Beaumont, Kansas: Railroad Town

A ghost town full of history

Beaumont's wooden water tower held
50,000 gallons of water!

Trains don't pass through Beaumont, Kansas, anymore. After it lost the trains, the little town died, bit by bit, and today, it is a genuine ghost town.  But in the days of steam engines, Beaumont was an important stop on the St. Louis, Wichita & Western Railway. Every train clanked and chuffed to a stop in front of the water tower. The steam engines' boilers had to be refilled, and Beaumont was the place to do it.

Beaumont was created by and for the railroad. The tracks were installed as far as Beaumont in about 1879. The train depot was the first building in town, followed by a general store. In 1880, a post office was established and the Summit Hotel was built. The water tower was built in 1885 (supplying water to the hotel as well as the trains,) and a roundhouse was built in 1890.

 A spur of the railroad ran from Beaumont south to Arkansas City ("Ark City") and into Oklahoma, and the main rail line ran from St. Louis to Wichita and westward.

If a locomotive needed service, it was moved into the Beaumont roundhouse, and a fresh locomotive was moved out and attached to the train. Up to 90 men worked at the roundhouse, servicing train engines and cars. Inside the roundhouse, the locomotives were parked on a giant turntable. The turntable moved the locomotives aside for work or storage and returned them to the tracks when it was time for them to leave.

Across the tracks from the roundhouse and depot, the Summit Hotel welcomed any travelers who needed a hot meal or a room for the night. The trains brought a lot of traffic to and through Beaumont. Homesteaders came west on the trains to settle in the area, and cattle from the Flint Hills were driven to Beaumont, loaded onto the train, and sent east. And there were many other travelers and freight going in both directions. The rails were modern transportation at its best.

The Beaumont Hotel today. I am not sure if the structure
still contains elements of the original Summit Hotel.

The hotel would be at far left in this photo, across the road
from the old store buildings, if I had been able to include it all.

Steam engines were used on the St Louis, Wichita & Western Railway through the early 1950s. In a curious overlap of transportation technology, the hotel added a grass airstrip during that same decade. A customer of the hotel liked to fly from Wichita to Beaumont in his small plane. It was dangerous for local drivers when he dropped out of the sky onto the road, so the airstrip kept everyone safe and happy. After he landed, he taxied into Beaumont, just like any other vehicle. (Keep in mind that Wichita, just 50 miles away, has been a manufacturing center for small planes for many years.)

My sister and I stopped at Beaumont and looked around last summer when we went out to Kansas last summer to visit my brother. These pictures are from that visit. (I admit that I'm "one of those tourists" who is always taking photos of the historic markers.)

Welcome to Beaumont Story of the landing strip

Historic info about the tower Hotel renovation in the 1990s

The water tower is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Maybe the pipe was hooked to a big hose to put water in the boilers?

I haven't come across any information about when the roundhouse ceased operation, but as a casual explorer, I saw no remaining trace of it. A hundred yards of train tracks still lie in front of the water tower, but the rail line was discontinued around 30 years ago.

The airstrip is still there, and the Beaumont Hotel holds a monthly "Fly-In" for small planes. They also hold monthly bike-ins for motorcyclists. They have a  formal dining room as well as the 50s-style cafe pictured below. And they have the great outdoors as well, so they can host all sorts of events. But I think staying at the hotel would be a nice get-away anytime. And if I ever do stay there, I hope the biggest event while I'm in Beaumont will be the tremendous peace and quiet we saw, felt, and enjoyed during this visit.

Tracks that go nowhere Inside the hotel's restaurant

The Beaumont Hotel lobby has rustic wood furniture and accents.

Hotel boardwalk The only ghost I saw.

Big shady lawn north of the hotel Old store buildings across from the hotel

I always hate to see an abandoned church. This handsome little building may have been the post office.

More about Beaumont:

• An interesting story about early railroad days in Beaumont appeared in the June 1933 edition of The Frisco Employes Magazine. (Scroll down to page 3 to read the first part and  scroll down to page 14 for the rest of the story.) 
•  Lots of  pictures of Beaumont and the surrounding area on Flickr.
• Article and pictures from someone who stayed at the Beaumont Hotel
• The Beaumont Hotel official website

5 Feb 2014
Scott Shogren of Wichita, Kansas, shared this link to a 1905 map that shows the location of the Beaumont roundhouse. Thanks, Scott!

http://www.historicmapworks.com/Map/US/499092/Union+Township++Cassoday++Beaumont++Page+073+++Right/

The map also shows the location of the hotel and the water tank so I'm able to orient myself from those. The roundhouse was located a couple of blocks east of the hotel, on the north side of the tracks. Livestock pens were located just west of the hotel also on the north side of the tracks.

