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The Half Swedes: Hank, Jim, and Amanda Pounds
Note to the reader: the arrangement of this essay limps like its protagonist Grandpa George, the father of the orphan children, because I am omitting Tom Pounds, written about in plenty elsewhere. Tom was the oldest of the eight orphans, but the present essay concentrates on the next three.
The Mother: Celia Pounds
A good fatalist might commend Celia Olson Pounds for her wisdom in dying in 1906 when she did. George Benjamin Pounds married her to breed children who would do the farm work for which he was unsuited by temperament (he was a gambler) and physique (he couldn’t walk without crutches). Before her fatal wrestle with the last infant, she had given birth to eight hostages to fortune. With no relief or end in sight, the ninth brought her to the state expressed in that fine old English phrase, “to give up the ghost.” The author of the present essay, her great-grandson, understands that much.
Buried in the NE corner of the cemetery, Celie originally had a marker, but it was made of sandstone, and time and the elements have long since consumed it. In her day the cemetery was called Dewey. Nowadays it is known as Pollick. For Celia, the local newspaper was The People's Press out of Perkins--socialism was dominant in Oklahoma at the turn of the last century. It carried an obituary in the Grand Center column written by "Topsy," a column which covered news from Merrick as well as Grand Center. On March 29, 1906, Topsy's column included this paragraph:
"Died at her present home on the old Clint Randall place, Friday March 23, Mrs. Celia Pounds. Funeral services were conducted by Rev. Garner and interment took place Saturday at the Dewey Cemetery. Her infant child was buried the preceding Tuesday. The deceased was the oldest daughter of Mrs. Olson of this district. She leaves a husband, mother, sister, brother, and eight children besides neighbors and friends to mourn her untimely death. The bereaved have the sympathy of the entire community."
Nearly a hundred years later, a great-grandson added this verse to her grave, itemizing her children:
Celia Olson
In memory of me
Celia Olson
because I lie in an unmarked grave.
I was the daughter of Bertha Anderson Olson
born April 1872
in Hansingland, Sweden.
I was married in Maysville Missouri
on September 26 1889
to a man with an ax-cut in his leg and a love of cards.
In 1891 delivered of a son named
Thomas Franklin
in 1893
delivered of a son named Hans Allen
in 1894
delivered of a son named James William
in 1897
delivered of a daughter named
Amanda Elizabeth
in 1898
delivered of twin girls named Early and Artie
in 1903
delivered of a son named John Anderson
in 1904
delivered of a son named Andrew Leland
on Tuesday March 20 1906 she was
delivered of a stillborn daughter
on Friday three days later
she died in childbed
much lamented
In this hapless verse from long ago for Celia Olson, Hank and Jim Pounds (bolded) are the second and third sons of her and George Benjamin Pounds and Amanda is the first daughter. Their older brother was my grandfather Tom Pounds, about whom I have too often written to express my admiration, once even putting my feeling into a song called “Grandpa”:
Grandpa was a fiddler
but I never heard him play,
Played for country dances
way out Merrick way;
Rolled his own Prince Albert smokes,
a hard workin man and poor,
Voted for Eisenhower cause Lincoln won the war.
The line about voting for Eisenhower is a true one, because one of the few admirable things about George Benjamin was that he was born in Illinois. He was no farmer--he preferred playing pitch, dominoes, and petty-ante gambling to hard work, and on that side of the argument he had indisputable support, as a early axe-wound in his leg, never treated by a doctor, had become infected with gangrene, and all his life he walked with crutches. My dad Archie told me the story of how, as a boy, Grandpa George had sent him to the creek bank to cut a sumac root for me, it being common knowledge that the root of the sumac terminated in a curve like a cane handle. When George died in 1941, Daddy visited the death room and found the sumac cane. He immediately claimed it as an heirloom, for he dearly loved anything with sentiment attached to it, but it has since gone the way of all flesh--or in this case the way of all wood. Another granddaughter, Hazel Sutton Pounds, has a memory that catches more of George’s deathbed. She told me that when he died, it was early spring and "the smell of honeysuckle and gangrene permeated the air."
