Authors: William Maxwell
Of all this, only the courthouse was left in my childhood. Postville had the misfortune to be a mile from the railroad. Because Abraham Lincoln practiced law in the old court-house,
Henry Ford bought it in 1929, for $10,000, and carried it off to his museum in Ft. Dearborn. Where it stood there is now a replica, built by the town fathers.
After the farmers came and spoiled the land for the trappers and hunters by staking out homesteads everywhere, as far as the eye could see, there was a new general wave of men, brought up in towns and looking for a situation that—if they were patient and sufficiently farsighted—would put money in their pockets.
In 1839, two Pennsylvania land speculators, Isaac and Joseph Loose, acquired title from the Federal Government to a quarter section of land in central Illinois in what had just become Logan County. They paid $200 for it, without ever seeing it, and eventually one of them sold his share to the other. Until the coming of the railroads, the settlements were nearly always on the streams, in the shelter of the timber, and this quarter section was marshy, unbroken ground. The great-grandfather of a boy I went to school with, riding over it some time in the 1830’s, roused a herd of forty deer.
During the summer of 1852, the Chicago and Mississippi Railroad was being extended north from Springfield to Bloomington, and the survey ran diagonally through Logan County. Abraham Lincoln was the railroad attorney; after a term in the House of Representatives, he was again practicing law in Springfield. One of the directors, Virgil Hickox, a friend of Stephen A. Douglas and for twenty years the head of the Democratic party in Illinois, had the job of securing the right of way. It was mostly done by condemnation proceedings, which the sheriff had to carry out. The sheriff of Logan County at this time was a young man named Robert B. Latham, who owned a great deal of land in the county and was also speculating in it with a partner whose name was John D. Gillett. A not
negligible part of the whole arrangement was the chief engineer’s promise that Latham would have the choosing of a station, for the railroad needed a watering and fuel stop halfway between Springfield and Bloomington. Knowing that the quarter township owned by Isaac Loose lay along the right of way, Latham went to Pennsylvania in February, 1853, and bought it from him for $1,350. He then gave a two-thirds interest in it to Hickox and Gillett in exchange for their financial backing. Abraham Lincoln drew up the documents establishing the joint ownership of the land and, when it had been surveyed, contracts for the sale of lots. The townsite was named after him, though somewhat against his advice. What he said was that he never knew anything named Lincoln that amounted to much. The streets of the new town were laid out parallel to the railroad instead of according to the cardinal points, and the proceeds of the sale of lots amounted to $6,000. During the sale, Lincoln walked around inspecting the lots, and remarked that they were cheap and desirable but that he couldn’t afford to buy. Four years later he ended up owning one, even so. He went on somebody’s note, as people were always doing in those days, and when the note came due the borrower couldn’t pay off the loan and Lincoln had to. He was given the lot in compensation.
According to the
History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois
, John England, the brother of my great-great-grandfather, David England, and the son of the pioneer preacher, Stephen England, “preached the gospel in various parts of Logan County in the forties and early fifties.” He was born in Kentucky in 1811, and grew up in Illinois before there were any schoolhouses, so he was a man of limited education. He became a blacksmith, then a wagon maker, then a farmer, and finally a preacher, like his father. And while preaching
he farmed a hundred and forty acres in Logan County. He had conscientious scruples about taking money for preaching, and was always afraid in his business deals that he would get the better of the other person. His son said of him, “If, in the evening, the topic of conversation would run upon anything of a financial character, in five to ten minutes he would be sleeping; but if there would be anything said pertaining to the Scriptures and the life beyond, he would be standing on his feet talking. He never seemed to be the least tired or skeptical about his hope for the future world.”
