History of Wayne and Clay counties, Illinois, Part 43

Author:
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Chicago : Globe Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 704

USA > Illinois > Clay County > History of Wayne and Clay counties, Illinois > Part 43
USA > Illinois > Wayne County > History of Wayne and Clay counties, Illinois > Part 43

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perhaps centuries after these glorious immor- tals have found rest in bloody, unknown and unhonored graves, " the world does move!" And the long delayed triumph of truth over error comes, and then, mayhap, those who murdered the great discoverer rise up and say. "Behold the blessing we have given you!" "Truth gains her victories in the end, but justice never, because the overwhelming majority are always on the side of wrong. Truth cannot enact bloody statutes, cannot persecute, but error has strewn the shores of time with its millions of murdered victims, and inflicted cruelties from the contemplation of which the mind turns away aghast. " The voice of the people is the voice of God," says ignorance, and thus, fattening upon its own corruption, it rises in its might and murders the true friends of humanity-those grand geniuses who cast pearls before the swine. There seem to be two inherent evils that enter the great majority of all minds, and that hold them in undisputed possession from the cradle to the grave. These are a blind reverence and belief in the greatness, purity and wisdom of the ancient times, and our literature is tainted with it, and poets sing of the glories of the Golden Age -- a sil- ly fable born of excited imaginations and enfeebled judgments, that deride the glori- ous present and mourn over fallen man. The other companion evil is a belief in the infallibility of the majority. These errors, once well intrenched in the mind, are about as immovable as the mountains; and they carry along the great tide of suffering hu- manity toward the plunging Niagara, and error does not cease to be dangerous when truth is left free to combat it; nor is truth ever left free to combat error, because error holds the reins of power, the sword, the police, and the vast, over crowded and count- less majority.

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If the school men could point to the fact that they had long ago discovered either these or other evils that beset men's minds, and had made a manly and heroic effort to stamp them or either of them ont, we would be free, nay, gladly confess it the friend, the builder and architect of some of the grand civilization we have.

The school teachers of the dark ages were cloistered monks mostly for the teaching of males only. They could translate the dead languages and glibly tell off the catechism, and for everything else they were not to blame for their phenomenal ignorance, because their life training and education had been such it could not be otherwise. In the course of ages, common decency forced open the schools to the female portion of child- hood, and to this day and hour the astound- ing fact exists that many of the most polite and refined training schools for the daugh - ters of the wealthy are tanght by cloistered females-pure, noble and good women-who concern themselves only about the future, and look with serene contempt upon the present and all of this world's surroundings. To pray and fast and hear mass without ceasing is the acme of that higher, holier and only real education in their minds. And the prevalent idea of a proper education for females furnishes the foundation upon which this anomalous state of facts has existed, and will continue until people learn more defi- nitely what education is.

The State or public schools, like nearly all State institutions, are encircled with a vast and complicated machinery, that add indef- initely to the expense and show, and in that proportion curtail their utility. A State Superintendent is over each County Super- intendent, and Boards of Directors. and Directors, Trustees and Treasurers and the County Superintendents are elected by the

wise majority, and they examine teachers and give certificates only to those qualified the best to teach. This amazing farce is fully portrayed when the writer is able to af- firm that in the school room of a city that boasts the excellence of its graded schools, he heard a teacher ask of a pupil the ques- tion, " Has the bell been rang?" or this, " Has Mr. --- came ?" This is no ex- aggeration, nor is there the slightest false coloring given to the language used, and upon inquiry he learned the teacher using this language had passed a splendid exami- nation for a second-grade certificate. Re- member it is the second-grade teachers who are placed over the children at that age when their language that will cling to them through life is formed. Does not this ac. count for the fact that, in the face of the many free schools all over the country, you can never hear a half dozen sentences pass between young or old without hearing about as many blunders as sentences, and you may see young men and young lady graduates of the high schools, who could not properly write the address upon a letter if life de- pended upon it-Greek and Latin scholars who know little or nothing more of the En- glish language than the slangy hoodlums of the streets. This may be labeled education and turned adrift from the school rooms as such until the world ceases to turn, but it will not be education, nor even an approach to it