This story is repeated at George’s Find-a-Grave memorial, which was written by my late sister Gerry, who in her lifetime was my companion is family-history labors. and in death still comes to sit beside me and comfort me in this lonesome-dog labor of writing, writing, writing, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/62801228/george-benjamin-pounds
George Pounds 1940 on the farm of his son Tom, NW of Chandler
George disposed of the older kids--Tom, Hank, Jim, and Amanda--by getting neighboring farmers to give them room and board in return for farm work, and he then left Lincoln County for neighboring Creek County to work in an oil boom going on there. For a while he ran a cafe in Kellyville, but gave it up for the free life of the family mooch. Once he was free of his younger children, George freeloaded off the older ones, staying with each for about a month before moving to the next. For example, in 1930 the census shows George staying with Jim, Jim’s wife Lena, and their children. Jim too was working in the oil boom.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/62801228/george-benjamin-pounds
But to return to the Great Mother Bertha’s daughter, Celia Olson emigrated from Hansingland Sweden with her mother and two siblings, Margaret and Hans, and in DeKalb County, Missouri in 1889 she married George Benjamin Pounds. In 1899 the newly weds followed the Olsons to Lincoln Co., Oklahoma Territory. George and Celie made the trip by wagon train with six little children on board. They arrived late in the year and camped on the banks of the Cimarron River. The 1900 census for Chandler city, Lincoln Co., OK Territory shows them living in Chandler and George listed as "day laborer," but a few months later he and Celia moved to the old Clint Randall farm one mile west of Four Corners on the north side of state highway 105, which runs from Tryon to Guthrie. Here three more children were born, the last of which was the innocent cause of a family tragedy. The infant died with its mother in April of 1906, leaving George a single father with eight children between the ages of one year and a half to fourteen. For he had fathered them like a carpenter builds steps, hoping to raise farm hands so he wouldn’t have to work in the fields. What happened in fact--what the devil of laziness in George caused-- is a break up of the family, resulting in the separation of the four younger children from their father and the older siblings--a separation and a suffering that time has been unable to heal or recompense. The children never forgot. The grandchildren never forgot. And I too, the last of the Lincoln County Poundses, do not forget. I am like one of those British soldiers wounded in the trenches of World War I (the subject of Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy) and hospitalized in England where they continually reweave the same story in which they received the original wound.
It is time now, however, to focus on Hank and Jim, Celia Olson and George Pounds’s children farmed out upon the mother’s death in 1906. “Motherless children have a hard time” is a line from an old blues lament, applicable then as now. The first book of family history I wrote back in 1996 carries the phrase in its subtitle: North of Deep Fork: An Oklahoma Farm Family in Hard Times. In the rest of what follows in the present essay, I will have one principal source and that is the book cited at the end of this paragraph--now thirty years old and out of print.
I. Hank Pounds
The second child of George and Celia Pounds was named after Celia's brother Hans Olson, but he was always known as Hank. He was born in Dekalb County Missouri in 1893, and was one of the four older children who hired themselves out as farm laborers after the death of their mother. The family had been living on the old Clint Randall farm near what is now Four Corners when she died, and afterwards the three older boys worked around Merrick and Four Corners. Hank evidently spent some time with his Olson grandparents, for in later life he entertained company with his imitations of Bertha Olson's Swedish accent.
The life of a teenage farm laborer cannot have been an easy one. Unless Hank was living with the Olsons, he probably lived under the same conditions as Tom, $15 a year, meals, and a shed to sleep in. In 1910 the census shows Hank and Tom in the John S. and Sarah Deming household, along with the Deming children Earl, Buck, Ethel, Paul, Charity, and Eve. The Deming family, still remembered today, lived north of Oak Grove toward Carney.
Like his brothers Tom and Jim, Hank grew into a big man. They were all six feet and two-to-three inches tall. The family reunion photo [what page?] doesn’t reveal much difference in their height. A clue as to their weight comes from a medical examination Hank received in his latter years which showed him weighing about 190 pounds. A comparison of their heights can be made from the photograph of their 1960 reunion in Chandler, which shows Tom, Jim, and Hank lined up with their younger brother Keith (adopted by a family in Kansas). The smile on the face of my grandad Tom (3rd from the left) lights up the whole photograph. None of his other snapshots show him smiling.
