Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas Burford Jeakins Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

BURFORD JEAKINS

(Transcribed by Lori DeWinkler)

Burford Jeakins has lived in El Dorado township since his birth,February 16, 1862, and in all that time has spent but three weeks outside of Butler County. That was when he made the run on horseback to the Oklahoma “strip” forty-two years ago, and staked a lot in Perry. Two weeks later he sold the lot and returned home. He has lived longer in the township than has any other man. For twelve years he was a member of the El Dorado council. Mr. Jeakins remembers when his father subscribed $13 to the sum El Doradoans were volunteering to induce the late Thomas Benton Murdock to found the Walnut Valley Times, and from that date, 1870, to this time, Mr. Jeakins has read every copy of The Times that was ever published.

Mr. Jeakins as a boy knew Dr. Allen White, father of Willam Allen White. “He was heavy set, wore a goatee and was a Democrat and a Yankee,” said Mr. Jeakins. “I always think of Bill White as a freckled-faced kid wearing knee pants, standing on a box at school to work problems, because, usually, they were long division and had to be started at the top of the blackboard. I recall the day my father drove a team of oxen to the Emporia mill to have some corn ground. He came home and said a town was to be started just north of us and called El Dorado. We were all excited about it.

“Buffalo were on the divide between our home and Towanda and when storms came they went to the river banks to eat with the cattle. My father cut down hackberry trees so the buffalo could eat the branches.”

Mr. Jeakins helped lay the track for the Santa Fe Railway line through El Dorado. He was working on the track one day when a man on horseback rode along, shouting, “Garfield is shot!”

Mr. Jeakins recalls that on his boyhood trips to El Dorado he saw many firearms glistening in the sun and there were always three or four saloons in town. He and the few other young persons in the neighborhood drove fifteen miles to literary societies many bitterly cold nights.

“I’ve gone to dozens of old-fashioned dances,” Mr. Jeakins said. “I never missed one in fact, but I have never danced a set in my life. Favorite tunes were ‘Old Dan Tucker’ and ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ and if a fiddle string broke, the fiddler kept right on playing.”