At one time there were seven Christian churches here and there in the county. A series of revival meetings on a farm near Lincoln resulted in the forming of a church, which at first met in a warehouse and other places, all in town. In 1854 the congregation of about thirty people built a chapel, and for years struggled to pay for it. When the courthouse burned down, the Circuit Court was held in this building. The church I went to with my Grandmother Maxwell was built during 1903–4. It had 605 members, the
History
says, and the value of the church property, including the parsonage, was $29,000. Toward the end of the account, which takes up a little more than a page, I was pleased to come upon this elegiac sentence: “Among those who did much for the church were John A. Simpson, R. C. Maxwell, H. O. Merry, and L. P. Hanger; they merit remembrance.”
My Grandfather Maxwell taught school for the first six years after he married. During the next five he farmed. My Great-grandfather Turley had nine children who survived to maturity, and he gave each of them eighty acres of land. The farm he gave my grandmother was three miles from Lincoln. After working in the fields all day, my
grandfather saddled the poor horse and rode into town and read law in the office of the most eminent member of the local bar, a man who made a practice of taking on certain odd cases that his confreres shied away from. A farmer accused of having carnal knowledge of his daughter or of buggering his animals would be defended by him, cleared, and relieved of his farm by way of legal payment. My grandfather also had a year of law school; there was a brand-new university in Lincoln—one not very large Victorian brick building is what it amounted to physically—and he went there. He was admitted to the bar in the spring of 1877, and then spent a year in the office of my maternal grandfather. As a child I used to think how nice it would have been if my two grandfathers had been law partners, but this was not a very sensible idea. They were both ardent Republicans, and honest men, and so far as I know, much esteemed by all who knew them, but my Grandfather Blinn was a member of the Buttercup Hunting and Fishing Club, he kept whiskey in the sideboard of the dining room, and it is quite possible he was a Unitarian. As partners, he and my Grandfather Maxwell could only have got on one another’s nerves. But they were joined, after a fashion, in my older brother, who was given the first name of one and the middle name of the other,
*
and from an early age felt obliged to become a lawyer because his two grandfathers were.
In 1878, the year that my Grandfather Maxwell hung out his shingle, the town of Lincoln had roughly six thousand inhabitants, and it was already well-supplied with
lawyers, but what with one thing and another he managed. He was elected city attorney during the first year of his practice. At various times he was elected or appointed to the offices of public administrator of Logan County, township collector, township clerk, and justice of the peace. I have been told by an elderly member of the profession that he was a very competent office lawyer—that is, he examined abstracts, wrote wills, and was engaged in the probate practice.
They lived in a little one-story house on Pekin Street, directly behind the jail.
Though Alexander Campbell looked with disfavor on secret and fraternal orders, believing that the church was intended to do every good thing these societies could possibly do, my grandfather belonged to Glendower Lodge No. 45 of the Knights of Pythias, Lincoln Chapter No. 147, Lincoln Council No. 83, Constantine Commandery No. 51—all in Lincoln. He was also a member of the Mohammed Temple Ancient Arabic Order Noble Mystic Shriners, and a thirty-third degree Mason, and member of the Oriental Consistory at Peoria, which was sixty miles away—in those days a considerable train ride from Lincoln. Though the number of lodges seems excessive now, it probably wasn’t considered so then.
When my grandfather stopped farming and moved into town, he also moved into the middle class, taking his family with him. What this meant was that to their other concerns a new one was added—the concern for respectability—which I do not suppose was of much interest to those men and women who walked six or seven miles to hear somebody preach, and found their way home by the light of a piece of burning hickory bark. On Sunday morning, my grandmother kept my grandfather waiting while she ran a couple of long hatpins through her hat and adjusted her veil and buttoned her gloves. And then, with the church bells ringing, they
walked a block and a half to the Christian church. Sitting in her pew, my grandmother did not give her attention so completely to the sermon that she didn’t notice what Mrs. Spitley and Mrs. Holton were wearing. Certain things were necessary or she couldn’t hold her head up.
In a place where everybody’s life was an open book, my grandfather was counted among the respectable. He paid his bills as promptly as he was able, his four children were properly fed and clothed and educated, and there was some but apparently not very much money left over at the end of the week to put in the bank or the collection plate. The older children were born on that eighty-acre farm. My father was born in town.
