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Born in Carroll County, Maryland in 1861, Susan was one of three daughters out of six children born to her and Christopher Obermüller, and ancestry.com makes it clear that they came from Koenriech Wurtenbergh, Germany in 1854. She and her husband, William H. Pounds, married in 1846 in Germany,
Obermüller Family
and arrived in this country in1854, where they lived from that time on, he dying early in 1896 and she a half century later in 1943. They had two children, Elmer Lewis Pounds and Elton Pounds, both boys. Susan’s first husband,
In 1880 the census shows the family living in Asturia, Fulton County, Illinois, and in 1900 in Cora and Pawnee Townships, Smith County, Kansas. Four years earlier, in 1867, Susan and Christopher married in Pope County, Arkansas, and in 1900 the census shows them in Cora, in Smith County, Kansas, which would be their home until their deaths. 1920 find them still in Smith County, where the husband died in May, 1943. The 1930 finds Susan still living in Smith Center, the 1940 is missing, and she died in May of 1943. They wee buried together in Cedar Hill Cemetery, in Cora, Smith County, where the only sound is that of the wind sweeping through the corn fields. A fine and private place, says the poet, but none do there embrace, and no obituaries were published to embarrass them.
William H. Pounds was a school teacher, and the papers announce that “Chastain School Opens Chastain school will open Monday for a six months term. The news also was announced local newspaper reports that William that Lewis Obermüller were at Smith Centre Saturday attending the elevator meeting and doing some trading.
Alexander Taylor Cooper: From a story by His Great Aunt Louisa
Alexander Cooper, wife, and son
Aunt Louisa was not an educated woman, but she love books and education, and saw to it that the children she raised received an excellent education. What follows gives her
voice, speaking, and in her own unpolished but always perceptive language.
Let’s cut the palaver and get right into this, because I’ve got a story to tell. It’s about my great-nephew Alexander Cooper, the brightest star among the three orphan children that I raised or helped raise. I never had no children of my own, so I was always hungry for kids. This story begins with my hunger and what happened as a result. But first I got to apologize to the reader for the style of this essay. I have an amanuensis who’s helping me get from the virtual reality of the afterlife to the printed page, and sometimes I can’t shut him up. Later on, talking about Alex, you’ll hear the difference as he takes over from me. I swear the boy knows more about nephew Alex than I do.
Naomi Pounds Cooper
I was borned in 1826 in Guernsey County, Ohio. My pa was Samuel Pounds, from Halifax County, Virginia, and he lived to be such an old man--101 years old when he finally cashed in his chips--that he used up two good women as wives, with eight kids by the first one and ten by the second, who was my ma Susana Williams, known as Sarah. I was the youngest daughter of Sarah, so you can guess who got to take care of her husband, the antique Sam in his endless old age.
My ma Sarah died in 1837, leaving me an orphan when I was hardly more than a child--not even twelve years of age and already saddled with the care of my relentless pa, at that time eighty-one years of age and bound to live another twenty. In most ways Pa was a simple and trusting soul. He belonged to a breed of men called backwoodsmen, much romanticized today but when I was a girl they was thick as fleas on a hound dog’s back and about as useful. They was as little romance to them as they is to a hound. If you think these men were romantic, you should have to wash their pissy underwear like I did so many years. But this is not the story of my travail--if you want that story, read an earlier book by me and my amanuensis called Naomi of Ohio: An American Pastoral. I didn’t like that title--it seemed too sentimental--so I had him change the subtitle to “A Dark Pastoral.” I don’t know if that got into the published book or not.”An Anti-Pastoral” might have been an even better subtitle. Demons and darkness haunt that book.
I thought I’d got me an escape from the drudgery of washing the old man’s diapers when I married a young fellow named Cecil White in Mason County, Illinois in 1848 when I was twenty-two. We was in Illinois because Pa never got over that wanderlust that had already taken him from Halifax County, Virginia, of Guernsey Count Ohio, and now here he was in Illinois, right near the Illinois River with the Mississippi another hop further west. Cecil was a nice enough young man--red-blondish hair with a ruddy complexion and a ready smile--and we had two kids in the shake of a lamb’s tale, but both of them died. Before the second one was even born Cecil got bit by the gold bug, headed to California, and he must a died there because I all I ever heard a him again was rumors. Pretty soon even the rumors stopped.
I was very close to my brother Joseph, five years older than me. He had done the smartest thing of his life when he married Mary Jane Ackerson in Mason County Illinois in 1845. That was smart because she was smart, and she was smart because her Jarvis mother come from the French Huguenots, and those are a protestant people known around the world for their traditions of literacy and intelligence. Joseph had done what every man should do--marry a woman smarter than himself. He could be the brawn and she the brains.
The Kidnapping, 1850
Joseph’s life was sadly cut short by some kind of brain fever that killed him early in 1855 when he was only thirty-three. As he felt himself failing, he called me to his side and asked me to help his wife take care of their five children. Times was hard, he owed money on his property, and he didn’t see how she could get along by herself. He and I agreed that I would take the two youngest, James Reynolds and Mary Ann, both born in 1852, though about nine months apart. Take them and raise them, and that’s exactly what I did. Mary Jane, Joe’s wife, was happy at first to have my help, but after a year she wanted her two kids back. I said No, that Joe had given the kids to me, and I was going to keep them. She was stubborn but she was no match for me. Just the year before I had married my second husband Theodore Long Cooper, and I said to Theo, “Let’s skedaddle. Let’s go further west out on the frontier where the long arm of my sister-in-law won’t be able to reach us.” And that’s how come Theo and I and the two little ones ended up in Nebraska, leaving no forwarding address behind us. As far as Mary Jane and her kin was concerned, we might as well have gone to the other side of the moon.
Communications was broke-back in them days. If you wanted your family to know where you was, you had to write them a letter. Theo and I didn’t write any letters home. She could write me if she wanted to, but I had no address and wouldn’t have answered her anyway. Theo told me he felt like John Bunyan’s pilgrim bowed under a great Burden upon his back crying lamentably, “What shall I do?” and setting out from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City atop Mount Zion.
That bright city for me included the children that I reared, educated, and sent out into the world. All in all, I raised a passel of them because I ran a boarding house for school kids and orphans that were smart and had some gumption, first in Nebraska and then in Kansas, but here I’m going to talk about the first three that I raised as though they were my own. Which they were--make no mistake about that. Then I’ll get to my great-nephew Alexander Cooper, who had the greatest worldly success. You won’t forget him in what follows because I’ll be referring to his essay “The Pound Family” as I go along.
I was saying that back in Illinois Mary Jane and me, we locked horns over the kids on several occasions, but before she had time to put the sheriff on me, I won the contest by a stratagem that was as simple as it was unarguable. I took Theo and the two kids and moved to the Nebraska frontier, leaving no forwarding address. Louisa, one of the three of Joseph’s children who remained with their mother, told her nephew Alex Cooper that the two youngest children were "practically kidnapped by their Aunt Naomi, who claimed that Joseph, their father, had promised them to her should anything happen to him." That’s the fact, and so far as I know Mary Jane never saw either of them children again.
