Putting a Face With the Name

I've written a few times before about Levi Overholser, my pioneering, railroad-promoting, gun-toting, alleged-bankruptcy-fraud-committing ancestor. But I don't ever remember seeing a picture of him. Now, from an Overholser cousin, here he is.

















Said cousin also sent this photo of Levi and Mary Overholser's graves at Fairlawn Cemetery in Oklahoma City. Thanks, Cousin!

The House Where Clara Grew Up

Some time between 1910 and 1913, Clara Paxton went to Valley Falls, Kansas, to live with her Uncle Charlie and Aunt Sue Overholser, who had no children of their own. Her mother, Grace Overholser Paxton, had died in 1901, before Clara turned two, and her father George Bailey Paxton died in 1910. Clara and her brother Burton were living with their grandmother Paxton in Independence, Missouri, in 1910 (down the street from the future Mrs. Harry Truman), but some time before 1913 they left her home. Clara went to Valley Falls and Burton to his aunt Hattie Overholser Jones in Columbus, Kansas.

(At left is a picture of Main Street in Valley Falls in 1909; the population in 1910 was 1150.)

Clara lived with Charlie and Sue until she finished high school in 1918. Now, thanks to some recently posted newspaper archives online, I think I've found some information about just where she lived.

The picture at left is from the front page of the July 27, 1906, issue of the Farmers Vindicator, the newspaper in Valley Falls. With the headline "An Historic Corner," the accompanying article talks about an old local hotel called the Cataract House (cataract being another word for waterfall--who knew?). Most of the article describes the hotel, which was built in 1857, but the last paragraphs touch on our family in explaining why the hotel is no longer there:

In 1880 the Cataract House was purchased by Mrs. Susan M. Gardiner, of Winchester, which under the management of J. J. Gardiner continued a popular hotel for 20 years. . . .About the end of the century the Cataract was closed as a hotel and the property was transferred to Susan E. Gardiner, now Mrs. Chas. L. Overholser. The work of removing and tearing down the old house began in the Fall of 1901 and in the year following the present modern cottage home of Mr. and Mrs. Overholser was completed.
Herein are illustrations of the old house and the new. The first lights in the Cataract House were tallow candles, then sperm, a burning fluid lamp, and later the Kerosene Chandelier. The Overholser home is brilliantly lighted by electricity in every room, and even out to the wood house and the hen house.

So from reading this and later newspaper items about Charlie and Sue, I feel fairly sure that the house pictured is the one where the Overholsers lived while Clara was with them.

More nuggets from the Vindicator to come.

Did Henry Overholser steal the seal?

A cousin writes: "Seems there is some story about an Overholser stealing the state charter from Guthrie and moving it (thus the capital) to OKC. You got anything on that?"

My reply: Hmmm, I've never heard anything about an Overholser connection to this story, but Guthrie residents have long maintained that Gov. Haskell "stole" the state seal from the capitol in Guthrie in the dark of night and took it to OKC. But from what I can make out from various sources, the story is exaggerated at best. There was an election to determine whether OKC or Guthrie should be the capital in June of 1910, and OKC won. Gov. Haskell sent his secretary for the seal that night, but the clerk there handed it over willingly. The election and the move were questionable legally, since an earlier law said that the capital could not be moved until 1913, but the courts ruled in OKC's favor.

This Tulsa World story sums it up pretty well.

I'm sure that Henry Overholser was a proponent of moving the capital, as it would have been good for his real estate interests. But there's nothing to suggest that he took the law (or the seal!) into his own hands. . . .

Happy 100th, Oklahoma!

Although I haven't really lived there for more than 20 years, Oklahoma is still home for me. Besides the fact that I was born and raised there and much of my family is still there, it's the one common denominator in my mongrel lineage. Oklahoma is where the daughter of a Czech immigrant and a French/Scotch-Irish horse trader met the son of English and Welsh coal miners, and it's where an orphaned English/German/Swiss/Scotch-Irish schoolteacher met a bookkeeper from the hills of Arkansas whose ancestors had been in America and inching west for 300 years.

So what parts of our family were in Oklahoma by November 16, 1907?

Clara Paxton was still an 8-year-old girl in Missouri and would not move to Oklahoma for another decade, but her grandfather Lee Overholser had lived there since the time of the Land Run, and her uncle Will and aunt Ella Overholser were living in Oklahoma City at the time. (Her brother Burton, incidentally, was born in Oklahoma City in 1896.)

