Amarillo, Texas Gets Religion

In its early days, the settlement that came to be called Amarillo was an irreligious place. Saloons were busy, Sundays were like any other day, and churches were unknown. The town was populated by young people, those who were healthy and strong enough to travel to a new settlement. This meant that death rarely came by natural causes. When someone was killed, H. H. Wallace, a local judge, would read the burial service from the Episcopal Prayer Book.[1]

But in 1888, Isaac Mills, a Methodist circuit-riding preacher who lived in Clarendon, came to Amarillo. His teaching and influence led to the establishment of a congregation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1889, the congregation built the first church structure in Amarillo. As other religious groups established congregations in Amarillo, the Methodists, to their credit, allowed the other churches to worship in their facility. [2]

Notes

[1] G. A. F. Parker, "Incipient Trade and Religion in Amarillo," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 2 (1929), 141-44.

[2] Ibid. Stephen Daniel Eckstein Jr., History of Churches of Christ in Texas, 1824-1950 (Austin, TX: Firm Foundation Publishing House, 1963), 173; "Methodist Circuit-Riding Preacher Founded Church," Childress Index, Wednesday, July 14, 1948; "Polk Street United Methodist Church," Texas Historical Commission marker, Amarillo, TX. Viewed March 27, 2020.

S. E. Kennedy's Designs on Meta Chestnutt's Christian School at Minco, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, 1894

In some previous posts here at Frankly Speaking, I've discussed the two main characters in the story that follows here: Meta Chestnutt and Silas Kennedy. To read more of their stories, use the search window at the top left of this blog. Especially during these days of COVID-19, may you be healthy and happy. --Frank Bellizzi

Apparently, sometime during the year 1894, Disciples minister Silas Kennedy developed a plan to gain control of Meta Chestnutt's school, to seize what she had built up over the previous five years. In a report on the Indian Territory dated March 10, 1894, Kennedy commended Chestnutt as "the tall sycamore of North Carolina and the giant teacher and true missionary of the West."[1] At the time, Kennedy and his family were new arrivals, having come to Indian Territory from New Mexico just three months prior.[2] And Meta Chestnutt made a favorable impression. She was a well-educated, articulate, and attractive daughter of the South, thirty years old and at least six feet tall. Even in dusty Indian Territory, though never showy, she always managed to dress immaculately. Yet this would be the last time Kennedy would say anything in print about Chestnutt, the founder of the school he later sought to promote and lead.

One can only imagine what Kennedy's motives and justifications might have been. Perhaps he simply reasoned that this was his moment, that taking Meta Chestnutt's school to the next level was a task for which he was specially qualified. Kennedy was born in 1849, in Wetumpka, Alabama, the third son of a blacksmith.[3] At age twelve, he was drafted into the Confederate Army. He soon saw action, and just a few weeks beyond his thirteenth birthday was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh in southwest Tennessee, April 6-7, 1862.[4]

In 1866, the year he turned seventeen, he moved to Fannin County, Texas, where he met Charlcy Dockary, who was also from Alabama. The two were married in Texas in 1868 and soon started a family. According to the federal census of 1880, the couple had three sons, all born in Texas, and Silas worked as an "itinerant minister."[5] But in 1885, for financial reasons and for the sake of his family, he "quit the regular work of the ministry and went to merchandising." Two years later, in 1887, he moved his family to New Mexico where he "engaged extensively in the mercantile business." In 1893, looking back on his previous eight years, Kennedy said that he regretted how going into business meant that he had to "harden" himself and "partake of the ways of the world." His never-ending desire to preach, and what he perceived as his loss of sympathy for others, brought him to a life-changing decision:

On the fifth day of last December I cut loose from all my business relations with the full determination and with a vow to Almighty God to devote the reminder of my life to building up the cause of Christ. I have selected the Chickasaw Indian Nation, which is now rapidly settling up with white people from every state in the Union. I got here, at Chickasha, on December 8, 1893.[6]

