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.