Allan Ralph Andrews, born September 13th 1939, Long
Beach California, St. Mary’s Hospital, 4:03 AM, father
Ralph B. Andrews, mother, Jean Thompson Andrews,
now remarried as Jean Colaluca.
In an attempt to trace the ancestors of my mother, Jean
Thompson Andrews, born Jean Thompson, of Hugh
Monroe Thompson, father, and Mary Lingenfelter
Thompson, mother, I discovered links to the Pyle family
tree through the parents of Mary Lingenfelter Thompson,
born Mary Lingenfelter to Henrietta Kennedy
Lingenfelter and Benjamin Harrison Lingenfelter. Both
Henrietta and Benjamin came from Missouri and there
were a number of links to their ancestors in Missouri
records. Henrietta was born Henrietta Kennedy to Judge
Samuel T. and Lucretia (Smith) Kennedy. The Missouri
Genealogy Trails website has an extensive biography
section for Andrew County Missouri and the discussion of
Henry Newton Kennedy gives the link to his father
Samuel T. According to this link, Samuel was born on a
farm in Fayette County, Indiana, September 29th 1830 to
a farmer named John Kennedy, born in North Carolina of
a mother with the maiden name of Charity McMichael,
also from North Carolina. Further links indicate that John
Kennedy was born as John Bennett Kennedy 26 July 1782
in Orange, NC and died 31 August 1863, buried in the
Cain Cemetery in Nodaway, Missouri. His wife, Charity
was born 9 May 1790 in Guilford, North Carolina. John’s
father is given as James Kennedy (died 1808 in Guilford)
and his wife is given the maiden name of Elizabeth
Bailelet, born 1752 in North Carolina. Charity McMichael
was the daughter of Archibald McMichael, who died in
Guilford 23rd of September 1818. Her mother’s name was
also Charity. The James Kennedy link appears to connect
to a Hugh Kennedy, born 1725, died 1814 and Catherine
Hughes. This takes the Kennedy linage out of North
Carolina and into Pennsylvania, where James Kennedy
appears to have been born. Apparently Hugh Kennedy
was born 1725 in Ireland and died in Mifflin, in Allegheny
County, Pennsylvania. Hugh married a Catherine Hughes
in 1746 in Pennsylvania, a daughter of Martin Hughes,
born sometime in 1725 in Maryland and died in Butler
County, Pennsylvania. Hugh Kennedy appears to be the
son of Jane Gray and William Kennedy. William Kennedy
was born in Charlesont Ireland in 1690 and christened 17
September 1692 in Dublin, Ireland. He married Jane Gray
on 3 November 1721 in Dublin. William ended up with
land at the fork of the Youghiogheny and Monongehela
rivers and lived there from 1773 till his death in 1793.
Williams father, given as William T. Kennedy, was born in
Scotland sometime around 1670 and apparently served
with William of Orange in the “Siege of Derry and Ennis
Killen 1689 Battle of the Boyne.” Notes available in
various genealogical references seem to indicate that he
married a woman named Ann and had a large family that
included the William Kennedy that came to America.
One reference available on the web, “Bill Roy’s
Genealogy Page” gives the following information on
Hugh Kennedy, son of William and grandson of William
T.. It claims that he came to America when he was only
17 and was disowned by his Presbyterian father for
becoming a Methodist. This would explain the difficulty
of tracing this line and the tendency for the children to
wander, since religious affiliation was an important
element of settlement at this time. Apparently Hugh
served as a private for the colonial army of Pennsylvania
in the Revolution in 1777 and 1778. It also states that
Jane Gray, mother of Hugh, died 9 September 1781, in
Pittsburgh, PA.
But, Henrietta’s mother was Lucretia Webster Smith.
How do you go about tracing that line? Fortunately
Barbara Leimback did a very good job of researching the
Ezekial W. Smith line and posted it April 2005. According
to this source Lucretia Webster Smith was the daughter
of John Payton Smith, born 5 December 1799 and
Elizabeth Crittendon (1800 -1839). Lucretia Webster was
born 1833 and died 1920. Apparently Ezekial W. Smith,
Sr. was born in Tennessee 28 November 1806, son of
Vincent Smith (1778 – 1857) and Anna Dolin (1775).
Now there is a Bedford Tennessee Deed Book, page 334
12/11/1826 in which William Crittendon lists his heirs
and one is Elizabeth Crittendon, wife of John P. Smith.
Apparently William Crittendon changed the spelling of
his name when he moved from Anson (Montgomery
County) North Carolina where he was born in 1765. His
father is given as William C. Crittenden of Essex County,
Virginia and his mother as Sarah Lee. William C.
Crittenden of Essex County is given as the son of Henry
Crittenden and Frances F. Upshaw, born in Gloucester
County Virginia and died 9 November 1716 in Essex
County Virginia, Henry is listed as the son of Richard
Crittenden and Ann Forrest. Sarah Lee married William
C. Crittenden in Virginia in1761, apparently, and died
November 9th in 1766 in Montgomery, North Carolina.
Among the Children of Henry Crittenden is a son born
about 1708 (also named Henry) who was the father of
John Lee Crittenden, who was the father in turn of John
Jordon Crittenden, Senator from Kentucky, Attorney
General of the US, and Governor of Kentucky, another
son Robert Crittenden, served as secretary and governor
of Arkansas when it was a territory. This connection is
probably the source of the family story that the governor
of Missouri, Thomas Crittenden, was a cousin, since he
was a nephew of John Jordon Crittenden, a very distant
cousin of Elizabeth Crittenden Smith mother of Lucretia
Webster. John Lee Crittenden, father of John Jordon,
appears to have married Judith Harris, daughter of
Obedience Turpin, daughter of Thomas Turpin and Mary
Jefferson (sister of Peter Jefferson and aunt of Thomas
Jefferson, President of US and Gov. of Virginia).
The Sarah Lee connection is also difficult to trace. Robert
Lee gave a will that is in book I, page 14, Anson County
North Carolina in which he gives items to his wife Sarah
Lee and his daughter Sarah Crittenden, the date is 1766.
This may be the Sarah Lee that married William C.
Crittenden, the son of Henry Crittenden and Francis F.
Upshaw and was the mother of William C. Crittenden,
born 1765 in Anson County and father of Elizabeth
Crittenden, wife of John P. Smith, mother of Lucretia
Webster Smith. Apparently Robert Lee was the son of
James Lee who died in 1732 (his will dated 14 January
1731 in Bertie Precinct, NC, proved in Edgecombe
Precint, NC, November Court, 1732). Apparently he
married a Sarah (Moore?), perhaps born in 1702 in
Nansemond County Virginia, He was, apparently the son
of John Lee of Liecaster England, born around 1670, and
migrated to Nansemond County, where John is found in a
4/20/1694 land patent that gives him the right to
transport 20 persons from England. John had 960 acres
on the upper part of Nansemond County, East side of
Somerton Creek, beginning on a small island on the East
Side of the Creek to the Northeast side of Cyprus Swamp.
These early roots in Virginia, North Carolina, and
Pennsylvania are difficult to trace, particularly when the
mother’s line is what you are after. John Bennett
Kennedy, appears to have married a Charity McMichael
sometime in 1806 in Guilford North Carolina. She
appears to have been born 9 May 1790 in Guilford. The
family appears to have moved to Fayette County Indiana
in 1825 and then moved to Rush County Indiana in 1834,
finally moving to Nodaway County. Charity McMichael
appears to have been the daughter of Archibald
McMichael, who died in Guilford 23 September 1818.
His wife was named Charity but there seems to be no
record of her maiden name.
If the McMichael link is hard to trace, so is the Kennedy.
Elizabeth Bailelet seems to have been born in North
Carolina and to have married James Kennedy in 1772.
The Family Tree Maker listings from Ancetery.Com list
the following children: Samuel Kennedy, born 22 of
October 1775 in Orange County and died 30 April 1840 in
Posey, Rush, Indiana. Mary Kennedy, born 29 December
1772, John Bennett, born 26th of July 1780, Jane, born 9
September 1788, Elizabeth, born 1 of July 1785, Nancy,
born 6 September 1782, and Esther, born 16 March
1796. John Bennett married Charity McMichael, born in
Guilford, NC, 9 May 1790 (1788) in Guilford. They had
the following children in Guilford: Margaret, 30 March
1807, Zabiah, 8 Feb. 1809, Nancy, 3 June 1811, James, 26
June 1812, William S., born 18 Feb. 1813, Elizabeth Ann,
2 Feb. 1815, Archibald McMichael, 15 August 1818,
Charity, born 7 March 1826, Sarah Jane, born 10 October
1823, and Samuel Thomas, born 29 September 1830 in
Fayette County, Indiana.
Apparently Samuel Kennedy got a deed in 1808 from the
heirs of James. These appear to have been Jesse Lynch
and his wife Mary Kennedy, Joseph Ross and his wife
Sarah Kennedy, John Kennedy, Betsy Kennedy, Jenney
Kennedy, Nancy Kennedy, and Esther Kennedy, this land
was now in Alamance County.
Joseph Ross appears to have died September 4th 1836 in
Fayette County, Indiana. Sarah (Kennedy) Ross
renounces her rights to administer the estate in favor of
her son Samuel K. Ross. He seems to have had an
interest in a store at Alquina, Indiana. Sarah appears to
have taken a gray mare, a colt, a bureau, a cupboard, a
clock, a black and white cow, a red pied cow, a trundle
bed and bedding as her hundred dollar share of the
estate, she also got a third part of the remainder which
included 20 geese, a breakfast table, 12 sheep, a stew
kettle, 8 acres of corn, a side saddle, a tea kettle, and
other things of this type. This Sarah Kennedy was born
to James Kennedy and Elizabeth Bailelet in Orange, North
Carolina 24 September 1780, and thus is an older sister
of my ancestor John Bennett Kennedy and an aunt of my
Great Grandmother Henrietta’s father Samuel. There is
speculation on the Donny Hamilton webside that Sarah
Ross has some problems that make her unfit as a
guardian for her children. It is indicated that Joseph D.
Ross owned and “platted” much of Alquina between
1822 and 1825.
John Kennedy’s wife Charity was born in Guilford Co. NC.
9 May 1790 to Charity and Archibald McMichael.
Archibald died 23 September 1818 in Guilford. His son
Thomas (older brother of Charity, wife of John Kennedy)
was born in Guilford in 1778 and died 30 November 1858
in Rush Co. Indiana. He married Nancy Ann Moody, born
28 January 1801 in Guilford, and died 5 August 1848 in
Rush County (buried in Stanley Cemetery, Posey, Indiana.
William (another older brother of Charity) was born 1787
and died 14 September 1848 in Guilford. Thomas and
Nancy Ann Moody had a child named Charity McMichael
who married Jesse Kelam in Guilford 28 January 1830,
the marriage announced in the Greensboro NC “Patriot.”
William McMichael marred Rhoda E. Pegram, died 3
January 1852. Both William and Rhoda are buried in the
Methodist Church Cemetery at 6142 Lake Brandt Road.
William McMichael died leaving five tracts of land
including 45 acres of Haw River tract land that had
belonged to his father Archibald. When Archibald’s wife
Charity (senior, several generations of daughters were all
named Charity) died in Guilford in 1829, she left her bible
to William and all of her beds and household furniture to
her oldest daughter Margaret McMurrey (born 1781).
Jesse Lynch married Mary Kennedy 9 January 1792 in
Orange, North Carolina. Jesse was born in 1752 and died
in 1825. He was the son of Thomas Lynch and Hannah
Schroeder. Thomas Lynch was born 1725 and died
March 15, 1781 in Hillsoboro NC. He was the son of
Jonah Jonach Lynch. Hannah Schroder was the daughter
of Johah Ulrich Schroeder. Jesse Lynch’s father-in-law,
James Kennedy, sold him 264 acres on Jordan Creek and
Jesse was a witness for the quit claim deed that gave
Samuel Kennedy land that had been James Kennedy land
in Alamance County, following the death of James
Kennedy (1808?). Mary Kennedy was the oldest of the
daughters of James and Elizabeth, born 28 December in
Orange, North Carolina.
Archibald McMichael Kennedy was a son of John Bennett
Kennedy and Charity McMichael, an older brother of
Samuel Kennedy. He was born in Guilford, North
Carolina 15 August 1818 and died in Rush County,
Indiana, 3 June 1897. He married Henrietta Langston, 10
October 1820 in Union, Indiana. Between 1870 and 1918
(postings in the web indicate this), Archibald and his sons
Emmett and Charles built over 58 covered bridges.
Apparently Archibald took up the trade of carpenter in
Rush County and moved on to Wabash in 1853, where he
started building bridges as a source of extra money. In
1870 he built a two span covered bridge in Rush County
that stood for more than one hundred years. In 1871, so
it is claimed, he and his son built a 150 foot span in Butler
County, Ohio over Seven Mile Creek. In 1883, Archibald
was elected to the Indiana State Senate.
At a certain point keeping track of these relations
becomes confusing. The Stanley Cemetery in Rush
County, Indiana contains a number of Kennedy and
McMichael graves, including Samuel Kennedy (died April
30th 1840, brother of John Bennett Kennedy) and Nancy
McMichael Kennedy, (died Dec. 11th 1862, sister of John
Bennett Kennedy’s wife Charity McMichael Kennedy) and
Nancy Ann Moody McMichael (died September 5th 1838,
wife of Charity’s brother Thomas McMichael).
Apparently the cemetery is the site of a church where
John McMichael lived in a nearby house and served as
the church janitor. John was the son of Thomas
McMichael and Nancy Ann Moody McMichael and he
and his wife Mahala Britton McMichael are buried in the
Stanley Cemetery, here, along with many relatives.
The 1850 census has John Bennett Kennedy and his wife
Charity and his son Samuel and his wife living in the same
area as Ambrose Cain. John Bennett Kennedy had a
daughter, Sarah Jane Kennedy, born 10 Oct 1823, who
married Charles Leo Cain and had a number of children.
Her daughter Margaret Victoria (age 2 months, 6 days) is
buried in the Cain Cemetery in Nodaway County along
with Sara Jane (age 6 months, 24 days). George M. and
George W., also sons of Sarah Jane and Charles Cain are
buried here. Jesse Cain and Martha, parents of Ambrose
Cain are buried here along with his sister Mourncy Cain.
There is obviously a relationship between the Cains and
the Kennedy family at this point, but it is not clear what
that is or what is going on. The memorial data on
Mariam Lowe Cain indicate that she was the wife of Jesse
Cain and the mother of Mourncy, Nathaniel, Belthelmite,
Griffith, Charles L. (1818 -1894), Lassel, Jesse, Shunamite,
Mary, Bently, and John Cain. If she is the mother of
Charles Leo as well as Ambrose and Charles Leo is the
husband of Sarah Jane, daughter of John Bennett and
Charity Kennedy, sister of Samuel Thomas, it explains
their presence together in the same area and the use of
both Cain and Kennedy of this cemetery. Some of the
Cains would be son-law, daughter-in-law, grandchildren,
etc. of Grandfather and Grandmother John and Charity
Kennedy.
A history of Northwest Missouri published in 1915 and
presented on a website for Andrew County, Missouri, has
a section devoted to Henry Newton Kennedy, a son of
Samuel T. and Lucretia Webster (Smith) Kennedy born
November 25th 1855 in Nodaway County. According to
this account, Samuel was fourteen when he arrived in
Platte County, Missouri. According to the account, the
area was mainly inhabited by Indians at the time. When
he moved to a farm near Maryville in Nodaway County in
1850, there were no families between him and the town
and only four families and a single store in the town
itself.
Samuel apparently was a Methodist, Mason, and an Odd
Fellow Lodge member. Apparently, Samuel was district
deputy grand master for the Masons in 1873 and 1874.
He was elected chairman of the County Court in 1873.
His son was a successful farmer, according to this
account, but a tornado took away all the buildings and
trees July 13, 1883. In 1901, Henry Newton Kennedy
moved to Andrew County on 320 acres, which at the
time of the article, were graced by “a handsome set of
buildings.” These included the “most up-to-date
machinery and equipment.” His wife is described as a
graduate of “Stanberry State Normal School” and as a
local school teacher in Andrew and Nodaway counties.
This description of the situation of Samuel and his son
Henry (Father and Brother of my Great Grandmother
Henrietta (Kennedy) Lingenfelter) illustrates the fate of
my Great Grandmother’s branch of my lineage.
Originally from Ireland, Scotland, and England via the
Guilford area of North Carolina, arriving in the 1730s and
1740s, they found that the land nearest the larger rivers
had already been claimed. Political positions and good
schools were reserved for established families. If they
could read and write in the old country, after a
generation in the backcountry, their children had largely
lost the ability to sign their own name. It was inevitable
that they would quickly move on to new land in Indiana
and Missouri, as soon as it opened up to settlement.
Slowly they obtained training and schooling for their
children and the land and equipment necessary for
success in farming and local crafts, eventually achieving
political and social positions of importance.
By the time my mother’s generation appeared, as far as
the family members that raised me were concerned,
teaching was a generally accepted occupation for
women. Both my mother and her sister, Jean and
Miriam Thompson, had teaching credentials, my Uncle,
Victor Thompson, had a degree in microbiology from the
University of California, Berkeley, and an MD from USC.
Henrietta (Kennedy) Lingenfelter’s son John Lingenfelter
was an MD gynecologist that is said to have never lost a
single mother in sixty years of practice at the Poly Clinic
in Seattle, Washington.
My generation has carried this to the absurd. I am a
certified public account, a certified clinical
hypnotherapist, I have been a marriage family and child
counselor intern for the State of California, a licensed
substance abuse counselor and associate counselor for
the State of Arizona, I have State of California Teaching
Credentials in School Psychology, Social Science, Life
Science, Physical Science, Agriculture, and Business, a
Masters in Botany from the University of California, Los
Angeles, a Ph.D. from Pacific Western, and I have
received Teaching Fellowships in History at the University
of Houston, Philosophy at the State University of New
York at Albany, Biology at California State University, Los
Angeles. I started teaching graduate students at UCLA at
the age of twenty two and by the age of twenty four was
Curator of the Herbarium of Medicinal Plants for the
Department of Pharmacology of the School of Medicine.
I have recently retired at 68 as School Psychologist and
Director of Special Education for the McFarland Unified
Schools in McFarland, California.
The need to achieve all these titles seems to be a natural
outcome of the influence of my mother and
grandmother on my early development. The family’s
experience in the Missouri of 1870, 1880, etc, convinced
some family members that education was the solution to
family social and economic problems. The result was
that both of my Grandmother Mary (Lingenfelter)
Thompson’s parents were college graduates and she saw
to it that all her children were college graduates as well.
Another pattern that is interesting is the reaction of the
family to the end of farming. By the end of the 19th
century, family members were leaving the farm and
moving to the city. The move to Seattle by Henrietta and
Benjamin Harrison Lingenfelter was a major affair. Both
Hugh Monroe and Mary (Lingenfelter) Thompson were
graduates of Seattle High School, which seems to have
been a good school at that time. But, Benjamin and
Henrietta spend a lot of ministerial assignments in other
places, Tacoma, Helena, Montana, finally ending up in
Torrance, California when it was still a small city. Hugh
and Mary ended up apple ranching in the town of Selah
outside of Yakima, where my mother Jean Thompson
was born. They finally moved to Torrance and then Long
Beach.
Both my parents, Jean (Thompson) Andrews and Ralph
Andrews, were graduates of Long Beach Polytechnic High
School and Long Beach City College. Long Beach was a
major beach resort and naval base, a major port city.
But, my parents could not seem to make up their mind if
they wanted to stay there after I was born. The whole
family, Hugh, Mary, my parents, my mother’s sister
Miriam and her husband moved to West Los Angeles,
around 1942, at the beginning of World War II.
Once the war was over my parents moved to a house in
the orange groves outside of Ontario, California when it
had a population of only 22,000. My aunt Miriam
(Thompson) Gilbert moved with her husband Frank to
Encino in San Fernando Valley and my grandmother and
grandfather, Hugh and Mary bought a hilltop in the valley
in Granada Hills. They never actually moved there, but
thought of raising chickens, per “The Egg and I” by Betty
McDonald, a very popular book and movie of that period.
So suddenly city was out and rural was good. This would
be a constant theme in my family. Relatives were
forever moving away from, or back to the city, away
from, or back to the country. It has also been a constant
theme in my life.
Just as my mother finally decided to settle down in North
Torrance, a house a way from a dairy farm, I started
moving and could not seem to stop. Long Beach State
College, University of California Los Angeles, a teaching
position in Western Michigan at Muskegon County
Community College, a position in Johnstown New York at
Fulton Montgomery Community College that saw me
living on Caroga Lake in the Adirondack Mountains.
Hunters taking aim at the rental housing I was living in
and sharing my bathroom with large rats sent me back to
the city and to Miami, Florida to teach community
college at Miami-Dade South Campus in 1968.
But, like my relatives, I could not make up my mind and
the next year saw me back up at Johnstown, but this
time buying my own house in town. That was when I
married a college chemistry professor from Manhattan
Island in New York, with hopes of actually living in the
city. We compromised on downtown Schenectady, New
York, where we purchased a very old house in the old
Stockade Area, the historic part of the city on the
Mohawk River. But that wasn’t enough, so the next year
we were off too London, England. I was doing research
at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and my wife and I
were teaching science in the Kent County Council
schools, till the religious discrimination, then in practice
against non-Christian children, became so extreme that
my wife and I left England in protest.
