Ninety Years
My parents were John and Elizabeth Cushionberry, born
and raised in Georgia. After their marriage they moved to the hill country of
Kentucky where I was born February 10, 1846.
We had free schools there though we had to walk three
miles to school and when the river was up and the backwater covered our road,
we would sometimes have to travel three-quarters of a mile in a skiff or boat.
Our schoolhouse was of native lumber with a clap-board roof and we had a
heating stove for heat. There was a twelve paned glass window for light and
this was all except a single pane above the boy’s writing table. Sometimes
we girls would knock out some of the chinking for extra light on our side.
We had no sewing machines in those days but I was a
good seamstress and unless you would look on the reverse side of the garment,
you could not tell my sewing from that of your machine. I was a good quilter.
We raised our own sheep and I even helped to shear them and washed the wool,
carded it, spun and wove it into cloth. I wove both the broken and the plain
twill cloth. We also made our own thread from the cotton and the flax, as well
as wove the cotton and linen cloth. I would weave the fancy patterns in the
linens and use two colors in the weaving of the bedspreads. For our carpets, I
made the regular three-ply warp.
The Methodists had church and Sunday School there and
in the summer when the crowds were large we would make a brush arbor and the
meeting would be held out of doors in the timber. We usually had a protracted
meeting each summer which would sometimes last several weeks.
The principal crop with us was tobacco which was
raised in large fields. This required lots of work and as my father did not
own any negroes, we children, when help was short, would have to help in the
fields. When the tobacco was ripe, it was cut and hung in a great shed to dry
or cure. The whole stalk was hung up and dried and when cured it was stripped
and packed and taken to the river and sent down the river in boats to market.
As hard as we worked we found time for enjoyment.
Those were gay times for us as we had our dances, log-rollings,
house-raisings, quilting and the men had plenty to drink. Whiskey was kept by
the barrel in the cellar.
Log-rolling was when they wanted to clear a piece of
land for farming. The neighbors were invited in and the men cut the timber and
burned the branches and brush and then rolled the logs together and set fire
to them. This was hard work but enjoyed as it gave the men a chance to test
their strength and many a contest was fought and won this way.
Tobacco was the best paying crop and most of the time
was devoted to raising it but the farmers also had lots of fat cattle and
hogs, but they thought so little of that that they would not even take them to
market and if the merchants wanted them they had to come to the homes and get
them.
Civil War Days
Before Lincoln was elected, a man came to my husband’s
father’s home and he said if Lincoln was elected he would free the negroes,
so after the election of Lincoln my father-in-law sold all of his and the sale
included the one that had been given to my husband when he was a very small
lad and who had grown up with him as his playmate. From the fact that we had
sold our slaves and tried to stay out of the trouble, we fared better than
most of those living around us. The soldiers would come to the house and
search for some one that they thought might be found there but no serious
trouble came of it until Grandfather Caven was keeping a sick man in his home
and the soldiers learned of it so they came one night and took the sick man
and grandfather with him. They took them some distance through the woods and a
cornfield of shocked corn. Then they told grandfather that he could return
home but as he had noticed two men drop out on the way, he was afraid to
return and so spent the night in a shock of corn. It was raining and he died
from the exposure of that night. Many of the people were afraid to stay in
their homes at night.
I was married October 20, 1869, and my husband was
just eleven days older than I was. I was thirty-five years old when our party
left Kentucky by covered wagon for the west. It was a disagreeable trip as we
had so much mud and water and almost no roads. Streams were often high and we
would have to camp and wait for them to run down and I ruined so many of my
pretty quilts on this trip. One prized possession I brought with me was my
side-saddle.
Traveling through Missouri, we went first to Kansas
and then we returned to Barton County, Missouri, where we remained five years.
Here we had poor houses and a new country to farm and quite a different life
from what we had lived in Kentucky.
Hearing so much of the Indian country and the great
possibilities and the cheap rents, we decided to come here. We located four
miles south of the present city of Fairland and rented between two and three
hundred acres of land from Uncle Jimmie Lamar giving him a third of the crop
raised. Here we had a three-room house, two of native lumber and one, a log
room with a fire-place. The house had only one window. I had brought my loom
with me from Kentucky and had hauled it around with me but sold it when we
left Missouri. After we came here I got another one but my weaving here was
limited to rug and carpet weaving. I wove no cloth.