Are the public schools a failure? We do not say they are, yet who can fail to see that they are daily and by the hundreds and thousands taking up the children of the poor and unfitting them for their station in life, and are not giving them a fair substitute in exchange. A farmer's or mechanic's son comes home from school or graduates from the high school room of some city school 20

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that ranks high, and he cannot longer be a farm boy or mechanic, nor is he prepared to support himself except as a school teacher or a clerk, either of which, until he learns the trade, he is not qualified to do. It does about as much for the wash-woman's dangh- ter. In fact, the majority of the poor men's children who are pushed the farthest in these unnatural hot-beds are the suffering victims who are splendidly prepared to be either loafers or tramps. Nature's laws are omnipotent, eternal, inexorable, and they will not excuse ignorance, whether it is clothed in rags and piety or in royal purple and rascality, and every error or delusion a man harbors and hugs to his bosom through life is an avenging Nemesis that cannot be appeased, but that carries its afflictions from father to son and from generation to genera- tion.

Hence, upon the subject of educating your children, you cannot afford to make a mis- take. A mistake bere is irreparable-its consequences may revisit with its horrid pains and penalties your remotest generation. It is not at all certain that because you may have money to spend upon your children that you can thereby hire and buy for them the best education, and thus dismiss the sub. ject after you have spent a sufficient amount of money, and if there is failure in the child transfer all the blame from your own shoul- ders to the child's. You may deceive your- self with such delusions-you cannot deceive Dame Nature. If your child's life is a fail- ure after you have been permitted to control and watch over its infancy and growth, mark you! the fault is yours and not the child's. The child is and can be shaped into full- grown life by only two things-the law of heredity and its education. And these all can only come from the parents. You may hire a substitute or you may have the State

give your child its education, but upon your head alone rests all the responsibility and much of the pains and agony that will follow a mistake here. Here is the important con- cern of life, the supremest of questions to men.

The corollary to the above proposition that nature punishes ignorance is the fact, which mankind generally it seems cannot learn, is the fact that much error-widespread and nearly universal error-is that people are good or bad, moral or immoral in the same proportion as morality is drilled into them. This was perhaps the sole reason why that, until very recent times, all the schools were in the care of the churchmen, and teachers were all at one time priests or preachers. They believed if the morals were sufficiently drilled they were the salt that alone saved and made men good, sober. pure and honest, and then edu- cation would take care of itself. In this they traversed the laws of nature, as we believe. Because the truth is that all peoples in all time have been sober, moral and good in the exact proportion that they have been wise or ignorant. And the only way to make men pure and noble is to make them wise. To preach interminable moral homilies to the ignorant people is as foolish as to try to whistle down the cyclone, or prate of the pangs of hell to a Texas steer. An ignorant semi-barbarous people will all get drunk or stupefy themselves with some drug or nar- cotic every time they can get it to devour. Ignorance is the essence of demoralization and depravity the world over, and has been so since the birth of man, and will so con- tinue forever.

The world is full of shams and empirics, and the keystone in this arch has been those mistaken men who have taken charge of the world's morals and education. Their un- questioned honesty of purpose and zeal liave

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only aggravated the monster evil, because they tried to reverse the law of nature. And all mankind are empiries -- we examine only one side of anything, and hence the world's best live and suffer and go to their graves filled with ignorance and prejudices. An empiric is one who from a superficial inves- tigation or a one-sided view of any subject, makes up his mind, forms his judgment (there is but one chance in a million that he is not wrong) and proposes to look no further and never change his mind, except upon still another one-sided view and prob bly an in- creased amount of error and mistake in his conclusions. It is a matter of the gravest doubt whether this evil of empiricism can ever be even in a measure dislodged from men's minds, because it is so universal, so much a part and essence of the very tissue of men's brains, that it must appal the in- vestigator and turn him away from its con- templation sick at heart. If even all the thinking men in this world, and there are very, very few of them. could but be brought to realize and reflect every time they are about to form a judgment on some matter after one of these hasty, one-sided investiga- tions, "now. I am an empiric-I have the malady in the most malignant form." We say. if this reflection could be always brought up to men's minds just before they had formed their unchangeable judgments, it would be a stride toward that higher and purer civilization and the world's good, such as has never yet and probably never will be taken. We question if the human mind is not, per se, too feeble to give even the faintest hope of this becoming a possibility. The result of this universal and hopeless empiri- cism is that we are a mere bundle of preju- dices, and a man of prejudices is a man of ignorance, and he is as incurable as the leper.

