A History of Northeast Missouri, Volume I, Part 7

Author: Williams, Walter, 1864-1935, editor
Publication date: 1913
Publisher: Chicago, New York, The Lewis Publishing Company
Number of Pages: 731

USA > Missouri > A History of Northeast Missouri, Volume I > Part 7

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

In this pioneer household every child was given his own horse and saddle when it was ten years old, and the twelve members made a goodly procession when they started to church.

Mrs. Fox's mother had one of the first cooking stoves brought to Northeast Missouri, but for many years it was simply an ornament. She was afraid the darkies would break it if they cooked on it. Mrs. Fox herself had the first sewing machine in her part of the country. Women would come for miles to see it, and men, sometimes driving stock, would stop and stay while she showed them the wonders of its sewing, meanwhile the hogs or cows straying far into the woods.

Mrs. Fox sits now, rocking gently ; on her finger, worn thin as her thread of life. is a gold ring worn one hundred and twenty-five years ago by her Kentucky grandmother and she shows with pride family silver hammered out a century ago by Kentucky silversmiths. Her eyes have witnessed marvelous changes. The town where she dabbled in philosophy and took her dancing lessons has grown from the small bunch of houses to a city counting many thousands of population. Log schoolhouses with their blue back spellers, and their simple games of "Black Man" and "Base" have given way to stately stone-trimmed edifices where they babble German, wrestle with Greek, and take exer- cise in a gymnasium.

Section by section the country has had wilderness and wolves, panther and deer, pushed into the primitive lying beyond. "I have seen changes, strange changes," says Mrs. Fox. "I can remember when here, where I sit, it was considered as much as a man's life was worth to venture near it. Yet men were always pushing just a little further on and women went with them. They are the real heroines of this country." And the old lady sits, her eyes far back into the past, seeing things that you can never see, this country as it looked when she herself came and dwelt, making overtures to fortune and the future.

EDUCATION OF WOMEN

While along in the thirties and forties of eighteen hundred, the educational facilities were intensively primitive, in a few sporadic spots, of older settlement, the habits of Virginia clung and the chil- dren were taught by a governess. Later the girls went to a "Female College," where the curriculum was sufficiently formidable to satisfy modern requirements.

Columbia even then had young and cherry-lipped maids who bab- bled Greek with the finished spontaneity of perfect acquirement. The Patriot, published in Columbia in 1841, in giving an account of the exercises of Bonne Femme College, says that Miss Mary Jenkins, after- wards the wife of Charles H. Hardin, governor of Missouri, read Cicero with "Extraordinary ease, lucid diction, and inimitable taste," and "read parts of the Greek Testament, named at haphazard by a gentleman in the audience, and went through the labyrinth of the Greek verb, not as by the aid of a borrowed clue, but as if nature had formed her another Ariadne." The latter quotation also gives an illus- trative flash of information on the educational acquirements of the edi- torial chair of the period. Or perhaps it was not the chair but a young tyro from the University sent out on assignment. The rosy-cheeked maid with a waterfall of curls, a cameo brooch at her throat, the billowy skirts

HISTORY OF NORTHEAST MISSOURI

Reception Hall. A Student's Room.

STEPHENS COLLEGE. Corner of the Campus.

Dining Room. Art School.

STEPHENS COLLEGE FOR WOMEN, COLUMBIA

HISTORY OF NORTHEAST MISSOURI

of her little checked silk flowing over her sedately strapped ankles, evi- dently intoxicated him and Ariadnes and Cupids filled all the air.

The meagerness of the early educational facilities was only a phase. It was a poverty, not of mind, not of purpose, but of resources. The adjustment was slow, but the strong arm was ever pushing back the primitive and the strong mind was ever appropriating, assimilating and improving, until today education is almost a fetich, an obsession, in Northeast Missouri. It is the freest thing we have. The mysteries of Greek are as open to the daughter of the day laborer as they are to the daughter of the capitalist.

MRS. SALLIE BARNETT

There prevailed still in the fifties in many communities social life of great simplicity. Finger bowls and pink teas lay in the unfathomed future. The blood ran full and expression was free and untrammeled. The dictum of culture that language is used to conceal thought had not penetrated to the localities where log cabins and puncheon floors prevailed. Boys and girls enjoyed life robustly, and when there was a country dance its opportunities marked the high tide.