Having lived the previous twenty-five years in Texas and New Mexico, Kennedy had come to Indian Territory looking for a new start. He found it. In the spring of 1894, when he reported to J. H. Garrison, editor of the Christian-Evangelist, Kennedy sounded like a promotional agent for the future State of Oklahoma. The potential of the place was nearly boundless. Indian Territory was, he wrote,

situated almost in the very geographical center of the United States, embracing the five civilized tribes of Indians, with the Kiowa, Comanche, Osage, Kickapoo, Cheyenne and other small tribes as well as that of Oklahoma, a scope of country larger than three of the average States of the Union, with soil, water, climate, timber, grass and many other advantages equal if not superior to any spot on earth, . . . [7]

Kennedy had found more than that in Indian Territory. He had also found at Minco, just eighteen miles north of his new home in Chickasha, a growing school, a five year old Christian academy poised to become a college. It was true that in Meta Chestnutt the school had an adequate leader. But the designs Kennedy had for the school--which were really no different than what Miss Chestnutt had in mind--would require his leadership. He was different. As tall as Meta Chestnutt was, Kennedy, who stood about six feet, five inches, was even taller.[8] And, he was fourteen years older. But most importantly by far, he was a man, a preacher, and not merely "a Bible teacher," the phrase Chestnutt was most likely to use when referring to her role in the Sunny South Christian Church at Minco. By contrast, Kennedy explicitly led congregations, baptized new believers, and published articles in brotherhood journals. And he dreamed of making more of Meta Chestnutt's school at Minco. Why have a local Christian school, when you could have a regional Christian college? So it was that by the early fall of 1894, Kennedy sent word to the Christian-Evangelist:

We are now building a college at Minco . . . I have raised up to date $6,400 in the Territory alone, nearly all of which is a clear gain of wealth to our church, as five-sixths of it has been raised from parties who are not members of the church. Of the above mentioned $6,400, $3,600 has been raised at Minco to build the college. . . . I promised the people of Minco that . . . I would undertake the building of a ten thousand dollar college. I further told them that I would have rooms open and ready to accommodate one hundred children by Oct. 1, 1894, and that by Jan. 1, 1895, I would try to have it ready to accomodate [sic] three hundred pupils. I began this work July 1, and on Oct 1, we will open this school.[9]

Kennedy's report nowhere mentions Meta Chestnutt, or that five years earlier, in 1889, she had arrived in I.T. and started the school that had been thriving ever since. Judging from what Kennedy published in the second half of 1894, one would never guess that Minco already had a Christian academy still led by its founding teacher. The stage was set for a struggle.

Notes

[1] S. E. Kennedy, "Letter from the Indian Territory," Gospel Advocate (April 26, 1894), 253.

[2] Ibid.

[3] "Gone to His Reward. Rev. S. E. Kennedy," Davis  (Oklahoma) News (April 25, 1918); 1850 U.S. Census, Coosa County, Alabama, population schedule, 1st Ward City of Wetumpka, p. 4 (stamped), dwelling 59, family 59, Aotho and Jane Kennedy, digital image, Ancestry.com, accessed March 21, 2020, http://ancestry.com.

[4] Jay S. Hoar, Callow, Brave and True: A Gospel of Civil War Youth (Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1999), 230. On June 2, 2018, the writer visited Silas E. Kennedy's grave in the Greenhill Cemetery, in Davis, Oklahoma, and found the C.S.A. Cross of Honor attached to the gravestone.

[5] 1880 U.S. Census, Bell County, Texas, population schedule, Enumeration District No. 7, p. 8, dwelling 58, family 58, Silas and Charlsy [sic] Kenedy [sic], digital image, Ancestry.com, accessed March 22, 2020, http://ancestry.com.

[6] Kennedy, "Letter from the Indian Territory."

[7] S. E. Kennedy, "The Indian Territory," Christian-Evangelist (June 14, 1894), 381.

