BACK TO WAYNE COUNTY LIFE AGAIN

Grandma and Grandpa Close had several children (39). They had two boys, Uncle Charlie and Uncle Bob. They had several girls. One of them, Aunt Meady, I think was the one who died shortly, and there was another one who died young (40).  One had typhoid fever and she lost all of her hair and I’ve seen some pictures of her completely bald.  One of the other girls was the mother of Zeta Green (41) who married Orville Green whom we call Si, and Zeta had a daughter Bernice who was Keith Hunt’s wife, who lives right next door to us here (42). I remember…I was walking, I was below school age I can feel quite sure, maybe three years old, something of the sort, when they took me down to see Zetey and the new baby. I wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Aunt Rose (43), who was with us then, said “Don’t you like the new baby?” Then she said “If you don’t like the new baby, why don’t you pop it one in the nose?” and I did. You can just imagine what that started.

Now the boys.  Uncle Charlie lived on the banks of the Skillet Fork Creek about a mile east of town (44). I’ve made that walk many a time and had some wonderful times playing there. As any child psychologist can tell you, it’s the unknown, the strange that attracts people.  I was always there in the summertime when the water was low and the creek right along there had a hard pan bed and it was safe to wade out in it.  I’d wade out in it and turn over rocks and so forth and imagine that I was going to discover huge diamonds.  I’d read somewhere that black rocks and blue mud were the indication that diamonds were laying around somewhere and they sure was plenty of black rocks and blue mud there.  

Uncle Bob moved out on the banks of the same creek only quite a few miles further downstream to south of Boyleston. This was really out in the wilderness (45). He became the supervisor of a huge estate of about 10 – 20,000 acres of nothing but wilderness. One of his jobs was to see that no timber thieves stole or cut down any of the trees and also to collect footage from the sawmills who were operating there and forward the money to the offices of the lawyer or whoever it was that managed the estate in New York. That was quite wild territory. Every time we went down there the first thing I did was to make a beeline for the woodlot ‘bout a hundred feet or so from the house. There was a great big sweet gum tree there and I’d give that thing a  couple of blows with an axe so the next morning I could go out and the sap would ooze out and form big gobs of gum and that was the loveliest chewing gum you ever chewed on. It didn’t have any flavor to it but it was good chewin’. And right nearby there was the privy, the garden castle, toilet, whatever you want to call it, just as the pioneers might have conceived it. There were four posts in the ground and you were hidden from view by just gunny sacks hanging down there. The reason Uncle Bob didn’t put up a more elaborate structure was that every spring in those days they had three or four feet of water there and a light structure like that would have been floating off down the river. (46)

A few feet further on beyond, though, was where he kept his five or ten stands or hives of bees. A little path ran along there between the beehives and the creek and you had to be careful, if you went up that way to fish, to stay on the path and to move carefully and softly and not swing your arms because those bees were wild.  I was scared to death of them.

In those days the farmers planted mainly corn and sunflowers. Those were their main crops. They tried to get their grain seed into the ground early enough so that they could do their last cultivating before the Fourth of July. They reasoned that if the corn wasn’t high enough by the Fourth of July to do the last cultivating -- which they called “laying it by.” then it wouldn’t grow enough to make full-sized ears of any account by the time the frost came around (47). So in celebration of “laying by” the corn on the Fourth of July, it was customary for all of the families around there, ten or fifteen families -- maybe a hundred people -- to come down on the banks of the Skillet there, south and west of Uncle Bob’s house and have a big fish fry. They’d gather there early in the morning, go down to the place where Uncle Bob and some of the men had arranged rough tables out of sawed sawmill boards and the women would set out their baskets and kids would play. ‘Course I was large enough by then that I was always in the midst of it and wanted to take a man’s share, even though I wasn’t bigger than a minute. (48)

Footnotes For Back To Wayne County Again

39) See footnote six for the family outline. There is another Close family in Wayne and Clay Counties that sometimes cause confusion.