It was a great time, says Mrs. Sallie Barnett, who was born in the last year of the thirties. A star danced the night she was born, and for once the horoscopic significance was true, for it is not the work of her pioneer home that lingers most vividly with this white-haired old lady, but the memory of the country dances. "It was none of your come at half past nine," she says, "and home at twelve. We began dancing at one o'clock and danced all afternoon, and all night and the next morning until noon." By one o'clock of an afternoon they came rid- ing in from country lane and forest road, brave boys, and buxom maids, many times the girls riding behind the boys. The flaming hickory blaze sent dancing lights over the smoothly worn floor, the old darkey tuned up his fiddle, and under its compelling music feet went flying in the mazes of the old time cotillion. At early dusk pound cake and cus- tard and fried pies were eaten with zest, and then the long white tal- low candles made by the women, were brought out and under their gentle radiance dancing and love making flowed along, interrupted only by the occasional disappearance of some of the laughing girls to make anew their toilets.

THE SOCIAL LIFE

For three times at least during the long dance girls changed their dresses, slipping away up the stairs and shortly emerging, fresh and stiffly starched and with smooth locks, for feminine vanity is the same yesterday, today and forever. Freshness and immaculateness were the chief points of glory in the matter of dress, for each was made alike, with tight waists and full skirt. In fact, there was only one pattern in the neighborhood and it passed from family to family, serving alike for the old and the young, the slim and her unfortunate sister. Any change in dress caused untold wonderment and once when two town girls appeared at a dance with their hair in curls and with ribbons, it caused an overpowering sensation.

"We had none of your dreamy waltzing," says Mrs. Barnett; "we danced and when it came to swing your partners, the boys fairly lifted us off our feet." And this same vigor was maintained until noon of the second day when they mounted horse and rode away to dream for weeks of swift glances and whispered word and the glory of the dance. Though

HISTORY OF NORTHEAST MISSOURI

the country swain of the fifties was generally in the proper bounds of conventional jeans and tow linen, a man who is now living and a wealthy citizen was seen by Mrs. Barnett wearing a gorgeous flowered calico coat, tow linen pants, and a pair of overshoes.

While this primitiveness of social life prevailed in many localities during the fifties, in others life was the reflection of the best that was maintained in Virginia and Kentucky. In many places fine country mansions had been built, large and spacious. Many of them stand yet, their workmanship having a permanent quality. They were built in a day when houses were built on honor. About their old colonial simplicity still hangs that basic idea of stability and honor, as well as a kind of story book stateliness telling of a day when men bowed with courtly grace and even sometimes kissed a lady's hand. What flower faces have looked out those little panes, or waited by the little ladders of light framing the great hall door for a glimpse of the com- ing swain. What gay figures have come trooping down those wide old

READ HALL, DORMITORY FOR WOMEN, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

stairs in sprigged muslins, in flowered, flowing, silk, with black sandals strapping their white ankles, a cameo brooch at their throat and their faces framed in curls. When they stood in long lines facing smiling gallants and danced the Virginia reel with graceful sway and stately curtsies, it was different from the country dance only in its little ele- gancies and the air of culture, for the heart of a maid beats in unison with the heart of a man, the wide world over.

"BECKY THATCHER"

· Northeast Missouri has the distinction of giving to literature one of its most famous heroines. For here still lives Mrs. Laura Frazer, "Becky Thatcher," the heroine of Tom Sawyer, known wherever the English language is spoken. Though her head is crowned with the snows of many winters, there is yet a twinkle in the eyes reminiscent of the gay little coquette that .tossed a pansy over the fence to bare- footed Tom. Time has covered the fire with a veil of years. but there' still shines through the glory of an eternal charm, and it is small won- der that Becky's initial appearance. roguish. dimpling. coquettish, swept

HISTORY OF NORTHEAST MISSOURI

Tom's heart like a gale. She sits in her room today, flashing eyed but serene.

Though the author, Mark Twain, has been her life-long friend and she prizes beyond anything his photograph he gave her shortly before his death, and bearing this in his fine old fashioned chirography, "To Laura Frazer, from her earliest sweetheart," Becky Thatcher is but an incident of Mrs. Frazer's youth.

