by Rocky Macy
Transcriber
(Note: Beginning this week I will profile my four great-grandparents on my mother’s side of the family: Alexander Sreaves, Mary Jane Ellis Sreaves, Samuel James Roark, and Nancy Anthaline Scarbrough Roark – at a pace of one per week.
In beginning research on my mother’s grandparents, I came across a lengthy set of notes that had been written by my grandfather’s younger sister, Fannie Matilda Sreaves Ulmer, a daughter of Alexander and Mary Jane Ellis Sreaves. In those notes my grand-aunt Fannie tells about her family’s sudden move from Arkansas to southwest Missouri in 1901, and then goes on to reveal much about their daily activities in those early years in Missouri.
As an introduction to Alexander and Mary Jane, both of whom will be profiled here over the next couple of weeks, I am going to post Fannie’s entire story in the blog today. Her notes appear to have been written in pencil. My copy is old and faded, but I will attempt to lay out her original document with only minor editing for clarity. The notes were untitled, so I have supplied a title. Also, the original document was essentially one extremely long paragraph – so I have broken it down into standard paragraph formatting in order to make it easier to read and understand.
The original document was written in a spiral notebook. Fannie appears to have started it when she was eighty-four and completed it as she was nearing eighty-six – or roughly during 1982 and 1983. At that time she was a widow living in Ft. Worth, Texas, with her daughter Ruth and Ruth’s husband, Gene Scurlock. Fannie’s account covered twelve full pages in the notebook! Enjoy!)
Recollections of Fannie Matilda Sreaves Ulmer:
I was born in Huntsville, Arkansas, on March 26, 1898.
My name is Fannie Matilda Sreaves Ulmer. My father was Alexander Sreaves. He was born Oct. 29, 1857, in Ohio. His father was born in Ohio. His father was Samuel Sreaves. His mother was Rebecca Blanton. She was born in Ohio.
My mother was Mary Jane Ellis. My father and mother were married Jan. 15, 1888, in Arkansas. My mother’s father was William J. Ellis. He was born in Georgia 1840. He was married to Matilda Cook who was born in 1842 and died in 1904.
My Dad and Mother, Alexander and Mary Jane Sreaves, had three sons: Daniel Alexander, William Jess, and Ira Jackson – and four daughters: Ethel May, Fannie Matilda, Alice Christine, and Lula Elizabeth. They had a son who was stillborn.
We moved from Huntsville, Ark. to McDonald Co (Missouri) in 1901. We moved in two covered wagons. My mother’s brother, my Uncle Tommy Ellis, had one of the wagons. We camped out three nights. The last night was at Anderson, Missouri.
The house we moved into was two rooms and an upstairs. My brothers Dan, Jess, and Jackson, and my sister Ethel went to Owen School. One room. They went there two years. My sister Alice was born in that house.
After that we moved to another place. It was Goodman (Missouri) Route One. My Dad bought it. He put out an orchard on it. That is where my baby sister Lula was born. My sister Ethel and I had lots of good times there. The house was a log house, one big room and an attic and a boardwalk took us to the kitchen. It was one room. In the separate kitchen we had a wood cook stove, a cook table, and dining table and chairs with hickory bottoms - they were made with hickory bark. The kitchen also had a pie safe, and a shelf for dishes and such. And a big box for the wood for the cook stove.
That was where I went to my first year of school.
There was a spring that was walled up with rocks. It was wonderful. My brothers could dip a bucket down and get it full of water. It was so swift that water went in and out all the time. I was six but I can still remember it. I am eighty-four-years-old now and have never gone back, but this spring I told my niece where it was. It was up a hollow, our neighbor lived in one hollow and we lived in the other. Well, she said the spring is still there. And there is still an orchard where my Dad had his orchard - not the same one, of course.
I went my first year of school at May. I remember Jackson, Ethel, and I went together. We had a path that made it a lot it a lot closer. My teacher was Bill Moore.
Oh yes, I want to tell you about Mama. It was before my time, but Grandma Ellis, Mama’s mother, told her if she would shear her sheep she could have the wool from one of them. She did, and she washed it, carded it, spun it into thread and wove it into cloth. She made Papa two pair of pants and a coat. When we moved to Missouri she left her spinning wheel. But she would raise a little batch of cotton and card it into bats to make our quilts and comforters when I was small.
Mama had several wool blankets she brought with her to Missouri.. She took some and made Ethel and I long-sleeved undershirts to wear to school. They sure did scratch, ha, ha.
