Main street in Iowaville, late afternoon

The Des Moines River is back within banks by now, late August, but just barely as the drawdown at Lake Red Rock upstream continues. The “road closed” sign that discouraged travel down to Iowaville has disappeared and it’s possible to reach this evocative no-place, then turn west and drive up along the old trail to Eldon.

“There’s nothing here,” some who have come along on other treks have said. Exactly.

Those of my tribe, Eurotrash who washed up on the shores of America a couple of centuries earlier, would recognize the landscape they found when they got here in the 1830s, but not the surface --- corn and beans and weeds with a few junk trees along the fringes. We’ve not improved the place.

What was here before we arrived --- Sauk and Fox, Ioway, others unnamed before them --- is the stuff of myth within myth, truth obscured by layers of fancy, legends endlessly repeated, shifting slightly each time they’re told, that have settled over the place like silt. Dilettants like myself, who dabble in history, need to be careful lest we muddy the waters further.

I’m standing here just east of Iowaville, looking east toward the hills north of Selma, a mile and a quarter downstream, on the river trail that has shadowed the north bank of the Des Moines for goodness only knows how long. The sharp left turn is fairly new, however, as is the arrow-straight stretch of road that now shoots north from here midsection out to Highway No. 16. The old river trail used to meander on down along the river southeast to Selma, but at some point that stretch was abandoned and closed. The old road north used to come down to the river behind me, straggling alongside the Iowaville ditch that now cuts through the village site. There was no Highway 16 then.

Back up with me a ways, then click and enlarge the photo below, look to the northeast, and you’ll see a white dot in the distance. That’s the Iowaville Cemetery sign, marking the spot where most of those who died down here when there was an Iowaville are buried --- suspended below enigmatic mounds that reportedly crown the bluff above and the highest reaches of the flooding river below. There are tall tales of young men who swam from the Iowaville Cemetery to Selma once when flood water spread bluff to bluff four miles wide.


If I am not mistaken, Robert Rathbun’s Iowaville House hotel, long a farm house, stood to the right of the old grain bin here until the 1950s --- Iowaville‘s last building. I listen for Robert’s voice sometimes while standing here, or nearby, without much hope of hearing it.

Robert, who came here before 1840, age about 40, was Iowaville’s blacksmith and later proprietor with his second (or third) wife, Letitia, of the Iowaville House. They had six guests when the 1850 federal census of Iowaville was taken in October of that year --- a lawyer, a laborer, a farmer and three carpenters.

One of the early true believers, Robert’s son, Hiram, credited him (along with my uncle, George Miller) of being responsible for convicting Sidney Rigdon, a towering and later disgraced figure among the early Saints, of the prophetic truth of the Book of Mormon and by extension the veracity of its revelator, the prophet Joseph Smith Jr. Robert followed that prophetic voice to Independence, Missouri, where his blacksmith shop was destroyed by “gentiles,” then to Caldwell County, Missouri, where something went horribly wrong at Haun’s Mill and his family shattered. His then-wife, Hannah, took the surviving children back to Ohio and Robert ended up here, described still as “a Mormon preacher” in the 1850s.

Robert survived the great Des Moines River flood of 1851, but became suddenly ill mid-April, 1856, scrawled a minimal will on 11 April, died on the 14th. He died seized of the Iowaville House and its barn, four other town lots, “a cow and yearling calf, household furniture, notes, books and accounts, provisions, &tc.”

Robert is buried at Iowaville Cemetery beneath a broken stone so blackened by time that it’s almost illegible. His name is misspelled “Rathburn” on it, not surprising since Letitia, who probably ordered it, could neither read nor write. I would love to know more of Robert’s story, but time has silenced him most effectively.


Turn around and look west now and you’ll see the little bridge across the Iowaville ditch in the heart of the village, dug at some point many years ago to drain the Avery spring --- a lavish source of pure water flowing out of the base of the hills to the north.

Cross the bridge and look farther west. Most of Iowaville would have been on the rise to your right, the river to your left.


Follow the road west, bend slightly southwest along the river with it and then turn again to follow the river northwest and you’ll come after a little more than a mile to the site of James Houston “Jim” Jordan’s home and, just southeast of it, the old lock-keeper’s house and the site of Black Hawk’s lodge, where the old chief died.

The Jordan home place, once the finest in this valley, survived until 1964. By now, the site has been bulldozed flat and left entirely featureless, a remarkably ugly rock quarry dug in its back yard.

I listen for Jim Jordon’s voice, too, because the tales he told seem to have set the agenda for most of what we‘ve heard since about this place. He was Black Hawk’s friend as the old warrior moved toward death.

Black Hawk and Jim Jordan, in a macabre sort of way, share more than a friendship and old men's tales.

Just as Black Hawk’s body was snatched from its grave some distance north of the Jordan farm in the 1830s, so too, during the 1930s, was Jim Jordan’s body snatched from its resting place in Iowaville Cemetery. But, more of that another time.

In the mean time, the Des Moines River flows on by as it always has just beyond the trees.

High water marks

As you can see, the proprietors of the 1846 Mason House Inn at Bentonsport are taking no chances. Sandbags remain in place in front of the venerable building, flooded many times in its 162 years but spared when the Des Moines spread beyond its banks and crept onto the street in front during June.

There was some joking at the Greef Store, when I stopped in Monday headed back upriver from Farmington, that the bags painted red and green would look cheery for Christmas. I doubt it will come to that.


Still, the old river is running high, as you can tell from this photo shot upstream from the old 1883 bridge connecting Bentonsport and Vernon toward the new. This is less a factor of recent rain than it is of the Army Corps of Engineers managing the level of Lake Red Rock at the dam southwest of Pella, but it looks darned intimidating.

Here's a shot looking east toward Bentonsport and the Mason House from the footpath that since 1994 or so has used the old bridge as a base to connect the two villages for pedestrians. Driving across that old bridge, when it was the only bridge, used to be a major treat --- approach cautiously from either end to make sure no one was headed your way (if you were careless enough to meet someone on the bridge there was no option other than one or the other backing off), then drive slowly across as the old girl rattled and shoook. Ah the good old days.


