois Volunteers at the begin-
ning of the Indian trouble, his sympathy for the red men and
their desire to recover the territory lost through the ignor-
ance and cupidity of their chiefs, never failed him. At the
close of the war, and after he was released from his confine-
ment at Fort Monroe, Black Hawk returned to his people and
eventually built himself a house, after the manner of the
white man, near the home of Captain Phelps. But the old
chief was disheartened. His power was gone ; his old home in
the Bock River country lost to him forever, and in few months
he died. It is probable that in his passing Black Hawk left
no friend who grieved his loss more sincerely, nor who after-
wards did his memory greater honor than Che-che-pin-e-
quah.
During the time of the Indian troubles Captain Phelps'
boat was requisitioned to help in the removal of captive In-
dians and of their squaws and papooses up the Mississippi
and across to the western side where their new territory
was located. On one of these trips an incident occurred that
evermore endeared him to the Indian people. There had
been a great bustle and confusion in getting the Indians on
board, and by some chance two squaws had left their babies
behind asleep in their wigwams. The boat was well under
way when they discovered their loss and in great excitement
and distress, their black hair disheveled, tears running down
their cheeks and milk streaming from their breasts, they
rushed to the captain their one sure friend and implored
him to return. He immediately reassured the frantic women,
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 297
rang the bell, ordered the boat back to shore, and the
papooses were restored to their mothers, to their great joy
and immeasurable relief. Later on, when the Indian troubles
were at an end, the two squaws brought their little rescued
boys to the trading post for the Captain to see, and to repeat
again and again expressions of gratitude; nor .did they fail
to find many services of kindness to render him, his wife and
his children in after years.
In 1846 Captain Phelps sold his trading post and boat
and returned to Lewistown where, as also at Havana and
Ipava, he entered the mercantile business, built an elevator
on Spoon River, operated the ferry across the Illinois at Ha-
vana and, after the Civil War during which period he served
as Provost Marshal for his Congressional district bought
many acres of the hill country about the Spoon, and there,
where in his boyhood he had visited the wigwams of his In-
dian friends, put his herds to graze. In his later life, ten
years after the death of the "Yellow Eose," he married Miss
Tillie M. Guernsey, a woman of much cultivation, whose af-
fection still keeps green the memory of this remarkable man.
The Indian friends of Che-che-pin-e-quah never forgot him,
nor failed to avail themselves of every opportunity to send
him messages of greeting. His old friend Keokuk had
died soon after the Captain's departure from the trading
post, but Chief Joe of a later generation, with his two wives
and several children, once planned to visit him. They had
reached Peoria when the illness of one of the children neces-
sitated their turning back and the trip, much to the regret of
both the Captain and his Indian friends, was never consum-
mated.
The long adventurous life of this man would furnish a
volume of fascinating tales. He was, himself, a famous story
teller and one who never hesitated to turn a point against
himself. There is one which he used to tell as illustrating
his belief in the efficacy of prayer.
As a boy he had visited the lead mines of Galena where
his brother Myron had certain interests. Once, when walk-
ing over the rough country thereabouts, his attention was
298 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
attracted by an eagle circling high above him. Thinking to
discover its eyrie, he kept his eye upon the bird and inad-
vertently wandered out of the beaten path and stumbled
into one of the open pits. The moment was a perilous one;
the rough stone ledge on which he had been able to fasten
his hold was crumbling beneath his weight; below him, for
all he knew, yawned a bottomless abyss, and in that frantic
moment he searched his memory for prayer. The Lord's
Prayer escaped him, but his childhood's supplication was too
firmly rooted in subconsciousness to desert him now, and there,
hanging by his hands, this great strapping youth prayed,
"Now I lay me down to sleep." At that point his hold gave
way and he fell, helpless but unscathed, to the bottom of the
pit a distance of perhaps f dur feet !
IV.
OLD LEWISTOWN CONTINUED.
Perhaps the next man of importance to take up his abode
in Lewistown, one who was to keep for many years a shaping
hand upon her destinies, was he who is referred to in the
introductory poem of the "Anthology," "The Hill," as
Major "Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution.
His death occurred as late as 1897 and his memory, which
remained undimmed to the last, covered with wonderful clear-
ness and precision nine decades of a century.
Major Walker was a native of Virginia, and a man who
already had arrived at considerable distinction when he came
to Illinois for, while yet but twenty-one, as Major in the state
militia, he had been appointed to the command of the escort
of Lafayette when that great man paid his fourth visit to
this country in 1824, accompanying him during almost all of
that triumphal trip through Virginia.
In 1835 the Major, then a man of thirty- two, came with
his bride of a year to Illinois and to Lewistown. He subse-
quently built a commodious house on the very place that
Ossian Ross had left five years earlier, and there he lived
out, in dignity and unfailing usefulness, his remaining years.
MAJOR WALKER
"Who Talked With the Men of the Revolution.'
vol. xiv. Nos. 3-4 xhe Spoon River Country 299
In politics the Major was a Whig of most uncompromis-
ing conviction, schooled in the school of great statesmen and
great men. In Virginia he had listened to such men as
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Eandolph and
Henry Clay ; and in the new land to which he had adventured
he was to meet and to hold in the close intimacy of an abid-
ing friendship one whose destiny was to carry him to in-
finitely greater heights Abraham Lincoln.
Major Walker's acquaintance with Lincoln began in 1838
when both were serving in the Legislature in the old State
Capitol at Vandalia. Adlai E. Stevenson, in an address on
Stephen A. Douglas which he delivered before the Illinois
State Historical Society, said of that body:
1 ' The Tenth General Assembly was the most notable
in Illinois history. Upon the roll of members of the
House, in the old capitol at Vandalia, were names in-
separably associated with the history of the State and
the Nation. From its list were yet to be chosen two Gov-
ernors of the Commonwealth, one member of the Cabinet,
three Justices of the Supreme Court of the State, eight
Representatives in Congress, six Senators, and one Presi-
dent of the United States. That would indeed be a not-
able assemblage of law makers in any country or time,
that included in its membership: McClernand, Edwards,
Ewing, Semple, Logan, Hardin, Browning, Shields,
Baker, Stuart, Douglas and Lincoln."
The chief measure before the Legislature at this time
concerned the building of the Illinois Central Railroad, a bill
having been introduced to obtain from Congress grants of
land to aid in its construction. This measure, which Major
Walker felt to be disastrous to the fortunes of the state, was
warmly approved by Lincoln, showing even in that early day
his certain vision and statesmanship, for it was the very suc-
cess of this measure that contributed more, perhaps, than any
other issue of that day, to the great prosperity of Illinois.
Those familiar with this period in the state 's history will re-
member how the completion of the road marked the beginning
of an era of marvelous development in Illinois and gave a
300 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
new impetus to all lines of industrial progress. The five
years following the passage of that bill saw an increase in
the population of the state from nine hundred thousand to
near one and a half million, and the prosperity of the state
was assured. The final passage of the bill was due chiefly to
the labors of Stephen A. Douglas, though Justice Breese had
advocated the measure in a former session.
The friendship established between Major Walker and
Lincoln at Vandalia was augmented during the following as-
sembly to which they were both re-chosen from their respec-
tive counties: The Capital, in the meantime, had been re-
moved to Springfield and it was while the two were attending
Legislature there that the intimacy grew and became for the
Major a fruitful source of reminiscence in the years that
followed.
