USA > Iowa > Marion County > Down on the ridge : reminiscences of the old days in Coalport and down on the ridge, Marion County > Part 9
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The Welch family were called proud because they provided themselves with everything within their reach which God had made for man's comfort. They were not
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proud, they were not aristocratic. Their hearts were large and warm and kind, and their generous hands were helpful in time of need. From their generous hands the thirsty had drink, the hungry food, the sick their cheer- ful presence. I speak feelingly of these people. It was they who administered these things to my own people away back there when cruel adversity wove hearts into the warp and woof of a common sympathy; when not the glitter of gold, nor hunger for popularity, nor strife for place and power, prompted any man or woman to be kind and gentle and good and true, but where the golden rule was the only law, and the God of our fathers the only God.
When profit no longer hovered over the operations of that old mill the Welch family sold their home on the hill and the old mill down in the valley and moved to Pella, from which place Uncle Billy and Aunt Betsy long since went over into that dreamless land. Their children drifted around and around in the whirlpool of life's tragedies, one here, another there. The old mill in its declining state passed into other hands, but like men, whose destinies are recorded on the page which tells of decay, it, too, passed away. The cheering difference be- tween the passing of this old mill, whose iron and steel and wood crumbled away and sought shelter in the friendly bosom of old Mother Earth and the old pioneer fathers and mothers, who down there were awakened from slumber in the early morning by the shrill whistle of the mill calling mankind from refreshment to labor, is the one beautiful thought that though their flesh and bone went back to dust there was with in a supreme intelligence, something called the soul, so full of God and life that it can never, never die.
In these reminiscences I would not for many, many reasons forget the Widow Davenport. This good old woman and her children, of whom there was a goodly
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number, lived down there in the strenuous days of the early fifties. Politically she just suited my father, and socially she came up to my measure. If I had acquired the smoking habit Mrs. Davenport and I should certainly have had a joyous time. She smoked long green and kept it in a little cloth bag with a puckering string around the top. This she kept hanging on the back post of an old- fashion high splint-bottomed chair. She smoked only once a day, and that was from "rosy morn until dewy eve." Once I tried to get into her class by learning the soothing habit of indulging in the pipe. My father also smoked, so one day when he and mother had gone to church out in the old schoolhouse mentioned so often in these reminiscences, I proceeded to load up the fragrant old thing, and soon the blue rings were chasing each other on their way to the god of smoke. I simply reveled in blissful ignorance of coming events. Soon my revelry was hushed by the most hideous stomach-tearing spasms ever visited upon a sinner here below. Then I learned early in life that the world is round, for it simply went over and over and me with it. I was under the impression I was going to die, feeling all the while I would rather be dead than endure that unholy existence long.
In due time my parents returned from church to find me crucified, pierced in both hands and feet by my folly. Great beads of cold sweat stood on my brow, while my stomach felt like it was going up in the air like a kite. My mother knelt down beside me and. with that kind, sweet symphathy which only a mother can feel, placed her tired hand on my clammy brow and begged me to show her my tongue, which, though cold and palsied, I finally succeeded in shooting through my teeth for her inspec- tion. In her gentle, kindly way she asked me where I felt the worst, when I raised my feeble hand and gently laid it on my poor revolving stomach. She then diagnosed the case, and I heard her say to my father, "Alfred has
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eaten too many plums." I let it go at that. Through all the remaining years of their toilsome lives'I held fast to my secret.
I was then a little past eight years old, so went and engaged to the Davenport people to assist in making sorghum on a princely salary of one quart of the product per day. This I carried home for the children to soak their corn pone in. They extracted the juice from the stalks by running them twice between two squeaky wooden rollers run by a horse hitched to a sweep. My job was to sit by the mill and receive the flattened stalks as they came from the mill and to carefully lay them in a nice straight pile, which when large enough was carried around and run through the mill again after the rollers had been keyed up a little closer. So you see I had a juicy as well as a very lucrative position. I had only one pair of pants and they were made by mother of old "Kentucky jeans." It was but a few days until those pants became so thoroughly soaked with juice and "skimmin's" that they were so stiff that on retiring for the night I simply slipped them off and stood them against the wall till morning. On getting up I stood them down by a chair on which I climbed and jumped off into them, and then walked away like and old armored Roman warrior.
