Patrimony: The Ghost Road

Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus

 Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo

Dewey Cemetery

Patrimony: The Ghost Road

1. 1906: The Death of Grandma Celia

Among the lost graves of the Pounds family and their kin in Lincoln County, one has always remained firmly lodged in our memory. This is the grave of my great grandmother Celia Olson Pounds, who in 1906 died in childbed with what would have been her ninth child, had the infant survived. She was thirty-three. 

Born in Sweden, she had arrived in the U.S. in 1882 with her widowed mother and two siblings. In 1889, at the age of seventeen, she married George Pounds in Maysville, DeKalb County, Missouri. Six years earlier her mother had married Oliver Olson in the same town, and by 1900 they had all upped stakes (with George and Celia’s six little ones) and moved to Lincoln County Oklahoma. Celia’s mother managed to acquire a 160 acre homestead in Iowa Township, near a short-lived village called Grand Center, not far from Merrick. 

When Celia died, George decided not to remarry. Instead he placed the older children on neighboring farms to work for their living, and the youngest ones he put up for adoption. Then he was free to follow his natural bent, which was to the pool hall where he played dominoes and pitch. The oldest son, Tom, was my grandfather, who worked too hard to ever think much about the past. The second son was Hans (Hank), who at first followed the oil fields, but then he got a better idea and enrolled in a correspondence course. Studying at night, he completed high school equivalency and went to work for a major oil company, where he worked his way up to be chief engineer at one of the local plants. That done, he could think about the past, which as it turned out he loved to do. He was the one who knew exactly where his mother was buried in the old Dewey Cemetery and who kept the knowledge alive. During one vacation, he and his wife traveled to Maysville to try to learn about the Olsons.

Dewey Cemetery

That was the way you learned about family history up until about 1980. You drove to the courthouse in the county where your people had lived and you looked at the records. That, however, would be the second step. For the first step, you begin with questions at home. Who knew the old stories? Who might have an old family Bible? What might be found in the courthouse of the county where your own family lived or had lived? Above all you talked to the old people, wherever you could find them, because the old are often treasure houses of the past. If you have found them silent in your earlier years, it was because they could never imagined that any young person could be interested in their old stories. 

2. 1985: Learning Family History

That’s what I slowly learned to do. I had important help from people I will never forget. In Lincoln County, there was the attorney William Vassar, from whom I learned what happened to the Indians. The old ones were long gone, of course, but their memories were deposited in the courthouse. Sometimes in forms so simple I was left gaping. Every lawyer knows the land records are deposited in the courthouse, where they are organized under township names, and in Lincoln County 20 of the 25 townships bear Indian names. (That was the revelation.) Bill Vassar had come from Tryon, where his parents had homesteaded. In his old age he wrote a book about it called Memories of Tryon which was a complete history based on local knowledge--things he had learned about Tryon from the town’s story tellers. 

Somehow or other, in the later 1980s I also learned of a Pound/s family historian named Cleburn Pound, a retired school teacher who lived in Seminole Oklahoma.  Cleburn was of the old school, a teacher who spent his summer's driving from courthouse to courthouse across the South from Virginia to Arkansas. If he knew his ancestors had lived in a county, he would stay there--a day, two days, three days--until he had located every record that referred to them. He was gray, patient, scholarly, meticulous--the ideal genealogist. He was also a gentleman, as I learned from personal experience. When I first became interested in family history, I wrote to Cleburne, who wrote back inviting me to drive down from Chandler to Seminole to visit him. At that time recently widowed, he had just retired from the Seminole school system--I think he had been a principal--and was living alone. For the better part of a long Sunday afternoon, he shared his work with me, demonstrating that flame of concentrated curiosity which is the heart of the true historian, and affecting me with the warmth. He gave me a 15-page typescript dressed in a judicial black robe of thick paper and probably his own composition, called The Name and Family of Pound, and as I left he went with me downtown so I could copy a 1941 essay on my own northern branch of the family.

Other events colluded with Bill vassar and Cleburn Pound to push me into family history. About 1989, when I was teaching at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo California, one night I received a phone call from a woman in Kansas named Rhonda Doering related to the Poundses. She had come across a postcard sent from a Thomas Pounds in Lincoln County about 1907, and she started calling all the Poundses around Chandler, until someone referred her to me. I thought at first she was talking about my grandfather Tom Pounds, but the date was wrong. In 1907 he would still have been a child. Then the lights came on. I realized she was talking about my granddad’s grandfather (also named Thomas), a man I’d never heard of, though my Great Uncle Hank had.