In an interview which Mr. Francis M. Love of Lewistown
had with him in 1895, he spoke of the evenings when Lincoln
would come to his room and how, when tired of telling stories
he would ask for a little music and he, the Major, would play
for him. Also when he went to see Lincoln the beloved fiddle
would go along. It was not all stories and fiddling though.
Many grave matters were discussed and among them the one
that always transcended all others the question of human
slavery.
On one of these visits Lincoln bantered the Major for a
wrestling match. The Major was a fine figure of a man,
almost as tall as Lincoln and well proportioned, but he was
no wrestler. He referred him, however, to his friend and
colleague Jonas Rawalt. Rawalt, who shared with Walker the
leadership of the Whig party in Fulton County, was a man of
smaller build and for that reason Lincoln demurred. The
Major, however, assured him that he need not stand back on
that account; Rawalt accepted the challenge and the match
was on. Lincoln, given his choice of the holds, chose the back
hold which was just what Rawalt wanted.
"Did Lincoln throw him?" asked Mr. Love.
"Well, I guess not" laughed the Major, enjoying the
affair afresh in reminiscence.
Vol. xiv. NOB. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 301
''Throw Rawalt? I guess not! There was not a man
in that Legislature could do that. Rawalt threw Lincoln be-
fore you could count ten to save you. You see Rawalt came
from the logging country in Illinois where he had a great
reputation as a wrestler. Lincoln laughed as heartily as any
of us over the incident. ' '
An amusing affair which the Major liked to laugh over
was in reference to a temperance lecture that was held in the
old Free Mason Hall in Lewistown. Lincoln had been asked
to address the meeting, but he was trying a case that evening
before Judge Douglas. "So," said the Major, "Lincoln asked
Cal Winchel, another visiting attorney, to go over and make
the speech for him. He knew that Winchel was a drinking
man but thought he would make a very fine temperance
speech. When he had finished speaking they passed the
pledge around for Cal Winchel to sign.
'What?' says Cal, 'me sign that? Well, I guess not. You
don't find me doing anything so foolish as to sign a temper-
ance pledge. Why, ' he said, ' I 'd rather be shot than sign it ! '
"Lincoln," continued the Major, "used to tell the story
often on Cal Winchel who afterward became a judge and a
good one, but never, so far as I know, quit drinking."
Lewistown has boasted four court houses in its time, but
the one that is always referred to as the "old Court House,"
the one round which the pleasantest memories cluster, the one
which "Silas Dement" burned on that moonlight night (De-
cember 14th, 1895), was designed and built under the direc-
tion of Major Walker in 1838; one John Tomkins, being the
master-builder. It was burned on the Major's ninetieth
birthday.
The court house burning is one of the several dramatic
foci which give to the "Anthology" almost the suggestion of
a plot. It directly involved the fortunes of at least three
characters of the book : ' ' Silas Dement, ' ' who performed the
incendiary deed, "W. Lloyd Garrison Standard" who de-
fended the "patriot scamps" who planned the affair, and
"A. E. Culbertson" who voiced his disaffection from the
grave that "Editor Wheadon" and "Thomas Rhodes"
302 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
should be given a tablet of bronze while his own contributions
of labor and money toward the building of the new temple
are but memories among the people
Gradually fading away, and soon to descend
With them to this oblivion where I lie.
None of these names in any way suggests the principals
involved in the court house scandal, nor did the " Silas De-
ment" of the actual occurrence suffer incarceration in the
penitentiary at Joliet, though a certain " presumptive de-
linquent" laid in jail for a season pending trial; but there is
no one in Lewistown or Fulton county not familiar with one
version or another of the alleged plot arising out of one of
the town's epic struggles to retain the county seat. In 1878
her claim had been contested by Canton, a thriving manufac-
turing town in the county; in 1888 Cuba, another avid neigh-
bor, sought to win the prize ; and pending the rounding of an-
other ten years, Canton was supposed again to be casting
covetous eyes in her direction. It seemed obvious that some
drastic measure must be resorted to. If the old court house
should be destroyed and a new one built before the time ar-
rived for the next contest it was fairly certain that the County
would not consent to a fresh draft upon her funds for many
years to come. However that may have been the court house
burned, and there was a great scandal. Certain prominent
men were tried for conspiracy, but nothing came of that. The
county refused to shoulder the expense of a new building and
the new court house was built by private subscriptions from
citizens of Lewistown and the immediate vicinity.
The event of that night in December of 1895 as described
by " Silas Dement" is a dramatic one:
It was moon-light, and the earth sparkled
With new-fallen frost.
It was midnight and not a soul was abroad.
Out of the chimney of the court house
A grey-hound of smoke leapt and chased
The northwest wind.
I carried a ladder to the landing of the stairs
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 303
And leaned it against the frame of the trap-
door
In the ceiling of the portico
And 1^ crawled under the roof amid the rafters
And flung among the seasoned timbers
A lighted handful of oil-soaked waste.
Then I came down and slunk away.
In a little while the fire-bell rang
Clang! Clang! Clang!
And the Spoon Eiver ladder company
Came with a dozen buckets and began to pour
water
In the glorious bon-fire, growing hotter,
Higher and brighter, till the walls fell in,
And the limestone columns where Lincoln
stood
Crashed like trees when the woodman fells
them.
When I came back from Joliet
There was a new court house with a dome.
For I was punished like all who destroy
The past for the sake of the future.
The building which Major Walker had designed upon the
lines which the Virginians had adapted from the old Greek
ideals the rectangular structure relieved by four great pil-
lars in front was a thing to please the eye, being both simple
and dignified. Its upper story was originally reached by means
of a circular stairway on the inside, but the danger and in-
convenience of that arrangement soon urged the advisability
of having the stairway placed on the outside from under the
deep portico. The total cost of the building was only eight
thousand dollars, and it is amusing to discover that those
great columns which were quarried from the Spoon Eiver
bottom, cost but one and a half dollars a section. It is not
true, as " Silas Dement" would have us believe, that in the
fire they ' ' Crashed like trees when the woodman fells them ' '.
They were in fact left standing and the two central ones the
pillars between which Lincoln stood to make his great speech
304 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
in 1858 were afterwards removed to the cemetery and there
erected as a memorial inscribed "To Our Patriot Dead".
The others may be found in sections, placed here and there
about the town, used chiefly as mounting-blocks before the
houses of the citizens who hold the old building in beloved
memory.
The old court house, from its very earliest history cher-
ished the tradition of great men. As early as the forties
Judge Stephen A. Douglas was presiding at the Fulton
County court and Edward Dickinson Baker (the beloved
"Ned Baker," "the silver tongued") frequently plead be-
fore its bar. Mr. W. T. Davidson, in his "Famous Men I
Have Known in the Military Tract" says of him:
"From my sixth or seventh year I vividly recall
that splendid specimen of young manhood as he appeared
in the old court-house, always crowded by people of the
county who came to meet their favorite party leaders
and to feast upon their oratory.