Mary Davenport, daughter of the widow, was my first school teacher. I have never forgotten that girl, though it has been many, many years since I saw her. This was a subscription school. My father subscribed the required amount of tuition for myself and my oldest brother, the amount to be paid in flour. My father was then engineer at the Welch mill, for which services he received any old thing to eat. I remember when Tom Davenport came to our house for the flour, a hundred- pound sack. When with the assistance of my father he threw the sack over his shoulders to carry to his home, a
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half-mile away, he joyfully exclaimed : "Now we shall have a jubilee at our house." There were Pete and Tom and Henry and John who have long since passed from memory down there.
The Davenport family were good folks, people of more than average intelligence and mental attainments. Their ideals were high and their home life simple and pure. The Widow Davenport was in many respects a most re- markable woman. She came from a very good old southern family. Her ambitions and ideals found lodging in most if not all her children. Mary, my good " school- ma'am," married L. O. Donley, a wealthy farmer and once treasurer of Marion County. Parmelia was married to a Mr. Forsythe, a druggist in Pella, now dead, and she lives in Des Moines. Lydia-I can tell no more; let the tragedies that came to this girl be forgotten. Nancy until this very night seemed forgotten by me ; of her coming and going if alive to-night I know nothing. Maria is now the wife of Judge George W. Crozier, of Knoxville, repre- sentative to the Thirty-third General Assembly from Marion County. These young men and women with their mother moved to Pella just after the incidents told in this story. There Mrs. Davenport, full of years and crowned with faithful service in the cause of her master, went, long years ago, into that rest she so richly deserved.
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"Old Dominion." Cruel old war with its dripping sword had not then severed the state in twain, nor were her beau- tiful streams made red with the best blood of her people. He was born on his father's plantation, known at that time as the "White House." This stately old place was situated on the James River. The staple product of this plantation was tobacco, which was shipped in large quantities to Richmond. Reuben Coffman's father was a native of Germany, and that thrift so peculiar to the German people was possessed in a marked degree by Uncle Reuben, as he was known to so many young people down there. Later the family, under the hope of acquir- ing sufficient land for all, moved over the Blue Ridge Mountains into the western part of the state, down on the Kanawha Valley. There young Rueben met and in 1823 married Julia de Robins Reynolds.
Miss Reynolds was said to have been a very pretty girl, blessed with a vivacious temperament, full of sun- shine and joy, all of which splendid virtues followed her all along her lengthened years. The pent-up tragedies and heart burdens of the leaping years and the fading, passing family circle could not rob her of those charms that let so much of sunshine in, even when more than eighty years had heaped their accumulated burdens upon her. Down on the Kanawha Valley those people lived, where Reuben farmed and also engaged in boating on the river. Boating was a great industry in those days. It was customary to transport great cargoes of salt, tan bark, hoop poles, etc., down the river to Cincinnati and other Ohio ports, as well as to far-away New Orleans. Flat- boats were used in this branch of commerce. Sometimes these boats were sold at the end of the journey and the boatman returned on steamboats or walked back home in order to save their wages or profit.
To this Virginia home the gathering years brought sons, Clark, Morris, William, Shull, Lovell, Van, Pratt and
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Tell, and daughters, Leah, Louise and Harriet, all of whom grew to adult age, and cradles rocked in other homes ere Time's reaper threw his sickle into the fields of wheat. Conditions were such in that country that it was next to impossible to acquire desirable land. So despairing was the opportunity for becoming a landholder that having heard favorable reports from Uncle Jack Reynolds, a brother of Mrs. Coffman, who had gone to Iowa sometime before, Mr. Coffman and his son Morris came to Iowa in 1853. Being favorably impressed they returned to Vir- ginia and in the autumn of 1854 the entire family, which then included two sons-in-law, George W. Martin and Paschal Hopson, and their six children, set out in prairie schooners on their long journey of eight hundred miles to Iowa, the new west. They arrived in Marion County in October and went at once to housekeeping in a hewn log house known as the " Day Everett house," situated at the extreme upper end of the Coalport bottom, then a vast forest.