It would be tedious, however, for me to recount all the stops I have made on the ghost roads triangulated by the states of Virginia, Ohio, and Oklahoma that have lead me out of Oklahoma and back. The term “ghost roads” seems to me applicable to my whole experience, but for the purposes of this book I want to reserve it for the unpaved backroads of Lincoln County. It certainly fits the approaches to Dewey Cemetery (now called Pollick) as they would have existed until the era of paved roads, for the cemetery lies on the north side of Highway 105 just east of the intersection with U.S. 177 near Four Corners. 

3. Entries from an Old Journal

As I write this in the year 2020, it’s been sixteen years since we buried him, yet Daddy keeps stumbling along behind me. As once with unequal steps I followed him, now he follows me and will not go away. This path is called the ghost road.

It must have been about the year 2000 that I took him out to Dewey Cemetery. He’d have been about eighty, walking with an old cane that I was later to inherit. The cane had its own history. As a boy, he cut a shoemake root at the creek bank and brought it home to his Grandpa George, who whittled it into a cane. Daddy didn’t use it to support his weight so much as for a swat to knock the heads off the taller and more obstreperous weeds. Sunflowers, the small bushy variety, were good for a whack too.

For years during the 1940s and ‘50s, Daddy drove a gasoline truck for Phillips  Petroleum Company serving farm tanks all around Lincoln County, but he told me he never knew there was a graveyard here. “I knew these roads like the back of my hand,” he said, “but I never knew there was a burying ground here.” It may not have been fenced in his day, and even today the fencing is sketchy. No gate or sign marks it as a cemetery. From the highway all you see is pasture. 

Daddy had strong family feelings, yet he never knew where his own paternal grandmother was buried. I can imagine how he might have spoken to her, for along the ghost road I can still hear him talking:

Grandma, I’m your grandson Archie. I never knew they put you here, this swatch of pasture by the Guthrie road. I should have guessed those cedars was for death, but for all the years I drove these roads I never knowed there was a graveyard here. Never asked about my grandma's grave? My daddy Tom growed up in this country, He fiddled hoedowns around Carney and Merrick, but I growed up around Oak Grove.

Daddy’s father was the oldest of the eight children left orphaned when their mother Celia died in childbed in 1906, and thus he became the defacto head of the family when his own father (Daddy’s Grandpa George) decided that he preferred playing pitch and dominoes in the pool hall to farming 80 acres of hard-scrabble upland. George said good-bye to the plow and cultivator by farming out his kids, some he sent to support themselves by working on neighbors’ farms, and for some (the little ones) he crossed the street from the pool hall to the court house to sign adoption papers, farming them out as well.

  For the curious visitor, the town of Carney still exists. Merrick has disappeared except for a sign proclaiming its one-time existence. There was a visitors’ center too, but it didn’t attract anyone except local people, old folks who’d sit around a talk about vanished days when there was a mission school for the Indians nearby. None would have remembered my granddad, a tall boy in overalls who played the fiddle for their dances and hoedowns, especially since when he married and the first baby came his wife made him quit the fiddle. That was the taming of Tom Pounds.

The monologue of my ghostly father continues:

We worked too hard to think about the past. After you passed, Grandma, my daddy was an orphan, he farmed to raise a family, and times was hard. Me, I followed a mule's ass from dark to dark, and when I was growed, I twisted the tail of a gasoline truck till I knew the roads of this county like a skinned knuckle. Shit, I never did nothin but work.

Honesty compels me to note that Archie exaggerates here. By the year 2000 he’d been retired for ten years, but he did manage to turn his retirement into labor by pulling a trailer behind the car to northern California (where he had a brother and two sisters) and back, hither and yon, until his back gave out and he couldn’t do the work of driving and getting the trailer onto and off its heavy hitch. 

Let him tell some more of his story--he likes to talk:

It was my boy brought me out here today, The August sun stuck low in the west,

the heat adhesive as a band-aid. I beat the clump grass back with my cane, but I didn't find your stone, Grandma. I found Swift, Over, and Dwyer, and I found Dewey, Dixon, Peebler, and Night--the standing stones about a dozen, the last dated about 1910, but I didn't find your name. And yet they put you here in the corner, and marked the spot with a stone. Sandstone would have supplied the stone. Sandstone means lives too frail for granite, the frail and crumbly lives of farmers.

