October Gleanings from Coffeyville, Kansas: A Pet Alligator, Freedman's Aid Society and Barbed Wire

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  If you have read any of my other “ Gleanings,” posts, you might recall that these “seen-around-town” sort of items were a regular column in the Coffeyville, Kansas newspapers, and many newspapers, in the 1870s and 1880s. This month I am posting two “Gleanings;” this one from the Coffeyville home of my Patchett and Barbour ancestors, and one from Fort Wayne, hometown of the Barbour brothers Lucius and Myron. 


19 Oct 1878 Coffeyville Weekly Journal


  • Mrs. Coons, residing a few miles northwest of Coffeyville, has a young alligator about 14 inches long. She keeps him in a barrel…Her son brought it from Texas in June. He got it near Houston, where several others were captured at the same time.


     Elizabeth Coons was a neighbor of my great-great grandparents, Enos and Avarilla Patchett, in Fawn Creek Township. She came from Clark County, Illinois, the same county Enos Patchett’s family settled in when they immigrated from England in 1846. Enos moved to Fawn Creek Township in 1870; the Coons moved in 1877. Elizabeth was widowed the following year. A mother of eleven, she died in 1897. My guess would be that my ancestors, who socialized with the Coons, went over to their house to see this exotic pet.


  • Wells Bros. have shipped about seventy-five bushels of hickory nuts this week.


  • The annual meeting in the interest of the Freedman’s Aid Society of the M.E. church will be tomorrow…The pastor desires a large attendance.


      The Freedman’s Aid Society was founded under a different name in 1859 by the American Missionary Association, a group supported by Presbyterian, Congregational and Methodist Churches. It founded schools and colleges for newly freed slaves in the South, and sent teachers to staff them. 


  • The following letter explains itself: 

                                                                             Howard Association, Memphis, Tennessee

To the Citizens of Coffeyville, Kansas;


     We return you our heartfelt thanks for your sympathy in our hour of affliction, and pray God may bless you for it. We enclose herewith receipt for your donation, $76.25….[$2,300 today]

     Very gratefully yours,

                                         J.H. Smith, Secretary


     In 1878 the letter ‘explained itself,’ but today few of us would know what it referred to. In 1878 Memphis suffered a devastating epidemic of yellow fever that killed about 5,000 people between August and October. The city suffered such devastating losses that it was left bankrupt. 

     The Howard Association was a group of volunteers whose original goal was the care of the indigent sick. It was named after John Howard, an 18th-century British philanthropist and reformer. By the mid-nineteenth century, there was a Howard Association group in most major cities in the U.S., each of them autonomous. The first was started in Boston in 1812. Some were formed specifically to address yellow fever and cholera. In Memphis during the 1878 outbreak the group employed 54 doctors, and many more nurses. Half the doctors died of yellow fever.

     In Coffeyville the Methodist minister, Rev. W.O. Breeden organized the fundraising drive to help with the humanitarian disaster in Memphis. He was also the minister behind the Freedmen’s Aid Society meeting in Coffeyville. Incidentally, his time in Coffeyville was brief. He moved to Kansas from Illinois where he was gossiped about as he was said to have abandoned a wife and married another. In his first posting in Thayer, Kansas in 1877 he was rumored to be too familiar with some of the ‘sisters’ in the church. He was transferred to Coffeyville as an itinerant preacher on the Independence circuit in March 1878 and left in March 1879. In June he resigned from the circuit and went to Missouri.


6 Oct 1883, Coffeyville Weekly Journal

  • Leaves are falling.
  • Plenty of rain.
  • Two-cent postage hereafter.
  • Since barbed wire came into use we find a great many more farms fenced than formerly.
  • A couple of young gents from the Territory became rather jubilant a few evenings ago from the effects of too much anti prohibition and were cared for by the Marshal until morning, when they added a few dollars to the city's treasury. 

Fencing the west was a challenge. In 1874 an Illinois farmer won a patent battle over a machine that could make barbed wire. Mass production meant massive sales. Previously, the "law of the open range" prevailed, but with farmers fencing their land, cattle drives became limited to the land around streams and rivers.


Sources:


     Capers, Gerald M. Jr. “Yellow Fever in Memphis in the 1870s,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 24, No. 4 (March 1938), pp. 483-502.

     Cummins, Eleanor. "The Thorny History of Barbed Wire," Popular Science, 12 July 2021, https://www.popsci.com/barbed-wire-invention-history/

Hildreth, Peggy Bassett. “Early Red Cross: The Howard Association of New Orleans, 1837-1878,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 20 No. 1 (Winter 1979), pp. 49-75.


Copyright by Andrea Auclair ©2023

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