40) James died at sixteen months. Kate died at fifteen and Meada died of “cerebral congestion” at eighteen. The Close family bible has this entry for Kate:

Katie dau of John and Marthy J. Close June 6, 1886 Jan 16, 1901

“A precious one from us is gone, A voice we loved is stilled,

A place is vacant in our home, Which never can be filled.”

Katie may have died from Typhoid but the death certificate has not been found.

41) Mary Close (1876- 1910) married 1) Wil Straud c 1894. She married 2) William Hale c 1899. Child of Mary Close and Wil Straud was Zeta Myrtle Straud b May 8, 1895. Children of Mary Close and William Hale were Russel, Oakley, and Glen. Zeta Myrtle Straud (1895 – 1978) married Orval Pearl Green (1889 – 1987) on January 10, 1914 in Wayne City, Wayne County IL. Orval and Zeta had Bernice Mae, Mary Jane, and Oval Paul.

42) Living next door to cousins is a mixed blessing. Bernice and I are of the same generation but she was a decade or two older than I. Naturally I couldn’t get away with anything and was a handy “yard boy” when her chores piled up. The good far outweighed the bad.

43) “Aunt Rosie” was only sixteen or seventeen when she initiated this little bruhaha. She was always a bit saucy and good at stirring up her younger nephews and cousins.

44) A visit to Uncle Charlie and to Uncle Bob was a great treat for us. Somehow we often visited when the Skillet Fork was in flood. That place was terrifying when the flood water would cover the deck of the bridge. Uncle Charlie lost two children to dysentery and typhoid. They drank un-boiled river water. Mother would make sure we had our own water or “Mom” Morgan (Ida Close Morgan) would buy us a nickel coke. Dad had me hunt “diamonds” in that blue mucky mud when the water was low. Never found anything but it made a coating hard for the mosquitoes to penetrate.

45) That area was the wildest woods I ever saw. We picked hazel nuts, hickory nuts, fished, and spent time around the kitchen begging cold cornbread, honey, and home made jelly and jam from Aunt Carrie. I think they tolerated us because it was so easy to get lost. When I took off to explore they had a dog or two follow me. There were wildcats, snakes, and other varmints I’ve never had sense enough to stay away from. They fed the hounds cornbread and sop. I guess they followed me because the cornbread I begged was part of their dinner.

46) This is exactly how the river in flood spread disease. When we camped in Wayne County we learned to filter, boil, and re-filter our drinking water.

47) I was thinking about this custom last summer. In this age of fertilizer, no-till farming, hybrid seed and

high priced chemicals my corn was six feet high and thinking about making tassels. I’ve had to explain the term to younger friends. Remember thirty or forty bushels to the acres was a good crop. They would not believe the yields today.

48)  These get-togethers built more community spirit, started more courtships, and created more township issues than you could  start from TV ads and activist meetings rolled together. We were friends, family, and loved each other. We eagerly looked forward to the next church social or harvest fest.

49) I posted this commentary on “loggin’ fish”on our Family Website March 3, 2003. Still holds good.
”Those of you who have listened to Euil Wayne Morgan’s tapes in his oral history “Comments Along The Way” may recall Daddy Guy spoke fondly of “loggin’ or hoggin’ fish” and the great fish fry parties   that followed. Basically one gets into the creek or river and feels around the bottom with his toes and occasionally prods around the debris with his hands until a hole is found. Usually this would be by a fallen log or a rock. Then one bends over and slowly feels along until a slender form is felt. Don’t move your hand! If you do, the critter will be gone. Just hold your position then slowly work your hands up to the gills, hoping it is a catfish or a carp or a perch and trusting the Good Lord it is not a snapping turtle or a snake or an Alligator Gar. Slowly move your hands…slowly…that’s it.   Find the gills, stick your fingers in the gill slots and quickly   rear back, yank it out of its hole and toss that fighting fish onto the banks for lunch. Bask in your moment of glory then go get another one.