Bentonsport and Vernon have taken a couple of big hits lately as towering figures in their recent history died. Burretta Redhead, who with her husband, Herbert, literally shook Bentonsport and brought it back to life, died during February of 2006. And Wendell Mohr, acclaimed watercolorist who turned the 1851 Vernon School into his home and studio in 1970, died on 25 May of this year. The old bridge that connects their former homes isn't a bad place to remember them and say "thanks!" for lives superbly lived.

Here's a final photo --- from the bridge toward the back of the 1852 post office building that used to stand just south of the Mason House until it was moved onto the riverbank --- and beyond it, the 1853 Greef Store.

Abner Kneeland don't get no respect ...

… at least not much in Iowa, including Farmington down in the southeast corner of Van Buren County, where the grand old infidel rests on a hill overlooking the Des Moines River valley with his fourth wife, Dolly, and other family members by his side. You’d expect at least a plaque when you’ve got custody of the mortal remains of one of the most innovative (and controversial) religious thinkers of the first half of the 19th century, the last man tried and jailed for blasphemy in Massachusetts and, some say, the nation.

Abner also, in 1839, was the first Iowan to launch a utopian community (this one for free-thinkers) at his Salubria along the river about two miles south of Farmington --- establishing a tradition carried forward by others, including arguably the most successful to date --- the Christ-centered Community of True Inspiration’s Amana Colony. And if you think that tradition is dead, consider Maharishi Vedic City north of Fairfield, founded in 2001 by followers of Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, the guy who brought us Transcendental Meditation. Ah, heaven on earth and the wonderfully whacky notion we can create it (overlooking the possibility the Creator may already have done that and we're just not paying attention).


Abner is a fascinating guy, born 7 April 1774 in Gardner, Massachusetts. Largely self-educated and trained to be carpenter, he moved as a young man to Dummerston, Vermont, where he married in nearby Putney the first of four wives (all removed in sequence by death save the last, Dolly, who survived him), Waitstill Ormsbee.

At Putney, he was duly dunked by the Rev. Josiah Goddard, became a member of the Baptist church and in 1801 began to preach. But Abner was by nature a seeker --- and soon the notion of universal salvation then rising in New England attracted him. Most Baptists were not amused by the idea of universal salvation.

That Universalist line of thought --- that God has an open-door policy --- developed in an era when it generally was felt one needed the proper combination to unlock the door to salvation (as a good many Christians still profess). In Universalism, the concept of hell went to hell, and that was considered heresy by many anxious to see those who disagreed with them fry. Still, Universalists (many of whom also were unitarian in outlook, dismissing the notion of the Trinity as fanciful) were more strongly Christocentric than the Unitarians and few of either profession dispensed entirely with God.

Abner was licensed as a Universalist preacher in New Hampshire in 1803 and ordained in 1805. He subsequently served Universalist societies in Charlestown, Mass., Whitestown, N.Y., and Philadelphia before relocating in 1825 to the Prince Street Universalist Society in New York City where his increasingly pantheistic views split the fellowship and led to his eventual withdrawal and finally disfellowship.

In 1831, he moved to Boston to become lecturer for the new First Society of Free Enquirers and with a long history in writing, pamphleteering and editing, founded his own newspaper, The Boston Investigator. By this time, he had tossed Christianity and organized religion as a whole out with the bath water and in the process of doing so landed himself in hot water.

The straw that broke the Boston establishment’s back was published in The Investigator of 23 December 1833:

“1. Universalists believe in a God which I do not; but believe that their God, with all his moral attributes (aside from nature itself) is nothing more than a chimera of their own imagination.

“2. Universalists believe in Christ, which I do not; but believe that the whole story concerning him is as much a fable and fiction as that of the god Prometheus, the tragedy of whose death is said to have been acted on the stage in the theater in Athens five hundred years before the Christian era.

“3. Universalists believe in miracles, which I do not; but believe that every pretension to them can be accounted for on natural principles, or else is to be attributed to mere trick and imposture.

“4. Universalists believe in the resurrection of the dead, in immortality and eternal life, which I do not; but believe that all life is mortal, that death is an extinction of life to the individual who possesses it, and that no individual life is, ever was, or ever will be eternal.”

Holy heresy! After three trials stretching over a five-year period, Abner finally was jailed for 60 days in Boston in 1838.

The whole process, however, was something of a turning point, although a far from complete one, in U.S. views of religious dissent. Even firm and convicted Christians began to understand what could happen if they dared express a view that seemed unorthodox to whoever was in charge at the time.

And Abner himself stoutly maintained that he was in no way an atheist --- merely a pantheist: "I had no occasion to deny that there was a God; I believe that the whole universe is nature, and that God and nature are synonymous terms. I believe in a God that embraces all power, wisdom, justice and goodness. Everything is God. I am not an atheist but a pantheist," he wrote.

Backing up 30 years, you’ll remember perhaps that Abner had married Waitstill Ormsbee in 1797 in Putney, Vermont. They became the parents of four children before her death in 1806. He then married Lucinda Mason of Wrentham, Mass., in 1806 and they had four children as well before her death in 1812. In 1813, Abner married as his third wife Mrs. Eliza (Deland) Osborn of Salem, Mass., and although that union produced no children it endured until her death, too, Finally, in December 1834, he married Dolly Lovering Rice whom he had met a year earlier when she asked him to officiate at the funeral of her late husband, James Rice, who died 5 December 1833. Abner was 60 at the time of the marriage and Dolly, in her early 30s with four children of her own Abner and Dolly went on to have four more children, the youngest of whom was born in Iowa when he was 68.

Out of Jail in 1838 and with the backing of the Boston First Society of Free Enquirers, Abner looked west for a new home where he and others could perhaps escape militant Christianity and found a city of free thought, set on a hill.

It‘s not especially clear who conceived the idea of the community called Salubria or who alighted upon its location about two miles south of the frontier village of Farmington on the east bank of the Des Moines in what became Van Buren County. More than likely it was a collaborative effort of several Society of Free Enquirers members and Kneeland. But when Abner decided to go there, he became its leader and prime mover.

Abner came west in May of 1839 with his stepson, James Rice, and they built a home. Dolly and her four daughters, three Rice and one Kneeland, followed, leaving Boston in June and arriving in Iowa in July.

