Pioneer cooks were masters of their trade

Thanksgiving has appeared on the mental radar scope, and that means Christmas dinner won’t be far behind.

Cooking for Thanksgiving means, in most households, turkey and the trimmings, making it one of our most all-American holiday mealtimes. That’s because much of the food we eat on Thanksgiving is derived from plants and animals found in the New World when Europeans arrived and introduced to the new arrivals by the Native People living here. Turkey, potatoes, sweet corn, cranberries, and the filling in those wonderful pumpkin pies were all discovered by Europeans after they got here.

Cooking for our ancestors took some doing, as might be expected. Clarence Birdseye was not even a glimmer in his parents’ eyes during the settlement era, and besides the technology to freeze food and keep it frozen was a century in the future when the first settlers started arriving in the Fox Valley.

Known as the Buck Tavern during its heyday after it’s proprietor, Solomon Buck, this fine example of Federal Style tavern architecture was located on the Galena Road in the Kendall County hamlet of Little Rock. After a fire, it was demolished in the summer of 2002. The Buck Tavern was a regular stop on the Chicago-Galena Road for stages owned by Frink, Walker & Company.

The late 1820s and early 1830s were the period of the most change in the Fox Valley as virtually all the area’s major roads and towns were laid out. The taverns—actually inns—that popped up along the new roads that stretched in a wagon wheel spoke arrangement from Chicago provided both a place to sleep for travelers and food for them to eat. The food served in those earliest taverns was identical to the food pioneer families ate. And there was a surprising variety of it.

Pork was very popular among the settlers because the hogs of the period were tough things, not much different from the wild boars from which they were descended. As a result of the diet they ate while rooting through the area’s groves, the pork of 1830 was much leaner than what we see today, and the meat was much darker—much different than “The Other White Meat” of those modern pork commercials.

According to A.D. Havenhill, writing in the 1914 history of Kendall County: “The introduction of the hog during the primitive days of Kendall County was done by the early settlers. Usually a few pigs in a box or crate were tied to the prairie schooner, and when settlement was made they were turned out to shift for themselves and as there was nothing growing at that time on the broad prairies upon which they could subsist, they naturally took to the timber belts where wild plums and fruits were plentiful, and walnuts. Butternuts, two varieties of hickory nuts and the many kinds of acorns were produced in large quantities. Upon them the pioneer hogs fed, and most excellent bacon was developed, and all the settlers had to do when the family got out of meat was for the man to take a rifle, go out cautiously into the wood, and help himself.”

The herds of essentially wild hogs that raised themselves in the Fox Valley’s groves were occasionally rounded up and driven overland to market in Chicago. Given how bad-tempered they animals were, it must have been an interesting job.

He continued: “These hogs were always white, sandy, or sandy and white spotted. Each bristle on this breed meant fight. These hogs were very prolific and as many as twelve or thirteen of these little “razorbacks” were raised by the mother hog at one time. These mothers knew how to protect their young, and woe be to the person who made one of her progeny squeal. His only safety lay in climbing a tree or making a record as a sprinter. This same type of hog seems closely allied to the wild hog of Europe.”

Beef was also favored by pioneers, but it was in shorter supply than pork because cattle were more difficult and expensive to raise—they weren’t nearly as self-sufficient as those hardy, nasty-tempered hogs. Some families managed to bring a few beef cattle with them, but many other families brought one or two milk cows from the east, tied to the backs of their covered wagons. That way milk, cream, and butter could be provided while on the trail west.

Milk cows and beef cattle were both brought west by the pioneers, but they were more labor-intensive for pioneer farmers to raise.

A.D. Havenhill, again writing in 1914, explained: “It may be interesting to note the primitive method of churning on those trips. When camp broke each morning, what remained of the morning milking was put in a bucket and hung beneath the wagon, and the constant motion produced butter for the evening meal. The industrious housewife, while the men were making camp, could separate the butter from the buttermilk, and work in a little salt, giving her family a delicacy for which her grandchildren of today are willing to pay fabulous prices—fresh made country butter.”