In my grandfather’s upright nature there was a vein of rigidity—of harshness even—that was no doubt inherited from his Scottish forebears. When my father was a little boy, he longed for a pair of copper-toed boots, such as he had seen other boys wear at school. My grandfather tried to discourage him, but my father kept on talking about those boots until he got them. They proved to be extremely uncomfortable, just as my grandfather had said, and after two or three days he hated the sight of them, but my grandfather made him wear them out. It is not something my father would have done to me.
For twenty years, my grandfather was an elder of the Christian church in Lincoln, and I have no doubt that the controversies that the Disciples of Christ were expending so much heat and energy on during this period were all thrashed out at the family dinner table, especially when some visiting preacher was bedded down on the couch in the parlor. It is questionable whether my Aunt Bert, with her delight in ribbons and bows, heard a word of what was said, but my father could not withdraw his attention so easily, and what he heard created a lasting impatience. His bent was toward whatever is practical, and he was neither
persuaded by nor interested in the argument that because the church in Corinth in St. Paul’s time did not have an organ, it could not be used in the Christian church in Lincoln. My grandmother, having no mind to speak of, bypassed all questions of doctrine and went right to the heart of the religion. She never stopped talking about immersion, or thinking about it. She kept track of who was and who wasn’t. She had the makings of an evangelist.
My grandmother did not like being stuck away in that little one-story house behind the jail, and she nagged at my grandfather to sell the farm her father had given her and use the money to build a house in town. My grandfather did not think very much of this idea, but my grandmother was a mulish woman, though dear, and very little ever came of arguing with her. The land, after all, was hers. In the end, he did what she wanted.
All Middle Western houses of that period were dark and gloomy, and I have no reason to think that the house my grandparents built on Kickapoo Street was an exception. I used to ride past it sometimes on my bicycle, but I was never in it. It was large, for that time and that place, with a round tower on one corner and spiderwebs of carpenter’s lace all around and even under the various porches. From an old photograph, it appears that the carpenter’s lace and the lace curtains in the bay window were almost identical. Driving past the house when he was an old man, my father shook his head and remarked sadly, “That fretwork cost eighty acres of the finest land in Logan County!”
Without the income from the farm, and with four children to educate, my grandparents found they were living beyond their means. My father, lying in bed upstairs, heard his father and mother quarreling over money. It was the barbaric custom for dry goods stores, and no doubt other stores as well, to bill their customers
annually.
Night
after night, all through the month of January, my Grandfather Maxwell walked the floor with the shocking and interminable statement from A. C. Boyd in his hand. “This item of five yards dress material,” he would begin, as if he had my grandmother on the witness stand. “What
kind
of dress material?” My grandmother didn’t remember what dress material she had charged on the twelfth of April of the year before. My grandfather didn’t see why she wouldn’t remember. “On the twenty-second you charged seven spools of cotton thread. And ten days later there’s another charge for ten more. And seven yards of silk braid … Does it ever occur to you when you are charging all these things that a day will come when they have to be paid for?” Though there were several possible answers to this question, my grandmother was not the woman to give voice to them. Instead she burst into tears, and perhaps wished they were back in that little house behind the jail. The next night it would begin all over again.
The house on Kickapoo Street passed out of the family before I was born, but my Aunt Annette spent a night there when she was a young woman and was outraged by an electric bell that rang loudly all through the upstairs when it was time to get up, and again when it was time to come hurrying to the table, where, to her surprise, they had steak for breakfast. Her mother—my Grandmother Blinn—was a Kentuckian, and though she believed in the Life Hereafter, she did everything in her power to make life on this earth agreeable to her family and herself. When her daughters married and started raising a family, all it meant, really, was adding more leaves to the dining room table. And people were never hurried to it; they came when they were ready. It has occurred to me that the electric bell may have served a purpose my Aunt Annette was not aware of—that it was a piece of ritual magic, intended to keep
disaster away from the house. Other men may think, if they choose, that man is not born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward; orphans know better.