So that found us living in a trailer park in a swampy area
north of Jacksonville, Florida till I got a job teaching
college in tidewater Virginia, where we lived in an old
farmhouse not far where my ancestors, the Crittenden’s
had lived two hundred years before. But, we could not
make up our minds just where to stay, a few years later
we were living in a the Park Wilshire Hotel on Wilshire
Blvd, and then we were in Houston, Texas, and then
Pasadena, California, then Richmond, Virginia, Portland,
Oregon, and then back to Houston, and then back to
Portland, and then we moved to Costa Mesa, in Orange
County, and then Seattle, while I moved back to Houston,
Texas, to play auditor for the Department of Defense. It
was as if all the social and geographic and rural vs. urban
indecision of my family had curled up in a giant ball and
sprung right in my face.
The solution was a series of 12 step programs for various
types of dependence and codependence that had built
up as I attempted to escape the pressure of the
continually tightening string. At first I could not slow
down, soon I was back in Seattle, then in San Jose. In San
Jose, I began training in hypnosis, and took a Masters
degree in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling,
became a teacher, and then trained as a School
Psychologist. Soon I was back in Long Beach where I had
been born, and I stayed in the general Southern
California area for the next few years till I took a job in
rural Kern County as a School Psychologist, and I have
been living in Kern County ever since. I retired from
School Psychology in 2008 and spent ten weeks doing
School Psychology in rural Ohio in 2010. Otherwise I
have been working as a graduate student in the
Humanities, emphasis Art, at local colleges, particularly
California State University, Bakersfield. Still working out
the rural against urban dilemma and still trying to
unwind the springs within.
Still dealing with how I had become something so
complex and so tightly wound that I belonged
everywhere and nowhere and I was spinning so rapidly at
that point that I first entered 12 step programs, it
seemed nothing could stop me. And yet, I was the
natural product, as you can see above, of the forces that
had created me, moving ever more rapidly, becoming
overeducated, absorbing and processing more and more
information.
In 12 step they tell you easy does it, keep it simple, first
things first, if it works do not fix it, time takes time, its
wanting what you have not having what you want that
counts, its an attitude of gratitude, of surrender, of
acceptance, that you did not cause, you cannot control,
you cannot cure the addictive problems of others, but
you need to focus on your own problems. Which is what
I have tried to do. But, it is not easy. Gradually, my
family has turned from farming and building bridges to
teaching, being a doctor, my mother left teaching to
become a Speech Pathologist, now I have become a
School Psychologist. My Great Grandparents were
preachers, brothers, fathers of preachers, I became a
hypnotist, one step further toward mind control of
others.
One of the things that becomes apparent in doing
research on these groups of ancestors is the pattern that
existed associated with occupations and religious
institutions. Generally, Quakers associated with Quakers,
Methodists with Methodists, Baptists with Baptists, and
were buried in association with particular churches.
Samuel T. Kennedy is described as being Baptist. His son
Henry is described as having no affiliation at all.
Henrietta and Benjamin Harrison Lingenfelter were
Disciples of Christ, Benjamin was a Disciples of Christ
Minister, originally his male lineage came from Quaker
ancestors. The Thompsons had been Methodists,
Fredrick Thompson, older brother of Hugh Monroe, was
a Methodist minister.
Generally, Jews and Christians, Catholics and Protestants,
Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians and Quakers,
Episcopalians, Lutherans, Mennonites, even Dutch
Reformed, within the Protestant community, kept apart.
The Guilford area of North Carolina seems to have been
largely Presbyterian, Quaker, Reformed, Baptist, and
Methodist. The McMichael and Kennedy family appears
to have been either Methodist or nothing much at all.
They did not appear to fit in with the established families
that had large numbers of slaves. Nor, initially, were
they artisans that brought the kinds of skills that would
work in cities. Where they were involved in cities, it was
more for things like politics, judgeships, running a store,
selling land. They did not tend to be the mill operators,
road builders, when they did get involved in building
bridges in Indiana, it seems to have represented a new
skill. They seem to have been more involved with
horses, rather than boats, carts, or railway operations.
So their big entrance into the urban world was when
their men folk became preachers, lawyers, judges,
doctors, when their women became teachers. And
nothing seems to have changed much in that area from
that day to this.
My position as a School Psychologist is sort of a
compromise between my mother’s work as a School
Teacher and a Speech Pathologist, my Uncle’s work as a
Doctor, and my Great Uncles work as a preacher in a
home for unwed mothers (My Great Uncle Fredrick
Thompson of Tacoma, Washington). It is a further
development and compromise of a process that had
been working itself through the family history for some
time. I am just another piece of tubing in the system it
seems.
My other careers fit in the pattern also. I taught native
plants for ornamental uses at California State Polytechnic
University, Pomona in 1966. I taught Botany at Miami
Dade Junior College South Campus in Miami, Florida, in
1968. When I was working as a teaching assistant and
research assistant for the Department of Botany at the
University of California, Los Angeles, it was still part of
the School of Agriculture. This is not inconsistent with
the farming background of my family and Grandfather
Hugh Thompson’s work as a State Agricultural Inspector
when he wasn’t apple farming or working for the local
post office in Selah, Washington.
My Grandfather’s twin brother was a dentist. He had a
large garden on property developed by my Great
Grandfather Thompson in Des Moines, Washington. He
and his friends and family had a good deal of knowledge
of various varieties of fruits and berries. It is not
surprising that my work for the Botany Garden and
Herbarium at UCLA, caused the Department of
Agriculture to offer me the position of curator of the
herbarium of the National Arboretum in Washington in
1964, for at that time, Dr. Mathias, the woman I was
working under in my doctoral studies, was considered
one of the world’s leading taxonomic botanists, and the
kinds of things I was studying were a natural
development of the interests of my farming relatives and
ancestors in the living things of the land and garden.
Teaching about them was a natural development of the
new interest of members of my family in State Normal
Schools and teaching institutions. The University of
California, Los Angeles, where my mother obtained her
degree in education, her sister obtained her degree in
nutrition, I obtained my MA in botany, had originally
been a state normal school for Los Angeles.
The woman I was studying under, Dr. Mildred Mathias,
had obtained her PhD in taxonomic botany in Missouri,
at Washington University in Saint Louis, and she herself
represented one of the many Missouri families that had
relocated to Southern California. So everything was
following its natural course. But, the problem for me was
there were too many natural courses and too many
streams of energy were coming together in too many
places and too many ways at once.
Part of this is caused by the effect of Southern California,
on the Pacific Coast, San Pedro, San Diego, Long Beach,
international ports, they attracted many different
religions and cultures. My father and mother, Ralph B.
Andrews, Jean (Thompson) Andrews, her parents Hugh
Monroe Thompson and Mary (Lingenfelter) Thompson
were attracted to the writings and the religious services
of Ernest Holmes and the Institute of Religious Science
and Science of Mind Magazine, now called “Centers for
Spiritual Living.” Holmes described what he taught as a
fusion of liberal transcendental “new thought”
Christianity with Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism, liberal
Jewish thought, Daoism, Islam, etc.. God became a
pantheistic infinite cosmic mind that was inclusive of all
things, a Hindu Brahman, Buddhist Buddhamind,
Platonist Hen One, boundless love and truth. It was
German Romanticism, Berkeley, Fitche, Hegel, Kant,
Alfred North Whitehead, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jung,
William James, Norman Vincent Peale, all wrapped up in
shiny paper. I took to it like a duck to water and I still am
stuck in the same pond, head full of philosophy and
science, my metaphysics not that much different than
what I learned from listening to Ernest Holmes lecture
every Sunday from his Theatre podium in Beverly Hills. It
is not surprising that I taught Comparative Religion at
several colleges, including an upper division class in
South Asian Philosophy at the State University of New
York at Albany in 1969-1970 as a teaching fellow, or that
I have spent a good deal of time in the Thai Buddhist
Temple in Bakersfield and the Tibetan Buddhist Group in
McFarland, California. It is my cup of Buddhist tea.
I believe my Grandmother and Grandfather Thompson,
both fans of Gandhi would have been in sympathy, I
know Hugh Thompson would have been because we
read Self Realization Fellowship books together, including
“Autobiography of a Yogi.” He used to take me to the
Religious Science Church in Hermosa Beach, which held
its services in the barroom of the old Hermosa Biltmore
Hotel.
Hugh Monroe Thompson was the son of the operator of
a livery business in Seattle, Washington. According to my
Grandfather, his father had practically a monopoly on
livery services in Seattle and refused to convert to the
age of the automobile because he thought automobiles
were a fad. At some point the Thompsons had moved to
Oregon and it was here that Hugh’s sister Mary would
meet, and later marry, Alfred Clinton Gilbert. This
marriage was significant because it would bring together
two people, now the stuff of legends, Alfred and Mary
Gilbert, that are the star characters in what is becoming
an important seasonal American dramatic production,
the play, and television movie, “The Man Who Saved
Christmas.”
Alfred had an MD from Yale and was a Olympic gold
medal winner in pole vault. He created one of the largest
most successful toy manufacturing operations in the
United States centered on a factory complex in New
Haven that made electric trains (American Flyer),
chemistry sets (Gilbert brand), fans, food mixers,
mechanical building kits (Erector Sets), magic sets,
microscope sets, etc.. For a while his toy company was a
legend at Christmas time, I and my Father Ralph B.
Andrews visited the Gilberts for a week and toured the
factory and grounds of the square mile of Gilbert estates
in suburban New Haven in the summer of 1952, when I
was 12. My aunt Miriam (Thompson) Gilbert married
Frank Gilbert, a son of Harold Gilbert of Portland,
Oregon. Harold was a brother of Alfred, which made
Frank his nephew. Frank had studied engineering at Yale.
When I was two years old, in 1942, my Father went to
work as a Bank Examiner for the Treasury Department
and was sent to the Utah area. My Mother went to work
in the Reiber aircraft plant (later Lear Jet). Frank Gilbert
was an electronic engineer on the staff of the plant and
my Grandfather Hugh was working as their purchasing
agent. A job he kept until I was fourteen in 1954. The
plant was on Pico Blvd. between Santa Monica and West
Los Angeles and we moved to the Pico Blvd. area in West
Los Angeles to be close to the aircraft facility. Reiber
seems to have been making parts for electronic
equipment in aircraft, but I am not sure, I was only two
years old. As a result my Mother and Father were living
next door to my Grandmother and Grandfather
Thompson and only a few blocks away from my Aunt and
Uncle, Frank and Miriam Gilbert, and only a few miles
away from my Grandmother’s sister Lois (Lingenfelter)
Engle. My Uncle Victor Thompson had a room in the
house, though he actually spent most of his time with the
Air Force in India. My Great Grandparents, Benjamin
Harrison Lingenfelter and Henrietta (Kennedy)
Lingenfelter were actually living in the same house with
my Grandparents. When Henrietta died, I was given her
sick room as my own room.
At an early age I was exposed to technology, science,
business, accounting, federal auditing. It is not surprising
that I have California teaching credentials in agriculture,
business, social science, life science, physical science, and
school psychology, that I am a Certified Public
Accountant and retired federal auditor (my father was a
Public Accountant, and when he retired from his
accounting business at the age of 84, Vice President of
the Southern California Chapter of the California Society
of Public Accountants). All are influences that can be
traced to experiences described above, and things that
were happening to my family as a result of happenings in
the world at large.
World War II brought the Federal Government and the
Military to Southern California in a major way, as noted
above. My mother’s favorite Aunt, Marty (Lingenfelter)
Farman, (another daughter of Henrietta and Benjamin
Harrison and sister of Lois and Mary) married a graduate
of California Institute of Technology that would pioneer
the application of new ideas in communication and
meteorology to the Air Force, later becoming a
decorated Brig. General of the Air Force on General
McArthur’s Staff in the occupation of Japan.
Lois taught English in Torrance High School, later moving
to the Los Angeles District and Brendo Junior High
School, when she worked as a Counselor. She married
John Engel, a brilliant mathematician and carpenter, who
became the head of set estimating for the 20th Century
Fox movie lot. Lois and John Engel’s son John would
major in Physics at UCLA and their daughter Jane would
go to the University of California at Santa Barbara, later
obtaining a doctorate in English and teaching at the
University of Florida.
I remember watching Frank Gilbert in his West Los
Angeles workshop in the back of his garage. He was
making a telescope and a television set from a radar set
sometime around 1945. I was five and thought this was
were it all was at, this was the aim of human existence,
to make to invent, to create new and better machines.
When Alfred, Frank’s uncle produced his Atomic Energy
set for children, I was one of the first to get one.
There I was about seven years old, with a Gilbert Cloud
Chamber, Geiger Counter, radioactive Alpha, Beta, and
Gamma ray sources and books explaining how they
worked. The problem was that all this mental stimulus
was too much and when I went to enter public school, I
tested with an IQ over 180 and they refused to admit me
because they did not have the facilities. My mother
educated me at home, and then in 1946, when I turned 7
they allowed me in the public schools, but insisted I start
in the third grade. I can understand the problem, I was
checking books out from the adult section of the public
library at that point, and reading a Paleontology text and
Charles Dicken’s Pickwick Papers.
As a School Psychologist, I believe we can make too much
over high intelligence in children. My muscle
coordination was no better than that of any other child
my age and my interests were similar to other children. I
had some great ideas, but putting them on paper was a
terrible problem for me, and for any other child my age,
sharpening pencils and getting pens and scissors to work
is not easy for small hands. My class work from this
period looks acceptable, but was no better than any
other child attempting to do a good job for the teacher.
The real problem was the super stimulus of the times
applied to an environment and a genetic system that had
just emerged from the wilds of colonial North Carolina
and the breaking of the great plains to the plow.
Everything creaked and groaned and shattered. But, we
had just won a war and we were the military, moral,
spiritual, and economic leaders of the Free World and
nothing was supposed to be wrong. I remember when I
first realized that there was something truly wrong. My
Father, a Bank Vice President, a recognized social and
business leader, was obviously not all there. He had
started the breakdown process that would years later
cause his hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia, the
system that existed at the time, was putting too much
pressure on him, and on my family. We had become a
weak point in the social web and we were unaware of it
at the time, my brother, then about two years old would
be the sacrifice to fix that disabled family system, when
later he would commit suicide at the age of 38. I
sincerely believe that the key to what was happening is
given by Gregory Bateson in his book “Steps to an
Ecology of Mind (Ballantine Books, 1972).” This book
discusses systems and their problems and breaking
points. We really are looking at overloaded systems and
how the collapse.
But, at the time the collapse was hidden. In 1946 and
1947, my parents were living in Ontario and they were all
over the society page, officers in the service clubs, Lions,
etc., the business men’s club, support groups for the
local YMCA, etc.. In the 1950 period, my Father had a
large entry in Who’s Who in Commerce and Industry, and
appointment to honorary positions in Mexico, etc..
Other relatives were doing well, with the husband of my
Grandfather Thompson’s sister Mary in Who’s Who for
his work as a toy company industrialist and a member of
the Olympic and Yale University athletic support groups,
my Grandmother Thompson’s sister Marty with a
husband who was a Brig. General variously at NATO and
the Pentagon. Dr. John Lingenfelter, Mary and Marty’s
brother, was at the peak of his career as a successful
gynecologist at the Poly Clinic in Seattle. Everyone
seemed to be moving to better places. My Father and
Mother were constructing a new home in a better
section of Ontario. My Aunt and Uncle, Miriam and
Frank Gilbert, were moving to a large new home in the
foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains in Encino. Even
my Grandparents where considering building on a hilltop
in Granada Hills.
The boom began with new automobiles. We looked at
new models of Hudson and Packard, Studebaker and
Ford. There was the Kaiser and the Fraiser, and later the
Henry J. Everyone needed new stoves and refrigerators,
vacuum cleaners, toasters, radios, washing machines.
Slowly televisions became more popular, they were
originally American made and broke down constantly.
The number of television stations multiplied and
programs moved from local to national as the capacity to
transmit signals progressed.
When General Eisenhower published his book, “Crusade
in Europe,” it was a must read. I was devoted to its maps
as if it was a bible, and traced them on to a huge map of
the World that I owned that showed the major battles of
the War. Indications that things might not be what we
hoped came in slowly. We were upset to discover the
damage generated by the atom bombs dropped in Japan.
When Gandhi was assassinated, it seemed to dominate
the Movietone News, that we watched in the Theaters,
before we could see the latest feature released from the
animators at Disney Studios. The Berlin blockade and the
rise of the Soviet block came as a terrible shock. An then
the radio announcement that North Korean armies had
crossed the frontiers and were invading South Korea,
overwhelming the American units that attempted to
resist them. We were shocked. I followed battles as
children follow the achievements of local football teams.
We were solidly Republican. Hugh and Mary Thompson
had been Democrat, but our house supported Dewey
when he ran against Truman. But, it was not the kind of
Republican you are familiar with today. We were Earl
Warren Republicans and backed Warren totally when
Eisenhower became President and appointed him to the
Supreme Court. We were Lincoln Republicans. In 1952,
before the Supreme Court decisions supporting
desegregation, my Father took me through the South.
He asked me if I understood why blacks had to sit in the
back of the bus and the theater, he showed me the
effects of segregation and explained the discriminatory
results of the Jim Crow Laws. He climaxed this by
drinking from the colored drinking fountain in the State
Capitol in Little Rock, exclaiming “Its only water Son,” as
he did so. It became obvious that my Father supported
Black Rights, Republican or not.
We were a pro-abortion rights Republican family long
before it became fashionable to be so. We were not
Bible thumping Christian Republicans, but strongly pro
Evolution and pro freedom of speech. My third grade
teacher was an outspoken Communist and Marxist and
taught about the Russian Revolution in a positive way in
my third grade class. My parents never had a critical
word to say about this. For them, the progressive
Governor Warren Republicanism of that time, had
nothing to do with denying people their personal
opinions, even at the Elementary School level. It was a
very different world I grew up in, and in so many way
more progressive and enlightened than the world of
today. Yes, there have been some victories, but all seem
to have been at the expense of even more disastrous
retreats.
It is understandable. America was put on a spot and too
much was expected of it. There is only so much you can
do with people that have emerged from the backwoods
of North Carolina and Indiana in only a few generations,
people with children that had forgotten how to sign their
own names. Never in the history of the planet had their
been a land with so much diversity, so much prosperity,
so much hope, and so much failure. Miss Jones, my
Communist Third Grade Teacher insisted on our singing
America the Beautiful rather than the Star Spangled
Banner, for our national anthem. She considered the
Star Spangled Banner too imperialistic.
At the time it made sense. For the first time the country
felt like it was “beautiful,” not just in one place, or
region, but from “sea to shining sea,” one nation in ways
that we had never felt before. We were welcoming Jews
from the death camps and Europe and Japanese recently
released from the camps in which they had been
detained during the War in the Western United States.
For a while, my family banked at the Bank of Tokyo and
we went to Japanese doctors and dentists and used
Japanese lawyers. It was a strange new world.
But the changes came in waves as they had been coming
from the time of the revolution. First the interior was
opened up to settlement (during the lives of John and
Charity Kennedy) and roads and canals opened up the
backcountry (the day and age of Samuel T and Lucretia
Webster Smith Kennedy). Then the steamboat and the
railroad brought cheaper transport. My Great
Grandparents (Henrietta and Benjamin Harrison
Lingenfelter) lived in the later part of the age when the
railroad was opening up the West, and my Grandparents
(Hugh and Mary Thompson) in the age of electricity,
telephones, and automobiles. My Parents times (Jean
and Ralph Andrews) were dominated by the movies,
airplanes, buses, street cars, and radio, the electrification
of rural areas, the triumph of indoor plumbing. My age
(Allan and Steve Andrews) was the age of television, of
nuclear power, of transistors and travel to the Moon.
Each of these periods has seen radical changes, but the
changes are building and multiply at an ever increasing
rate of speed. The problem is that we have become too
accustomed to this craziness. For five thousand years,
prior to the industrial revolution, culture and society
changed at a far slower rate.
One of the hardest things to deal with in my life has been
the clash of the cultures. The old world of Judge Samuel
T. Kennedy was dominated by an ancient bible based
world view that was rooted in the Roman Empire and the
learning of the Jews and Greeks. The world of my Uncles
was dominated by a new age ruled by Science. But, my
Grandmother and her sisters were interested in Art,
Music, Literature and a culture dominated by classical
values. Religion was influence by the transcendentalist
and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. These
three pillars, the Bible going back to ancient Jerusalem,
the Arts to the Renaissance and Florence Italy, Science
fresh out of the local Land Grant colleges, were attacked
by new ideas out of war ravaged Europe, the
Existentialism of Sartre and Camus, etc..
Initially, I ignored both the Bible culture and the
Existential challenge, it was the integration of Science
and Humanities that interested me, and that was the
general tone of the instruction that was available both in
school and college at the time. It was only later, in the
1970s that the war between the traditional world of
ancient scripture and the modern world of Post-War
philosophy and art would be matters of concern.