Poultry was also a favorite meat, but domestic chickens were unable to fend for themselves and so were easy prey for the few prairie wolves, coyotes, and the foxes that still populated the Fox Valley in fair numbers. That meant chickens had to be protected with their own houses and coops and were somewhat rare for several years after settlement. But Prairie Chickens and the few other wild fowl still around that hadn’t been hunted out by the Native People helped vary pioneer diets.

The pioneers favored root crops such as potatoes, turnips, and carrots because they grew well in the rich prairie soil and also “kept” well in root cellars. Corn was ground for that all-purpose food item, cornmeal, which was used in so many different ways by pioneer cooks, from cornbread to Indian pudding. Wheat farming was tried for years, but was never all that successful in Illinois, given the climactic conditions here. But early on, enough was grown locally to provide the makings for bread. Before pioneer millwrights arrived and built their gristmills, wheat, rye, and barley was ground in homemade mortars or, if the family was lucky enough to have one, in a coffee grinder.

So sufficient food was available quite soon after those first hardy settlers arrived out here on the northern Illinois prairie, but how was it prepared in the days before cook stoves?

Cooking in the days of fireplaces was a true art that required quite a bit of pre-planning. But it was a skill that came second nature to the women of the period because it was what they all grew up with. Most cooking was done with only one or two utensils, generally a long-handled cast iron skillet and a cast iron pot. Sometimes, a family had an iron Dutch oven that was used to bake and cook in, but most baking was done in brick ovens built either as part of home fireplace installations or were free-standing in the farm yard.

Given a couple of cast iron pans and a fireplace, how were entire meals cooked for hungry travelers in Kendall County’s pioneer taverns—or large farm families? Luckily we have some accounts by travelers of their experiences in stagecoach inns here on the Illinois prairie. A particularly vivid one was left by a female passenger whose coach stopped at dawn for breakfast at a Carlinville tavern while on her way from St. Louis to Springfield.

Pioneer fireplaces were larger and much more elaborate than those in modern houses. A long-handled frying pan (second from left) and a few pots were all that were necessary for a skilled cook to quickly prepare a hearty meal for a stagecoach load of passengers–or a hungry family–during the 1830s in northern Illinois.

The young female cook, who, the traveler praised for her efficiency, first took out a long-handled frying pan and put it on the fire, resting the long handle on a chair. She placed coffee beans in the pan and parched—roasted—them. She removed the coffee beans, washed out the frying pan, and then stirred up corn bread in the pan and put it back on the fire to bake. Meanwhile, she ground the roasted coffee beans and put the grounds in an iron pot with water and started it boiling. When the cornbread was done, she removed it from the pan and put it by to cool. She then cut a chunk off a side of bacon hanging in the kitchen, sliced it, and fried it in the pan that had so far roasted the coffee beans and baked the cornbread. When the bacon was crisp, eggs were fried to order in the bacon grease and the newly arrived guests along with those who had stayed the night all sat down to enjoy the meal.

Meals, of course, varied by location. One traveler who passed through southern Michigan in 1830 reported that supper was biscuits, fried pork, and venison, washed down with buttermilk. Breakfast was the same except for having cornmeal griddle cakes in place of the biscuits and a glass of cider. The entire bill for both meals—including the buttermilk and cider—was 21 cents. That’s $7 in today’s dollars, still a good deal.

Here in Illinois by the time Kendall County settlement got going in the early 1830s, the deer population had been almost entirely eliminated by the Native Americans who killed them for food and for hides to trade for food, so venison was found on few menus. Prairie chickens and rabbits, however, were commonly found on the menus at Illinois taverns, and presumably in the homes of pioneer families.