Pounds children reunited after half a century. The four men
in the rear are Tom, Hank, Jim, and Keith
As a young man, Hank along with his brother Jim left Chandler and went to work in the oil fields around Bristow and Sapulpa. Anyone who drives from Bristow to Sapulpa today will go by the old Oklahoma Natural Gas booster station where, as Archie Pounds tells the story, “Uncle Hank went to work in 1918 with a fourth grade education digging a ditch. He educated himself by correspondence courses at night through the twelfth grade, a high education, and worked up to be Chief Engineer for years. He retired from Oklahoma Natural Gas after 37 years without ever missing a paycheck. That is one of the main reasons Grandpa George lived with Uncle Hank and his family so much.” That is, because Hank had an education he didn't have to farm. He had a steady and adequate income.
Hank married Cora Melvina Westfall, whose parents were Andrew Jackson and Elizabeth Westfall. Much of Hank and Cora's life was spent around Ninnekah and Chickasha, and later Oklahoma City, where Hank worked. After his retirement, they moved to Chandler, Oklahoma, where they bought a home. On a hot August day in 1964, at the age of 71, Hank was mowing the lawn, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Hank was the first of George Benjamin Pounds' four older children to pass away, but he had already been preceded by three of the younger four: his brothers Jack and Keith and his sister Arlie. Hank Pounds is buried in Oak Park Cemetery in Chandler.
Hank and Cora Pounds had four children, of whom Andrew "Andy" Benjamin was the oldest. Andy's sister Irene remembers the friendship between the two boys:
Archie used to come and visit with us, and oh we loved for him to come. God, I loved him! He and Andy got along so well. Melvin never did come down there and visit, but Archie did, and I tell you what. We had so much fun, and he and Andy would laugh and laugh and laugh at anything, and I just worshipped Archie. They sat on that ole front porch out there at Ninnekah [in Grady County near Chickasha] and just giggled and laughed. When he'd come and visit us, I never did want him to go back home.
My father Archie loved his cousin Andy, and because of that affection I am letting him tell Andy’s story. My source remains the same--North of Deep Fork. His full name was Andrew Benjamin Pounds, and his dates are 1918-1986. My Great Uncle Hank and his wife Cora Pounds had four children, of whom "Andy" was the oldest.
Cousin Andy by Archie Pounds
Uncle Hank said Andy started drinkin because of the paint fumes, to get the taste out of his mouth after he worked all day. Uncle Hank and I did a lot of talkin, back and forth when we'd go shoppin. He had his own ideas about why Andy drank.
Now when my Pounds first landed in California and we learned where Bend Oregon was, my brother Melvin had me write and ask Andy about directions. Sometime when we had some time off we'd drive up and see 'em. Melvin was very hurt and offended to think that they didn't even answer our letter. Uncle Hank said it was because Andy was so far into drink they didn't want us to know.
Years later I wrote him and he answered. This was when he was already divorced and livin in Ada. Andy and Gwen, that was his wife, after they got married they moved up around Hutchinson, Kansas, where her family had a store. There were some of those Westfall boys up there. Andy stayed with us in 1942, stayed overnight, that was before they was married. That was the last time I saw Andy until Uncle Hank's funeral.
He was drinkin at his own Daddy's funeral. Brought his mixins with him, and had all that stuff out, a bottle of hooch and ice in a bucket, mixin himself a drink. I can't understand it, how a man could get drunk at his own daddy's funeral. He was drunk at his sister Mary Francis' funeral too, and her husband Bob Williams jumped on him hard. Told him he was a sot, he ought to be ashamed of himself. But it didn't do any good.
His family got where they didn't want to have anything to do with him. He finally moved back to Ada so Aunt Cora could take care of him, after he was laid up with alcohol poisoning and couldn't walk. He died in the Veteran's Hospital--yeah, he was a veteran--and requested that his ashes be scattered in some ol' fishin hole. I guess he thought no one cared about him.
What'd they do with his ashes? I heard later that Irene and Evelyn sprinkled his ashes on Uncle Hank and Aunt Cora's grave.
I don't even want to think about it. Me and Andy was always close. There wasn't half a year difference in our ages. That guy could have been anything he wanted to be--had opportunity, talent, brains, personality, looks, and he was an athlete. [He strikes the table with his fist.] It makes me sick to think of it.