"But Ned Baker was in a class by himself. If he
only spoke for five minutes to court on some point of
law, the crowded court room was all attention. But if in
a murder case he spoke for hours his audience was
thrilled to the verge of collapse. Two-thirds of a cen-
tury has passed, but I can see that straight, lithe, blond,
graceful youth as he swayed his audience, jurors, the
bar and even the judge upon the bench with the music
of his voice and his word-pictures, his irresistible logic,
his illustrations, and the unconscious, spontaneous, per-
fervid oratory that come as fresh to me as when a child
like the musk of an ancient queen that fills her apart-
ment an age since she is dead.
"Glorious Ned Baker, who led our Illinois troops
from victory to victory in Mexico, and while a United
States Senator from Oregon, was shot dead at Ball's
Bluff in 1861 while leading a brigade in that heroic battle
for the Union."
General James Shields was a familiar figure here. He
was not only a great orator and a great soldier, but was
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 305
afterwards distinguished as the only American to be chosen
as United States Senator from three states. When Ste-
phen A. Douglas resigned from the bench of the Supreme
Court of the State of Illinois he was appointed by the Gov-
ernor to fill his unexpired term. Francis 'Shaughnessy, in
an address delivered at the dedication of the monument to
General Shields at Carrollton, Missouri, November 12th, 1914,
said:
" Shields' fame might have been locked up in the
sheepskins of law libraries had not President Polk called
him from the Supreme Bench to the office of Commis-
sioner General of the Land Office of the United States.
He had just set to work in a broad, intelligent way to
administer the affairs of this big office when the annexa-
tion of Texas, followed by a chain of rapid events, cul-
minated in a war with Mexico."
Judge William Kellogg came to Canton, Illinois, in the
early forties and Fulton County claimed him until 1863 when
he went to Peoria. No man of his period had a surer grasp
of the politics of the time, nor a more prophetic vision. He
was Lincoln's closest friend and advisor from the birth of
the Republican party until his ( Kellogg 's) retirement from
his third term of Congress in 1857. Lincoln was himself, of
course, in attendance on almost every term of court through
these years.
But not only could the bar of Fulton County boast vis-
itors of distinction; these splendid forties saw also the de-
velopment of a number of Lewistown's citizens who later
were to come into prominence in her own and broader fields.
W. C. Goudy, who had come here from the east to study law
under Judge Wead, and incidentally to lay the foundation of
that career that was to gain him, for many years in later
life, the undisputed title of Chicago's leading lawyer; S. P.
Shope, afterwards Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
Illinois; Leonard F. Ross, hero of Vera Cruz and Cerro
Gordo, educated to the law but making his claim to recogni-
tion in the Civil War when, after the capture of Fort Donel-
306 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
son, he was commissioned Brigadier General ; and Col. L. W.
Boss, for whom the town had been named, and who was des-
tined to become its greatest and most constructive citizen
and who was just beginning his long and brilliant career in
law and politics.
The next decade was to see the names of Robert Inger-
soll, William Pitt Kellogg and S. Corning Judd added to the
already glorious roll of the old courthouse. Ingersoll the
audacious, the brilliant, the great-hearted in those days a
radical Democrat engaging here at Proctor's Grove and at
other points all over the district, in those joint debates with
Fulton's "Old Man Eloquent," Judge Kellogg, which left a
trail of brilliance that lingers still in the memories of those
who heard them debates that were destined to end in defeat
for Ingersoll in the race for that coveted seat in Congress
which he had hoped to win from Kellogg; William Pitt Kel-
logg (a distant relative and law partner of the Judge), hand-
some, young, elegant in those days, avoiding the drudgery of
the office, but lounging about the court-house and the offices
of his Lewistown friends on court days, delighting them with
his wit and brilliant anecdote and who was to become in turn
Lincoln Elector, Governor of the Territory of Nebraska, re-
construction Governor of Louisiana, and finally Senator from
the same state; and S. Corning Judd, who in the seventies
as Chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Illinois came into
prominence through his prosecution for the Episcopal
Church of the case against the Eev. Dr. Cheney, which com-
menced in 1869 and is considered one of the most important
cases of this kind ever conducted in this country, and who
was appointed Postmaster of Chicago under Cleveland
in 1885.
But the Golden Age of Lewistown was probably denoted
by the fifties, a period of great importance in the history of
the whole of Illinois. Its development was coincidental with,
if indeed, not attributable to, the sudden rise of the press to
a position of enormous power and influence and its wilful
shaking off of the old trammels and restraints that hitherto
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 307
had made it an organ of subservience rather than of leader-
ship. It was the great hour of the " country editor" in Illi-
nois, and the press found in this state, which was virtually
the arena of the great slavery struggle that was to terminate
in the Civil War, an instrument made to its hand.
It was an anti-slavery editor, Paul Selby, who called to-
gether the Illinois editors united on this sentiment and or-
ganized a party which should take unqualified grounds in
opposition to slavery, and out of this meeting grew the or-
ganization of the Republican party, born and nourished in
this State, and giving to the nation one of its greatest Presi-
dents and to the world one of its greatest Liberators.
Back of the leaders on either side of this issue were
ranged a stalwart group, and the battle might be said to have
been fought to its ultimate conclusion in the columns of these
newspapers. Among those on the Democratic side in un-
flinching support of Douglas was W. T. Davidson of Lewis-
town; a "country editor," to be sure, but wielding one of
the powerful pens in the Military Tract, having at his
disposal all the gifts of invective, sarcasm, pathos and illumi-
nating humor. "It is not too much to say" wrote a con-
temporary, at his death, ' ' that Davidson belongs in that small
class of really great editors; that he was to Illinois provin-
cial journalism what Bennett, Greeley, Dana, Storey, Medill
and other master journalists were to national newspaperdom.
He had filled and dominated his restricted sphere as thor-
oughly and well as they did their larger fields."
In Mr. Davidson's later life he held for the character of
Lincoln the most intense veneration and reverence. He
came to be regarded as an important authority on Lincolniana
and his lectures on Lincoln and Douglas were delivered all
over the United States. He was one of Lewistown's most
picturesque characters.
The two greatest days in the history of the town, those
on which it bases its surest claim to historical recognition, are
known upon its calendar as "Douglas Day," and "Lincoln
Day."
308 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
Lincoln and Douglas had become, as will have been seen,
familiar figures about the streets of Lewistown in the forties,
and the passing years had brought to both but particularly
to Douglas increasing fame. Douglas was at this time the
most noted man in America, and the Democratic Party was
looking forward to the next Presidential election to place him
in the Executive Chair. The country was prescient with
some great danger to the Union growing out of the increasing
agitation over the question of slavery and state's rights and
Lincoln, though lacking the fame of Douglas was believed to
be no mean opponent. The challenge which Lincoln had given
Douglas for that series of debates throughout the state, which
has come to be referred to as the "hundred days' contest,"
had been accepted and the Lewistown speeches preceded the
first of those engagements the Ottawa debate by a few
days only.
Masters, in "The Lincoln and Douglas Debates," which
is included in the collection of his poems called "The Great
Valley," has put into the mouth of his uncouth philosopher
a description of that day.
them were great days.
One time the Little Giant came here with Linkern
And talked from the steps of the court-house ;
And you never saw such a crowd of people;
Democrats, Whigs, Locofocos,
Know-nothings and Anti-masonics,
Blue lights, Spiritualists, Eepublicans
Free-soilers, Socialists, American such a crowd.