Even so the intersection of Science and Humanities,
forgetting some of the more difficult baggage, proved to
be far more difficult that it seemed. I published a very
flawed volume titled “Love” in 1974 that was the fruit of
my feeble attempts to locate some acceptable common
ground. But, I was not the only one in my family with
these problems. My Grandmothers youngest sister, Ruth
(Lingenfelter) Jurich wrote poetry and was a newspaper
journalist in Seattle, Washington in the period just before
and after World War II. Her writing attempted to probe
the humorous aspect of the clash of different cultural
forces. A pioneer in the Woman’s Rights movement and
an Opera singer in the Seattle Opera, much of what she
wrote and did has been forgotten, in part because of
prejudice against her outspoken point of view. I visited
the Jurich residence in 1948 when I was 8 years old, and
again in 1952, 1954, 1956, etc. Ruth ended up having
considerable influence on my development, including my
interest in Poetry and Philosophy. She was a graduate of
the University of Washington and continued the tradition
that was developing in the family of educating women in
the Arts.
This is so different from what happened in earlier
periods. Ruth’s grandmother Lucretia Webster, lost her
mother when she was relatively young. Lucretia’s
mother’s mother and father are mentioned frequently in
the dealings of William Crittenden of North Carolina. It
was the tradition of the family that Grandmother
Elizabeth was a first cousin of Governor Thomas
Crittenden of Missouri. A careful look at the records, as
discussed above, seems to show that her father was a
first cousin of a John Crittenden, who married a
granddaughter of Mary Jefferson, the sister of Peter
Jefferson, Father of Thomas Jefferson. It appears that
Thomas Jefferson had correspondence with the uncles of
John Crittenden’s wife and lived in her grandfather’s
house when he was Governor of Virginia. John
Crittenden’s sons were territorial governor of Arkansas
(Robert Crittenden) and the Governor of Kentucky,
Senator for Kentucky, Attorney General of the United
States, John Gordon Crittenden, another son was the
father of Governor Crittenden of Missouri. William
Crittenden had a father named William who was the
brother of John Gordon Crittenden’s grandfather Henry
Crittenden (thus making Lucretia’s great grandfather
William the great uncle of John Gordon, the Kentucky
Governor). Finally, her great great grandfather, Henry
was the great grandfather of Gov. John Gordon and the
great great grandfather of Gov. Thomas Crittenden of
Missouri. But, Lucretia would also be aware of how
unimportant women were considered to be in this whole
system. When it came to politics, women could be
ignored because they lacked the right to vote. Lucretia’s
maternal grandmother was considered to be so
unimportant that no one bothered to record her name.
Now comes a subject I have visited several times before
and will attempt to get right again. The difficulty I am
having with this subject is a difficulty that people had
with the subject and the time. Let us try again. There is
an Anson County North Carolina will, dated 6 March
1808, in which a Thomas Presley leaves 125 acres of land
to his wife Sarah Presley and makes his “true and trusty
friend William Crittenden” one of his executors.
Elizabeth Crittenden was born 1 June 1800 in
Montgomery, North Carolina and died 18 Aug. 1839 in
Platte Co. Mo. She would have been 7 years old at the
time the will was written. In the Deed Bk. BB pg 334,
12/11/1826 Bedford Co, TN Deed list William Crittendon
heirs as: John, wife of John Wagster, wife of Lorenzo D.
Whitmorth, Shelby B. Crittenden, Mary wife of Robert
Thogmorton, and Elizabeth wife of John P. Smith, William
and Joel Crittenden. In a 2/8/1827—2 deeds where
William Crittenden gives daughters Mary Throgmorton
and Elizabeth Smith, slaves for their lifetime (per
rootsweb.ancestry.com). Rootsweb gives William C.
Crittenden as the son of Sarah Lee, daughter of Robert
Lee. It gives his birth as 1765 in Anson (Montgomery Co.)
North Carolina. That would make him around 35 at the
birth of Elizabeth and 43 at the time of the 1808 will and
around 71 at the time of the deeds described above.
Other sources list him as the son of William C. Crittenden
born 1716 and died 1790, this William the son of Henry
Crittenden, born 1675 and died 19 Nov 1766 and Frances
F. Upshaw, born 1680 and died 15 Dec. 1741. According
to this source (wikitree.com), William’s mother Sara Lee
was born in 1735 and died 9 Nov. 1766. William,
husband of Sara Lee, had a brother named Henry who
was the father of a Major John Crittenden born 24 Aug
1742 and died 19 Nov 1800. He was married twice, first
to Anne Obedience Turpin, daughter of Tomas Turpin,
and Mary Jefferson (President Thomas Jefferson’s aunt).
This marriage produced Henry Crittenden, father of
Governor Thomas Crittenden of Missouri, and then to
the 13 year old Judith Harris whose relationship to Ann
Obedience is not clear (daughter, niece?), this marriage
to a 13 yearold girl produced Governor John Jordan
Crittenden Governor of Kentucky, Senator from
Kentucky, Attorney General of the United States, and
Robert Crittenden, territorial secretary and governor of
the territory of Arkansas. William husband of Sara Lee
would have been the uncle of Major John Crittenden and
the great uncle of Henry and Robert and John Jordan,
which would make John Crittenden a cousin of William
father of Elizabeth, and a second cousin of Elizabeth.
Now this may or may not revise what I have said
previously, and do not be surprised if I revise it all again.
Truth is no one knows for sure and I am not certain they
even knew for sure at the time. But, this has a certain
importance. Thomas Jefferson was Governor of Virginia
and President of the United States. He lived in the Turpin
house when he was Governor. John Jordan was a very
important figure in the nation, several times Attorney
General of the US. Jefferson corresponded at times with
the brothers of Obedience Turpin, wife of John
Crittenden cousin of Elizabeth, nephew of her father. It
explains why this cousin issue was so important for the
children of Elizabeth and why it would be important for
Lucretia when the son of Henry son of John by the
mother of his second wife should show up as governor of
her state (Missouri) at a point where her husband was in
politics.
The Lee issue is another problem. There were two
prominent Lee families that may, or may not, have been
related. William married into one, Robert Lee of North
Carolina, and the grand children of William’s brother
Henry became connected with another when John
Jordon Crittenden married a distant relative of Robert. E.
Lee, the confederate general. This is brought up on page
4 of the Wikipedia discussion of the Lee family in
discussing how many Lees were generals in the civil war.
They mention George B. Crittenden, who was a general
for the CS, and Thomas Leonidas Crittenden, a general
for the US, and the article says that their mother Sarah O.
Lee was a great great great granddaughter of the original
Richard Lee, founder of the Lee clan of Virginia and
Maryland. Of course it does not mention that they are
also great great grandchildren of Henry Crittenden, the
great grandfather of Elizabeth Crittenden.
What becomes clear here is some strange ways of using
women, like the thirteen year old granddaughter of
Jefferson’s aunt that married Maj. Crittenden. His son
John Jordan does not seem to treat women much better,
going through a number of wives in addition to Sarah
Lee. You have many problems here. What happened to
the Sarah Lee that was married to William when he died?
There is some indication that she may have married
Thomas Presley mentioned in the Thomas Presley will is
Elizabeth Crittenden’s grandmother. But the mother’s
name does not appear here, or does not seem to.
William has a number of children, Jane in 1787, John in
1790, William F. in 1793, Mary B. in 1794, Elizabeth in
1800, Sarah in 1804, Joel in 1805, Shelby B. in 1811. This
would mean that the mother was alive and living with
William when the Presley Will was written in 1808.
Apparently this Presley family is the ancestor of a
number of people including Senator Helms of North
Carolina and President Carter, the older branch of the
family traces down to Elvis Presley. One family tree
indicates that a woman named Culpepper was the
mother of the older Presleys and the Sarah Lee that is
William’s mother is currently Thomas Presley’s wife at
the time of the 1808 will and is the mother of the four
girls born after 1770. Perhaps date of death for William
sr. is incorrect and is not 1790. If this is the case, than
Thomas Presley may be the stepfather that raised
William jr. There is a deed from 1761 to William
Crittenden witnessed by Robert Lee, father of Sarah Lee.
There are others from 1767, 1765, 1764, 1762, 1761,
1758, etc. It is possible that he died before 1770.
Allan Ralph Andrews, Bakersfield, CA May 5th 2012
Apparently the family was forever fighting the Civil War.
It is known that Crittenden’s were on both sides, as
shown above. There appears to have been a need for
the family to suppress its Southern ties once the South
lost and slavery was over. Even though her Father willed
her a slave, Elizabeth named her daughter Lucretia
Webster after a Northern Senator, making it obvious
which side she was taking on these issues. John Gordon
Crittenden, while a Senator from Kentucky, and
Elizabeth’s distant cousin, was working for some
compromise. These issues show up again and again in
the stories of their day and it is difficult for our
generation to understand how significant they were at
the time.
One major reference I use for understanding these times
is “Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853 -1913,” by
Harris Newmark, 4th Ed, edited by Maurice H. and Marco
R. Newmark, published by Zeitlin and Ver Burgge, in
1970. These are the reminiscences of a practicing
Hebrew, born in Loebau, West Prussia, 5th of July, 1834.
Harris Newmark’s brother, J. P. Newmark had arrived in
San Francisco May 6th 1851 and wrote a letter asking
Harris to join him in California. Harris arrived in San
Francisco 16 October 1853. He writes about great
quantities of sand that was blown into the city and
required constant efforts to remove. He reports there
were no sidewalks and there were many saloons and
gambling houses. There was no stage connection to Los
Angeles at the time, so Newmark was force to take the
steamer Goliah south. There were no wharves and
passengers got off in small boats according to Newmark
(p. 22). Newmark was taken from San Pedro to Los
Angeles in a very primitive stage over terrible roads.
Newmark describes thousands of ground squirrels
watching as he passed ranch houses with strings of beef
hanging over fences to dry. Los Angeles was approached
then on a narrow road bordered by vineyards and willow
trees. He notes that the population of Los Angeles of the
time consisted of 3700 mission Indians and 4000 nonIndians (p. 25) at that many of these had gotten drunk in
the wine harvest. Newmark boarded at the Bella Union
Hotel and worked as a clerk for his brother.
In 1853, Governor John Gordon Crittenden, great
grandson of Henry Crittenden, son of John Crittenden
and Judith Harris, who was the granddaughter of Mary
Jefferson, the Judith Harris who married John at the age
of thirteen, son John Gordon Crittenden was finishing out
a term as Attorney General of the United States, having
been appointed by President Millard Fillmore in 1850, he
had received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Harvard in
1851, and served as acting Secretary of State during the
illness of Daniel Webster, issuing a warning to Britain and
France not to interfere in the question of Cuban
Independence, now, finishing up his term as Attorney
General, he had married his third wife, February 27, 1853
and was elected Senator from Kentucky to replace Henry
Clay upon his death.
Lucretia Webster Smith, daughter of John Payton Smith
and Elizabeth Crittenden (great granddaughter of the
same Henry Crittenden discussed above), had married
Samuel Thomas Kennedy on the 14th of July 1850. They
had moved to Nodaway County, Missouri on a farm near
Maryville at time when it had only four families and a
store, as discussed above. Seven of the children of James
and Elizabeth Kennedy of Orange County North Carolina
were still alive at this point including Mary Kennedy,
Sarah Kennedy, John Bennett Kennedy, Elizabeth
Kennedy, Jane Kennedy, Nancy Kennedy, and Esther
Kennedy. It would be ten years before their tombstones
would start to appear in the Cain Cemetery in Nodaway
County. Hiram Smith, brother of John Payton Smith and
uncle of Lucretia died on the way back to California in
September of 1852. Her other uncle Ezekiel had died of
cholera 28 May 1849. William McMichael, brother of
Charity McMichael had died in Guilford 14 Sept 1848 and
his wife Rhoda had died 3 Jan. 1852 and was buried near
William in Guilford. Elizabeth Crittenden, Lucretia’s
mother had died August 18th 1839 and her father, John
Payton Smith had died August 23rd 1841 when she was 8.
She had brothers and sisters living in Missouri, William
Vinson Smith, born August 25th 1819, Jane Catherine
Smith, born January 17 1828, Mary Ann Smith, born
1823, it is not clear who she lived with before she
married Samuel Kennedy.
Back in North Carolina, the textile industry was booming.
Mills were being set up on the Haw River and Great
Alamance Creek, where James and Elizabeth Kennedy
had owned land. Edwin Holt built the Alamance Cotton
Factory which was manufacturing cotton fabrics on
power looms by 1837.
But, I am focusing at this point on Jean (Thompson)
Andrews, and her mother Mary (Lingenfelter) Thompson,
and her mother Henrietta (Kennedy) Lingenfelter, and
her mother Lucretia Webster (Smith) Kennedy because I
am concerned about my maternal inheritance and its
crash landing into Southern California and Los Angeles in
the years preceding and subsequent to my birth. To look
at this crash landing, I need to look at the force (my
maternal inheritance) and the immovable object (Los
Angeles County and Southern California in 1939).
Strange as it may seen, outside of all sorts of windy
speeches made by distant Crittenden cousins in an
attempt to save the Union, I know very little about the
force and it appears I will have to go elsewhere to
understand it, places like “The Evolution of Man and
Society.” by C. D. Darlington, for example. At least
Newmark gives me some local detail on the Los Angeles
end of the crash landing of my family (but more details
on that later).
Harris Newmark is eating at a restaurant operated by a
French man named La Rue. The restaurant had a dirt
floor with tables covered by dirty tablecloths. According
to Newmark, killings were frequent in Los Angeles at the
time (p. 31), perhaps twenty or thirty a month. He
remembers much alcohol of all kinds and much music,
mainly harp and guitar. Newmark’s brother was dealing
in dry goods and clothing. There were no sidewalks or
graded streets and mud and dust could pile up to several
feet in depth (p. 34). Trash was disposed of in the
street. Light came from candles and candles in lanterns.
Now what is interesting here is how similar situations are
in California and elsewhere. At this point in the
development of America there are still large numbers of
Indians. Emigrants are arriving from everywhere without
any real control over entrance to the country. Things are
changing constantly as new technology and new skills
enter the area.
A history of Nodaway County notes that it has a rich soil
that is good for growing corn, winter wheat, oats, barley,
rye, buckwheat, hemp, flax, millet, sorghum and blue
grass. Cattle and hogs are listed as important. A Thomas
Adams built a cabin in a grove of Burr Oak in 1840 and
lived there till 1849. In the same year a John Mozingo
and his two sons build a cabin and set up a farm. John
Trosper built a cabin that was 14 ft by 14 ft and a
chimney made of notched poles, mortar, and mud, he
planted apple and cherry trees, leaving for Kansas in
1860. The Lanham brothers came in 1841 and William
Saunders in 1846. John Jackson came in 1843 and was
treasurer of the County form 1845 to 1849.
The history says that the settlers went to Liberty, Clay
County to obtain anything of importance, like flour. It
took about eight days to go there with an ox team, with
two or three yokes to a wagon. Neighbors might go
together and sleep in the wagon and kill game to eat on
the way. In 1841 there was only one corn cracker in
Andrew County, another mill was built in Andrew County
in 1842 and another in 1843. A fourth mill, on the
Nodaway River was built by Erastus Downling and A.
Terhune. It took two years to build and the irons for it
had to be brought in from St. Louis. Downling was a
blacksmith and forged the iron needed for the mill. In
1851, Terhune sold out to Downling and bought out the
mill of Hiram Lee. Lee had put a log about eighty feet
long across a stream and then had added brush and rock
to make a dam. The mill wheel was a wooden tub wheel
and the mill was able to grind 15 bushels of corn a day,
but it was all washed away by a flood in the spring of
1852. Terhune put up a frame structure to operate a
grist and a saw mill. In the fall of 1852, ice came down
the Nodaway and caused the river to rise and wash out
an eight foot channel around the end of the dam.
Terhune fixed the problem and sold out to Rankin Russell
in 1853.
Similar primitive conditions existed in Los Angeles at this
time. Newmark notes that water was carried in a huge
ditch from the Los Angeles River and that the adobe brick
house were roofed with tar from the La Brea tar pits.
As mentioned above, roads were terrible and there were
no stage connections with San Francisco.
In Guilford County North Carolina, the Fayetteville and
Western Plank Road, brought the world longest road of
its kind into Guilford County. It was 129 miles long and
stretched from Bethania to Fayetteville. The railroad
would not arrive till 1856.
Most of the Kennedys and McMichaels seem to have
been back in Rush County Indiana. The grave of Mahala
McMichael, wife of John McMichael had been placed in
what would become the Stanley Cemetery upon her
death August 20th 1847. Joseph D. Ross had married
Sarah Kennedy, daughter of James P. Kennedy and
Elizabeth, sister of John Bennett Kennedy, aunt of
Samuel T. Kennedy.
The 1850 US Census for Jennings Township, Fayette
County, Indiana, site of the city of Alquina gives the
following per ancestry,com: Henry J. Ross, age 31,
farmer, born NC, Arvarilla Ross, age 35, born KY,
Greenberry Ross, age 8, born IN, John Madison Ross, Age
5, born IN, Martin K. Ross, Age 1, born IN, Sarah Ross,
Age 62, born NC, Jane Kennedy, age 50, born NC. The
next house has: William D. Ross, age 28 Farmer, NC,
Adaline, Age 25, IN, William M., Age 8, b. IN, James A.,
Age 6, b. IN, Elizabeth, Age 4, born IN, Malinda, Age 2, b.,
IN.
The Hartsell family was living nearby just over the border
from the Jennings township in 1850. Their descendents
have a website which gives information on the living
conditions in Indiana in 1850. Families were living in two
and three room cabins with no schools nearby. Instead
of a sink there is a bowl on a table. You bathe once a
week. There would be no railroad through this area till
1856. The first railroad came to Chicago in 1851. As the
railroad came south, stations were set up with water
tanks and windmills every 10 miles, according to this
website.
As stated above, Samuel T. Kennedy had moved from
Indiana to Missouri and was now living in Maryville,
having just married Lucretia Webster Smith. Living
nearby was Ambrose Cain.
My favorite history of England, is the “Victorian Age,
1815 -1914” by R. J. Evans, Edward Arnold, 1950. It was
my college text when I took “British History in the
Victorian Age” at Long Beach State College (Now
California State University) in 1959. According to this
text, the old Duke of Wellington died September 14th
1852. The general election of 1847 had given strength to
the Whig party. Peel, one of the great leaders of the
British Parliament had died as a result of a fall from a
horse in 1850. A Great Exhibition had been held in 1851.
This was the source of the “Crystal Palace,” a great
building in London, England made of plate glass
(invented in 1848) and wrought iron. It was a
tremendous success, filled with 14,000 exhibitors
showing off British industry and commerce, but it does
not seem to have solved the government’s popularity
problem. Arguments between the Queen and the Prince
Consort and growing differences between Russell and
Palmerston (both major leaders in the Parliament of their
day) had resulted in the resignation of the government
and the formation of government by Derby, on invitation
of the Queen. A general election held in July of 1852
resulted in a Parliament with no clear leadership.
Another favorite text of mine is Carlton J. H. Hayes, “A
Political and Social History of Modern Europe, Volume II,
revised edition, 1815-1924,” Macmillan, 1931. This text
discusses how Prince Louis Napoleon came up with a
document calling for the dissolution of the French
Assembly. Things were even worse in Ireland, according
to Hayes. Ireland’s wool industry had been ruined by
British legislation and its Catholic population
impoverished by land owning Protestants from England.
The diet of these poor was mainly potatoes and terrible
famines resulting from diseases of potato plants had
caused one out of five to die in 1739 and for many to
come to America in the famine of 1846, reducing the
Irish population from eight million in 1845 to six and a
half in 1851 (see op. cit. p.321). Samuel Kennedy’s
ancestors, Hugh Kennedy, and possibly the McMichaels
as well, appear to have arrived in America, in the year
just after the 1739 famine. Now another famine was
driving more Irish to the United States. When the Irish
landlords did not receive their rents from their starving
peasant tenants, they evicted them. The tenants
revolted in 1848 and formed a Tenant-Right League in
1850. But there was no immediate improvement in their
condition. This was the period in which Guiseppe
Garibaldi was fighting in support of Italian independence
from foreign domination. In 1849 he had supported
Mazzini’s “Roman Republic.” When that failed, he came
to New York and made enough money as a candle-maker
and “trading skipper” to return to Italy in 1854 and buy
the island of Caprera (op. cit. p. 166). The United States
was obviously a land of fortune for some in this period.
The general liberal tone of the foreign policy of France
and England, at least in comparison with Russia,
Germany, and Austria, had been supported by a
friendship between Aberdeen, who ran the British
Foreign Office from 1841 -1846, and his French counterpart, Guizot (see Evans, p. 127). Great Britain absorbed
New Zealand in 1840 resulting in a dispute over Tahiti,
which the French took in 1843. By 1845, Aberdeen and
Guizot were able to agree on an end to the slave trade in
Africa. But, Palmerston took Aberdeen’s place in 1846.
Aberdeen was responsible for the Ashburton Tready of
1842 and the Orgeon Tready of 1846, which established
the current boundary of Canada and the United States.