Mr. Martin and his little family were "at home " in the smokehouse, a two-by-four log shanty, and when this family vacated that palatial mansion under the northern skies my father and his family, six in all, went in and possessed it, and there for several long months it was a willow upon which my parents hung their harps while their bleeding hearts and calloused hands reached out and out over that great stretch of country dividing them from their old home and friends so far away. But in after years when God had smiled upon us and our native land wasall baptized in blood they were glad that some friendly guiding hand had led them out of the Egypt of their birth ere they had seen with tear-dimmed eyes the awful carnage of war.
Uncle Reuben acquired land situated on the east branch of Competine Creek, where he and his boys pro-
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ceded as quickly as possible to cut the timber and haul the logs to Pella, where they were sawed into lumber and hauled back to the Ridge for building their new Iowa home. They built this house to the north of the branch, situated on the brow of the hill gently declining to the south-west and north. This new western home was a story-and-a-half building with a fireplace in the south end and a kitchen addition on the west. Around this home Uncle Reuben planted a grove which furnished shelter for the song birds who with each returning springtime came and set up housekeeping for themselves in its friendly branches. Here these songsters soon learned that to awaken Uncle Reuben and Aunt Julia they must contract the habit of singing at an unusually early hour.
This house faced the main road running south, and in the front yard here and there, in addition to the accumu- lated duties coming to this pioneer woman, she found time to plant seeds and to cultivate the growing, blooming flowers, to lend fragrance and cheer to laughing health and fevered brows. They painted this house white, and it was the first new white house I ever saw in Marion County. To wrest this new home from nature's lap meant many weary days of toil and sacrifice. There were rails to split and haul from the river bottom, and fences to build, brush to grub out of the ground, hazel thickets to cut down and the brush to pile and burn, and then the unlocking of the virgin soil, then the planting season full of promise. This breaking of the soil and hauling they did with cattle. The hauling was done either on a sled in the winter time or on an old wooden skein, linch-pin wagon in the summer. The fertile soil they turned over with a huge breaking plow with massive beam to which were hitched three or four yoke of oxen, turning over with the soil myriads of hazel roots in great clusters. Then it was harrow, harrow with a wooden harrow made like the letter "A," filled with iron teeth made by the local
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blacksmith. The boys would follow after the harrow and gather up the loosened roots and pile them heaping high, and when thoroughly dried they were burned.
Uncle Ruben's timber wassituated on the river bottom north of where the Welch people lived. To reach this timber the Coffman boys went down the road to the river and thence north. In doing so they passed the Barnes house on Maint Street in Coalport, where my father lived forty-nine years ago. I remember very distinctly their passing our place on their way to the timber, just as the morning sunbeams danced on the ice-clad brow of the hill beyond, the oxen moving patiently along, crunching the frozen snow beneath their feet, the whole scene occasion- ally awakened by the crack of a big long whip plaited of deer skin attached to a stout, flexible hickory pole. Some of these ox drivers were very expert in the use of the whip. They prided themselves on being able, in the summer season, to kill a fly on an ox in the lead team five times out of six with the sharp cracker attached to the whip.
Each added year set with industry brought further improvements, extended conveniences and richer promise for declining age to these people who away back under Virginia's blazing sunshine looked toward the new west for a full realization of their happy dreams. With all of their children here save Clark, and joyous, laughing grandchildren nestled near, these two people, now happy as they stood within reach of the castles they builed with such consummate care and hope, looked into the unborn years for that comfort and cheer they had so nobly earned. Clark, the oldest son, unused to the rigors of Iowa winters, in 1856 returned to Virginia, and then forthe first time this father and mother began to realize what a drifted family means, a broken, distorted chain.
Living more than two miles distant from these people, which in the days of ox teams was a long way off, I was
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denied the opportunity of letting them into my boy life, yet I have a very vivid recollection of how these good old people looked. Uncle Reuben was just a little past three score years old, yet to him they were toilsome years. Every day and every year he lay bound on the altar, a sacrifice to those he loved. I digress to wonder and wonder how many parents are martyrs even to those who call them father and mother. But, after all, how willingly we approach the sacrifice for those we love!