[8] Note how Kennedy is taller than every other person, including Meta Chestnutt, in Photo 23196.2, Photograph Box 1, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Special Collections, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, Okla. To see the photo online, click on the link that follows here. Then, click on Archives Catalog. In the search window, type "Meta Chestnutt Rev. Kennedy."  http://okhistory.cuadra.com/star/public.html

[9] S. E. Kennedy, "A College in the Indian Territory," Christian-Evangelist (October 4, 1894), 636.

Amarillo, Texas: Early Beginnings

Amarillo, Texas, c. 1889

Today, Amarillo, Texas straddles the line that divides Randall and Potter Counties. A brief look at the federal census of 1880 provides a glimpse of just how stark and simple the place used to be. That year, the two counties, not much more than squares on a map, had a grand total of twenty-seven residents. Almost all of them were young, unmarried men who, according to the census taker, were "Herding Cattle" and "Hunting Mustangs." For several years, then, the only residents of two counties were a few lonely cowboys.[1] But all of that was about to change.

In 1887, a construction crew was laying track across Potter County for the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad. A new settlement grew up around their campsite and a post office was established. By 1890, the town next to a brand new railroad was one of the busiest cattle shipping points in the world. But busy does not mean large, and as late as 1900, the city that had come to be known as Amarillo had fewer than 1,500 residents.[2]

Fast forward more than a century, and the contrasts could not be more striking. Today, Randall and Potter Counties are home to well over a quarter million people, and the city of Amarillo continues to grow.

Notes

[1] Ernest R. Archambeau, "The First Federal Census in the Panhandle--1880," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 23 (1950): 22-132.

[2] Handbook of Texas Online, H. Allen Anderson, "Amarillo, TX," accessed February 23, 2020, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hda02.

Coleman Grigsby "C. G." Witherspoon (1856-1916) and Early Deaf Smith County Texas

Born on Christmas Eve 1856 in Waxahachie, Texas, C. G. Witherspoon would go on during the 1880s and 90s to become an early settler in Deaf Smith County and a founding father of the town of Hereford.

His early years must have been difficult. His mother, Ann Elizabeth Garvin Witherspoon, died in 1862. Coleman was only five, and his little sister, Anna Elizabeth Rachel, was not yet four months old. Their father, William Anderson "W. A." Witherspoon, married again in 1871. Less than a year later, his new bride, the former Milinda "Linnie" Garvin, gave birth to the first of her nine children, five boys and four girls. The youngest, Mary Leona, was born in 1887, the year her mother turned forty.[1]

In 1888, the year he turned thirty-two, C. G., his wife, Fannie Armstrong Jackson Witherspoon, and their young son Claude moved to Amarillo. C. G. taught the first full term of school in Amarillo. Sometime later that year, the family moved to Deaf Smith County where C. G. "filed on land near the center section of the county"[2] It must have looked very promising. In 1889, C. G.'s half brother, Anderson, visited the county. The next year, Anderson, his brother Remmie, and their father, W. A., set out driving a herd of cattle and horses from somewhere around Waxahachie toward Deaf Smith County. By the Fourth of July 1890, the three men had made it to a campsite in Randall County, near present-day Canyon, Texas, just thirty miles from their destination.[3]

The Witherspoon men, C. G., his half-brothers, their father, W. A., and their families were some of the first residents of an early settlement in Deaf Smith County called La Plata. In fact, Alvie William Wilson, a grandson of W. A. Witherspoon, was the first child born in La Plata in 1892.[4] The town is no longer there. Around 1898, it moved, courthouse and all, to be close to the railroad that was coming through the county. The first attempt to rename the town had to be given up. The residents of what they called Blue Water, named for the Tierra Blanca Creek just south of town, soon learned that another community in Texas had already taken that name. So they changed it to Hereford, the name of the sturdy breed of beef cattle that men like L. R. Bradley and G. R. "Rat" Jowell had brought to the area.[5] In time, residents of Hereford came to call old W. A. Witherspoon "Uncle Billy."

According to the U.S. Census of 1910, Coleman G. Witherspoon was 54 years old and was engaged in the real estate business.[6] By then, he had established himself as a businessman and civic leader in Hereford. He was one of nine co-founders of Hereford College and Industrial School in 1902.