Palmerston supported the Swiss and encourage the
establishment of the current Swiss union. 1848 saw a
series of revolutionary changes in Europe and
Palmerston supported an independent Italy the removal
of Austrian influence. Palmerston received the support
of Parliament in his activities in spite of the distrust of
the Queen. He ignored her complaints and, thus, he
helped set up the tradition of modern British foreign
policy coming totally from the Prime Minister and his
Foreign Secretary. This process had been in play for
some time, but Palmerston gave it new strength. When
Derby became Prime Minister, he made Lord
Malmesbury Foreign Secretary, he was a friend of Louis
Napoleon, now Emperor of France. The Derby-Disraeli
ministry fell in 1852 and a coalition government was
formed. Aberdeen became Prime Minister. Louis
Napoleon had demanded French rights over holy places
in Palestine. This disturbed the Russian Czar. In July,
1853 a Russian army invaded Moldavia and Wallachia, in
reply a fleet was sent to the Dardanelles to defend
Turkish Constantinople. The Sultan of Turkey declared
war on Russia and attacked the Russians. On November
30th, Turkish ships were attacked by Russia and
destroyed. British and French ships were sent into the
Black Sea and by March, 1854, there were declarations of
war and the Crimean War had begun. On September 14th
1854, 50 thousand French and British troops had invaded
Russian territory and defeated Russians some 15 miles
north of Sevastopol on the Black Sea.
The United States was not involved in this war at all. It
was far away from North America and, except for
Canada, which was still a British Colony, had nothing to
do with North Americans.
As to the Kennedy family, several generations removed
from connections to the British Isles, it was all about
survival in the harsh conditions of the newly cultivated
West. A notation on ancestry.com states that George E.
Hamilton, son of James Hamilton and Mary Eyestone,
was born 24 May 1827 in Connersville, Fayette IN and
married Susan Malinda Ross on 26 Nov. 1848 in Fayette,
IN, daughter of Joseph D. Ross and Sarah Kennedy Ross.
Jennings Township of Fayette County Indiana listed the
following in 1850: George Hamilton, Age 23, born in
Indiana, Susan Hamilton, Age 24, born in Indiana,
Thomas T. G. Hamilton, Age 1, born in Indiana, and the
next house, Mary Hamilton, Age 42, born in Ohio, David
Hamilton, Age 17, born in Indiana.
At this point in time there was a major problem with
outbreaks of cholera and resulting panic. There was an
outbreak in this period, 1849-1851 with losses of 4,557 in
St. Louis, Cincinnati lost 5,969, taking away 5 to 10% of
the population (Transactions of the American Clinical and
Climatological Association 2008 119: 143 -153, Walter J.
Daly, Md). Some small towns appear to have been
depopulated as a result and the populace seeking
appeasement of an angry God. Sanitation was bad and
cesspools were allowed to seep into water sources.
Boston Indiana had 120 people in 1849 and there were
53 deaths in five weeks. The town was abandon. In
Aurora, Indiana, there were 14 deaths on June 14th 1849.
Efforts were made to make the air pure by setting fires
on street corners and firing a canon every 25 minutes.
1600 of the towns 2000 residents fled as a result of 51
deaths in the next three weeks. In Madison, Indiana
there were 163 deaths. Advice was given to avoid fruits
and vegetables, night air, and damp places. Cholera his
Greene County, Indiana in 1851 and killed all of its
doctors. It is not clear what effect this had on
movements of the Kennedy family and their relatives,
but scares like this may have driven them to places
distant from the crowded cities that were full of sewage
generated disease. There is a grave in the cemetery in
Rush County, Indiana for a John J. Kennedy, died
September 16th 1849, age 9 months and 10 days, (son of
T. and D. Kennedy). It is not impossible that he died in
the cholera epidemics of 1849. There are graves in this
cemetery of relatives of Kennedy and McMichael family
members that had moved on to Northwestern Missouri.
The railroad between Madison and Indianapolis stopped
running in because of cholera, at this time it was the only
railroad in Indiana. People travelled by river, but that
was a major source of the problem. A posting on the
web about plague ships (old-merseytimes,co,uk quotes
the Liverpool Mercury for Saturday, July 5th 1913 on this
subject) states that in November of 1853 there were 28
ships taking emigrants from America to Europe with
cholera on all of them resulting in 1,141 deaths. There
were 100 deaths on the Constellation which left
Liverpool with 922 persons, 62 on the Tapscott, 89 on
the Union. Napoleon, Indiana was a transportation hub
with a number of stage routes, 35 of its 250 people died
of cholera in 1849. Perhaps, Fayette, and Rush counties
in Indiana were too full of the fear of this disease and
that was what sent the Kennedy and McMichael families
to the fresh water and air of the yet relatively unspoiled
and unsettled land of Platte, Andrew, and Nodaway
Counties in Northern Missouri. There are Rush County
graves for Mary E. McMichael, born April 25, 1840 died
September 15, 1846 (age 6) and James Kennedy, son of
Samuel and Nancy Kennedy, died November 28th 1840 or
1846, age 31, William C. Kennedy, son of Samuel and
Nancy Kennedy, died September 4th 1843, age 27,
Samuel Kennedy, died April 30th 1840, age 64.
Alfred Lord Tennyson was writing his “In Memorium A. H.
H.” in 1849, published in 1850:
XXI
I sing to him that rests below,
And, since the grasses round me wave,
I take the grasses of the grave,
And make them pipes whereon to blow.
The traveler hears me now and then,
And sometimes harshly he will speak:
“This fellow would make weakness weak,
And melt the waxen hearts of men.”
Another answers, “let him be,
He loves to make parade of pain,
That with his piping he may gain,
The praise that comes to constancy.”
A third is wroth: “Is this an hour
For private sorrow’s barren song,
When more and more the people throng
The chairs and thrones of civil power?”
“A time to sicken and to swoon,
When Science reaches forth her arms
To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon?”
Behold, ye speak an idle thing:
Ye never knew the sacred dust:
I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing:
And one is glad; her note is gay,
For now her little ones have ranged;
And one is sad: her note is changed,
Because her brood is stolen away.
This was the mood of the times. It was the most quoted
poem of its day. People were more important to each
other when there was no radio, cell phone, television,
computer, telephone, or other device to keep them
company. Sadness and fear, the desire to escape, who
knows what drove them to move on after loosing
children like this. We can only guess.
The settled places, the good land belonged to the
Quakers and the Pilgrims, the members of the Episcopal
and Presbyterian, Unitarian, and Congregational
Churches. These families seem to be mainly Methodist,
Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, even Mormon, but
rarely any of the denominations associated with wealth
and power. Rather than coming from the prosperous
portions of the British Isles, they were largely rural Scott,
Irish, Welsh, members of the Celtic fringe areas. They
kept to the fringe areas once they arrived and filled up
the empty land that no one claimed except the Indians,
and later, the steamboats and railroads. But, often, it
was their good luck to find themselves near a railroad
line, or a river running West, and be the first to claim
access to this new source of communication and power.
Rivers and railroads, steamboats and stage lines, new
roads and even telegraph lines, would change their lives
in ways that could not be foreseen. As these fringe
groups of farmers found each other and began to
intermarry it became difficult to know who was related
to who.
When Samuel Kennedy got his quick claim deed from the
heirs of James Kennedy in 1808, the other heirs were
Jesse Lynch and Mary Kennedy, John Kennedy (husband
of Charity McMichael, Jane Kennedy, Betsy Kennedy,
Nancy Kennedy, Esther Kennedy, Joseph Ross and Sarah
Kennedy. Joseph Ross was involved in promoting the
Alquina area of Jennings Township in Fayette County,
Indiana. The children of Joseph and Sarah Ross were in
the Alquina area at the time of his death in 1836, along
with Jane Kennedy. These children would be
grandchildren of John Bennett and Charity McMichael
Kennedy. Susan Malinda Ross was a daughter of Joseph
D. Ross born 7 April 1825 in Alquina and she married
George E. Hamilton on 26 Nov. 1848 in Fayette County
Indiana. They had a son Thomas Jefferson Greenberry
Hamilton and were family #63 in the 1850 census of
Jennings Township of Fayette County. Family #22 was
Henry J. Ross (31), Avarilla Ross (35), Greenberry Ross
(8), John Madison Ross (1), Martin Ross (1), Sarah Ross
(62), and Jane Kennedy (50), Family #23 was William D.
Ross (28), Adaline Ross (25), William M. Ross (8), James
A. Ross (6), Elizabeth Ross (4), and Malinda Ross (2).
All of the children of John Bennett Kennedy and Charity
McMichael Kennedy were born in North Carolina except
for Samuel Thomas, my grandmother’s grandfather, who
was born in Fayette County, Indiana 29 September 1830.
There is no way to know exactly what was happening,
but soon my ancestors started moving to Posey
Township in Rush County, the County next to Fayette
County, and not far from Indianapolis, the state capitol.
It is at this point the family begins to be associated with
the Cain and Allender Family. Eliza Ann Kennedy (born 2
Feb 1815) married Jacob C. Allender who was born 15
July 1814 in Fleming, Kentucky. They were married 18
Oct 1835. She died 9 March 1836. There is a will of
Nathan Parrish of Rush County, Indiana, dated 26 Feb.
1842 with Thomas McMicheal and George Moore as
witnesses. On the 16th of November 1846, Charity
(Carrie) Kennedy (born 7 August 1819, daughter of
Samuel Kennedy and Nancy McMichael) married Jacob
Six (born 1 March 1819 in Fleming County, Kentucky).
They had a number of children, John W. Six, born 21 Feb.
1849 died 29 March 1849, buried in the Stanley
Cemetery in Posey Township. On the 12th of September
1850, Mary Ann Six (born 2 Jan 1828) married Nathaniel
Kennedy (born 1825 in Washington, Tennessee, son of
Samuel Kennedy and Nancy McMichael.
As discussed above, my branch of the Kennedy family will
move to Northern Missouri and end up in Maryville in
1850, living near Ambrose Cain from Rush County,
Indiana. Samuel Thomas, son of John Bennett Kennedy
and Charity McMichael, had just married Lucretia
Webster Smith, daughter of Elizabeth Crittenden Smith.
Later, Samuel and Lucretia will have a daughter,
Henrietta, who will marry Benjamin Harrison Lingenfelter
and they and their daughter Mary will move to Seattle,
Washington, where Mary will graduate from Seattle High
and be wed to another Seattle High graduate, Hugh
Monroe Thompson. Their daughter Jean Thompson,
being my mother, marrying Ralph Andrews in Los
Angeles County, and giving birth to me in Long Beach,
California.
On its way West, the family left a series of graves,
McMichael graves in a Methodist Cemetery in Guilford,
North Carolina, McMichael, Kennedy, etc., graves in the
Stanford Cemetery in Rush, County, Indiana, the Kennedy
and Cain Graves in the Cain Cemetery in Nodaway,
County, Missouri.
Standard US history textbooks like Henretta, Brody,
Ware, and Johnson, “America’s History,” (Bedford/Saint
Martin, 2000, V. I, pp 334 -335) describe the period
between 1830 and 1854 as a time of exceptional growth
in personal income. Carpenters began to build houses
with a frames of wooden studs joined by crosspieces at
top and bottom (balloon frames). The four room frame
house began to replace the two room cabin. Sheeting
and fabric was sold in local stores, a product of the mills
multiplying in places like the Haw River in North Carolina.
Stoves, ovens, broilers, grates became available using the
same iron technology that generates the boilers for
locomotives and the rails for railroads. These items were
delivered on the railroads that began to penetrate Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, all the way to St. Louis and beyond in the
period from 1850 to 1860. Up to 1852, the canals carried
twice as much tonnage as the railroads, but railroads
were the major carriers of freight by 1859. But there was
no communication with California and the far West at
this point, except by overland trail or by ship around the
Horn.
Newmark (See Above) describes the Los Angeles of 1853
as being more like a village. Shops were made of adobe
and signs were painted on unbleached cloth nailed to the
outside of the stores. Painted wooden signs did not
appear till 1865. Merchants would close their stores
when they felt like it, or spend hours playing cards. The
first saw mill and lumber yard did not appear in town
until 1861 (op. cit. pp. 80-81). There was little iron
available. The blacksmith in town bought old wagon
parts from outside of town to use in making utensils and
horseshoes. Most people used the old carretas with
solid wooden wheels. The blacksmith attempted to
introduce Eastern style wagons, but had little luck at first.
Carriages were very scarce. Don Abel Sterns had the only
private carriage in Los Angeles, at the time. People used
horses and carretas for all their travel.
Newmark describes the carreta as a massive platform on
wheels sawed from logs. It squeaked and could be heard
from far away. Oxen pulled them with ropes attached to
their horns. Usually, up to fifty howling dogs would
follow the squeaking carts. Long leather ropes were used
to hold on to horse because there were no hitching
posts. Newmark says that General Fremont’s wife had
one of the finest carriages in California that had been
made in the East and shipped around the Horn.
A Mormon colony in San Bernardino was supply Los
Angeles with butter, and eggs, but it took three days to
arrive, the butter melting and the eggs stale.
In 1853, according to Newmark, there was only one
newspaper in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Star. It
published in both Spanish and English. When it was
founded in 1851, Los Angeles had no telegraph lines.
Post from San Francisco might take 50 days or more. The
admission of California into the Union in 1850 was not
known on the Pacific Coast till six weeks later, the news
of the deaths of Clay and Webster in 1852 did not reach
the Coast for a month (op. cit. p. 93). This was progress,
according to Newmark, because the news of the death of
President Harrison took three and a half months to make
it West. The Los Angeles Post Office contained a soap
box where citizens would help themselves to mail. Many
of the wealthier citizens lived at the Plaza, which was
usually filled with thrown away rubbish. The Church of
Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels, dated from 1822, had
no pews and required participants to knell on the floor or
stand during worship. Newmark says the bell rung at six
in the morning and eight at night marked the limits of the
day. The Corpus Christi festival required the cleaning of
the Plaza and the major families, Del Valles, Olveras,
Lugos, Picos put up altars in front of their homes covered
with silks and satin and expensive jewels. A procession
would move to each altar with children dressed in white
carrying flowers. On Christmas eve, there were plays
presented by young people and the eating of “bunelos,”
which Newmark describes as “native donuts.” Newmark
states that the first “Jewish Cemetery” was established in
Los Angeles in 1854 (op. cit. p. 104). In 1855, the city
built its first public school building.
Newmark points out that there was much more home
treatment in 1853 (op. cit., page 110). Castor oil, ipecac,
black drought, and calomel were used frequently.
Surgery was done at home and there were few
instruments available.
West to the ocean, from the few streets that made up
the city of Los Angeles, according to Newmark, was a
great undeveloped field with swamps full of tules. South
and east of the city, there were large vineyards. All of
the land, to the city limits, belonged to the city, the land
had been surveyed, but no streets were cut, according to
Newmark. The houses that existed were made of adobe
bricks formed of mud and straw and dried for months in
the sun. The walls were several feet thick, but required
protection of roofs and verandas, or they washed away
in the rain. There were patios but no basements and the
floors were often of dirt. Doors were wide and windows
were deep. Wooden shutters were used instead of
curtains. There were wide verandas, but no chimneys or
fireplaces. There were few gardens because of the cost
of water. Roofs were flat and covered with tar from the
tar pits at the springs on the Hancock Ranch (today’s La
Brea Tar Pits) or imported from places to the North.
Enormous kettles were put up in the streets to melt the
pitch and fires we lit under them. The molten tar was
carried up in buckets and poured on the roofs. Newmark
believed the first brickyard went up around 1855, but
recalls a brick kiln built in 1853 and at least one brick
building at that time (op. cit. p. 115). He recalls a second
brick kiln made for a new jail, that replaced an old adobe
jail that had no cells and kept the prisoners fastened to
logs outside.
Irrigation and water came from the zanjas, or open
ditches. There were seven of eight of them in operation
in 1853. They connected with the zanja madre, the
mother ditch that ran through the north side of the city.
The source of the zanja madre was the Los Angeles River
from a point well north of the city. Carriers charged 50
cents a bucket for water from the river. Animals of all
kinds used the river, including pigs, so it was not clean.
The river had no bridge over it and all the young children
bathed their to amuse themselves. The city council
passed a resolution against washing clothes in the zanjas
but the women of the city continued to wash this way.
Water went into five gallon “ollas” that were porous and
kept the contains cool from evaporation. The ollas were
hung off the ground and gourd dipper were often used to
dip water from within.
Small pox epidemics arrived every year. The natives
were afraid of vaccination and sanitation. A smallpox
wagon called the “Black Maria” was in the streets during
the epidemics.
In 1854, an Aunt and Uncle arrived from New York City,
and they began to give Harris Newmark instruction in
English. Joseph Newmark would organize the Los
Angeles Hebrew Benevolent Society, which, among other
things cared for the Los Angeles Jewish Cemetery.
The money in circulation in Los Angeles came from
France, Spain, Mexco, etc. and it was exchanged based
on size, thus a Mexican quarter, worth only 14 cents was
accepted in exchange for an American quarter (op. cit., p.
129). Privately stamped coins appear to have been
common, issued by assaying companies. Stealing and
gambling, drinking, and bad language were common in
the city of Newmark’s day. The merchant would keep
some worthless jewelry within easy reach to protect his
more valuable items.
Although the Los Angeles County of Newmark’s time is
very different from the Los Angles that Henrietta
(Kennedy) Lingenfelter would bring up her family in when
she resided in Torrance in the 1920s, there are some
similar points. Los Angeles County was still expanding,
and much of the expansion was from places outside the
state, just as was the case in Harris Newmark’s day. Also,
the advance of medicine and technology was changing
life as rapidly, perhaps more rapidly than in Newwark’s
time. Family was still very important, but it gradually
grew less important as new opportunities opened up at
work, at school, in government, etc., that had nothing to
do with local kin.
There was another process that was at work, and was
even further along for Henrietta than it had been for
Newmark. The woman’s rights movement had begun
among the abolitionists (see America’s History, cited
above, p. 392). Angelina and Sarah Grimke had left a
South Carolina plantation to lecture against slavery in the
North. In 1837, clergy members asked the sisters to
cease lecturing to mixed audiences, since it was the duty
of women to obey men. The Grimke sisters began to
maintain the need to free women from “domestic
slavery.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott
organized a convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. More
conventions followed in the 1850s. Susan B. Anthony
joined the movement for women’s rights in 1851.
Henrietta (kennedy) Lingenfelter was a college graduate,
two of her daughters, Lois and Ruth, were also college
graduates. Both female children of her oldest daughter,
Mary, graduated from college as well. That Harris
Newmark was learning English from his aunt, is symbolic
of the new role that women would play as leaders in the
field of education.
The 1850s represented a transition from steamboat to
railroad as the major means of transportation in North
America. Places like Los Angeles and Nodaway County
Missouri were still dependent upon steamboats rather
than railroads. As the railroads reached these areas,
there would be a major change in their character. Cabins
and adobe brick structures, like those described above,
would begin to be replaced by brick and balloon frame
structures. Already, vaccination was beginning to bring
smallpox under control, further progress against disease
would have to wait for the improvement of microscope
techniques and development in microbiology, the subject
Henrietta’s grandson Victor Thompson (son of Mary
(Lingenfelter) Thompson) would obtain his B.A. degree in
at the University of California, Berkeley and the subject
that I would teach for the State University of New York at
Fulton Montgomery Community College, after obtaining
a Master’s degree at the University of California, Los
Angeles (Botany, 1963) and doing doctoral work in the
life sciences. I remember being vaccinated for smallpox
as a boy, by my great uncle John Lingenfelter MD,
Henrietta’s only son, the other four children were
daughters.
The fear of disease, of cholera epidemics, drove people
to religion, the Mormon Church, the Church of Christ, the
Disciples of Christ, the Methodist Church in the case of
the Kennedy Family. With the spread of abolitionism and
women’s rights came the spread of the transcendental
philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have in my hand a
book of Emerson’s Essays that belonged to Benjamin
Harrison Lingfelter, husband of Henrietta, when he
studied at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. On
page 148, Emerson says “I look for the new Teacher that
shall follow so far those shining laws that he shall see
them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete
grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul;
shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with the
purity of the heart; and shall show that the Ought, that
Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with
Joy.”
In the first part of the 20th Century, Ernest Holmes
organized the Institute of Religious Science to promote
these ideas of Emerson. This institute was located near
the springs on the Hancock Ranch in Los Angeles, that
Harris Newmark wrote about many years before. Ernest
Holmes was influence by one of the few religious
movements started by a woman, the Christian Science
movement begun by Mary Baker Eddy of Boston, started
in 1866. Ernest Holmes ideas would attract both of my
parents and my mothers parents, including three of
Henrietta Lingenfelter’s daughters: Mary (my
grandmother), Lois (Lingenfelter) Engel, and Ruth
(Lingenfelter) Jurich.
Rather than following their children into Religious
Science, Benjamin and Henrietta remained true to the
Disciples of Christ church, the more liberal denomination
of the Church of Christ movement, but not nearly as
liberal as the ideas of Holmes, which embraced the
theism and pantheism and agnosticism of Buddhist,
Hindu, Jewish, Moslem, and Chinese philosophy and
theology. Holmes was not particular about the details as
long as it was positive and constructive in its tone. In his
book, “What Religious Science Teaches,” he embraces
Emerson, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Swedenborg,
Whitman, Jesus, The Hermetic Teaching, Talmud, Koran,
Zend-Avesta, Buddhist and Hindu Sacred Writings, New
and Old Testaments, Gnostic Writings, Book of Dao,
Upanishads, Pistis Sophia, Apocrypha, The Book of the
Dead, Bhagavad-Gita, Veda, Mahabharata, and others, as
sources of doctrine and authority. This was the sort of
thing my parents and grandparents were reading and
studying in the early years of my life. Many of the
ministers in the organization were women and women
continue to be very active in the organization to this day.