Cal Jones was a 12-year-old boy whose family was probably living in Boynton, Indian Territory, on the day that it became Oklahoma. His parents Silas and Nannie had left Arkansas four years earlier.

Blanche Vermillion was seven months old, having been born in Wayne, Indian Territory, in April. She was living with her mother in Wayne, and the celebration of the new state must have been muted for them, as her father Walter Vermillion had died in September. Blanche was surrounded by cousins in the area, most of them grandchildren of George and Kate Jicha, who had settled across the river in Oklahoma Territory in the 1889 Land Run. Blanche's one living grandparent, John Washington Vermillion, also lived in the area, where he had settled as far back as '89 also.

Six generations of our family have lived in Oklahoma so far, and Clara's sons' families are on their seventh. It's probably not any kind of record, as a lot of Oklahomans reproduce more rapidly than we do. But considering our earlier family history of heading west every generation or two (always in search of farmland, something that's not so much an issue now), it's a pretty good run.

I wish I could be in Oklahoma today, but I'm there in spirit.

Clara's Cotton Buyer

After Clara Paxton's mother and father died, she lived with a succession of relatives: her grandmother in Independence, Missouri, her uncle Charley and aunt Sue Overholser in Valley Falls, Kansas, and her uncle Will and aunt Ella Overholser in Oklahoma City. She lived with the Overholsers in the 1918-1919 school year, when she seems to have been taking courses at Central High School--probably to get some college preparation that her high school in Valley Falls had not provided. In 1919-20 she was at Hollins College in Virginia with Mary Overholser, and in 1920-21 she was back in Oklahoma City and earning her teaching certificate from what is now the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. Because the Overholsers were part of what passed for society in Oklahoma City in those days (1918-1921), Clara turned up in the newspaper from time to time: hosting a lunch for friends at the Skirvin Plaza Hotel with her cousin Mary Overholser, attending a party here and there. On Sundays, the Oklahoman's society page would feature photos of pretty and prominent young women, apparently just so everyone would know who was who.

On September 26, 1920, it was Clara's turn (see clipping at left--click to make it larger). She was one of five women included that week, and the caption began "Two ambitious students, two charming brides, and an interesting young traveler in foreign lands. Upper left--Miss Clara Paxton, niece of Mr. and Mrs. Will L. Overholser, who is striving for a degree at the Central State normal at Edmond. . . . "



















Two days after the picture appeared, a Mr. Sidney Caldwell in Duncan, Oklahoma, wrote her a letter (above--click on the pages to make them bigger). Mr. Caldwell had wisely ruled out the two brides and evidently preferred Clara to the interesting young traveler, who had just returned from Germany, and the other ambitious student, an undergrad at Cornell (unless of course he wrote to them, too.) Here's the letter in its entirety:

Duncan Okla.
Sept. 28--1920
Miss Clara Paxton
Centeral State Normal

My Dear Miss Paxton, I thought I would write you a little love letter to let you know I love you very much. I saw your picture in the Daily Oklahoman Sunday. It said that the college girls loved to receive letters from other towns and I thought I would write you a small letter to let you know I love you. If you will write me I will answer your letters.
I think you are the most beautiful girl in the world, and I don't know what you think about me. If you will send me a picture of your self, and I will send you a picture of myself. If you love cotton buyers that get a salary of $5000 a year you had better tie into me. I'm 19 and a little bit over and you look in the picture about the same age.
Don't forget to write, I must close as a wagon load of cotton is on the street.
Yours truly,
Sidney Caldwell
P.S. Be sure and write me.

I don't know what Clara thought about the letter; my guess is that she kept it because she thought it was funny (and of course a little flattering). What Mr. Caldwell had no way of knowing was that 86 years later, Clara's descendants could use the Internet to do a little fact checking on him. I found him in the 1920 census, and there seems to be some truth--well, truthiness--to what he told Clara. His FATHER is listed as a cotton buyer, but at the time of the census (January 1920), Sidney was still in high school. So perhaps he'd joined his father in business by September of that year.

So what do you think? Did Clara choose the right guy? Maybe if she'd gone with Sidney, we'd all be in the tall cotton now.

A Bad Apple on the Family Tree?

All right, I think all you Overholser descendants had better sit down. This is not easy to say, but there is increasing evidence that Levi Overholser just may have been, well, something of a crook. I was prepared to dismiss his reported willingness to settle disputes with a revolver as just evidence of a colorful character. But now, from the same intrepid historian who turned up the details of Levi's involvement in the railroad business (thanks again!), come these two newspaper items from 1868, when the Overholsers were apparently living in Vincennes, Indiana (which was news to me).