Some misunderstandings about Salubria have developed over the years. It was in no way intended to be communal, for example; merely free of organized religion. By some estimates there were as many as 100 Salubrians in and around the community center. And there was some evangelizing going on. Abner is known to have lectured in the river towns of Farmington, Bonaparte, Bentonsport and Keosauqua and elsewhere and to have continued contributions via letter to The Investigator back in Boston.

The Christian preachers arrived hot on Abner’s tail --- and probably because most of them outlived him by many years, it doesn’t take long with a Google or other search to find several instances online of preachers strutting around crowing about how they bested Abner in debate and sent the Godless infidel running for cover.

This all seems unlikely, since Abner was by all accounts a gifted speaker and debater and the most gentlemanly of contenders, and unlikely to run from anyone. He who lives longest sometimes wins merely by doing so, however, and Abner didn’t.

Abner was old in terms of those days and his followers were few and his sudden death on 27 Aug 1844 at age 70 pretty much removed the unlikely possibility that Iowa would develop as a pantheistic paradise rather than as one of the stronger links in the Bible belt of America.

Abner was buried with others in a little cemetery at Salubria and remained there for somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 years. Among those who joined him were his stepson-in-law, Thomas Crim, who died June 6, 1858; his stepdaughter, Dorcas J. (Rice) Crim, who reportedly died in 1864; a James Kneeland, whom I can’t identify because I can’t read the inscription on his tombstone or find anything else to tell me precisely who he was; and Dolly, who died at Keokuk at the home of her daughter, Dolly L. (Rice) Drummond/Farris, on 5 November 1871, age 71.

All still were at Salubria in the late fall of 1880 when the following report appeared in The Farmington Bee of 6 November: “On last Sabbath it was our pleasure to visit the grave of the aged and celebrated Pantheist, Abner Kneeland. This noted man established himself two miles south of this city, in a small colony which he called Salubria. In the month of August, 1844, he very suddenly died. His grave is marked by a plain marble slab, surround by some half dozen other mounds. Over the sleeping-place is growing kenicanick and briars, the whole surrounded by a field of green growing wheat, and in the distance is still standing the house built by his hands. The place is, indeed, salubrious and romantic. One standing upon this beautiful spot cannot help being struck with the former bravery and wisdom of the venerable sleeper.”

Not long thereafter, perhaps because of the abandoned nature of the cemetery, the Kneelands and their tombstones were brought into Farmington and the bodies reinterred in a new addition to the Farmington Cemetery, located on a bluff just east of town. And there they remain to this day.

And I think some sort of minor monument explaining a bit of this history to passers-by is in order. The people of Van Buren County might consider this, the Unitarian Universalists (who consider Abner a founding light on the road to rationalism), even a coalition of Christians: There’s nothing better for stirring up revival, after all, than the sort of righteous indignation a pain in the ass like the Rev. Mr. Kneeland can and did inspire.


The grave of Dorcas J. (Rice) Crim, one of Dolly's daughters by James Rice, is located just south of Abner's. She reportedly died in 1864 although most of the inscription on her tombstone either is below ground or, if this is just a tombstone fragment, missing entirely.


Dorcas J. Rice's husband, Thomas Crim, who died in 1858, is buried just south of her. Like the others buried on this lot, his original resting place was the small cemetery at Salubria about two miles south.


This appears to the top part of a larger tombstone. The inscription begins, "In Memory of James Kneeland," but I simply couldn't make out the rest. I do not know who James was. He was not a child of Abner, however.


This is a view, looking northeast, of the entire Kneeland lot. The stubby marble obelisk at the south end of the lot has simply dissolved over the years and there's not a trace of an inscription although probably there once was one to tell us whose grave it marks.

To reach the Farmington Cemetery, turn east off Highway 2 in the east part of town onto Van Buren County Road J56 (Pearl Street) and follow it up around the hill on which the cemetery is located. The cemetery is full and a newer burial place in south Farmington has supplanted it. In addition to some interesting old tombstones, many in deplorable shape, the old cemetery contains some of the finest oaks I’ve seen, trees that perhaps predate this hill’s present use. You can turn onto short circling drive through the newer east part of the cemetery. But be warned if you’re tempted to drive into the old cemetery on what looks like a grass trail you’ll have to back out, dodging tombstones and trees all the way. It’s best to park and walk. You’ll find the Kneeland lot in the extreme northwest corner of the cemetery, out on a point west of the original hilltop burying ground.


There’s a good deal of material about Abner available online and, of course, in print. I’ve relied heavily on Mary P. Whitcomb’s excellent article entitled “Abner Kneeland: His Relations to Early Iowa History” published in the April 1904 edition of Annals of Iowa (I lifted the alleged heretical statements published in The Investigator from this source); Stillman F. Kneeland’s 1897 Seven Centuries of the Kneeland Family, where I found the report of a visit to Abner’s grave as reported in the Farmington Bee; and an excellent concise summary of his life found on the Web site of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.

On the road to Abner Kneeland's grave Monday ...

... I stopped at the Davis County Iowa Welcome Center in Bloomfield to pick up an Iowa map. Didn't really need one, but a map makes me feel secure and the last time the old pickup went in for an oil change I did a clean sweep to make it look a little less like someone was living in it --- and the maps ended up in a heap in the house in Mason City. Iowa produces and gives away wonderful road maps and welcome centers (rest stops, too) are some of the places you can find them.

Besides, I like the Bloomfield Welcome Center, located maybe a block north of the northeast corner of the square right on Highway No. 63. If I'm remembering right, it's a restored Sears, Roebuck & Co. house. The two front rooms form a shop featuring local crafts, books and the like. The volunteer attendant, surrounded by the usual blizzard of pamphlets and promotional material, sits in the old dining room and the room north of that is a Christmas center --- interesting if you're in the mood for Christmas in August. And then there are the usual restrooms, etc.

I always find something to buy, for better or worse, and this time it was a copy of the brand new "Mars Hill: A Living Legacy," by Michael W. and LeAnn Lemberger (Ottumwa: PBL Limited, 2008, list price $24.99 --- yikes!). But it's for a good cause, the restoration of Mars Hill Baptist Church whose torching by stupid-kid arsonists I lamented a couple of years ago (with pictures) somewhere else in this rat's nest of blog entries.

