Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas Dr. Allen White Mrs. Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

DR. ALLEN WHITE AND MRS.

MY PARENTS

For Volney P. Mooney’s history, published in 1916, William Allen White wrote this story, entitled, “My Parents:”

My father was Dr. Allen White, a pioneer doctor, who came to Kansas in 1859. My earliest recollection of my father must go back to a time when I was two or three years old and he was keeping a country store in a little wooden building which we were using as a home. It was located where the post office building site is, facing East Central Avenue, in El Dorado. It was a rambling, one-story, unpainted house, with a chimney rising from every room in it—a rusty, sheet iron chimney. These chimney’s sprouted all over the gray roof of the house and it was known in the vernacular of the town as the “foundry”.

My father kept the country store and sold everything that the pioneers would buy. Later he bought a drug store and moved over on to Main Street, and I recollect him even more vividly than I recollect him in the little store. In the drug store I remember him chiefly as wearing nankeen trousers six or seven months in the year, a white, pleated shirt (which my mother ironed with great care), and a rather broad-brimmed panama hat.

He was a jovial, good natured, rather easy-going man, but I think he must have been very effective, for I can recollect that they hanged him in effigy in Augusta in the county seat election, and that he chuckled and laughed at home and that my mother was very angry and not a little afraid that they might do violence to him. I believe they said he helped in stuffing the ballot box which carried the election. Of course, I was too little, then, to know the facts, but I should not be surprised to learn that he knew something about it. He played life according to the rules of the game at that time in vogue, and it was his chief joy in life to get results. He was a Democrat, I remember, and many and many a day I have ridden with him as he drove over the county making the first organization of the Democratic party in Butler County. The Democrats put up a county ticket and I remember this strategy—that they thought if they would concentrate their entire efforts on one man on the ticket they could elect him and so get a foothold in the courthouse. Thus Vincent Brown was elected, to the surprise and consternation of the Republications.

My father sold his drug store and bought a farm seven miles north of El Dorado, where he tried to realize a lifetime dream. He had been born and reared on a farm near Norwalk, in Huron County, Ohio. His father had cleared the wilderness and my father wanted to go back to the pioneer living that he enjoyed as a child. So he built on this farm north of El Dorado, a log cabin with a great fire place and rafters where on hung dried pumpkins and sage and onions and all sorts of festoons that held dried food during the winter. I can see him, winter nights, sitting by the fire, smoking with supreme satisfaction. He had rail fences built all around the farm, and cleared out some woodland patches and did all he could to duplicate the farm of his childhood. But the day had changed. The farm which he laid out required hired men to work it, and a lot of hired men; for my father was fat and clumsy and could not do very much. And the hired help that crowded around the table made the farm work so hard that my mother could not do it. She broke under the strain and we had to give up the farm and move back to town—back into the old foundry.

My mother was of Irish extraction. Her father was Thomas Hatton, an Irish weaver near Longford, Ireland, and her mother was Anne Kelly of Dublin, the daughter of a contracting carpenter on the docks. They were married in the Catholic Church at Longford, where presumably Anne Kelly’s father was working on a contract. I have seen the marriage register signed by Anne Kelly in the church at Longford. They came to America and my mother grew up at Oswego, New York. She was left an orphan at sixteen, with a small brother and sister, and she went west with some friends—drifted away from the Catholic Church, was converted at a great revival, joined the Congregational Church—worked her way through Knox College, doing sewing and house work, learning the millinery trade. The truth is that she did anything she could to keep herself in school, and finally having got what education she could at Knox College, set forth as a school teacher. She came west, taught school in Council Grove and Cottonwood Falls—met my father at a dance and they were married in 1867.

After our farm experience, we moved back to town, and my father, who was an expansive sort of a person and like to have a house full of company, tore down the old foundry and built what was then a commodious residence. He had so much company that my father and mother talked it over and decided to open a hotel; hence the White House, which my father and mother ran for three or four years. My mother did not like it, but my father was never happier in his life. The nankeen pants, the pleated white shirt, shinily starched, and the panama hat and the white suspenders gleam through the gloom of that day in my memory as a joyous apparition.

I think he lost money every day he kept the hotel open and I think that it was his chief pride in life that he wasn’t making any money out of his guests. He was something of an amateur cook and loved a good table. I used to go to market with him in those days when he had the run of the butcher shops in El Dorado, and he would pick out fine, thick sirloins and porterhouse steaks, and tall, fat rib roasts and bring them home to his guests, whom he fed and roomed at $2 a day. Prairie chickens were common in those days and we only used the breasts, and a little boy and I had to pick them. We also served quail and bass, and buckwheat cakes and homemade sausage for breakfast. It was early in 1882 that my mother, seeing the family fortune failing, rebelled and the hotel closed.

As I have said, my father was a tremendous Democrat, but he was a Democrat with a little “d”. One of the earliest family traditions that I now recall was a famous blow-up that he had when Kansas gave the suffrage to the colored man—a proposition which he supported—and denied it to the women. He was a woman suffragist and a prohibitionist. We entertained St. John at our house before the days of the hotel, and in September, 1882, when the Democratic convention at Emporia nominated Glick for governor on a platform declaring in effect for the nullification of the prohibitory law, my father came home and went to bed sick. It broke his heart. He took politics that seriously. He believed in Kansas; he believed in prohibition; he believed in the Democratic party and the nomination of Glick was too much for him. He died in October, though I feel sure that if he had lived and had been able to toddle to the polls in his white linen trousers and his white shirt and panama hat (which he wore clear to the last day of the mild weather in the long Kansas autumn) he would have cast a vote against Glick if it had been the last act of his life.

My mother was an Abolition Republican, as one may infer when one recalls that she was educated in Knox College and sat under the altar of Lyman Beecher, but so great was her loyalty to my father after his death that when Cleveland was elected president in 1884, she set a lamp in every window of the big house the night the news came in and rejoined mightily at the triumph of her husband’s party.

As I have said, my father was born in Ohio. His father was born in Raynham, Massachusetts, and his mother was Fear Perry, who, according to family tradition, was some kin of Commodore Perry, and my father’s maternal grandfather was a brother, I believe, of William Cullen Bryant’s father, and the White family runs back, near the little town of Raynham, Mass., to 1630; so he was pure bred Yankee and my mother was pure bred Irish, and it was a curious mixture that came into my blood. As I look back over my childhood days in El Dorado, I can see more and more plainly the marked traits of the Irish and the Yankee in our family life. It made a thrifty, hard-working, resourceful, cheerful family and I, more than most boys of my time, was blessed with the environment of books, for always my mother was reading to me. Night after night I remember as a child, sitting in the chair, looking up to her while she read Dickens and George Eliot, Trollop, Charles Reed and the Victorian English novels. My father, I remember, used to growl a good deal at the performance, and claimed that if my mother read to me so much I would never get so I would read for myself. But his prediction was sadly wrong. It was to those nights of reading and to the books that my mother had always about the house that I owe whatever I have of a love for good reading.

They always kept me in school. It was my father’s plan to send me to Ann Arbor to be a lawyer and he left $1,000, (which was considered a vast sum in those days), to be devoted to my education, and I remember that my mother’s sorrow when I quit the University of Kansas without a college degree, was poignant, and that much of it reflected what my father would think that I should quit school without a college degree.

Those were golden days for me. I look back upon them all with memoirs of the keenest joy, from the very first recollection of my parents in the old foundry to the day when I set out from El Dorado to make my fame and fortune in Kansas City. Always, in recalling those days, I have the feeling that I was made the special care for the loving devotion of two middle-aged people to whom I was set apart as the most wonderful child that had ever been born on the earth.