First this one:

The most of our readers have doubtless heard of the failure of Mr. Levi Overholser, of Vincennes, formerly doing business at Palestine. There has been a great deal of gossip as to his real failure, and some suits growing out of the matter in order to test the legality of certain sales of property made by him at about the time of his failure. A week or two ago a suit was instituted in the U. S. District Court, at Indianapolis, to compel him to go into bankruptcy. The following item, which we find in the Indianapolis Journal, would seem to indicate that his failure (?) did not leave him in a penniless condition:
"Mr. L. Overholser, a wealthy citizen of Vincennes, Indiana, lately secreted in his house about $16,000, and contrived to let it become known that he had the money. One night last week the house was entered by burglars, completely ransacked, the money found, and the thieves got safely off with it. The owner would be willing to give $2,000 for the recovery of the money."
--Robinson Argus, April 30, 1868

Then, a week later,

THE OVERHOLSER ROBBERY AT VINCENNES
Last week we copied an item from the Indianapolis Journal in relation to the robbery of Levi Overholser of the sum of $16,000. -- Since then we find in the Journal the following item in a letter from Vincennes. Overholser was charged of having acted dishonestly before the announcement of this theft, and if the money was stolen it but confirms these charges. Mr. O. is very generally believed to be the real owner of some $15,000 worth of real estate in this county, and which he very conveniently has in the name of another party in order to keep his creditors from getting hold of it:
"The Overholser robbery seems to have created more excitement out of Vincennes than in it. The business transactions of Mr. O. have not been of the most creditable character. -- When his creditors desired a settlement he seemed to have no money to pay them, and proclaimed himself a bankrupt, though all the time he has been doing a thriving business. No one here seemed to have any confidence in him or sympathy for him, and when the robbery was proclaimed it produced a smile of doubt rather than tears of sympathy. No headlines announced the robbery in our county papers, while the editorial comments made were anything but flattering to the loser. If Mr. O. had sixteen thousand dollars to lose, he would have had many to sympathize with him for his great loss if he had given any indication that he intended to pay his honest debts."
--Robinson Argus, May 7, 1868

So this looks . . . not so good. But you will notice that both of these items--and the previous one about his pulling a gun on a business associate--come from the same newspaper. I think the only thing we can REALLY conclude is that the Robinson Argus was blatantly anti-Overholser and clearly had it in for Levi. Right? Right?

Or maybe he was just a crook. As I told the historian who found the clips, I'd feel guilty about living off his ill-gotten gains if we still had any.

Levi Overholser's Guide to Business Negotiation

I used to wonder if the Overholser brothers faced much danger in those chaotic first days of Oklahoma City, when law enforcement was spotty and property disputes could turn ugly very fast. But it looks like Levi Overholser, at least, could hold his own--and wasn't afraid to draw a six-shooter if necessary.

I mentioned below that a railroad historian had found references to Levi's involvement in the building of a narrow-gauge railroad in Illinois before he moved to Kansas and Oklahoma. That historian has very kindly sent me those references, mostly from Illinois and Indiana newspapers between 1878 and 1882. It sems that Levi was one of several businessmen that built a section of this railroad from Switz City, Indiana, to Effingham, Illinois.

The project was financially troubled, and some of the builders went bankrupt. Levi and some others filed a suit against the main construction company in 1878. A volume called "History of Greene and Sullivan Counties" explains that "This proved to be the most fruitful cause for litigation ever in the [county?] and for some time gave almost constant employment to the entire Sullivan bar as well as a number of attorneys from other places, especially Chicago." So in addition to hiring hundreds of men to build the railroad, our Levi was doing his part to create jobs for lawyers, too.

The newspaper clips mainly discuss the progress of the railroad, with frequent mentions of Levi or Lee Overholser and the firm of Overholser and Schafer. At about the time it was finished in 1880, this item appeared in the Argus, a newspaper in Robinson, Illinois, a town along the railroad line and near Palestine, where Levi and his family are known to have lived:

"Monday morning at Palestine some pretty warm words passed between E. Pratt Buell, General Manager of the narrow gauge railroad, and Levi Overholser, late contractor on the road, relative to a sum of money borrowed from Overholser by Buell, which the latter claimed he had repaid. Overholser drew his revolver, and was only prevented from shooting by the prompt interference of bystanders."