Linkern 's voice squeaked up high,
And didn't carry.
But Douglas !
People out yonder in Procter 's Grove,
A mile from the Court house steps,
Could hear him roar and hear him say :
" I 'm going to trot him down to Egypt
And see if he '11 say the things he says
To the black republicans, in northern Illinois."
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 309
It made you shiver all down your spine
To see that face and hear that voice
And that was The Little Giant !
And then on the other hand there was
Abe Linkern standing six foot four,
As thin as a rail, with high-keyed voice,
And sometimes solemn, and sometimes comic
As any clown you ever saw,
And runnin' Col. Lankfor's little steamer,
As it were you know, which would bobble the skiff,
Which was the law ;
And The Little Giant 's other foot
Would slip on the bank, which was the constitution
And you could almost hear him holler ' * ouch. ' '
And Linkern would say: This argument
Of the Senator's is thin as soup
Made from the shadow of a starved pigeon !
And then the crowd would yell, and the cornet band
Would play, and men would walk away and say :
Linkern floored him. And others would say :
He ain't no match for the Little Giant.
But I'll declare if I could decide
Which whipped the other.
Proctor's Grove, where Douglas delivered his address
on this occasion (you remember how "Hod Putt" beholding
How Old Bill Piersol and others grew in wealth
Robbed a traveler once in Proctor's Grove)
is still referred to by its original name, although it is now
platted into town lots under the name of Davidson's Sec-
ond Addition. It formerly comprised thirteen acres shaded
by magnificent forest trees. It lies to the south and
west of the town, within walking distance, and used to be
the forum for all open air speaking in the early days in
the history of Lewistown. It was the place where po-
litical rallies were held, and Fourth of July celebrations, and
especially was it noted as the theatre of those stirring
310 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
debates that used to engage the wit and eloquence and logic
of the public men of that day. It was at Proctor's Grove
that William Pitt Kellogg once crossed swords with S. Corn-
ing Judd; here Ingersoll and Judge William Kellogg began
their series in their senatorial race of 1860; and here the
voice of almost every distinguished man possessed of the
gift of oratory in central Illinois was heard at one time or
another.
But the red letter day for Proctor's Grove is forever
fixed in its history as August 16, 1858 "Douglas Day."
The importance of the occasion can be imagined. On
the Friday preceding the Monday which was the 16th the
"Little Giant" had spoken at Havana, and on Saturday morn-
ing a committee of Lewistown's citizens from the Democratic
ranks I note among them the names of W. C. Goudy and
Col. L. W. Ross went to that place to escort Douglas to
their city. Several miles out of town they were met by a great
concourse of people come out to do him honor ; a brass band
played, and much cheering went to the general effect of a
triumphal entry into the town. Mr. Douglas was entertained
at the house of Mr. Goudy, and during that three days' stay,
for he remained till Tuesday morning, hundreds of citizens
called upon him ; the string band, that ubiquitous small town
adjunct, serenaded him, a display of fireworks added its
glare and glory, and all went splendidly.
On Monday morning, however, an effigy of "Douglas
the Traitor " was found conspicuously displayed in the square;
also the ropes of the Democratic pole had been cut and a
small civil war threatened. Excitement ran high but the mat-
ter was finally passed over in the press of the great occasion.
Immense delegations came to Lewistown from every town-
ship in the county. It was estimated that half the county
was there, for it must be remembered that not only was this
section of the state intensely Democratic but Douglas had
been for twenty years its political hero. Therefore when
he began his speech that day in Proctor's Grove he literally
looked down upon acres of faces, probably 5,000. For the
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 311
first and only time in his experience, it is said, his voice was
unequal to the occasion and after he had spoken for an hour
Col. Eoss was called upon to address the people in his stead.
On the following day, which was August the 17th, Lincoln
came to Lewistown. He, also, came from Havana where he
had gone to address the people. He was escorted from that
place to Lewistown by a committee consisting of Major
Walker, his old friend, John W. Proctor and others. He
also was met by a delegation, though a much smaller one
(seventy-six horsemen, seventeen wagons and buggies are
mentioned). No doubt the brass band came again into play;
he too, was serenaded duly and there was much greeting and
hand-shaking to be gone through. At two o 'clock that after-
noon, he spoke from the portico of the old court house. How
singularly at home be must have looked! That tall, gaunt,
dramatic figure, full of grave dignity, standing between those
great columns of unpolished, native stone.
It is recorded that he began simply and directly, as was
his usual way, addressing his remarks, apparently, to an old
man on the right flank of the crowd. He spoke earnestly
for several minutes ; then some men on the other side called
out: " Abe, you've talked to them fellers long enough. Now
talk to this side awhile." Whereupon Lincoln quietly apolo-
gized for his preoccupied manner and made the rest of his
speech to the other side !
Lincoln's audience was by no means so large as Douglas'
had been, but it gave him close, even rapt, attention. Major
Walker heard him with awe and wonder. Twenty-five years
had passed since he had heard his voice in debate, and al-
though he had been told that his friend had made great pro-
gress in the matter of public speaking he was not prepared for
the power and eloquence, the tremendously moving quality
of his simple speech.
It was on this occasion that Lincoln delivered the glow-
ing eulogy on the Declaration of Independence which the
London Times commented on as worthy to be preserved among
the Nation's classics.
312 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
Lincoln was entertained at dinner that night by Major
Walker, spent the night with Mr. John "W. Proctor, and the
next morning was driven by the Major to the point thirty-
two miles away where he was to take his train. The Major
bade good-bye to Lincoln there, and neither he nor Lewistown
was to see his face again.
V.
THE MCNEELY MANSION.
Perhaps the most interesting monument to the fifties
still extant in Lewistown is the stately old house which Col.
L. W. Ross, son of Ossian Boss, built in the middle of the
decade. Although it has passed from possession of the
family, and has sustained some injury from fire, it is still in
an excellent state of preservation, having been restored by
Mr. A. J. Bay, with a fine sense of fitness and an appreciation
of its historic value. Mr. John Kennedy is the present owner
of the house. It is, by common consent, identified with the
McNeely mansion of the " Anthology." So descriptive of
the Boss fortunes are the first lines of the Washington Mc-
Neely epitaph except that the girls were sent to Notre Dame
and Vassar that it reads like true biography :
Bich, honored by my fellow citizens,
The father of many children, born of a noble mother,
All raised there
In the great mansion-house, at the edge of the town.
Note the cedar tree on the lawn !
I sent all the boys to Ann Arbor, all the girls to Bockf ord,
The while my life went on, getting more riches and honors
Besting under my cedar tree at evening.
The years went on.
I sent the girls to Europe;
I dowered them when married.
I gave the boys money to start in business.
They were strong children as apples
Before the bitten places show.
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 xhe Spoon River Country 313
Also three names of the McNeely children are Boss
names; but Mary died in infancy; John, who "fled the coun-
try in disgrace," was the bright particular star of the fam-
ily, and Jennie who, peradventure, "died in child-birth," is
Mrs. G. K. Barrere of Los Angeles, California, and has just
written me in response to my inquiry if I might without of-
fense to her so identify her old home: "I have not the least
objection to your speaking of the McNeely mansion as the
Ross home Adverse criticism has such a different
meaning to me from what it once had. It is only the reflec-
tion of one's own viewpoint. There are two sides to every-
thing in life, including people, and it is up to us which side
we see." It is an amusing incongruity, considering the fate
of "Jennie," that Mrs. Barrere 's letter ends: "I wish you
might see our three grandsons. They are the joy of our
lives."