Jim and Hank, 6'3" and 6’2"
II. Jim Pounds
Jim Pounds, born in 1894, was the third son of George Benjamin and Celia Olson Pounds. He was born, like his two older brothers and three younger sisters, near Maysville, Missouri, in Dekalb County. After the death of his mother in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, in 1906, Jim and his two older brothers worked as farm hands in return for their keep in the area around Four Corners and Merrick. Although tradition says it is Hank who stayed most with the Olson grandparents, Jim stayed with them a while, for he was enumerated in the Olson household when the census was taken in 1910 (Jimmie Pounds, 15 years old). When the boys were older, Jim and Hank joined their father in the oil fields between Bristow and Sapulpa, principally around a little town called Kellyville. Jim fought in the first world war, which (though it started in August of 1914) the United States did not enter until April 1917. Jim was drafted that year and served in Company A, 132nd Machine Gun Battalion, Infantry Division, in France and Germany. He made the rank of Private First Class before being discharged in June of 1919. Upon his return from the war, he married Sarah Westfall, sister of Hank's wife Cora, but before the marriage had produced a child Sarah died from a fire caused by an exploding stove.
In 1922, Jim married Nancy Lena Archer, daughter of Joe Franklin Archer and Sarah Shedd. Lena was born in Le Flore County in 1903 of a large family. Franklin Archer, born in 1845, fought for the Confederacy in North and South Carolina and Tennessee. Upon returning to his home in Oklahoma after the end of the War, when he would have been 20 years old, he could not find any of his family except his little brother Tommy, whom he then raised. Joe Franklin Archer had thirteen children by three wives, of which Sarah was the third. The Archers lived near Poteau in Le Flore County before moving to Kellyville, where Lena met and married Jim.
Jim worked in the oil fields most of his life. He was ordained a Deacon in the Free Will Baptist Church of Bristow, Oklahoma, in September 1941. He passed away on January 2, 1970, and was buried at the Greenhill Memorial Gardens in Sapulpa, where his wife Lena still resides. Approaching 90, she is still cooking famous biscuits and mowing her own lawn.
Four children were born to the marriage of Jim and Lena Pounds. Clarence Fredrick, called Buster, was born in 1923 in Kellyville. He attended public school at Olive, Oklahoma, near Drumright, and worked in the oil fields until joining the U.S. Marines in December
1942. Buster trained with the Marines until March 1943, when he received a Medical Discharge due to a broken back he had received after being thrown from a rodeo horse at the age of 18.
In 1945 Buster married Emma Sue McMurtrey, who was born in 1924 in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, the daughter of Luther Martin and Ruby Ruth Curry McMurtrey. They moved to south Texas, where Buster worked in the oil fields. In 1951 Buster began working as a truck driver, a career he followed until 1973, when he was involved in a truck accident that resulted in critical burns over 60% of his body and forced his early retirement. During his eight months in the hospital, one of his nurses was Jeanie Belz, who would later become his daughter-in-law, when she married his son Mike. Buster continues to be active in the Red Fork Lions Club and to escort wide loads for oil field hauling companies. In 1993 Buster reckoned that over his life he had driven 3 million miles.
My father Archie also drove a gasoline truck in the late 1940s and early 1950s, hauling for Claude Jondahl’s Philips 66 station in Chandler, but the routes he drove were all in Lincoln County except during his last year, when work had begun on Turner Turnpike, and he serviced the big road-building equipment. Still, he held no candle to the record of his cousin Buster and the big rigs the latter drove. In some way that I would never attempt to explain, Buster’s overdrive lives on in his son Michael Pounds.
Buster and Sue's first child is Michael Lee, who married Jeanie Belz and now lives in Owasso, Oklahoma, while working as Personnel Director in the Tulsa Public Schools. Their second child is Shara Lynn, who married Bobby Dean Blevins. And their youngest child is Steven Keith, who married Cynthia Ann Lewis. The two latter families also live in Tulsa. Emma Sue McCurtney passed away in 2006.