I remember Daddy Guy taught me how to do this at Uncle Rob’s place on the Skillet Fork River in Wayne County IL. Usually when the men were seriously getting dinner we small boys got to whoop up and down the banks catching and corralling the flopping fish then sticking them into a “gunny sack” (a burlap bag) and toting it up to the women. Even then the women didn’t like to clean fish. The men and boys did that when we got “e’nuff for a mess” but some of the women pitched in “to see it done right”.   After we had most of what we needed the men would break in the boys and we’d get to get good and wet for an hour or so and we actually caught fish. I used to be pretty good at this and once at college in 1957 we were night fishing on the Saline River. I told my fishing buddies about this and they swore I was lying. Dean McElravy   (a Korean War Veteran) bet me “camp chores” I couldn’t do it. I stripped down to my shorts and slipped into the river. It didn’t take five minutes and I had a five pound catfish for our dinner. He laughed and I had a luxurious weekend so far as cleanup is concerned. After the first meal Dean cooked the other guys swore that chore wasn’t in the bet and I went back to being Camp Cook but Dean and the others did all the cleanup.”

I should also mention Dad told me he once pulled out an Alligator Gar. (The size of the fish grew over the years from two or three feet to a six foot giant. A three foot gar will do nicely.) He tried to flip it onto the bank but it twisted in the air, nailed him on the shoulder, then made its escape. It bled nicely, and eventually left some scars, but it wasn’t all bad. The women and girls fussed over him and he was excused from the clean up.

50) Most of the Fry’s I attended had snapping hot lard in the skillets and kettles. I remember that along with the fish a goodly number of crickets, grasshoppers, and other flying creatures became part of the seasoning. At the end of the Fry when the men strained the hot oil there were a lot of “crispies” left on the screen. Nobody died… or got sued.

51) Bones and fish were a problem for Dad. After college, when I lived in Minnesota, Dad discovered the bone free joy of walleye and bass fillets. He enjoyed his fish then…in or out of season.

Interlude Completed- (52)

As I said before, that was quite wild territory in those days.  When we went down there we were very careful to keep one eye on the sky all the time because you could only go on the hard road out as far as the Sims road south, and from there on it was dirt road. And it was good old gumbo and clay Southern Illinois soil so you had to be very careful or you might be mudded in there for quite a while.

Once auditors from the estate came to survey the timber holdings, and with cars it was impassable at that time of the year.  So he (Uncle Bob, Robert Wayne Close) met them in his wagon, took them down and they stayed all night, sleeping on his corn shuck mattresses. The next morning he took them in the wagon down a little timber path until they came to a division in the road where it went off in all directions and he told them, and he says, “Now you get off here and you make a tour down there, so many, so far so many rods and so forth and then come to a certain direction and said sweep around.”  And he said, “I got to go down here and see the men at this sawmill and I’ll meet you back here about lunch time.” And so they got out and started off down one of the timber trails, and he clepped up his horses and he went on down.  He hadn’t got a hundred yards down when he heard some yellin’ a-going on and he stopped and turned around and here came these two timber runners.  They said “For God’s sake don’t leave. You give us our report,” said “we’ll go back to the house and you tell us what we want to know”, said “don’t leave us alone in this God Forsaken wilderness.” He (Uncle Bob) said, “They said you can’t see the sun on account of all the branches and the clouds and the moss grows on all five sides of the trees and everywhere you looks it looks the same. We’ll just go back to the house and write what you say.” (53)