Colonel Boss was forty-three when he began the erec-
tion of the "mansion-house at the edge of the town." Al-
ready honors had begun to find him out. He had been twice
chosen to a seat in the Legislature ; his service in the Mexican
war had brought him the title of Colonel ; he had been Presi-
dential Elector in 1848 ; and he was the acknowledged leader
of the Democratic party in Central Illinois.
In early life he had married Miss Frances Simms, the
daughter of a fine old Virginia family, a sister to the wife of
Major Walker, and a thriving group of boys and girls was
growing up about him, crowding the modest limits of the
parental quarters. Moreover, to build a house is an instinc-
tive act in man a reaching out, perhaps, after some portion
of that material permanence that is the undoubted tenure of
things that are made with hands.
Somewhere along the Hudson Colonel Boss had once
seen a house that exactly pleased him. He had obtained the
plans, and now that a permanent home was in contempla-
tion, he carried them out to the last architectural minutia.
The house stands today exactly as when completed. The
main body of the building is the old square form with the
wide hall running through the center, but it extends
314 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
in the rear on three different levels, after the New
England fashion, adapting itself to the gentle decline of the
land at that point, beginning with the kitchen and servants'
quarters and terminating in the wood and carriage houses.
Indeed the most interesting view of it is obtained from the
rear, but trees and shrubbery obscure its fine proportions
from the camera.
The house, which contains seventeen rooms, was built
of brick burned in its own door-yard, the stone for its foun-
dations came from the valley of the Spoon, where, also, the
lime for the plaster was kilned a fine old house, as native to
its surroundings as the forest trees on its lawn. H. V. V.
Clute, a young master carpenter and wood-worker, came from
the East and spent a year on its interior finish, and the win-
dow and door lintels, the paneled infolding shutters of the
long French windows of the East Parlor, and the banisters
of the fine old double staircase attest his skill.
The house is set in spacious grounds. There was for-
merly a small deer-park of twenty acres in the rear, and
There is a garden of acacia,
Catalpa trees, and arbors sweet with vine.
Although the building was completed in 1857, and be-
came a place of hospitality from its inception, yet owing to
that troublous period preceding the breaking out of the Civil
War, the hard years of its duration, and those immediate to
its conclusion, no social event of importance took place there
until in 1869, when the eldest daughter of the house gave her
hand in marriage to Mr. B. M. Hinde.
Mr. Hinde, who is always affectionately referred to as
u Judge" Hinde, lived, until his death two years since, in
Lewistown and the lovely oval face of Ellen, long since de-
ceased, looks out from a canvas above his mantlepiece
"judge" by courtesy only, a tribute, he used to declare, to
his connoisseurship in good whiskies and fine horses. Indul-
gence in both these tastes had long since been relinquished,
but the title persisted, perhaps on other grounds, for he was
to the end past master of that subtler, finer sport the almost
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 xhe Spoon River Country 315
perished flower of his generation a raconteur of delightful
tales.
Whatever traditions have come to the enrichment of the
history of this place, none are more dramatic than those as-
sociated with it through the events of the Civil War. Those
were stirring times in a section of the state that was essen-
tially Democratic. At a meeting held in the old court-house
on April 3rd, 1861, Leonard F. Eoss withdrew from the old
party, but his brother, Colonel Ross, remained in the Demo-
cratic ranks. In 1863 he was chosen a member of the House
of Eepresentatives, and being twice re-elected, served till
1869. But those early years of the war were tense years for
Lewistown and there was a time when, owing to trouble en-
countered in making enrollments for the draft, and in arrest-
ing deserters, the Provost Marshal of the Congressional Dis-
trict sent a company of German cavalry always referred to
as the Dutch cavalry to Fulton county. A little later these
were reenforced by fifty additional cavalry and a company of
eighty infantry. Arrests in the south end of the county had
aroused the people in that section to a point of insurrection.
"There are no words," says an old newspaper account, "to
tell the horror and excitement of that day." A mob of six
or seven hundred armed men came up from the south of
the county and sent in an ultimatum that unless the prisoners
were given up, they would be rescued at whatever cost. Colo-
nel Ross as leader of the Democratic party naturally came
under the suspicion of being in sympathy with them, and as
one of the counter-moves on the part of the military, a cannon
was trained directly upon the fine new house.
Matters were, of course, adjusted. The prisoners were
not surrendered, but they were granted an immediate trial
under Judge David Davis of Springfield, and were acquitted.
The old offensive enrolling officers were removed and men in
whose fairness the county had confidence, named in their
places. Both sides profited by the experience and thereafter
the enrolling went on without resistance; such deserters as
were arrested surrendered quietly; and after a time the mili-
tary marched away.
316 Josephine Graven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
Many memories stand about this place; memories of
famous people entertained at its hospitable board; memories
of love and passion evinced by a package of old letters, tied
with a faded ribbon, slipped down between the inner and
outer walls and discovered by workmen after the recent fire ;
memories of the pains of birth and death; of towering ambi-
tions and of spiritual disasters; and memories of that long
procession of the dead who came to lie, one by one in the
library with windows looking towards the west and, presently,
in the ' ' burying-yard " which their sturdy progenitor, Ossian
Ross, had bequeathed to the city in its infancy, and where so
many friends and kindred already were "sleeping, sleeping,
sleeping, on the hill".
It may be interesting to know that the tradition of the old
Boss line has been carried on by the Colonel's eldest son. John
Boss, like his father, entered the profession of the law. He
began his career in politics by serving one term in the Legisla-
ture of his native state but soon afterwards he went to Wash-
ington, D. C. He was made postmaster of the capital city un-
der Cleveland and during the Harrison administration re-
ceived the appointment making him one of three commis-
sioners of the District of Columbia, a position which he held
until his death. His two sons, throughout the late great war
served their country in France, Tenny Ross as Lieutenant
Colonel in the regular army and Lee with the engineering
forces; and the latter 's son has but lately graduated from
West Point.
Not all the memories are sad that stand about the old
"McNeely mansion".
VI.
THE CHURCH OF ST. JAMES.
It is strange that during the uneasy period of the Civil
War there should have been added to the town of Lewistown
the structure that has proved, perhaps, the most constant
aesthetic influence throughout the whole of the Spoon River
country The Episcopal Church of St. James.
'j^'--''\-"'''i'~y& : ?% '/ '' ' - ' -
"" ,4-? M' ' x ''"' r
vol. xiv. NOB. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 317
As early as 1859, we learn from the files of The Fulton
Democrat, an organization of that denomination was formed
and a plan was made to build a "beautiful Gothic church".
On the old vestry book the name of S. Corning Judd appears
as Senior Warden and it was doubtless chiefly due to him that
the ideals in church architectures, just beginning to obtain in
the East, found expression in this little western town.