As far as the larger financial dispute over the railroad is concerned, Levi appears to have settled not for blood but for 65 cents on the dollar--the amount one of the financiers paid to the main construction company's creditors when he took it over.

Levi bought four shares of the completed railroad in 1882, at which time he is listed as a resident of Newton, Illinois, one county west of Palestine. The family must have moved there after the 1880 census. An item in the "Local Correspondence from Palestine" column in the Robinson Argus from July 12, 1882, supports this: "Mrs. Mary Overholser and Hattie returned to their home in Newton Wednesday."

Levi's Railroad Ties

I got an e-mail in response to my recent post about Levi Overholser from someone who has researched the Effingham, Springfield, & South Eastern Railroad, a line that ran through Palestine, Illinois. He said that the major subcontractor that built the line (ca. 1878-1881) was the firm of Overholser and Schafer, and that one of the partners in that company was one Levi Overholser, also known as Lee. While we can't be sure it's our Lee, there may well be something to it.

I don't know what excites me more: having another piece of the historical puzzle, or knowing that someone actually read the blog!

Salathiel, Jeroboam, and More

You can hit a brick wall pretty fast when you try to research a surname as common as Jones. Our Jones line disappears into Jackson County, Alabama, in the 1820s, when our ancestor William "Billy" Jones was born there. We know that Billy's father was born in South Carolina, but we do not know his name. A cousin who has been doing genealogy research for years has tried to track down Billy Jones's father, and while she's not found anything close to definite, she has found some possibilities. My favorite is a man named Salathiel Jones who lived in Jackson County at the right time, was born in South Carolina, and had a son around Billy's age. I'd love to have a Salathiel in the family, wouldn't you?

Thinking about Salathiel reminds me that there a bunch of cool and/or weird names in my family history. Here are a few favorites. Depending on which side of the family you're on, some of these may be in your tree too. Feel free to consider them if you're planning a family:

Jeroboam Howard (b. 1759): an ancestor of George Bailey Paxton on his mother's side. Jeroboam, like Salathiel, is an Old Testament name. (At left is King Jeroboam, from the first book of Kings.) Those were big in the 19th century.

Jehu Jehu: C.M. Branch's great-grandfather. There were at least three generations with this identical first name-last name combination in his mother's Welsh family.

Grizzie Riddle (1826-1876): Billy Jones's wife. The name Grizzie was not all that uncommon among the Scotch-Irish; it derived from Griselde, a name that appears in the Canterbury Tales. Still, I'll give five bucks to anyone who honors the family legacy by naming their daughter Grizzie.

Ferdinando Thayer (1625-1713): an ancestor of Cal Jones via his father's mother, the source of my only New England ancestors. Ferdinando was an early settler of Mendon, Massachusetts, and, it is said, a renowned wrestler. I don't know anything about the origin of the name, but it definitely sticks out amid a bunch of Isaacs and Thomases in the Thayer family.

Argyle Blackstone (b. 1650): also from way back in Cal Jones's grandmother's family, but from a Virginia line. This one always sounded like someone from a romance novel--kind of a Rhett Butler type, maybe.

Charity Grubb (1687-1761): an ancestor of Cal's other grandmother. The name Charity appears many times in this Quaker family, but "Charity Grubb" sounds like a name for a soup kitchen.

Johan Andersson, aka Stalkofta (1627-1685): a distant ancestor of Cal's mother. Johan came to America as part of the Swedish settlement called New Sweden (later Delaware). He became known as "Stalkofta"--or "steel coat"--among the other Swedish settlers, apparently because of his habit of wearing armor when hanging around the fort. He took the name as a surname, and it was gradually anglicized to "Stalcop," a name still seen frequently in the Southern U.S. Any of you who are unsatisfied with your current surname might consider a favorite article of apparel: "Bob Fleecepullover," maybe, or "Karen Haltertop."

Gruffydd Nannau (b. 1568): a Welsh ancestor of Clara Paxton via Levi Overholser's mother. The Welsh names always look like someone was typing with their eyes shut--and sound like something from Star Wars.

Anybody out there know some good ones I left out?

The Other Overholser

You don't have to look very deep into the history of Oklahoma City to encounter the names of Henry Overholser (1846-1915) and Edward Overholser (1869-1931). Henry came to the city on the day of the 1889 Land Run with six prefabricated wood-frame buildings (above) on railroad cars and quickly became an important real estate and entertainment impresario. The mansion he built in 1903 was for years the city's social center (and is now a house museum operated by the Oklahoma Historical Society).