In my own philosophy, I have tended to follow the path
set out by Holmes and Emerson, fusing philosophy and
science and looking to Chinese and Hindu sources for my
religion, looking to Socrates and Plato as often as I look
to Christianity. It is a long way from the Christianity of
Methodism and Mormonism. That there are members of
the LDS Church among the family is to be expected. The
path the Mormons followed from New York to Utah
passes right through areas where family members
settled, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, etc..
Newmark’s business seems to have brought him in
contact with Mormon organizations and since he seems
to have dealt with most of his commercial contacts in a
respectful friendly way, the results appear to have been
positive. Every month new people appear in Los Angeles,
with which Newmark establishes social and business
relationships, they bring new technology, commercial,
legal, educational connections.
Cooking in Los Angeles in 1853 was largely Mexican,
according to Newmark: tamales, enchiladas, frijoles,
tortillas, pan de huevos, panocha, with the Indians
contributing pinole. Dancing centered on the fandango,
jota, and cachucha. Food in Missouri and Indiana was
largely what was available, corn and wheat flour, chicken
and eggs of all kinds, pork and beef in various forms.
When Joseph D. Ross, husband of Sarah Kennedy, died 4
Sept 1836, the extensive probate records, remember
that Joseph D. Ross was largely responsible for the
development of Alquina, Indiana, in Jennings Township
of Fayette, County, these records list agricultural
property including: 60 head of geese, cows and steers, 12
and 13 head of sheep, a field of corn, a sugar tub, a lot of
wheat, a lot of rye, a coffee mill, 10 head of hogs, a tea
kettle. Looking at this I remember my grandmother,
living, when I was two, in the same house with her
mother, her mother Henrietta (Kennedy) Lingenfelter
dying in the room that became my bedroom, and I
remember lamb cops and pork chops. I remember corn
in various forms, including hominy. I remember wheat
bread and rye bread and lots of milk and butter. My
main comment on the above is that they must have
eaten a lot more goose in Sarah Kennedy Ross’s kitchen.
I do not recall eating a goose or a goose egg, although we
raised them in my backyard when I was 13 and living in
Compton (just North of Long Beach in Los Angeles
County). In the period of time we are discussing, 1853,
many family members were living in the vicinity of the
Stanley Cemetery in Posey Township of Rush County,
near Arlington.
An account printed in the extensive family tree for the
descendants of George Allender mentions an item from
Rush County that probably took place about the time
that Henrietta (Kennedy) Lingenfelter was setting up
house for the first time in Torrance, California, a suburb
of Los Angeles. Remember that Thomas McMichael and
George W. Moore were witness to the will of David
Parish, father of Nathan Parish and husband of Selitha
Allender, parents of Henry W. Parish and George
Washington Parish and that Jacob Six had married
Charity Kennedy, daughter of Samuel Kennedy and
Nancy McMichael, and they were the parents of Nancy J.
Six, Thomas J. Six, William M. Six, Samuel K. Six, John W.
Six (the later buried in the Stanley Cemetery referred to
above. Remember also that Mary Ann Six married
Nathaniel Kennedy, son of John S. Kennedy and grandson
of Samuel Kennedy. Jacob C. Allender married Eliza Ann
Kennedy, the daughter of John Kennedy and Charity
McMichael (grandparents of Henrietta (Kennedy)
Lingenfelter.
Donna Tauber, apparently the source for the extensive
Allender family file I am using here has a story place
under a section for Evalena Drennen, with a lineage
going back to Elisabeth Six and Mary Allender, cousins
and in-laws of cousins, relatives of cousins resting in the
Stanley Cemetery mentioned above. According to the
story quoted, “Aunt Zola lived in Arlington and she would
come and bring her son Jim Eddie and Oscie would be
there from Indianapolis, Aunt Thelma from Connersville
and my Gandma and Grandpa Maggie and Homer Enis.”
The story goes on to tell how, “Grandma lived in a cute
little white house in Arlington, coming from Rushville just
past the cemetery and the cannery we would turn the
first street left go about one block and we would be
there.” She describes how, “We always went around to
the back door and everyone would be in the kitchen
eating pie.”
I remember by grandmother Mary, Henrietta’s oldest
daughter making pies in 1943, 1944, 1945, in her house
in West Los Angeles. The War, World War II was the
focus of everyone’s attention, my uncle Victor Thompson
was with the Air Force in India. Henrietta’s daughter
Marty was married to Ivan Farman, an Air Force General,
my mother and her father (Hugh Thompson, along with
his son in law, Frank Gilbert) were working for Rieber
Aircraft just down Pico Blvd. Rationing was on and when
we went to the local Safeway, or the Atlantic and Pacific,
it was difficult to get all the items grandmother needed,
but I remember lots of pies. Grandmother mentioned
her mother’s advice when she made them. She
constantly complained about the crust not being right.
Rhubarb Pie, mentioned in the Allender story above, was
a major item that she baked and I loved it. I would love
to watch and help by licking spoons and eating shortning.
What strikes me about this is what changes and doesn’t
change. On the surface nothing could be more different
from Indiana than this West Los Angeles house with its
white washed stucco walls, Spanish Tiles and patio, and
tile roof. But underneath the stucco was a balloon
frame, not the adobe brick of the Los Angeles of Harris
Newmark’s 1853. There was asphalt on the roof, but in
association with real tiles, much too expensive for all but
the rich in the time of Newmark’s arrival. There was no
sign of any Mexican food in this middle class
neighborhood, bread and milk were delivered daily by
delivery truck and the streets were clean and swept by
street sweeping trucks. Something unimaginable in the
time of Sarah Ross, Samuel Kennedy, or Harris Newmark
in 1853. Life had been transformed by telephone and
radio, television was on its way, as mentioned above, at
this time my uncle Frank Gilbert, husband of Miriam
Gilbert daughter of Hugh and Mary Thompson, was busy
in his garage a few blocks away, converting an old radar
set to a three inch television. Still, what we ate, had not
changed that much, at least in grandmother’s kitchen,
from what had been cooked and served a hundred years
before, or was been cooked at that very time by other
relatives back in Missouri and Indiana, from where the
family came.
Now even this would change, as all things do. I
remember coming to visit my parents in Torrance
sometime in the 1980s. My mother had divorced my
father in 1953 and married Paul Colaluca, originally from
Philadelphia, PA. They took me out to eat at their
favorite restaurant in Redondo Beach, Pancho and
Wongs, a restaurant, since closed, that served both
Mexican and Chinese cuisine. The Southern California
area is the source of many currently popular restaurant
and fast food chains, including those that specialize in
food of this kind.
You can see the beginnings of the process that generated
this in Harris Newmark’s story of his life in California. Los
Angeles is constantly receiving new settlers from all over
North America and the larger world. They come, mainly,
by ship at this point, some from the gold fields.
Newmark notes (op. cit. p. 143) that Bishop and Beale,
received an enormous amount of Kern County land in
1854, Newmark estimates that it was around two or
three hundred thousand acres, for work they did in
surveying the Butterfield Stage route. Newmark believes
that Bishop sold out to operate a streetcar line in San
Jose. Bakersfield, according to Newmark, was part of this
ranch, getting its name from Colonel Baker. Newmark
claims that Baker sold out to Beale and bought the San
Vicente Ranch, that took in the whole Santa Monica area.
It consisted of 30,000 acres on which Baker raised sheep.
Newmark relates that the “Soldier’s Home” is on part of
this land (op. cit., p. 143).
It is interesting to me that my current home in Oildale,
Kern County, is in the suburbs of Bakersfield and may be
on land that belonged to Baker’s original ranch. Where
my grandmother lived in West Los Angeles was close to
the Soldier’s Home, which is now associated with a
military cemetery and Veteran’s Administration Hospital.
It seems odd that my grandmother’s house may have
been on land that was part of, or adjacent to, Baker’s
Santa Monica ranch. It is strange to think that my life has
been a journey from one part of Baker’s property to
another.
I have been fortunate to have had access to both. The
Self Realization fellowship, begun by the author of
“Autobiography of a Yoga,” owns some beautiful
property north of Santa Monica, that I often passed as a
boy and later visited. I have spent many hours collecting
sea weed along the coast north of Santa Monica in what
must have originally been land belong to Baker, or to his
neighbors. Yesterday, I went for a two hour walk in Hart
Park alongside the Kern River, gazing at the mountains
that frame the Kern River drainage.
Newmark discusses how gold fever affected much of
what happened in Southern California. Apparently gold
was found at Havilah, in Kern County, and the word
spread everywhere, by 1855, according to Newmark (op.
cit. pp. 148 -149) the amounts of gold had been greatly
exaggerated and rumors were everywhere. Newmark
says that the find attracted gamblers and “desperadoes”
to the area. As a result there were gunfights and four
men were shot dead in the Plaza, and six wounded, on a
Sunday night in 1855.
Among those arriving was a W. G. Ross, who purchased
the main hotel in Los Angeles (Bella Union), July 22nd
1854, along with a man named Crockett. I have no idea if
this Ross is a relative of the Ross family in Indiana,
apparently Ross and Crockett were bought out by a
Robert S. Hereford on April 7th 1855, and Ross was later
killed in San Francisco by a C. P. Duane (op. cit., p. 150).
Los Angeles was served by schooners and side-wheeler
steam boats with paddles that “churned the water into a
frothing foam.” Sometime in this period a stage line was
put in that went south through San Jose and Santa
Barbara to Los Angeles and San Diego. In 1854, a route
was surveyed to Salt Lake City and started as a pony
express route. Later, this became a wagon route. Bull
fighting and cock fighting were still common in Los
Angeles at this time. Among those reaching Los Angeles
at this time was George Dalton, who came from London,
England and established a vineyard and orchard.
Newmark mentions an earthquake, July 11th 1855, that
left cracks in most buildings in Los Angeles.
This is a world that belonged largely to men. Men were
exploring the seas, using the new forms of transportation
available and the new lands available to see the world.
These opportunities were largely closed to women.
Contraception was only slowly beginning to improve.
Children were subject to many different diseases.
James Oliver Robertson and Janet C. Robertson have
written a book based on the accumulated papers of the
Taintor family of Hampton, Connecticut (All Our
Yesterdays, HarperCollins, 1993). The Taintors were well
off. They, like the Newmarks, were one of the leading
families in their city. The Robertson book, in discussing
the Taintor family in the 1840s and 1850s points out that
“Caring for sick children was a mother’s absolute duty.” I
remember the devotion with which my grandmother and
my mother cared for me as a child when I was sick.
There were many child killing diseases around, Scarlet
Fever is mentioned as a particularly dangerous disease.
According to the Robertson book, families were
responsible to caring for the old and dying was
something a daughter duty. In the case of the Taintor
household that is the subject of the Robertson book,
Delia and Henry Taintor took care of Henry’s mother for
ten years (see op. cit. p.227). Dr. John Lingenfelter MD,
son of Henrietta took care of his mother’s wife in her
later years in Seattle. I remember visiting their house in
1948 when she was living in her home. His older sister,
my grandmother took care of her mother Henrietta
(Kennedy) Lingenfelter while she died. I remember
visiting her in the room that would later become my
bedroom. When John Engel, husband of Lois
(Lingenfelter) Engel was slowly dying from accumulations
of minor strokes, his wife, daughter of Henrietta, was
working as a guidance counselor and did not have time
to look after her husband. It became my younger
brother, Stephen Charles Andrews, duty to look after
him, when he wasn’t going to High School. Stephen
actually lived with his great aunt and uncle during this
period.
When Mary (Lingenfelter) Thompson died of thyroid
cancer in 1953, her husband Hugh Monroe Thompson,
lived with John and Lois (Lingenfelter) Engel, then, in
1954, he moved in with us and had a room in my
mothers house for a number of years, till finally moving
into his own place (I am trying to recall the date but I
cannot remember). Hugh and I became very close, he
and I drove together, with me driving most of the way,
from Los Angeles to Seattle in 1956 in an old 1947
Plymouth. This was an opportunity for me to visit with a
number of members of the family. My uncle Victor
Thompson, MD, in Weed, California. My grandfather’s
twin brother Victor Thompson in Des Moines and his
older brother Frederick Thompson in Tacoma, my great
uncle Dr. John Lingenfelter, MD, in Seattle, his sister Ruth
(Lingenfelter) Jurich in Federal Way, and their children.
We continued down to Portland, Oregon to visit Mrs.
Harold Gilbert, mother of Frank Gilbert, and sister-in-law
of Alfred Clinton Gilbert, of Gilbert Toys in New Haven.
I am holding Hugh Thompson’s copy of Ernest Holmes
book “The Science of Mind” as I write this. The first
address in the book is 2406 West 171st Torrance,
California, the house my mother purchased in 1954, and
the second address is Hugh Thompson’s retirement
location, 13821 Fresh Meadow Lane, in Seal Beach,
California.
At the time that we are discussing, this area is nothing
but fields and willow swamps grazed upon by cattle. It is
a world where little is known about disease and
medicine. Primitive microscopes have been developed
and vaccination against smallpox has proven so effective
that Napoleon ordered all French citizens to be
vaccinated against smallpox. But other diseases, like
cholera, still have no effective treatment. Cholera strikes
London, England in 1831 and 1832 and again in 1848. In
1849, John Snow, and English obstetrician published a
pamphlet that demonstrated that cholera was associated
with dirty water. In 1853, cholera killed over 5000 in
Hawaii. In 1854, the Italian anatomist Fillipo Pacini found
the bacterium that caused cholera, but his discovery was
not translated into English. When another cholera break
out occurred in London, Dr. Snow was able to trace it to
contamination near a public water source on Broad
Street.
Transportation was developing in this period and it
would spread disease. In 1855, Yellow Fever appeared in
Norfolk, Virginia, apparently brought in by a steamship
that carried the infected mosquitoes from the West
Indies. We have discussed, above, the passage of cholera
down the railroad lines. There was extensive railway
develop in this period, as discussed above. The
Robertson book, mentioned above, relates how Henry
Taintor of Hampton, Connecticut, was investing in
railway stock in 1850. He bought shares of the Erie line
that was 483 miles long when completed in 1851. This
line ran from New York City to Lake Erie. In 1851,
according to the Robertsons, the US had 9000 miles of
railroad (more than all the rest of the world, op. cit. p.
345).
The railroads had not reached California, and because
transportation was so bad to the interior, little was
known about much of the interior of the state.
According to Newmark, there were no fences separating
the great Spanish and Mexican land grant ranchos, the
cattle wandered where they wished to, each ranch
having branded its cattle with its own distinctive brand.
Great rodeos were held. These involved the round up of
all the cattle in an area by the vaqueros (cowboys).
Major celebrations where held at this time, including bull
fights and horse races (Newmark, op. cit. p. 182). The
rodeos were presided over by Judges of the Plains.
Under the old Mexican law, the Judge of the Plains was
the law. Trade was opened up with Salt Lake following
an old Spanish trail to Sante Fe. The first shipment
involved fifteen wagons pulled by 150 mules. This wagon
train carried thirty tons and left in May and came back in
September (op. cit, p. 187). Banning, who was closely
associated with Newmark and seems to have been active
in all the commercial goings and comings that promoted
the Los Angeles harbor area, where he had heavily
invested, seems to have been a major sponsor of this
new venture. Newmark writes that he brought back
some of the first vehicles with spokes in Southern
California.
By 1856, Los Angeles was opening its second public
school. The owner of the Star, the major Los Angeles
paper, did not feel so positive about the future of the
city, writing “The flush times of the pueblo, the day of
large prices and pocket-books are past.” He wrote that
he saw “only bad liquor, rags, and universal dullness,
when neither pistol-shots nor dying groans” could help
“when earthquakes would hardly turn men in their
beds!” The owner sold the paper June, 1856, to Henry
Hamilton, who had come from Ireland to California in
1848.
In 1853 there were around 80 vineyards in Los Angeles.
William Wolfskill, who came west from Missouri, was a
pioneer in lemons, oranges, and grapes, and began the
California fruit industry. According to Newmark, the local
Indians were still living off of acorn meal, but the 1854
crop was very poor.
Newmark’s entry for 1857 concerns me. At this point, he
discusses the destruction done at Fort Tejon by the great
quake of 1857, and how the men were forced to live in
tents after the destruction of the barracks. But, most
telling is his story of the tsunami that nearly swamped
the Sea Bird as it entered San Francisco Bay.
My mother lived through the great Long Beach
earthquake of the 1930s. The quake was not that strong
as quakes go, but Long Beach was built on beach sand
and alluvium. Many of the buildings, and all of the
school were made of brick and fell down. My mother
went to school in tents. The balloon frame house they
were living in was thrown off its foundation. It was the
balloon frame that saved many lives. Balloon frames
respond to major earthquakes much better than two and
three story brick construction. The survivors of this Long
Beach quake were in great fear of a tsunami, but one
never came.
People coming to California from Ireland and New
England looked with contempt on the way of life of the
Native Americans. The Gabrielinos, named by Europeans
for the San Gabriel mission that they were associated
with, had lived a largely nomadic life, gathering acorns in
the mountains and foothills in the Summer and
retreating to the ocean, even to islands like Catalina to
fish and gather shell fish in the Winter. It is probable
that they retreated to mountain areas and stores of
acorns in the hills, when floods, ocean storms,
earthquake generate tsunamis and coastal swamp
disease were a problem. In like manner, when poor
rains, or heavy snows, or fire, made the mountains
undesirable, they took refuge at the sea, even on
Catalina Island.
This way of life made no sense to the Europeans. Who,
generally, had nothing but contempt for everything
about the Native American. Yet, by the time English,
French, and German speaking settlers arrived, the
Spanish may have absorbed some of this wisdom from
their Native American wives. There may be a reason
that Los Angeles was located so far from the coast, San
Diego was located next to available mesas, San Francisco
was located on the bay side of the ocean. The records
are so poor, it is difficult to be sure. But, when I was
younger, I often gazed and the remains of the original
church at San Juan Capistrano, devastated, if I remember
correctly, and I am not checking my history on this, by an
earthquake thirty years earlier than the 1857 quake we
are discussing. For a while, my nephew, Stephen Roy
Andrews, son of Stephen Charles Andrews, son of Ralph
B. Andrews and Jean (Thompson) Andrews, was living
with his mother, Elaine Smith, in Crescent City, and
frequent trips to that coastal city reminded me often of
the toll that tsunami waves had taken on that city, poorly
placed from the stand point of defense against
earthquake generated ocean waves. (The frequent use in
this text of the term “American Indian, or just “Indian,”
does not reflect the point of view of the author, but is an
attempt to show the mind set of the Europeans of the
day, to show the world from their point of view, in order
to better understand it).
It was one reason why many residence of Western places
like Nodaway County Missouri, were so slow in taking the
available railroad transportation, once it became
available, to go West. At the time of the great San
Francisco quake, the belief that California was in danger
of falling into the ocean was already common, according
to friends of mine who had relatives living there at the
time. The following story was told to me (related by
Ralph Pease of Van Nuys in 1995, before his death) and is
probably true. This relative of my friend was living with
his wife in a San Francisco hotel when the quake hit.
There was a pitcher of water by the bed. The lights went
out and the pitcher of water sailed up in the air and came
down on the bed. At this point the uncle of my friend
cried out to his wife, “Hang on Sally, we are going
under!”
The same Ralph Pease that related the story above,
worked for many years for the Sunkist citrus packing
organization. According to him, some of the agricultural
patterns in the Los Angeles area were due to the fact
that the variety of citrus they were planting had a tree
life of about 50 years. The trees, he claimed, would bear
great quantities of fruit just before they died.
This was a frequent experience of my boyhood. Friends
and associates of my Bank Vice President father, would
buy an orchard that was producing great amounts of
fruit. Then, the orchard, would suddenly start to die.
They would sell to a housing developer and what had
been agricultural land would convert quickly to mass
cheap housing. This was particularly common when I
was a boy, just after the end of World War II. Large
numbers of trees were planted at the time of the railroad
boom, created by the competition of Santa Fe and
Southern Pacific railroads for West Coast business. In
1940, 1950, 1960, they had entered their period of
decline (trees planted in 1890, 1900, 1910). Towns
devoted to citrus were suddenly devoted to housing
development (Ontario, Pomona, Upland in San
Bernardino County, Santa Ana, Orange, Anaheim in
Orange County, Riverside in Riverside County, San
Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County).
An important factor in this is my presence in the middle
of Orange Groves in Ontario, California in 1945, when my
father was Vice President of the First National Bank in
Ontario. A second factor was my program of study for
my doctorate in Botany at the University of California,
Los Angeles, at the point in time when the School of
Agriculture was moving to the University of California,
Davis. By 1962, at the age of 22, I had already passed the
doctoral written exams and was teaching the labs for the
graduate level course in Plant Taxonomy (Dr. Mildred
Mathias, Director of the Botanic Garden was my major
Professor and gave the lectures for the course). I was
able to take courses from agricultural professors that had
not yet relocated, including a memorable course in tissue
culture given by an agricultural professor who was an
authority on citrus.