Mr. Judd, who has been referred to in the chapter on Old
Lewistown, was born in New York state, and had, before com-
ing to Illinois in 1854, a various experience. He studied law
in the eastern part of the state, passing his examination in
Albany; took up the practice of his profession in Syracuse;
presently became editor of the Syracuse Daily Star an old-
line Whig paper, devoted to the interests of that party as
represented by Webster, Fillmore and other famous political
men. He relinquished that post to accept a position with the
Department of the Interior at Washington. After eighteen
months spent in that city he returned to Syracuse becoming, on
this occasion, both proprietor and editor of the Daily Star.
Upon the general disruption of the Whig party he sold his
paper and ventured west, coming to Lewistown and entering
into a law partnership with the Honorable W. C. Goudy as
previously stated.
He was twenty-seven when he came to Lewistown but he
had, from earliest manhood, been an ardent churchman; was
familiar with the best in church architecture of his day; and
it is probable that he was acquainted with, and interested in,
the work and ideals of that organization known as the ' * New
York Ecclesiological Society" which was formed in 1848 for
the avowed purpose of working certain radical changes in
ecclesiology, the chief principles of which were the adoption
of the Pointed Gothic of the Augustan Age of Architecture,
deep chancels, proper furniture for chancels, altars, and the
like.
The value of this pioneer movement in America scarcely
can be over estimated when it is remembered that prior to this
time church building throughout the country had consisted
almost altogether in the erection of unpleasing rectangular
318 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
structures, crudely reminiscent of Grecian temples, and
uniting in mongrel assortment, the elements of domestic and
of commercial architecture. "I suppose", said Ralph Adams
Cramm, in his " Quest of the Gothic", "there is no more
awful evidence of rampant barbarism than that which exists
in the architecture of the United States between the years of
1820 and 1840." It seems strange indeed that up to the build-
ing of Trinity (New York City) by Upjohn in 1847, not a single
church, constructed along the lines of the fourteenth century
Gothic, was to be found on this continent ; and so undeveloped
was the whole body of liturgical science that it was not till
1860 that the rector of even that leading church had the cour-
age to vest its choir.
The labors of the Ecclesiological Society covered a period
of five years, ending its career in 1853, and already, in '59
so fast the flame of beauty runs in this remote western
town of at that time less than a thousand inhabitants, a
"beautiful Gothic church" was in contemplation! The suc-
cess of this ambition, culminating in 1865, was due to the en-
terprise of Mr. Judd who secured, through influence, the
plans for the building, from a New York church architect of
considerable fame, Edwin Tuckerman Potter. He consented
to furnish them only on the consideration that no expense
should be spared in the erection of the building that would
make for the complete development of the design. In ac-
cordance with this stipulation Mr. Judd obtained the bulk of
the funds for the enterprise from the East. He furnished
from this source, about $6,000, and the people of Lewistown
contributed the remaining $2,000 required.
This architect, the son of Bishop Alonzo Potter, was one
of the first exponents of the Gothic in America. He has to his
credit a number of fine churches in this country, notably the
Church of the Heavenly Eest, N. Y., Colt Memorial Church at
Hartford, Conn., and the Church of the Good Shepherd, as
well as the Memorial Hall at Schenectady, N. Y., but it is
doubtful if he has left to do him honor any building, either
large or small, more perfectly conceived in the faith of the
Seven Lamps than the little church at Lewistown.
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 319
As originally built for a wing has been added since
the building was 66 x 26, but the satisfying proportion of the
angle of its pointed roof to the architectural demands of the
mass, the propriety of its moderate buttresses, the grace and
fitness of its slender tower, all conspire toward the expres-
sion of that consummate art "without which", says Rodin,
"the greatest cathedral is less than the smallest church that
has it".
It is built of brick, now time and weather-worn to a lovely
monochrome, and relies alone for ornament, upon a design of
brick-work that is thrown out in mild relief and which extends
around the building some four feet, perhaps, below the eaves ;
and upon the effect of the long hand-wrought hinges across
the door of the portico.
The master carpenter employed in the construction of the
church was that H. V. V. Clute who had come West at the
behest of Col. Ross several years earlier. The stone and brick
work was awarded to local workmen but a masonry-artist
from Peoria,. Robert Turner, was employed for the ornate
portion and a man was brought from Chicago for the interior
painting and gilding.
St. James has a very beautiful marble baptismal font, the
gift of the Rev. Dr. Clarkson who was the rector of that St.
James Episcopal Church of Chicago for which this one was
named.
It is unfortunate for Lewistown that St. James is falling
into disrepair, Many of its more able parishioners have
moved away or died, and this lovely monument to the spiritual
and aesthetic aspiration of an earlier day, which has won the
praise of every lover of good architecture who has come with-
in its neighborhood, is suffering decline. Mr. Frederick
Fultz, whose name is associated with some of the best early
civic and domestic architecture in Chicago, made at one time,
elaborate drawings of the building, and pronounced it, in his
opinion, one of the most beautiful and perfect examples of
Gothic architecture in America, but unfortunately for the pur-
poses of this book, these drawings have disappeared since
his death, and no trace of them can be found.
320 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
Time and the tenderness of vines is over it, but already
there is about this little church, but slightly more than half a
century old, the pathos of an unregarded beauty; the fleeting
loveliness of things that are conceived in the high faith of love
and aspiration, but are fore-doomed, after the brief flowering
of an hour, ' ' to pass and to be as dust that is blown now this
way and now that, -and in the end is gathered to the wilderness
of lifeless things. ' '
VII.
SCHOOL DAYS OF THE POET.
For the purposes of poetry the education of Shakespeare
according to Ben Johnson was, perhaps, ideal ' ' a little Latin
and less Greek. ' ' An academic training is necessarily an em-
barrassment to an ego seeking "a gesture of mine own." The
contemplations of ''Theodore the Poet" are more directly
to the purpose; and just as Mr. Masters has conceived his
characters as drawing their philosophy from their occupa-
tions "Griffy the Cooper" from his tubs and "Dow Kritt"
from digging "all the ditches about Spoon River" so we
may suppose as autobiographic his conception of the boy who
sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid Spoon
With deep-set eye, staring at the door of
the crawfish's burrow,
Waiting for him to appear;
Who wondered in a trace of thought.
What he knew, what he desired, and why he
lived at all;
and, as a significant intimation of that "orientation of the
soul to the conditions in life" which is Masters' own defini-
tion of poetry, the introspection which completes the poem:
But later your vision watched for men and
women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that vou could see
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 321
How they lived, and for what,
And why they kept crawling so busily
Along the sandy way where the water fails
As the summer wanes.
The ten years which the poet spent in Lewistown seem
to have been variously employed ; in school both the grades
and high; in newspaper work in a local office; in sundry ad-
ventures in long-distance journalism; and in reading law in
his father's office which undertaking was one of not un-
mixed enthusiasm and suffered the interruption of a winter 's
study at Knox College at Galesburg, Illinois. Also there was
a continual preoccupation with literature, especially poetry,
and endless experiments in verse. Four hundred poems
before he was twenty-three! It was as a little boy in the
grades that he came under the tutelage of that benign char-
acter Esther Sparks, who is the "Emily Sparks" of the
"Anthology."