Needless to say, we never took out any adoption papers on the children when they was small because Mary Jane would not sign them. As far as she was concerned, the children were still hers. Her second husband, Daniel Horner, must a felt so too, twenty years later when he bought her children's interest in his wife's property, he also bought the missing children's two-fifths interest as though both were still part of the family. Daniel was a good man and honest. He sent the payment money to James Reynolds and Mary Ann and it was a help to us, especially with James’s education. At this time James would have been twenty-one, and he and his sister had been living away from their mother for eighteen years.
James and Mary Ann grew up as the children of Theo and myself. After James arrived at maturity (age 21), proper adoption papers were written up and, urged by Theo, he became officially James Reynolds Cooper. I got Mary Ann to change her name to Mary Naomi, although the name she went by at home was Mollie, and when she married she wed under the name Mollie Pounds.
Alex Cooper said in “The Pound Family” that I would never discuss my action and I would never talk to James or his family about it either. That’s right. That was my way of saying the issue was not up for discussion, not even in retrospect. Alex learned what he knew of the case from James' older sister, Louisa, although it’s not clear what all she told Alex. In the 1890s James Reynolds was living in Auburn, Nebraska, and his natural mother in Red Oak, Iowa, about fifty miles away. She died there without either ever knowing the other was nearby. I kept them apart because I knew I had to. The children loved me as their mother, but blood is blood and will win every time over adoption.
I did what I had to do. It felt like it was the road of destiny when me and Theo and the kids headed for the territories. In those days, Nebraska was the frontier, and that’s where we stopped--across the wide Missouri and far back on Todd’s creek in what was later called Johnson County, so far beyond yonder in the backcountry a raccoon couldn’t have found his way in or out. About the only good that came from that rough life is that we had a neighbor named William Blystone. A recent widower whose young wife had died in childbirth, he and Mollie got sweet on each other and eventually married in 1871.
Nebraska and Kansas
Apart from that event, those were hideaway years, a bit wasted because there were no real schools back in those woods, and my James was growing up and had already learned all I had to teach him. So within a few years we moved over to the town of Peru, which had a normal school. I thought it’d be a fine thing to show for our struggles if James became a teacher, and that’s what he did. Peru was on the bluffs above the Missouri River. The college there, originally called Mt. Vernon Seminary, was the first college to open in Nebraska. By the time we got there it had become a normal college to train teachers.
We all worked hard but we never had enough money to keep James in school full time. He had to work too, and that slowed him down in his studies. After Theo had that sunstroke in 1878, he wasn’t good for much besides piddling, couldn’t work the fields, so we moved into town and I ran a boarding house first in Nebraska and then in Kansas. That turned out to be as good a living as farming, maybe because I found I had a natural talent for running a large household. I catered to students, because they’re much easier to get along with than older folks set in their ways, and I liked them because they provided an atmosphere of books for my boy James. In August there would be revivals, and I’d get Theo to bid on the boarding tent. If we got the bid, then we’d get the concession to run the tent, supplying food and meals, and that paid pretty well too because it was a kind of monopoly. No huckstering was allowed on the grounds.
James did well in school, what time he could go. Once about this time he was a speaker at the Philomathean Society in Normal Hall. Most people don’t know what that is, and I had to have James explain it to me. He said it was the oldest literary society in the United States. Founded in 1813, its goal was to promote the learning of its members and to increase the prestige of the university. The word Philomathean was derived from the Greek philomath, which means "a lover of learning." The Society was trying to raise money to buy an organ, and it made me feel proud of James.
About this same time James met a medical man up in Cass County, across the Missouri River from Iowa. This Dr. Alexander Taylor was so taken with James he offered to help him become a pharmacist and open his own shop. In those days, you remember, it was common for a doctor to have a pharmacy right there in his own office or next door. The doctor was cumbered with a passel of daughters--he must a had eight of them before he ever had a son, and that may have helped him take a liking to my boy. James was twenty-eight, level-headed, decently educated, and he liked one of those girls that was two years younger than him--that was Sarah Jane, or as we called her Sadie--and they got married right there at the doctor’s house. Sadie’s sisters must a made it a bright occasion, with all of them serving as bridesmaids.
James had heard that the little town of Yutan needed a pharmacist, and since he had a spirit of independence it wasn’t long before they had moved over to Saunders County, just northwest of Cass, to Yutan, a little fart of a place didn’t amount to a gopher hill. The children started coming, first Theodore Reynolds Cooper and then my favorite nephew Alexander Taylor Cooper. Alex’s early years, starting with his birth in Yutan, can be found as an appendix to the tale that you are reading. But first I have to tell about my two other kids, the one I got from my brother Joe and the one that just came down like a gift from heaven.
The other child from brother Joe was Mary Ann Pounds. In my vanity I had her legally given the name Naomi as a middle name, but it didn’t take. She was always known as Molly and finally married under the name Mollie Pounds. As I have mentioned, this was on the Nebraska frontier and she married an Ohio fellow named Bill Blystone. Joseph’s wife Mary Jane married again after his death, this time to Daniel Horner and their daughter appears in the photo below.
Left to right, Mollie Pounds, sister Louisa Jane Pounds
and half-sister Addie Horner
Now you’re not going to like me for saying this, but I’ve always had a bigger place in my heart for boys than for girls, so I’m not going to talk about Mollie’s children. In fact, I hardly knew them. And no sooner are those words out of my mouth, then I stop for a major exception to my preferences--the only girl except Mollie that I raised and cared for like she was my own child. And that is Alice Belle.
Alice Belle Cooper
Alice Belle was the third child that I adopted after James Reynolds and Molly. I could tell about her parents, but I’ve always kept that private and that’s the way it’s going to stay. I took her in when she was hardly a year old, and from the very first she was mine and pure gold. She was loving and naturally obedient, and when she started to school she applied herself to her school books. She did so well that she attended normal school and became a school teacher. In later years, the thought of her would bring back to me Wordsworth’s lines about an aging shepherd and his only child:
A child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.
--“Michael: A Pastoral Poem”
My great-nephew Alex knew her personally: “Alice grew into a comely, vivacious young woman,” he wrote. “I remember her with affection as a talented and charming individual. She later went to India as a teacher-missionary for the Lee Memorial Mission at Calcutta.”