The early settlers of Clay County had

more pressing concerns when first they came here than the subject of schools for their children. Among these wants would nat- urally be a mill to crack their corn in order that they might have bread and hominy. A clapboard roof to protect the family from the elements, a bushel or two of cracked corn, a pumpkin for occasional " sass," and a plenty of bear, turkey and deer for meat, and he- would be the happy lord of the new demesne. and about literally " lord of all he surveyed " with his eye. Real money was an unknown quantity in their heaviest financial schemos, and he generally hunted, and carried his corn on horseback to the herse mill, and the family attended the truck patch; the women and children in the early spring, when vegetables had long since disappeared, would gather "sheep-sorrel" and eat it, and ransack the woods for wild onions, and gather thistle and other weeds for greens, and then; like niggers in the rolling season on sugar plantations, they began to wax fat and sleek. "It was a hard country on women and oxen, but a kind of lazy paradise for men and dogs," in the language of O. B. Ficklin.

The first mill in the county was built in what is now Louisville, in 1823, by Goble & Weath- erspoon. It had then been thirteen years since John McCawley had come to the county. The county was most probably organized and called Clay County bofore there were enough people here to form any one community with children enough to attempt the employment of a teacher. An extended account of all these early schools and the names of the teachers the reader will find in the respective township histories in this volume. They wero of the most primitivo character, but this is not saying they were a whit inferior to the schools of to-day. They made no preten- sions, even the highest or best of them, to more than teach the children to read and write-

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and the first few simple rules of arith- metic. Three months' school a year were for a long time the utmost limits of any one's thoughts on that subject. If they made mistakes, they were on the right side. That is, they did not attempt to take the children racing over a cart load of text books, as is the agony now, but they simply tried to take them over very little ground, but to keep them at it until the pupil knew it as well and thor- oughly as his mind could comprehend. And the return to this practice would be a blessing to the children of this age. We realize these earliest schools were very poor ones. The mis- takes of our fathers were many and grievous, but the great fact remains, and we record it to their everlasting credit, that in this one respect of confining themselves to the three simplest branches in the school room they were far wiser than we. And could the truth be ascertained, we have no doubt but that the pupils that went into the world from these rude cabins have in the end produced an average of successful and partially well-edu- cated men in their after lives as has been averaged by the schools of the present gen- eration. These early schools filled a great want of the people of that day, and filled it well. Their results were the best, and their adaptation to the wants of society and the demands of the age were admirable. They were organized, run and controlled and paid for by the people, and it was no bad illustra- tion of the happy results of the people man- aging their own affairs without the officious meddling of government.

These primitive schools joined hands with the early churches, and very often the teacher taught school the six days in the week, and preached the simple and sublime truths of Christ and Him crucified on Sunday to pupils and parents, as did Elder John M. Griffith for many years. These men taught school

for their bread, and preached for the love of God. And preaching and teaching were adapted to wants and yearnings of their peo- ple, and were healthy food for mind and soul. Their effects were visible upon the community then, and with the descendants of these peo. ple they linger with us yet. The only theo- logical school these early preachers ever at- tended were " found in the lids of the Bible," and the only normal school these teachers ever graduated in were Diebold's arithmetic and Webster's spelling book, by a rush light and camp fire. He knew nothing of a State institution for the manufacturing of school teachers by the wholesale and retail, who an- nually went forth in swarms upon communi- ties, with no other well fixed idea about schools and school children than that they were made solely for the benefit and behoof of the teachers, and who can never be exactly happy until the State passes a compulsory education law, aud furnish policemen to lead half-naked urchins by the ear to his school room, where and when he can, with his pat- ent Normal-educational sausage-stuffer, cram them to bursting with knowledge. No! the early teacher was a plain, simple, sincere man, who believed that a knowledge of reading, writing and the four simple rules of arith- metic were the sure and only foundation for a future education. and the rest, after get- ting these, was with each pupil himself. He believed this, and his faith and practice were an unmixed blessing to his day and age.