That gives you some idea of how wild it was.  Believe you me, they had some scaly bark hickories down there.  They had the old time shag bark hickories, them great big ones in the hull that’s as big as baseballs or bigger. Many of a time that we’ve gone down there, even after your mother and I were married, and gathered those big old swamp nuts, we called them. Found out later that they were called shag bark hickories. I know the fall of thirty-five, your mother and I had been married about two months or so, and Dad and Mother and Shirley and I decided that we would go down on a Saturday, since I was teaching school we’d go down on a Saturday, to the bottoms and gather nuts. Well, that morning we started out real early in the car and it was misting rain a little bit. By the time we went on through the south end, down through Aden, and by the time we got down there why it was a sprinkling, just a slow drizzle and we knew that we couldn’t get over those roads too far in a car so Dad stopped to the house of a fellow he knew, an old acquaintance, and left the car there.  Dad rented a wagon and a team of horses. And there we went, and we traveled about five miles over those timber roads that a car would’ve had trouble with even if it wasn’t wet. We got into the woods and the leaves were falling and the nuts were falling and we, in the rain, went out there and we gathered I think it was seven big gunny sacks full of those nuts. Hulled now, I don’t mean with the hulls on them, they were hulled. And I got lost. Well… I started back to the car. You know I’m the kind always trying to see what’s right over there. Around me were all the nuts in the world that I could of used for five years but I wanted to see if there was a tree where they were thicker so I wouldn’t have to take so many steps. The rest of them went back to the car, with a load, and I started walking through the woods.   Due to my scout training, I would spot a tree ahead of me and I would go straight to it.  I had no idea that anything like this could happen. I decided I’d gone far enough so I turned to my right to look for the road and I walked and I walked and I walked and I… a well, I know I’m going straight, so I made another right turn, I… at least I can control my circles if I’m lost, and I went through a thicket and fifteen feet there I came to the road and I looked down the road there about a half a mile away and there was the car. I’d been walking all that time within fifteen or twenty feet of the road and I couldn’t tell it. Strangely enough after spending all that time out in those dripping woods, none of us had a cold, not a one of us. (54)

Footnotes For Interlude Completed

Wayne County Life.The Honey Collectors

The following excerpt from "Comments Along the Way" was previous published in the family calendar "Remembering Us 2003.A Family Memory," copyright 2002 by Albert Wayne Morgan, Peggy Anne Morgan Phillips, and Graham Alan Morgan. The transcription used in that calendar was by Euil Wayne Morgan's grandson Thomas Nathaniel Morgan.

COMMENTS ALONG THE WAY

by Euil Wayne Morgan

Date of this recording: December 1985

"Much earlier than that, in about twenty-two (1922), something like that, Uncle Bob (1) sent up a letter that he had located a bee tree. And he wanted Uncle Owen (2) and Aunt Rose (3) and Dad (4) and the rest of us to come down and help him cut a bee tree. So down we went. Well this bee tree. we went about a quarter of a mile south of Uncle Bob's house and over to the side of the creek and there was this huge maple. That thing must have been four feet in diameter. And Uncle Bob took me to one side and he pointed about thirty feet up and they was a hollow in the tree and he said you look real close you'll see bees a going in and out and sure enough they were. Well the men took their axes and their cross cut saw and they preceded to fall that giant. When it crashed, it came down with a bang. I'm telling you it just shook the whole neighborhood. Well, Uncle Bob said, "Pat (5), run up there and see if there's any bees there," course he was just kidding me.

And I walked up to the stump of that tree and the top of the trunk was just about as...up to the top of my armpits. but I wouldn't climb up there. So here came Dad. He said "Son," says "don't hold back like that," says "be brave like your old Daddy." And he jumped up on the stump and then walked the trunk of that tree among all the branches up to where the bee hole was and about that time why the bees recovered from their shock and here they came. They started to (come) swarming out. Here came Dad, bending all those branches, a crashing through the underbrush, he always kept his hair cut short and mother counted later he had thirty two bee stings on his scalp. I got one on my left wrist and it like to killed me.

Now Dad never complained, never said a word, and from then on, why, Uncle Bob always had the story that he liked to tell, like most of my family they liked to tell stories, why, he'd come out when something happened and he'd say. "Be brave like your old Daddy," and slapped his leg with his hand and just guffawed to who come next. After they'd smoked the bees a little bit, cut some of the branches away, they took their crosscut saws and they started sawing off the top side of that trunk of that tree and using wedges and axes to drive them with and they wedged off the top of that thing and opened it up a space of about, oh, I'd say about twelve feet, along the top there, and that tree was hollow and it was plumb full of honey. We never got it all. We couldn't handle it all.

They must have been putting honey in there for generations after generations. But we started carrying honey, and we had these big fifty pound metal lard tins, we had milk buckets, we had everything possible that you could carry honey in, and we took shovels and we'd fill those.dip in there and fill those with honey.and two people would pick up a fifty pound lard tin, holding on to each side of it, and in their other hand why they'd hold a two or three gallon pail with honey in it and they'd start off up to the house with it. I don't know why they didn't hitch up a horse and come down there with a wagon but we carried those things a quarter of a mile.

