COMMENTS ALONG THE WAY

COMMENTS ALONG THE WAY

By Way of Introduction

"Comments Along the Way" is an oral history recorded by Euil Wayne Morgan, a native of Wayne County Illinois, whom I am honored to claim as my father. He was born March 19, 1910 in Wayne City, Illinois, the son of Albert Franklin Morgan and Ida Close. Euil W. died December 23, 1988 in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. He married Shirley Jean Cates of Dahlgren Illinois in 1935 and they had three children, Peggy Anne, Albert Wayne, and Graham Alan.

Euil Wayne was a teacher, carpenter and journalist, as well as the owner, publisher and editor of the Dahlgren Echo. He was an artist, railway postal clerk, volunteer and above all a story teller. He was honored for his service in Boy and Girl Scouting, teaching, wrote the Casey Jr. High School Victory March and arranged and adapted the Loyalty song. After he was legally blind he painted original compositions, learned to play the piano by ear, and entertained at many area functions. If he set his mind to learning a new skill, preferably one he knew nothing about, he would find a way to do it even after he was blind and limited by severe heart problems.

Euil Wayne Morgan (pictured Above)

It was after his eyesight failed and his health was decaying that he succumbed to the urgings of his children and took up the challenge of dictating memories of his life. He was given a tape recorder and a stack of blank tapes. The result was "Comments Along the Way", 900 minutes of memories, on cassettes, of Wayne, Hamilton, and Jefferson Counties in Illinois. This oral history was transcribed by Peggy Anne Morgan Phillips and Albert Wayne Morgan and is in preparation for publication as part of a larger work. The transcriptions are literal with minimal editing. Genealogy data, pictures, and historical commentary has been added by Albert Wayne Morgan, mostly to correct a few failing memories and family myths.

The following excerpts are submitted for the enjoyment of all those with Wayne, Hamilton, and Jefferson County roots who still have "clay behind their ears". Dad would have wanted it that way.

Albert Wayne Morgan August 2007

All material is Copyrighted by Peggy Anne Morgan Phillips, Albert Wayne Morgan, and Graham Alan Morgan. These excerpts are reprinted here by permission.

Tape One Side One

COMMENTS ALONG THE WAY

by Euil Wayne Morgan

Date of this recording October 1984

"This is a recording by Euil W. Morgan (1), not to be confused with Euil Wayne Morgan II (2), my young grandson upon whom my elder son (3) saw fit to hang the name of Euil, the compliment I appreciate in the manner in which it was intended. I hope that he has better luck with it than I did. I foresee for him a battle throughout his life in regard to 1: the spelling of his name, 2: the pronunciation of it, and 3: the various tricks and puns and play on the sound of it that he will receive from his contemporaries. The name Euil, spelled EUIL, was hung on me by my parents, as a compliment to Doctor Barney E. Garrison (4) an old physician who lived and practiced in Wayne City Illinois, back in the 1900's, who was the doctor in attendance at my birth. I understand that they asked the Doctor what the E. in his name stood for and after some coaxing why he revealed that it stood for Euil, which was a family name that had been passed down and hung on him by his ancestors. It's a Welsh name and a Welsh spelling.

The Wayne part I enjoyed. It has a nice ring to it and when I was in college I did my very best to be called Wayne instead of Euil. Of course later on when I got out into life and where I had to determine the legal signing of my name why. I . all the papers and documents that I had to learn to sign Euil W. Morgan because they want the first name, middle initial, and last name. Not necessarily in that order. Thank goodness (for) some of my Close (5) relatives, when I was a very, very young chap, especially Grandfather Close (6). Grandpa was a thorough going Irishman and he hung the name Pat Murphy (7) on me, and for years while I was growing up, and even yet, my Aunt Rose (7a) calls me Pat, and I sort of had an Irish inclination in that regard cause I much preferred it to the name Euil.

My maternal ancestors the way I understand it came from Ireland. Oh, sometime during or after the potato famine over there. They were the Closes (6), C L O S E, and the Ellises (8), E L L I S. The Ellises came to the United States and the Closes, the way I understand it, I may have these mixed up, but one of the branches of my Mother's family, came to Canada, and emigrated from Canada down into the United States, and wound up over in Ohio. The other branch came directly to the United States and wound up in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. One of my nephews, I believe it's John Mayfield (9) or it may be his brother, David (9), has the Colt Revolver that my great grandfather used, or perhaps it's my double great grandfather used, he was a policeman in Philadelphia (10). It's one of those 45 revolvers, a cap and ball revolver. It's a huge thing. And for years that thing. after grandmother (11) died. why that pistol lay in a drawer over at Mother's (12), or locked in a trunk, and it had a charge in it, and she had to go to a great deal of trouble to have that charge drawn, because it had been in the pistol for so long.

My mother had an Uncle (13) who enlisted with the Ohio volunteers during the Civil War and he was killed at or about the time of the battle of Nashville. And years and years ago, back in the thirties, Mother and Dad drove down to Nashville and, after consulting all the records, they found his grave in the National cemetery down there.

Somehow or the other the Closes and the Ellis family moved on over into Illinois and into Indiana. A lot of the Ellis's settled in Southwestern Indiana. Many of them came to Illinois over in Wayne County in the vicinity of Orchardville and to this day there are still Ellis's over there. I know very little about, actually about Grandpa Close's folks, I know more about the Ellis family because Grandpa Close died when I was a freshman in high school and I didn't really get a chance to hear him talk.

Grandma Close (11) on the other hand loved to talk about the old days when she was a young girl and one of the stories that she told was concerning her family, my great grandfather Ellis's (14), family, they had moved over into the Southwestern part of Missouri, near Sarcoxie, I believe, and had a farm there, log cabin, and were carving out a life for themselves there, when the Civil War came along. As you read about the Civil War, and especially the Civil War in Missouri, you will find that there was quite a great deal of guerilla warfare. Southern sympathizers were quite active, and as a rather peculiar thing but most of the Irish who came to this country were strong Union people.

Now great grandfather Ellis (14) was a strong pro-union man and a Republican as it turned out, and the guerillas had threatened him and his family, they had already burned out and killed some of their acquaintances and neighbors so Grandpa Ellis up and took his family and they packed what they could in a wagon and started back to Illinois. It was sometime in the summer that they made the start of their trip. Of course the roads were ill marked dirt roads. Great Grandmother Ellis (15) drove the wagon. She had several children, Grandma Close (11) being a very young girl at that time, very young. They would drive along the road toward St. Louis during the daytime. Great Grandfather Ellis would follow them but he would not take the road. He tramped through the woods and the fields and the wilderness and would come back to the road at night and find where his family had camped for the night but he wouldn't come in to the camp but he would make his presence known and Grandmother Ellis would take his food out to him. I remember Grandma saying that they were very short of supplies, they scavenged as much as they could on the way, what edible things they could find, and if they came across any other Union sympathizers why they were given a little lift but most of the Union sympathizers were of course like themselves on the way back to more safe country.

I remember they came along in September to a farm where the man of the house had also been. he had either been killed or he had gone to join the union army something of the sort but there at the house was only the woman of the house and her few children. One thing they had was a large apple orchard and Grandmother and her family and Grandpa. that is Great Grandpa (14). they stayed there and picked the apples, and peeled them, and sliced them, and put them out in the hot sunlight and dried them. Now unless you know what a dried apple is they make them in thin slices and they dry and then they put them in containers and bags of some sort and when they want to have an apple pie or stewed apples all they have to do is soak them in water and they come right back and taste just like fresh apples. Grandma said that her brothers and sisters and her mother picked and sliced these apples and did the work of drying them on the shares. that is they were to get a part, a portion of the dried apples as their pay as well as board while they were doing the work.