Alice was a popular young woman around Jewell City, Kansas, where Theo and I lived. I don’t know how else to explain the fact that the Jewell County Republican tracked her life over the next several years, the reports usually appearing on the front page. They reveal what an attractive personality she had. First, a passage from a letter she wrote to her friends in Jewell:
30 Sep 1904
“I am at last where I have long wanted to be, at the Chicago Training School for Missions. This is such a delightful place. It is a large building, six stories high and accommodates about 200 students. At 6:30 a bell rings for rising; at 7:00 another for morning watch, that is we all gather in the halls and sing a hymn; then comes breakfast. After we are through eating we turn our chairs around and sing and pray, then we go to our rooms till 8:30 when lessons begin. I am taking the regular Deaconess course for foreign fields. I study Greek, old and new Testament, history, music, sewing, cooking, and missions; besides this I must put in one hour a day in work in the house and one hour in exercise. One afternoon a week we must spend in visiting and Deaconess work. We do our own room work, our own washing and ironing, and must furnish the soap, starch and
Chicago Missions School, about 1906
blueing. “So you see how busy I shall be, but I shall be happy in the work I think. My roommate is a southern girl, from North Carolina. My address is 4949 Indiana Ave Chicago Illinois."
14 Oct 1904: A Missionary to India. Miss Alice Cooper sails for Calcutta, India, November 15th. She becomes a teacher in the primary department of the missionary school, established there by Bishop Thoburn many years ago.
Of the two hundred girls in the Chicago Training School for Missions, she was chosen by Bishop Warne as the most efficient and nearest equipped for the place, and she gladly answers the call. This school pays her passage there which is $300 and her mother, Mrs. Edward Edwin of this place maintains her for two years, the length of time that a teacher is unsalaried owing to learning the language. She goes for ten years. It required thirty days to reach Calcutta. Mrs. Cooper, who is now Mrs. Edwin, had no children of her own but during the forty-five years that she lived with Mr. Cooper, she was a mother to six children doing more nobly by them all than many parents have done by their own children. She is especially glad that one of them can respond to such an important position of trust. Jewell City people will have an interest in India not hitherto felt, and will always appreciate hearing from Miss Cooper.
I may have already said this, but keep in mind that ever since Theo’s sunstroke I supported us by running a boarding house. I liked to take in young people--under my wing, you can be sure. Back in Nebraska, because of the normal school, I had as many as twenty, though never so many in Jewell City. I could tell more about Alice, how she got married to a missionary in India and had a daughter named Rita, but since I myself died a year before Rita was born, maybe that’s enough about Alice, except I’ll say this again. Among the children that I raised and educated, she was the sparkliest jewel.
Alexander Taylor Cooper
And now I’m going to turn from Alice to a boy in whose raising I had hardly any hand in at all, but I told him a lot of important things about the Pound/s family that he put into that essay of his of the same name that has spread around what today they call the world wide web. This is Alexander Taylor Cooper that I’m talking about. He’s not famous but he is well known among historians of the Pound/s family for an essay he wrote in the early 1930s called "The Pound Family," and he got the oldest parts of that from me. I knew a lot, not because I ever been to Virginia, which I have not, but because for twenty years I had the care and maintenance of my pa, who was born there in 1755 and grew up in the household of William Pounds, the Revolutionary War soldier. I’m not sure now how they were related, but I think my pa Sam was William’s nephew. What I told Alex were the stories I got from Pa.
Alex sent copies to genealogists he knew, evidently with the intention that the essay be shared. The essay was copied and distributed among acquaintances, and now it has spread widely over the internet. (My amanuensis says that he received his copy from Lloyd M. Hicks of Plant City, Florida, about 1991.) It seems to have been composed as part of an autobiography, “The Days of a Midwesterner,” where it appears in slightly altered form. Cooper deposited a copy of his autobiography with the State Historical Society of Nebraska. It is still there and has never been published.
I am proud to say that while parts of Alex’s big essay on “The Pound Family” are mistaken--at least, according to my amanuensis--the parts Alex got from me are not. I mean the names of William Pound and his family. I was wrong about the Williamses (the family of old Sam’s second wife Sarah) because Sam got them confused with another, more famous Williams family. An easy confusion to understand since the descendants of John Williams, the wealthy Welshman that they called the Duke of Surry, was living in the same area as the Poundses. So the mixup is my fault, since I was repeating things my dad told me, and Alex just wrote it down. As I’ve said, I never lived in or visited Virginia, but my pa did and he didn’t make any mistake about the Poundses because those were people he had growed up knowing.
But getting back to my nephew Alex, after he had completed his research in the National Archives while he was stationed at Fort Myers Virginia, he wrote an autobiography called The Days of a Midwesterner, which is included as an appendix to the present essay. Before Alex died he gave his autobiography to the Historical Society of Nebraska, where it gathers dust unpublished to this day. In the first chapter, he writes, “In July, 1887, in a covered spring wagon, the [Cooper] family started overland by easy stages west. One of the stops was at Jewell City, Kansas.
The Great Plains West of the 98th Meridian
The journey became a trial and a tribulation, but character never exists in a vacuum. It emerges in a struggle with the surrounding world. In the case of north-central Kansas, the physical environment was the harshest, the hottest and the coldest, of any encountered so far in the Pounds-Cooper family’s journey west from Virginia. Illinois forms part of the Great Plains, but it’s a part with adequate rainfall. Moving west now into Kansas, we were crossing the 98th meridian where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. From the 100th meridian, the two-thirds mark on an east-west axis, there is generally not enough rain to support agriculture. “The Homestead Act of 1862, with all its promise,” writes John McPhee, “did not take into account ineluctable fact. East of the hundredth meridian, homesteaders on their hundred and sixty acres of land were usually able to fulfill the dream that had been legislated for them. To the west, the odds against them were high.”
Going west, we were going uphill, though the incline was so gentle we hardly noticed. Kansas and Nebraska are sedimentary wedges “like pieces cut from a wheel of cheese--lying on their sides, thick ends to the west,” writes McPhee. The land rises from about 400 feet above sea level in the east to 4000 in the west. And though the comparison of the waving high-grass prairies to ocean waves was already a commonplace, we would not have guessed its literal truth.
7.3 sea turtle from the Niobrara Chalk
Beneath us was a chalk and limestone ledge, reposing like a sunken boat in the waters of a lake, containing the fossils of great prehistoric marine creatures left by the subsiding of the North American Inland Sea which had existed there a hundred million years before. By 1870, the first fossils had been discovered and soon eastern paleontologists would be competing to excavate them, exciting the wonder of the local farmers. Many bones came to repose in the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas, where a hundred years later my amanuensis too would pause to gaze at them.
For the Great Plains of the present--the present as opposed to the Paleozoic--the best description is provided by Walter Prescott Webb in his classic study of 1931. For Webb the region has three distinguishing characteristics:
1. It exhibits a comparatively level surface of great extent.
2. It is a treeless land, an unforested area.
3. It is a region where rainfall is insufficient for the ordinary intensive agriculture common to lands of a humid climate.