The second child of Jim and Lena Pounds was Clara Marie, born in 1925, who married James W. Barrit in 1945. Their children are Pearlena Ruth, who lives in Tucson AZ; Jamie Katherine, who married Bill Hackney and lives in Casper WY; Anna Marie, who married Dennis Harrington and lives in Bowling Green KY; James M., who lives in Gaithersburg MD with his wife Elya; and Danny, deceased. The third child, Naomi Ruth, born in 1927, married Daryl W. Wright in 1946. Their children are Donald Eugene, who lives in Keifer OK, and Nancy Teresa, who married Sam Warren and lives in Leach OK. The fourth child, Edna Lee, born in 1932, married George Jackson Boggs in 1950. Their daughter, Jackie Lee, lives in Sapulpa OK.
III. Amanda Pounds Smith
Of the three Poundses, children of George Benjamin Pounds and his wife Celia, I probably know Aunt Amanda the least well. This may because the visiting that we did probably took place when I was too young to remember--and we may have lived too far apart--but do remember visiting them, and I have often heard my dad speak of her and her husband Arly. My book source book, North of Deep Fork, mentions her only about ten times. From these fragments I have pieced together her story as best I can. As my dad remarked once, in those old times if you were separated by more than twenty miles you might as well have been living in another state.
When Celia Olson Pounds died in 1906, Amanda, the fourth child, had not yet reached her tenth birthday. Judging from stories that her children tell, after her mother's death she tried to run the household, doing the housework, cooking for the family of nine, and taking care of the four younger children. It is hard to imagine how a child of that age could have been asked to carry such a burden. But with the death of Celia, Amanda at nine and a half was the oldest female in the family, and George Pounds was not a man adverse to relying on his children. It is not surprising that within two years the family members were all dispersed. My aunt Sarah added this remark, “I don't remember Grandpa ever talkin about his wife or family. Except Aunt Amanda, he'd mention something once in a while about the one daughter he'd kept that stayed with him and kept house for him. Evidently Aunt Amanda stayed with him when his wife died. For some reason, he didn't adopt her out. We always assumed that she cooked and kept house for him. I don't know how old she was.
After the family broke up Amanda, like the three older boys, worked as a farm laborer in return for her keep, and the four children stayed fairly close together in the Merrick and Four Corners area. Ruby Faye Smith Knox, Amanda's youngest daughter, tells that Amanda had been taken in by a family in Payne County but did not like it there, with the result that she ran away more than once. During one of these flights, she was walking south of Tryon on her way home and passed a young man named Arley Smith, who was sitting beside his family's mailbox. He spoke to her, they passed the time of day, and that was her first encounter with her future husband. is anecdote has the further interest of suggesting where George Pounds was living after the death of his wife, for the Smith residence that Amanda passed on her way home was three and a half miles south of Tryon, which puts it north of Pleasant Ridge. In 1907 George Pounds’ father, the Civil War veteran Thomas Pounds, wrote a letter from Route 7, which ran northwest of Chandler toward Carney. If Thomas was staying with George, which seems likely, we can infer that George may have been living in the area where the section line Amanda was walking intersects old Route 7. Daddy certified the roads taken by old Route 7.
[from my Aunt Sarah] I don't remember Grandpa ever talkin about his wife or family. Except Aunt Amanda, he'd mention something once in a while about the one daughter he'd kept that stayed with him and kept house for him. Evidently Aunt Amanda stayed with him when his wife died. For some reason, he didn't adopt her out. We always assumed that she cooked and kept house for him. I don't know how old she was. When his mom died, Dad left and took Uncle Hank and Uncle Jim with him. They always gave us the impression they thought Grandpa didn't care anythin about the kids. They felt like he could have kept them together if he wanted to. I have heard that he never did adopt Aunt Amanda out, or she never did stay with anyone else or anything. Evidently she stayed with Grandpa.