She has been through fires that have only made wider spaces for a great soul. When the horrors of war convulsed her state, she too suf- fered and endured and triumphed. When the emancipation procla- mation freed the slaves it left a great mass of helpless women to whom the cooking of a meal was as great a mystery as the hie- roglyphs of an Egyptian monument. They knew nothing of cooking or of the management of a kitchen. But these finely bred gentlewomen of Missouri met the condition with the courage of the brave and the resourceful. "If a woolly-headed negro could learn to cook," said Mrs. Frazer, "I knew I, with intelligence, added, could and surely would learn too." And this was the general attitude of that large number of women of Northeast Missouri who met the fortunes of war like good soldiers. Yet how trifling was this domestic disorganization to the tragedy of war with its harrowing suspense, its torture of soul and mind.

"It was a black time," says Mrs. Frazer. With her husband in hiding in another town, this wife and mother, only twenty-three, scarcely more than a girl, stayed in the home with her two little boys, her soul torn with the anguish of uncertainty. General McNeil was camped in her yard. It rained and he asked permission to bring his officers in her house. She gave it. They filled the house, cooking, eating and sleeping there. Her kitchen was full of strange negroes and she cooked for her family as she could. With the guileless craft of sweet and loving women she made a little dinner and asked General McNeil to dine with her and when he had broken her bread and was under the influence of dainty courtesies and the charm of his hostess, she plead with him to permit the return of her husband, upon the solemn assurance that while his sympathy was with the south, he was not actively arraigned against the government, and that his services as a physician were needed. Her request was granted and her husband came home, but only saw his brave wife and his babies that night, for General McNeil, breaking camp next morning, had reconsidered over night and had taken Doctor Frazier with him a prisoner.

Then began for Mrs. Frazer a period of waiting in which body and soul were so lacerated by emotion that life was a living death. She made continued, frantic, unavailing pleas for her husband's release. The days went by on leaden feet. Fields were laid waste and homes burned. Lone women were stupefied with terror. That her home was not burned was due to herself, General McNeil himself admitting that he was in that part of the country for that purpose, when her courtesy saved it.

On an October morning in 1862 she went to Palmyra, only to again meet curt refusal. So great was her own distress that the crowds about the officers' quarters, stern faced men, women crying, women praying, disheveled women, with hair streaming down their shoulders. made only a blurred picture in her mind. It was not until she reached Hannibal that she learned that General McNeil had ordered ten southern prisoners to be shot, because of the disappearance of one Allsman. Five had been selected from the prison in Palmyra and men were there even to take five from the Hannibal prison. And her hus-

HISTORY OF NORTHEAST MISSOURI

band was in that prison! She made appeals in every quarter that offered a bare possibility of hope. The only shadow of hope accorded her was the statement that a number of prisoners were to be transferred to St. Louis. It was an exhausted, tragic, heroic, little figure that asked for admission to the prison to see her husband. While waiting the provost marshal read a list of prisoners to be transferred to St. Louis. Doctor Frazer's name headed the list! Her alternating hope and despair burst into a prayer of thankfulness that amazed her hus- band, who was wholly unaware that his life had been hanging by so slender a thread. With the undaunted courage of women she followed him to St. Louis and traveled every avenue of appeal until at last Doctor Frazer went home with her a free man.

Though half a century has passed away there is a tremor in Mrs. Frazer's voice as she gently turns the leaves in her Book of Years. In this spacious room high above the city, steals an awe and a holy quiet and abides. Through the window, a beautiful picture, the broad Mis- sissippi glistens and gleams and slips by the tree crowned bluffs. Tears are over the bright eyes of Becky, Becky Thatcher. "Life is a trag- edy !" she says. But out of tragedies women weave their starry crowns of womanhood. From travail of soul and the discipline of life are evolved the sons and daughters that are the glory of the state. "Becky Thatcher" is a beautiful gift of permanent charm to the world but a greater gift is a rare and beautiful womanhood radiating strength and virtue, and left as an inheritance to perpetuating descendants.