Edward, Henry's son by his first marriage, inherited some of his father's interests but succeeded where his father had failed: he was elected mayor of Oklahoma City in 1915. (Oklahoma City history blogger Doug Loudenback has written about Henry and Edward on his blog.) It was primarily for Edward but also in part for Henry that the city's reservoir was named Lake Overholser in 1918.

But what does this have to do with my humble origins, you ask? Some of you who are Clara Paxton's descendants or relatives already know that there are Overholsers in our tree: we descend from Henry's older brother Levi (Lee) Overholser (1836–1905), who also came to Oklahoma City in its early days and also did well in business there, though not as spectacularly as his brother. If, as is often said, Henry Overholser was the father of Oklahoma City, that would make our Lee the uncle of Oklahoma City (and me the city's first cousin thrice removed!).

So here's where the Overholser brothers came from: They were born on a farm in Montgomery County, Ohio, near present-day Dayton, sons of John and Elizabeth (Niswonger) Overholser. Their grandfather, Jacob Overholser, was a blacksmith in Pennsylvania before moving to Ohio, and his children were all baptized in the Lutheran-Reformed Church. (The Overholsers of our acquaintance would later be Presbyterians--a close fit theologically with the Calvinism of the Reformed church and probably a concession to the fact that the German Protestant churches were harder to find as they moved southwest.) The Overholser family was German in origin, while Elizabeth Niswonger's forebears (originally Neuenschwangers before they met up with Scotch-Irish attempts to pronounce the name in the hills of Virginia) had come from Switzerland.

Levi and Henry were among 13 children in their family, and it was probably assumed that they, too, would be farmers. The 1850 census shows a 14-year-old Levi on his father's farm, listed as a "laborer." But Levi and Henry both ended up leaving the farm for careers in business--the earliest among any of my ancestors to trade farm life for small-town life.

In the 1860 census, we find Levi living in a hotel in Palestine, Illinois, a town near the Indiana line and about 230 miles from his father's farm. His occupation is "clerk." Also in Palestine in that census is Mary Young, an 18-year-old living with her siblings and widowed mother. (Her father, we know from the previous census, was a shoemaker.) The next year, 1861, Levi and Mary were married. We don't find them in the 1870 census, but we know from other sources that all five of their children who survived into adulthood were born in Palestine between 1863 and 1875. Levi's obituary says that he was "engaged in the general merchandise business and made a success of it" during this period. (They say this happened in Ohio, but the Oklahoman was apparently no less prone to error in 1905 than it is now.) In the 1880 census, no occupation is given for Levi, but he is listed in Palestine with Mary and their five children: "Elley, Charley, Gracey, Hattie M., and William."

Meanwhile, Henry Overholser had left home by 1870. He was living with his wife and two children in Sullivan, Indiana, just 23 miles from Palestine. Probably not coincidentally, he lived next door to Mary Young's brother William, and both were in the dry goods business. There was probably a good deal of collaboration in business among this network of kin.

Some time after 1880, the family left Illinois for southeastern Kansas. We don't know for sure when Levi and Mary moved there, but their oldest child, Ella, married J.C. Haskett in Illinois in 1880 and gave birth to their first child, Frank, in Baxter Springs, Kansas, in 1883.

We don't know why the family moved west, but the usual answer was economic opportunity. It's possible that the Overholsers were already casting their eyes on the Unassigned Lands of Oklahoma, as the Boomer Movement to open those lands had begun as early as 1879. Levi and Mary's oldest son, Charley, spent some time in the territory before the Land Run, according to his 1928 obituary in the Valley Falls (KS) Vindicator: "As a young man Charley had more than the average share of adventure as a cow-boy on the plains of the Indian Territory in the days immediately proceeding [sic] the opening of Oklahoma, when all the bad men from the entire nation seemed to naturally gravitate to this last 'no-man's land.'"

In the meantime, Henry had made his way to Wisconsin, made a fortune, divorced his wife, and was looking toward Oklahoma himself. But unlike so many who came and pitched tents, Henry built some of the city's first "permanent" structures (in quotes because he soon replaced them with brick buildings). And though he's never mentioned in the history books, Levi was there very early on: in an 1889 Oklahoma City directory, Henry is living at 201-1/2 West Grand, on the second floor of one of his buildings, and Levi and his 15-year-old son Will are next door in another of the prefabs at 203-1/2.