Mama always made our soap. Papa would fix a barrel we called a hopper. It had a hole in the bottom. They would just put wood ashes in it, and pour water on the ashes. When the water got through the ashes they had a container to catch it. It was lye, and Mama made soap with it.
Papa made lots of railroad ties. He would cut a tree and measure the length. He had a broad axe to hew them with.
(Transcriber’s Note: Many early pioneers in the Ozarks earned money by cutting ties and selling them to the railroads.)
We raised our own cane to make our sorghum molasses. When I was small Papa would get red clay, and after we ground the cane we would carry it to a big pan like the one we cooked it in, put a big scoop shovel of clay in the juice and then stir it with a big paddle until it all mixed real good. Then we let it set for about twenty minutes. We had a stopper in one end of the pan which we would take out. Then we drained it out and put it in the cooking pan. It would have the green juice as clear as water. When we did that we didn’t have nothing but a few white skimmings. It sure was awful good sorghum. It was much better than other people around us made. It sold real good. Some would say they had “Sreaves Sorghum,” so Papa had labels made to put on his sorghum.
(Transcriber’s Note: Dan and Jess Sreaves farmed as adults, but they also went into the sorghum production business together and made an income from that as well.)
When we lived in the house where Lula was born we had some neighbors who lived just a little ways from us. Their name was Carr. They had two girls. Their names were Mary and Clara. We played together. Grandma Ellis came from Arkansas and visited with us. That was before we got Lula. When she went home Papa and Jackson took her home in a covered wagon. When they came back, Uncle Tommy’s girls, Nellie and Mable, sent Ethel and I two little dolls. They were about six inches long and came with two matchboxes of clothes. We had lots of fun changing their clothes.
One night Papa and my brothers and a neighbor went coon hunting. They caught a coon and three little ones. They had killed the old one, so they brought the little ones home. They kept one and the neighbor took the other two. They all made pets out of them. Ours would go to the blackberry patch with us. It would eat blackberries off the vines and follow us back home. It was like a monkey. One day it did something it wasn’t supposed to and Mama whipped it. She had a basket with eggs on the sewing machine, so the coon got up there and went to throwing eggs on the floor.
And our neighbor’s wife made some blackberry jam. She put in in a pitcher to cool on the table. While she was outside the coon got on the table, and when she came back in it was stirring the jam with his paw. She didn’t like the coon in the house, so she waited till her husband was eating the jam and then told him what happened. I don’t know if he got rid of it or not.
We had a threshing crew at our house. The coon didn’t like strangers, so it hid out and after dark we heard something in the chicken house. My brother Jess went to see what it was. The little coon had a rooster by the foot trying to get it, so Jess brought the coon to the house and fed it and it was okay.
When I was about seven Papa sold the place and we moved to Swars Prairie. I went my second year of school there. I don’t think I liked it there very much for I don’t have as many fond memories about the place. From there we moved to our old home place. That was Papa and Mama’s last move. They were there till we children were all grown.
The folks bought it (the home place) from Mr. Lagers. It was awful cold. I remember Papa and Mama had an iron kettle with a lot of hot coals in it. So us kids sat around it to keep warm till they got the stove up and a fire in it. We had three rooms and two upstairs and a back porch on the east side of the kitchen.
Our closest neighbor was Mr. John Thompson. They had four girls, all about the same age of us girls: Martha, Pearl, Minnie, and Marie. They had one boy his name was Charley. He was next to Martha.
(Transcriber’s note: Fannie’s oldest brother, Daniel Alexander “Dan” Sreaves was reportedly “sweet” on Martha Adeline Thompson when he was a boy. He went on to marry Nancy Jane “Sis” Roark and Martha married Wesley Roark. Years later (1954) after they were both widowed, Dan and Martha married each other and were together until Dan’s death on September 29, 1970. Martha passed away on February 25, 1972. Dan and Sis were my maternal grandparents.)
Us girls would help with the chores and help in the field. We didn’t have corn planters then. The men folks would get the ground plowed and harrowed. Then they would lay the rows off both ways, and then us girls would drop the corn in the rows, and sometime someone would follow behind and drop stock peas in with the corn. Then it was all covered with a plow, but most times it was covered with a hoe.