This must have been a fairly prosperous farm for the day because one day they. Grandmother (11) came running in and to the house and yelling that the guerillas were coming and so she grabbed all of the pillow cases full of dried apples and hid them under the floor boards of the smoke house where she and her family were staying and just as they were replacing the boards they looked up and saw a soldier looking through the window at them. They were scared to death. They didn't want to lose their dried apples because that represented a great deal of food. These days when we're more concerned about money, those days the people were down to elementals, it was something to eat, something to keep their body alive but the soldier only laughed at them.

And they went to the window and looked out after he had passed on and they found that the southern soldiers or guerillas as they were really known were very busily engaged in shooting and killing as much of the livestock as they could. They drove away a cow, I think Grandma said, they shot the hogs and hung them on their pack horses and Grandmother Close (11) remembers that one soldier when he went out he had hung. tied the feet of all the chickens they could catch or kill and he had them hung on a belt around or over his shoulders until he looked like that he was a poultry man on his way to market."

(...Continued in Chapter 1 "Comments Along the Way")

Footnotes for "By Way of Introduction":

1) EUIL WAYNE MORGAN was born March 19, 1910 in Wayne City, Illinois, and died December 23, 1988 in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. EUIL was the son of ALBERT FRANKLIN MORGAN and IDA CLOSE. ALBERT F. was the son of GEORGE W. MORGAN and ELLEN KITTURIE TERRY. EUIL married SHIRLEY JEAN CATES August 10, 1935 in Marion, Crittenden Kentucky, the daughter of EPHRAIM ZELOTUS CATES and HESTER LOWRY. SHIRLEY was born July 05, 1913 in Dahlgren, Illinois, and died May 18, 2003 in Mt. Vernon, IL.

Children of EUIL MORGAN and SHIRLEY CATES are:

i. PEGGY ANNE MORGAN, b. September 26, 1936, Dahlgren, Illinois; m. DONALD PHILLIPS, November 22, 1956, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; b. August 08, 1934, MO.

ii. ALBERT WAYNE MORGAN, b. September 29, 1938, Mt. Vernon, Illinois Jefferson County; m. CARLENE DIAN LAWS, July 09, 1961, Clinton, Illinois; b. April 09, 1939, Clinton, Illinois.

iii. GRAHAM ALAN MORGAN, b. November 22, 1948, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; m. LINDA LAVONNE COTHERMAN, August 15, 1970, Chadwick Carroll Co IL; b. October 04, 1943, Decatur IL.

2) EUIL WAYNE MORGAN II was born September 5, 1968 in Belleville Illinois the son of ALBERT WAYNE MORGAN and CARLENE DIAN LAWS.

3) ALBERT WAYNE MORGAN is the elder son who followed the Irish and Scot Irish naming system. The first son is named after the paternal grandfather and the second son is named after the maternal grandfather.

4) DR. BARNEY E. GARRISON had a long professional and personal relationship with the CLOSE family in Wayne County. By the naming convention EUIL MORGAN should have been named GEORGE MORGAN after the father of ALBERT FRANKLIN MORGAN. GEORGE had, however, been sent to prison after a fight in Jefferson County. The Supreme Court threw out the whole case two and a half years later and he was released but by that time his wife ELLEN K. TERRY had divorced GEORGE and remarried MARCUS L. SHELL. EUIL's mother, IDA CLOSE MORGAN, was deeply ashamed of having an ex-convict as a father in law and swore "There will never be another George Morgan in this family." Hence they chose to honor their friend and doctor BARNEY E. GARRISON by naming a son after him. The WAYNE middle name was for IDA'S brother ROBERT WAYNE CLOSE. He in turn was named for Wayne County and General "Mad" Anthony Wayne.

5) See "John Close Family Tree" on the Wayne County Illinois Genealogy Trails Web Site:

http://genealogytrails.com/ill/wayne/close.htm

6) Grandfather Close is JOHN CLOSE, who was born February 28, 1855 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and died March 22, 1926 in Wayne City, Illinois. John was the son of John Close and Mary Ann Graham, Irish immigrants who immigrated to the United States during the potato fame in 1848. John (b 1855) married MARTHA JANE ELLIS February 25, 1875 in Johnsonville Wayne County, Illinois, daughter of CHARLES RAWLINGS ELLIS and NANCY CARLISLE. She was born October 01, 1856 in Newton County, Missouri, and died August 14, 1946 in Mt. Vernon, Illinois.

Children of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA ELLIS are:

i. MARY CLOSE, b. December 31, 1876; d. October 14, 1906; m. (1) WIL STRAUD, Abt. 1893, Illinois; m. (2) WILLIAM HALE, Abt. 1902, Illinois.

ii. ROBERT WAYNE CLOSE, b. March 14, 1879, Orchardville Wayne Co IL; d. January 10, 1947, Wayne City, Illinois; m. CARRIE D. ALLEN, December 12, 1902; b. February 05, 1877, IL; d. January 10, 1947, Wayne City IL.

iii. CHARLES R CLOSE, b. April 23, 1881; d. January 02, 1953, Loda, Illinois; m. ERLIE LOUISE SMITH, February 24, 1904; b. April 16, 1883, Four Mile Township Wayne CO IL; d. 1962, Elgin IL Kane County IL.

iv. JAMES M CLOSE, b. July 01, 1883; d. November 09, 1884.

v. KATE CLOSE, b. June 06, 1886; d. January 16, 1901.

vi. IDA CLOSE, b. September 11, 1889, Wayne County, Illinois; d. October 08, 1974, Hickory Grove Manor Nursing Home Mt. Vernon, Illinois; m. ALBERT FRANKLIN MORGAN, May 18, 1907, Wayne City IL; b. April 08, 1885, Jefferson Co IL; d. September 04, 1943, St. Lukes Hospital St Louis MO.

vii. MEADA O CLOSE, b. August 25, 1892, Wayne City IL; d. January 27, 1910, Wayne City IL.

viii. ROSA LEE CLOSE, b. June 07, 1896, Wayne City IL; d. November 29, 1983, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; m. OWEN DEL HERBERT, July 08, 1919, Fairfield IL; b. August 05, 1896, Dahlgren IL; d. March 11, 1985, Mt. Vernon, Illinois.

7) PAT MURPHY was a nickname recognized as defining a generic Irish American. EUIL had a number of acquaintances in Wayne and Jefferson Counties who only knew him as PAT MURPHY. He used to get mail addressed to "Pat Murphy, Mt. Vernon, IL" and it was always delivered.

7a) ROSA LEE CLOSE, b. June 07, 1896, Wayne City IL; d. November 29, 1983, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; m. OWEN DEL HERBERT, July 08, 1919, Fairfield IL; b. August 05, 1896, Dahlgren IL; d. March 11, 1985, Mt. Vernon, Illinois. AUNT ROSE and UNCLE OWEN were a joy to the myriad clutter of nephews and nieces that were always underfoot.

8) See: "Ellis Family" on the Wayne County Illinois Genealogy Trails Site:

http://genealogytrails.com/ill/wayne/ellis.htm

9) The MAYFIELDS were the children of EUIL"S sister ALMA GERALDINE MORGAN and CHARLES SUMNER MAYFIELD. She was born November 24, 1916 in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, and died January 10, 2003 in Leroy Nursing Home, Leroy McLean Co IL., the daughter of ALBERT FRANKLIN MORGAN and IDA CLOSE. She married CHARLES SUMNER MAYFIELD August 24, 1940 in Marion, Crittenden County, KY, son of FRANK MAYFIELD and GERTRUDE PATTON. He was born June 23, 1916 in Elizabethtown, Illinois, and died April 16, 1969 in Bloomington, Illinois. Their children were JULIET ELLEN, CHARLES DAVID, and JOHN MORGAN MAYFIELD.

10) Despite the family story no documentation has been found indicating that the immigrant JOHN CLOSE was ever a policeman. There is evidence that he was a laborer during his time in Philadelphia.

