Genesis: Puxico

Puxico, c1900.

In 1848 not a single mile of railroad track could be found in the entire state of Missouri. The following year saw the chartering of its first railway, the Pacific, which opened five miles of track from St. Louis to Cheltenham in 1852. Off to a promising start, Missouri railroad construction soon slowed down due to the panic of 1857 and was stopped completely by the Civil War.

During the war, the Missouri's Bootheel region, where the Andrews and John William Summers would one day settle, was the home of Confederate sympathizers and guerilla bands, which Union forces tried to dislodge. The ensuing battles, often occurring in muddy swamps and swollen streams, were neighbor against neighbor, and kin against kin, with atrocities committed by both sides. The Battle of Mingo Swamp, which occurred on 4 Feb 1863 just north of Puxico, was the bloodiest battle in Southeast Missouri. Family feuds between combatants continued for decades after the war.

1907 Timetable (St. Louis Mercantile Library).

Missouri railroad construction took off again in 1865, at war’s end, and became rampant in the Bootheel area, a region of productive timberlands used for railroad ties and barrel staves. In 1883, Louis Houck, a railroad entrepreneur, extended his Cape Girardeau Southwestern Railroad through the swamps from what is today the town of Advance to Puxico. The following year, Puxico was incorporated as a village. Its position in the center of the timber industry of T.J. Moss, a large tie contractor, made it an important railroad stop. By 1888, Moss, who had acquired 40,000 acres of Stoddard timberland, became the largest tie contractor in Missouri. In 1902 the Cape Girardeau Southwestern Railroad and other lines were sold to the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway Company (the “Frisco”). And then John William Summers arrived in Stoddard County with some Andrews half-siblings.

Frisco Station, Puxico, c1902.

By 1910, 20-year-old John Summers had a room in a Puxico boarding house, about five miles north of Asherville, where his half-brother Lewis Andrews was living. John had moved to Puxico after getting a job as a laborer with the Frisco Railroad.

Another person associated with the Frisco in 1910 was Cass B Crabtree, who was working as an express shipping manager, while living with his mother and father on a farm outside town. Not a Frisco employee, Cass used the railroad for his express deliveries. Born with the name “Cason Lee,” he took the name “Cass B,” for unknown reasons, and treated the “B” not an initial, but as his middle name. His signature was sometimes written with quotation marks around the “B” to show it was not an initial, and it was even entered on some official documents that way. According to family members, that caused no end of confusion to record keepers.

Signature on WW I draft registration.

John and Cass met, either due to their railroad connection or because Crabtree and Andrews family members were neighbors in the Asherville area. According to descendants, John was invited by Cass to have dinner with his family. And at that dinner, John Summers met Cass’s sister Verne Cumi Crabtree. You can guess what happened next.

Verne Cumi and John William Summers, 1911.

On 3 Feb 1911 Verne and John obtained a marriage license in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and were married two days later in Asherville, which both had listed as their home. Verne’s brother, John Henry Crabtree, a farmer and Baptist minister, may have conducted the wedding. John Henry lived near the Andrews and officiated at many “Asherville” weddings, including those of his brothers Cass B on Crabtree 6 Aug 1911, the same year his sister Verne was married, Charles Dillard Crabtree, and George Franklin Crabtree. Actually John Henry’s home, a mile or two north of the tiny community, was used for at least some of his “Asherville” weddings.

John H. Crabtree lived near Asherville
and Lewis Andrews (Plat book, 1930).

Verne and John William lived only briefly as a married couple in Stoddard Co. By August of 1911 John was working as a Frisco station agent in Boynton, Arkansas. Quite a jump from laborer to agent. But that is a future chapter in our saga.

Destination Missouri

 We know that James Jordan Summers’s first-born children William and Mary Elizabeth went to live with their Aunt and Uncle Amanda and Squire Mooney in Kentucky after the deaths of their parents (The Orphans), but where did James’s son John William Summers and John’s half-siblings, the Andrews, end up?

Stoddard and Butler Counties in 
Missouri became Andrews residences.

We last saw John Summers and the younger orphaned Andrews children (Lawrence, Nora, and Anna Mae) living with Lewis Robert Andrews and his wife, Nancy, in Northern Twp, Franklin Co, Illinois. Between 1906, when their son Coy was born in Illinois, and 1908, when their son Millard was born in Stoddard Co, Missouri, Lewis and Nancy moved to Stoddard Co, where they were living in Duck Creek Twp in 1910.

Lewis Robert Andrews had 162 acres of farmland in Duck Creek Twp, just south of the small, unincorporated village of Asherville (Plat book of Stoddard County, Missouri, Hixson and Company, 1930).

Accompanying Lewis and Nancy on their trip to Missouri were two of their 1900 “tenants”—Anna Mae Andrews, who married Edward Metcalf in Stoddard Co 24 Jun 1908, and John William Summers, who was living in Puxico, Stoddard Co, Missouri in 1910.