Scott added, "I remember the Frisco trains. They really sped through that part tracks line."

Mogul This and Mogul That

Powerful "Moguls" of days gone by

Vintage image of a Mogul tractor  from dok1 

In 2013, the word "mogul" has a vaguely negative feel to it. We might speak of "shipping moguls" or "manufacturing moguls", meaning the powerful people who control those industries. But a hundred years ago, "mogul" was a positive word, often used as a brand name for powerful machines and equipment.

 Mogul Motor Trucks were manufactured in St. Louis and in Chicago.  The Mogul  Street Sprinkling Truck was probably made by that company. And certain large locomotives were called moguls.

Mogul 1629 locomotive. Image by tkksummers. Gene
Autry purchased this Mogul 1629 after it was retired
 from a long life of of service on the rails. It  was used
in several Western movies and shows. You may
remember seeing it on "Gunsmoke" or "Wyatt Earp."

Mogul tractors with kerosene engines were manufactured by the International Harvester Company of Chicago, Illinois, through 1924. (If you enjoy mechanical curiosities, watch this YouTube video:  Harry Henderson starting his old Mogul tractor.)

I've written several times on this blog about the hard-working Mogul Wagons that were manufactured in Hopkinsville, KY from the 1870s through 1925. Production was halted by a fire that destroyed the factory, but the Forbes Brothers sold their remaining inventory of Mogul wagons, wheels, axels, and other parts for another 25 years.

Moguls didn't always live up to the promise of their name. The Mogul Steamship Company is mainly remembered for a court case in England that concerned it. The Mogul Mining Company was declared a poor investment by a financial adviser of 1920.

How to look and feel like a Mogul yourself? Just light up a Mogul cigarette! (Ugh. I have a feeling they were terribly strong.)

The following definitions are from a dictionary of the period, The Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913

Mogul \Mo*gul"\, n. [From the Mongolian.]
1. A person of the Mongolian race.
2. (Railroad) A heavy locomotive for freight traffic, having three
pairs of connected driving wheels and a two-wheeled truck.

Mogul \Mo*gul"\, n.
A great personage; magnate; autocrat.

Related:
Mogul Wagons from Hopkinsville sold in Mississippi, North Carolina

Willoughby Cemetery: Homesteader's Rest

An old settlers graveyard in Republic County, Kansas

Willoughby Cemetery, near Agenda, Kansas

One hot day last July, my brother, my sister, and I drove up to Republic County, Kansas, and found Willoughby Cemetery. It's named for W. H. Willoughby, the man who donated one corner of his homestead to be a community burying ground.

W. H. Willoughby (my great-great-granduncle-by-marriage) was a preacher and one of the first settlers of Elk Creek Township in Republic County.  He homesteaded on Elk Creek in the late 1860s, along with a small group of brothers, cousins, and  "in-laws." This group of original settlers included  my great-great-grandfather Ashbel Mapes. Ashbel and W. H. Willoughby were brother-in-laws: Ashbel was a brother of  W. H.'s wife Rachel Mapes Willoughby.

My gr-grandfather's Charles Leslie Hill's original gravestone.
There's also a new stone for Charles and Lilly Hill  (at right.)

My family has several graves in Willoughby Cemetery. Great-great-grandmother, Martha Vining Mapes (wife of Ashbel Mapes), is said to be there, but we didn't see her grave.  I don't know if it is unmarked, or marked with a uninscribed stone, or the words on her tombstone have weathered away. Or maybe her stone is hidden by a clump of bushes or flowers.

Great-grandfather Charles Leslie Hill is buried there, beside his first wife, Lillie Mapes, who was a daughter of Ashbel and Martha Mapes. When Lillie died of "catarrhal fever" leaving three little children without a mother, Charles married her younger sister Lana Mapes, my great grandmother.

My gr -gr -grandaunt, Rachel Ann Mapes,
She was W. H. Willoughby's wife.