Commencing with the first little three months' school of fifteen children, this insti- tution from the first more than kept an even pace with the growth of the population of the county and the other material improvements made by the people. The people built school- houses before they built churches, and then they were used for meetings on Sunday, and all manner of sects and preachers were freely

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admitted, even the Mormons not being ex . cluded.

The total number of children in the county at this time, under twenty-one years of age, ; is 8.240; of these there are males, 4,335; females, 3.979. Between the ages of six and twenty-one years, males, 2,901; females, 2,722. In the county are ten brick school buildings, seventy-three frame and nine log schoolhouses, making a total of ninety-two school buildings. The average number of

months taught in the schools is six and one- half months each per year. There are 710 children who attend graded schools, and 693 who attend the ungraded schools. The total attendance of children in the county is 1, 775. There are 138 teachers, and of these are ten males and fifteen female teachers in the graded schools. The total amount of funds received for school purposes in the county. $40,493.41; and the total amount of town- ship funds is $31, 168.59.

CHAPTER VIII.

WAR-REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIERS-BLACK HAWK WAR-THE LATE CIVIL WAR-THE HEROIC CON- DUCT AND BEARING OF THE PEOPLE OF CLAY COUNTY-GEN. L. B. PARSONS, CAPT. J. W. WESTCOTT AND MANY OTHERS, ETC., ETC., ETC.

A S we have shown in another chapter, the territory comprising Clay County is a part of the ground trod by the heroes of the war for our independence. Its date goes back to the year 1778, when it lay in the line of the expedition of (ten. George Rogers Clark and his little band of great heroes. Thus early in the annals of our country was this made historic ground. The centennial month of that wonderful expedition, its sore trials and magnificent outcome has come and gone, and, we regret to record it, without so much as a remembrance by the people of the county. These men were the heroes and ben- efactors of the human race. They gave us the Mississippi Valley and its millions of happy homes, its incomparable wealth, and its splendid civilization. and to forget or neg- lect so soon smacks of ingratitude and igno- rance of our noble sires that is melancholy to contemplate.

In 1840, there were three of the Revolu-

tionary fathers, who were pensioners, resid- ing in Clay County, to wit: Samnel Parks, aged ninety-three years; Moses Johnson, aged one hundred years, and Nathaniel West, aged ninety years. This little band of aged heroes have quietly passed away, and they sleep in unknown graves. History will tell yon of their sufferings, hardships and invin- cible heroism. How these men fought, bled and died, that we their children might be a free and independent people. And they fought solely for their friends and their fam- ilies, and their sworn statements, in every case where they applied for a pension, was that they had struggled for bread so long as even the feeblest effort was possible, and only when they tottered and fell by the wayside, hungry and dying, did they apply to the Government to which they had given so much for a pittance on which to linger out the few remaining days of their lives. Some suita- ble commemoration of the dust of these

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heroes would be a most becoming act upon the part of the people of Clay County. It would tell at least the rising generation who these men were, and teach them the lesson, that busy selfish man is only too apt to for- get, that the memory and fame of our real benefactors should be cherished and not at once forgotten. No monument, no name of town, village or municipality, we believe in the county, commemorates the lives of any of these old heroes, whose heroic deeds were in some way connected with the history of the county. Amends should be made at some early day for such an omission of what should have been both a duty and a pleasure.

We are informed, but we could learn noth- ing of the particulars of his life, that there was a man named Bartley-known univer- sally as "Grandpa Bartley " -- who lived in the extreme northwest portion of the county, and died there we believe in 1879, whose life was the most remarkable chapter in the his- tory of the United States. He was born July 4, 1776, and was alive and a vigorous old man July 4, 1876, when the American centennial was in progress in Philadelphia. He died as stated above in 1879, and was consequently one hundred and three years old when he died. Certainly in all that goes to form the leading coincidences of a long life the whole country has not perhaps had a single person whose life was so singu- larly marked as this man's.