11) GRANDMA CLOSE, GRANDMOTHER, and GRANDMOTHER CLOSE all refer to MARTHA JANE ELLIS, the daughter of CHARLES RAWLING ELLIS and NANCY CARLISLE, who was born October 01, 1856 in Newton County, Missouri, and died August 14, 1946 in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. She married JOHN CLOSE February 25, 1875 in Johnsonville Wayne County, Illinois, son of JOHN CLOSE and MARY GRAHAM. He was born February 28, 1855 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and died March 22, 1926 in Wayne City, Illinois.

12) MOTHER is IDA CLOSE MORGAN, the mother of EUIL WAYNE MORGAN

13) ROBERT CLOSE was the son of JOHN CLOSE and MARY ANN GRAHAM.

He was born in 1844 in Ireland and died September 2, 1863 in the General Hospital in Memphis TN.

From the Close Family Bible Pages:

"Died on the 2nd of Sept 1863 in the military hospital Memphis Tennessee from a wound received on the 20th of May in an attack on Vicksburg Robert Close, son of John and Mary Ann Close of the City of Philadelphia aged 19 years and 3 months. He suffered and died far from home and home friends but in all his letters he gave evidence that the Sufferers best friend was with him. John and M.A. Close"

Service Records: In the roster of Ohio Troops, page 574, he is listed as "Close, Robert, Private, Age 18. Entered the service July 18, 1862 for a three year service. He died Sept 2, 1863, in General Hospital Memphis Tenn.

The official Roster of the Soldiers of the State of Ohio in War of the Rebellion 1861-1866 Vol. VI 70th-86th Regiments-Infantry (published 1888). The 83rd Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry was organized at camp Dennison, Ohio, in August and Sept, 1862, to serve three years.

Battles Robert Close was in were Chickasaw Bayou, Miss (Dec 28-29,1862, Arkansas Post, Ark Jan 11 1863, Port Gibson, Miss May 1, 1863, Raymand, Miss May 12, 1863, Champion Hills, Miss May 16, 1863, Big Black River, Miss May 17, 1863, Vicksburg, Miss (Siege of) May 18 to July 4, 1863, Vicksburg, Miss (Second Assault) May 20 1863. In this battle Robert Close was fatally wounded.

See Robert's Letters at: http://genealogytrails.com/ill/wayne/rclose.htm

14) GREAT GRANDFATHER ELLIS is CHARLES RAWLINGS ELLIS, the son of ISAAC M. ELLIS and JANE RADCLIFF. He was born January 31, 1832 in Washington County Indiana and died August 14, 1885 in Wayne County Illinois.

15) GREAT GRANDMOTHER ELLIS is NANCY CARLISLE the daughter of JOHN CARLISLE and HANNAH SMITH. She was born February 03, 1840 in Orange County, Indiana, and died August 20, 1885 in Johnsonville, Illinois Wayne County. NANCY'S heritage has been traced back to OPECHANACOUGH, POWHATAN, during the Jamestown era. See: "The Ancestry of Nancy Carlisle", a submission to the Wayne County Illinois Genealogy Trails site.

Back To Wayne County

Eventually they got to St. Louis. As you read your histories of Missouri you will find out that this was before the days of the Eads Bridge. Crossing the Mississippi river was a matter of crossing on a raft on ferry boats that plied back and forth across the Mississippi. There was a big jam because that was the only crossing for miles upon miles up and down the stream, and hundreds upon hundreds of people were fleeing from the guerillas and camping out all around St. Louis.

Eventually they got across the Mississippi and they took up the eighty or ninety mile trek back to their relatives (16) who were either in or near Orchardville. Now they arrived at Orchardville on Christmas Eve. I think this was in ‘62 or ‘63. I’m not positive of that date. When Grandma Close (11) was very ill near the end of her life, I sat down with a pad and pencil and I was going to write down as many of the particulars as I could. But somehow or other the story didn’t come out because she was not up to telling me all the things, just repeated me some of the highlights that I already knew. Well, they spent Christmas night, Christmas Day and a week or so with these relatives. Great Grandfather Ellis (14) was a miller. They found another cabin somewhere nearby there, and the relative of Grandfather owned a flour mill. These little old mills were located all over this part of the country, naturally, because the roads were all mud. If you went from one place to the other you either rode a train if there was one, except there were very few through Illinois in those days, or you took the dirt roads. To go to town and back, even if you just lived outside of town, would take all day.

Great Grandfather Ellis apparently was pretty handy with his hands. He was a millwright, and a miller by trade before he had taken his fling at farming down in Missouri, so he went to work in the mill. Eventually he moved to Wayne City, that’s a few miles south of Orchardville, and he went to work in the mill there. That mill was still there when I was a boy, but then it was run by steam. In Great Grandfather’s day there was a little brook or creek of sorts that ran down through that part of Wayne City and they had a mill pond. They would let water out of the mill pond and run it over a water wheel in order to furnish the power to run the mill stones. This mill was located about a block and a half east of Wayne City’s main north and south street, about a block and a half or two blocks south of the Southern Railroad tracks, and on the street that you would take today if you were going to go through Wayne City from the highway over to the site of the grade and high school where they are now.

Anyway Great Grandfather Ellis and his family were pretty poor. Grandmother (Martha Ellis Close) remembered that when her father first went to work there that they were very poor, and one day they had some relatives come in. Although they had plenty of flour, they had no baking powder and so Grandma was sent down to the mill to ask him for a nickel so they could go to the store and buy a small can of baking powder. Great Grandpa Ellis had to ask for an advance on his week’s wages in order to get that nickel so that the family could make their biscuits. Still in all they were pretty, pretty frugal. When Grandpa Ellis hadn’t worked there very long -- oh a year or two or three, something of the sort -- anyway the old owner of the mill apparently had passed away or retired and Grandpa Ellis managed to gain the ownership of the mill. I understand that when he died that he was considered one of the wealthiest men in that part of the county. After he died, however, he had quite a few children and the family divided up the estate, which somehow, it clings in my mind, in those days it amounted to oh sixty, eighty thousand dollars in cash and property. (17) There wasn’t much left for each person and they managed to run through it pretty well.

Foot Notes For Back To Wayne County

16) These relatives were probably WARNER ELLIS and WILLIAM ELLIS who lived in Johnsonville in the 1860 Wayne County Census. WILLIAM BOSWELL was a miller in the area according to family lore and was also a relative.

17) Wayne County probate records give a final distribution of $1700 to each of six heirs. This totaled $10,200 in total, much less than we were told. This was still a significant estate for the time. $1700 was about eight years wages at a good job.

GOING TO OKLAHOMA

Now my mother, (12), went through the eighth grade, the eighth reader as they called it in those days. She worked as a clerk in one of the many small groceries in Wayne City (18); she also clerked for a while in the post office at that time. Her father, John Close, who married my Grandmother, Martha Ellis, was a farmer and a laborer and did just about anything that was handy in order to make a living. This was the way that poor folks lived in those days. They lived to provide the necessities of life and their children were expected to work right along with them. Ida Close Morgan, my mother, was born in 1889 and she was only a few years old when the family decided to go down to the newly opened Cherokee Strip country of Oklahoma and to take up a homestead there (19). They had friends and relatives who had gone down and wrote back that the land was rich and the land was there for the asking.

It was different in Wayne County.(20) This was before the days of the artificial fertilizer, liming the fields, and all that sort of thing, and the land which was cleared and had the sprouts dug out of it had been cultivated so long without anything being put back into the soil that you were considered very fortunate if you got forty bushels of corn to the acre. The average was around twenty-five bushels to the acre. Consequently farmers usually, unless they had just an exceptional stroke of luck, considered themselves lucky to just have enough to eat and maybe enough to buy a few necessities like salt, some clothing, boots, and things of that sort. (21) An example of what I mean on this clothing deal is that the typical house of that part of the country was a three or four room house. By that I mean there were just rooms, no closets. I can take you to houses today with no closets built in. If people had an extra coat or a dress they would drive a nail in the wall behind the door and that’s where it hung, because they didn’t have enough clothes to need a closet. And here Shirley and I are. We have closets all over the place, jammed plumb full of clothes, and yet your mother says she doesn’t have a thing to wear!