He crouched before each stone until he could make out the inscription and he’s say, “Yeah, I know that name.” He meant he knew the family name. He’d probably delivered the gasoline for their farm. He paused at the stone for David Kinder, 1810 to 1901: “I knew some people by that name, and here's the prayer they left for him,” which I transcribe with the original spelling:

rest father rest

the battle is over

the victory is wone

And your stone, Grandma? I can tell what happened the same as I was here. The rain beat the sandstone bare, the crazy-making wind erased the words, then mowers came, brush hogs broke up the rock. Some grandson piled the pieces in the fence. Soil built up and suckers covered them, leavin you with post oak, blackjack, cedar, foxtails, cockleburs, and those milkweed flowers that that turn their battered faces to the sun.

Yeah, they were battered alright--after he got through whacking them with his cane. Still, he does know his grandmother is buried in this cemetery. His uncle Hank, the second oldest of the eight orphaned children, stayed for some time with his grandparents, both of whom were from Sweden. The old folks talked to each other in Swedish, as was easy and natural for them, and Hank learned to imitate their speech, a Swedish brogue which he used to make the rest of the family laugh. 

Hank was the most successful of the eight orphan kids. As a young man, he left the county to work in the oil fields around Bristow and Sapulpa. As Archie told 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 school education, and worked up to be Chief Engineer. He retired from Oklahoma Natural Gas after 37 years without ever missing a paycheck. That is one of the reasons why Grandpa George lived with Uncle Hank and his family so much.” After Hank retired, he moved back to Chandler, where he had leisure to visit Dewey Cemetery. He knew where his mother was buried, knew the very corner where the grave was, but of course he found no marker. 

Daddy is still talking:

And you, Grandma, dead at thirty-three, your dress now a suit of clinging clay down where it's black as Coley's butt. Oak roots fiddle with your bones, delvin like a husband's hand still lecherous in death, though the cradle of your pelvis broke in labor with the ninth. White and brittle, the snapper clings to your side, no bigger than a rabbit.

His grandmother has his attention now, and maybe he has hers. The conversation becomes more intimate:

From Sweden you came to a Missouri farm, and married Grandpa George, a man with a limp, a love for cards, and a gangrene gash in his foot from an ax. Mama didn't like it when he stayed too long, said he got that leg cause he danced too much. I looked in his suitcase once: a pitch deck, a nickel box of soda, and Choice Reading for the Home with a pledge to never drink or smoke, unsigned. He lived to be seventy-nine, but you were thirty-three the raw March day when your womb wore out and you died.

I could imagine the epitaph he’s writing for her in his mind: An epitaph for an unmarked grave, it looked like this:

In memory of 

Celia

daughter of Bertha Anderson Olson

born in April 1872 

in Hansingland, Sweden 

married in Maysville Missouri

on September 26 1889

to George Benjamin Pounds

  in 1891 she was 

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 she was 

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

Like the epitaph’s diminishing tail, Daddy’s words, encomium or conversation, dwindle to silence, so I take him to the next place I have discovered, the old farm where his grandparents and their eight children were living when Celia died. Daddy called it the old home place, but it wasn’t a homestead, just a farm they’d rented from the original homesteader. Celia’s parents were the ones who had homesteaded, stolid Swedish farmers that they were, but George never had that kind of gumption. The lights of the poolhall in Chandler were burning too brightly, and like a moth he was drawn to the flame.

Now Daddy has arrived at the old home place:

Today we found the farm where you died and your true grave stone there, the old front step of your house--now filled with hay but still a house, though storm-blown from its foundation by several feet. Inside the finishin boards said house, and in one of the outbuildings still half standing, a nail wore a necklace of corn-binder gears. Was it here death sewed his black seeds in your row, Grandma? You lie there in Dewey Cemetery half the globe away from home. Born in Sweden plump and golden, you died in Oklahoma white and thin.

Corn-Binder Gear in

Such was Celia, Daddy’s unknown grandmother, who died twelve years before he was born. Give him a moment to reflect as he sits on the kitchen stoop.

The poor get no show when they die. They bury you by the road, the cars scoot by 

and don't even see there's a graveyard here, or if they stop to look don't find your name. It's a hell of a note, to live and die--and my kids wonder why I sit and fret. They don't know what trouble’s like.

Well, Daddy, if we don’t know what trouble’s like, it’s because you protected us. Still, I always liked your stories about the old hard times of growing up poor. Age will bring each of us its trouble, no one is immune. And I still keep your granddad’s shoemake cane in my closet as a way of communing with your unwearied bones as they walk the ghost road. 

Some day I’ll take the cane out of the closet. It’s my patrimony. 

Corn-Binder Gear in