A useful demarcation is the 98th meridian, which runs south through Wichita, Oklahoma City, and Dallas and north through Nebraska and the Dakotas. West of this line, the annual average rainfall drops well below twenty inches, the minimum needed for traditional agriculture. For Webb, this is the “fault line” beyond which the old ways of settlement were forced to change in order to adapt to the dry treeless prairies. At this fault line, ways of life changed. Practically every institution that was carried across it was either broken and remade or else greatly altered: the ways of travel, the weapons, the method of tilling the soil, plows and other agricultural instruments, and the laws.
The Plains climate was and still is characterized by extremes of heat and cold, drought and flood, hail and blizzards, and most famously tornados. “It’s a place,” writes William Least Heat-Moon (a Native American with a lovely name), “of such potential celestial violence that the meteorologists at the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City, Missouri, are sometimes called the Keepers of the Gates of Hell.” Temperatures reach killing extremes, from a 121-degree high in 1936 to a 40-degree-below-zero low in 1905. This is the area from which Dorothy and Toto were lifted to the land of Oz.
Webb puts the matter memorably by observing that “east of the Mississippi civilization stood on three legs--land, water, and timber; west of the Mississippi not one but two of these legs were withdrawn--water and timber--and civilization was left on one leg--land. It is small wonder that it toppled over in temporary failure.” The Plains climate and topography could be treated with humor, as in some of the anecdotes Webb supplies. (“This,” said the newcomer to the Plains, “would be a fine country if we just had water.” “Yes,” answered the man whose wagon tongue pointed east, “so would hell.”) But they could not be ignored.
Jewell County is located in the northernmost tier of counties,150 miles from the Missouri River, and is situated two counties west of the 98th meridian. On the north, it borders Webster County Nebraska, containing the community of Red Cloud (pop. 1020), where the region’s finest novelist, Willa Cather (1873-1947), spent her childhood. For evocations of the high prairie landscapes and the way of life of the first pioneers, the reader is referred to her early masterpieces O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918), but for a quick glimpse of the weather, an 1896 story may suffice, where she speaks off “those scorchy dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas [and] seem to dry up the blood in men’s veins as they do the sap in the cornleaves.”
Alexander Taylor Cooper and “The Pound Family”
Sarah Cooper died at the house of her sister, Mary Wentworth, on a farm near Smith Center, Kansas.” And that’s where the poor woman was buried (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/95684157/sarah_taylor_cooper.) Alex remains the best witness to this fact. In 1941, he had his mother's monument restored. The first marker had decayed and fallen over.
Alex described this in a reminiscence:
There my mother lies on the wind-swept prairies of Kansas. Since then I have visited her grave twice, one in 1905, and again in November of 1940 when I stopped on an overland automobile trip to inspect a marker I had had placed at her grave. My father had placed a small stone there but the markings had become almost illegible, and as no foundation had been made, the stone was toppled over and would not stand erect.
The new stone is quite erect and handsome. I remember that “erect” was one of Emily Dickinson’s favorite words for describing herself. I hope it can be applied to me after I’m dead.
This may be the place for me to put in a few remarks about my own tombstone, since my death followed Alex’s 1905 visit by four years. It’s larger and finer than a poor body like myself deserves, but I must protest that it’s got my name wrong. It says Mary Neumia Cooper, which is more than wrong--it’s silly. I wasn’t any Mary that I ever knowed of, and Neumia sounds like pneumonia. But if I step back and consider the matter, in 1909 in Jewell Kansas, they wasn’t anybody who knew my true name. I’d done outlived them all. So they must a asked my neighbors, Mrs. Kinkhead and Mrs. Perfect (not their real names, just names I made up to mock them), who were as ignorant as a box of hatchets. The main thing I notice is that even today the stone is still erect.
If he’d only known it, Alex could have stuck around to view my stove-in head and attend my funeral. He was twenty-six when I died. Of course, he had better things to do, so I’ll mention a few of them. In 1909, the year of my death, Alex joined Army Medical Corps, where he would spend his career, and after that he was probably too busy to think about his Aunt Naomi. The next year he was living in Washing DC, which must a been where he met Charlotte Carter Baker, for they got married that year in Atlantic City NJ. Charlotte was a Washington girl. In 1918 they had their first child, a son named David, and in 1923 they had their second, a son named Quentin. By that time Alex was already stationed in Fort Myer VA, where he’d remain until 1937, commuting to DC to do his family-history research in the National Archives. The first fruit of this work was an application to the Sons of the American Revolution, which was accepted. Formed in 1889, the SAR is the little-brother organization to the famous DAR, about which I have something to say but little of it good.
I’m not criticizing their genealogies, which I know nothing about, but I don’t like their surveys of cemeteries--which form a big part of their work--because they pass over black cemeteries in silence. With one fell stroke, they have eliminated more than ten percent of the population of the United States. Of course, for the War of Independence there’s a certain reason on the DAR side, for many blacks joined the British who promised to free them from slavery. Yet my amanuensis tells me that black soldiers made up about four percent of the Patriots' numbers, so they numbered around 9,000 men, 5,000 of which were combat-trained troops. And consider this. The average length of time in service for an African American soldier during the war was four and a half years (due to many serving for the whole eight-year duration), which was eight times longer than the average period for white soldiers. Meaning that while they were only four percent of the manpower base, they comprised around a quarter of the Patriots' strength in terms of man-hours. There’s more I could say, but you get the point. I don’t like the DAR, and I don’t really understand Alex’s joining the SAR, except that Alex was an orphan, and an orphan needs to belong. He was accepted into the SAR in 1932.
After Alex’s death in 1949, an obituary appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which summarizes his professional work by naming his official positions:
Obituary for Alexander Cooper, 1949
The letter above has a use besides naming Alex’s offices and functions. It states very plainly that Alex is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and all genealogists recognize that the place of burial as a vital part of anyone’s life. The 1949 obit from Alex’s colleague also gives his military history. The choice of Arlington Cemetery like the Sons of the American Revolution was another act of joining American society at its roots. His wife is buried beside him.
The historical irony of his burial place will not be lost either if we remember that Arlington National Cemetery was started in 1864, near the end of the Civil War, on land confiscated from the private property of General Robert E. Lee. In Cooper’s life exists another naive error: he believed that Samuel Pounds carried an old Bible with him in the War of 1812, when the book itself wasn’t printed until 1831. You would think that someone as smart as Alex would have checked the publication date.
The old Bible that Alex cites created additional problems for later researchers. For decades the birth and death years of Samuel Pounds were based on Alexander Cooper's 1941 essay "The Pound Family," where they are given as 1778-1878. In November 2014, however, the cemetery book for Mount Zion was found. For Samuel Pound, it states "Age 101 y 6 m 24 d." The stone was cleaned at about the same time, and new photos were posted here by Michael Curry. The inscription, faintly legible, says "Age 101 y 6 m 24 d."