Anyway to get back to the story, Grandpa Close decided to take his family down to Oklahoma. I believe though this was near Sapulpa. However I’m not sure of that. I have an old bill of lading where my two uncles (22) loaded their livestock into a freight car and the car was consigned, I believe, down to near Sapulpa, Oklahoma. The two boys went along to take care of the stock and the rest of the family traveled down later by train. I can remember my mother telling about how they arrived at this particular station down there in the middle of the night, and they’d made arrangements for a friend and former neighbor of theirs to meet them at the station. He was there, and they all piled into the buckboard (which was a springless type of wagon) with their small amount of goods, and they took off across the country toward the claim that they were going to homestead. Mother (12) remembered that ride because it was pitch dark, it was bitter cold, and there were no roads. They traveled right across the country. Every once in a while, the driver would let out a yell of warning and the horses would drop down the side of a buffalo wallow and the wagon would follow after it -- everybody on for dear life. Finally they got to where they were going and they stayed a few days or weeks with this neighbor until they could get their own place set up.

In this particular case the home was a tent, and around the edges of the tent they piled chunks of sod. The menfolk were busy building a Soddy house, a house made out of sod. It’s excavated down below the surface of the ground and then they cut huge chunks of sod and stack like concrete blocks for the walls and then the whole thing is covered by poles and canvas and then even the roof is covered with sod. It made a very, very warm and substantial building, not very large, and not clean by any means since the floor was dirt. They didn’t stay down there long enough really to appreciate the advantage of living in a sod house (23) because they had just barely got settled when they began to be exposed to the rigors of the Oklahoma climate that they hadn’t counted on. I remember one of the highpoints that mother used to tell was being waked up in the middle of the night by the yells and shouts of the older people. One of the huge winds that comes across Oklahoma, almost a tornado in this case, came sweeping across there and they were all very, very busy storing the stuff away. They had an old organ, one of those that you pump with your feet, that was a prize possession, and they propped it up against the main pole of the tent. (24) It was the job of my mother and her two sisters to hold on to that organ and hold on to that main pole. Even then it almost blew the tent and the house away. Shortly after that they decided that they didn’t want any of that Oklahoma territory business, so they loaded the things in the back, they sold out what they had, and then loaded themselves back on a train and came back to Illinois.

Footnotes For Going To Oklahoma

18) This was identified in a family photograph as the Rasselar store. We still have this photo in our possession.

19) We have a photograph of the main street of Hobart Oklahoma on July 2, 1902. John Close purchased this as a memento.

20) Dad always had a tendency to wander in stories, whether spoken or written. He generally stitched the fragments together and they made sense. Sometimes it takes a while.

21) Dad, like most old timers, myself included, are quite certain later generations do not know how well off they are. The “nail in a wall” was Dad’s preferred way of solving storage problems. The “nothing to wear joke” was a running gag in our household.

22) Charles and Robert Close, brothers of Ida Close, went with the stock to Sapulpa, Creek County, OK.

23) Euil was always enamored with the idea of building a “Soddy” or Adobe block house. He talked my Boy Scout Troop into trying it. We had the walls up four feet when we decided pounding clay into brick mold and baking them in the sun went out with the Israelites.

24) My cousin, Martha Fugate Kusmaul, has a small corner curio cabinet made from the wood of that old organ.

BACK TO WAYNE CITY

They settled this time south of Wayne City several miles, oh about four miles, something like that. I believe it was on Four Mile Creek (25). This was in the flatland country, very near what later became Starvation Corner because the land around there was so poor it wouldn’t grow hardly anything except Red Sorrel (26). I can remember later on in the twenties when we had the automobile, Mother, Dad and my two sisters and I would go on take day trips down through that territory and see some of their old friends and people whom they knew. Starvation Corner was a landmark, and to this day mention Starvation Corner to any of the old timers from that part of Wayne County and they’ll know exactly what you mean -- in those days it was one corner of the crossroads. When the highways came down from Wayne City to McLeansboro, of course, the highway obliterated the corner. Now it makes a wide curve and sweep to the east and then straight from McLeansboro, but Starvation Corner’s still there. I imagine that whoever farms it now has put plenty of lime on it to sweeten the soil and they probably get pretty good crops of soybeans. All of that country down there now is devoted to soybeans instead of corn, and one of the largest, if not the largest, soybean elevator/storage/shipping point today is in Wayne City, Illinois.(27)

Well, enough about the changes and the things that have taken place there in Wayne City. We’re not too much interested in that right now. After they came back to Wayne City, Grandpa Close bought a house there and the lot next to it. The house was located southeast of the large block that the Wayne City School is located on. The house was on the corner and had a porch across the back end. Joining the roof of the porch was a smokehouse that was just plumb full of musty old stored things like all of the old smokehouses were. A smokehouse, you know, was the storage place people used to smoke their meat and cure it when they killed a hog or a cow or whatever. (28)

To the side of the smokehouse was a big cistern that gathered its water in wooden gutters from the roof of the house. Grandpa used to go out every spring and get several bullhead catfish from a pond somewhere to drop in there, and those fish would eat up the larva of the mosquitoes that would lay their eggs on the water. Sometimes, if the fish were unavailable, when you pulled up a bucket of water you would find all of those little squirmy mosquitoes larva swimming around in there, and you’d have to strain the water out of that bucket through a clean dish towel into another bucket in order to get the wiggle tails out. It’s that well, too, that Grandma used as a cooler. She had a large tin bucket with a cover and she’d put her butter and anything else she wanted to keep cool in that, put the cover on and then hang that down in the well just above the level of the water. It was always a chore when you went out to draw a bucket of water to be sure that you didn’t disturb that bucket. I did one time and luckily, although I knocked the lid off, the butter did not fall into the water.(29)

I always liked to go into the garden. Grandpa gardened that whole lot – about 50 by 150. He had it plowed up every spring; right down the middle of it was a long row of gooseberry bushes. I’d go down there and gather a handful or two of those gooseberries, run into the kitchen, and reach down into the salt jar that was full of coarse, what they call bar’l salt. In those days you bought your salt not in boxes but out of barrels and they‘d give it to you in a paper bag. I think it was one or two cents a pound, something like that. I can remember Grandma sending me downtown to the store with a nickel and she’d say “You spend four cents for salt and you can have the penny for yourself.” I’d get enough candy with that penny to do me the rest of the day. All of us kids had a time there with those gooseberries. The idea was to pour a little salt on a handful of gooseberries and pop them in your mouth, keep your mouth closed and chew up those gooseberries and swallow them without making a face. (30)

Just east of the house was a mulberry tree. In season that thing had the biggest, the darkest and sweetest mulberries on it that you ever tasted. Many a time I’ve gone out there and picked those mulberries and that’s what our dessert would be. Mulberries covered with sugar and cream, oh boy!

Then down in the chicken yard that was just south of the smokehouse was the woodhouse. It was right on the road, and Grandpa would have the coal thrown in one part of it and the other part of it was filled with wood. I usually got in on a little bit of the sawing of the wood. He’d have it split up into fairly narrow lengths or thicknesses. I’d take a sawhorse there and get that old bucksaw, even when I was ten or twelve years old, and put a chunk of that wood up there and take that bucksaw and saw away for dear life in order to get ‘em short enough so Grandma could put ‘em in the cook stove. (31)

There was a board sidewalk about twenty five or thirty feet long that led from the porch out to the chicken yard gate and that was always my job too. As soon as I could lift a hammer, when I went down to visit, Grandma ‘d chase me out there to repair that board walk, and I’d rip up boards wherever I could find them and nail that walk up. I’m telling you I never saw a walk that could disintegrate so quickly from one summer to the next.