Several other Mapes family members are buried in Willoughby Cemetery, including  Rachel Mapes Willoughby,  and several of Ashbel and Martha Vining Mapes's ten children: James Mapes, Nellie Mapes Boyer, Lillie Mapes Hill (as already mentioned), and probably Lucy Artimus Mapes Wharton (very likely, but not yet proven.)

Also, little Clarence Hill, a great-uncle who died at the age of 3 years and a few days, is buried there. His grave is probably at the foot of his mother's Lillie Mapes Hill's grave, where a small, uninscribed stone stands.

 While we were there, I tried to photograph all of the gravestones in the cemetery that were legible or at least partly so. I planned to post them to Find-A-Grave when I got back home.

When I began editing the photos and researching the names in Willoughby cemetery, I learned that a surprising number of people there were related to my relatives in one way or another.

All of them, related or not, were from neighbor families and many were homesteaders. Some came to Kansas from New York, Ohio, Indiana, and other states, and others were immigrants from foreign countries.Their life stories were just as interesting as my own family's. (And I don't mean that they were all saints! One of them even served time for stealing chickens.)

Intrigued by their histories, I decided that I would include at least a few sentences about the life of each person in Willoughby Cemetery in his or her Find A Grave memorial. Achieving that goal has been an interesting, engrossing project. I've found obituaries for many of them in the old Republic County newspapers. For others, I've constructed a short biography from census data and other sources.

While searching the old newspapers for the names on the stones, I've found about twenty obituaries for people who were buried in Willoughby, but do not seem to have grave markers (or their grave markers are illegible.) So, I created Find-A-Grave memorials for them with their obituaries, so their stories can be retold and remembered, too.

Willoughby Cemetery in Republic County
near Agenda, Kansas

I have done about 40 memorials so far, and I still have about 25 more photographs and a few more obituaries to work through. Some of the stones in the remaining photos are badly weathered, but maybe I can figure them out with the help of Ancestry.com, Family Search, and the old Republic County newspapers.

A shopkeeper in Agenda, a little village a few miles away, told us that W. H. Willoughby gave the cemetery land with one condition -- that no one would ever have to pay to be buried there. No burial plots in Willoughby Cemetery were ever to be sold. The community still honors that promise, she added.

The first burial in Willoughby Cemetery (that I know of)
was little Margaret Miller who died in 1871.

These Willoughby children were a nephew and a niece of
W.H. Willoughby, who founded Willoughby cemetery to
serve the needs of the Elk Creek homesteader community.
Rest in peace, little ones.

A Brief History of Immigration Before 1920

How America closed the "Open Door"

I recently bought an old civics textbook (Community Life and Civic Problems, written by Howard Copeland Hill, and published in 1922 by Ginn and Company). I have enjoyed its several chapters about immigration; it was obviously a hot issue, and  it remains so, today, as much as ever.

As I read the text, I saw that some of  my and my husband's ancestors fit very neatly into the general immigration patterns from colonial days to 1920. Perhaps you'll see where your ancestors fit, too. 

According to the textbook, the vast majority of immigrants to America before 1820 came from England. Certainly some immigrants did come from other countries, and plenty of slaves were brought in from Africa, but even if all of these people were added together, they were still a  minority in comparison to the English.

From 1820 to 1855, immigration from Ireland and Germany increased greatly. Most of these immigrants came to America to escape hard times, religious oppression, and tyranny. One of the events that spurred Irish immigration was the potato famine of 1846.

Immigration slowed down during the Civil War, but afterward, the flood of foreigners resumed. Now, the immigrants were largely German, Irish, and Scandinavian. Many of them were poor, but most were not refugees. They immigrated because they were interested in the free land of the West and the freedom and opportunity of America.

Many Chinese also came to America during the gold rush of the 1840s and the periods of intensive railroad construction before and after the Civil War. This was the era in which the Transcontinental Railroad was built.

Unemployment soared when railroad and mine work dwindled. Resentment simmered against the hard-working, frugal "China-man", who in many cases seemed to be prospering. Lynchings and riots occurred on the West Coast. To ease tension and stem the inflow of Chinese workers, an immigration treaty with China was renegotiated.  In 1882, immigration from China was formally suspended for a decade.

The ban on Chinese immigrants followed an 1876 ban on criminal immigrants. For the first time, America's "Open Door" was closed to some people.