The restoration after the fire of Iowa's oldest functioning log church out there in the woods between Ottumwa and Floris is nearing completion, it's good to report. I planned to stop when I was headed home later Monday, but took a wrong turn north of Floris and missed it entirely (but it was a pretty drive anyway). I can always find Mars Hill coming in from the north, so that can wait until another day.

The fiberglass horse attached to an Amish buggy in front of the welcome center signifies that Bloomfield is at the heart of one of Iowa's fastest-growing Old Order Amish communities and if you're interested in visiting some of the dozens of on-the-farm shops operated by the Amish (offering everything from groceries and furniture through tack and buggies to baked goods), you can get a map at the welcome center --- and you'll need one.

I'm not sure if it still works this way, but the welcome center folks used to turn that big plastic horse over to the historical society before Christmas and it was moved to the museum and hitched to a sleigh as part of a holiday display before being stabled inside during snow season.

I had gotten to Bloomfield along one of my favorite routes --- east from Chariton on Highway 34, then south through Melrose (the Irish capital of southern Iowa) to that Appanoose County road that skims along the north side of Lake Rathbun (water's as high as I've ever seen it there) on the Mormon Trail route before plunging south and east through Moravia, Unionville, Paris (Bunch) and Drakesville (still on the Mormon Trail) to pick up No. 63 just north of Bloomfield.

After lunch at Uncle Bob's (not quite the same as when Uncle Bob actually ran it but good enough), I headed east off the southeast corner of the square toward Troy.

Ghost stories

I’d expected lonesome, but was surprised even so by how empty the old home place felt when I drove out late Tuesday --- as if the very life had been sucked out of it.

Truth be told, I hadn’t planned to go out there this week --- let it rest for a while, leave it to the Realtor. But my aunt, now safe in the suburbs a long day’s drive away with the old Buick in Linda’s and Randy’s driveway and all her belongings in storage awaiting the perfect apartment or condo, had started to worry: Where was the thermostat set? Had the phone really been disconnected? And where the heck was her pill-cutter? She wanted some photos of the old place, too.

There’s nothing spooky about the house. When my aunt and uncle started working there in the early 1970s, they gutted it, had it propped up and a new basement inserted, made a few additions and rearranged the interior space. They dropped a brand new house inside the shell of the old. And when the tiny louvers between layers of glass in those Pella windows are closed, you could be in the suburbs of any city .

Walking around outside is a little different, however, thinking about all the feet that had walked out here before, and those big old barns can be spooky --- especially when the owl family that calls the upper barn home is in residence, hooting unexpectedly from its depths.

I kept hearing a sound I couldn’t place out by the barns --- a humming. Someone operating equipment in the distance? A ghost? Then I batted away a few incoming rounds that had gotten tangled in my hair and looked up into the twin pines, remnant of a great windbreak that once had encircled the farmstead, and spotted the swarm of bees. A big one.


I could just see Granddad then in his bee-keeping gear, smoker in hand, headed up a ladder to soothe, then capture and hive that swarm. An orchardist, he always kept bees; and I remember the honey, still in combs, in a big cut-glass bowl in the middle of the kitchen table.

That got me to thinking in a fanciful sort of way about ghosts who might haunt this place now that the life had gone out of, who might have taken advantage of the vacuum and moved in for a while to reclaim it. It had to be people who had died here, I decided, on the larger farm that our home place and the older Miller farmstead with its 60 acres just down the road once formed.

It’s nice when you can pick your ghosts and set the parameters for them.

Understand that I don’t believe in ghosts --- spirits from beyond the grave. Such ghosts as do exist live in our heads I think; we create them --- sometimes to feel good, sometimes to feel bad and at other times just to scare ourselves to death. I’ve known people whose ghosts come to possess them. But I just think in ghostly terms sometimes.

The first to die here in our time, after 1880, was a baby boy, youngest child of my great-grandparents, who didn’t live long enough to be named although he was called Joseph Cyrus in the family Bible, named after his death for the father who had inadvertently killed him. Born 26 July 1895, he was a sickly infant and his mother, sicker. Mary Elizabeth was 40 at the time and probably should have stopped with Uncle Jerry, born three years before. Cyrus, with a houseful of other kids, a sick baby and a desperately sick wife, confused medication and gave the baby a dose of something powerful intended for its mother. The baby died as a result on 14 August 1895, less than a month old.

Cyrus brooded about that, Grandpa used to say, consumed by grief and guilt. Three months later, on 15 November 1895, he fell over backwards dead into a wagonload of hogs he was taking to market in Chariton. Neighbors noticed the team and wagon traveling on their own, stopped the horses and found him. He was 42, but his ghost for me always stands alongside the road out on Highway 14 south of the Williamson turnoff, just as it starts to angle southwest down the Little Whitebreast hill to cross the creek. That’s where he died or so Grandpa said.

The next to die was another baby, this one up the road at the new house, son of my grandparents, Will and Jessie Miller. Like his uncle, whose death was a tragic accident, this baby too was named after his death in the family Bible, William Ambrose Miller Jr., just so he’d have a name. Little Will died of the whooping cough, no less sorrowful an event but less tragic. Born 6 November 1912, he died on 23 December of the same year. Even though he had been given a name, Grandpa had just the worlds “Our Baby” inscribed on the big tombstone erected many years later on that little grave in the Columbia Cemetery.

But surely two babies are unlikely to haunt much of anything 100 years or so later, long after all who remembered them are in their graves as well.

Two years after the second baby died, Jessie’s mother, Chloe Brown, died at the new house on 15 June 1914. She was 80 and had outlived two husbands, Moses W. Prentiss and Joseph Brown, and had come up from Columbia to live with Jessie and Will when they were married in 1905. This gentle and gracious lady, who had come west as a young woman with her family from Mason County, (West) Virginia, died more or less of old age, it was said, and 80 at that time was very old. My Uncle Joe, about 8 at the time, used to say he could just barely remember her at rest in her coffin in the living room.