Stone of Patriarch Samuel Pounds 1735-1856
The error stems from Alexander Cooper, who said that Samuel Pounds was born in 1778. Cooper couldn't read the year in the old family Bible shown here. He found the birth year on the 1850 census for Guernsey Co. OH and then added 100 to it to arrive at the death year 1878. He also said that Samuel Pounds was buried in Hancock Co. IL. That notion too was completely wrong.
Conclusion: Samuel Pounds dates are 1755-1856.
Alex, His Brother, His Son
My nephew Alex did some good work, but also propagated some errors and persevered in them like the one above. Some similar statement could also be my own epitaph. The fatal error I persevered in was my marriage to Mr. Elyea. He wasn’t a bad man, though he had a nasty habit of wearing his calvary boots at all times and occasions, in doors and out. His problem was medical. He had epilepsy, though I never saw any sign of it during our brief courtship, which sometimes caused him to have fits, and in those days there was no cure for what he had. On a balmy May midnight in 1909 the fit came on him and he picked up a hatchet as I lay sleeping and killed me dead.
Ours was no May and December wedding. When we got hitched in 1904, he was seventy-four and I was three years older. It was a December and December wedding, and we had both been married before and were old enough to have knowed better. According to my obituary that appeared in the Jewell newspaper, my foster daughter Alice Cooper “begged and pleaded that she would not marry Mr. Elyea, but Mrs. Cooper was a determined woman, and what seemed to her right, that she did in spite of all counsel.” I had a pair of busybody neighbors that I called Mrs. Kinkhead and Mrs. Perfect. They offer a chorus to support what the obituary says: "She had no children of her own, but she gave a mother's love to four who needed a home and reared and educated them. In taking a position she was governed by what she considered to be right, but the position once taken she could not be moved." What those to old biddies say is just gossip, but I freely admit I was strong minded, and I see now how it makes a link between myself and my nephew Alex.
The link is not merely virtual reality. It’s a blood link, and while blood may leak or get spilled, it doesn’t die. Simply put, Alex was the grandson of my brother Joseph Pounds and thus my great nephew. Mentioning Joseph again allows me to gather my wooly thoughts into a final statement. I adopted Joseph’s youngest son James Reynolds Pounds Cooper, who became a pharmacist, as I have told you. But that’s not half the important thing that boy did. He married twice and had a total of eleven children who lived into adulthood, and they were all gifted with brightness. Well, I tell you, I can’t deal with eleven cases of intellectual brilliance, and my amanuensis says he can’t either, so we’re just going to look at the first two children of James Reynolds Pounds Cooper.
His first wife was the girl I mentioned before, Sarah Janes “Sadie” Cooper, whose dad was a medical doctor. She’s the one they buried out on the Kansas prairie in 1887, the one that Alex went back to her grave about 1940 to replace the native sandstone marker with a granite stone that would stay erect.
James Reynold’s oldest son was Theodore Reynolds Cooper, a bright boy who completed five years of college before moving to California about 1910, where he never prospered as a farmer-rancher in the counties where he lived--Butte County, 1910s; Sacramento County, 1920s; Stanislaus County, 1930s; and Inyo County where he died--
but he left behind a fragrant memory for his honesty and upright character. As witness, a grandson wrote:
My grandfather died when I was 1 year old. Yet I bear his name and feel like I know him. He and my grandmother were both well educated. Included in his folder is a thesis he did for his college degree. After graduating from college & marrying, he and my grandmother started a rice farm in Biggs, Ca. Year after year, they would make money and reinvest it all back into the following year's crop. They were in their last year & planning to retire, when the severe rains wiped out everything they had. From that time on, things simply got tougher.
He went on to try a couple of other farms, but subsequently had to find work teaching and working on State projects planting wind breaks. Two brief stories about him stand out in my mind. One from my grandmother when I asked her if he smoked. Her reply was, "SMOKE ? SMOKE ? LIKE A CHIMNEY HE SMOKED."
The other story comes from my dad who, at the age of four, was provoked by his two older brothers into getting his dad's shotgun and taking shots at his older brothers as they scrambled across the rice paddies. My dad said "My father took me, and I hit the ceiling, then I hit the four walls, and then I hit the floor."
But EVERYBODY loved grandfather, because he was smart (a valedictorian), good and honest.
That’s a tribute from a grandson, Theodore Reynolds Cooper III, born in 1941. I like the way that “Theodore” is preserved in this young man’s name, for that was the name of my husband, Theodore Long Cooper, a good man and born in Ohio, but another orphan. His parents are unknown.
The second son of James Reynolds Pounds Cooper was Alexander Taylor Cooper, who took after his dad’s medical mindedness, got all the schooling he could, put himself through medical school in Pennsylvania, and joined the Army Medical Corps. When Alex retired he was a full colonel. Now that’s what education can do for a family. In two generations, from a barefoot country boy (my brother Joe) in Guernsey County Ohio, son of an illiterate backwoodsman, to a full colonel in the Army Medical Corps. His dad was my nephew James Reynolds Pounds Cooper that I snatched from his biological mother. I took him and his sister Mary Ann--the one I liked to call Naomi though the name never stuck--and I raised them both by hand, giving them both a better education than their biological mother could have. I have said these things before, but I repeat them here to drill the facts through the reader’s thick noggin.
Alex had two sons, and and my amanuensis tells me that for twenty years he tried to locate them or their descendants, but to no avail. He wanted to ask them if they held copyright to their dad’s essay on the Pound-family essay. He says now that, given the passage of more than seventy years and the absence of descendants to claim rights to the essay, he believes there is no copyright issue in the essay’s appearance anywhere. Shucks, I could have told him that. The essay quotes me more than anyone else, and frankly, Gentle Reader, I couldn’t care less. All the fine folks named in that essay are safe in heaven dead.
Appendix: Chapter 1 of The Days of a Midwesterner
The Days of a Midwesterner (1943)
an unpublished autobiography
by
Alexander Taylor Cooper (1893-1949)
Ch. 1: First Days
I was born April 8, 1883, at Yutan [in Saunders County], Nebraska. My father was James Reynolds Cooper, born Pounds, who had been adopted and raised by his paternal aunt, Naomi Pounds Cooper. His father, Joseph Pounds, died as a young man of acute cerebro-spinal meningitis, commonly called “brain fever.” Joseph Pounds’ father, Samuel Pounds, born Pound, originally cane from North Carolina and Virginia and was the son of William Pound, a revolutionary soldier. Samuel’s second wife was Sarah Williams of Virginia, the daughter of a revolutionary soldier, Joseph Terry Williams, who was born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. He lived in Jackson County, Illinois and died there in 1832. I do not know the name of Samuel Pounds’ first wife but have a dim recollection that Grandmother Cooper told me that she and Samuel Pounds had lived in Indiana and that she had died either there or in Illinois.