Now I was a going along and I had two, two gallon milk pails full of honey, 'bout all I could handle, and ahead of me why there was Mom (6) and Aunt Carrie (7). They had a fifty pound tin of honey between them and each had a bucket of honey in the other and all at once Aunt Carrie gave a loud whoop and dropped that honey and began pulling her dress up and slapping. A bee had come along there and crawled up her legs and stung her in a very, very delicate place. And that gave rise to a lot more stories that Aunt Carrie didn't appreciate. So I remember (we brought back) a large washtub full of comb honey and again all of  the neighbors benefited because you can eat just so much honey and then you're tired of it."

(.Wayne County Life is continued in "Comments Along the Way")

Footnotes for "The Honey Collectors":

1)  UNCLE BOB is ROBERT WAYNE CLOSE, b. March 14, 1879, Orchardville Wayne Co IL; d. January 10, 1947, Wayne City, Illinois; the son of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA JANE ELLIS. UNCLE BOB m. CARRIE D. ALLEN, December 12, 1902; b. February 05, 1877, IL; d. January 10, 1947, Wayne City IL.

2) UNCLE OWEN is OWEN DEL HERBERT b. August 05, 1896, Dahlgren IL; d. March 11, 1985, Mt. Vernon, Illinois. the son of GEORGE W. HERBERT and EMMA GRACE. He married July 08, 1919, Fairfield IL; ROSA LEE CLOSE, b. June 07, 1896, Wayne City IL; d. November 29, 1983, Mt. Vernon, Illinois. AUNT ROSIE is the daughter of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA JANE ELLIS.

3) AUNT ROSE is ROSA LEE CLOSE, b. June 07, 1896, Wayne City IL; d. November 29, 1983, Mt. Vernon, Illinois, the daughter of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA JANE ELLIS. She married OWEN DEL HERBERT

4)  DAD is ALBERT FRANKLIN MORGAN who was born April 08, 1885 in Jefferson Co IL, and died September 04, 1943 in St. Lukes Hospital St Louis MO.  He married IDA CLOSE May 18, 1907 in Wayne City IL, daughter of JOHN CLOSE and MARTHA ELLIS.  She was born September 11, 1889 in Wayne County, Illinois, and died October 08, 1974 in Hickory Grove Manor Nursing Home Mt. Vernon, Illinois.

ALBERT FRANKLIN MORGAN was the son of GEORGE W. MORGAN and ELLEN KITTURIE TERRY. Children of ALBERT MORGAN and IDA CLOSE are:

i. JULIET ELLEN⁵ MORGAN, b. January 13, 1908, Wayne County, Illinois; d. December 17, 1998, Bloomington, Illinois; m. PAYTON KENDALL FUGATE, August 10, 1935, Marion KY; b. August 04, 1910; d. January 25, 1977.

ii. EUIL WAYNE MORGAN, b. March 19, 1910, Wayne City, Illinois; d. December 23, 1988, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; m. SHIRLEY JEAN CATES, August 10, 1935, Marion Crittenden Kentucky; b. July 05, 1913, Dahlgren, Illinois; d. May 18, 2003, Mt. Vernon, IL.

iii. ALMA GERALDINE MORGAN, b. November 24, 1916, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; d. January 10, 2003, Leroy Nursing Home, Leroy McLean Co IL; m. CHARLES SUMNER MAYFIELD, August 24, 1940, Marion Crittenden CO KY; b. June 23, 1916, Elizabethtown, Illinois; d. April 16, 1969, Bloomington, Illinois.

5) PAT or PAT MURPHY is the family nickname for EUIL WAYNE MORGAN I

6) MOM or MOTHER is IDA CLOSE MORGAN, the mother of EUIL WAYNE MORGAN. All of her grandchildren called her "MOM MORGAN".

7) AUNT CARRIE is CARRIE D. ALLEN; b. February 05, 1877, IL; d. January 10, 1947, Wayne City IL.

She was the wife of ROBERT WAYNE CLOSE.