After 1885, America saw a sharp increase in "new immigrants." These people came from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia, whereas the "old immigrants" had been mostly from northwestern Europe. Many of the new immigrants, illiterate and unskilled but eager to work, settled in ethnic communities within cities where they found employment in factories. For the first time, some immigrants had no interest in acquiring American citizenship. They wanted to work, save money, and return to their homelands.

In the late 19th century, many Japanese immigrated to work in West Coast farms and factories. They faced the same hostilities that Chinese workers endured. America viewed these workers as a  problem and pursuaded Japan to prohibit immigration to the United States. Some western states passed laws prohibiting Japanese residents from owning land.

By 1910, laws had been passed to exclude convicts, lunatics, idiots, paupers, diseased people, anarchists, laborers under contract, and all those who were likely to become dependents of the state.

In 1917, a law was passed that excluded any "aliens over sixteen years of age, physically capable of reading, who cannot read the English language, or some other language or dialect." In other words, illiterate immigrants were no longer welcome in America. The bill did provide exemptions for some illiterate people if they could prove they were religious or political refugees, or if they already had relatives in the United States.

I scanned the photos of immigrants that accompany this brief history from the 1922 book I mentioned above. (Community Life and Civic Problems, written by Howard Copeland Hill, and published in 1922 by Ginn and Company).   In my personal timeline, these photos were taken just a few years before my mom and dad were born in 1923.

Abigail Willoughby, 1822-1880

An incomplete story with a sad ending

Abigail Willoughby (b. 1822, Pennsylvania) appears as one of my great-great-great grandmothers in every family tree related to me that I've seen online. She was married to my great-great-great grandfather, James C. Vining (b. 1812, New York). James and Abigail are on my dad's side of the family. They were my paternal grandfather's maternal great-grandparents, to be exact. (I know it's confusing!)

Vague and missing info

Abigail Willoughby and James Vining are "brick walls," as family-tree researchers often say. Their branch of the family tree ends with them, because no one yet has learned the names of any of their parents. Abigail told an 1880 census taker that her parents were born in Massachusetts.

I like the sound of "Abigail Willoughby" -- it's almost poetic. But I don't know if Willoughby was really her maiden name or not. Most family trees say that Abigail Willoughby was born on 15 Feb 1821 in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, and that she married James C. Vining in 1838 in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. But where did my fellow researchers get that information? Was it in a family Bible or passed down in family letters? Or was it just an estimate and a guess, copied from one family tree to another? I haven't found any birth or marriage records at all.

Fairly reliable data

Here are some things I do know about James and Abigail:

• James Vining was living in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, at the time of the 1840 census with a total of three people in his household. The exact date of the census is not given, and only the head-of-household is named. 

• My great-great grandmother Martha Almeda Vining was born in 1839 in Pennsylvania.  Her sister Abigail Christine Vining was born in 1840 in Pennsylvania. They gave this information on multiple census records.

• In September 1850, the James C.Vining family was living in Henry County, Illinois. James was married to Abigail, and they had a new baby boy, Robert Henry (b. 1848, Illinois). 

• James and Abigail had six more children between 1850 and 1868 in Illinois. Then between 1868 and 1870, they moved to Cloud County, Kansas, where they were some of the earliest settlers.

•  James Vining died soon after they moved to Kansas. The 1875 Kansas census shows Abigail widowed and living with four of the children on a farm in Cloud County. 

• Before 1880, Abigail married Silas Zenus Waters. He was a farmer,  ten years older than her. The 1880 census shows them living in Norton County, Kansas, (about 150 miles west of Cloud County). Two of Abigail's children were still with her, listed as stepchildren of Silas Waters. One of Abigail's sons (James W. Vining) was the Norton County sheriff from 1879-1883.

• Family trees say that Abigail died in 1880. The date usually cited is December 4, 1880.

Willoughbys and more Willoughbys

I've been especially curious about Abigail Willoughby because of a series of marriages that took place in Illinois before the family moved to Kansas. The two oldest Vining girls, Martha and Abigail, married Mapes brothers. And a William H. Willoughby married a Mapes sister. Were William H. Willoughby and Abigail Willoughby related? They probably were, but I haven't been able to prove it.

