From North Carolina to Indian Territory

The train traveling west from Greenville, North Carolina, left the station three hours late. But Meta Chestnutt didn't mind. The only thing that mattered to her was that she was going to Indian Territory and the challenges awaiting her there. The conductor eventually made his way to her row.

"What city, Miss?"

"Silver City, Indian Territory."

"I beg your pardon."

"Silver City," she repeated.

"You must be mistaken. There is no such place."

"Oh, but there is and I am going there."

"I will have to let you off at the next stop and you can talk with the station agent."

After looking at his map, the agent repeated what the conductor had said: there was no Silver City, Indian Territory. The best the agent could do was to send Meta some forty miles further west, to Goldsboro, North Carolina. Perhaps the people in the station office there could help her.

The agent at Goldsboro gave her no more help. He suggested that she take the next train to Richmond, Virginia. By that point, Meta was exasperated. She had letters with her, sent by Annie Erwin and postmarked "Silver City, I.T."  She insisted that there was such a place, and that she had to get there. But her only choice was to go to Richmond. Maybe someone there could help her.[1]

Thanks to the nineteenth-century's transportation revolution, by 1889 the United States had been knit together by an ever-expanding network of railroads. From 1850 to 1870, massive investment in railroad construction created a web of tracks totaling 53,000 miles. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in May 1869. By the end of the 1880s, the decade when construction reached a fever pitch, there were 164,000 miles miles of track in operation.[2]

Still, for all of that, no railroad ever reached Silver City, Indian Territory. Meta Chestnutt knew the place was there. But judging from a map of the nation's railroads, it wasn't. She must have felt anxious as she rode the train 165 miles from Goldsboro, North Carolina, to Richmond, Virginia, following the path of today's Interstate-95. If she was ever going to make it to Silver City, she would need to travel south and west. At this point, she was going north and east!

At Richmond, the agent encountered the same problem, but had the presence of mind to ask, "Do you know of any town that might be near where you want to go?" Looking at the map, the only place Meta could suggest was Oklahoma City. So the agent sold her a ticket to Oklahoma City and suggested that she send word to her friends in Indian Territory to pick her up there. She was starting her trip to the west all over again. This time, she was further away.

It would be difficult to trace the exact route that Chestnutt followed from Virginia to Indian Territory. It appears, however, that she eventually traveled west through Missouri and into Kansas before heading south into I.T.

At some point in Kansas, she had a brief encounter she would remember for the rest of her life. A black man boarded the crowded train and looked for an empty seat. He noticed the spot next to Meta and sat down. Immediately, the white woman from North Carolina, born during the Civil War, the grand-daughter of slave owners, reacted. Not once in her life had she been that close to a black man. In fact, the only time she could remember seeing an African-American beside a white person, it was a servant girl sitting next to her white mistress.

Meta concealed her anxiety and disgust as best she could, but her emotions must have shown. Soon, a white man spoke up and asked the black man sitting next to Miss Chestnutt to move and sit next to him instead. With no apparent surprise or indignation, the black man stood up, walked to the seat next to the white man, and sat down.

Telling this story years later, Meta insisted that the black man who sat next to her that day was someone whose photo sometimes appeared in the newspapers: George Washington Carver. When recalling the episode, she would add, "I would be proud to have him sit beside me today."[3]

The available facts support Meta's story. For example, the train that brought her to Oklahoma City in 1889 ran on the Southern Kansas Railway, a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, traveling south out of Kansas.[4] As a young man, George Washington Carver left his home in Diamond, Missouri, and moved to Kansas. For several years until 1890, Carver spent much of his time in Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa "seeking an education while supporting himself doing laundry, cooking, and homesteading."[5]

Notes

[1] Eva Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity (and Rise Above It)," 31-32. The unpublished book typescript is located in box 1, folders 6 and 7, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City. The spoken words here do not come from a transcript. Instead, they represent what appears to be Heiliger's imaginative recreation of what could have been said--and might likely have been said--at a certain point in Meta Chestnutt's story. Heiliger was Sager's great niece as well as biographer. As the Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection reveals, the two women corresponded with one another for many years.

In one of his books that contains reported dialogue, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote, "The reader is entitled to ask if the material here is factually reliable. Reliable is the perfect word in this context. The book is not strictly factual, in that conversations are reported which cannot be documented as having taken place word for word. Yet it is reliable in that these words might well have been spoken. There are zero distortions here--no thought is engrafted in anyone that alters the subject's character or inclinations, or even habits of speech." William F. Buckley Jr., Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2008), xi-xii. In the spirit of Buckley's apology I occasionally report dialogue taken from Eva Heiliger's manuscript.

[2] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 532.

[3] Heiliger, Born to Meet Adversity, 32-34. Chestnutt's emotional reaction in this instance might be compared to a story Melton A. McLaurin tells in his memoir, Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 27-41. McLaurin's chapter titled "Bobo" is named for a black childhood acquaintance of the McLaurin's. The two boys had gone to a store where they used an air compressor to inflate a leaky basketball. Bobo put the air needle in his mouth first. The first attempt at airing up the basketball didn't work. So McLaurin, without thinking, put the needle in his own mouth. Instantly, he recognized what he had done. For a moment, he imagined that Bobo's blackness was somehow already infecting him. Still, he managed to conceal his distress. Part of his assumed white superiority meant that he could not visibly react. Later, though, he went by himself to an outdoor spigot where he repeatedly rinsed out his mouth.