Later, I would become lecturer in native plants for
ornamental uses for the Ornamental Horticulture
Department of California State Polytechnic University at
Pomona, and then Associate Professor of Botany for
Miami Dade Junior College, South Campus, in Miami,
Florida. There I worked with Dr. Monroe Birdsey,
authority on Cycas (Sago Palm), formerly of the
University of Miami, Department of Botany. He and I
would often travel together to various cites. I remember
when he took me to the Citrus Park in Homestead,
Florida, which at that time (1968) grew a number of
different genera and varieties of citrus.
The University of California, Los Angeles, was doing quite
a bit of research work with citrus at the time I was there.
I was a research associate for the Botanic Garden and for
the Department of Pharmacology at this point. One of
my titles at one point, was curator of the herbarium of
medicinal plants for the department of pharmacology of
the school of medicine. This fancy title was generated
for the purposes of one of the fancy grants that helped
pay my small salary. All of that is long forgotten, it faded
as soon as the grant money that drove it disappeared.
One of my jobs as the teaching assistant in charge of the
labs in plant taxonomy, was to located plants belonging
to various families of plants so that specimens could be
brought into the plant taxonomy room for students to
study and be tested on. The botanic garden at UCLA
already had a number of different kinds of citrus relatives
as specimens in the garden, one of my jobs was to make
sure we could find them and that they were properly
labeled.
I have just located by copy of “The Families of Flowering
Plants,” Vol. I, by J. Hutchinson, 2nd Edition, Oxford, 1959.
This was our guide for the plant taxonomy class and I was
paid to convert the class to the Hutchinson system. Later,
in 1970, when married to Linda (West) Andrews, I would
actually work as a research associate (unpaid) at the
Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where Hutchinson had
been “Keeper of the Museums of Botany.” Hutchinson’s
treatment of the family (p. 354 of the above) gives a
number of genera, including Ruta, for which the family is
named, most numerous in Africa and Australia. Lemons
are Citrus medica, var. limonum. Oranges are Citrus
aurantium. Limes are Citrus medica, var. acida, all listed
as originating in India. The family is characterized by the
glands in the leaves, the source of the citrus smell and
flavor. It is obvious that I could go on and on with this.
When I was doing this project, I had a doctoral guidance
committee. Two of the members of this committee were
Dr. Mathias, mentioned above, and Dr. Harlan Lewis,
(student of Carl Eppling, authority on Salvia (Sage))
authority on the genus Clarkia (Farewell to Spring), Dean
of Life Sciences at UCLA, at then, President of the Society
for the Study of Evolution. I took a graduate class in
“Evolution” from Dr. Lewis in 1962. Our textbook was
Volume I, “The Evolution of Life,” from the “Evolution
After Darwin” series, generated from the University of
Chicago Centennial (of Darwin’s Origin of the Species),
edited by Sol Tax, and printed by the University of
Chicago Press, in 1960. The section on the evolution of
flowering plants was written by Daniel Axelrod, of the
University of California, Los Angeles Department of
Geology. I was one of Dr. Axelrod’s students. I took
Paleobotany from him, and although, I did not agree with
his opposition to continental drift, he is a source of a
continuing interest in geology and paleobotany. It was
Axelrod and Mathias that generated my interest in plant
geography, and how it is effected by geological and
climatic forces. This all relates to citrus and earthquakes
because it is geological forces that created California,
shaped what it is and shaped its climate. I have written
extensively on this elsewhere.
One of the interests of the botany department at UCLA,
particularly the Botany Garden and Herbarium, under the
direction of Dr. Mildred Mathias in the 1960s, was the
distribution of agricultural productivity, what places,
what climates were best for which varieties of plants and
why. I was often asked by Dr. Mathias to help her in
doing research for various projects involving climate and
plant geography.
It was the point of view of Dr. Axelrod that because of
patterns of the circulation of water and air the West
sides of continents were more alike. This is something I
have studied extensively and it works like this. I found
that the closest approximation to the climate of Tokyo,
Japan that I could find was in Nashville, Tennessee. In
general, New England is not climatically New England, it
might be more appropriately called “New Korea” and
Texas called “New China.” If there is a “ New Portugal” it
is in coastal Southern California, and “New Spain” in the
interior toward Pasadena. “New Ireland” is in the Pacific
Northwest, and Victoria, British Columbia really does
have elements of a British climate. This is the true “New
England,” if there is one. “New Germany” is probably in
Oregon and “New France” in the Napa Valley of
California. “New Italy” should be somewhere toward the
interior of California, but that becomes “New Turkey”
and “New Afghanistan” the further your go toward Utah.
At some point in Kern County you begin to get climate
approaching the Syrian Desert and the cooler places in
Iraq. As you go north into Canada you approach some
kind of “New Russia,” as you move through “New
Germany” and “New Poland.”
Now you have to understand there are no perfect
climatic equivalents. There is nothing quite like the
northern coast of California, and that is, probably, one
reason why it is the refuge for the last of the redwoods.
But, it is certainly true that if you are looking for a “New
Ireland,” you are much more likely to find it around
Seattle, and “New Norway” and “New Denmark” as well,
then in New England (which has climate more like
northern China and Korea than like Europe). This may
explain why so many people with an Irish origin
eventually found themselves drawn to places like Seattle,
and why skin cancer might kill a farming ancestor like my
grandmother’s grandfather, Judge Samuel Kennedy, who
attempted to survive, with genes for skin adapted to an
Irish climate, in geographic conditions on the northern
plains of Missouri, that were closer to Manchuria and
Mongolia.
It also explains why I have an appointment with a
dermatologist in two days to have the stitches taken out
that result from removal of pieces of my skin that would
have survived in better condition if my ancestors had
remained in Seattle. If these problems affect the dermis
of the human skin, the also the epidermis of plants. The
oil glands in the Rutaceae may be responsible for the
secreting of oils that helped the ancestors of oranges and
lemons resist the heat of subtropical summers and the
fungal infections that come with tropical humidity. The
problem for these plants comes with freezing
temperatures. The water in the cells of the fruit expands
and it forms ice crystals, and the result ruptures the
developing cells and spoils the fruit. Various techniques
have been developed to prevent the freezing, wind
machines to move away cool air and burning of oil in the
so called “smuge pots” there were common in the
orange groves of Ontario, California around 1945. We
would wake up on a freezing morning to find everything
black with the residue of the smudge that had been
generated by lighting fires in the night in these oil filled
pots to protect the fruit in the Orange groves from being
spoiled.
It is a shame that Botany is no longer commonly taught,
because if more people were familiar with the science
they might understand more about problems we face
with generating enough food, saving water, and
preventing destruction from global warming. Botany
teaches the central role of the sun in everything that
happens on the earth. This is where plants get their
energy, not from the soil but from the sun.
Citrus requires lots of sunlight and subtropical warmth.
It requires water as well and the trees must be irrigated
regularly. It is one reason why the groves are located
near mountain ranges that can provide the necessary
water, and also because the trees like sandy well drained
soils. These factors were important elements in my
youth when we were living in the middle of the orange
groves west of Ontario, California. The day of the week
when the irrigation water would flow through the
irrigation systems was a major event. The weekly timing
of events of live in the groves had to be coordinated to
agricultural happenings like smudging and irrigation.
But, Newmark lived in a time before damns and pipes
and irrigation systems, water was delivered through the
zanjas. According to Newmark, the experiments with
citrus had largely failed till a Dr. Halsey started a nursery
for oranges and limes in 1854 (see op. cit., p. 211). This
was sold to William Wolfskill. Newmark claimed that in
1857, there were not more that a 100 orange tree
fruiting in the entire county. When Wolfskill planted
thousands of trees, he created the largest orchard of its
kind in the country, according to Newmark.
It was this same year that Germans living in San Francisco
bought the land near the Santa Ana river that would
become the town of Anaheim (Ana for Santa Ana and
heim for the German word for home). George Hansen
surveyed the land in twenty acre lots. There was a canal
to bring water from the Santa Ana river and a natural
fence of willow trees.
Newmark says the John Butterfield was the organizer of
the American Express Company and began the
Butterfield Stage route which went from San Francisco to
Gilroy and to Visalia, to Fort Tejon and to Los Angeles.
From there, the route ran to San Bernardino, Temecula,
and Yuma, then to El Paso and ended in St. Louis. They
began running in 1858 and reached Los Angeles in
September. B. W. Pyle, a native of Virginia, arrive in
1858 and set up a jewelry and watch business. Phinneas
Banning established his landing north of San Pedro in
1857. He set up the community of Wilmington in 1858.
Newmark notes that Pyle made much money, but
invested in speculations that did not work out,
apparently resulting in his suicide. I have no idea if this
Pyle was related to the Pyle family that was ancestral to
Benjamin Harrison Lingenfelter’s great grandfather, Dr.
Octavious Pyle, of Northwest Missouri?
Looking at the Wikipedia article on Rutaceae, it gives 160
genera for the family. The oil producing glands are called
“pellucid glands.” Pellucid means that they admit light,
are translucent. The Wikipedia article on Citrus suggests
and origin in Myanmar (Burma), India, and Yunnan,
China. Citrus appears to hybridize easily and cultivated
citrus trees may be hybrids of several different species.
Commercial trees are created by grafting on to disease
resistant rootstocks. This article gives the following
species: Citrus aurantifolia, Key Lime (India), Citrus
maxima, Pomelo, from Malaya, Citrus media, Citron,
from India, Citrus reticulate, Mandarin Orange, from
China, Citrus trifoliata, Trifoliate Orange, from Korea,
Citrus asustralasica, Finger Lime, from Australia, Citrus
australis, Australian Round Lime, Citrus glauca, Australian
Desert Lime, and a few others including Citrus indica,
Indian Wild Orange, Citrus Latipes, from Assam, Citrus
halimii, from Thailand, the various species of Kumquats
(Fortunella) from East and Southeast Asia, etc..
Significant hybrids include Grapefruit (Mandarin Orange
and Pomelo?), Lemon (Citron and Pomelo?), Sweet
Orange (Pomelo and Mandarin Orange?).
A major source of the cultivation of citrus in Florida,
according a website promoting Merritt Island, was
Douglas Dummit. He moved to the Titusville area from
Tomoka, where he was growing sugarcane and oranges.
He planted wild sour oranges that he had obtained from
Spanish root stock that were adapted to Florida soil and
grafted various sweet orange cuttings on the root stock,
perhaps cuttings obtained from colonists at New Smyrna.
These plantings survived a bad freeze in 1835 and were
transplanted in the Dummitt Grove, now part of Merritt
Island National Wildlife Refuge(adjacent to the Kennedy
Space Center). It is estimated that Douglas was
producing as many as 60,000 oranges a year by 1859.
Improvements in agriculture began slowly and then
picked up speed. The Orange County Farmer’s Museum
has posted a short history of agriculture on its website. It
starts with the use of oxen and horses pulling wooden
plows. This was the state of much of the agriculture
known to the Kennedy and McMichael family in its early
history. Cast iron plows began to appear about the time
that the Kennedy family was moving to Indiana. The
McCormick reaper appeared in 1834 and practical
threshing machines and steel plows in 1837. The 1840s
were a period of increasing use of factory manufactured
farm equipment. Methods for making superphosphate
appeared in 1843, mowing machines in 1844, irrigation in
1847, mixed chemical fertilizers in 1849, self-governing
windmills in 1854, two-horse straddle-row cultivators in
1856, mason jars for home canning in 1858.
Thomas Gaunt was born in Straffordshire , England, April
4th 1830 and came to the United State in 1853. In 1854
he worked at the Smith and Franklin Plant Nursery in
McDonough County, Illinois. In April,1855, he moved to
Andrews County, Missouri and set up a nursery for Smith
and Franklin. He moved to Nodaway County in 1857. He
set up his own nursery in Nodaway with many kinds of
shade and fruit trees (See nwmissouri.edu). This site
would be donated for the Marysville District Normal
School and its house is the residence for the presidents
of Northwest Missouri State University.
Washington, Missouri is located in Eastern Missouri, at
the other side of the state from Nodaway County, on the
south side of the Missouri River just east of St Louis.
There is a history of the city that is available on line
(washingtonmo.com). The section that deals with the
pre-civil-war period describes a rather sleepy little place.
In the 1839 period, Daniel Hammerstein, the first
shoemaker is living in a log cabin. Godfrey Beyreis, is the
first carpenter and he built a frame house. Washington is
incorporated in 1841. Henry Wellenkamp moved to
Washington in 1843 and described it as a town with
about thirty voters. Outside of a few frame houses, most
were log cabins. The 1840 crank operated ferry had
been replaced by a horse ferry in 1843. Wellenkamp was
shipping a lot of tobacco leaf in hogsheads of 1000
pounds. Most agricultural production was corn and
tobacco. There were a few years of bad corps and bank
failures. The worst disaster was a great flood in 1844.
Trees, fences, fence rails, houses, were lifted up by the
flood waters and carried down the river. Chickens,
geese, hogs, and cows could be seen on the roofs of
floating houses. All of it seemed to pass by at a furious
rate according to the account of Wellenkamp. The
current was too strong for anything to cross. Steamboats
were unable to land. Seven or eight houses floated off
their foundations. After the flood came epidemics of
cholera and fever. Most people were ill and doctors
could do little to help.
According to this history, the German Revolt of 1848
brought many “political refugees” into the area. The
Pacific Railroad was under construction and it brought in
jobs. There was also a great deal of steam boat traffic on
the river in this period. The discovery of gold in
California stimulated a movement West. Apparently
there were 58 large steam boats on the Missouri in 1848,
and seventy “regular packets” by 1858. Steamers arrived
from the West with “gold dust” shipments. It was the
completion of the Hannibal and St. Joseph railroad that
brought a decline in this trade after 1859 (ibid).
Earlier settlers had taken the land along the rivers, so the
Germans settled in the hills and slowly started moving
into the bottoms as well through hard work and industry.
Some of these new settlers were educated and
prosperous and they began to play an important role in
the cultural life of the community. There appears to
have been a building boom after 1850. A brickyard
started making bricks by the millions and two large
hotels were constructed. A city hall was constructed in
1851, which was also used for a school. A Lutheran
Church and a Presbyterian Church organized parochial
schools.
Construction began on the Pacific Railroad in St. Louis in
1851 and reached Washington in 1855. The railroad
replaced a wagon train of three to five wagons that had
been hauling goods to and from St. Louis. For a while
Washington was the terminus of the Missouri Pacific
railroad. Four horse post coaches connected Washington
with Jefferson City, where connections were available to
Springfield, Van Buren and Fort Smith, Arkansas. When
the next section of the railroad was completed, 750
persons boarded a special excursion train of eleven cars,
these included railroad and state officials. But, the train
plunged through a bridge across the Gasconade river,
killing 33 and injuring others.
A ferryboat was sent out and the result the following
description of the wreck in the Jefferson Examiner of
November 3, 1855: “When we reached the Gasconade
bridge we found nothing but the ruins…” The account
continues, “Cars piled upon each other; here a top; there
part of a side; the trucks of some partly protruding from
others upon which they were precipitated in their
mission of death.” “The locomotive lay end first, bottom
up, near the first pier; a little to the right of it, with the
forward part touching the end of the locomotive…was
the baggage car, much smashed and partly under water.”
This disaster, and others like it, noted above, does not
seem to have stopped the development of the city as a
manufacturing center. In 1853 Henry Krog and Anton
Jasper began the manufacture of farm implements,
including the two horse plows described above. John D.
Roehrig began a cigar factory. The John B. Busch Brewing
Company opened in 1854, and Christopher H. Kahmann
started a pork packing operation in 1857. By 1861, Henry
J. Buhr was manufacturing about 15 wagons and
carriages a year (Ibid).
Disasters like the train wreck described above, affect me,
because my fathers childhood was greatly damaged by a
train wreck on the Colorado and Rio Grande Railroad in
Green River, Utah, when my grandfather, an Engineer on
the Railroad, and a graduate of Ohio State in Columbus,
Ohio, drove his wreck train into the back of a wreck and
was killed when my father was only four. It is not certain
that the frequent sessions of mental illness that affected
my fathers life were not partly caused by the trauma of
this experience, his mother, Alice (Smith) Andrews seems
to have never fully recovered from this event. I need to
add that I visited the site of this disaster with my father
when I was twelve.
It is events like these that puzzle me. I am driven by an
attempt to understand my brother’s suicide (Stephen
Charles Andrews, at the age of 38, leaving a 6 month son
behind (Stephen Roy Andrews). How much was a result
of genetics and how much of environment. There are
some indicators. The suicide of Mr. Pyle in Los Angeles,
perhaps a very distant cousin. Then there is the issue of
Sarah (Kennedy) Ross, the wife of Joseph Ross of Fayette
County, Indiana (see above). She and her daughter Susan
Malinda Ross and her grandson, Thomas Jefferson
Greenberry Ross, appear to have all suffered from some
sort of behavioral and mental problems.
Let us review what we have said above. James Kennedy
and Elizabeth Bailelet have the following children in
Orange, North Carolina: Samuel Kennedy, b. 22 Oct 1775,
Mary, b. 29 Dec. 1772, Sarah, b. 24 Sept. 1780, John
Bennett, b. 26 Jul 1782, Elizabeth, b. 01 Jul 1785, Jane, b.
9 Sept 1788, Nancy, b. 06 Sept 1782, and Esther, b. 16
Mar 1796. Sarah, sister of John Bennett and Jane and
Samuel, etc, marries Joseph Ross and becomes Sarah
Ross. She, is therefore, the aunt of Judge Samuel
Kennedy, and the great aunt of my great grandmother
Henrietta (Lingenfelter) Kennedy. When Joseph Ross
dies in Fayette, County Indiana, dies 4 Sept 1836, the
probate records indicate that Sarah may not be totally
competent, that, possibly, her sister Jane is looking after
her.
Susan Malinda Ross was born 7 April 1825 in Alquina,
Fayette, Indiana. She married George E. Hamilton, born
24 May 1827, Connersville, Fayette, Indiana. The
marriage date is 26 November 1848 in Fayette, Indiana.
They had the following children: Thomas Jefferson
Greenberry Hamilton, born 12 July 1849, Delores
Cortenes Hamilton, born 12 Oct 1851, Florence Eleanor
Hamilton, born 20 May 1853, William Marshall Hamilton,
born 29 Nov 1855. Susan (Malinda Ross) Hamilton was
admitted to the Central State Hospital in Wabash County
Indiana, 12-11-1857 for hereditary melancholia with
homicidal aspects induced by exposure to cold. She was
not discharged till 6-15-1860. If Sarah Ross is John
Bennett Kennedy’s sister, than Susan Hamilton is his
niece and Thomas Jefferson Greenberry Hamilton is his
great nephew, James Kennedy’s great grandson. Records
indicate that Thomas Jefferson Greenberry was a
member of the LDS church (Mormon). In his application
for a pension, he indicates that his father, George
Hamilton died serving in the Civil War and his mother
died 25 Nov. 1860. The deaths of both parents left four
children under 16 years of age. The claim state that
Thomas Jefferson Greenberry Hamilton “formerly drank
more than was good for him but has not been drinking so
much as of late years…” Elsewhere the information
available on the web from Donny Hamilton indicates that
he was a very tall man with a violent temper. He died 22
July 1926 in Kress, Swisher, Texas, of senility.
Just what is happening here is not clear. It is obvious,
however, that this is not the most stable part of a family
that seems to have difficulty staying for long in any one
place, witness graves strung from North Carolina through
Indiana and Missouri and now reaching to Texas, many of
them in abandon cemeteries uncared for by family
members. But, to be fair, this is happening everywhere
in the United States with the development of the
railroads. Even the Taintors of Hampton, Connecticut,
who seem the most stable and conservative of folk,
certainly they appear to have kept records of everything
and remained in one house and one town for a good bit
of time, seem to have drifted off to Englewood, Kansas
and Gate, Oklahoma (Robertson, p. 457).
In 1850, Charity and John Bennett Kennedy were living
next door to Samuel T. and Lucretia Smith Kennedy, who
had just gotten married. Lucretia’s father, once
prominent in the politics of nearby Clinton County, was
now dead, her mother, a Crittenden, distant cousins of
the politically prominent branch of the Crittenden family,
who had married into cousins of the Jefferson’s and Lees
of Virginia, had died also a while before. A Crittenden
had been territorial secretary and temporary governor of
the Arkansas territory, a Crittenden would be governor of
Missouri, a Crittenden had been Attorney General of the
United States more than one time, had been governor of
Kentucky, had taken Henry Clay’s seat in the Senate of
the United States. Lucretia Webster was named after
Clay’s great rival in the Senate, Daniel Webster. All the
trouble was happening on the other side of the Missouri,
not far away in Kansas. It is a family legend that one of
Lucretia’s brothers was the “first white child born in
Kansas.” Her father had lived and worked on the Kansas
side of the river at one time. While Samuel and Lucretia
where raising children on their Nodaway farm, the
country was preparing for Civil War.
John Bennett Kennedy had been born 26 Aug 1782 in
Orange, North Carolina and Charity (McMichael)
Kennedy had been born 9 May 1790 in Guilford, North
Carolina. They had a number of children. Their youngest
children were Charity, born 7 March 1826 in North
Carolina, Sarah Jane, born 10 Oct 1823, Guilford, North
Carolina, and Samuel Thomas, born 29 Sept 1830 in
Fayette, North Carolina. A middle son, William S., was
born 18 Feb 1813 in Guilford, North Carolina. He married
Mary Birt on 8 Oct 1835, she appears to have followed
him to Nodaway County, because she died 5 May 1858
and is buried at Cain Cemetery along with William (died
12 Oct 1889) and John Bennett (died 31 Aug 1863) and
Charity (McMichael) Kennedy.
