The Tragic Death of Melissa Barbour

 

Died in a fire. It was all I knew about my great-grandmother Melissa, and I knew this fact from the time I was very little. It’s something that reverberates across generations – her horrible death and her six children left motherless, my grandmother only a baby. All of her great-grandchildren, scattered in different parts of the country, knew this story, and the part that came after. Her husband Clyde kept all of his children together. He raised them himself as a single parent - very unusual for the time. He did not remarry until they were grown. 

     I have since learned scraps about her life. She was born in December 1876 on a farm in Fawn Creek Township, a few miles out from Coffeyville, Kansas. She was born at a time when the financial Panic of 1873 still gripped the country, and the year after the “Grasshopper Years” when grasshoppers, drought and chinch bugs devastated crops in a wide swath of the country, including Kansas. Many in Fawn Creek Township were left destitute and relied on out-of-state donations of food and seed to get by. 

     Melissa’s parents were homesteaders who came to Kansas in a covered wagon in 1869. They were Enos Patchett, born in England, who immigrated to America as a seven-year old and was raised in Clark County, Illinois; and Avarilla Stephens, from Edgar County, Illinois, the child of parents from Kentucky and Tennessee. Melissa was their sixth of ten children. Her Uncle Mathew and Aunt Eliza lived on the farm next door, with her cousins Tom, Bruce, Mollie, Andrew, Fanelia and Charlie.

     She was ten years old when her mother Avarilla died suddenly of typhoid pneumonia, “no warning given,” according to her obituary. The funeral was at home, as funerals were then, and Avarilla was buried at the Robbins Cemetery in the township. The youngest child was ten-month old Bertha; the oldest was 17-year old George. The oldest daughter was Josephine, known as Josie, who was 14 and probably became “mother” to her younger siblings from then on. Enos never remarried, and like his future son-in-law, he kept all of his children together at a time when it was common for men in his situation to farm their kids out to relatives and asylums. 

     Melissa attended the Pierson School, a one-room schoolhouse, which in 1888 had thirteen students, including her brothers John and George. It was taught by Homer Overhiser, who published a school report in the Coffeyville Weekly Journal that December. Melissa had the third highest grade average in the little school, an 87. George had an average of 79 and John had a 74.

     There was a lot happening in her area in 1888. The village of Dearing was coming into existence at the crossroads of two lines of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, popularly known as the Mo Pac. That year, a post office was established and passenger train service began. Telegraph wires connected the village to Independence twelve miles away – and of course, to the world. A newspaper correspondent wrote about how lots would soon be sold, and it was time to “boom” this town. A little later he wrote of his disappointment that no one was yet selling lots, and there was no public house - a hotel or boarding house - in town for workers on the Mo Pac, or others who might be interested in building there. (The town would not be incorporated until 1909; its population was then 250.)

     In November 1898, Melissa quietly married Clyde Banta Barbour. Clyde’s parents settled on a farm in Parker Township when Clyde was about ten, but Clyde’s uncle Lucius lived on a farm in Melissa’s neighborhood. 

     Clyde was recently released from prison after committing an armed robbery in Indian Territory. He received a three-year sentence that was served in Albany, New York. Melissa was three months pregnant when they married. That probably didn’t sound like the most auspicious of marriage choices or marital beginnings, but I think Clyde was determined to be the father and husband that his own father had not been. 

     They moved to the “I.T.” - Indian Territory - with Melissa’s cousin Bruce, who was married to Clyde’s sister Maud. (Two cousins married two siblings.) Everyone was going there, to the little town of Lenapah and the farms around it. Melissa’s brothers George, John and Reuben already lived there. Her sister Josie lived in the Creek Nation. And soon after settling in, her mother-in-law Agnes, newly divorced, came to live with them. 

     They lived very quietly, keeping their names out of the paper. They had six children: Russell, Guy, Vern, Floyd, Vera and Grace. At the end of 1910, Melissa was pregnant with twins. The family was looking forward to Christmas. 

     Then came that terrible day. It was December 9th. Clyde got up early, started a fire in the kitchen stove, and went out to attend to farm chores. When Melissa got up, the fire was nearly out. Like so many women did then, she poured oil into the stove to get things going quickly. She had probably done this hundreds of times before. This time, however, “this became ignited in an instant bursting the can and dashing the flaming contents over her body, setting fire to her clothes,” according to an article in the Lenapah Post. 

     Clyde heard her screaming. He and his hired man rushed into the house where the two extinguished the flames, but of course the damage was done. The same article said she was burned “severely about the breast and lower limbs.” Another article in the Lenapah Post said, “Her entire body below the waist was burned appallingly, as well as the upper body. One hand was burned to the bone, and will have to be amputated even if she recovers.” 

     On Wednesday pleural pneumonia set in. She gave birth to one of her twins on Wednesday night and the other twin Thursday morning, both babies dying, perhaps stillborn. Melissa died that day at the age of 34. A Dr. Wilkinson had been attending her, but so little was known about burn care then. One can hope that she was given enough of the painkillers used at the time, morphine and laudanum, to relieve some of her suffering. 

     Relatives and neighbors offered to take the children, especially the girls. Grace was 22 months old and Vera was two months shy of her fourth birthday. Clyde refused. “I’m keeping all of my children,” he told them. 

     I can still see my Grandma Grace’s and my Aunt Vera’s faces as they stood in Aunt Vera’s rec room, recounting this story. They had been too young to remember the pain of losing their mother, but with such love and warmth, they remembered their dad and what he did for them.

My dad admired his grandfather Clyde, whom he called an honorable man who did whatever he had to do to support and raise his children.

     Several years after Melissa’s death, after Clyde’s crops failed two years in a row, he joined his Aunt Alice, the widow of his uncle Lucius, who was homesteading in Wyoming with her sons. Clyde did not stake a claim for a homestead. He was done with farming. He worked as a house painter, and he sent his kids to high school. Three of them graduated. People today don’t realize how rare this was. Only 16 percent of young people graduated from high school in 1920, and the number climbed to 29 percent in 1930. There wasn’t a stigma to not having a high school education, but it was an accomplishment.

     I look at Melissa’s sweet young face in the only picture we have of her. Of course I wish things had been different, and that she lived a long life. 

Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023