According to Levi's obituary, he didn't move to Oklahoma City until 1892 or '93. But I suspect he and perhaps Will spent a lot of time there in the intervening years, waiting until a semblance of order and civility had been established before bringing Mary to the city. (The other children all left home around this time: Grace married George Paxton in 1893 and was living in Joplin, Missouri; Hattie married Bert L. Jones that same year and lived in Columbus, Kansas. Ella and J.C. Haskett remained in Baxter Springs (before moving to Oklahoma City in 1912), and Charley had traded in the adventurous life of a cow-boy for a career in dry goods in Valley Falls, Kansas.)

While Henry Overholser promoted railroads, telephones, an opera house, the state fair, and real estate, Levi dealt in property and insurance in a partnership called Overholser and Avey. In 1893, Levi and Mary traveled to Chicago for the Worlds Fair (as we know from a souvenir handkerchief of Mary's); the fair's gleaming vision of a planned, classical city must have inspired the Overholsers--and shown them what a long way their young city had to go.

When Henry built his mansion in 1903--way out in the cornfields of NW 15th Street--he and Anna (wife #2, his trophy wife) introduced it to society with a big party. The next day, as we read in the Oklahoman society page, was reserved for family: besides Henry's son Edward, they had Levi and Mary, the Hasketts, and Will Overholser and his wife Ella to dinner.

Levi died in 1905; the cause listed in the cemetery records is "stomach trouble." The Oklahoman, under the headline "Prominent Citizen Dead," reported that he left an estate of $100,000. He and Mary lived at the time at 1602 N. Robinson, an address later occupied by J.C. and Ella Haskett when they moved to the city. (Will and Ella Overholser later lived at 1610 N. Robinson. Neither home still stands.)

Mary died two years later in Baxter Springs, presumably while visiting the Hasketts there. Again, the Oklahoman reported (left, click image to enlarge) that the estate was worth about $100,000 (about $2.1 million in 2006 dollars), most of which was in real estate.

Levi and Mary had five children who survived to adulthood (we know from the 1900 census that Mary had also had five children who were no longer living, presumably having died in infancy) and at least 11 grandchildren. Here's a quick rundown:

Ella Overholser (1863–1937) married J.C. Haskett. As I said, they lived in Kansas until 1912 and then moved to Oklahoma City, where all three of their sons ended up living. Their sons were: Frank C. Haskett (1883-1967), Paul E. Haskett (1886-1966), and Clarence R. Haskett (1892-1962).

Charles L. Overholser (1865–1928) married Susan Gardiner. They had no children, but they raised Grace's orphaned daughter Clara Paxton during her teenage years.

Grace E. Overholser (1869–1901) married George Bailey Paxton. They lived in Joplin, Missouri. She died of pneumonia in 1901. George died of Bright's Disease in 1910. They had two children, George Burton Paxton (1896–1948) and Clara Paxton Jones (1899-1971).

Harriet (Hattie) M. Overholser (1873–aft. 1930) married Bert L. Jones. They lived in Columbus, Kansas, and had three children: George Lee Jones (1896–bef. 1928), Clair L. Jones (1898–?), and Helen Jones Winter (1904–?).

William Levi Overholser (1875–1964) married Ella King. They lived in Oklahoma City and had three children: Mary Overholser Meder (1898–1977), William Levi Overholser Jr. (1907–1993), and Charles Kent Overholser (1909–1962).

As always, I wish I had more information and pictures of some of these people. If you have any to share, please e-mail me at familyhistorybites@gmail.com.

UPDATE, 6/12/07: A railroad historian has sent me some newspaper references that suggest that Levi was involved in building a railroad near Palestine. It got rather contentious, and at least once Lee had to pull out his revolver. Details here.

UPDATE, 6/15/07: It gets worse. Levi may have been something of a crook. . . .

George Bailey Paxton, 1862-1910

I'm going to start this new blog with a short biography of George Bailey Paxton. He had kind of an interesting life, as my forebears go, and it's possible to piece together a little bit about his life from family sources, census, old newspapers, and other surprising sources (a book on the history of zinc mining, a 1912 history of New Mexico). So here goes. I recognize that some of these pieces will be a little long for blog entries, but I mainly just want to get them out there for family to see and for others to find via Google.