In the chicken yard itself was a couple of plum trees. These were big old red plums and there was one blue plum. I loved those things too. That’s always where I headed whenever I had the faintest suspicion that they were beginning to get ripe. I liked them when they were nice and soft and ripe, but I liked them best when they had just turned red and still were real acrid and acidy.

The chicken house was over in the corner. (32) Grandma always kept a bunch of chickens. It was my job when I was there to go out and gather up the eggs. One time Grandma decided since I was gonna be there a week that the chicken house needed cleaning out. So I took the rake and the hoe and a shovel out there and I proceeded to clean out that chicken house. When I came to the back end of the house after a morning of cleaning, I was just covered with chicken lice. Grandma had to give me a bath and wash my hair in kerosene to get all the chicken nits and lice off of me. (33)

Footnotes For Back To Wayne City

25) The name Four Mile Creek may be found in eighteen various locations in ten states according to the 2007 listing of the United States Geologic Survey GNIS survey. Illinois and Wayne County are not indexed, although the Creek shows up clearly on their Topographic map.

26) Dad figured that Red Sorrel grew best in acid soils. In truth it will grow anywhere. He used to say when the world ended the last two living things would be Red Sorrel and cockroaches. We used to put Red Sorrel (called Sour Sorrel or Sheep’s Sorrel in Hamilton County) into our greens. Picked and washed and boiled it made a tea that vaguely tasted like lemonade. Native Americans used it as an antidote for poison. Pioneers used the juice to treat sore throats, urinary and kidney problems as well as skin problems including boils and shingles. Boiled up and concentrated Red Sorrel makes a dandy furniture polish and stain remover.

27) Starvation Corner is aptly named. When he was legally blind Euil painted a picture of Starvation Corner. I am the current custodian. With only 10 per cent peripheral vision in one eye, colorblind and otherwise totally blind he put together a series of marvelous oil and acrylic paintings. His recollection of the size of the Wayne County soybean industry grew over the years. Dad always felt that the best thing to do with any soil was to cover it with lime. Some of the gardens at home resembled paved roads. When I was six I told him my Grandmother Cates used compost and mulched heavy. He handed me the hoe and said “Here! You grow the tomatoes.” I did and they came out well. Still, he kept telling me a little more lime wouldn’t hurt.

28) The Smokehouse pictures and pictures of the home place in Wayne City are taken from some 1920 era negatives that were not found until 2004.

29) The cistern that collected run off water from the roof was very common. Yes, it washed dust, bird droppings, insects and decaying vegetation into the drinking water. Still, we lived and the taste was fine. As long as one let the sediment settle and didn’t stir up the bottom it was fine. The bullheads as a “wiggler control” scheme is not common. We usually just strained the water through cheesecloth.

30) He never lost his love of gooseberries. I still can’t choke them down.

31) Bucksaws and wood were good ways to control small boys. When one can’t hear the racket of the saw being drug “si-gog-alin” through the wood it is time to go look. We used scantlings (the outer trim of the tree from the first cuts at the mill) and these sawed easily and split nicely with a hatchet.

32) The chicken house was still there, chickens and all, when my sister Peggy and I would visit in the World War II years. For some reason that house fascinated us and we generally went in to inspect, mostly to check for eggs under the hens. Then Grandma Close would holler “You kids better not be in that chicken house botherin’ my chickens,” and we’d scoot out giggling, ready to sneak back in at the first opportunity.

33) We also got our share of lice, nits, and kerosene baths. This treatment wasn’t as bad as the one favored by my Aunts and Grandmother in Dahlgren, Hamilton County IL. They scrubbed us down with lye soap, sulfur, and kerosene then made us take a tonic of kerosene, sulfur, and sugar. Only the strong survived.

FIRST AID

The next day I had a blister on my left hand, and the next day why that began to swell up. So she put something on it, peroxide or something, but in another day why it was swollen up to where my fingers were as fat as sausages. She took me down to Dr. Barney Garrison (4) and he proceeded to work instruments in between my fingers and to lance the skin to let that pus out. This was in the day before penicillin and any of those things. Grandma took a big piece of fat bacon rind and slapped on that hand and wrapped it real good and in two or three days—why, it was well. It just cooked that meat. That’s an old time remedy. The pioneers would put fresh dough or fat meat on infections to draw out the fever. (34)

Footnotes for First Aid

34) By experience this has worked real well for me more than once but I use a piece of bacon most often to extract splinters. Works for me. Try at your own risk.

POST OFFICE

Beyond the chicken yard was the barnyard or the horse lot. When Grandpa (6) was appointed at the post office as the rural mail carrier out of the Wayne City Post Office, he was the first one at the time the government instituted the rural free delivery. He drove a wagon that was like a big square box on four wheels -- typical carryall designed by some screwball in the Post Office Department in Washington. But it worked, and he delivered the mail all over there. (35) Well, that was a pretty nice job in those days. When he became of age he had to retire, though, that was just a few months before they passed the pension law, so Grandpa never did get a pension out of his days of carrying the mail. But back in that barn lot was the barn. It had a couple of stalls for horses and a corncrib. There was a loft for hay, and then a shed on the side where he kept his carryall that he delivered the mail in. Next to the fence was a driven well. (36)

Now this well was enclosed in metal pipe. I judge it was about ten inches in diameter. The bucket was tied to a rope that went over a pulley, and this bucket was about six inches in diameter. It had a valve at the bottom and the bucket itself was about three feet long. You let that down into the well, and when it hit the water the valve would open and the water would rush in; then you’d pay out rope until you found that the bucket had hit the bottom. Then you’d pull it up again and the valve would close. And when you got it up, you’d rest the bottom of the bucket on the little bench beside the well and then pour the water into a bucket to carry it to the house. Now a grown man could have just lifted the thing up and poured it in there, but water weighs eight pounds to the gallon (37) and this had about three gallon of water in it and I wasn’t big enough -- so I had to rest the bottom on this bench and about half the time, why, I’d hit that valve and all the water would splash out on the ground and I’d have the whole thing to do over again! Sometimes Grandpa would have me to go out there and it’d take me about an hour to draw enough water out of that well and fill the horse’s trough with it so the horse could drink. But I don’t remember too much about that. I remember visiting down there earlier and I would watch of an afternoon to see if Grandpa was coming and when I saw him turn the corner up by the schoolhouse, I’d run down the block to the other corner and he’d stop, pick me up and let me drive the horses into the house and around to the barn. He never would let me un-harness the horse. I didn’t want to, anyway. I was scared to death of them. (38)

Footnotes For Post Office

35) The post office has provided jobs for our family members for nearly a hundred years. John Close was a rural mail carrier (I have his cap insignia). After Great Grandfather John came my grandfather Albert F Close. He worked as a railway mail clerk. My father Euil Wayne Morgan clerked in the office and also worked as a railway mail clerk. After retirement I had a part time job as a rural mail substitute carrier. My oldest son E. W. Morgan II worked for five years as a clerk and carrier. That’s five generations. My mother and some cousins clerked at the post office in Dahlgren and Mt. Vernon.

36) A driven well was a way of getting water without depending on water washing off the roof into a cistern. Unfortunately these wells tended to be shallow and were driven near the outhouse or the barnyard. This was a contributing cause to the typhoid and dysentery often rampant in Wayne County.

37) Actually it is 8.345404 pounds per gallon but Dad is “close enuff fer common folk”. Forty years of chemistry does make one picky.

38) Dad never did care much for hay burning horse power but he could harness and handle a team. He gave me a great piece of advice on handling a team: “When the horse sneezes, hold your breath!”