William Andrews, the oldest of Tillman’s children, also headed to Missouri. There, he and his wife, Hester, settled in St. Francis Twp, Butler Co, just across the St. Francis River from Duck Creek Twp, where his brother was living.

In 1930 William Andrews and his son George were living in St. Francis Twp, Butler Co, just west of the St. Francis River (Plat book of Butler County, Missouri, Hixson and Company, 1930).

The Andrews and John Summers ended up in Duck Creek and
St. Francis Townships.

Lewis’s brother Lawrence, who had also lived with Lewis and Nancy after the death of his parents, took a detour to Arkansas. There, he married Martha E. Waller, before traveling to Stoddard Co, where he was living in Duck Creek Twp in 1920. But Lawrence did not stick it out. He went back to Illinois, to Union Co. And he was eventually joined there by brother Lewis and most of Lewis’s kids.

Two of the Andrews siblings never made it to Missouri. Nora Andrews, who married Joseph E. Young in Hamilton Co in 1904, died between 1906, when her daughter Dorothy Lee Young was born in Illinois, and 1908, when a contract was made by Nora’s husband, Joseph, for Nora’s sister Anna Mae to care for Dorothy. Dorothy ended up in Stoddard Co with her Aunt Anna.

And Thomas B. Andrews and his wife, Marjorie, were living in Black Twp, Posey Co., Indiana, in 1900. Thomas may have died there, for his presumed widow married William Lewis Copeland in Franklin Co, Illinois in Jan 1910.

What drew the Andrews family to Southeast Missouri? The area, which contained large tracts of swampy, forested bottomlands, was once a vast wilderness of cypress, tupelo, and water. Indeed, some have claimed that it was the northern part of the Mississippi River delta, “a howling wilderness of swamps and marshes and lakes.” The Federal Swamp Act of 1850 sought to solve the problem by selling swamp land to the states, which in turn sold it to counties for final sale to individuals. Stoddard Co land prices became incredibly low, and that may have attracted the brothers William, Lewis Robert, and Lawrence Andrews. The swamps were finally drained in the 1920s and 1930s.

Mingo Swamp, just north of Puxico in Duck Creek Twp, is typical of the overflow lands that once covered
much of Stoddard and Butler counties (USFWS).

And they may have felt at home in Stoddard Co, whose society and politics resembled those of Franklin and Hamilton counties in Illinois, where their Andrews family originated. Many of the inhabitants in the Bootheel area of Missouri were from southern states with states' rights leanings and conservative views. During the Civil War, 623 Stoddard residents had joined the Confederate military, while only a little over 200 had joined Union units.

Unattractive was that the region was rather low income. That there was a tendency towards lawlessness. And that there had been significant Klan activity following the war (and again in the 1920s). Missouri had been a slave state before the war, and racial intolerance continued. A 1910 edition of the Dexter Statesman newspaper wrote favorably that Stoddard had “no saloons, no negroes.” "No saloons" is a stretch. Besides, moonshining and bootlegging were common in the Bootheel.

Despite providing little cultural, economic, or societal improvement over "Little Egypt," Southeastern Missouri turned out to be highly rewarding for John William Summers. Stoddard Co was where John began his lifelong career with the Frisco Railway and where he met his future wife, Verne Cumi Crabtree. More on that in our next episode.

Stoddard County History, A Local History Digital Archive, http://www.stoddardcountyhistory.com/

Draining and Leveeing Missouri Low Land, The Bureau of Labor Statistic of Missouri, Jefferson City, Missouri, 1910.

Cletis R. Ellinghouse, Mingo, Southeast Missouri’s Ancient Swamp and the Countryside Surrounding It, Exlibris, Philadelphia, 2008.

The Orphans

Despite having nine children from three marriages (see The Mysterious Tillman), James Jordan Summers, Lucinda Russel, Rosetta Cole, and Tillman Andrew were short-lived. Tillman lasted the longest, dying (by his own hand) around age 48. Lucinda passed around 45, James Jordan about 38, Rosetta under 25. By 1897, or so, all four parents were dead. And what happened to the orphans? Here are their stories, combined with charts in hopes of simplifying things.

In 1900 William and Mary were living with their Aunt and Uncle.

In 1900 James Jordan and Rosetta (Cole) Summers’s children, William and Mary Elizabeth had moved in with (or been "farmed out" to) their aunt and uncle Amanda and Squire (also, “Esquire”) Mooney in Lisman, Webster Co, Kentucky. Amanda was Rosetta Cole’s sister.

Albert and Mary Elizabeth Craig.
 (Katharyn Silva Belew, Ancestry.com.)

Born 23 Oct 1884, in McLeansboro, Hamilton Co, Illinois, Mary Elizabeth Summers lived only briefly with her aunt and uncle. On 16 Nov 1900 she married William David Keller in Henderson Co, Kentucky, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1910. Mary next married Joseph Eich in Knox Co, Indiana, 5 Nov 1917, and when Joseph died on 13 Jan 1944, she married Albert Granville Craig in 1948. Mary died 22 Dec 1965 in Vincennes, Indiana. Despite three marriages, Mary Elizabeth had but a single child, Carlus Clinton Keller, product of her first marriage.