WOMEN IN CIVIL WAR TIME

All over Northeast Missouri the story of Mrs. Frazer can be dupli- cated. Gay, feminine women keep their lady feet in soft and beaten ways, until occasion arises with stern demand. The soldier on the firing line is not braver then than she. When word came to Mrs. Thomp- son Alford that her husband was at Vicksburg and wounded, dainty dependence dropped from her like a garment. She was all iron. Through the horror of Vicksburg, her husband, and wounded! What were the hundreds of miles of Federal blockade that separated them ? Love and money rendered impotent any barriers that men can build. She had both, ran the blockade and nursed her husband back to health. And when she had to return to her Missouri home, he procured an overcoat belonging to a soldier in the opposing army and going ou hoard one of their transports put her in charge of the captain. "Madam." he said with a courtly bow, "I wish you a safe journey home." And he left her there on the deck of the boat. Both were dry-eyed and calm, and neither had the assurance that they would ever again see each other. But when a similar call came to her, again she went. and followed her husband all over the south. The tragedy of the weary months culminating in Altoona, Georgia, when Sherman went through to the sea. Captain Alford was in an upstairs room wounded and helpless. The flames were blazing up the stairway before the frantic appeals of the faithful wife brought help.

For weeks after she tended him in a tiny cottage near Altoona, their sole fare being bacon and bread made from corn ground daily. They were permitted this luxury because of their host's expedient; when he heard of Sherman's coming he had ripped out the ceiling of his porch and hidden both bacon and corn under the roof, nailing it up again securely. When peace came to the wrecked country Mrs. Alford returned to her Missouri home with her husband where they found their

HISTORY OF NORTHEAST MISSOURI

once magnificent farm a barren waste, and their home in ashes. But what was that to a husband with such a wife !

HOME LIFE IN PIONEER TIMES

These little stories of human interest are representative of phases of Missouri history, and show that, in whatever phase, women played well their part. "In books," says Carlyle, "lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the Past when the body and the material substance of it, has altogether vanished like a dream." Vanished indeed like a dream are the conditions and the environments called to mind by these stories of a day that is past. Ere long the last human link will have been broken, and it will be only through books that we can see the advancing of the sturdy pioneer, his broad axe whetted to carve out civilization, adventurous men with prophetic eye on the edge of the future with its full and fat years, and with them women, wives and daughters, building a foundation that their daughters and granddaughters might be as "corner stones polished after the simili- tude of a palace." Through books only can we see the forest give way to fields of corn and vistas of prairie grass to fields of waving grain. Now we see only results.

The little red schoolhouse occupies the site of the old log room. And they who sat on the old split log seats builded so well that now their granddaughters matriculate from one of the foremost universi- ties of the country, here in Northeast Missouri. Instead of a blue back speller and the Life of Washington every facility known to an age when education is apotheosized, is at the command of the poorest. "My great-grandmother," said one, "propped an old grammar in front of her while she wove cloth, and she spoke so pure an English that it put us to shame." Is it a wonder that her descendants are at the head of colleges and schools and the center of the educational life wherever they may be ?

The pioneer housewife tended with zealous care the corn pone slowly baking on its board before the wide-throated fireplace, and when done placed it on the snowy square of cloth of her own weaving. Her grand- daughter takes her pan of biscuits, little flyaway puffs, from the oven of an electric range, and serves them on a machine-made doilie on a silver tray, but the fine instinct of looking well to the way of her household has come down true and unalloyed. No more shines the blaze of the back log and the softer radiance of the candle while girls in calico gown. home-woven skirts and home-made shoes disport over smoothly-worn puncheon floors to the inspiring music of the old fiddle. Instead, stringed orchestras play, and gliding over the waxed expanse go fairy forms, silken hosed, satin slippered, with wild roses going a-maying over hair and filmy gown. Everything different except the coquetry. That is eternal. Women have gone along offering the apple to man, in one guise or another, ever since that little affair in the Gar- den of Eden.

WHEN THE BABY CAME

The pioneer woman was happy with two or three little calico slips, the little flannels that she herself wove for her baby, and when the time came for her to go down in the dark valley, more often than not the doctor was forty miles away, and her only refuge was some good old woman, who many times had performed such offices. Indeed the pioneer mother was a good doctor, and knew all the qualities of medicinal herbs. It is related today by the eighty-four-year-old son of Mrs. Ann

HISTORY OF NORTHEAST MISSOURI

Waters, who was born in 1805 and died in 1905, that his mother looked on a doctor as a genuine disciple of Black Art, firmly believing that if she were to imbibe any of his potions it meant certain death. There was not much demand for a doctor in the pioneer day, however. Life ran quieter, less tense. It is in this swift, madly rushing present of 1913 that the neurologist is coining gold. Then, a birth was a natural proc- ess of nature, like the opening of buds in spring. Now it is becoming an event that disturbs the whole trend of life. It means drawers full of lacy, perishable things, two or three doctors, trained nurses, long hours of lounging in blue ribboned lingerie, long periods of readjust- ment. The modern woman has not the physique of her pioneer for- bears. Invention and modern appliances have so reduced the labor of modern home life, that the body does not develop its full capacity. The heart and mother love are the same though, and no more splendid mothers could be found in the world.