Black Hawk War-When this war came, Clay County had been organized a few years, and enough people were here to receive a call from Gov. Reynolds to furnish a quota of men to go out and fight the Indians. We were furnished a communication from Mr. Pierce, of Xenia, which was published a few years ago by him in the Flora Journal. As the paper was written by an eye witness, we feel justified in re-producing it entire, as follows:

"Seeing some historical sketches of Clay County in your paper lately in which I have felt an interest, I have ventured to call up from 'the misty past ' an event that occurred in this ancient town, now so silent and still, that one might well be pardoned for skepti- cism as to its ever being otherwise; but many years ago, before Clay City, its rival, in whose shadow it now lies, was even thought of, it was the county seat and the scene of many a stirring event, especially during the week of Circuit Court. But the event I al- lude to occurred in the spring of 1832.

"During the early spring, rumors were prevalent that the Sac and Fox Indians, led by the famous chief Black Hawk and the Prophet were laying waste the Northwestern frontier, at that time the Rock River country, killing the men and carrying off as captives the women and children.

" About the 24th of May, these rumors as- sumed tangible shape by the arrival of Robert Blackwell, Esq., with a dispatch from Gov. Reynolds to Maj. John Ridgway, calling for a company of mounted men from this county to go in pursuit of the Indians. Runners were immediately sent out over the county, and the following Saturday the hardy settlers began to gather in this old county seat of Clay, in obedience to the summons, and a more enthusiastic gathering was never seen there before or since.

" When the drum and fife began to call for volunteers, young men who had not thought of going in the company when they left home that morning, found themselves step- ping into the ranks as defenders of their coun- try against the hostile savage.

"To illustrate how earnest the people were in this matter, I will relate a little in- cident that occurred. When a Mr. Chamber- lain remarked, 'If I had a horse I would go,' the reply came quickly from the now

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venerable Isaac Elliott, . You need not let that hinder you; I have a horse, saddle and bridle which you can have.' He accepted the offer and went with the company.

"To give up a horse at the beginning of the crop season, every farmer knows, means a sacrifice, unless he has a surplus; now the first settlers of Clay County in general were free-hearted and open-handed, but they were not burdened with wealth, yet in this case they stood ready to make any sacrifice.

" The company was soon made up to forty- eight members; the lato Maj. John Onstott was chosen as their Captain, Alfred J. Moore Second Lieutenant and the other officers, owing to the lapse of time, have been forgotten. They reported to Gov. Reynolds, were ac- cepted and ordered to be at Hennepin, on the Illinois River, by June the 10th. Soon after they assembled at . Sutton's Point,' now the present site of Oskaloosa, and on the 9th of June reported at Hennepin, and were attached to the Third Illinois.

"Of that company of forty-eight man, but three are now known to be living in Clay County, viz., Alfred J. Moore, James McKin- ney and Abram Songer."

This company formed a part of Third Regiment of the First Brigade of Illinois Mounted Volunteers, called into service on requisition of Gen. Atkinson, by Gov. Rey- nolds' proclamation. The company organized May 29, 1832, and was murstered out August 15. 1832. The following is supposed a com- plete roster of the company: Captain, John Onstott; First Lieutenant, Trussey P. Han- son: Second Lientenant, Alfred J. Moore; Sergeants, Cyrus Wright. Elisha Bashford, Arch T. Patterson and James Tompkins; Corporals, Samuel Whiteley. Strother B. Walker, Joseph Whiteley. Francis Herman; Privates, James T. Ano, Jefferson Creek, James Cook, Sol B. Curbow, Young Cham-

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History of Wayne and Clay counties, Illinois, Part 43

Author: Publication date: 1884 Publisher: Chicago : Globe Pub. Co. Number of Pages: 704

Author:
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Chicago : Globe Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 704