[from Archie] Buster says [Great] Grandma [Celia] Pounds is buried in Tryon Cemetery. If she is, I know where that is. But Buster and I ain't in agreement on where it is. But if it's where we buried Aunt Manda-- that's the only Tryon Cemetery I know, and I been in that country. Uncle Arley had a new Star, I believe. He'd gone to the field to work, of course, and Aunt Amanda didn't know how to drive a car, but she was bound and determined she was goin to learn to drive that new car. She got in that thing--it was a little bit down hill--and took off down through there. She hit one of them big ol' trees. I mean she just wrapped it plumb around it. She didn't try to go this way or that way, she just split it right in the middle. Anyhow it was downhill from then on. I guess that was the last car he ever owned. I don't know what they done with their money. They kept that ol' 80 up until Aunt Amanda, you know, they sold it and moved to town just before she died. But it done somethin to Uncle Arley. I think that was part of his quietness. He had that big fine team, and had them big celluloid rings all over the harness. Aunt Lena ought to have some pictures of Uncle Jim's oil field harness. It would turn you on. He had the prettiest horses, big ol' things went up over the hames. I remember when Uncle Jim had them big oil field teams. The wagon had an iron thing come up like this and across. You had a line that went through one. They had a strap hooked through--they might of even had them on the bridle--but they had a strap run up here about where the collar is. It'd lay clear back on the horse's side, on his flank. On each side they'd have them lined with celluloid rings and circles of different colors. I've seen Uncle Jim's team with that on it. But Uncle Arley had the same thing--brand new wagon, fine team, and they talk him comin down the main street of Tryon, really respected, somebody, compared with just poor sharecroppers. But after he lost all that, and how he lost it I don't know, I can get you people in Tryon today that'll tell you Uncle Arley never drove down the main street of Tryon after that in his life. He took down the alleys behind the stores, behind Boggs's, behind Herefords'. He quit goin, never go to town. His nature was on the quiet side anyway.
I don’t remember Grandpa ever talking about his wife or family. Except Aunt Amanda, he’d mention something once in a while about the one daughter he’d kept that stayed with hi and kept house for him. Evidently Aunt Amanda stayed with him when his wife died. For some reason, he didn’t adopt her out. We always assumed that she cooked and kept house for him. I don’t know how old she was.
Here the author of the present essay enters in his own persona with an anecdote. Among Aunt Amanda and Uncle Arley’s children, my favorite was always their youngest daughter Ruby Faye Smith Knox, whom I only came to know in the late 1970s when I was doing the research for North of Deep Fork. Ruby Faye, born in 1932, the youngest child of Amanda and Arlie Smith, married David Keene Knox, and they now live on a farm in the northwestern corner of the county, a mile and a half south of Olivet Cemetery, where the Olsons are buried. Dave was born and grew up in this part of the county, where his father, Merl Knox (1889-1964), arrived in 1898. Ruby and Dave's children are David Ivern, who married Juanita D. Londigan; Dick Lee, who married Sharon Kriel; and Patty Sue, who married Patrick Thompson.
I make special note of Ruby Faye’s children, since some could still be alive at the moment I am writing. Her obit says: She is survived by her husband, David K. Knox; sons, David Ivern and Juanita Knox of Carney, Dickey Lee and Sharon Knox of Claremore; daughter, Patty Sue Knox-Thompson and Patrick of Perkins; eight grandchildren, Paula Knox, Beth Knox-Souza and Pablo, David Knox and Stacy, Jeremy Knox and Jessica, Russell Knox and Erin, Geoffrey Knox, Charles Thompson and Candy, and Grant Thompson; and eleven great grandchildren. Wayne Pounds, the humble author of this book, hereby reminds them all of their kinship with him and urges them to get in touch. My email address is wapo@cl.aoyama.ac.jp.
I will end by sustaining this last sentimental note with a further one from my dad Archie, which forms the last paragraph of my original Hard Times book.
Those were hard times then. I say this with love, but this generation of people from about 1940 to now does not or cannot know hard times as we lived through. Not just us but everybody except a few moneyed people in town. Daddy would go to town on Saturday evenin and buy twenty-five cents of sugar and twenty-five cents of coffee, ten cents tobacco, and maybe some soda or bakin powder, and that was it. But we always had plenty to eat as we raised it and canned it: 700 to 900 quarts of fruit, vegetables, and jelly in the cellar every winter plus four or five hogs every winter that gave us lots of meat, sausage, lard, head cheese. Mother could and did sit a table for twelve or fourteen any day and never think of goin to town. If you worked a day for a man you did not get paid a dime. He paid you by workin a day for you.
That is enough of that. But people our age knows what hard times are.
Wayne Pounds
July 20, 2026
Tokyo, Japan
wapo@cl.aoyama.ac.jp.