WOMEN IN THE CHURCH

While all the presiding ministers in Northeast Missouri are men, a large proportion would not command their salaries if it were not for the activities of women. From the tip of the spire to the basement the trail of the women is over the church. The ministers are learned, erudite, and can thrill to tears, but it is the women who pay for the pulpit, buy the pipe organ, tack down the carpet, control the missionary exchequer and see that the coal bins are full. "What great work," was asked a woman of intelligence and broad acquirements, "have the women of Northeast Missouri accomplished in religious work ?" "Noth- ing," was the answer; "nothing! she has been too busy paying the preacher and making missionary money." After all is it not practical religion that is the weightier argument ?

The woman of today is a composite of Mary and Martha. She breaks her alabaster box with one hand and serves sandwiches with the other. Missions and church socials were not thought of in pioneer days. Church was solely a place in which to worship God, a place of godly quiet, solemn observance, firstlies and seventhlies. "You may say," said an upright old lady of eighty, wearing her years like a coronet, "that for more years than I can remember I never missed a Sunday service, and my husband and I rode four miles horseback, each carrying a child behind us and one in front of us. They sat between us during the service and neither talked or whispered. I car- ried cookies and a bottle of water in my reticule to give them. I do not like the way children run about in Sunday-school now, and neither do I like your godless music or your twenty-minute sermons."

It is indeed a far cry from the ante-bellum church habits and methods to this day of progressiveness. The exponents of each have a very visible line of demarcation albeit each looks to the same ultimate point. Outward forms and mental attitudes are a product of the times, whether of old time sobriety, or modern broad interpretation. Though the solemn significance is often not felt in the atmosphere of some of our churches, who shall say that the white-gowned modish matron or maid who plays bridge on Saturday and sits under the jeweled light of stained glass windows on Sunday is less religious, less capable of sacrifice ?

As pretty a story as one can hear is that of the recent action of the women of a Fulton church, who had, by the usual methods of women's church organizations. raised the sum of $1,000 to be used in providing long-coveted improvements. But when old Westminster burned-

HISTORY OF NORTHEAST MISSOURI

Westminster! where their fathers and grandfathers and husbands had gone to school-and the old columns stood stark and naked and alone in the grove-these women did not hesitate. They sent their thousand dollars at once. "Take it," they said, "it will help in the rebuilding." And they probably did this beautiful act of sacrifice in a smiling, every- day way. There was no solemn, religious hour of rendering a religious service to the Lord.

Religion is largely hid today under convention, or shall we say, that a broad, democratic interpretation of religion prevails, an everyday religion, capable indeed of its high and holy moments, but given mostly to doing deeds of week-day holiness, noiseless as the snow. There is no woman, however apparently given over to worldly ways, but has an inner chamber where the snake has never entered, and which keeps her soul true to the pole.

WOMEN IN THE SCHOOLS

It is in school work that the women of Northeast Missouri have rendered a service next to that of motherhood. It is probable that seven- eighths of the instructors in the educational world are women. Some of them are at the head of the most successful colleges and schools and A. M. degrees are commonplace possessions. However, how many ab- breviations she may be entitled to suffix to her name, the instances are rare when she has not been willing to substitute the simple prefix of Mrs. for the entire aggregation of the symbols of her learning, thus keeping inviolate the reputation of our women to be above all things truly feminine, truly women.

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

A History of Northeast Missouri, Volume I, Part 7

Author: Williams, Walter, 1864-1935, editor Publication date: 1913 Publisher: Chicago, New York, The Lewis Publishing Company Number of Pages: 731

Author: Williams, Walter, 1864-1935, editor
Publication date: 1913
Publisher: Chicago, New York, The Lewis Publishing Company
Number of Pages: 731