W. F. Pearson Tells of the Days of 70 Years Ago
Copied from Wellsville Globe, January 16, 1930
During the past year I have noticed a n umber of articles in the Globe and in other papers about early times, written by different ones. I enjoy reading all of these stories and hope to see more of them in print. The following is a little about a few of the things that took place when I was a boy, as I remember them.
My father, Robert Pearson, came to this country from England in 1832, when he was about four years old. They settled in Pennsylvania. He went to California during the winter of 1851-52. In 1854 he started East and hearing that the Kansas territory was coming into market, he decided to seek a home here. He entered Kansas at Wyandotte, but the troops drove him back and would not allow any sooners in, but he later came in by the way of Westport. He preempted a claim joining Palmyra on the north and west. In 1859 he sold this place and purchased the farm 1 ½ miles west of Black Jack and later purchased the adjoining 80 acres of the John Brown battleground. Richard (Dick) Pearson, my father’s younger brother, came to Kansas in 1855 and settled on a claim near Baldwin but soon left the claim and went East to join the army. He returned later and took up farming south of Black Jack where he lived until his death in the ‘90’s.
The town of Palmyra, which was located a mile north and a little east of where Baker University now stands, was one of the first villages between Paola and Lawrence. About 1860 this town was made up of three blacksmith shops, one wagon shop, one hotel and a stage barn. Joe Fager owned the wagon shop, and the blacksmith shops were run by Bill Junkens and Ed Bodwel, John Griffith and Mr. Webster, and John Marley and another man, whose name I do not remember. J. W. Ramsey conducted a small grocery and dry goods store and Oliver Johnson the hotel and stage barn.
Fred Vaughna, Governor Wright (a negro), and Joe Chamberlain were the only other citizens of this small village, in the summer time one blacksmith shop would often take in a hundred dollars a day.
When the Union Pacific railroad was completed from Kansas City to Denver freight was sent by rail and the ox trains were discontinued over the Santa Fe trail through Palmyra. So, Palmyra was moved a half mile south and was then called Baldwin City, named after John Baldwin, a German who owned and operated a saw mill south and east of where the Baldwin water tower now stands. Two days of the week individuals would take their corn to the mill and have it ground into chop. The chop was then taken home and the corn meal sifted out and used for cooking purposes.
A few years later the citizens of the new Baldwin City decided the town was too far from the mill and a Baldwin City decided the town was too far from the mill and town fight took place over the location. In the end Baldwin was moved a half mile father south, where it now stands.
After John Baldwin’s son died, he sold his mill and went back to Ohio. He walked part of the way, rode the stage part of the way, and took the train the remainder of the way. When he boarded the train, he looked so repulsive the conductor put him out of the first-class car into the smoker. He was very much opposed to the use of tobacco and argued with the conductor but to no avail. When the train reached Berea, [Ohio]. he stepped up to the conductor and asked him if he knew who he had been arguing with all day. He replied that he did not and that he did not care, either. Baldwin then told him that he owned the controlling interest in that road and asked him to go up to the office with him.
On March 1st, of 1860 we moved from north of Baldwin to near Black Jack. Black Jack was then a small station of two stores, a hotel, two blacksmith shops, a wagon shop and a stage stand. H. N. Brockway owned one of the stores and Samuel A. Stonebraker the other. The hotel was owned by a man by the name of Hays and the wagon shop was owned by John Eady. Two stage routes passed through here, one from Paola to Lawrence and the other from Kansas City to Lawrence. Mexican freighters were also very common. These trains were drawn by ox teams and averaged about 40 wagons to the train. Once in a while two trains would pass through in one day, then again there would be only one train in three or four days. One train that I remember in particular was said to have been four miles long and the average speed of an ox team was 12 miles a day. The freighters camped along the road, and where there was no wood, cooked with buffalo chips. At the end of each day’s journey the wagons were drawn up together to form a corral. The crew consisted [of] one man for each wagon, and a boss. There were a few trains drawn by mules.
A log fort was built at Black Jock during the war. The Bushwhackers set fire to the H. N. Brockway store three times, and each time Mrs. Brockway put out the fire with water from a tub she had standing in the house, but they succeeded in burning the store which stood where the school house now stands. When the Union army called for an enlistment, my father joined the Kansas Militia under Captain Shores.
Well, I remember the time of Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, although I was too small to take part in the search for the raiders. Threshers were at work at our place that day. About nine o’clock a man came galloping up and shouting, “Lawrence is on fire.” In ten minutes not a man was to be seen. After the raid on Lawrence, Quantrill and his men started south through Brooklyn, a village north and west of Baldwin on the Santa Fe trail. They burned the town and killed one or two, then continued on south and crossed Tauy Creek a little above Norwood. The men from the Black Jack vicinity had started for Brooklyn to meet the confederates but arrived there too late. That night my father was away from home, and my mother, my younger brother and myself slept in the corn field, not knowing whether we would have a home to return to in the morning.
Among the early settlers of Black Jack were John Holton, Jackson Bell, John Eaton, David Monger, Patrick Dean.
When I first started to school at Black Jack, Ellen Rosabaugh was teaching a subscription school of from 12 to 20 scholars and usually received one dollar a month per pupil. School was conducted during the spring and summer for two or three months, and all the scholars attended bare footed. A bench, made from a log cut in two, was placed along the wall of the school house and this was where the scholars were taught to read and write. The whole school was usually divided in two classes, the smaller children and the older ones.
The early houses were either built of native lumber or logs. On the houses made of lumber the boards on the sides were placed up and down with cracks between the boards and no batting over the cracks. The wind that came through these furnished plenty of ventilation for health, and some of the floors were only dirt floors. The doors swung on wooden, homemade hinges and a wooden latch and a string on the outside provided the means of fastening. Anyone wanting to come in simply pulled the string and at night the string was pulled inside to lock the door, and not one from the outside could raise the latch. There were a few dugouts and a few sod houses over the country.
There were but few shelters for cattle and they were either a stack of hay or a hay shed, and a hey shed would leak for a week after a rain.
Our firewood was cut and hauled from the Marais des Cygnes, near Rantoul.
And now—the stages and freighters have been replaced by trains, busses, cars and trucks; the village of Black Jack has been gone for many years only a modern country school house and a country church building stands in its place. How times have changed in a few short years.
As I remember it ~
W.F. Pearson