I doubt Chloe would have much interest in haunting or inclination to haunt in these parts. Maybe a stroll down the street in old Columbia, or out north of Corydon; Point Pleasant on the Ohio perhaps. But not here.

Great-grandmother Miller, nee Mary Elizabeth Clair, was the next --- on 11 October 1933 down at the old house. She was 78 at the time, a strong woman who had raised a big family mostly on her own after Cyrus died, built the house she died in, pulled the farm out of debt on her own. She accomplished a lot in a fairly long life and I can‘t think of a reason she‘d look back regretfully enough to haunt her descendants --- hundreds if not a thousand of them by now.

Grandmother Jessie died 12 years later in the new house on 7 January 1945 at age 70 after a long and meticulous battle with diabetes conducted when treatment for that disease was in its infancy. Seventy is not especially old now, but it was a miracle some say that Jessie lived as long as she did. That was before I was born, but my folks talked sometimes of her funeral down at Belinda Christian Church on a day so cold and snowy it took a road grader running in advance to get the funeral party from the church to Columbia Cemetery and out again. This was the last time the whole process --- from embalming to visitation --- took place on the farm.

Jessie was a lot like her mother, and my mother (her daughter), I’ve been told, kind, gentle and gracious --- but strong enough to keep my rambunctious grandfather firmly in control. She also talked a lot --- maybe I inherited that since my mother didn’t. But a ghost? I don’t think so.

And finally Warren, who was my Uncle Jerry’s youngest son. Warren sometimes took on almost mythic proportions for us grandkids, his much younger cousins just up the road --- because we never saw him even though he was there all along less than a quarter mile away.

He’d come home after the Korean War to live with his dad and just got shyer and shyer as the years passed, or so it seemed. When any of us, or other strangers, showed a sign of getting close he headed in the other direction as fast as he could --- into the barns, out across the fields or upstairs if caught in the house. I saw his back one time from an upstairs window at Granddad’s house as he walked north through the orchard --- moving away from a houseful of his Miller cousins. And that was it.

Warren rented Granddad’s farm for a while, even lived in the new house off and on in a camp-out sort of way after Grandpa moved to town. But we never saw him.

“It’s just too bad,” my dad said one time. “He was a fine looking man and a smart and well-spoken one, too.” We never figured out what the problem was --- of if there was a problem at all. Sometimes when people don’t behave the way we think they should we conclude something’s wrong. But this could have just been Warren being Warren and there was nothing wrong with that. Or maybe he'd allowed his own ghosts a little too much latitude. I just don't know. I do know his sisters and brother, nieces and nephews, loved him a lot.

Warren died of a heart attack on 13 August 1980, when he was 55, in his shop down at the old farmstead. My dad was one of the pall bearers.

Warren was the last of us to die out there on the farm but I doubt he‘d haunt us. Not very sociable in life, death would be unlikely to change that.

The uncomfortable thing about all this ghostly speculation was how clearly it brought into focus my own ghost story --- the one I know is true. I’ve never told it and am unlikely to, not because it frightens but because it makes me sad. And there’s no point in dwelling on such things and I don’t think much about it anymore. Like I said, our ghosts live in our heads.

But it seemed odd out at the farm then, as evening settled it; so I got into the truck and went home.

I’m anxious for the old place to sell now, for new life to take possession and send those old ghosts, whoever they may be, on their way.

Splendor in the grass

I'd just as leave drive a truck when it comes right down to it, or farm, or build stuff --- do something that's useful. But the sad truth is I'm mechanically inept and you have to be mechanically apt to do stuff like that. (Well maybe not drive a truck these days, considering the price of diesel.)

I think this may be some kind of birth disorder --- color-blindness, for example. Like most of us who think we want to do stuff we can't, I prefer to think that if I really applied myself, worked hard at it, I could change the oil in the truck, too. Or build a deck. But another fact of the matter is I'd rather read another book, and not about mechanics or building decks, and so most likely will never know for sure.

Which brings me to the venerable Snapper (above). Isn't she a beauty? Looks a little like a small dinosaur that just crawled out of its rock, a fossil come to life. We've spent a lot of quality time together.

Other folks play golf; I mow lawn. It's not the finished product that's important you know. It's the process.

I like to push the old pusher (not the Snapper) out to the back 40 on a crisp day, divide it into neat quarters with even slices, then cut each quarter into swaths headed in different directions, a visual treat for whoever might be flying over. Cavafy is my lawn-mowing muse:

"Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches."

But when push comes to shove, I'm just as content aboard the Snapper going around in fast circles and getting that darned grass cut darned quick --- especially if I want to go somewhere else or it's 100 degrees in the shade.

The Snapper had developed a couple of minor problems this summer --- it needed a new part and one tire was wounded. So Darrin came over last week and fixed her up and on Monday when, plagued by heat and houseguests, I fired her up and roared out to the back 40 I was fired up, too.

Then I noticed she was riding kind of high --- not cutting the grass short enough.

Now I don't want no long-haired hippy lawn. I want buzz-cut. I've got long-haired hippy lawns for neighbors. The guy who owns the quarter block back of me doesn't care about grass --- he's focused on the model train outfit he's been building for years among the tufts and weeds. Fine by me; mine looks better by comparison. The guy who owns the other half of my quarter block, just to the south, cares too much about his grass and he likes it long, uniform, weed free and boring (he patrols the line with a spray can filled with poison, zapping any hapless immigrant that tries to sneak over the border from my territory into his and has accused me at times of grass abuse for cutting mine too short). I still cut mine short.

Anyhow, I kept mowing even though what was left was way too long, then drove the Snapper back to the house trying to figure out why she hadn't cut shorter.

As it turns out, Darrin had been watching and came over to see how the old lady had performed. "Well," I said, "she's cutting a little long."

"Well," he said (or something like this; trying to spare my tender feelings), "you know that little lever right there raises and lowers the blade; I raised it when I fixed it and forgot to lower it again."

Now I knew that --- a couple of years ago; but since I always mow short hadn't thought about it in a long time and that useful piece of information had just flown right out of my pretty little head.

So he lowered the blade, I rose above my humiliation, fired her up, went back to the back 40 and mowed it again. It was just as much fun that time as it had been the first time around.