We know a lot about Mary Elizabeth but almost nothing about her brother, William Summers, who is found in the 1900 census as a nephew living with Amanda and Squire Mooney and is never seen again. That census gives his date of birth as Oct 1881 with Kentucky as his unexpected birthplace.

By the time that Lucinda, the last living parent, died, some of the orphaned descendants were no longer children. Tillman and Lucinda’s three oldest were married, all three in Franklin Co, Illinois—William Andrews to Hester Hutchcraft on 5 Jun 1894, Lewis Robert Andrews to Nancy Ella Kerney on 11 Jul 1895, and Thomas B. Andrews to Marjorie M. Waller on 3 Dec 1896.

By the time their parents had died, the three oldest Andrews were married.

And by 1900, the unmarried Andrews, the three youngest—Lawrence, Nora, and Anna Mae—were living with their married brother Lewis Robert in Northern Twp. Franklin Co. Also living with Lewis Robert in 1900 was his half brother, ten-year-old John William Summers, the youngest of all the offspring. That John William was taken in by Lewis was probably the reason that John and his future wife, Verne, maintained contacts throughout their lives with Tillman’s children and grandchildren. And many of John and Verne's descendants did the same.

The subject of our next blog is where John William Summers and his Andrews half-siblings ended up.

James and Rosetta

Marriage License Cover

The descendants of William K Summers have been extensively researched by Judith (“Judy”) Somers, wife of Dale Somers, William K’s great grandson. (The spelling of the last name was changed.) Before Judy died in 1992, she corresponded with Verne (Crabtree) Summers, wife of James Jordan’s son from his third marriage, John William Summers (see The Mysterious Tillman Andrew), passing on abstracts of Illinois courthouse records. Among the abstracted records were those of James Jordan’s 1879 marriage to Rosetta “Caul” in Hamilton Co. There were two highly questionable things in the abstracts. First was the claim that the records showed this to be James’s second marriage. He had apparently been married once before, but to whom nobody knows. Second was Rosetta’s middle name, transcribed by Judy as “Filone,” and changed by some to “Trilone” or “Frilone.” And it would be interesting to see if Rosetta’s family name was really given as “Caul.” It seems like a good time to take a look at digital copies of the original records, rather than abstracts, and here they are, from the Hamilton Co courthouse.

Marriage License

Marriage Return

The handwriting on the Marriage Return is poor and there are some errors. James’s mother’s name was “Nichols,” not “Nickles.” Rosetta was probably born in Webster Co, Kentucky, not in nonexistent “West Vill Co Ky.” And her family name is given as “Coal,” not “Caul” as transcribed by Judy, nor “Cole,” as given on the Marriage License Cover, which it really was. Of course, that James and Rosetta were Illiterate (as shown in the 1880 Hamilton Co census) did not help.

The Marriage Return does indeed state that with this marriage James had been married “Twice.”  But the bride’s middle name is not “Filone” or “Frilone” or “Trilone.” It is obviously “Freelove.” Why are we so certain, given the overall poor handwriting? In the 1860 census, Rosetta’s parents, Robert and Lucy, were living in Webster Co, Kentucky, next door to another Cole family with a daughter named “Freelove Cole.” The families were almost certainly related, particularly since the 1850 census shows the same Cole family as well as Rosetta’s parents living in Allen Co, Kentucky, along with a large number of other Coles, sixty total. It appears that “Freelove” may have been a family name. The Allen Co Coles originated in Virginia. Various records show that state to be the birthplace of at least three different 18^th- and 19^th-century women bearing the name “Freelove Cole.” And the writing of the name is relatively clear in the Marriage Return.

Lucy Cole's Hamilton Co Marker (Find A Grave).

The digital images of the marriage records show three other things of interest. (1) Rosetta apparently gave her name as “Rosety,” though it does appear as “Rosetta” in the marriage license. (2) She was married in the house of her father Robert, known to live in Knights Prairie Twp, Hamilton Co. (3) The witness was Rubin Dial, the brother of Rosetta’s stepmother, Mary Dial. Prior to Rosetta's marriage, her biological mother, Lucy, had passed away, sometime around 1868, presumably in Hamilton Co, where she is buried.

If you would like free no-strings-attached copies of the marriage documents and my transcriptions, just click on the link below. You don’t need the Dropbox app. If, at this point, you get a “Log in or Sign Up” message just ignore it. Press the download button at the top of the web page. You will then get (another) “Log in or Sign Up” message. Just click “Or continue with dropdown only” at the bottom of that message. You need not log in or sign up. It is not necessary to be a Dropbox user. Leave a comment or send me an email if you have problems.

Marriage Records Download