My mother, Sarah Taylor, was a daughter of Dr. Alexander Taylor, whose mother was Sarah Adair from Kentucky. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, was Harriet Shivvers or Shivers. Most of my forbears were, as near as family legend holds, of English Scotch extraction but the father of my maternal grandmother (Shivvers) is said to have come to the United States from Alsace-Louraine. So much for the forbears, I only mention them to show that I was of average American basic stock as it existed during the middle of the 18th century and after the Civil War.
My first memories are of Yutan, Nebraska, a town twenty miles west of Omaha, named after the Yutan Indians, a branch of the Sioux. My father was occupied with his drug store and for a while was postmaster, if my early memory is correct. I was the second child, born April 8, 1883, having a brother Theodore two years older and a sister Maud eighteen months younger.
Our house was a small square cottage. A milk cow was part of the family holdings and I remember watching my father milk the cow. Down the road, east, possibly at the next corner stood the Lutheran church. The pastor, Reverend Conrad Huber, was a kindly young German. I was christened by him in that church and my parents attended services there. Off in the opposite direction from the house, several blocks away, was another Protestant church, possibly Methodist. My mother kept house, assisted at intervals by a hired girl. I recall the news received of the death of my mother’s mother (Harriet Shivvers Taylor) who had been living with her husband, Dr. Alexander Taylor, in Colby, Kansas. My mother’s tears at this distressed me greatly.
After the birth of my sister Maud on September 24, 1893, of which I have no recollection, my mother’s health began to fail. During the early art of the year 1886 she was confined to the house much of the time. Due to her growing disability the doctor who was attending her prescribed raw beef blood which must have been a nauseating mixture.
During the early summer or spring of 1887, my father for some reason, possibly because of an itching foot, together with continued worry over the prolonged illness of my mother, sold his drugstore and with a team of horses hitched to a covered spring wagon took off over the roads westwards towards his father-in-law’s farm in western Kansas (Colby). This was in the summer of 1887. There were still some of the old prairie schooners on the roads that a decade or two before had carried the migration of more easterly states into those of the Missouri Valley and further west into the Rocky Mountain area. The roads were quite well surveyed even at that time. They were unimproved, however, and even if well laid out consisted of nothing more at time than well worn wagon wheel ruts. We crossed several minor streams; the one which impressed me most was the Blue River. I recall standing on its banks and being greatly awed by its width. Continuing our overland spring wagon trip we stopped for a few days at Jewell City, Kansas, where my father’s adoptive mother (paternal aunt, Naomi Pounds Cooper) lived with her husband, Theodore Long Cooper. They had another child of their own, adopted, named Alice.
After my mother had rested a few days at Jewell City, we took to the road again westward and eventually arrived at Smith Center, Kansas, where my mother had a widowed sister, Mary Taylor Wentworth (Aunt Mary), living on a farm near the town. We stopped in Aunt Mary’s tiny little frontier farm house, and there my mother breathed her last on July 15, 1887, and was buried in the cemetery at Smith Center, Kansas. I was taken by my father along with my older brother and younger sister to her bedside as she was dying and afterwards we stood at her grave as she was lowered into the earth. I was slightly more than four years old at the time, four years and three or four months. She died, so I was later informed, of pulmonary tuberculosis and in later years I came to realize that she must have contracted the disease from her father, Dr. Alexander Taylor. He suffered with a chronic cough and it was said kept a newspaper spread out on the floor at his bedside so, as he said, he could cough, spit and clear his nose and throat in the morning. Dr. Taylor never succeeded in raising a son, though his wife bore him two or three. Their sons died in infancy and were in all probability infected with tubercle bacilli in babyhood by their devoted parents. Tuberculosis in those days, one must recall, was not the comparatively well understood disease that it is today, though light, as to the manner of its spread, was beginning to break through. It was then considered to be inherited, as a family predilection for cancer is at this date considered probable. Apparently none of my mother’s children were infected badly enough to develop active clinical tuberculosis, but x-rays taken of my lungs when past middle age showed definite evidence at one apex of a slight amount of fibrosis above the usual encountered, and for a numbers of years as a boy, I carried tender nodules behind my left ear and in my neck.
There my mother lies on the wind-swept prairies of Kansas. Since then I have visited her grave twice, one in 1905, and again in November of 1940 when I stopped on an overland automobile trip to inspect a marker I had had placed at her grave. My father had placed a small stone there but the markings had become almost illegible, and as no foundation had been made, the stone was toppled over and would not stand erect.
To resume our spring wagon journey. Across the plains went a bereaved man with his three small children. In due time we arrived at Colby, Kansas, where my grandfather, Dr. Taylor, was living a lonesome existence on his farm about nine miles north of that town. Here my father moved in. There were no women folk about and it devolved upon the men . . . not only to run the farm but keep house. Those days in Kansas were pioneer days, true there were no Indians left, but the prairie was virgin, most of it unbroken by a plow.
In 1887, western Kansas was being settled by immigrants from the more easterly states by steps called “taking out a timber claim.” Under such a procedure a citizen picked a quarter section of land still owned by the government, fenced it and planted on it ten acres of trees, i.e. cottonwoods, elms, boxelders, maples or some variety that with minimum care and water would live and grow. At the end of five years if the settler had succeeded in keeping alive the ten acres of trees, he could “prove up,” that is, demonstrate to the governmental authorities that such was the case and the Federal government then gave him title to the 160 acres. My father, on arrival at Colby, Kansas, took out or filed such a timber claim north of Colby, as his father-in-had. So there were two men and three young children. We lived in a sod house which had been built by my grandfather. The barn and outhouses were also of similar construction. The houses were made of virgin sod turned by a sod plow.
A sod plow is different from an ordinary stirring plow. The share is the same but the moldboard is replaced by some rather elongated iron strips, about one inch in diameter, each separated from the others by two to four inches. Such a modified moldboard allows the sod strip to be more easily turned completely upside down so that the grass is turned under; the soil being held together by the thickly matted roots of buffalo grass. The sod plow turned a long unbroken strip twelve to fourteen inches wide and three to four inches thick. This strip was cut with a spade into three to four feet lengths and the house was built by laying these strips one on top of the other as a brick wall is built. Such a house usually had dirt floors, well packed down, but the more elegant had wooden floors. These houses were usually of one story. The rafters for the roof were of sawn imported pine lumber, or rough-hewn cottonwood beams obtained from trees that grew in some nearby draw. The actual roofs were made of shingles of pine shipped in from the east, though I presume before the railroad was extended through Kansas and shingles were unavailable, reed grass growing in the scattered draws or actual sod was used. I do not recall seeing such a roof, however. Additional rooms were added as the family requirements grew. These sod houses were warm and cozy and afforded adequate shelter from the fierce northwest blizzards which swept across Kansas during the winter time. They were also reasonably cool in summer and to a certain extent kept out the heat that rolled witheringly across the prairies.