BACK TO WAYNE COUNTY LIFE AGAIN

Grandma and Grandpa Close had several children (39). They had two boys, Uncle Charlie and Uncle Bob. They had several girls. One of them, Aunt Meady, I think was the one who died shortly, and there was another one who died young (40). One had typhoid fever and she lost all of her hair and I’ve seen some pictures of her completely bald. One of the other girls was the mother of Zeta Green (41) who married Orville Green whom we call Si, and Zeta had a daughter Bernice who was Keith Hunt’s wife, who lives right next door to us here (42). I remember…I was walking, I was below school age I can feel quite sure, maybe three years old, something of the sort, when they took me down to see Zetey and the new baby. I wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Aunt Rose (43), who was with us then, said “Don’t you like the new baby?” Then she said “If you don’t like the new baby, why don’t you pop it one in the nose?” and I did. You can just imagine what that started.

Now the boys. Uncle Charlie lived on the banks of the Skillet Fork Creek about a mile east of town (44). I’ve made that walk many a time and had some wonderful times playing there. As any child psychologist can tell you, it’s the unknown, the strange that attracts people. I was always there in the summertime when the water was low and the creek right along there had a hard pan bed and it was safe to wade out in it. I’d wade out in it and turn over rocks and so forth and imagine that I was going to discover huge diamonds. I’d read somewhere that black rocks and blue mud were the indication that diamonds were laying around somewhere and they sure was plenty of black rocks and blue mud there.

Uncle Bob moved out on the banks of the same creek only quite a few miles further downstream to south of Boyleston. This was really out in the wilderness (45). He became the supervisor of a huge estate of about 10 – 20,000 acres of nothing but wilderness. One of his jobs was to see that no timber thieves stole or cut down any of the trees and also to collect footage from the sawmills who were operating there and forward the money to the offices of the lawyer or whoever it was that managed the estate in New York. That was quite wild territory. Every time we went down there the first thing I did was to make a beeline for the woodlot ‘bout a hundred feet or so from the house. There was a great big sweet gum tree there and I’d give that thing a couple of blows with an axe so the next morning I could go out and the sap would ooze out and form big gobs of gum and that was the loveliest chewing gum you ever chewed on. It didn’t have any flavor to it but it was good chewin’. And right nearby there was the privy, the garden castle, toilet, whatever you want to call it, just as the pioneers might have conceived it. There were four posts in the ground and you were hidden from view by just gunny sacks hanging down there. The reason Uncle Bob didn’t put up a more elaborate structure was that every spring in those days they had three or four feet of water there and a light structure like that would have been floating off down the river. (46)

A few feet further on beyond, though, was where he kept his five or ten stands or hives of bees. A little path ran along there between the beehives and the creek and you had to be careful, if you went up that way to fish, to stay on the path and to move carefully and softly and not swing your arms because those bees were wild. I was scared to death of them.

In those days the farmers planted mainly corn and sunflowers. Those were their main crops. They tried to get their grain seed into the ground early enough so that they could do their last cultivating before the Fourth of July. They reasoned that if the corn wasn’t high enough by the Fourth of July to do the last cultivating -- which they called “laying it by.” then it wouldn’t grow enough to make full-sized ears of any account by the time the frost came around (47). So in celebration of “laying by” the corn on the Fourth of July, it was customary for all of the families around there, ten or fifteen families -- maybe a hundred people -- to come down on the banks of the Skillet there, south and west of Uncle Bob’s house and have a big fish fry. They’d gather there early in the morning, go down to the place where Uncle Bob and some of the men had arranged rough tables out of sawed sawmill boards and the women would set out their baskets and kids would play. ‘Course I was large enough by then that I was always in the midst of it and wanted to take a man’s share, even though I wasn’t bigger than a minute. (48)

Footnotes For Back To Wayne County Again

39) See footnote six for the family outline. There is another Close family in Wayne and Clay Counties that sometimes cause confusion.

40) James died at sixteen months. Kate died at fifteen and Meada died of “cerebral congestion” at eighteen. The Close family bible has this entry for Kate:

Katie dau of John and Marthy J. Close June 6, 1886 Jan 16, 1901

“A precious one from us is gone, A voice we loved is stilled,

A place is vacant in our home, Which never can be filled.”

Katie may have died from Typhoid but the death certificate has not been found.

41) Mary Close (1876- 1910) married 1) Wil Straud c 1894. She married 2) William Hale c 1899. Child of Mary Close and Wil Straud was Zeta Myrtle Straud b May 8, 1895. Children of Mary Close and William Hale were Russel, Oakley, and Glen. Zeta Myrtle Straud (1895 – 1978) married Orval Pearl Green (1889 – 1987) on January 10, 1914 in Wayne City, Wayne County IL. Orval and Zeta had Bernice Mae, Mary Jane, and Oval Paul.

42) Living next door to cousins is a mixed blessing. Bernice and I are of the same generation but she was a decade or two older than I. Naturally I couldn’t get away with anything and was a handy “yard boy” when her chores piled up. The good far outweighed the bad.

43) “Aunt Rosie” was only sixteen or seventeen when she initiated this little bruhaha. She was always a bit saucy and good at stirring up her younger nephews and cousins.

44) A visit to Uncle Charlie and to Uncle Bob was a great treat for us. Somehow we often visited when the Skillet Fork was in flood. That place was terrifying when the flood water would cover the deck of the bridge. Uncle Charlie lost two children to dysentery and typhoid. They drank un-boiled river water. Mother would make sure we had our own water or “Mom” Morgan (Ida Close Morgan) would buy us a nickel coke. Dad had me hunt “diamonds” in that blue mucky mud when the water was low. Never found anything but it made a coating hard for the mosquitoes to penetrate.

45) That area was the wildest woods I ever saw. We picked hazel nuts, hickory nuts, fished, and spent time around the kitchen begging cold cornbread, honey, and home made jelly and jam from Aunt Carrie. I think they tolerated us because it was so easy to get lost. When I took off to explore they had a dog or two follow me. There were wildcats, snakes, and other varmints I’ve never had sense enough to stay away from. They fed the hounds cornbread and sop. I guess they followed me because the cornbread I begged was part of their dinner.

46) This is exactly how the river in flood spread disease. When we camped in Wayne County we learned to filter, boil, and re-filter our drinking water.

47) I was thinking about this custom last summer. In this age of fertilizer, no-till farming, hybrid seed and

high priced chemicals my corn was six feet high and thinking about making tassels. I’ve had to explain the term to younger friends. Remember thirty or forty bushels to the acres was a good crop. They would not believe the yields today.

48) These get-togethers built more community spirit, started more courtships, and created more township issues than you could start from TV ads and activist meetings rolled together. We were friends, family, and loved each other. We eagerly looked forward to the next church social or harvest fest.

Interlude-LOGGING FOR FISH (49)

But of a morning the men would put on their old clothes and their old shoes and they’d all wade out in the water and start loggin’ for fish. Now the proper way to log for fish is to just get right down in the water and go along and feel along the bank for all the holes in the bank, all the hollow logs, underneath the logs, feeling very, very carefully. If you touch a fish under water you can tell that it’s a fish. The trick to it is once you have touched that fish that you don’t take your hand off of him. Then he thinks that’s just a bit of debris that’s floated down there, but if you take your hand off then he knows that whatever touched him is alive -- and he’s gone. So you keep your hand on him and you very carefully work your hand until you can find out where his head is. Then you get your other hand around and in the same instant, why, you jam your hand against his snout and the other up through his gills and then you stand up with the fish.

And then… someone is always walking along the edge of the bank with a gunny sank and you take it over and you dump it in there. Sometimes they used a net where a lot of debris, brush and so forth, had gathered around the undercut roots of a tree. They’d set the net around that and then a couple of men would get in and stir it up, and then the fish would start this dashing madly away from all the commotion. When they hit the net, the men standing holding the net on the outside would reach down and grab them.