I shall never forget one occasion on which Uncle Reu- ben through a little event impressed himself on my memory. To tell the story I must of necessity divulge the innocent ignorance of the writer. It was the Fourth of July, 1861. A big celebration was on in a little butternut grove in Rousseau, just north of the Kent mill. Everybody was there, big and little, old and young. Patsy Johnson with her bushel basket, in it a cake about the size of a saucer- coming, and heaping full of loaves and fishes-going, was there. An ox was roasted and many delicacies came in baskets. The stars and stripes were everywhere, and fire- crackers chirped and barked under every bush. Somebody brought in an old fiddle. He twisted its ears, thumped on the tightly-drawn strings, then drew his bow and sent up a call loud and long. Soon upon the green sward the sun- burned boys and red-cheeked girls were gaily whirling around in the giddy mazes of the dance, while the old fiddler weaved back and forth to the tune of old " Money Musk." From the platform somebody read the Declara- tion of Independence, and some young orator, I think it was Van Bennet, flew the American eagle. Among the refreshments sold was ice cream, but I did not know what it was then. Uncle Reuben was a persistent patron of the particular booth where this strange luxury was sold, and every time I passed that way I found him busily engaged eating that white stuff, of which he evidently was very fond. I cautiously approached as nearly to him
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as I could without intruding, in an attempt to relieve my mind of the awful mystery which had settled down upon it. Following a few moments of careful study I arrived at the conclusion that I had never before seen a person eat butter that way. I had always been taught to spread it on bread with a knife and very little did me, but here was Uncle Reuben eating dishful after dishful with a spoon.
I never saw Uncle Reuben when he was a young man. He came into this strange, happy, sad old world long before I looked across the turnpike road into the placid waters of the old Kanawha River which ran near that little West Virginia town where I was born ; but in his face, though heavily marked with the pencil of Time, I could see behind the faded scenes of years the outline of a young man of becoming appearance, a fit soul and heartmate for one so fair as Julia Reynolds when life was new and the world so full of sunshine and promise.
The passing of the old world's soldiers tells the story of how men toil and strive and fight in life's fierce strife, and how, when the battle seems almost won, almost ready to sit down in the peace and quiet of an undisturbed old age, surrounded by children and friends and love, they just quietly pass over the river that divides this from that strange country over there. So passed Reuben Coffman when sixty-three years had left their wounds upon him. This man, upright in his life, a good, quiet, peaceful citizen, a man who builded for the world, a man who left no scar of wrong upon the old world's face, a man so full of love and sympathy, one day in 1865 went down to that rest he so richly deserved, and now he sleeps on the brow of a hill on his old pioneer farm near the home for which he gave so much of toil, now long since gnawed down by the tooth of Time, and the friendly soil which yielded to him so much of interest on everything com-
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mitted to its care has gone into strange hands, and the birds, which sang so sweetly in the springtime in the shady groves where life and hope had a dwelling place are startled away by the strange sadness which envelops that sacred spot.
Uncle Reuben and Aunt Julia surely builded for the world. Besides the new homes that came out from theirs, four sons they gave to the country's service. Clark, the oldest, volunteered in a West Virginia regiment, and Morris, Lovell and Van went into Iowa regiments. The tragedies of war fell heavily on this family. Morris, who had been so much of help in the old days, on returning from the south was never Morris again. How strangely sad the changes on the throne where intellect so brightly sat supreme! Van never recovered from the ravages which befell him under the southern skies. He sought relief amid the hill where he first saw God's sunshine and first heard the warbling of the southern thrush bird, but the book of fate held the story of his short life, and there amids the hill of his native land he went out into the other world.
The two sons-in-law of Uncle Reuben coming west were George W. Martin, a goodly man of whom I have had something to say in these reminiscences, and Paschal Hopson. "Pack," as he was known, was a blacksmith, having learned the trade back in Virginia where he mar- ried Leah Coffman. This family lived in the village of Coalport, where Pack worked at his trade in those primitive days, when by hand he would make horseshoes from bar iron and also the nails with which he fastened them on. I used to watch him in his long leathern apron, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows showing his strong, round, muscled arms. I watched him with the lever work the big leather bellows and saw the flames shoot high on the forge while the increasing heat prepared the
JULIA COFFMAN.