George Bailey Paxton was born on September 12, 1862, presumably on his parents' farm in Deepwater Township in Henry County, Missouri. He entered the world at a tumultuous time, both locally and nationally. The Civil War had been on for more than a year, and guerilla fighting in Kansas and Missouri was bloody. His mother, Amanda Bailey Paxton, had lost her father and a brother at the start of the war, when a band of "Southern guerillas" (as a later family history referred to them) took them from their home and shot them because of their Union sympathies. His father, Samuel, would soon join the local militia, which later became part of the Missouri State Militia Cavalry. The war disrupted the lives of both the Bailey and Paxton families. (I learned about this from a paper by historian Toby Terrar--a Bailey cousin--that focused on the Baileys in the pre-war and war years.)

Both families were new arrivals to Henry County. George's grandfather William Paxton had left the family home in Virginia, first going to what is now West Virginia, where Samuel Paxton was born in 1834, then to Cooper County, Missouri. Samuel acquired 320 acres in Henry County in 1857. He was one of the first settlers of Deepwater Township. George's other grandfather, George Bailey (the Civil War casualty for whom he was named), came from Kentucky to Illinois, where Amanda was born in 1840. They came to Henry County in 1856.

We don't know much about George's early life on his family's farm, but by the time he was a young man, the family must have been at least moderately comfortable. A railroad was laid near the farm just after the war, and the town of Montrose was laid out adjacent to the farm in 1871. A biography of Samuel from 1883 describes a prosperous farmer/businessman:

"Soon after Montrose was laid out Mr. Paxton built the Montrose Steam Elevator, and has since been engaged in buying and handling grain. This elevator has a capacity of 2,000 bushels per day, with a corn sheller and a corn grinding burr. He is doing a large shipping business which will compare favorably with any in Henry County. He still owns his fine farm adjacent to the town, which consists of 115 acres, all in good cultivation with comfortable out buildings, etc., and an orchard of 400 bearing apple trees of select varieties."

The biography also identifies Samuel, Amanda, and their daughter Mary as members of the local Baptist church. The Paxtons must have taken their religion seriously: George's younger brother, Frank Lawler Paxton, was named for a long-time Baptist preacher in the area. (Frank, who went on to be a miner and one of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the Spanish American War, would later complain that he had been "churched to death" as a child.)

The census for 1880 finds George, at age 17, living with his parents; the note for occupation says "works on farm."

That fall, George entered William Jewell College, a Baptist institution in Liberty, Missouri. The school has no record of his graduation, but he was enrolled in a liberal arts curriculum there for at least two years, 1880-81 and 1881-82.

After that, I lose track of him for a while. There is an item in a biography of a doctor in Montrose, Richard B. Fewel, that may refer to him. It says the doctor “had the first telephone line in Montrose running from his drug store to his residence, over a quarter of a mile, put up by George Paxton in 1884.” Although we can't know for sure that it was our George, I like to think it was the kind of thing a young engineering-minded man (who later would promote the first electric line in Joplin) might have done with his free time.

What else he did is a subject for speculation. I will assume that it didn't take him long to get into the mining business, because by the turn of the century he was a highly regarded authority on zinc mining in the Joplin area, which was one of the world's major suppliers of zinc at the time. It was probably while working in that area that he met Grace Overholser, whom he married in St. Louis on November 30, 1893. (I don't know why they were married in St. Louis; it suggests a possible elopement.)

Grace, born in 1869, was the daughter of Levi and Mary (Young) Overholser, who had come from Palestine, Illinois, to Baxter Springs, Kansas, in the 1880s. (Baxter Springs was just across the line from Missouri in southeast Kansas; the mining district was known as the "tri-state area" encompassing parts of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma.) Levi Overholser, also known as Lee, was a dry goods merchant in Illinois and presumably engaged in some sort of business in Baxter Springs until the family moved to Oklahoma City in 1893. Levi's brother Henry had arrived in Oklahoma City on the day of the great 1889 Oklahoma Land Run and established himself in real estate and other businesses, and Levi joined him soon after. But the family must have stayed in Baxter Springs long enough for George and Grace to meet.

[UPDATE, 8/30/07: See this post, and these two, for more about Levi Overholser and his family.]

George and Grace had two children: George Burton Paxton, born February 22, 1896, in Oklahoma City (It's not clear whether the Paxtons might have lived there at the time, or if Grace went to be with her parents while she had the baby. George apparently traveled a lot in the West for his mining work.) and Clara Paxton, born October 9, 1899, in Joplin.