[4] See Augustus J. Veenendaal, Jr., "Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=AT001, and Linda D. Wilson, "Oklahoma City," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=OK025.

[5] Linda O. McMurry, "Carver, George Washington," in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4:513.

The Standard of King Immanuel: Meta Chestnutt's Mission to Indian Territory

Meta Chestnutt, c. 1888

Meta Chestnutt’s first night in Oklahoma was not what she had imagined it would be. Shivering in her bed during the wee hours of the morning, she stared down at the floor of her room. Her “room” was actually a lean-to with one hole in the wall to serve as a window. The lean-to was attached to the Grand Avenue Hotel, "which was not very grand at that time." The hotel stood in "a town of shacks and tents" known as Oklahoma City, then barely four months old. Beneath the floor, a wolf had entrenched himself with no intention of leaving his new home. Earlier that evening, a few of the leading men of the town, including the mayor and marshal, had tried to evict the wolf. But all such attempts were angrily rejected. Afterwards, no one above or beneath the floor got much sleep as the wolf yipped and howled through the night.[1]

The next morning, September 6, 1889, W. J. Erwin, a former U. S. marshal, accompanied by his daughter Grace, picked up a load of lumber in Oklahoma City. Then, they picked up their new school teacher, recently arrived by train from North Carolina, who had with her a large trunk. Among its contents were "two big feather pillows made of feathers picked from the geese of the old plantation home, sheets, pillowcases, and clothes for a five year stay." Grace, who had turned ten years old that May, and “Miss Meta,” as people came to call her, climbed onto the lumber stacked on the wagon and used the trunk for a seatback. Then, the father, daughter, and school teacher rode the many hours to Silver City, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, a trip that included a crossing of the Canadian River swollen to its banks by recent rains.[2] It was no doubt during the trip that Meta discovered what the lumber was for. Mr. Erwin would build on the side of his house another lean-to. This one would be Miss Chestnutt's living quarters not for one night, but for the next seven years. Little did she realize that during those years, when dry spells came, for days on end she would eat nothing except corn meal moistened with a bit of milk.[3]

Upon making it to Silver City in the afternoon, Chestnutt discovered that she had missed her welcoming party. The arrival of a new teacher in Indian Territory must have meant a great deal, because the night before, when everyone had expected her, "the little settlement had staged a big dance," with some in attendance from fifty miles away. By the next afternoon, however, "the cowpunchers had all returned to their herds, the ladies had ridden their ponies away with their sidesaddles and long riding habits, the hacks and wagons had rumbled off along the trails." In stark contrast to the festivities of the night before, at that point "there was no sound save the prairie chicken's squawk, and no curious eyes save the jack rabbit's stare." Still, the lady from eastern North Carolina found her new home enchanting: "that first sunset over miles and miles of prairie was a blaze of glory one could never forget."[4]

Meta Chestnutt began teaching on her twenty-sixth birthday, two days after she arrived in Silver City. The tiny community had prepared for her as best they could. Fifty years later, she described that first schoolhouse they had waiting for her. It was built, she said, 

by a few cowmen and some of the “nesters” down near Silver City cemetery. It was a frame building 24 by 36 feet, with a log rolled up to the door for a step. Rough cottonwood lumber was nailed up for seats and desks. Three twelve-inch boards four feet long were nailed together for a blackboard and painted black. Pieces of chalk were chipped from a large lump and served as crayons with which to “cipher.”[5]

Photo c. 1892. Back row, left to right: W. J. Erwin, Ann "Annie" Tuttle Erwin, Grace Erwin, Meta Chestnutt. Front row: Mary Ann, Wilma, Claude Tuttle Erwin. All of the children were born in Sherman, Texas, before the family moved to Indian Territory.

Someone had ordered school books, and they had been delivered--to Silver City, New Mexico![6] So Chestnutt, as she had to do countless times in Indian Territory, improvised. She began by announcing, “The first thing we will learn today is the ‘Golden Rule.’ We will memorize it and then we will begin to learn how to live it.” At that point, she had only seven students. Before the first school year was over, there were thirty-seven.[7] This was the beginning of thirty years of teaching and school administration, first at Silver City, and later at Minco, I.T. Through it all, the conviction that sustained her was that she had come to Indian Territory by the will of God; that her work was not merely educational, but missionary and redemptive. She once wrote that her goal was “to fix firmly the standard of King Immanuel.” But the mission was not hers alone. This was church work. “Our battle,” she continued,

has been a fierce one all along the line, and our burden a heavy one, but the Lord has blessed us in all our fiery trials. Our little band has grown from two to fifty or sixty. Some zealous brethren belong to our band now. It is a glorious sight to see whole families coming to service, one in Christ Jesus. At our regular Lord’s day service our attendance sometimes runs to seventy-five, and our Bible readings on Lord’s day night are well attended.[8]

