From city to not . . .
August 9, 2013

Confusion reigns supreme in my mind, for the moment at least.  Which small heartland town was that?  What place was burned to the ground?  Where was that amazing historic downtown?  Which small heartland town was that again?  And who was that masked man?

On this trip and on others before, we have driven though, traversed, bypassed and circled through such an endless number of small settlements that unless I photograph and label them immediately, they blur into one gigantic mass, and even then, I tend to merge various characteristics one into another.

The occasional sprawling metropolis is  not necessarily a welcome respite from this.  Our westward jaunt took us through St. Louis, a jolt to our small town sensibilities.  Obviously, it doesn’t make sense to maneuver through city traffic pulling the trailer, so in those cases when we cannot avoid a city, we take advantage of the Interstate highway system.  Even when utilizing it, the heavy traffic can be harrowing; Chris deals with it much better than I do.  I try not to white-knuckle all the way through, but am only semi-successful.  The lengthy halting traffic flow eased up at one point but quickly resumed its not resuming.  Chris called it a “burst of go”.

The earlier bridge detours caused us to get to St. Louis later than anticipated: at rush hour, to be specific.  Heavy traffic there continued until we were 30 miles or more outside the city, causing Chris to wonder where all those people were going, thinking they must camp out in corn fields when not working in the city.

It was, therefore, quite a contrast to wander the narrow winding country roads into Florence, the late home of my Chilcoat, Harmon and Weaver ancestors.  The nearly-non-existent town is even more abandoned than the first time we ventured there more than 20 years ago - dead as a doorknob is an apt description.

We were there only for a short detour to put flowers on the graves of John Chilcoat (1758-1851), Steve Weaver (1848-1914) & Margaret (Chilcoat) Weaver (1854-1937), William Chilcoat (1826-1910) and Elizabeth (Harmon) Chilcoat (1827-1881).

There is no actual grave marker for John Chilcoat nor for his third wife, Hulda, our ancestor, that we know of, only a memorial stone for John.  Numerous folks have searched for their graves, to no avail, although we (that’s the royal “we” - Chris gets the credit here) did find their tumble-down log cabin way back in the woods years ago.  I collected samples of the irises that have grown rampant around the house.  They are beautiful; we have dubbed them “Chilcoat irises”. 

John was a veteran of the American Revolution; he wore out three wives and still had two minor children when he died at age 92.

His son, William, served during the Civil War in the Union Army from the very divided state of Missouri, working as a cook.

Another stop for the same purpose was at Green Ridge where we honored my great grandparents - Charles Rhodimer (1878-1911) & Sarah (Weaver) Rhodimer (1880-1925) and my great uncle Dale Rhodimer. 

Sadly, Charles died at age 33 of tuberculosis; he had been a saddle and harness maker, and Sally went on to raise her three children in Colorado Springs in a climate that was deemed healthful. After a final move to the San Fernando Valley in California, she succumbed at age 45 to the disease that tragically claimed her husband.  The family buried her and Dale back at Green Ridge next to Charles.

These are all people whose life happenings we have recorded as best we have been able with much help from kin we have located here and there and from Grandma Grace’s fond memories of her parents and her growing-up years.
  
Orient . . .

Wondering if we could find a place to get the trailer in and most importantly, back out, we also ventured again through Harrisonville where my two greats grandfather, John J. Rhodimer (1850-1929), is interred at the Orient Cemetery.  Following up on an earlier attempt, we hoped to discover the exact location of his unmarked grave so we could possibly give him a marker. 

We lucked into parking in the drive of a nursing home across the way and found the phone number of the burying ground’s sexton.  He kindly agreed to go look up the records, but no luck: evidently, the grave location is lost to time.  We left flowers for John Rhodimer at the cemetery entrance.

 Of all the family mysteries, we have more questions about John Rhodimer than almost anyone else.  He was a blacksmith from New Jersey, lived in Kansas, and later Sedalia, Missouri, across the road from his son, Charles, and family.

His daughter-in-law, Sally (Weaver) Rhodimer wrote a fictionalized story about a young man who was abused by his father and ran away to join a cowboy camp.  That, coupled with other clues, leads us to speculate that John was perhaps the abuser mentioned in the story. 

First, elderly cousins who had been in touch with John and his wife, Ada, passed on a family story that John was cruel.  I take all family traditions, especially negative ones like that, with a hefty measure of salt; however, we found something more that backs it up.

When Ada (Coykendall) Rhodimer (daughter of Daniel Coykendall I wrote about at Andersonville) remarried, her marriage license application asked if she had been divorced and if so, under what grounds.  Ada answered that her ex-husband was in the penitentiary for cruelty.

We have not been able to find a record of any court judgments against him, nor a record of his imprisonment; the search is more difficult because we don’t know which state it occurred in.  If he was in fact imprisoned, it must not have been for a very long sentence because we know his whereabouts for much of the time.