I've looked at a zillion census records and family trees and I still can't prove how Abigail Willoughby fits into the Willoughbys who lived in or near Tioga County, Pennsylvania, where people say she was born. The generations aren't right. She's either too old or too young for those families.

I've entertained a weird theory that maybe Abigail's real father died and then her mother married a Willoughby, so Abigail wasn't really a Willoughby by blood. And I've explored an alternative (but similar) theory that maybe Abigail was married to a Willoughby before she married James Vining, and that her real maiden name wasn't Willoughby at all.

Most recently, I've decided that she might be the daughter of Elijah Willoughby who appears in the 1850 census in Delmar, Tioga County, Pennsylvania, living with his daughter Laura and her family.  Elijah was born in Massachusetts, so that matches. Elijah's mother's name was Abigail -- hmmm. And Abigail Willoughby (my Abigail, not Elijah's mother) named one of her daughter's Laura -- possibly after her older sister?

Betsy Who?

Lately, I've renewed my research efforts, and I've turned up two pieces of information about Abigail that I haven't seen on anyone else's family tree or read in their notes. Both of them shocked me.

First, it turns out that Abigail may not be a blood relative to me. A brief family history (on the middle of p. 202, Genealogy of the Hannum Family by H. F. Temple, 1911, West Chester, PA ) that I found for Louisa V. Mapes (my great-grand-aunt,) states that her grandparents were James Vining and Betsy Ann Murphey, of New York State.

James Vining and Betsy Ann Murphey? I had to think about that! But upon examination, it makes sense. Maybe James was married to Betsy, had two daughters, became a widower, and then married Abigail several years later. That would explain why no children were born for about eight years after the first two girls.

Also, Louisa Mapes was 53 years old and in her right mind in 1911 when that family history was printed.  Surely she was the one who provided the facts about her family. She was 22 years old when Abigail died. She would have remembered Abigail clearly, but she didn't name Abigail as her grandmother!

Abigail's death

My other discovery is very sad. Last week, I learned that Abigail Willoughby committed suicide. This tragedy was mentioned in a short biography of James W. Vining, (p. 172, The History of the Early Settlement of Norton County, Kansas by F.M. Lockard, 1894, Norton, Kansas), who was one of James C. Vining's and Abigail Willoughby's sons.

[J. W. Vining's] father died in Cloud County in 1868. His mother married S. G. Waters in 1874; they came to Norton county in 1876 and settled near Edmond, their domestic life was unhappy which caused Mrs. Waters to commit suicide. Her remains were taken to Clyde [in Cloud County, Kansas] and buried beside her former husband. Mr. Waters died in 1889.

The county history where this account appears is criticized for containing gossip, but there are two unhappy facts here, whether or not they are related: (1) Abigail's marriage to Silas Waters was thought to be miserable, and (2) she killed herself.

There is nothing new under the sun -- didn't Solomon say that? I suppose that unhappy marriages have been around ever since marriage was invented. And I've seen dozens of stories in old newspapers about people committing suicide. I just didn't expect to find such a happening in my own family tree.

About fifteen years ago, a member of my husband's family committed suicide. I know how deeply we grieved about that. I also know how I grieved when my parents died. Abigail's children must have been devastated.

- - - - - - - - - -
This article was written by Genevieve L. Netz and originally published as a blog post at http://prairiebluestem.blogspot.com/2012/04/abigail-willoughby-1822-1880.html. Copyright 2012 Genevieve L. Netz. All rights reserved. Permission is granted for attaching this article to Vining and Willoughby family trees as long as this entire notice is included. Any other use requires written permission. gnetz51@gmail.com

Bridges at Cairo, Illinois

Railroads and ferries brought prosperity

A. B. Safford Memorial Museum in Cairo, Illinois, built in 1883

Cairo, Illinois, is at the extreme southern tip of Illinois, at the point where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers converge.

I always have mixed feelings as I drive through Cairo (pronounced "Care-roh".) Sadly, the town has endured a long period of hard times and population loss. In the business district, empty lots suggest that many deteriorated buildings have been bulldozed and hauled away. Some old buildings, still standing, are candidates for the next demolition list.

I'm not sure if this church is in use.

But the town still has some fabulous old buildings. I always enjoy the architecture when life leads me to Cairo.

Cairo became an important railroad hub after the Civil War, and the town enjoyed several decades of great prosperity. Train cars (and other vehicles) were ferried across the rivers, and the ferry business was as important to local fortunes as the railroad and river-shipping businesses.