During the winter the heating was done by iron cooking and heating stoves. The fuel was such wood as could be obtained locally, which was not much, or that was shipped in from the eastern part of the country or Colorado. Coal mines in western Kansas had not then been developed. In summer all available hands went out and collected “buffalo chips” in sacks for fuel. These were the dried dung droppings of cattle which had been desiccated to a dry crisp chip and could be easily collected and handled. Evidently this fuel was a survival of earlier days when buffalo roamed western Kansas and their dried dung was used by campers and explorers as fuel.
During my time no buffalo were left on the plains of Kansas, and there but a few antelope, the principal animal life remaining were the coyote and the rabbit, both cottontail and jack. These rabbits were quite a source of food though the cottontail was more esteemed as such than the jack-rabbit. I remember, while driving in a wagon one day, my father saw several cottontails disappear down the same rabbit hole. He left me to watch and going to the house procured a spade and dug them out. As a result we had rabbit stew for several days. There were also quite a few prairie chickens and bobwhite quail. These were considered a luxury and were only obtainable if one took the time to hunt them with a shotgun. Good hunting dogs had not become generally available throughout that part of Kansas at that time.
How long we lived on the farm at Colby I have no definite memory. Long enough to watch another sod house of sorts being built. Chicks were raised, crops planted and mischievous and annoying traits showed first evidence in me, which later caused my father so much chagrin, such as locking my grandfather in the chicken house and following him as he planted peanuts and picking them up to eat. He, my grandfather, never punished any of the three grandchildren thrust upon him, so he must have been a kindly man. He had raised his family, his children were all married and gone, his wife was dead, and he, in his sixties, land poor in a new western home. He was a physician, having practiced all his adult life, but it evidently was restlessness which kept him in the vanguard of the migrating westward moving Americans. He originally as a young married man had left the home nest at Washington Courthouse, Ohio. . . . .
About 1888, after a year or less, my father left western Kansas. His assets at that time had evidently reached almost the vanishing point. Kansas land was a drug on the market. (He subsequently sold his timber claim in the latter nineties for three hundred dollars.) His first [need?] was was to provide for his children. My older brother Theodore was placed with my father’s foster parents, Theodore Long Cooper and his wife Naomi, at Jewell City, Kansas. There he was well provided for. I was left with my Aunt Mary Wentworth at Smith Center, Kansas, and my younger sister Maude was left with my father’s sister, Aunt Mollie (Mary Ann Blystone), who lived nine or ten miles southeast of Tecumseh, Nebraska, with her husband William J. Blystone, a Union veteran of the Civil War.
Evidently I was a problem, too much for my kindly Aunt Mary who was widowed and had three children of her own to care for. She had a youngster about my own age and we staged some battles. This was too much, so my aunt took me to my father at Tecumseh, Nebraska. He was living with his sister (Aunt Mollie) and making a living teacher school (he was a graduate of the Peru State Normal School), and also selling insurance for the Home Fire Insurance Company of Omaha, Nebraska. I then lived for a short time on the farm with Aunt Mollie where my younger sister was already living. Life there was comparatively pleasant. My father was the teacher at the district school at Grandview, two miles westward and one-half mile south. For this work he received forty dollars per month for eight or nine months work. He drove back and forth from his sister’s house, where he boarded, in a two-wheeled cart.
The old-fashioned school of the midwest in those days was a solid, substantial institution. It was a one room affair with double seats and desks that had a sunken inkwell
in the center. Underneath the upper surface of the desk was a shelf compartment, in which were kept the occupants’ schoolbooks, tablets and such trash that might have been collected and stored there for lack of other available place. The edge of the desks were usually deeply carved with notches and initials of former occupants. This carving seemed to be permissible as long as the teacher did not actually see the laborer pursuing his task. The teacher usually conducted the class by calling the pupils to the front of the room and having them sit on front benches or seats. If these were not available or the class too large, the children remained in their seats and the teacher heard the recitations from there. The switch was rather freely used on recalcitrant boy pupils. I never knew a girl to be whipped. It seemed to be the ethical and disciplinary standard that no girl was to be struck, though the younger boys used to have occasional fights with them on the school playgrounds. Usually, however, after making a brave show with our firsts against some annoying girl one took to one’s heels in ignominious flight. There was no disgrace nor shame, in a fighting boy running from an irate female in such circumstances. Everybody brought midday lunches. The standard lunch usually consisted of sandwiches made of cold meat (chicken, pork, beef), or cold cuts of the same. Pieces of bread spread thickly with butter and and jelly or jam, a rosy apple, and a sizable piece of pie. The pupils were well fed.
The instruction consisted of such subjects as arithmetic, grammar, geography and writing. Barnes readers were used. The school was usually opened in the morning by reading a short passage from the Bible followed by repeating the Lord’s Prayer in unison. As the Amen was said there was always quite an ado and bustle as the pupils secured their books and tablets from the desks. There was little or no homework. The pupil was supposed to study under the eye of the teacher; the idea of homework was not considered. When the boy got home there were chores to do: cows to milk, horses and hogs to be fed; gardens to be hoed. The girls had to help their mothers in household duties in the kitchen preparing the evening meal. Every Friday or every other Friday afternoon was taken up with a special program of recitations and songs by the pupils, which might be attended by several of the parents to see their progeny perform.
Such was the foundation on which the midwest education was based fifty and more years ago and while there must be change, I believe the men and women produced in such an environment went as far and accomplished as much, all things considered, as those whose primary education today has had added to it many other things, and folderol, to be learned, which according to modern educators allows the child self-expression.
The busy home life of my Uncle Will’s and Aunt Mollie’s farm was a busy one, up at four-thirty to five in the morning building the fires, doing the chores and the farm work in season. The food provided in those days on the farm was excellent. Milk and eggs were abundant. Usually several hundred jars of various fruits were made into jellies and jams, and vegetables were “put up” during the summer months. Mason screw top glass jars were used. But this I learned in more detail later, as I watched my stepmother when I was older. Evidently at this time due to the extra care thrown by a troublesome youngster on my aunt, my father was constrained to look for another place to put me. My aunt was devoted to my younger sister as she had no daughters of her own. She had only one son, Samuel, who was about ten years older than I and between us there was either open warfare or armed neutrality. I had to go. So after the necessary arrangements I was taken to the home of Rev. Conrad Huber who now lived in Omaha with his young American wife and one to two year old daughter. Mr. Huber was a kindly bighearted Lutheran minister who had fled from Germany for some reasons of conscience in the “seventies.” He gave me, a motherless difficult boy of six of seven years of age, a home. However, after six months to a year I became too much of a care and responsibility for his young wife and my father was compelled to look elsewhere for a home for me.
Having run the gamut of those relatives who might possibly give me a home and having been unable to make an adjustment, my father as a last resort had me admitted to the “Home for the Friendless,” a state supported institution at Lincoln, Nebraska, paying a stipulated sum for my board and keep. How much I do not remember, but to the best of my recollection ten to fifteen dollars per month as a non-charity case. My father’s business was now entirely that of an insurance agent and he was on the road most of the time. Servants of the proper sort were beyond his means so the only practical way of having his young children even adequately cared for was by farming them out, so to speak, among relatives, and as that was no longer possible in my case, admitting me as a paying boarder to “The Home for the Friendless” was a good solution.