To add to the mystery, John later remarried and they also divorced, but when his second wife died just a month before him, her obituary reverted to her previous name and never mentioned him at all, even though the second wife’s first husband was still alive when she married John.  But then, what fun would genealogy be without the mysteries?  Some get solved; some do not.

Nevada . . .

A short distance along our migration toward home, we stopped at Nevada (pronounced with a long “a” in the middle), Missouri, to be close enough for research in St. Claire and Cedar counties.  Managing to fit both stops into one day, we came away with very little about our Fergusons, Gentrys and Langfords who were there.  A little disappointed but not overly surprised: we think they were not in this area for an extended period of time.

Two courthouses, two libraries later, we have some possible collateral material and that’s about it except for a State land record for James Gentry. 

Perusing the Cedar County records in their vault revealed no marriage record for William Ferguson and Mary Gentry, yet we had second-hand information about that 1850 wedding, so why didn’t it show up officially?  Later, at the library, Chris found marriage record microfilm and against all odds since we had just checked the official records, found their marriage unindexed.  It was not hard to understand why Ferguson was not indexed: the way his name was written made it look more like Zirgusson, but hers was quite plain and should have been there.  Thinking back about the condition of the vault makes us wonder if they are missing some early books despite saying they have them all.  Great find on Chris’ part to come up with the original record.

Driving over there from Nevada took us through some of the most beautiful parts of Missouri that I have seen - many miles of high prairie-like land with forested areas ribboning across the more distant views.  Of all the towns that we have stopped to explore, there are hundreds more just as interesting. 

El Dorado . . .

El Dorado (Do-ray-do in the local vernacular) Springs turned out to be one of the more fascinating.  Its lovely central park is anchored by the spring that still flows.  We thoroughly enjoyed a walk around and learning some of its history.  The spring water has a very high mineral content - after I put my hand into it, my fingers smelled strongly of iron.

Everywhere we look is flooding.  We took a break and a gaze-around several places along Truman Lake (former President Harry Truman was born near here), the Sac and Osage rivers, all really beautiful waterways now high over their banks and spreading into the countryside.  I was especially fascinated to see the confluence where the Sac flows into the Osage.  It is an area that begs to be fished and kayaked.  There were lots of egrets spotted white against all the green foliage and a flock of Canada geese were raising a ruckus as only they can do.

Alright already! Glitches galore. . .

When we pulled into the campground at Nevada, the ground had standing water over much of it, turning our grassy spot into a slippery mucky muddy mess.  How long did it take to dry out, you wonder?  Check back in a few months and we will see if it has yet.  For most of the two nights we were there, it deluged, it poured, it came down in torrents and it was accompanied by the most outrageous lightning and thunder I have ever experienced.  Thunder did not rumble loudly a lot; it boomed continuously without letup and we actually heard lightning sizzle - a sound I had never experienced before and one I hope not to hear again.

The intention had been to hang out there with no particular agenda after the bit of research was complete.  We found ourselves with a scheduling snafu when Chris’ mental calendar went on the fritz.  Reservations were made at RV parks for the remainder of our time away; howsomeever, it was discovered that there was an unaccounted-for week in the midst of it.  Time to punt (again), so we’ll set ourselves in one place for a spell to regain whatever senses that were regainable, so went our reasoning.

The first clue the place was not for us was that soupy mess all around the park.  The second clue was those two nights during which we estimated it rained about another ten(!!!) inches to add to the already saturated, flooded landscape.  The third clue was that no end was in sight and the window over the bed leaked again. 

Not one to throw good time after bad, I suggested we hie ourselves anywhere but there and so we did.  But first, we spent a morning photographing Nevada and environs, a very attractive little town with as large a historic residential and commercial neighborhood as I’ve ever seen.  I photographed only some of the ornate structures in the commercial section; we’d be there still if I’d started in on residential. 

 

 

Nevada's courthouse is quite the majestic structure.

And of course I had to throw in some of the storm damage that was extensive - tree limbs down everywhere and some power lines, too.

And their murals are fabulous!  On this trip, I have passed up more wonderful murals than I’ve actually recorded, mostly due to inconvenience in getting to them while hauling the Totee.

Nevada sports a really picturesque lake in Radio Springs Park with a trail around its circumference and even more unique - Cottey College, a private two-year women’s school with a charming campus.

 
 Although most of the residential section is well-maintained as is the majority of the commercial, there are signs of decay in places, like a beautiful old church that is boarded-up and rotting away.

It would seem that being a railroad terminus and having a huge 3M plant are factors that lend the area a measure of prosperity.

In my rush to get blog postings out quickly enough not to interfere with life’s living, I forgot to mention new birds we got in North Carolina.  They were Cooper’s hawk, song sparrow and American goldfinch plus three life birds: eastern towhee, worm-eating warbler and red-cockaded woodpecker.

In Kansas, we saw two new trip birds: hairy woodpecker and black-capped chickadee.  Missouri’s contribution so far is eastern bluebird.

This structure was in memory of Mary Rita, but why a shovel tree was erected for her is a mystery to me.

As the plaque tells us, this early-day well capstone was retrieved from under pavement and put on display.