C. G. Witherspoon died in the summer of 1916 in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was only 59 years old. His widow, Fannie Armstrong Jackson Witherspoon, survived until 1947, when she died in Dallas at the age of 84. The two lie buried next to each other in the Waxahachie City Cemetery in Ellis County.[7]

Notes

[1] Information via ancestry.com, accessed January 2, 2020.

[2] Bessie Patterson, A History of Deaf Smith County (Hereford, TX: Pioneer Publishers, 1964), 60.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Handbook of Texas Online, H. Allen Anderson, "HEREFORD, TX," accessed January 2, 2020, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/heh02.

[6] Information via ancestry.com, accessed January 2, 2020.

[7] See the Find A Grave memorial for Fannie Jackson Witherspoon, with links to members of her family, at the following URL, accessed January 2, 2020: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/30091413/fannie-armstrong-witherspoon

Judge L(ysius) Gough (1862-1940)

When he died in November 1940, "Judge L. Gough" was described by his hometown newspaper, the Hereford Brand, as "a great leader, a true pioneer, and friend to all."[1] To this day one of the thoroughfares in the old section of Hereford, Texas, is Gough Street.

Lysius Gough was born in 1862 in Lamar County, Texas, his parents having moved there from Kentucky. As a teenager, he moved on his own to West Texas where he got a job working as a cowboy on the T-Anchor Ranch. Several times he worked a cattle drive, guiding a herd of thousands all the way through present-day Oklahoma to the rail head in Kansas. Having grown up in a strict Disciples home, he refused to drink, smoke, or swear. Noticing this, his fellow cowboys named him "Parson."

In the years that followed, Gough established himself as a community leader, serving as a lawyer and judge, and working in the cattle, farm, and real estate businesses in Castro and Deaf Smith Counties.[2]

Gough and his wife, Ida Etta Russell Gough, who died in 1904 at the age of 35, helped to establish the Christian Church in Hereford in 1899.[3] He was one of the founders of Hereford College and Industrial School in 1902.

Notes

[1] "Final Tribute Paid to Judge L. Gough in Services at First Christian Church Here Tuesday," Hereford Brand, November 7, 1940.

[2] Ibid.

[3] The Fiftieth Anniversary of the First Christian Church, Hereford, Texas (Hereford, TX: First Christian Church, 1949), 5.

Additional Source

Article on Lysius Gough in the Handbook of Texas Online:
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgo20

Reuben Harrison (R. H. or "Rube") Norton (1860-1944)

This brief biography is part of a project designed to acquaint myself with the people who founded Hereford College and Industrial School in Hereford, Texas, in 1902.

Reuben Harrison Norton--who went by R. H. or Rube--was born in Johnson County, Texas, in February 1860. He was married to the former Lou Alice Corbett, who was seven years his junior. The couple made their first home in Stephens County, where she had grown up. In 1891, the Nortons began moving west. Rube was setting out to establish himself in the cattle business. The couple's first stop was Quanah, Texas, where they lived until 1896. Another move took them to Amarillo, where Rube owned and operated a grocery store. In 1898, the Nortons moved to Hereford even before the town was established. There in Deaf Smith County, Rube became a successful stockman. He built a reputation for raising some of the best cattle in Deaf Smith County. At its peak, the Norton Ranch covered more than 5,000 acres.[1] R. H. and Lou Alice Norton were charter members of the Christian Church in Hereford, established in 1899.[2] Having lost his wife in 1915, R. H. was a widower for nearly thirty years. He died at his daughter's home in Amarillo in 1944. The couple lie buried next to one another in West Park Cemetery in Hereford.[3]

Notes

[1] Bessie Patterson, A History of Deaf Smith County (Hereford, TX: Pioneer Publishers, 1964), 55-56.

[2] The Fiftieth Anniversary of the First Christian Church, Hereford, Texas (Hereford, TX: First Christian Church, 1949), 5.