The lives of our pioneer ancestors who arrived out here on what was then the western frontier didn’t have a particularly easy time of it, especially the earliest arrivals. But using the technology and the skills they brought with them, live was definitely livable. And while food preparation technology might seem crude to modern sensibilities, skillful cooks could turn out excellent meals in a remarkably short time using one or two pans and plenty of ingenuity and elbow grease. It’s not too difficult to imagine how those same early cooks would have contrived to have produced a full-course turkey dinner to mark Thanksgiving all those years ago.

Oswego wasn’t exactly the Wild West, but sometimes it was indeed wild

My hometown of Oswego here in northern Illinois was a great place to grow up in the 1950s. In those days, it was a peaceful little town whose merchants mostly catered to the surrounding farming area. The explosive growth that changed its character was still on the horizon, a place where, if you didn’t personally know someone, you knew of them.

For kids it was safe and secure—at least for most of us. I didn’t learn about the disturbing underbelly of our small rural county until decades later. For us, back then, it was a place where during summers we could leave home on our bikes after supper most evenings, ride around town like maniacs, and not be expected home until dark.

Oswego, Illinois in the 1950s was a small town–1950 population was 1,220–that was a great place for kids to grow up. (Little White School Museum collection)

Little did we know that Oswego hadn’t been such a calm place in the century before we were born in our own 20th Century. When I got interested in the nuts and bolts of the community’s history and really began digging into it, I made the startling discovery that gunplay was far from rare during the era when the same sort of behavior was creating the legend of “The Wild West” out beyond the Mississippi River.

The earliest reported gunplay in Oswego involved domestic violence, something the nation’s still plagued with these days. In September 1872, Samuel “Duke” West climbed up onto the shed roof of an addition to a downtown building, and shot Mark Newberry through a second story window, instantly killing him.

The West family—Sam, Hannah, and Sam Jr.—had immigrated to Illinois in the late 1840s, where the Wests had one more son, John. Sam Sr., who at age 57 was about 20 years older than his wife, was nicknamed Duke and sometimes the Duke of Wellington, probably because of his accent.

West was a well-known local character whose wife was apparently trying to leave, and had developed a relationship with Newberry. West warned Newberry to stay away from his estranged wife, advice Newberry ignored. The night in question, Newberry was playing cards with West’s wife, Hannah, and West’s oldest son, teenaged Sam West Jr. in the Wests’ second floor apartment, when Duke fired a shotgun blast through the closed window, gunning him down.

The west side of Main Street in Oswego’s downtown in the mid-1870s sort of looks like our idea of a Western cow town. Duke West shot Mark Newberry from a shed roof behind one of these buildings. The only building still standing is the old Driftwood Arts/Jacqueline Shop building at right. (Little White School Museum collection.

The Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent, Lorenzo Rank, reported that while Newberry was killed instantly, “Two of the shot struck Mrs. West in the face but doing no serious harm to her. The Duke went immediately to Justice Newton and gave himself up. Constable Congdon took him into custody. West, the murderer, is an old offender; has served one or more terms in the Joliet Penitentiary and rumor says at one time he was a convict at Botany Bay.”

As might be imagined, tempers around town and throughout Kendall County ran high following Newberry’s murder, leading to a change of venue up the river to Geneva. According to Rank writing in the Feb. 20, 1873 Record: “The approaching trial of Duke West at Geneva is more or less discussed pro and con; a great many witnesses are subpoenaed; there are many who think that he ought to swing, not so much because he killed Newberry but on general principles.”

West was subsequently convicted of murdering Newberry and was sentenced to life in the state prison at Joliet. He died there Jan. 26, 1876.

Gunplay seemed fairly rare for the next few years until the Record reported on April 10, 1879 that horse thieves were deterred by the swift action of 12 year-old Willie Parker. The Parker farm was located over on what’s now Ill. Route 31 and on April 3, 1879 George Parker had headed across the river to Oswego to see what the spring election vote totals were. A couple horse thieves decided to take advantage of Parker’s absence to snatch his best team of horses.