According to the notes for John Bennett Kennedy on
Masters Connections, the family moved to Fayette
County Indiana in 1825, moved on to Rush County
Indiana in 1834 and then to Missouri in 1843. According
to this source, Samuel married Lucretia Webster Smith,
14 July 1850. They had the following children: Mary J., 8
Jun 1851, John W, 20 April 1853, Henry N., 25 Nov 1855,
Austin S., 4 July 1858, Alice, 11 Jan 1861, Dora, 7 Feb
1864, Andy W., 14 Sept 1867, Henrietta, 24 Jan 1870,
Arch S., 2 Apr 1873, Belle, 14 Nov 1875.
Charity Kennedy, born 7 Mar 1826, appears to have
married an Allen Andrew about 1824 and to have died 11
Sept 1846. Sarah Jane Kennedy, appears to have married
Charles Leo Cain, as discussed above, and to have had
many children, Napoleon Bonaparte Cain, Mary Ann
Cain, George Washington Cain, Thomas Benton Cain,
Christopher Columbus Cain, Francis Marion Cain,
Solomon Cain, Margaret Victoria Cain, Sarah Jane Cain,
Elzona Cain, and Amanda Cain. Christopher Columbus
Cain was born 1 October 1851, at the time Samuel and
Lucretia were beginning their family. All these Cains
were grandchildren of Charity and John Bennett Kennedy
and nieces and nephews of Samuel Kennedy, those that
survived would be first cousins of Henrietta.
The younger children and grandchildren of Charity and
John Bennett Kennedy were moving to Nodaway County
in the 1850s, these included the Cains, and their
grandparents. Many of these would be buried in the
Cain Cemetery in Nodaway.
On 20 Nov 1858, in Allendale, Worth County, Missouri,
Mary Ellen Pyle, daughter of Cyrus Octavius Pyle and
Sophronia Moore, married John Lingenfelter, born 10
Mar 1832 in Perry County, Illinois. They would have the
following children: Alice, 1860; Lycurgus, 1861; James
Valentine, 1863; Benjamin, 1865; Edward A., 1874; Frank
D., 1876; George, 1878; Charlie, 1880; John H., 1882;
May, 1884. Benjamin would later marry Henrietta
Kennedy, mother of my maternal grandmother Mary
(Lingenfelter) Thompson.
The Pyle family and the Lingenfelter family overlapped,
as did many of the large families of this time. Octavius
Pyle was born May 02, 1819, in Jackson County, Illinois,
and died November 21, 1897 in Allendale, Worth County,
Missouri. He was the son of John Pyle and Mary Wells
and married Sophronia Moore, born August 23, 1823
near Knoxville, Tennessee, died February 10, 1906 in
Mount Ayr, Iowa. They had the following children,
Marcellus, Jan 30th 1841, Perry County, Lycurgus, May 23,
1842, Perry; Octavius Jr. August 29, 1843, Perry; Mary
Ellen, November 6, 1844, died May 19th 1932 in Des
Moines, Iowa; Sarah Ellen, born August 23, 1846, Perry,
died November 2, 1931 in Lansing, Kansas; Synora Pyle,
Dec. 30th 1847, Perry; Cyrus, born Oct 22, 1849, Perry;
John Jr., August 2, 1851, Perry; Eliza, March 2, 1853,
Perry; Lassira Ann, January 27, 1855, Worth County,
Missouri, died Oct. 14th 1931, San Diego, California,
married Leonard M Scott, November 24, 1872, in
Allendale, Worth County; Martha Elizabeth, Dec. 2nd
1856, Worth County; Cortez S., July 16th 1862, Allendale,
Worth County; Anna Laura Pyle, April 26, 1864, Worth
County; George, July 28, 1866, Worth; Thomas, Sept. 19,
1868, Worth. From this we can see that the Pyles left
Perry County Illinois and arrived in Worth County
Missouri by 1855.
Benjamin Harrison Lingenfelter was born 18 Dec 1865 in
Allendale, Missouri and died 2 April 1951 in Torrance,
California. He married Henrietta Kennedy, who was born
24 Jan 1870 in Maryville, Missouri, and died 17 Dec 1941,
in my bedroom (or what would become my bedroom, in
what was then my grand parents house and became my
parents house) on Parnell Avenue off of Pico Blvd. in
West Los Angeles, California. Their children were John
Samuel Lingenfelter, Mary Lucretia Lingenfelter (married
Hugh Monroe Thompson (my maternal grand father),
Martha Lingenfelter (married Brig. Gen. Ivan L. Farman),
Lois Lingenfelter (married John O. Engel (Engeldinger),
two chidren, John and Jane), and Ruth Lingenfelter
(married John A. Jurich).
Octavius (Octavus?) Pyle was the son of John Jack Pyle,
born 13 Aug 1782 in Chatham, NC, and died 5 May 1851
in St. Johns, Illinois. He was the son of John Pyle and
Sarah Brashear. John Jack Pyle married Mary Polly Wells,
born 29 Mar 1792 in Greenfield, SC, and died 22 Jun 1869
in Allendale, Worth, Missouri. Their children were Sarah,
22 Oct 1807, Christian KY; Hiram, 25 Feb 1810, Christian
KY; Rufus, 7 Jun 1815, Christian KY; Cortez, 14 Feb 1818,
Jackson, Illinois; Octavus, 2 May 1819, DuQuoin, Perry,
Illinois, died 21 Nov 1897; Ulysses, 2 Mar 1823, Jackson,
Illinois; Joanna, 1826, Jackson; Hellen, 1828, Perry;
Lassira, 1829, Perry; Ustocium, 1832, Perry.
It is amazing how many children were produced in these
families and how little is known about many of them
today. Wallace K. Ferguson, Professor of History at New
York University and Geffrey Bruun, produced a set of
books titled “A Survey of European Civilization”
(Houghton Mifflin, 1952). Geoffrey Bruun, a visiting
professor at Cornell, appears to have written the second
volume (Since 1660). The Second Edition (1952) carries a
chapter titled “The Role of America.” This chapter
contains material that explains some of what is taking
place in this period. By the end of World War I, power
had shifted toward the United States. The United States
had emerged as the world’s richest and most
economically creative nation (see op. cit, p. 883). My
ancestors were caught up in this process. At first they
were unaware of what had happened. Once they did
become aware, they began to rewrite their history,
leaving the odds and ends that didn’t fit lying in the
basement and attics of house like the Taintor house that
the Robertsons bought in Hampton, Connecticut (see
above). Many critical records for the Andrews (and some
critical Pyle, Thompson, Crittenden, Lingenfelter, etc, as
well) side of my lineage are in stacks in my closet. Since I
have had numerous burglaries and other disasters since
acquiring them, it is uncertain that the information they
contain will ever see the light of day (after all, I am 72,
my eyesight is failing, and I am not getting any younger).
I am sure that is the case with much of the missing
information from the genealogical efforts that can be
found above.
The “Survey,” quoted above, claims that the United
States grew from 3 to 140 million in six generations (op.
cit. p 883). These six generations reach back to my
mother (Jean Thompson Andrews) and her mother (Mary
Lingenfelter Thompson) and my great grandmother
(Henrietta Kennedy Lingenfelter) and her mother
(Lucretia Webster Smith Kennedy) and her mother
(Elizabeth Crittenden Smith), great grand daughter of
Henry Crittenden of Virginia (who was the great grand
father of John Jordan Crittenden (who was the Attorney
General (and acting Secretary of State) of the United
States and great great nephew of President Thomas
Jefferson)). The text talks about the astonishing empire
built up by the United States, a product of ordinary
people like Elizabeth and Henry, who helped farm the
land and clear it, and less ordinary people like Jefferson
and John Jordan who were responsible for the purchase
of much of it from Napoleon, or defense of it from
France and Britain (see the actions of John Jordan
Crittenden as acting Secretary of State, discussed above).
This chapter of the Survey discusses the westward
expansion and the massive immigrations from Europe, in
our family including Irish and Scots sent to the US in 1740
by the potato famine of 1739, Germans from the Palatine
and French Protestants. They will meet, teach, be taught
by, eventually intermarry with the massive immigration
of people from various countries to port cities like
Seattle, San Francisco, the constant arrival of new
families from France, Germany, and the Eastern United
States in the Los Angeles of Harris Newmark, discussed
above. Newmark’s story almost more a part of my
experience, born in Long Beach, growing up in the
Southern California described by Newmark, than the
history of my great grand parents in Missouri, or Indiana
(by the time of my birth, something to forget, or long
forgotten). Yet this family history made me what I am,
just as much as the Southern California environment it
attached itself to so vigorously when I was a boy, and it
explains so much of what is not explained, things that a
therapist might otherwise blame on some chemical
disorder of the brain or traumatic experience of
childhood.
According to the Survey, what might have generated
regional isolation, was reversed by the coming of the
railroads. The Survey might also have mentioned the
canals and steamboats and the linkage of the Great Lakes
with the Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri River System and the
Gulf Coast and Gulf of Mexico. It was this system that
allowed the McMichael and Kennedy, the Smith, and
Crittenden, even the Lingenfelters to move West to the
point where they came in contact with the railroads that
would carry them to Seattle and Tacoma and south from
Seattle to Los Angeles. The Survey tells how 53% of the
workers were still in agricultural in 1870, but only 17% in
1940. This was the case when I was a boy. My mother
had been born on a farm outside of Yakima, but she was
working in a defense plant on Pico Blvd. in West Los
Angeles in 1943. Our closest contact with agriculture
was the victory gardens we were planting in the backyard
on Parnell. I forgot to harvest mine and it went to seed.
Something that I was very impressed with in 1943. I
remember the flowers on the carrots. There was no hint
that I would be assisting Dr. Mildred Mathias with her
study of flowers of this type twenty years later, as a
doctoral student in Botany at UCLA and a teaching
assistant and research assistant in plant identification.
Mildred Mathias was the major authority on the
Umbelliferae, the Carrot Family, at that time, a study she
was doing in collaboration with the President of the
University of California at Santa Barbara.
The Survey notes that a child born in the US in 1800 had
a life expectancy of 35 years and that by 1940, that life
expectancy had increased to 65 years. It mentions food,
medicine, sanitation as important elements in this
improvement. An important aspect of these changes
were the large numbers of educated people arriving from
France, Germany, and Scandinavia, and the respect for
education the brought with them. Major changes in
medicine were be instituted in England as a result of
Florence Nightengale and studies done on the spread of
Cholera, noted above. Research in microbiology in
France and Germany established microbiology as a new
science, a science my uncle Victor Thompson would
obtain his BA in from Berkeley, and a subject I would
teach for the State University of New York. My aunt,
Miriam Thompson Gilbert would obtain her BA from
UCLA in nutrition, she died this year at the age of 98,
keeping her mobility and alertness to the very end.
In 1859 this grand triumph was far from certain. The
nation was moving quickly toward a great conflict and
the state of Kansas, just across the Missouri river, was a
center of the developing conflict.
But before we look to this developing conflict, let us look
to problems within the family itself. The general style of
the family at this time is to look for opportunity and to
move on as soon as the opportunity has passed. In
general, the family is operating as a small unit, what is
necessary to operate a farm, or a series of neighboring
farms. When the family group gets to be too big it
divides and moves on like a bacterium or a protozoan. It
has a tendency to discard and ignore is more
dysfunctional members, to leave them behind. In
general, the family seems to concentrate on the
youngest members, particularly those who are fertile and
bearing children. This technique will work as long as
there is open land and new opportunities, particularly for
agriculture. It will not work if there is no new land
available, or when agriculture fails, or when reproductive
rates decline.
In the face of these problems, the family has tended to
marry its women off to successful families that appear to
now how to deal with urban conditions. An example is
the marriage of the Lingenfelter to the Thompsons and
Gilberts who appeared, at least at the time to have
mastered some of the problems of obtaining status in
urban environments like Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
The marriage of Jean Thompson to Ralph Andrews, with
a family from an urban situation (Allen Andrews and
Alice Andrews, parents of Ralph Andrews, were originally
from Columbus, Ohio, the state capital) and of Miriam
Thompson to Frank Gilbert, son of Harold Gilbert, of a
family prominent in Portland, Oregon, are possibly
examples of this.
Consider another factor, suppose we have genetic
pattern, learned cultural patterns, transmitted by
example, by oral language, by ritual, by written language,
by law, by mixtures of all of the above, these patterns
would tend to remain stable where they supported the
replication of physiology, culture, family, family life,
regardless of the source and nature of the pattern and its
method of replication. It is silly to try to disentangle the
web of mitochondrial and chromosomal genes and
physiological and environmental and social and cultural
influences, the relationships are too complex in social
creatures with many levels of organization, such as a
human. If one of these patterns favored the decline of
older adult intelligence to juvenile levels in all areas
except verbal memory, this would facilitate identification
of young children with their grandparents, and an
understanding of the children by the grandparents, the
grandparents possessing these very same child like
mental limitations at this advanced stage of their own
life. It is not surprising that these are the patterns that
are actually found in communities where aging adults
and young children are paired together. Suppose also
there was a pattern of supporting members of the
community to the point at which it was obvious that they
could no longer contribute to the community, in
situations where there were large numbers of children, it
would not be surprising that these less promising
offspring might be allowed to expire, or to just slip away,
disappear. Suppose there were aging factors that might
encourage debilitate elderly to loose their connections
with the family, just get lost somewhere. These are
exactly the patterns that seem to be manifest when the
Crittenden, Kennedy, McMichael, Hamilton, families are
examined. Vital grandparents are usually found with
promising mothers that are producing large numbers of
healthy children, less promising individuals some how are
pushed to one side. It is not surprising that we find
Charity and John Bennett Kennedy leaving the Sarah Ross
and Thomas Jefferson Greenberry Hamilton situations in
the care of Jane Kennedy, as they move off to Ross
County, Platte County, Missouri, Nodaway County
Missouri and are found living alongside the future Judge
Kennedy and his wife, a daughter of a politically
influential family. When Mary Lingenfelter Thompson
marries her eldest daughter (now a graduate of the
University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in
nutrition) to a Yale University educated engineer, Frank
Gilbert, son of prominent members of Portland, Oregon
society, and nephew of a prominent toy manufacturer, A.
C. Gilbert) and when the youngest son of Mary
Thompson, Victor Thompson received his degree in
Microbiology for the University of California, Berkeley.
When young children are produced by daughters of Mary
Thompson, who shows up to live with Mary Thompson
but mother and father Benjamin Harrison and Henrietta
Kennedy Lingenfelter.
Thomas Jefferson Greenberry Hamilton has long ago left
for Texas, where he dies of alcoholism and senility, his
mother having escaped from the Indian mental
institution and gone no one knows where. By this time
Henrietta and Benjamin have largely forgotten their ties
to other places, just as their grandparents Charity and
John left Indiana and North Carolina behind in favor of
the Missouri frontier. Now I have my explanation for the
speed with which my family forgot and ignored the
alcoholism and suicide of my brother, the growing
senility of my mother, the tendency of relatives to loosen
the ties with my less fruitful side of the family tree. It is
no surprise that the only hints to the broken branches of
the tree lie overturned in forgotten cemeteries and on
abandon headstone long untended.
Pets, little dogs and cats, are extremely good at imitating
the behavior of tiny human children. It is no surprise
that the failure of modern families to generate the huge
number of infants that were normally associated with
fertile mothers before contraception, have been
substituted for by large numbers of cuddly pets that
imitate the helpless dependence of human young. It is
no surprise that so much of our effort in educating our
young are focused on degrees in service occupations like
nursing, education, mental health, that can act as
substitutes for unsatisfied maternal cravings.
England was dealing with the aftermath of the Crimean
War as this point. The first reform of parliament done in
1832 had increased the franchise, but it had largely left
the government in the hands of the old rural aristocracy.
In 1867, a new reform bill provide a million new voters,
almost doubling the number, and forcing a situation
where real democratic processes would emerge. The
Crimean War had caused a rise in the price of wheat,
increasing prosperity for farmers that could ship grain
down the Missouri and Mississippi, or use the expanding
railroad network. Science and engineering began to be
applied to manufacturing and agriculture, and the US
began to copy English models. Henry Bessemer
discovered how to make steel from Iron in 1856 (see
Evans, op. cit. p. 186). England converted her factories to
steam power from 1840 to 1870. Pressed by the needs
of supplying a Civil War, the US would soon imitate the
British example. Education would also be reformed by
the British: Clarendon Commission report of 1861,
Taunton Commission, 1865, The Endowed Schools Act of
1869 that reorganized British grammar schools (op. cit. p.
198).
Arnold Toynbee has look at this process in this “Study of
History.” In an abridged version of this “Study” made in
1946, by D. C. Sommervell, for Oxford University Press,
Toynbee dates the universal education of children in
Britain to “Forester’s Act in 1870. He sees the “Yellow
Press” as an unfortunate and unforeseen negative effect
of universal education. He describes this as “press-lords”
that provide “idle amusement for the half-educated.” He
sees the use of the press by Hilter, and its carry over in
films and radio, is a further development in this process.
Members of the family would be drawn into this new
world, culminating with two daughters of Mary
(Lingenfelter) Thompson with teaching credentials and
teaching credentials earned by the numerous great grand
children of Henrietta (Kennedy) Lingenfelter, of which I
am one. Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Ruth
(Lingenfelter) Jurich would write the “Prudence Penny”
columns that appeared in Pacific Northwest Newspapers
during the early years of World War II. My father, Ralph
B. Andrews, owned and published a local paper in his
district of Long Beach during the 1970s. Ruth Jurich
would write the church news for the Federal Way Times
in the Seattle, Washington area during the same period.
It was partly in reaction to the overemphasis of “Yellow
Journalism,” that my friends, at Torrance, High School, El
Camino College, and Long Beach State College, supported
Rodney Harwell of Torrance, California in his sponsorship
of the “Royalist” and the “Augustan Society,” which we
saw, at least I did, as a college prank, a spoof on the
people’s press (and royal pretensions as well). When
Rodney began to make serious money by using it to
support German Catholic genealogy, I supported the idea
as a legitimate way to investigate areas of family history
that might otherwise have been ignored. But I could
never take it seriously the way he did. Rodney seemed
mildly amused about these activities. I never recall him
claiming any lineage himself. Sometimes it seemed that
he enjoyed the pomp for its own sake. His attitudes are
significant here, because he shared some of the same
geographical connections. His family had come to
Torrance, California from Nebraska, just across the river
from Missouri and Iowa.
This brings up another issue. Toynbee was concerned
with how civilizations go stale, loose their creativity. One
example is the pitfall of believing yourself to be “a
chosen people” as in the Jewish belief of being chosen by
God, the Athenian belief that they were “the Education
of Hellas.” These processes were at work in the United
States at the time we speak. If you were to attend some
of the camp meetings that the Kennedy family might
have attended, many of the preachers appeared to
believed in the destiny of Christian people, their need to
carry their missionary message to the world. An example
of this notion of special destiny has always been attached
to the so called “Mormon” LDS Church. There was a
special energy attached to this organization at the time,
and it caught up members of the Kennedy family, of
which Thomas Jefferson Greenberry Hamilton, see
above, is an example.
Land was opening up as the Native Americans moved
west. The Omaha had lived along the Wabash and Ohio
Rivers in 1670s (see Wikipedia, and Native American
tribes in Nebraska), but started moving into Nebraska.
The Osage, Kansa, and Quapec moved west also. Tribes
were being forced to move on to reservation land. Later,
tribes would be encouraged to move to Oklahoma in
order to free land in Nebraska for settlement.
Jackson County Missouri has attempted to recreate at
typical Northwest Missouri settlement of this period.
The year they chose to focus on was 1855 (see the web
site for Jackson County Missouri Town 1855). The site
says that 1855 was chosen because it was before the
fighting on the Kansas and Missouri border began to
disrupt the area. According to this source, a typical
western Missouri village might have a tavern, school
house, church, and store. It was the store the Ross
family was operating in Jennings township in Fayette
County, Indiana. There was no running water, cars,
television, radio, microwave. But people were proud of
the telegraph and the sewing machine, the steamboat
and the railroad. Goods were often bartered. The whole
family would work hard in the summer to make sure the
harvest was good. The girls worked in the garden and
cooked, cleaned, did sewing and milking. School was
held in a one room school house and lasted all winter,
from October to April. It was held on every day but
Sunday. Towns had travelling preachers, Baptists on one
Sunday and Methodists on another (op. cit.).
Ambrose Cain had come with the Cain family from Rush
County in Indiana. He had married Sarah Amanda
Fulkerson. Mary Ellen Cain was born near Maryville in
Nodaway County, Missouri, July 2, 1849. According to
the account posted on the web (see Lorene H. Reid,
familytree maker geneology), She was the first child born
to Ambrose and Sarah. She lived in Missouri till she was
10. In the spring of 1859, the family left for Texas in a
covered wagon. They moved to Collin County, Texas,
were there a short time and moved on to Wise County,
south of Decatur, Texas. They lived there a year and
moved to Parker County, a mile from Goshen, Texas.
Ambrose taught school at Goshen, as he had done
earlier, according to report, in Rush County, Indiana.