[3] Patterson, A History of Deaf Smith County, 55-56. See the photo of the couple's gravestone at the following URL: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/143191489/reuben-h_-norton#view-photo=117535885

Samuel Shipman Evants (1846-1921)

S. S. (Samuel Shipman) Evants was born in Pope County, Arkansas, on July 31, 1846. At the U.S. Census of 1900, Evants was nearly 54 years old, had been married to Haskie McElroy Evants for 30 years, and lived in Hereford, Texas. A "stock raiser," he owned property outright in Deaf Smith County.[1] Evants had come to Hereford just a year before, in 1899, having previously lived in Marietta, Indian Territory, and Gainesville, Texas.[2] He was one of nine founders of Hereford College in 1902. Although he is not listed as one of the founding members of the Christian Church in Hereford, his daughter-in-law, a Mrs. W. R. Evants, was part of the Women's Missionary Society affiliated with the church.[3] Later in life, Evants moved further west. He died in 1921 at the age of 74 at his home eight miles west of Casa Grande, Arizona. He lies buried there in the Mountain View Cemetery.[4]

Notes

[1] Brandy Miller, ed.. Dawson, Deaf Smith, Denton and Martin, Texas Census, 1900 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 1999.

[2] Deaf Smith County: The Land and Its People (Hereford, TX: Deaf Smith County Historical Society, 1982), 119.

[3] Ibid., 538.

[4] Find A Grave memorial for "Samuel Shipman Evants."
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21982074/samuel-shipman-evants

The Growth of Public Education in Deaf Smith County and the Demise of Panhandle Christian College

As early as 1891, 22 citizens of Deaf Smith County, Texas, petitioned for a referendum that might create a new tax. Revenues would support and maintain free public schools.[1] Voters approved the measure with only one vote in opposition. The new ordinance generated a tax of only 0.06% (six cents per $100). But it was a start. Public education began in 1893, when a one-teacher school was established in the Womble community northeast of Hereford.[2]

The years around the turn of the century witnessed some important steps toward greater support for schools in the growing county. In 1898, the year Hereford was established, four leagues of Lamb County land, set aside by the state to benefit Deaf Smith County public schools, were sold for a dollar an acre. The windfall of $17,756 generated the county's permanent school fund. The next year, a local referendum doubled the rate of tax that went to support schools, from 0.06 to 0.12%. In 1902, yet another referendum increased the tax to 0.20%.[3]

Growth in student population closely paralleled growth in tax revenues for county schools. In the spring of 1901, the public school in Hereford had 208 students. In 1906, Hereford held its first graduation ceremonies. And by 1910, the total number of students had grown to 548. That same year, the town began building a three-story school house. Local citizens contributed $2000.[4]

The growth of the public school system in the town of Hereford and in Deaf Smith County was no doubt one reason why Panhandle Christian College, which always taught the primary grades, rapidly declined during its short life.

Notes

[1] Deaf Smith County: The Land and Its People (Hereford, TX: Deaf Smith County Historical Society, 1982), 65.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 65-66.

First Christian Church and the College at Hereford, Texas

This post relates to my previous entries about Panhandle Christian College (1902-1911) in Hereford, Texas. It helps to explain why this college, affiliated with the Christian Churches in Texas, and the emerging Disciples of Christ denomination, was forced to close its doors so soon after it began.

By 1907, just eight years after it began, the Christian Church in Hereford had outgrown its building at the corner of 3rd and Main Streets. That spring, several members of the congregation made pledges of $500 and $1000--impressive sums at the time--toward the construction of a new house of worship.[1]

The next year, builders broke ground at another prime downtown location, the northwest corner of 6th and Main Streets, just three blocks north of the first building. At that juncture, in 1908, the final cost of the new facility was projected to be $13,770. By then, the church had already arranged the sale of their first building. While they waited for the new one, they met in the auditorium of Panhandle Christian College, less than a mile away.[2]