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iron for the tongs and hammer and anvil, then with wonder I saw the bright hot sparks fly like shooting stars here and there while the "village blacksmith" shaped the horseshoe around the anvil horn.
I shall always remember an incident which happened in this shop. It was in the early spring of 1859. In those days boys, if they were fortunate enough to have a pair of shoes must make them do until the barefoot season returned again. My winter shoes had gone out of busi- ness sometime, and if I ventured out in the village I must skirmish around for something to wear. On this particular occasion, it being a rainy day and the mud rather deep, I found a pair of my father's old boots in which I hustled over to Pack's shop to watch the sparks fly. There I found a strange visitor. To those who knew him he was "Uncle Jimmie Karr." This character lived on Whitebreast Prairie. He was a lover of tobacco and began early in the morning with an ordinary chew ; to this he kept adding a little now and then during the day to freshen it up, laying it aside during the noon hour, repeating the process during the afternoon. By the time the evening shades had drawn nigh his jaw looked like it had a well developed cancer on it. Then he would remove this accumulation of the chewed weed and carefully lay it away to dry for Hetty, an old maiden daughter, to smoke. Uncle Jimmie had been married several times, and seemed to never grow tired of the job. On this oc- casion he pretended to be in search of cabbage plants. Everybody knew that there were plenty of these plants over on the Prairie, but Uncle Jimmie thought a widow living a few miles beyond had the only plants in Marion County. Well, he soon observed me in my usual place, when, taking his knife from his old jean pants, he said : "See here, youngster, I guess I will take your ears off !" Upon which I made a dash for home, and when I hit the
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deep mud I ran right out of my boots and left them sticking there.
After a few years Mr. and Mrs. Hopson moved into the Iola neighborhood and afterwards went to Pella. Pack was always a money-maker, and with his good wife Leah they gave to the world a splendid family, all girls except one. Ann and Mary lived in Kansas. Ann married Will Lee and Mary married Warren Whaley, while Flora is married and lives in Des Moines. Frank, long since a grown man, has drifted out of my knowledge. Pack and Leah moved, a number of years ago, to Kansas, where, full of years and weighted down with the old world's service, they closed their eyes to the scenes of this life and went to a better world beyond.
Louise, wife of George W. Martin, whom I have mentioned before, I knew far better than any of the Coffman women. Having lived near this family so many eventful years, their family life and our own came very close together. Our parents were friends down in old Virginia, so out in the new west they were friends again. Many a long winter evening this good man and woman spent around our blazing fire in the old fireplace, and there talked over the events of the faded past away back yonder, talked of the present, talked of the future, not of the accumulation of gold but of the bounteous treasures waiting for them in that better world above.
I remember Louise Martin as one of those splendid mothers, one who made life and home and church and society worth while. To the world, to God, and to her children she gave valiant service, and when her good husband had quit the field, the schoolroom and the home for that sweet rest above, she gave her remaining years to her children, yet living all the time full of confidence in the promises of Him whose praises she sang so many, many times in that little old schoolhouse down on the
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Ridge. So one sad day-no, one sweet day-full of years, weighted down with life's tragedies, yet full of faith, she went into a world radiant with never-ending sunshine.
Harriet Welch was a sweet and charming girl when Uncle Reuben and Aunt Julia brought her to the Ridge. I remember the very house she lived in as a bride. I remember her home in the village of Coalport. After that she did not come much into my life, yet I think of her as a kindly woman, earnestly devoted to her husband and little ones. Beadle seemed devoted to her. It seemed that her very wish was anticipated. Children laughed and played down there, every sunbeam stole in on a happy home, and every star twinkled in glee as they peeped in on the scene. I can not, neither would the angels, tell more. Harriet, so quiet, so uncomplaining, so patient and so kind, has all these years been beautifying and adorning a home away above the stars, and some day it will be hers.
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