Looking for love in all the wrong places

This is a post about blogging, not romance, so if you were expecting more I apologize.

I got to thinking about the topic after tracking a post on another blog to yet another blog whose author had abruptly stopped blogging and given his reasons for doing so.

One of the big issues was the fact he didn’t get much feedback. He’d installed a counter, so he knew he had a couple of hundred readers, but very few of those hits led to affirmation: comments, e-mails. He didn’t know who his readers were or what they thought about what he had written and found that frustrating.

I sympathize --- everyone who blogs appreciates affirmation I expect. I do. So keep those occasional comments and e-mails coming. On the other hand, I’ve also spent all of my working life in newspapers and learned some time ago that any writer whose self-esteem is based upon positive feedback from readers is going to be a pretty banged-up buckaroo.

You can bust your butt on a project that wins accolades from colleagues --- maybe even an award from a professional group --- but nearly all of your readers will just say to themselves (but not to you) “that’s nice,” then move silently along.

I SEE FROM ONE of the sidebars on this blog that I’ve been at it since 2005 --- a long time in the blogosphere. That’s surprising. Usually I get bored with a project after a few weeks or months and drop it.

I started blogging because I like to research and write about local and family history. It’s fun to share that, but hard to find a publisher unless you publish it yourself --- and a blog is ideal for that.

I also like to write. In fact I started life as a reporter, but moved on many years ago to editing --- and when you do that you effectively give up writing. There tends not to be time for both.

I used to compensate with what in retrospect seems a fairly amazing life in letters --- the sort you typed, folded and placed in a stamped and addressed envelope. I still have files of letters from others that I treasure. Then many of my correspondents, older and more attuned to the art of pen and ink (or typewriter or laserprinter) on paper, up and died. The rest of us switched to e-mail.

Now the blog serves as the outlet for that desire to play with words arranged sometimes gracefully and sometimes not into sentences and paragraphs, then see the result in print.


THE BLOG HAS CHANGED a little as time has passed. I started out as “FDM” for some reason, then along the way decided that was kind of silly. Now I’m just who I am, Frank D. Myers of Chariton and Mason City, Iowa.

I planned at first to write only about local and family history, and much of what’s here still is that. But I’ve broadened the range a little for purely self-indulgent reasons.

I'm trying to blog more often, on something of a schedule, because I think it's a useful discipline to do that.

OTHER BLOGGERS I read probably say a lot about who I am.

I don’t read political blogs. I find them excruciatingly tedious. I pretty much know I’m going to vote for the Democrat and I’m not going to change the minds of my Republican friends --- and that’s fine.

I don’t read angry blogs --- and by that I mean blogs that are always angry. Life is way too short.

I’ll always read an Iowa blog because I’m interested in how Iowans think --- as a rule, we’re good, thoughtful people, and there are some really good blogs out there. I wish there were more.

I read a few religion blogs --- almost all written by people who share my views about matters of faith and life. There are an amazing number of angry blogs about religion. I don’t read them.

I read a few gay bloggers. But sexual orientation is a mighty slim thread on which to hang a whole life or a whole blog --- be it homosexual, heterosexual or somewhere in between. So there’s got to be more to it than that to hold my interest.

I usually don’t read blogs devoted entirely to comments on current events. I come with built-in opinions and am capable of forming my own about topics and events I’ve not thought deeply about before.

I’m fascinated by how people live and think in places I love other than Iowa --- so there’s that blog by the dour old Republican rancher out in the middle of Montana and blogs by people who live in specific places in Wyoming, South Dakota and New Mexico.

My favorite blogs probably incorporate aspects of many of the above (including those I don't read regularly) without being obsessive about any of them.


HERE'S AN OPEN COMMENT, an unsent e-mail, to all of my favorite bloggers frustrated by lack of feedback. I enjoy and appreciate your work or I wouldn’t be among the hits your counter records. I love and honor your effort. You’ve opened your life to me and invited me in. Wow! What a gift. Thank you!

Ancient Faces: The Ratcliffes at Hogue Cemetery

I ran onto these photos taken last fall at Hogue Cemetery down in Wayne County the other day while looking for something else, so it seems like a good time to trot out the Ratcliffes, the Coxes, even Myrtillo E. Hart, credited with being the first person buried at this lovely place back in 1852.

That's Jane Anna (Boswell) and Thomas J. Ratcliffe up top with two of their sons. Grandmother Jessie did not identify the boys, but I suspect that they're the youngest of Jane's and Tom's nine children, Lloyd (born 16 May 1875) and Peachy G. (born 5 July 1877). Peach was the only grandchild to carry forward the outlandish name of his maternal grandfather, Peachy Gilmer Boswell.


Quite a while back I did some theorizing about what makes a great cemetery, and Hogue falls into greatness in my book primarily because of its setting --- way off by itself in the hills and timber with a lovely view of a lake-sized pond downhill to the west (which I couldn't photograph last fall because the sun was going down and defied my attempts to shoot directly into it.

Located maybe two and a half miles southeast of Cambria in Section 35 of Washington Township, here's what I think is the easiest way to find it: Drive about four miles north of Corydon on Highway 14 and after you cross the South Fork of the Chariton River start watching on your left for a new-like sign that says "Hogue Cemetery" pointing up a gravel road headed up the hill west. Drive about a mile and a half west on the gravel road and watch to the south (left) for a shot-up sign beside a gate that says "Hogue Cemetery," too (keep in mind this a part of the country where everybody shoots at stuff, including signs, but we won't shoot at you --- unless it's deer season and you're not wearing orange). Turn left through the gate, drive a little more than a quarter mile down the narrow lane and you're there.


Jane and Tom lived less than a mile southeast of the cemetery on the south bank of the South Chariton --- but you can't get there from here anymore since a bridge went out and wasn't replaced.

Jane, born 14 February 1836 at Point Pleasant in Mason County, (West) Virgina --- there was no "West" in West Virginia then, was the second of the seven surviving children of my great-great-grandparents, Peachy Gilmer and Caroline (McDaniel) Boswell. My great-grandmother, Chloe Boswell/Prentiss Brown, was the eldest.