The completion of the building's exterior in 1909 created mixed feelings. The new structure was the largest, most impressive church in Hereford. In size and beauty, it would be second only to the Deaf Smith County Courthouse, completed in 1910. But the congregation could yet not pay to finish the interior. At Christmastime, members gathered in the barely finished basement. Around that same time, they learned that the projected total cost for their new building had been far too low. The new estimate was $20,000.[3]

For several years, the congregation struggled to pay their current bills while raising the money to complete and furnish their new building. In 1910, the church borrowed $10,500 from the California State Life Insurance Company. Seven years later, they received a $5000 loan from the American Christian Missionary Society, an arm of their Disciples of Christ denomination. Finally, after nearly a decade of struggle, First Christian hosted their "first regular Bible school and church services" in a newly-completed building. It was May of 1917.[4]

In those early years, when the Christian Church at Hereford was struggling to complete its building, Panhandle Christian College just a few blocks away existed on the verge of financial collapse. One reason that the school closed in 1911 was that the same group of people was trying to pay for the largest church facility in Hereford while they supported their local college.

Notes

[1] The Fiftieth Anniversary of the First Christian Church, Hereford, Texas (Hereford, TX: First Christian Church, 1949), 6. According to this source, the original members of the financial committee were L. Gough, W. L. Vaughn, Ed Connell, and T. J. Graves.

[2] Ibid., 7. The splendid building, whose exterior was completed in 1909 with tall Corinthian columns facing both Main and 6th Streets, no longer exists. In 2019, 110 years later, a relatively-simple structure stands at this location: the Parkside Chapel Funeral Home.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Sources on Frazer, Greer County TX, and Altus, OK

Handbook of Texas Online, Webb L. Moore, "GREER COUNTY," accessed October 25, 2019,

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hcg81

Frances Herron, "Altus," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=AL013.

Frazer Cemetery chronicle:

http://www.okcemeteries.net/jackson/Frazer/Frazertranscription.htm

Barbara Kay Shelton, "Altus on the Hill above Frazer in Old Greer County," Chronicles of Oklahoma 40, no.4.

Frazer Cemetery and Bitter Creek, SW Oklahoma

On Friday, October 18, I submitted final grades for the first 8-week Fall semester at Amarillo College and headed east to Oklahoma. My mother was in the hospital at Altus. Over the weekend, my dad and I took turns staying with her. She's doing better now and has been discharged from the hospital.

Before leaving Altus on Sunday, going back west toward Amarillo, I stopped by a few places of interest to me.

One of the earliest white settlements in the area was a place called Frazer (alternately spelled Frazier), a forerunner of present-day Altus. A post office was established at Frazer in February 1886. That was ten years before the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the U.S., not Texas, owned the territory south and west of the North Fork of the Red River. So, from the time people began living at Frazer, until the settlement was destroyed by a flood in June 1891, it was always a part of Greer County, Texas. Today, the same region (which comprises Jackson, Greer, and Harmon Counties, and part of Beckham County, Oklahoma) is known as "Old Greer County."  

Residents of Frazer buried their dead in a cemetery that lay perhaps to the north and east of the settlement (and to the west of present-day Altus). I visited the Frazer Cemetery and took a few photos:

According to online sources I found, there are approximately 63 graves in Frazer Cemetery. The cemetery is located west of Altus, on County Road 202, about a half mile south of U.S. Route 62. 

On Sunday afternoon, October 20, the big sky was quite a scene looking to the north and east.

If gravestones like these ones date to 1891, they must have been crafted somewhere else in Texas and brought to Frazer by wagon.

Frazer was located near the confluence of Bitter Creek and the Salt Fork of the Red River. These two streams flow south-southeast towards the Red River, and are located west of Altus. When heavy rains flooded both streams in June 1891, flowing water covered all of the land in and around Frazer. Residents woke up with water up to their beds. In the middle of the night they started making their way north and east toward a place that came to be called Altus, a Latin term that means "high."

This sign greets travelers on U.S. Route 62 heading east.

Under the bridge, I was surprised to find a good bit of water. The creek was flowing and frogs were jumping. After a minute or two, I smelled a skunk and got out of there. My shoes and jeans were covered with stickers.

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.