The Elijah Bradfield family in Lincoln County

From my recently published book about Wright Cemetery, available from Amazon. The photo shows Elijah's grave marker in Tryon.

Bradfield, Cecil May (1897 - Feb 1901)

Bradfield, Aletha Victoria (1899 - Mar 1901)

We are well informed about the family of these little girls because, though their parents did not stay around Chandler more than a few years, their paternal grandfather was a well known minister in the Tryon-Agra area and one of his sons left a fine memoir of early-day Lincoln county.

The E. E. Bradfield who bought the burial plots was Easton E. Bradfield (1866-1922) and his wife was Ellen Jane Cox (1870-1959). Easton was born in Indiana as was Ellen Jane. Both were living in Butler County KS when they married in 1895. On 6 Mar 1902 Easton bought twenty acres in sec 27 of 14N-E4, about four miles south of Chandler.  Though the family didn’t stay long in Lincoln County, Easton’s father the Rev. Elijah Bradfield (1827-1910) did. He homesteaded in Osage Township about halfway between Agra and Kendrick, and he is buried in Tryon’s Old George Cemetery. The Lincoln County Oklahoma History recalls him as “a singing minister at the Union Friends Church, located seven miles north and a half-mile west of Chandler” (LCOH 91).

Elijah had six sons and two daughters, the third son James Wesley Bradfield being the writer of the memoir. It forms part of the 116-volume WPA collection of interviews and memoirs called Indian and Pioneer Historical Collection done during the 1930s. The subjects of the interviews were old timers living in the former Indian Territory, though some of the more educated interviewees preferred to write their reminiscences rather than be interviewed, and I have long suspected that James’ was one of those. I say “long” because I have known this document for more than twenty years, since first discovering it in a dim back room of the Oklahoma Historical Society. 

At the time of the interview in 1937 James Wesley Bradfield was a widower living in Muskogee. He relates that his mother was Nancy Ellen Featherstone, whose father was a quarter Cherokee. “Pap was a farmer and [Quaker] minister but never preached for money.” Elijah had in fact been a union soldier in General Sherman’s brigade for eighteen months, which would have included the famous (or infamous) march through Georgia. As a Quaker, he was not a volunteer and did not believe in war but was drafted. In 1879 the family of ten went to Kansas, in Butler and Douglas counties, where they lived until coming to Chandler. Elijah bought a relinquishment nine and a half miles northeast of Chandler that became the family home. 

Elijah was closely associated with John Murdock, a pioneer minister among the Indians who worked for years at Hillside Mission in Skiatook OK. The two men built the church called Valley Queen four miles southwest of Tryon, which was still standing in 1937, as was the Valley Queen schoolhouse stood across the road from it. Union School, which was used as a church, was known as Hardscrabble.

Toward the end of his reminiscence, James Wesley writes: “Pap died in the summer of 1913. He preached at 11:00 a.m. and died at 4 p.m. John Murdock preached his funeral at Tryon. My mother died in 1906 and my wife in 1904. They are all buried side by side.”

The fascinating part of James’ story concerns the cyclone that destroyed Chandler in March of 1897. He rode his horse over to see the disaster the next morning.

Chandler was riddled from Bell Cow Creek where the gin was on the northwest, on through the town to the southeast side and on into the country. The only buildings left were the jail and the Court House . .. I saw three corpses that had burned to death. People had tried to get [into] a cave but they [were told], “We were here first.” . . . The storm carried an infant probably three miles and hung it in a tree unharmed. One man’s arm was caught in a structure between the 2 x 4’s and he begged the people to cut his arm off but no one would do it and he burned to death.

He also tells about “a lady preacher who had come to Chandler to hold a meeting.”

She could not get any hearing because the people would not come to hear the Gospel preached. She told them that “Inside of three months Chandler will be torn up by a cyclone.” There was one man there who was an infidel. During the storm his boy came to [someone’s] door and [they] would not let him in. After the storm this man said he did not like God Almighty’s way of doing business.

The other event that James tells and which has remained in my memory for two decades is that he saw Matt Fooks shoot down Price Stoneking on the steps of the Courthouse in 1903 just as the District Court was taking its noon recess and the judge and the lawyers were descending the steps. Fooks had emptied his pistol into Stoneking and was beating him on the head with it when Sheriff Bill Tilghman came and escorted him around the corner into the jail. I gave the background and retold this story in my first collection of historical narratives about Lincoln County called The Lonesome Death of Billie Grayson (2014; 2017). 

I owe James Wesley Bradfield a debt of gratitude, and I trust that this biographical tribute occasioned by the presence of his two little nieces in Wright Cemetery can stand as an indication of my thanks.