If you click on the family photo to enlarge it, you'll notice a finger missing on Jane's right hand. Here's the story about that: Chloe and Jane were the eldest Boswell children, so chores that might have been handled by the boys fell to them. They were sent out one day at Point Pleasant to chop up some wood for the fire. Chloe had the axe; Jane held the wood. Jane's finger got in the path of the axe and goodbye to it. She never seems to have held her missing digit against Great-grandmother.

Peachy and Caroline brought their family (which by then included Frances Susan, William Reed, Ellis Green, America Elizabeth and Thomas W., age 1) west to Village Township, Van Buren County, in 1850. Almost whole Boswell herd abandoned West Virginia in the late 1840s and 1850 and nearly all of Peachy's siblings and his mother ended up in Van Buren County, too.

Three years later, in April of 1853, Peachy and Caroline settled just the far side of Wildcat Creek immediately north of Corydon in Wayne County.

Tom Ratcliffe, son of Jesse, was born 18 January 1834 in Jefferson County, Ohio, and came west to Van Buren County with his family about 1852 and moved farther west to Wayne County in 1853, too.

Jane and Tom probably met in Van Buren County and were married there on 2 February 1854. Tom died 15 January 1896 on that riverside farm and Jane continued to live there until 1906 when she moved into Corydon. She died 18 September 1912 at the home of her son, Peach.


Buried to the northwest of the Ratcliffes, over by the west fence, are Jane's sister, America Elizabeth Boswell (8 December 1847-16 December 1925), and her husband, George Washington Cox (8 November 1846-20 August 1898). George and "Mec" lived a little more than a half mile due south of the cemetery. And yes I know the tombstone says born 1848, but it's a liar.

George, who was a teacher, died at 52 after a long, long illness; and America outlived him by 27 years. Aunt Mec was the only one of the Boswell siblings that my mother remembered --- and only faintly. It was the long, long trek by horse and buggy from English Township, Lucas County, to Washington Township, Wayne County, that Mother remembered better.

There are other kin buried here, but their graves are not marked. Peachy Gilmer Boswell's brother, William M. Boswell (died 25 December 1867), his wife, Eliza Jane (died 23 December 1884) and two of their children, Greene H. (died about 1858) and Angeline (died 15 November 1891) lie in unmarked graves just north of the Ratcliffes. Not many people know that, but I do --- although I have no idea exacly where on that lot or in what order they are buried.


As I said, Myrtillo E. Hart, who died 13 January 1852 at age 37, reportedly was the first to be buried here at Hogue. His tombstone has fallen flat on it's back, which allows us to take a look at something I found interesting --- the maker's mark on the stone that ordinarily would be below ground level. I read it as "R.S.S., Eddyville."

Keep in mind that there weren't many people, let alone a tombstone maker, in either Corydon or Chariton (the nearest good-sized towns) in 1852. So it looks like family members interested in marking graves had to go all the way to Eddyville, way off to the northeast on the Des Moines River were Monroe, Mahaska and Wapello counties meet, to acquire one. That was about the biggest trading center (larger than Ottumwa), milling center and river crossing site in the region in those long-ago days.

Larry McMurtry's "Books: A Memoir"

You'll enjoy Larry McMurtry's brand new "Books: A Memoir" if: (a) you love books just because they're books; (b) collect (or accumulate) hundreds, even thousands, of them and have read, are reading or will read most; and (c) believe that the answer to everything is somewhere in a book and that you'll find it if you keep reading.

If you don't, you won't.

McMurtry, surely you remember, is a prolific writer ("The Last Picture Show," the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Lonesome Dove"and 36 others if I counted right, plus two in partnership with Diana Ossana) and screenwriter (including Academy-Award-winning "Brokeback Mountain" with Ossana).

Less known to many of us is his lifelong career as a book seller and occasional scout, proprietor of a sprawling establishment in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, that offers some 400,000 used, rare and collectible volumes.

"Books" is not in-depth autobiography nor is it intended to be profound --- it's merely an account of how books have woven themselves into McMurtry's life told anecdotally in 109 brief chapters filling 259 pages (Simon & Schuster, hardcover list price $24).

But the "merely" is mighty entertaining, following McMurtry's life from its start in a Texas ranch house without books to proprietorship of one of the largest U.S. book stores.

There certainly is some thought-provoking speculation about the future of books and reading in the digital age, but many more entertaining insights into the great characters in book scouting, selling and collecting.

A good many funny anecdotes, too, including an account of an encounter with Janet Lee Auchincloss Morris (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's mother), paralyzed with horror when she realized that in attempting to sell the library of her late second husband, Hugh D. Auchinchloss, she might have to deal with common folks "in trade."

It's a good read however you do it --- in one gulp or more slowly; and a good addition to that pile of books dealing with books and the people who relish them.

Who will watch the home place?

That opening line of the refrain from a Laurie Lewis song kind of says it all for most of us involved directly or peripherally (me) during the last few weeks in the closing down and family leavetaking at the old Miller home place in English Township.

The rest of the refrain would be overstating the case for most of us, although certainly not for my Aunt Marie:

Who will tend my heart's dear space?
Who will fill my empty place
When I am gone from here?

When I backed out of the long driveway early Tuesday (filled with vehicles so the turn-around was not accessible), Dick was wrangling the stuff he and Karen are hauling now back to New York into a U-Haul. His treasure: an ancient anvil anchored to a substantial tree stump that Grandpa kept in the back garage.

Among Karen's: A modest pile of rocks (to Dick's dismay, although they're used to each others oddities and tolerant of each other's quirks by now). In that, Karen is her grandmother, Jessie, and my mother, her aunt, reincarnated. For some reason, Miller women always have collected rocks and hauled them home. Karen recalled bringing a small rock back from Okinawa, where she was teaching quite a few years ago now and where she met Dick, for my mother to add to her collection on our farm south of Russell.

The big auction was Saturday, the packers came Monday and as I drove north on Tuesday the moving van was headed toward the farm from Omaha with an anticipated noon arrival. By now, the big old house is as empty as it's ever been in the century since it was built as the last of its most recent family drives east.