Oh, I have seen sack after sack of fish taken out of there. And I’m talking about fish! Of course these are rough fish. Channel cat, mud cat, yellow cat, weighing up four and five pounds! Carp! I’ve seen carp taken out of there that would weigh ten, fifteen pounds. We didn’t know anything about trout and any of the finer types of game fish. We ate these. Ordinary today people wouldn’t have anything to do with them but believe you me back in those days we appreciated them. After the men had gathered several sacks of fish why they’d take ‘em up on the bank down the stream a little bit and they’d clean them, and cut them up into fillets, give them to the women who’d have fire started. They’d have big iron skillets and they’d fry up that fish. And the way they did the bigger fish, they cleaned them, heads and tails and insides and gills off, you know, then they’d lay ‘em up and slice them just like you’d slice a loaf of bread. And that was the customary way of frying those fish. They didn’t bother too much, sometimes they’d put a little flour on ‘em, but usually they’d just throw ‘em in and fry ‘em. (50)

My Uncle Bob, I think, was the champion fish eater. I’ve seen him take two big slices of bread, slap a great big slab of carp fish on there and start eating. One of the things you have to watch when you’re eating fish like that is the bones. Consequently most of the people laid the fish out and they’d take a bite of bread and then they’d pinch through some fish and get all the bones out and then they’d pop that in their mouth -- but not Uncle Bob. He’d bite into the fish sandwich, one side of his mouth, and he’d start chewing and the first thing you know why you’d look up in one corner of his mouth and you’d see those fish bones begin to dribble out. He’d go through a whole sandwich and by the time he got through, he’d have her all done and all the bones spit out. I’ve never been able to do that. I didn’t quite ever trust myself to do it because if you swallowed one of those bones, why, it might cause a little damage. (51)

Footnotes For Logging for Fish

49) I posted this commentary on “loggin’ fish”on our Family Website March 3, 2003. Still holds good.
”Those of you who have listened to Euil Wayne Morgan’s tapes in his oral history “Comments Along The Way” may recall Daddy Guy spoke fondly of “loggin’ or hoggin’ fish” and the great fish fry parties that followed. Basically one gets into the creek or river and feels around the bottom with his toes and occasionally prods around the debris with his hands until a hole is found. Usually this would be by a fallen log or a rock. Then one bends over and slowly feels along until a slender form is felt. Don’t move your hand! If you do, the critter will be gone. Just hold your position then slowly work your hands up to the gills, hoping it is a catfish or a carp or a perch and trusting the Good Lord it is not a snapping turtle or a snake or an Alligator Gar. Slowly move your hands…slowly…that’s it. Find the gills, stick your fingers in the gill slots and quickly rear back, yank it out of its hole and toss that fighting fish onto the banks for lunch. Bask in your moment of glory then go get another one.

I remember Daddy Guy taught me how to do this at Uncle Rob’s place on the Skillet Fork River in Wayne County IL. Usually when the men were seriously getting dinner we small boys got to whoop up and down the banks catching and corralling the flopping fish then sticking them into a “gunny sack” (a burlap bag) and toting it up to the women. Even then the women didn’t like to clean fish. The men and boys did that when we got “e’nuff for a mess” but some of the women pitched in “to see it done right”. After we had most of what we needed the men would break in the boys and we’d get to get good and wet for an hour or so and we actually caught fish. I used to be pretty good at this and once at college in 1957 we were night fishing on the Saline River. I told my fishing buddies about this and they swore I was lying. Dean McElravy (a Korean War Veteran) bet me “camp chores” I couldn’t do it. I stripped down to my shorts and slipped into the river. It didn’t take five minutes and I had a five pound catfish for our dinner. He laughed and I had a luxurious weekend so far as cleanup is concerned. After the first meal Dean cooked the other guys swore that chore wasn’t in the bet and I went back to being Camp Cook but Dean and the others did all the cleanup.”

I should also mention Dad told me he once pulled out an Alligator Gar. (The size of the fish grew over the years from two or three feet to a six foot giant. A three foot gar will do nicely.) He tried to flip it onto the bank but it twisted in the air, nailed him on the shoulder, then made its escape. It bled nicely, and eventually left some scars, but it wasn’t all bad. The women and girls fussed over him and he was excused from the clean up.

50) Most of the Fry’s I attended had snapping hot lard in the skillets and kettles. I remember that along with the fish a goodly number of crickets, grasshoppers, and other flying creatures became part of the seasoning. At the end of the Fry when the men strained the hot oil there were a lot of “crispies” left on the screen. Nobody died… or got sued.

51) Bones and fish were a problem for Dad. After college, when I lived in Minnesota, Dad discovered the bone free joy of walleye and bass fillets. He enjoyed his fish then…in or out of season.

Interlude Completed- (52)

As I said before, that was quite wild territory in those days. When we went down there we were very careful to keep one eye on the sky all the time because you could only go on the hard road out as far as the Sims road south, and from there on it was dirt road. And it was good old gumbo and clay Southern Illinois soil so you had to be very careful or you might be mudded in there for quite a while.

Once auditors from the estate came to survey the timber holdings, and with cars it was impassable at that time of the year. So he (Uncle Bob, Robert Wayne Close) met them in his wagon, took them down and they stayed all night, sleeping on his corn shuck mattresses. The next morning he took them in the wagon down a little timber path until they came to a division in the road where it went off in all directions and he told them, and he says, “Now you get off here and you make a tour down there, so many, so far so many rods and so forth and then come to a certain direction and said sweep around.” And he said, “I got to go down here and see the men at this sawmill and I’ll meet you back here about lunch time.” And so they got out and started off down one of the timber trails, and he clepped up his horses and he went on down. He hadn’t got a hundred yards down when he heard some yellin’ a-going on and he stopped and turned around and here came these two timber runners. They said “For God’s sake don’t leave. You give us our report,” said “we’ll go back to the house and you tell us what we want to know”, said “don’t leave us alone in this God Forsaken wilderness.” He (Uncle Bob) said, “They said you can’t see the sun on account of all the branches and the clouds and the moss grows on all five sides of the trees and everywhere you looks it looks the same. We’ll just go back to the house and write what you say.” (53)

That gives you some idea of how wild it was. Believe you me, they had some scaly bark hickories down there. They had the old time shag bark hickories, them great big ones in the hull that’s as big as baseballs or bigger. Many of a time that we’ve gone down there, even after your mother and I were married, and gathered those big old swamp nuts, we called them. Found out later that they were called shag bark hickories. I know the fall of thirty-five, your mother and I had been married about two months or so, and Dad and Mother and Shirley and I decided that we would go down on a Saturday, since I was teaching school we’d go down on a Saturday, to the bottoms and gather nuts. Well, that morning we started out real early in the car and it was misting rain a little bit. By the time we went on through the south end, down through Aden, and by the time we got down there why it was a sprinkling, just a slow drizzle and we knew that we couldn’t get over those roads too far in a car so Dad stopped to the house of a fellow he knew, an old acquaintance, and left the car there. Dad rented a wagon and a team of horses. And there we went, and we traveled about five miles over those timber roads that a car would’ve had trouble with even if it wasn’t wet. We got into the woods and the leaves were falling and the nuts were falling and we, in the rain, went out there and we gathered I think it was seven big gunny sacks full of those nuts. Hulled now, I don’t mean with the hulls on them, they were hulled. And I got lost. Well… I started back to the car. You know I’m the kind always trying to see what’s right over there. Around me were all the nuts in the world that I could of used for five years but I wanted to see if there was a tree where they were thicker so I wouldn’t have to take so many steps. The rest of them went back to the car, with a load, and I started walking through the woods. Due to my scout training, I would spot a tree ahead of me and I would go straight to it. I had no idea that anything like this could happen. I decided I’d gone far enough so I turned to my right to look for the road and I walked and I walked and I walked and I… a well, I know I’m going straight, so I made another right turn, I… at least I can control my circles if I’m lost, and I went through a thicket and fifteen feet there I came to the road and I looked down the road there about a half a mile away and there was the car. I’d been walking all that time within fifteen or twenty feet of the road and I couldn’t tell it. Strangely enough after spending all that time out in those dripping woods, none of us had a cold, not a one of us. (54)

Footnotes For Interlude Completed

52) As usual Dad gets back to the story. Foraging for nuts, greens, roots, and other provender was a big part of my early life.