My quilts were badly worn and here I pieced and
quilted many quilts and as I and the older girls quilted, Mary, my daughter
here, kept us a pot of coals from the fireplace sitting in the center under
the quilt to keep us warm.
It was while living here that my younger girls started
to school. Their first teacher was Mrs. Nettie May, now living in Fairland.
She was a young lady then and she started out and solicited pupils from the
families and, with a few pupils in a small building furnished by the
neighborhood, started her little school. The children had to walk and most of
them had to go over the prairie covered with tall grass and many of the roads
were mere paths through the prairie and of course there was danger from the
snakes and wild animals.
An event of those days was the first neighborhood
Sunday School picnic that was attempted and held on the McCollough place on
Horse Creek. Mrs. May was requested to take the school children and arrange a
program for the day. The men hauled lumber to the place and built a platform
and arranged some seats for the crowd in the grove. These seats were only
rough boards placed on supports about twelve or fifteen inches from the
grounds and had no backs. The children taking part in the program wore tall
red caps and red sashes. The parents prepared and took with us our dinner and
at noon we had a basket dinner and spent the whole day there. In appreciation
of her efforts in training the children, the folks gave Mrs. May an album.
Many of my opinions changed after I came here. While
we were in Kansas I had seen a party of Indians eating raw meat without any
salt but here I found my friends and neighbors, who were mostly Indians,
living as I had been taught to live and as friendly and neighborly as I was.
We had eight children and the older ones took care of
the smaller ones while I helped my husband in the field during the busy
season. We raised much wheat and kept enough for our own flour and seed for
the coming year. The surplus was hauled to the Frisco and sold. We could get
some things that we needed at old Prairie City and Fairland after it was
established but each spring and fall my husband and I would make a trip either
to Baxter Springs, Kansas, or Southwest City, Missouri, and bring home the
groceries and clothing and the things that we would need through that season.
Later we moved near Bluejacket where we lived six
years and here we began to raise more corn, which we sold for twenty-five
cents per bushel, and delivered it at the railroad at Bluejacket, and as they
did not have grain elevators in those days, it was usually unloaded along the
right-of-way on the ground but sometimes they would build great open pens for
it. I have seen great mounds of corn piled up this way. It was all right if it
did not rain and spoil the corn. I had never been back to my old Kentucky home
and while we were living at Bluejacket I decided to go back on a visit taking
my younger children with me. I went by train and while waiting in Saint Louis
for my train, which would not leave until the next day, they told me that I
could go to a hotel and get a room to stay over night and when I asked them
what the hotel would charge me, they told me that it would be two dollars. So
I sat up all night in the waiting room and made beds for the children on the
seats. The thing that seemed best to me at the old home when I reached there
was the spring near the house and which was connected with the house by a
cable. Standing at the house you could bring a bucket of that spring water
cold as ice to you and it reminded me of the difference between it and the
water we had had so many years in the Indian Territory.
While we were living near Bluejacket, our barn burned
and we lost so much stock and grain and machinery that it made it hard to farm
so we decided to move to Miami. We came here and stayed until the second
spring when we returned to farming. In the fire on the farm I lost my
side-saddle.
We were living at Miami when the Frisco was built from
Miami south to Afton and my children were in the crowd of school children that
marched that day to the railroad to see the driving of the "Golden
Spike" which celebrated the connection of the Frisco at Miami with the
main line at Afton.
After our return to a farm which we rented south of
Fairland, we continued to live in that neighborhood until our children all
married, eight of them. When my husband died in 1920, we were alone except for
a grandson who was living with us and so he and I continued to live there
until a few years ago when I broke up housekeeping and came here to Cardin to
live with my daughter.
[NOTE: Mrs. Caven suffered a fall some time past which
has confined her to her chair since and her hearing is failing but she has her
second eyesight and was doing some plain sewing when the writer visited her,
and insisted that her daughter show me a quilt that she has pieced the past
winter which is pieced of very small pieces. - Investigator]
[Transcribed by Dawn Hills, Keizer, Oregon, dhills@peoplepc.com Sept 2000]