The extreme tenderness which Masters has brought to
the conception of the women of his characterization is in-
finitely divining; those forsaken women, "Louise Smith"
and "Mary McNeely," regarding, each, her soul's disas-
ter; "Flossie Cabanis" transcending the sordid failure of
her life by that prayer which was the voice of her histrionic
aspiration; "Caroline Branson," and the tragedy of the
"room with lamps;" "Edith Conant," the pity of her
unremembered beauty; "Elizabeth Childers," who cries to
the child who died with her death voicing the suffering of
women too fine for the harsh conditions of life; even the
prostitute "Georgine Sand Miner," who cries out against
her ultimate degradation.
If Daniel had only shot me dead!
Instead of stripping me naked of lies,
A harlot in body and soul !
"Emily Sparks" is one of the most subtly rendered,
as she is one of the most universal, of all the Spoon River
folk. She is long since dead, but the "eternal silence" of
her that spoke to the soul of "Reuben Pantier" is eloquent
to a larger audience:
322 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
My boy, wherever you are,
Work for your soul's sake,
That all the clay of you, and all the dross
of you,
May yield to the fire of you
Till the fire is nothing but light ! . . . .
Nothing but light!
It was during his first year in the high school that Mas-
ters came under the influences of the teacher who proved
to be his greatest inspiration, and who awakened in him an
abiding interest in literature Miss Mary Fisher.
Miss Fisher was a young woman of twenty-seven when
she came to Lewistown in 1885, and her preparation had been
exceptional. She had studied in Chicago, Edinburg and
Boston. At Boston she had touched elbows with the Con-
cord School, had caught the flame of its enthusiasm for let-
ters and ideas and here in Lewistown in the one year of her
sojourn, she held aloft the torch. Ten years later she began
the publication of a series of books that established her
claim to a place of distinction in the field of letters and
gave proof of her exceptional breadth and vision as an edu-
cator. Between the years of 1895 and 1902 she published
successively " Twenty-five Letters on English Authors,"
"A Group of French Critics," "A General Survey of Amer-
ican Literature," and a novel, " Gertrude Dorrence."
The inspiration and value of the work of such a teacher
is always incalculable. In Miss Fisher's group at Lewistown
were two others beside the now illustrious Edgar Lee, who
were destined to feel the stirring of ambitions and of un-
doubted gifts Julia Brown, who afterwards became the wife
of Dr. William Strode, and of whom I have already spoken,
and Margaret Gilman George.
Margaret George, though coming under the influence of
Miss Fisher, was not of the high school. A faulty heart
valve, which caused her too early death, rendered her health
inadequate to the rigor of the public school so that it was
necessary for her father to instruct her at home. As a re-
sult the scholarship of this frail young girl was exceptional.
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 xhe Spoon River Country 323
Not only was she a mistress of English, but she had a work-
ing knowledge of French and was a fine Greek scholar. Her
penchant was for the classics, and she had a remarkable
knowledge of the Bible. Among the mementoes which her
mother now treasures is a little Oxford Bible given her by
the Poet when they were both very young. "For Margaret
from Lee" is inscribed on the fly-leaf.
This period was one full of dreams and plans and small
exciting adventures for the ambitious youngsters. There is
a delightful story of a compact entered into by Edgar Lee
and Margaret, to write the very worst ballad conceivable
and to undertake to get it published. Nothing came of Mas-
ters' venture perhaps he succeeded too completely but
Margaret wrote a long sentimental tale in rhyme which she
called "The Ballad of the Dishcloth" and sent it to Eugene
Field who was then conducting the "column" called "Flats
and Sharps" in the Chicago Record. Its immediate accept-
ance filled her with unholy glee, but on its publication it was
found that Field had taken liberties with the concluding
stanzas, and her triumph was changed to chagrin.
"The Ballad of the Dishcloth" concerned itself with
the love affair of a housemaid, her lover the butcher boy,
and a shadowy third, a rejected suitor the milkman. The
dishcloth was the signal to the lover that the mistress was
away and he might venture upon a call. After a time it was
decided that he should go away to seek his fortune, but
should return within a year to make her his bride. True to
his pledge the lover returns, and his emotion on finding the
dish cloth out and the tragic denouement, as described by
Margaret, is as follows:
' ' Oh, trust sublime ! " he fondly cried,
And ran to kiss the signal white,
But as he reached the casement's side
What tableaux met his frenzied sight.
There stood false Susan with a man
Her head reclining on his breast:
He loudly praised the dish-cloth plan
The while her coral lips he pressed.
324 Josephine Craven Chandler J - l - s - H - s -
One leap the frantic lover made
And with the rival wiped the floor !
In her own dishcloth choked the maid
And left the scene forever more.
But Gene Field had omitted the last two stanzas and
substituted in their stead:
There sat false Susan in a chair
Resplendent still in buxom charms,
Holding, Oh, horror and despair !
A puling infant in her arms.
"What means this spectacle?" said he,
Brushing a scalding tear aside ;
"I thought you would not come," said she,
"And so became the milkman's bride."
' ' What means the dishcloth then, ' ' he cried,
' ' That from your upper casement swings ? ' '
"That's not a dishcloth," she replied,
' ' That 's where we dry the baby 's things ! ' '
The home of Margaret constituted the nucleus of what
might be called the literary group in Lewistown. Mr. B. Y
George, who was the Presbyterian minister of the place, was
a scholarly, broadminded man. He occasionally contrib-
uted to the periodicals, especially church journals; lectured
at intervals on literature and the Bible; took a deep and in-
telligent interest in the questions of the day, and never
wearied of the society of the young folks growing up about
him. Mrs. George will be remembered chiefly as a person-
ality a woman who found a delightful humor in the spec-
tacle of life. She used to give entertaining talks on George
Eliot, Shakespeare and the Brownings before Women's
Clubs and in the homes of "literary" people, but it was only
among the intimates of the inner circle of her friends that she
abandoned herself to those moods wherein impersonation,
augmented by a natural gift of mimicry, made the relation
of the merest incident, having the elements of social comedy,
a thing to be remembered.
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 325
The Georges had two daughters. The younger, Anne, *is
now regarded as one of the foremost educators in the United
States. She is the American representative of the Montes-
sori system ; is the head of that school in Washington, D. C.,
and to her contributions on the subject to various popular
magazines is chiefly due the prompt and intelligent accept-
ance, in this country, of the methods of that school.
Margaret, the elder daughter, would seem to have in-
herited, in fortunate conjunction, the intellectuality of the
father and the taste and personality of the mother. "The
good stars met in her horoscope," and only the briefness
of her life, perhaps, defeated her dreams of a place of per-
manence among the Lyra Americana. In the seven years
between her graduation from Lewistown High and her mar-
riage her poems found their way into the best magazines
of the day; The Century, Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's and
many others. Her poem "Shrived," which appeared in
Lippincott 's, elicited from the editor of that magazine praise
that did much to establish her place among the younger
poets, and already she had begun to be spoken of as the
"coming poet of the West." In 1890 she collaborated with
Mr. Davidson in the production of a novel, but this was
merely an experiment and proved less interesting to her
than her verse. A photograph of her in her young girlhood
shows an exquisitely delicate profile, and in the delineation
of the high fine brow and the full curved mouth, that supreme
combination found in women who achieve in love and art
passion and intellect.
She married in 1895 Mr. W. T. Davidson, and left at
her death a little son, Gilman, who was in the late war with
the flying corps in France.