Model 1851 Navy Colt revolver. (New York Metropolitan Museum of Art collection)

Young Willie, seeing someone out by their barn went outside and called to him, thinking the guy was his brother. But when the guy didn’t answer, instead going back to the barn, Willie grabbed the family Navy Colt revolver ran outside and took a shot at the thief—who fled. A second thief, apparently acting as lookout on a nearby haystack, took a shot at Willie as the two miscreants fled.

As the April 10 Record reported: “Willie then retreated and before he could get reinforcement the fellows had cleared out and no further trace of them could be found.”

Things calmed down during the next few years until May of 1882 when William Bradford met his violent end. Bradford, a member of the Black farming community in the Minkler Road area south of Oswego, was known as a hard case. He’d been born into slavery in the 1830s, was liberated as contraband during the Civil War and reportedly served as an orderly in a Union Army unit before coming to the Oswego area after the war. According to newspaper accounts, Bradford was described as being “of medium size, compact and stoutly built, and the toughest material, with a constitution like an alligator, and said to be a hard case to handle.”

He married into the numerous Lucas family, but was often in trouble and served a year and a half in the prison at Joliet.

“He had frequent difficulties with both whites and blacks, and numbers of his own race about here were on unfriendly terms with him,” Record Correspondent Lorenzo Rank reported. He and his wife divorced in January 1881.

His last bout of trouble began in late April 1882 when NaAuSay Township farmer Robert Thompson signed a complaint charging Bradford with stealing grain. Constable Nelson Larkin searched for Bradford with no luck. In early May Larkin, hearing Bradford had been sighted around Specie Grove, asked local farmer Don Winn, who knew Bradford, to go with him to see if the accused could be found and arrested. They were unsuccessful in their search.

Downtown Oswego about 1878, a few years before Don Winn shot and killed William Bradford. Bradford’s death was ruled self-defense. (Little White School Museum collection)

But then Larkin heard Bradford was in Aurora, so he went up there, found Bradford, and arrested him after what was described as “considerable resistance,” taking him down to the Kendall County Jail in Yorkville for an overnight stay.

The next morning Larkin brought Bradford back up to Oswego to appear before Justice of the Peace Asahel Newton. On the way back to Oswego, Bradford made a number of threats against several people, including Don Winn, saying to Larkin that as soon as these were killed he wouldn’t care what happened to him.

In the meantime, Winn had come to town and was told, given word Bradford’s threats had quickly gotten around town, to look out for himself. Being unarmed, he bought a pistol, loaded it, and put it in his pocket. Then he went over to Newton’s office to hear Bradford’s trial.

As soon as Winn stepped through the door, however, Bradford saw him and despite being handcuffed rushed at Winn, grabbing him by the neck and pushing him violently against a wall. “Winn, not being the coolest man in the world, immediately drew his pistol and shot Bradford in the left breast,” Rank reported. “All this happened in a room crowded with men; there was a scattering, however, when the shot was fired.”

A Black friend of Bradford, S.A. Long, whose legs were paralyzed and with whom Bradford had been staying, was waiting with a team and wagon outside Newton’s office. Winn accused Long of being there for an “evil purpose,” and to be fair, when he was searched he was found to be carrying a loaded Navy Colt revolver in his coat. Since there was “no evidence of evil,” however, Long was fined $1 for carrying a concealed weapon and released.

With a fair percentage of Oswego’s male population now drawn to the downtown area, a coroner’s jury was immediately called, which found Winn’s actions were in self-defense. Bradford was buried in the Oswego Cemetery the next day.

Then in 1891, the community was rocked by another deadly domestic dispute. George Mears, a traveling salesman, and his wife had been having domestic problems for some time, when she decided to leave their Aurora home. She found a job working for Mrs. George Wormley helping to keep house. In December 1891, Mears showed up at the Wormley farmhouse and tried to persuade his estranged wife to return home to Aurora, but she refused.