One time when Alice was about 10-years-old we were waiting until Jess got the rows ready for us girls to plant the corn and peas. Alice and Lula would climb up on an old straw stack and roll down. So it was time for us to start planting and Alice said “I am going to roll down once more.” But when she started a copperhead snake bit her on the thumb. It went in so deep on her little thumb that it wouldn’t sling off. My brother Jess came running and he was chewing tobacco, so he took it out and held her thumb real tight and he would suck her thumb and spit it out. He got some of it out. He said it puckered his mouth like a green persimmon. We had three doctors, and it took about a year before she got it all right. It left her thumb stiff.
Well, we all finished our school at Hart. It was two rooms: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades were in one room, and 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th were in the other. I remember one year there were one hundred and eight in school. Charley Nutting taught the higher classes. At the end of the term he wrote a poem and everyone’s name was in it. A little boy, Clarence Roark, died. I remember the end of it (the poem). He had all of the names two at a time. The last of it was: “Ethel Sreaves is the last one mentioned. We have none with her to mix.”
Oh yes, I forgot that when we moved to Missouri we had two horses. They were bay. Their names were Fan and Bird. Fan was blaze-faced and Bird had a little white spot on her face. We also had two cows, Hart and Lill. Hart had a hat in her face, and Lill was brindle. We had them a long time. We had two dogs. Flora was a shepherd. We had her till she was eighteen-years-old. Ring was red with a white ring around his neck. Old Fan raised enough mule colts to pay for our home place. The last mules she had were twins. Papa called them Jerry and Ribbon. They never did get very big. He broke them to work, and when he sold them he sold them together.
(Transcriber’s Note: A mule is a large farm animal used for heavy chores like plowing and pulling wagons and sleds – and logs for railroad ties. Mules are products of cross-breeding between female horses and male donkeys. They are born sterile which means they can’t reproduce as a species.)
Mama had a bunch of Plymouth Rock chickens.
Well, Ethel and Alice taught school. Alice didn’t like teaching, but Ethel taught till she got married. She married Harry Anderson. They had four girls and three boys. After they were grown she went back to teaching. Ethel made a real good teacher, one of the best. If they didn’t like school, she got them liking it. After Harry died she joined the Vista Volunteers and they sent her to Florida. She worked with the real poor people. She started Meals-on-Wheels. One old lady called her “the angel.”
My sister Alice married Henning Anderson. He was a cousin to Harry. He was from Nebraska. My brother Dan married Nancy Jane Roark. They had four girls and three boys: Mary Ruth, Florine, Christine, and Bettie – and the boys were Dean, Ned, and Floyd. Jess married Lula Anderton and they had one girl and three boys: Mary, Ray, Roy, and Marvin.
My brother Jackson never married. He had heart trouble real bad. He had an enlarged heart and when he died at thirty-seven, the doctor said the ligaments gave away and it dropped down.
My sister Lula married Wess Kelley. They had one boy and two girls. Their names were Manuel Kelley, Jewel Kelley, and Ethel Kelley. They were the ones who started Kelly Ville.
(Transcriber’s Note: I can remember visiting Kelley Ville a couple of times with my parents back in the 1950s. My memory is that it was on a river near “Twin Bridges” close to Wyandotte, Oklahoma. The primary business was a café which also doubled as a tavern. The most memorable thing about Kelley Ville was Aunt Lula’s husband, Wess (Wesley Robert) Kelley. He looked and sounded exactly like William Frawley, the actor who played Fred Mertz on the television show “I Love Lucy.”)
I, Fannie, married Joe Ulmer. He was a wonderful man. We had five children. The oldest is Ruth, then Grace, Othur, Ray, and Joan. Ruth married Gene Scurlock, Grace married Alfred Shreve, Othur just lived six weeks – he had flu, Ray married Mary-Ann Loucks, and Joan married Charles Tanner. Joe is gone but I will never forget him. He was sick a long time with cancer. I loved him so much. I am making my home with Ruth and Gene at Ft. Worth, Texas. I am eighty-five, eighty-six before long.
(Transcriber’s Note: Fannie’s story ends there. The only time that I can remember seeing her was at my grandfather’s funeral in 1970. Fannie Matilda Sreaves Ulmer passed away in Parker County, Texas, on December 1st, 1990 at the age of ninety-two. Descendants of Alexander and Mary Jane Ellis Sreaves will be forever grateful for the time and attention-to-detail that Fanny took in preparing this narrative and preserving a cache of family history which will be shared and enjoyed by many generations yet to come!)
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