Posts
I have known the name of Joseph Bayles Elliott more years than I’d care to count, and that’s curious because our lives don’t overlap at all except in whatever significance attaches to the name Chandler, a small town centrally located in Lincoln County, where he died in 1904 and I was born in 1946. Chandler itself is in turn centrally located in the state of Oklahoma, itself one state below the geographical center of the United States, which is in Lebanon, Kansas--unless you are talking about the discontiguous center of the U.S., which is positioned in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, where the South Dakota-Wyoming-Montana borders meet. According to the NGS data sheet, the actual marker is set in an irregular mass of concrete 36 inches below the surface of the ground. The location of the new center is at Latitude 44 degrees, 58 minutes North, and Longitude 103 degrees, 46 minutes West--and don’t get any ideas about taking it home for a souvenir.
Prof. Elliott is notable for his exemplary tribute to his own ancestor Daniel Elliott, Patriot, published in tandem with a Record of His Descendants 1769 to 1930. In the which he subscribes as follows: Joseph Bayles Elliott was born in Highland County, Ohio, where his father Andrew lived for a time after his second marriage to Parmelia Bayles Davis, a widow. He grew to manhood but married after going west. For a while he lived in Indiana and later went to Champaign County, Illinois, where his two oldest children were born. He then moved to Missouri and his later years were spent in that state. Evidently this was about the year 1867 and after his war service. He was enlisted in Company E, 149th Infantry of Illinois during the Civil War. After the close of the war he was retained in the military service because of his adaptability as a hospital aide. He was well educated and wrote an excellent hand and performed services not usually considered a part of hospital duty.
He had previously been a school teacher and was gifted in music, which he not only understood but taught to classes during many years. Those who knew him refer to his fine personal character and appearance. He was active in church and community affairs. Until late in life he engaged in Sunday School work and for much of his life was a choir leader. He died in Chandler, Oklahoma in 1873. Nearly all of his children lived to found families of their own and his descendants are numerous and prominent wherever found.
Thus far the encomiast, but at this moment the writer of the present essay feels obliged to correct our biographer by noting that the date of the death of Joseph Bayles Elliott in Chandler was not 1873 as he first states but 1904, a distinction in chronology that may appeal to the precise biographer. Joseph Bayles Elliott’s place of death, as aforesaid, was Chandler, Oklahoma, a village nestled happily halfway between Tulsa and Oklahoma City on Route 66, where now by a commodius vicus of recirculation we pause to consider where we have arrived. Albeit before doing so we might do well to notice that Joseph Elliott formerly had a mistaken memorial in Winfield Kansas, which has since been removed. His wife Mary Ann Gardner is buried there and has a Find-a-Grave memorial linked below.
In 1820 Pound was born the sixth child of Thomas Pound IV of Weakley, Tennessee, and his wife (Catherine (no maiden name). The first recorded reference to him came in 1846 when he married Louisa Elizabeth Davis of Tennessee. The bride and groom were of exactly the same number of years, and the marriage took place in the state of Kentucky. All of their eight children except the last were born before the Civil War broke out in April of 1861, and in December of 1863 B. O. C. Pound enlisted as a corporal in Company F, 2nd State Troops Cavalry, of Texas. The central two initial letters O. and C. have never been explained.
The 1870 census finds him in Gainsville, Cook County, Texas, a city that has gone down in infamy for the 1962 event known as the Great Hanging, in which a controversial trial and lynching of forty suspected Union loyalists, brought the new town to the attention of the state and came close to ripping the county apart but seems not to have affected our hero, who is still in Gainsville when the census is taken in 1880, 1880, and 1890. The last date, however, is called a bibliographers’ mirage, a common product of the unrestrained zeal of me of this profession. In fact, Pound’s death is recorded convincingly at another place and date, as time will tell below.
In 1860 Pound married for his second time Mary Ann Gardner in Vermillion, La Salle County, Illinois. During the Civil War he fought with Co. E, 149th Illinois Infantry. He and his wife spent the last two decades of the 19th century in Missouri in Gentry and Dekalb County. They had ten children, among whom was Frances Nora Elliott, who married Franklin Chester Barnhart in Caldwell County, Missouri, and among their four children was the famous lexicographer Clarence Lewis Barnhart, known for his important series of dictionaries of the American language. Judging from his progeny, the subject of the present essay would seem to have been a man of qualities, and we are almost ready to sound the horn of judgment--but first it must be noted that through some quirky twist of the numbers that earlier biographers had to rely upon, his death year is given as 1890, a noble year no doubt but unfortunately and demonstrably in this particular case--wrong. Completely and disastrously wrong.
Lest any reader experience the least twinge of doubt in this matter, below is a photograph of the final resting place of Joseph Bayles Elliott and the year correctly given--not 1890 but 1904: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/144394817/joseph-bayless-elliott.
For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah,
No comments:
Post a Comment