The Riverlore in Cairo, Illinois

During this era, a U.S. Customs House was built in Cairo to process goods from foreign countries.  The Cairo Post Office (a mail distribution center of major national importance) and a Federal court were also located in the Customs House.

Then in 1889, the Illinois Central Railroad completed the Cairo Rail Bridge across the Ohio River (image, another image). It was a masterpiece of engineering. The metal bridge itself was nearly 2 miles long and the entire structure including the wooden approaches was almost 4 miles long. Freight from Chicago could travel directly to New Orleans via the Cairo Rail Bridge -- a revolution in rail shipping, but a blow to Cairo.

More mansions in Cairo

In 1905, a group of five railroads built the Thebes Rail Bridge over the Mississippi River, eliminating the need for railroad cars to be ferried at Cairo. Thebes, a town on the Mississippi River about 25 miles north of Cairo, was chosen for the bridge because the earth there was much firmer than at Cairo.

Vehicles traveling in the Cairo area still used the ferries until two highway bridges were built -- the Mississippi River bridge (leading to Missouri) in 1929, and the Ohio River bridge (leading to Kentucky) in 1937. The bridges and roads connected a short distance south of Cairo, so travelers could quickly cross both rivers without even entering town.

The loss of the railroad and ferry industries was significant, but it alone did not kill the town. By the early 1900s, other serious problems (racism, corruption, violence, crime) were well-established in Cairo. Over the next century, these evils had a slow-but-deadly effect on the town. You can read about the darker side of Cairo's history at "Cairo, Illinois, Death by Racism."

Overgrowth and disrepair, too!

Last summer, I traveled from Kentucky to Missouri. South of Cairo, I crossed the Ohio River bridge from Kentucky to Illinois, but the Mississippi River bridge south of Cairo was closed for repair. So I drove through Cairo, got on Interstate 57 a few miles north of town, and crossed over the Mississippi River and into Missouri on the I-57 bridge. A few days later, I drove through Cairo again on my way home. That's when I took these pictures.



Related:
A photo I took inside the Customs House some years ago
Seen at Wickliffe, Kentucky

Ohio River bridge, just south of Cairo

Winner of the "Most Colorful Ancestor" Award

Robert Henry Vining (1848-1888)

Robert Henry Vining was my great-great grand-uncle on my dad's side of the family -- a  younger brother of my great-great grandmother Martha Alameda (Vining) Mapes. Henry's parents moved from Pennsylvania to Henry County, Illinois, in the 1840s, and Henry was born there in 1848. He spent his boyhood years on the family farm on the Illinois prairie.

Kennesaw's Bombardment '64
Sketch by war correspondent Alfred Waud

In 1864, at the age of 16, Henry enlisted as a Union soldier (Company H, Illinois 112th Infantry Regiment). He lost a leg in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain near Marietta, Georgia, and was discharged in 1865.

Henry Vining came to Republic County, Kansas, in 1868, and settled in the Elk Creek valley along with Ashbel Mapes (Ashbel was Henry's brother-in-law and my great-great grandfather), three Willoughby brothers, and William Oliver. All of these men were relatives or connected by marriage. They and their families were among the first white settlers of the Elk Creek area.

Henry was a member of the Salt Creek Militia that was formed in 1868 to protect Republic County settlers from the Indians. He also served as the Republic County sheriff that year.  On January 1, 1869, he married Martha Oliver -- the first marriage in Republic County, Kansas.

Henry's missing leg didn't slow him down too much. He was proud that he had given a leg in the service of his country. People called him Peggy, because he had a peg leg.  He served as a marshal in the little communities of Clyde and Concordia, Kansas, during the 1870s. Later, he was the manager of the Western Detective Agency of Clyde (a bounty hunter?), and he also ran a saloon in Clyde which was destroyed in a business district fire on January 25, 1881. (See Belleville Telescope p. 3, Feb. 3, 1881)

In June of 1881, Henry got into a bad fight. Apparently he and the schoolmaster in Clyde had already disagreed about something. Then, the schoolmaster slapped Henry's son on the ear for fighting with another boy. Henry found the schoolmaster in a store and, after an exchange of words, gave him a punch that knocked him to the floor. The schoolmaster knocked or kicked Henry down, and they scuffled.