A few times a year, the congregation would hear the sermons of visiting preachers like R. W. Officer, J. H. Hardin, Volney Johnson, and D. T. Broadus. On Sundays when they had no preacher, which was most of them, Meta would “teach the Bible” and “spread the Lord’s table.” That is, she would preach a sermon and preside at the Lord's Supper, which the congregation observed every Sunday. In time, the Church of Christ that met in the schoolhouse at Minco, I.T., would grow to well over one hundred in attendance.[9]

Over three decades, Meta taught some 2,500 students, and provided a Christian example for them and their families. Many of her students became Christians. Several went on to become political and business leaders in the new State of Oklahoma. In recognition of her life's work, in 1939, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. In short, Meta Chestnutt, who died at Chickasha, Oklahoma in 1948, was one of the most successful bi-vocational missionaries in the history of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement.

Notes

[1] Mrs. J. A. Sager, "Some Wildflowers from My Garden of Memory," Meta Chestnutt Sager file, box 10, Historic Oklahoma Biographies Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma. See also Eva Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity (and Rise Above It)," 1-3. Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, box 1, folders 6 and 7, Research Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City.

[2] Sager, "Some Wildflowers."

[3] Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity," 33-35.

[4] Sager, "Some Wildflowers."

[5] Meta C. Sager, "Early Grady County History," Chronicles of Oklahoma 17, no. 2 (June 1939): 187. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "nester" as "a person who settles permanently in a cattle-grazing region as a farmer, homesteader, etc." The earliest example of the use of this word dates to 1880.

[6] Gwen Jackson, "Pioneer Teacher in First Graded Grady County School: Meta Chestnutt Sager of Silver City and Minco," Grady County Historical Society, Chickasha, OK.

[7] Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity," 42-43.

[8] Meta Chestnutt, "Minco, Ind. Ter.," American Home Missionary 1, no. 4 (April 1895): 61-62. As in the passage quoted here, Meta sometimes used military metaphors to describe her missionary work. This matches up nicely with something David Hackett Fischer has described. Fischer observed that the inhabitants of the American backcountry (including Miss Chestnutt's North Carolina) were the descendants of people who had immigrated to American from the borderlands of North Britain. Because the borderlands witnessed perennial violence, people from the region often spoke using figures from armed conflict. Even their sermons and hymns abounded in the language of battle. See Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 618.

[9] Chestnutt, "Minco."

Meeting with Meta at the Oklahoma History Center

I was in the archive at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City this Monday through Wednesday, March 16-18. What a great place to do research on the history of the Sooner State!

I spent almost all of my time there going through "Box 1" of the Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection. Those folders look innocent. But searching through their contents wore me out.  . . . 

Among the many documents in the collection, there were also a few photographs. In this one, probably taken in Nashville, Meta is about 26 years old. The year would have been 1889.

Here she is 50 years later, in 1939, beside her house in Chickasha, Oklahoma. This photo was taken on the day she rode the train to Oklahoma City where she was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

Among the few items she put in her scrapbook was the Rock Island Railroad napkin from the train ride to "the City."

Christmastime in Texas and Oklahoma

Just a quick note from my home here in Tulia, Swisher County, Texas. It's Sunday evening, December 28. The last few days have been full and fun. But I'm so glad to be home now, taking it easy.

On Thursday, both Ben and Aubrey drove down from Amarillo to spend Christmas with me and Michele. We exchanged gifts and, of course, ate a bit too much. (But it was so good, thanks to Michele).

Ben, Aubrey, and Michele. Christmas Day 2014

Friday, the 26th, was a long day for Abigail, me, and Michele. Ab started the day with an early-morning flight out of Hartford, CT. She changed planes at Midway in Chicago, and landed before noon in Oklahoma City. Michele and I had also gotten up early that morning to drive from Tulia to OKC.

After the three of us shared lunch, we drove to Wellington, Texas, for a wedding rehearsal. My niece, Larkin Davis, was getting married to Ory Johnson the next day. And I was one of the officiants! 

Larkin and her dad, Keith Davis. Wedding rehearsal dinner, Dec. 26, 2014

After rehearsal and dinner in Wellington, the three of us were back in the car headed to Tulia, where we spent the night. Whew! We were so tired.

We got to sleep in the next morning. The wedding wasn't until 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and we didn't need to be back in Wellington until about 1. That was nice. The wedding went off without a hitch. The other officiant in the ceremony, Judge Les Hatch from Lubbock, is a great guy and did a fine job. It was so good to be with most of my family that day.

After the wedding reception, Michele and Abigail and I decided that we hadn't gotten to spend near enough time with my kid sister, Vicky Crews, and her family. They had just come in from Arkansas the night before. They would be staying the night in Altus, OK before returning to their home on Sunday, the 28th. So we all loaded up and went to Altus together. 

We met at my parent's house and got to catch up a bit. When the folks started getting weary, we went to the motel and took over the lobby until late into the night. 

Joy, Abigail, and Frank H. Bellizzi at the Davis-Johnson wedding, Dec. 27

With my parents, two great people