The auction Saturday exceeded everyone's expectations I'm told (although I wasn't there because of a command performance at the office here and I can't decide if I'm sorry or glad to have missed it). It did not rain, for a change, to everyone's relief and a big crowd turned out to pay absurdly high prices for some things; absurdly low prices for others. The auctioneer even --- as an afterthought --- sold for $40 a pile of rock that had been hauled up to the house over the years and deposited out northwest of the house. There's just no accounting for what people will buy.

People have asked Marie, Karen and Dick --- even me --- during the last few weeks if we don't feel just awful about selling and leaving a farm that's been in the family since the 1880s.

And the answer to that, for all of us I think, is well, not really. It has served one family wonderfully well for going on 130 years, but there's a time and a season for everything and it's someone else's time and season now. We just hope it continues to be loved and taken care of.

I have a strong sense of place, I think, but tend not to be overly sentimental about real estate. I wouldn't want the farm even if I could approach affording it. Others' dreams have spread themselves across those acres of rolling hills and woodland and have been invested in mighty barns and a house that reflected their thoughts about a suitable place to live. But it's the dreamers who hold a place in my heart --- Grandpa and Grandmother Jessie, Verna, Uncle Richard and Aunt Marie.

Without them, it seems hollow --- and echoes lonesome.

I'm missing Aunt Marie already --- she who is among the most delightful of human beings; and anticipating the empty space that will be left when "the girls" fail to make their annual (or more frequent) pilgrimages from across the East to the farm.

But I'll give them all a call this weekend when the dust has settled a little, and feel better about their absence.

Maybe I'll go out to the farm after a while and walk around a little, take a few more photos. Then again, maybe I won't.

The photos up top here were taken last fall, looking south across a small pond just beyond the old orchard toward the farmstead, then north across the pond to the fields and woods beyond. I just haven't had the heart lately to run around out there with a camera.

Snakebit II: Worth Eugene Nelson

Look down a ways here and you'll find the first "Snakebit," a list of stories extracted from Darlene Arnold's index to Lucas County newspapers related to rattlesnake bites (some fatal but most not) sustained by Lucas Countyans between the 1880s and 1920s. One of those who died was a little boy named Worth Eugene Nelson, but I couldn't tell from the index if he was from Lucas County or somewhere else.

Got to visiting via e-mail with Darlene yesterday about something else, mentioned this and she recalled checking the little boy's death out some time ago for a relative of Worth named Kimberly Smith, who lives in the Davenport area.

As it turns out, Worth, age 4, was bitten by the snake somewhere in Pleasant Township's wild and wooly hills. The story states that the family farm was "a few miles east of Tipperary, near Olmitz," and that's a little odd --- Olmitz was just south of Tipperary, but at least it tells us the general neighborhood.

And it's a neighborhood where you wouldn't be surprised to find a few rattlers, even today. It's beautiful --- but rough (hilly) and wooded. A couple of units of Stephens State Forest are located there, units that the state intentionally has returned to an undeveloped state after making an effort quite a few years ago to make them a little more user-friendly (the state forest units in western Lucas County, near Lucas, are considerably more hospitable).

Tipperary and Olmitz both were mining towns, now vanished. I can take you to the site of Olmitz, but it's impossible even to get to Tipperary. The road that used to continue east past Zion Cemetery led there, but it was closed many years ago; and the road in from the north now is a private lane.

Olmitz and Tipperary could be pretty tough places in their time. Dad used to talk about the time old Sam Beardsley, Chariton's best-known undertaker, went out to Tipperary to lay out a corpse. "How did this man die?" Sam reportedly asked. "Don't ask," was the answer.

But none of this has anything to do with Worth Nelson. Here's the newspaper report of his death that Darlene forwarded to me:

SNAKE BITE PROVES FATAL

Little son of Mr. & Mrs. Schaterick Nelson, of Near Olmitz, is Victim.

IS BITTEN THREE TIMES

Passes away after suffering several hours; snake menace in Southern Iowa becoming serious.

"One of the saddest events we have had to chronicle for some time is the sudden death of little Worth Eugene Nelson, four-year-old son of Mr. & Mrs. Schaterick Nelson, who reside a few miles east of Tipperary, near Olmitz, which resulted from being bitten by a large rattlesnake on his father's farm.

"On Tuesday afternoon the boy and his father were picking blackberries, and the little fellow, who was barefooted, stepped on the snake. The rattler struck him three times on the left leg, near the ankle, each bite going deep into the bare limb, and it was impossible to check the spread of the poison through his system. The boy's leg was soon swollen to three time its normal proportions. The accident occurred about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Dr. Fisher, of Tipperary, was hastily summoned, and later Dr. Hills of Russell, both of whom tried every method of relief possible, using whiskey, tourniquets, and other aids without any results, and in the evening it was decided to remove him to the Miners' Hospital in Albia. They arrived there in the evening at 9:30, but hospital officials were unable to give him any aid, and stated that the boy was so badly bitten that it is doubtful if he could have been saved if a physician had been right on the spot. He passed away on Wednesday morning about 2 o'clock. Right after being bitten, the lad said that the snake had gone into a hole in the ground. A large rattler was found about 30 feet away, however, and was promptly killed.

"The remains were brought to the family home on Wednesday and today will be taken to Centerville, where funeral services and interment will take place. The boy is survived by his parents, and by two brothers and one sister. To them the deep sympathy of all good people will be extended.

"Reports from many sections of Iowa state that there are an unusually large number of snakes this year, many of them of a dangerous nature, and people are advised to be cautious and keep a careful lookout. The greatest danger is to children, who seldom watch their steps closely, and who are unable to defend themselves if attacked. Snakes should be killed on sight."

This story was taken from The Chariton Herald-Patriot of Thursday July 27, 1922.

Kimblerly Smith told Darlene that Worth's parents were Shadrick and Lena (Zeller) Nelson, who moved away from Lucas County a few years after the little boy died. Darlene looked for a tombstone record in Appanoose County, since he reportedly was buried at Centerville, but none was found.

By the way --- if you look in the sidebar you'll find a link to the Lucas County Genealogical Society under "Lucas County Genealogy." You can find out there how to join. And if you had joined, you'd already have known all of this since it was included in the most excellent newsletter that Darlene and other members publish once a month.