The schoolmaster might have won the fight, being wiry and more agile with his two legs, but Henry pulled a gun. It misfired the first time, and the second shot went into a trunk. The schoolmaster abandoned the fight and rode to the county seat to file a complaint with the marshal. Henry was arrested and charged with "assault with intent to kill". I don't know what happened after that, but I'm very curious.

The editor of the Clyde Democrat, who also happened to be the schoolmaster's friend and roommate, wrote a sensational newspaper account of the above event (See "A Murderous Assault," Belleville Telescope, p. 2, June 16, 1881) .  He stated that Henry Vining was a drunkard, which may or may not have been true. The report is clearly slanted in favor of the schoolmaster -- perhaps rightfully so.

Henry Vining seems to have been well-liked by most people and was well-known in the area, so I suspect that the charges were eventually dropped, or that he was not convicted, or that if he was convicted, the sentence was light. That's just my hunch, not a proven fact. I'm still researching -- I'd love to know the rest of the story!

The Clyde Democrat ceased publication in mid-1882. I think the editor probably left Clyde at that time, and probably his friend, the schoolmaster, left too.

Henry Vining died unexpectedly in 1888 at the young age of 40. He had an agreement with his long-time friend and fellow veteran Jacob Sohlinger that, if one of them died, the other would see that he was laid to rest, wrapped in the flag. Jacob Sohlinger kept his promise, and Henry Vining went to his grave embraced by the flag and declaring his patriotism to the end.

US Flag with 38 stars.
In use 4 July 1877–3 July 1890.

This article was written by Genevieve L. Netz and originally published as a blog post at http://prairiebluestem.blogspot.com/2011/11/winner-of-most-colorful-ancestor-award.html . Copyright 2012 Genevieve L. Netz. All rights reserved. Permission is granted for attaching this article to Vining family trees as long as this entire notice is included. Any other use requires written permission. gnetz51@gmail.com .

An 1886 Visit to Fairview, KY

Fairview, birthplace of Jefferson Davis

The following passage is transcribed from the Kentucky New Era, July 23, 1886 (page 3). I have preserved the original punctuation, but divided the long paragraphs to make them easier to read. Jefferson Davis (1808-1889), mentioned in the article, was elected the President of the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861, and served until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Saturday morning two NEW ERA men hired a buggy and went to the speaking at Fairview. The drive was delightful amid the sloping hills and rich fields of grain. The country never looked more beautiful and the magnificent crops give promise of a bright and prosperous future for the planters.

We arrived at the pretty little village just in time to partake of a good dinner at the hospitable board of Esquire Richard Vaughan.

After dinner Mr. G. S. Brown very kindly assumed the duty of showing us the town. He conducted us to the spot where the great Jefferson Davis was born. The old house with its many memories has been torn away and over the historic spot is being erected a Baptist church.

The church when completed will be one of the handsomest in the county. Rev. E. N. Dicken who served the old Bethel church so long, is the pastor. He is one of the best pastors in the land and as a preacher is second to none. He lives in the parsonage half a mile east of the church. The church will probably be dedicated in October and Mr. Davis will be present on that occasion.

Fairview lies in two counties. The county line runs through the store of Mr. W. B. Brewer, who can stand behind his counter in Todd, and sell goods to his friends in Christian.

About 2 o'clock the candidates began the oratorical contest. Judge Winfree led off and the other fellows said their pieces in order. The boys gave the Todd county candidates some of their time. Col. Milt. Brown made a short address and Mr. D. S. Watson was shaking hands with the boys who do their voting in Todd.

Fairview is a thrifty village. The residences are handsome and the stores are well kept. Mr. John Yancey will soon build a fine brick store house at a cost of $2000.

Jefferson Davis in 1853

We were presented with a walking cane, made out of the flooring of the room in which Mr. Davis was born, by Mr. Brewer. Most of the candidates got one of these sticks to hobble through the campaign on.

The New Era representatives were kindly treated by the generous citizens of Fairview and after half a day of pleasant commingling with these good people, they turned their faces toward Hopkinsville. The drive home through the moonlight was delightful and the pleasure of a day at Fairview will be the chief object of interest in our minds for many days.

- - - - - - - - - -

Check the Prairie Bluestem posts tagged "Fairview KY" for some modern-day images of Fairview.