Later, he taught at Springtown, Texas, five miles from
Goshen. He rode there on horseback. The school was so
full that Mary Ellen had to help him. Toward the end of
the Civil War, the family moved to Springtown, where
Ambrose operated a carding machine, weaving and
spinning wool in rolls. At the end of the war, he sold his
land in Missouri and moved to Washington County,
Arkansas. There is no record of why Ambrose moved, or
why he left the Missouri Cains behind, anymore than
there is any indication why they had all left Rush County
Indiana in the first place.
There was lots of trouble in the area, or at least in Kansas
nearby. According to Wikipedia (See Kansas Nebraska
Act), the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 made Kansas and
Nebraska into territories. Settlers were allowed to
decide between slavery and no slavery, which set aside
the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which had closed
Kansas to slavery. This whole idea was the product of
the Democratic Senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas.
The Republic Party was organized in opposition to the
result. Railroads wanted to extend there lines into this
area and they were behind much of the effort to settle it.
Soon pro-slavery settlers moved into Kansas from
Missouri. Abolitionist settlers moved in as well.
Territorial governors tried to keep peace. The territorial
capital of Kansas at Lecompton was a scene of so much
agitation, that the Free-Staters set up an unofficial
capital at Topeka (see op. cit p. 8). It was during this
period that John Brown and his sons murdered five proslavery settlers.
According to Alexander Adams account of the “Great
Naturalists,” the book titled “Eternal Quest” (Putnam,
1969), June 18, 1858 was the day when Charles Darwin
opened a letter from Alfred Wallace that indicated that
Wallace had independently developed some of the ideas
that Darwin had worked out in the book he was planning.
Darwin sent the letter to his friend Charles Lyell, the
great authority on geology at that time. Charles Wallace
was a young Englishman who had dabbled in a numbers
of trades, surveying, watch making. He visited Paris in
1847 and took an interest in the plant collections in the
Jardin des Plantes. When he returned to London, he
visited the insect room at the British Museum and
decided he wanted to travel and sell specimens to pay
for his travels (op. cit. p. 342). He became a partner with
Henry Walter Bates, who taught him about entomology
(the study of insects) and introduced him to a book on
evolution, “Vestiges of Creation, which was published in
1844. In 1844, Wallace and Bates went on an insect
collecting trip to Brazil in 1848. Wallace’s younger
brother Herbert joined them in Brazil in 1849. After
parting with Bates, and then from his brother Herbert,
Wallace started up the river Negro on August 31, 1850.
In January, 1851, he passed into Venezuela. Further
travels, after returning to London, brought him to
Singapore in 1854. On November 1st 1854, he reached
the island of Borneo (op. cit., p. 356). By 1856, he had
reached the island of Bali, from here he travelled to
Macassar and the Kai Islands. Locating at Ternate, he
made trips through the Molucca Islands all the way to
New Guinea. In 1857, he was pondering the question of
the origin of species and thinking of writing on evolution.
Like Darwin, he thought about what Malthus had written
on what happened to populations as they grew. Could
this be the key to the origin of variations in living things,
like Darwin, he began to believe it was true. It was here
in a thatched house sick from fever that he
independently developed the Darwinian notion of the
“survival of the fittest” (op. cit., p. 368).
Charles Darwin published his book “Origin of the
Species,” in 1859. By January of 1860 it had sold out and
a second edition was being printed (op. cit., p. 385). The
major Botanists of the day, Hooker, and Zoologists,
Huxley supported Darwin, the most important British
geologist, Lyell, took Darwin’s side in the 10th edition of
his “Principles of Geology.” The great Swiss geologist and
zoologist, Louis Agassiz, now associated with Harvard
University in Boston, remained the most prominent
opponent of Darwin’s theories.
The Darwinian Centennial publication that was used as
my textbook for my graduate class in evolution at the
University of California, Los Angeles, was published only
a hundred years later. But, in that hundred years Darwin
inspired biology had spread in many directions. The
Darwin Centennial volume included chapters on the
origin of life from inorganic chemistry, on virus particles,
on the laws of evolution, and the history of life.
Botanists wrote about genetic systems and the fossils of
flowering plants. Complex mathematics was used to
describe genetic relationships, and the new science of
population genetics was described in detail. There were
even discussions of microbiology, behavior, and the new
science of ecology. By 1959, the discoveries of Darwin
and Wallace, a hundred years earlier, had come of age.
After studying these principle of Darwinian science, I
would later pass the biological record examination in
biology with a perfect score and obtain a teaching
credential in life science with the State of California. Else
where in my writings I compare modern ideas of Darwin
with the mythical weather cycle of the Chinese made
immortal in the magical polarities of yin and yang in the I
Ching, or Yi Ching. Elsewhere I visualize a Heaven Trigram
of genetic mutations being subject to competition,
extinction and natural selection in Flame Trigram to
eliminate dangerous maladaptive genetic expression in
Thunder Trigram purifying the gene pool of the
population of organism in the Lake Trigram resulting in
adaptive peaks and ideally adapted genetic systems in
Wind Trigram maintained by feed back and homeostasis
and replication in the systems of Water Pit Abysm
Trigram resulting in adaptive phenotypes in Earth
Trigram checked and supported by input from systems
products in Earth trigram through species systems
maintained by speciation and genetic isolation in
Mountain Trigram. Thus, the old daughter yin of genetic
fixation and replication is opposed to the old son yang of
genetic change and evolution, the middle daughter yin of
genetic system fragmentation and gene segregation is
opposed to the middle son yang of genetic system
integration, and finally the youngest daughter yin of
sexual reproduction and genetic recombination and gene
pool association is opposed to the youngest son yang of
genetic isolation and species formation. In personality
disorders, this would be the compulsive vs. the antisocial,
the narcissistic vs. the avoidant, the dependent vs. the
schizoid. These structural polarities are part of a larger
system of polarities that build level upon level to unite
particles into atoms and atoms into molecules and
molecules into macromolecules, and macromolecules
into simple cells and simple cells into complex cells, and
complex cells into tissues, and tissues into organs, etc,
etc..
This complex vision of the world is far from the simple
vision of the camp meetings in the villages of Missouri
and Indiana at this point just before the Civil War, when
the focus was on scripture and an understanding of the
Bible. Thus, in many ways, my outlook on the world is a
far from that of my grandparents as their outlook was
from their Druid worshiping ancestors. Even then, I am
having trouble, as discussed above, and elsewhere in my
writings, with integrating this point of view with my
larger world vision. Because, as I express above and
elsewhere, I do not believe humans progress in all things,
or that all changes in doctrine and philosophy represent
progress. My ancestors were faced with the challenge of
responding to change in their environment. I am faced
with the challenge of responding to the acceleration of
these changes and the questing of the desirability of
these changes, at what every level they occur.
When it comes to works like J. Hutchinson’s “The
Families of Flowering Plants,” there is no problem. His
ideas of classifying angiosperms follow logically with the
understanding he obtain in his time (1926, revised in
1959) of progression of forms in flowering plants. It is
like understanding Mozart’s musical forms in comparison
with those of Wagner. Once you examine the leaves and
flowers he is looking at and understand how he saw
them and his assumptions, the rest follows like a piece of
Baroque harmony. But, even this is a long way from
villages in Northwestern Missouri. The plant museum
(herbarium) and botany garden at University of
California, Los Angeles represent a collection built up
over many years by many collectors. When I visited the
collections at Harvard and the Royal Botanic Gardens at
Kew outside of London, I was examining sheets of
specimens of Elatine and Bergia (genera of the
Elatinaceae, subject of my botanic studies) collected over
hundred of years by hundreds of collectors. These kinds
of collections are only found in a few places on the
planet. In California, in 1962, this meant UCLA and the
University of California, Berkeley, and perhaps Stanford.
C.D. Darlington, an English geneticist, attempted to
analyze history from a Darwinian point of view in “The
Evolution of Man and Society,” which he published in
1969 (Simon and Schuster). Darlington notes that an
“imaginative craftsman demands the company of kindred
spirits.” He goes on further to state how “slowly has new
immigration, partly Jewish, further hybridization, and
further assortment softened in some places the
American resentment against speculative thought (op.
cit., p. 611). He goes on to describe how universities
become associated with a group he calls an
“Establishment.” Both I and my brother, my
grandmother’s youngest sister, became involved in
various ways with the social movement Darlington is
attempting to discuss. The failed elements of the
Intelligensia it encouraged began to surface in San
Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s in
various forms of protest and social reaction, the “beat
generation,” and the “hippies.” In Harris Newmark you
find the discussion of the slow emergence of these new
urban elites in places like Los Angeles there we once
nothing more that villages.
But, technically we are still in the 1850s, by 1859 Charles
Darwin is finally publishing his “Origin of Species”
biological classic. But, where the Pyle, Lingenfelter,
Smith, Crittenden, Kennedy, and McMichael descendents
are collecting in Northwestern Missouri, there is nothing
but conflict coming across the Missouri River frontier
with Kansas territory.
Eli Thayer organized something called the “New England
Emigrant Aid Company.” It started sending settlers to
Kansas and had moved some 1,200 from New England to
Kansas by 1855 (see Bleeding Kansas, www.pbs.org). An
abolitionist minister named Henry Ward Beecher was
giving out rifles that came to be known as “Breecher’s
Bibles.” Armed men from Missouri moved into Kansas in
1854 to vote for proslavery candidates. Armed men from
Missouri came across the state line for another election
on March 30, 1855 in which there were 2,905 registered
voters, 6,307 ballots, and 791 votes against slavery.
The resulting legislature passed laws that copied the
Missouri slave laws, laws that had severe penalties for
speech against slavery. The anti-slavery votes
established their own legislature at Topeka. Free State
voters cast 1,287 votes, to 453, to outlaw all blacks from
Kansas, slave or free. Continued violence brought
kidnappings and killings. On May 21, 1856, proslavery
men burned the Free State Hotel in Lawrence and
pillaged homes and stores. The abolitionist John Brown
lead an attack on Pottowatamie Creek. John and his sons
are said to have “hacked” five proslavery men to death
(op. cit, p. 3). Senator Charles Sumner made an
impassioned speech against what was happening in
Kansas. Congressman Preston Brooks beat Sumner
“senseless” at his desk with a cane. A new governor
arrived to “restore order.” Violence declined, but there
were more attempts to draft proslavery and free state
constitutions, including one at Wyandotte in July 1859
(op. cit. p. 4). It was only in 1861, after Confederate
secession, that Kansas was admitted as a state.
But, the United States was drifting toward civil war.
Senator John J. Crittenden, great grandson of Henry
Crittenden, distant cousin of Lucretia Webster Smith
Kennedy, and of the Jeffersons and Lees of Virginia,
(representative of the closest thing to an “Establishment”
that existed in the Ohio River and Mississippi River area
at the time), holding the Senate seat formerly held by
Henry Clay, introduced the “Crittenden Compromise” in
the Senate on December 18, 1960 in an attempt to save
the Union. It was opposed by the Republican Party and
the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln. So the
country continued to drift toward war. Thomas Jefferson
Greenberry Hamilton’s father would die in that war and
his mother would become “homicidally melancholy” and
be assigned to an institution for the insane, leaving him
to be brought up his uncles.
Ambrose Cain has come up in this story on various
occasions. His family married into the Kennedy family
and was living close by. A different look at what is going
on a this time can be gotten by examining it from the
standpoint of the Fulkerson family, a family not related
to our as far as I can tell, but one, like many, that crossed
passed. The Fulkerson and Cain story that is posted on
the web (Fulkerson.org) tells the story of Sarah, who was
born 2nd of July 1825 in Jefferson city, Missouri. Sarah
Fulkerson was the second of 10 children growing up with
many aunts, uncles, and cousins, just as was the case
with the Lee, Ross, Cain, Kennedy, McMichael, Smith,
Crittenden, Lingenfelter, and Pyle families, as noted
above. Her family moved to Nodaway County, Missouri
in 1845 and she married Ambrose Cain 30 Oct 1845. His
parents were Jesse Cain and Merriam Lowe, both born in
England, as discussed above. Sarah and Ambrose moved
to Maryville, as did the family of Samuel Kennedy. They
remained in Maryville when Sarah’s parents and
brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins went West on the
Oregon Trail in 1847 (op. cit, p. 2). You will note that
Lucretia Webster Smith Kennedy lost contact with a
number of her father’s relatives when they took the trail
west to Potter’s Valley, California. Apparently, Sarah’s
mother, brother, and uncle died on their journey west.
In 1858 Sarah and Ambrose moved south to Springfield,
and in 1859 they took a covered wagon south to Texas.
The Oregon and California Trails Association web
positings indicate the following: maybe as many as 500
thousand followed the trails west. Between 1812 and
1848, 5000 went to Salt Lake, 10,000 to Oregon, and
2,000 to California. As many as 40,000 may have taken
the trail in 1849. Maybe as many as 65,000 took the trail
in 1850, with 5000 possible deaths from cholera. These
travelers were mostly going west to California to obtain
gold. Less than 10,000 went west in 1851, but the
numbers climbed to 70,000 in 1852, decreased to 35,000
in 1853, decline further to 20,000 in 1854, most of the
7000 going west in 1855 went to Utah. 1856 saw 12,000,
mostly to California, 1857 less than 6000, mostly to
California, 1858 saw a possible 7,500 travelling west, but
the numbers were up to 80,000 in 1859 because of men
travelling west in search of Colorado gold. There were
around 20,000 in 1860, less than 10,000 in 1861, 20,000
in 1862 and 1863, and 40,000 in 1864, mainly to
Montana. It seems to have taken around 121 days to get
to California and 140 to get to Oregon.
This was also a period of movement and conflict for the
LDS (Mormon) Church. Richard E. Bennett has written
material on the Mormon Exodus (see “We Had
Everything to Procure from Missouri”: The Missouri
Lifeline to the Mormon Exodus 1846 – 1850). According
to this account, the Mormons had been forced from
Nauvoo, Illinois. Under the direction of Brigham Young,
they began to move westward toward the Rocky
Mountains. Bad weather caused the Mormon wagons to
sink to their axles in the mud of Iowa. They made it to
Council Bluffs in mid-June, too late to cross the
mountains that summer. However, the Army asked the
Mormons to volunteer for a Mormon Battalion to march
with Kearney to California. This gave them permission to
settle on Indian lands near Omaha. Thousands took
shelter on the plains of Nebraska, Iowa, and down the
Missouri River to St. Louis. With little food and clothing,
many became sick and died. A Missouri delegation led
by a Colonel Thomas Jennings incepted Brigham Young
and forced him to agree not to travel into Missouri. The
Mormons were forced to come south into Missouri
anyway in search of seed and supplies. They traded
feather beds and china, glassware and cutlery for corn
and beans. Some went south on the Missouri and found
work in St. Joseph. Bishop Newel Whitney took a
steamboat to St. Louis in the fall and bought supplies.
Another site, on Kansas History, has an account titled
“The Mormon Trail (Road) in Kansas Territory,” by Morris
W. Werner. This discussion of the movement of
European converts to Salt Lake City includes material
from diaries such as the following: John Johnson Daves,
in 1854, is a Mormon convert out of Liverpool, England.
He notes deaths from cholera on the steamboats in the
Missouri River. He notes leaving Westport in a train of
50 wagons. J. A. Butler in 1856, left Westport and
travelled down the Sante Fe Trail in a party of 32. Says
that they missed the Oregon Trail and went down the Ft.
Riley road to the “old California Road.”
Another account, “Eastern Ends of the Trail West, by
Stanley B. Kimball tells how the Union Pacific Railroad
started to come west from Omaha, Nebraska, 10 July
1865. The railhead had reached North Platte, Nebraska
by 1867 and Laramie City, Wyoming by 1868. Prior to
the railroad, there we various departure points, Council
Bluffs, Iowa, 1849 – 1852, Florence, Nebraska 1856 –
1863, Wyoming, Nebraska 1864 – 1866.
The Oregon Trail is described as having two branches and
a number of feeders. One of the feeders was The
Mormon Grove Trail, part of the Fort Leavenworth
Military Road.
The Wikipedia has a description of the Beehive House. It
was constructed in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1854 and was
one of the two residences of Brigham Young. Young was
a polygamist and the House had to accommodate him
and wives and children. It was the executive mansion for
the Territory from 1852 to 1855. Young received
important guests here at this time.
In the meantime, according to Harris Newmark (op. cit. p.
241), Andres Pico had submitted a bill to the state
legislature of California calling for the separation of the
State into two states. This bill passed both houses and
was signed by the Governor, but it was rejected in
Washington D.C.. Newmark points out that snow in the
Rocky Mountains closed off Utah in the winter at this
time. Newmark reports that a number of wagons were
carrying goods between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles
and that they arrived almost daily.
The Bella Union added a second story in 1859, and a
steam whistle to announce the arrival of dinner. In May
of 1859 deliberations began on the possibility of
constructing a road to Santa Barbara. A Quartetmaster
Department was established for the army in Willmington.
An Ice House was functioning in 1859 that stored ice
from nearby mountain lakes. The ice was cut in cubes
weighing around 100 pounds and brought down the
canyons by trains of thirty to forty mules. Silver dollars
were being minted in San Francisco in 1859 and they
began to appear in Los Angeles.
San Francisco and Los Angeles were beginning to grow
into real cities. Even Salt Lake City had its buildings.
However, to my knowledge, all the Kennedy,
Lingenfelter, Pyle, Smith, McMichael, Crittenden,
Andrews, and Thompson grandmothers and grandfathers
of my own lineage remained safely east of the Rocky
Mountains, and with a few exceptions, east of the
Missouri River as well.
What you do not know you do not know. At a certain
point information fades in the mists of time. The
material available on the web on Ezekial W. Smith of
Tennessee, referred to above (Barbara Leimback) relates
how the settlers of Tennessee came to the Watauga
Valley area in 1768 (op. cit. p. 1). The Smith line in
question lived in Bedford County, formed from
Rutherford County in 1807, which was formed from
Davidson County in 1803, Davidson was organized in
1787. The Bedford County courthouse was destroyed
three times, fires and a tornado, so there are no decent
records for Vincent Smith (1778 -1857) and his wife Ann
Dolin. They had 10, or more children, including John
Payton Smith, father of Lucretia Webster Smith Kennedy
and grandfather of Henrietta Kennedy Lingenfelter. John
Payton was born 5 Dec. 1799, his brother Ezekiel was
born 1804 and his brother Hiram was born 5 Dec. 1799.
John Payton Smith, as discussed above, is said to have
worked for the US government and to have been a
County judge (op. cit., p. 3). John’s brother Hiram went
to California in 1846 with a party from Buchanan County
and Andrew County, Missouri. He returned to Andrew
County, Missouri in 1852 and died on his trip back to
California. Ezekiel, and his wife and children came to
Missouri and were in Buchanan County by 1833 (Ibid).
Ezekiel was sheriff of Andrew County in 1841 and died of
cholera in 1849. His wife Sarah left St. Joseph for
California in April 1857. They were on the trail for 192
days and arrived in California in October of 1857.
Apparently she had owned seven slaves, according to the
census of 1850. Sarah and her married children had
arrived in Sonoma County, California by June of 1858.
She is buried in the Cemetery in Potter Valley, having
died at Pomo in Medicino County, California 24 July
1874. Lucretia Webster Smith orphaned niece of
Eziekiel, married Samuel Thomas Kennedy 14 July 1850 in
Nodaway, County, Missouri, where she remained till she
died.
On July 14th 1900, Judge Samuel Thomas Kennedy, and
his wife, Lucretia Webster Smith Kennedy (daughter of
John Payton, niece of Eziekiel, per the above), celebrated
a golden wedding anniversary at the home of their sonin-law on the west side of Maryville. Sixteen of their
twenty-three grandchildren were present. But, that is
getting well ahead of my story, for my grandmother,
Mary Lingenfelter Thompson was one of the
grandchildren who was not present (at least to my
knowledge). To get to that spot in our story we will need
to fight a very difficult and nasty civil war and build some
transcontinental railroads (on which my portion of this
linage came west).
America’s History, Volume 1, Henretta, Brody, Ware, and
Johnson (Bedford/St Martins, 4th ed, 2000, as cited
above), gives and interesting summary of the events.
Chapter 14, “Two Societies at War, 1861 -1865” divides
the process into: secession and military stalemate,
choosing sides, setting war aims, mobilizing armies,
mobilizing resources, turning point of 1863,
emancipation, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, strategy, Grant in
Virginia, Election of 1864, Sherman’s March.
Once Lincoln was elected, secessionism spread through
the South. Political leaders were in a race to do
something before Lincoln’s inauguration in March of
1861 (op. cit., p. 442). South Carolina voted for
succession on December 20th. Senator John J. Crittenden
of Kentucky proposed a compromise, as discussed above.
In his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Lincoln called
secession “illegal.” He announced that he would hold and
occupy federal property in the seceded states. The
confederate government decided to take Fort Sumter
with force. The fort surrendered on April 14th and
Lincoln called 75,000 state militia members into federal
service. When Virginia left the Union, Lincoln acted to
take West Virginia by force and secure Maryland. The
German Americans in Missouri were mobilized to save
the state for the Union. German American militia
defeated the confederates led by Governor Clairborne
Jackson. Fighting back raids by Jesse and Frank James
and William Quantrill, the Union retained control of the
state throughout the war (op. cit., p. 445).