53) The Skillet Fork bottoms and the wilds around Four Mile Creek and Boyleston generated a number of tales. Uncle Bob told me squirrel hunters could go in there every fall and lose their way. Some were never seen again. Bob swore others had made it all the way to West Virginia without leaving the woods. He told me one old boy reappeared years later and it was determined that he had ended up in a lost world and only made it back when wandering aimlessly in their alien woods. I absolutely believe it.

54) Proving the “apple don’t fall far from the tree”, in Fall 1964 my wife and I came down from Minnesota to visit. My Grandmother Ida Close Morgan rounded up a Wayne City Cousin and I drove us all down into the bottoms to gather nuts. We filled six sacks and in record time got lost. After a bit my cousin found the car and began to honk the horn. I followed the sound and proceeded to walk off the bank and tumble into the sunken road. Gave us all a good laugh.

Tape One Side Two

Wayne County Life.The Honey Collectors

The following excerpt from "Comments Along the Way" was previous published in the family calendar "Remembering Us 2003.A Family Memory," copyright 2002 by Albert Wayne Morgan, Peggy Anne Morgan Phillips, and Graham Alan Morgan. The transcription used in that calendar was by Euil Wayne Morgan's grandson Thomas Nathaniel Morgan.

COMMENTS ALONG THE WAY

by Euil Wayne Morgan

Date of this recording: December 1985

"Much earlier than that, in about twenty-two (1922), something like that, Uncle Bob (1) sent up a letter that he had located a bee tree. And he wanted Uncle Owen (2) and Aunt Rose (3) and Dad (4) and the rest of us to come down and help him cut a bee tree. So down we went. Well this bee tree. we went about a quarter of a mile south of Uncle Bob's house and over to the side of the creek and there was this huge maple. That thing must have been four feet in diameter. And Uncle Bob took me to one side and he pointed about thirty feet up and they was a hollow in the tree and he said you look real close you'll see bees a going in and out and sure enough they were. Well the men took their axes and their cross cut saw and they preceded to fall that giant. When it crashed, it came down with a bang. I'm telling you it just shook the whole neighborhood. Well, Uncle Bob said, "Pat (5), run up there and see if there's any bees there," course he was just kidding me.

And I walked up to the stump of that tree and the top of the trunk was just about as...up to the top of my armpits. but I wouldn't climb up there. So here came Dad. He said "Son," says "don't hold back like that," says "be brave like your old Daddy." And he jumped up on the stump and then walked the trunk of that tree among all the branches up to where the bee hole was and about that time why the bees recovered from their shock and here they came. They started to (come) swarming out. Here came Dad, bending all those branches, a crashing through the underbrush, he always kept his hair cut short and mother counted later he had thirty two bee stings on his scalp. I got one on my left wrist and it like to killed me.

Now Dad never complained, never said a word, and from then on, why, Uncle Bob always had the story that he liked to tell, like most of my family they liked to tell stories, why, he'd come out when something happened and he'd say. "Be brave like your old Daddy," and slapped his leg with his hand and just guffawed to who come next. After they'd smoked the bees a little bit, cut some of the branches away, they took their crosscut saws and they started sawing off the top side of that trunk of that tree and using wedges and axes to drive them with and they wedged off the top of that thing and opened it up a space of about, oh, I'd say about twelve feet, along the top there, and that tree was hollow and it was plumb full of honey. We never got it all. We couldn't handle it all.

They must have been putting honey in there for generations after generations. But we started carrying honey, and we had these big fifty pound metal lard tins, we had milk buckets, we had everything possible that you could carry honey in, and we took shovels and we'd fill those.dip in there and fill those with honey.and two people would pick up a fifty pound lard tin, holding on to each side of it, and in their other hand why they'd hold a two or three gallon pail with honey in it and they'd start off up to the house with it. I don't know why they didn't hitch up a horse and come down there with a wagon but we carried those things a quarter of a mile.

Now I was a going along and I had two, two gallon milk pails full of honey, 'bout all I could handle, and ahead of me why there was Mom (6) and Aunt Carrie (7). They had a fifty pound tin of honey between them and each had a bucket of honey in the other and all at once Aunt Carrie gave a loud whoop and dropped that honey and began pulling her dress up and slapping. A bee had come along there and crawled up her legs and stung her in a very, very delicate place. And that gave rise to a lot more stories that Aunt Carrie didn't appreciate. So I remember (we brought back) a large washtub full of comb honey and again all of the neighbors benefited because you can eat just so much honey and then you're tired of it."

(.Wayne County Life is continued in "Comments Along the Way")

Footnotes for "The Honey Collectors":

1) UNCLE BOB is ROBERT WAYNE CLOSE, b. March 14, 1879, Orchardville Wayne Co IL; d. January 10, 1947, Wayne City, Illinois; the son of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA JANE ELLIS. UNCLE BOB m. CARRIE D. ALLEN, December 12, 1902; b. February 05, 1877, IL; d. January 10, 1947, Wayne City IL.

2) UNCLE OWEN is OWEN DEL HERBERT b. August 05, 1896, Dahlgren IL; d. March 11, 1985, Mt. Vernon, Illinois. the son of GEORGE W. HERBERT and EMMA GRACE. He married July 08, 1919, Fairfield IL; ROSA LEE CLOSE, b. June 07, 1896, Wayne City IL; d. November 29, 1983, Mt. Vernon, Illinois. AUNT ROSIE is the daughter of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA JANE ELLIS.

3) AUNT ROSE is ROSA LEE CLOSE, b. June 07, 1896, Wayne City IL; d. November 29, 1983, Mt. Vernon, Illinois, the daughter of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA JANE ELLIS. She married OWEN DEL HERBERT

4) DAD is ALBERT FRANKLIN MORGAN who was born April 08, 1885 in Jefferson Co IL, and died September 04, 1943 in St. Lukes Hospital St Louis MO. He married IDA CLOSE May 18, 1907 in Wayne City IL, daughter of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA ELLIS. She was born September 11, 1889 in Wayne County, Illinois, and died October 08, 1974 in Hickory Grove Manor Nursing Home Mt. Vernon, Illinois.

ALBERT FRANKLIN MORGAN was the son of GEORGE W. MORGAN and ELLEN KITTURIE TERRY. Children of ALBERT MORGAN and IDA CLOSE are:

i. JULIET ELLEN⁵ MORGAN, b. January 13, 1908, Wayne County, Illinois; d. December 17, 1998, Bloomington, Illinois; m. PAYTON KENDALL FUGATE, August 10, 1935, Marion KY; b. August 04, 1910; d. January 25, 1977.

ii. EUIL WAYNE MORGAN, b. March 19, 1910, Wayne City, Illinois; d. December 23, 1988, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; m. SHIRLEY JEAN CATES, August 10, 1935, Marion Crittenden Kentucky; b. July 05, 1913, Dahlgren, Illinois; d. May 18, 2003, Mt. Vernon, IL.

iii. ALMA GERALDINE MORGAN, b. November 24, 1916, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; d. January 10, 2003, Leroy Nursing Home, Leroy McLean Co IL; m. CHARLES SUMNER MAYFIELD, August 24, 1940, Marion Crittenden CO KY; b. June 23, 1916, Elizabethtown, Illinois; d. April 16, 1969, Bloomington, Illinois.

5) PAT or PAT MURPHY is the family nickname for EUIL WAYNE MORGAN I

6) MOM or MOTHER is IDA CLOSE MORGAN, the mother of EUIL WAYNE MORGAN. All of her grandchildren called her "MOM MORGAN".

7) AUNT CARRIE is CARRIE D. ALLEN; b. February 05, 1877, IL; d. January 10, 1947, Wayne City IL.

She was the wife of ROBERT WAYNE CLOSE.

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