Several years after her death her husband began to
collect her poems from various sources, and to print them
in the columns of his paper under the caption "Her
Songs." "I have found," he says by way of explanation
of the previously unpublished verses, "a trunkful of manu-
*Miss Anne George, now Mrs. Robert Miller, Evanston, Illinois.
326 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
scripts, written many of them, on scraps of paper, some in
dim penciling, some mere fragments with pages missing; a
holy jumble of precious gems."
As if some prescience of her early doom had been vouch-
safed her she died of heart failure there was found among
the many exquisite songs of gladness and love, and hope and
heart-break those "things that perish never" "Mora-
tura. ' '
I am the mown grass, dying at your feet
The pale grass gasping faintly in the sun :
I shall be dead long, long 'ere day is done.
That you may say, ' ' The air today was sweet. ' '
I am the mown grass dying at your feet.
I am the white syringa, falling now
When some one shakes the bough ;
What matter if I lose my life's brief noon?
You laugh, "A snow in June?"
I am the white syringa, falling now.
I am the waning lamp that flickers on,
Striving to give my old unclouded light
Among the rest that makes your garden bright :
Let me burn still till all my oil is gone.
I am the waning lamp that flickers on.
I am your singer, singing my last note
Death's fingers clutch my throat!
New grass will grow, new flowers bloom and fall,
New lamps play out against your garden wall.
I am your singer, singing my last note.
VIII.
HERE AND THERE.
That all the people of the " Anthology" are not "sleep-
ing on the hill" is evidenced by the occasional presence upon
the streets of Lewistown of an uncouth individual, ragged
and unshorn, whom inquiry discovers to be that digger of
ditches about Spoon River, "Dow Kritt". His occupation is
in harmony with his appearance, and whatever his philosophy
.-*
vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 xhe Spoon River Country 327
might prove to be on close acquaintance it is obvious that he
does not "need to die to learn about roots". A certain
Charley Metcalf is pointed out as "Willie Metcalf". His oc-
cupation, and his place of residence as well, is a local livery
stable. His talent for handling horses is well known; indeed
his sense-oneness with all forms of nature suggest a certain
atavism. A simple, harmless soul! "William Jones", who
has been identified as Dr. Strode, late of Bernadotte, is daily
seen about the round of his professional calls or occupied with
civic business. A room of his office suite is occupied by his
collections and one great cabinet and several tiers of moth-
proof boxes containing bird-skins (each wrapped in its tiny
shroud) have obtruded themselves within the confines of the
office proper.
But every passage about the town evokes, for the lovers
of the ' ' Anthology ' ', the drama of the past. The courthouse
which "Silas Dement", on his return from Joliet, found built
on the site of the one which he had burned; the bank whose
failure involved not less than ten characters of the "An-
thology"; and Beadle's Opera House (the "hall of Nicolas
Bindle") all stand as monuments to the past, and keep in the
steadfastness of brick and stone, "the glory of their fallen
day."
Beadle's Opera House, which belongs to the estate of the
late Mr. R. M. Hind, has passed into disuse as a place of en-
tertainment since the advent of the cinematograph. Its fres-
coes are dim with time and the spider has made his lair in the
long deep recesses of the windows ; the walls of the dressing
rooms are scrawled with the names of many mummers; and
on the deep stage .
that overlooks the chairs
and where a pop-eyed daub
Of Shakespeare, very like the hired man
Of Christian Dahlmann, brow and pointed
beard,
Upon a drab proscenium outward stared,
odd bits of "property" stand about with a pathetic patience.
Here walk the ghosts of "Flossie Cabanis" and of "Ralph
328 Josephine Craven Chandler J - L s - H - s -
Barrett, the coining romantic actor" who enthralled her soul;
here "Harry Wilmans" heard the Sunday-school superin-
tendent make that flamboyant speech which sent him to the
rice field near Manila and through
days of loathing and nights of fear
To the hour of the charge through the steam-
ing swamp
Following the flag :
and here was staged one of the episodes of "The Spooniad"
which "Jonathan Swift Somers" conceived in epic mood but
never carried to completion. Of those two conflicting forces
in Spoon River it was the liberals who
in the hall of Nicolas Bindle held
Wise converse and inspiriting debate.
Lewistown has two cemeteries. The one
Where holy ground is and the cross
Marks every grave
lies to the east of the town. It covers three slopes of a hill on
the summit of which is a great gray Christ upon a cross.
Gallighers, Maloneys, 'Daniels and many other names be-
speaking a Celtic origin are found upon those gravestones
but one looks in vain for the name of "Father Malloy".
There never has been a Father Malloy in the town, it ap-
pears, but a certain Father Thebes answers to that descrip-
tion. Every one was fond of Father Thebes, especially the
boys. But one insists on a Father Malloy. The name car-
ries conviction and "Spoon River" is a large territory.
The Protestant cemetery, which also is on a hill which
covers several gentle knolls in fact is north of Lewistown
and is separated from the town by a ravine. No pleasanter
place could be found for long, long sleeping. A winding road
leads through it, flanked on either side, in the summer, by
purple phlox; great elms and small sweet cedars fill the place
with restful shadows and with pleasant scents and sounds;
and on the central eminence stand those limestone pillars
already hallowed by the memory of Lincoln and inscribed to
"Our Patriot Dead". All about one are names, that to the
literary pilgrim, are essentially "Spoon River" names; aE
'OVER ME A FOND FATHER ERECTED THIS MARBLE SHAFT ON
WHICH STANDS THE FIGURE OF A WOMAN."
Vol. xiv. NOS. 3-4 The Spoon River Country 329
about one on the quaint moss-grown slabs are willow trees
and gates ajar, harps and lambs and upward pointing hands.
Suddenly through the trees one is startled to descry the figure
of a woman upon a marble shaft. Even the long grasses can-
not stay the impatience of the feet! " 'Percy Bysshe Shel-
ley* ", one says softly with amazement. "Can there really be
a 'Percy Bysshe Shelley' in this place?" But astonishment is
scarcely less on finding upon the pediment that supports the
classic figure
William Cullen Bryant
Died March 24, 1875
Age 24 years.
Investigation proves that the young man was a relative
and namesake of the poet. His father was that Honorable
H. L. Bryant who introduced Douglas to his audience in Proc-
tor's Grove on the occasion of his great speech. William
Cullen like "Percy Bysshe Shelly" of the "Anthology" was
the victim of an accident, having been killed by the discharge
of a gun while duck hunting on Thompson's Lake. The
marble statue is a dramatic figure against the massed back-
ground of the cedars, and the coincidence of the two names
i& a sufficiently illuminating commentary upon the literary
method of Masters.
In all this silent place one may hear no sound save the
wind in the branches of the trees, the insect voices in the long
grass and the importunate incessant crying of a flock of tit-
mice that have their haunt in the neighboring ravine. Only
the "memories" are here, their
eyes closed with the weariness of tears
An immeasurable weariness!
And yet the loiterer for an hour will find in these grassy paths
now bright with sun, now soft with shadows, these low
mounds and unostentatious gravestones, how all things con-
spire for peace, and those who are a little weary may find
themselves reflecting, as Shelley in the Protestant cemetery
without the walls of Rome where his body came ultimately
to rest: "It would almost make one fall in love with Death
itself to think one should be buried in so sweet a place."
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA
917.73C36S C001
THE SPOON RIVER COUNTRY SPRINGFIELD
30112025337541