Home for the Friendless, Lincoln NE,1904
On looking back I have no rancor nor resentment over that course. True, some of my aunts and uncles were perhaps quite able to give me a home, but I was a difficult child from all reports, and all of them had children of their own, requiring a full measure of their care and responsibility. Remember that my brother Theodore was at my (adoptive) Grandfather Cooper’s and my sister Maude at my Aunt Mollie’s.
Years later in 1918, while visiting at Aunt Mollie’s and Uncle Will Blystone’s at Lincoln, Nebraska, one of the places I insisted on visiting as we were driven around the city in an automobile was the old “Home”. After the drive, my devoted wife took me to task sharply , stating that insisting on such a drive past the “Home” had caused considerable embarrassment to my uncle and aunt. With a woman’s intuition she had sensed it, while to me, a man, on looking back I had only recalled a slight lapse in the conversation at the time. In a recent visit (1940) to Lincoln in my own care, I was unable to find the old “Home” and the best I could determine was that its place had been taken by a hospital.
My life at the “Home” was more or less satisfactory. It was an institutional life, and at best that is not ideal for young children. We had to work, had our chores to do; scrubbing the porches, cleaning out the bathrooms, scrubbing the dining tables, no tablecloths were provided, in fact, as I recall most of the work except the actual supervision of the cooking seemed to be done by the inmates who varied in age from a few years upward to old homeless women. School was held during the school hours and except for the fact of an overworked teacher, only one was supplied, it was a very good school. The teacher was assisted with the younger pupils, by some of the older ones. On the whole there always seemed to be a shortage of personnel. This was evidently due to the desire of the state fathers at the legislature to run the “Home” with as little money and as economically as possible.
I recall that at one time we were visited by a delegation from “The Capital.” I think the Governor was among them. One of the visitors, an old bewhiskered billy goat, it may have been the Governor himself, gave us a few words of his wisdom while we were collected in the schoolroom. The tenor of his remarks was that we four to ten year olds ought to be eternally thankful that we were permitted to have a place to stay such as this institution. This made a confused impression on me which persisted for years. My father was paying for my keep. Why should I be thankful to the Governor when I wasn’t particular whether I lived at the “Home” or not? Besides I was earning my board by scrubbing out the bathroom daily. That was my mental response.
Children remember things against individuals and happenings through the years much to the discomfiture of all concerned, except themselves. I remember one Thanksgiving week when for some reason my brother, who had joined me at the Home, and I were permitted to go on a visit to some relatives (aunts) in the nearby town of Ashland. For weeks we talked about the wonderful dinner we were going to have. The details leading up to our going were unknown to us but we went expecting to stay several days and over Thanksgiving; we had three aunts in town all with families of their own and their time occupied in taking care of their own children. In forty-eight hours or so we had been shuffled around, like hot potatoes, from one aunt to another and were then put on the train and sent in humiliation back to Lincoln, where we ate Thanksgiving dinner at “The Home.”
During these early years when six to eight years old, twice I ran away from “The Home.” The first time when I was six and a half years of age along with an older boy about ten years old (Eddie Mitchel). We took off over the hills south of Lincoln and in the afternoon we got as far as a paper mill which was then located a mile or two out of the city limits. There we were given supper by some kind-hearted workman and in the evening the night force let us sleep on benches with their coats as covers. It was quite an experience for a six to seven year old. Next morning Eddie and I left bright and early returning to the city where we lived on the streets for several days, sleeping in alcoves of buildings, in back alleys, and getting food to eat by pilfering from fruit stands, or soliciting money from passersby. It was a great life while it lasted, but one day a kindly policeman picked us up, took us into a store and gave us a plate of ice cream and sent us out in the police patrol wagon to the Home where I was locked up for several days in a room, before being allowed to rejoin the others on the playground. One again, perhaps a year or eighteen months later, with three other boys I took to the hills. Among them was my brother Theodore who was two years older than I. To begin with, it was in the month of February; we went out of the city and for the first night found shelter in a cattle shed near Salt Creek. We slept in the mangers and as the cattle were getting their food from a husked over corn field called locally stocks, we were not disturbed by persons coming to care for the animals. We got hungry but managed to beg some food from nearby farm houses and pilfer supplies from their cellars. It was, however, too cold for comfort and we returned to the city and spent one night getting warm by breaking into “The Home’s” schoolroom. In a day or two the police picked us up and were ignominiously returned to “The Home.” The usual punishment of isolation and added work followed. These runaways were not in any sense due to mistreatment, but to the universal childhood instinct to roam. The institution was probably as ably conducted as any similar institution in those days and perhaps today. Children were not whipped nor beaten and the teachers and attendants were on the whole considerate and kind. It is no easy task to control and supply the mental and disciplinarian needs of one hundred or more children of all ages. But at the best, institutional life for children is neither a wise nor proper thing.
Several times epidemics of various childhood and infectious diseases occurred. During one of these I was quite sick for a number of weeks and I realize now that it must have been typhoid fever, due to the severe reaction I always had when taking typhoid vaccine in later years.
How we children used to talk and dream about our parents. The partings from my father when he would come to see me left me in sobs. Institutional care will leave its scars on the lives of children, notwithstanding it is a humane step forward in orphan care. During the years 1890-1891, my father due to the desire to keep his children together, entered both my brothers and my sister in “The Home,” and there we stayed until in the spring of 1891 he married again. His second wife was Grace Baird, whose parents resided seven or eight miles southeast of Tecumseh, Nebraska. He married, of course among other reasons, to provide a mother and home for his three children. After some investigation he decided to settle in Auburn Nebraska, and built a small four room frame cottage in south Auburn near the old Catholic church and moved his family there.
End of Chapter
Sources
Cooper, Alexander Taylor. “The Days of a Midwesterner.” Unpublished Typescript. Nebraska State Historical Society, 1943. Used by permission.
Heat-Moon, William Least. Prairy Erth: A Deep Map. 1991; Mariner Books; Reissue edition February 15, 1999.
McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World. A compilation of five books, the first four of which were previously published as Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), and Assembling California (1993), plus a final book, Crossing the Craton. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Pounds, Wayne. Naomi of Ohio: An American Pastoral. [Ebook subtitled A Dark Pastoral.] Columbia SC: Kindle Press, 2018.
_____. The Fate of Bones: Adventures in Family History: From Virginia to Kansas with a Glimpse of Oklahoma Territory. Charleston, SC: Kindle Press, 2012.
Webb, Walter Prescott. The Great Plains. New York: Grosset’s Universal Library. Grosset & Dunlap, 1931.
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