The George D. Wormley House on modern Ill. Route 31 as it looked in 1993. (Little White School Museum collection)

Mrs. Wormley tried to act as a peacemaker, but Mears, apparently enraged, drew a pistol shooting Mrs. Wormley in the neck and her teenage son, Harry, in the side. Mrs. Mears was not injured, Mrs. Wormley recovered from her wound, but Harry’s wound was fatal, he dying within a few days.

Mears was tried for murder and in November 1892 was sentenced to life in prison.

And finally, we come to the story of an 1893 domestic dispute that ended much more comically than the previous ones.

Oswego lawyer and landowner Paul Hawley was known for paying more attention that he should have to several area women. One of those women was Mrs. Oleson, wife of the tenant farmer on Hawley’s Oswego farm. Oleson had reportedly warned Hawley to keep away from Mrs. Oleson. Hawley denied all, and the talk died down.

Stationmaster Henry Green Smith and two young friends sit on the freight platform at the south end of the CB&Q’s Oswego Depot about 1890. Off to the left, an empty cattle car waits by the loading chute at the stockyard. (Little White School Museum collection)

But then, as the Aurora Herald put it, Hawley may have decided the coast was finally clear again. It wasn’t: “Mr. Oleson conceived the idea that Mr. Hawley was altogether too frisky around his house He thereupon procured a pistol and meeting Mr. Hawley down near the depot commenced blazing away at him.”

Fortunately, however, as the Herald explained: “Mr. Oleson is evidently a poor marksman for he only hit Hawley once, inflicting a slight wound. Both parties are very reticent and no further particulars can be obtained.”

It’s interesting that despite two clear homicides with witnesses to both, neither earned their perpetrators the death penalty. It also suggests the bad guys back then were no better shots than they are these days.

Frisky lawyers, homicidal traveling salesmen, and murderous transplanted Englishmen—Oswego turns out to have been a pretty exciting place once upon a time. Not that any of us had a clue about any of that fascinating local mayhem when we were growing up back in those friendly 1950s.

An Oswego story: The life and times of Alice Gray

Long before the Oswegoland Heritage Association Board of Directors appointed me the volunteer director of the Little White School Museum back in 1994, I was an enthusiastic visitor at museums—large or small made no difference—wherever we traveled.

On one memorable childhood trip west to visit relatives and friends, my mother vowed to stop at every historic site and marker along our route. And we did it, too, much to the bemusement of my father. It was great fun.

I kept up that tradition as an adult–often to the chagrin of my children. From the great local museum at Fergus Falls, MN to the sprawling Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. to the historic reconstructions at Fort Massac, Fort Mackinac, and other forts here an in Canada to the Illinois State Museum branches in my home state, I not only enjoyed them, but also learned something new from every one of them.

It’s been a lot of years now, so I can’t remember exactly where I heard it—it may have been at the Art Institute of Chicago—but at one museum with a wonderful collection of historic textiles, a staffer made a comment that’s stuck with me for decades. They noted that visitors should keep in mind that museum artifacts on exhibit are frequently those owned by the financially well-off, since poor people couldn’t afford to save such things. Instead, in the old Great Depression phrase, they had to use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Not recognizing that situation tends to give visitors a skewed idea of what life was like during whatever era the artifacts on exhibit are attempting to illuminate.

I kept that thought in mind whenever we visited museums thereafter. And when I became responsible for designing some of our museum’s exhibits, I decided that an important part of the museum’s mission ought to be to try to tell the story of the regular folks whose hard work actually created the Oswegoland community, along with the accounts of those who led the community’s governmental, civic, and business life.

One of those “just regular folks” whose story I thought would make an excellent exhibit was Alice Gray, a disadvantaged single woman who nonetheless made her way in life, pretty much on her own and despite adversity, here in Oswego.

We were lucky in that while Alice Gray’s life story, like most less well-off people, wasn’t covered in local histories or in the press we did come into possession of a collection of her belongings, albeit a collection somewhat worse for wear.