By the late 1890s, we begin to see references to George Paxton in newspapers related to his work. A Dallas Morning News item from 1897 lists him as a director of the newly formed Winifred Mining Company in Oklahoma City. An advertisement in the Chicago Tribune from 1899 touting the prospects of the Continental Zinc Co. (for which George was a consulting engineer) identifies him as secretary of the Missouri-Kansas Zinc Miners' Association and "one of the highest zinc authorities in America." Around this time, he also developed something called the Paxton Scale for determining the price of ore.

In June of 1900, the family was found by a census taker at 626 Wall Street in Joplin. His occupation was listed as “mining engineer.” His wife Grace is listed as having borne three children, two of whom are living. This was the only evidence I have found for a third child of George and Grace; he or she must have died in infancy.

While I think George had worked further west before, in September 1900 we hear from a Taos newspaper that he has been hired as superintendent for the Anaconda Copper Co. there. Eventually, George would move permanently to Red River, New Mexico, and the copper mining business.

On March 26, 1901, Grace died of pneumonia. Two years later, George married Susan Botsford, a 24-year-old native of Ohio. It's not clear just where Burton and Clara lived during the decade after their mother's death, but they probably spent most of their time with George's mother Amanda. The elder Paxtons had moved to Joplin in the 1890s, and Samuel died there in 1903. Amanda later moved to Independence, Missouri, where her daughter Mary Paxton Victor (she had married a Baptist preacher) was living.

George and Susan had a child of their own on October 24, 1908, a daughter they called Elizabeth. She was born in Red River.

George got increasingly involved in his New Mexico interests over the decade, as clips from the New Mexican indicate. He operated a property near Red River that was at various times referred to as the Anaconda mine, the Copper King Mine, and the Paxton Mine.

Somewhere along the way, he also got involved with the effort to secure statehood for New Mexico. I have found no documentation of just what his involvement was--his daughter Clara described him as a lobbyist--but it was significant enough for him to spend several months in Washington, D.C., in 1910 as the statehood bill was working its way through Congress. He apparently took up residence at the Riggs House Hotel there around January.

At some point around this time, his son Burton had found a golden eagle feather at Red River. His father took it to a jeweler in Kansas City (Clara remembered going with him) to have it made into a quill pen with a band of Taos County gold and the inscription "State of New Mexico." George had either been charged or had appointed himself with the task of supplying a ceremonial pen with which the President of the United States would sign the statehood act.

George must have known by this time that he was ill with Bright's Disease, a kidney ailment. He had suffered from the chronic form of the disease for 12 years, according to his death certificate. It finally killed him on June 17, 1910, the day that the House of Representatives passed the statehood bill. President Taft signed it into law three days later, using the eagle-quill pen. The essentials of this story are confirmed by a contemporary book called A Concise History of New Mexico (1912):

"The President said a few words of congratulation, and then proposed to affix his official signature. The postmaster general presented a gold pen with the request that it should be used, and Delegate Andrews produced the unique gold-banded quill taken from the great American eagle captured in Taos, and furnished for the occasion, in its beautiful case, as a patriotic service by George B. Paxton, when he had no thought that death would forbid his presence at the ceremony. The President wrote half of the signature with the former and the remainder with the latter, returning the pens to the donors as mementoes of this great historic occasion."

George was 47 years old. His body was returned to Joplin for burial. Among his other achievements, it turns out that he was, in the words of the local newspaper, "the father of Scottish Rite Masonry in the valley of Joplin." He had an elaborate funeral at the Scottish Rite cathedral.

This is about what I know at this point. I'd welcome any information, anecdotes, and especially pictures that anyone might have of George.

I've got a few other ideas for posts; let me know if you have any questions about family history. For those of you who don't count George as an ancestor, rest assured that I'll be posting about the Branches, Jehus, Vermillions, Jichas, Joneses, Shumates, and Overholsers as time wears on. . . .

UPDATE, 3/27/07: A cousin kindly sent me a photo of George. Thanks, cousin!

UPDATE, 4/19/07: Another cousin visited Montrose and sent along pictures of the old Paxton farm in Montrose.

UPDATE, 6/14/07: Cousin #1 saw something I missed in the 1910 census, in which George was recorded in April at the Riggs House in Washington. I had thought that he was there alone, but just below George on the census roll are his wife Susan and one-year-old daughter, listed as "Helen E." (Elizabeth must have been her middle name.) So it seems likely that they were with him in Washington when he died two months later.