Oswego’s first firefighters pose in front of their new hose cart in August 1895, at Washington at Tyler Street, Oswego. The village’s new water tower, completed earlier that year, is in the background. (Little White School Museum Collection)

I first heard about her in 1982 when I was a member of the committee putting together 150 Years Along the Fox: The History of Oswego Township, Illinois to commemorate Oswego Township’s sesquicentennial. Luella Tripp Meetz submitted a capsule history of the Oswego Fire Protection District for the book, which included a short, entertaining account of a 1918 fire that destroyed the home of Alice Gray. It happened during the era before Oswego bought a fire engine and so had to make do with a high-wheeled cart that had a big fire hose reel on it. The members of the Oswego Fire Brigade usually pulled it by hand to fight fires in town. According to Luella’s account:

“When Alice Gray’s house on [East] Washington Street caught fire, Wilt Woolley happened to be in town with his team of mules which were hitched to a farm wagon. He hooked the hose cart behind the wagon and headed for the fire at breakneck speed. In rounding a corner, the cart tipped and rolled over unrolling a length of hose which was left behind. Upon arriving at the fire, the firemen hooked the hose to the nearest hydrant, but lacked 200 feet of reaching the fire. Needless to say, the house burned to the ground, livened up for the onlookers by the continual banging of several boxes of .38 cal. revolver shells which Mrs. Gray always kept handy in case of emergency.”

It was indeed an entertaining story, one stuck in the back of my mind.

Fast forward to 1991. When crews excavating for a two-flat apartment building on East Washington Street here in Oswego accidentally dug into the corner of what seemed to be the remains of a building destroyed by fire, Oswegoan John Samuel, who had drawn plans for the building, contacted me, wondering if I’d ever heard of a house burning down a long time ago in that neighborhood. He invited me to take a look at what had ben found, and I think that’s when I occurred to me this might be the house fire where onlookers were “livened up” by the banging of .38 cal. revolver shells.

John Samuel and Sue Matile work quickly on an archaeological recovery dig to save artifacts from the Alice Gray fire in 1991. (Little White School Museum collection)

John got permission from the property owner to have the crew delay construction for a day or so and he supervised a short archaeological recovery dig—my wife Sue volunteered to be his assistant—that resulted in saving a collection of household materials that survived the fire. Remarkably, they even recovered some of those spent .38 cal. cartridges that might have been the ones mentioned in Luella’s account.

The dig’s productive results meant we definitely needed to know more about Alice Gray, her life and her times, especially if we were going to create an exhibit about her. So I hit the newspaper microfilm down at the Oswego Public Library and found a brief note in the Kendall County Record’s  Jan. 23, 1918 edition’s “Oswego” news column reporting the fire:

“While Alice Gray was in Aurora Tuesday her home was burned to the ground. It is thought an overheated chimney was the cause. Not being able to get water with which to fight the fire, the building was soon in ashes.”

I let it be known I was looking for more information on Alice Gray and the community’s underground telegraph came through for me when I got a call from Newton Woolley, then living over at The Tillers retirement home. He invited me to come over to chat about her. It turned out he actually knew Alice Gray when he was a youngster and remembered her well. He helped fill in some of the blanks, like how she made a living and what happened to her after the fire.

Having what few possessions she owned burned up in the fire, she moved into one of the homes for indigent people maintained by Oswego Township, this one located at the corner of Ashland and Polk streets. There, she continued to work as a washerwoman for several Oswego households until she died. He remembered her as short, wearing her hair in a bun atop her head and kind to kids like himself—a generally well-liked and respected person around town.

We looked through our copy of the Oswego Township Cemetery records and found her name, but no death date, a fact that serendipitously turned up in the papers of Jenny Hubbard Wormley in the museum’s collections. Mrs. Wormley noted on a scrap of paper: “Alice Gray found dead in her yard in the morning of Sept. 15, 1922.”

So, who was Alice Gray, really?

Jane Alice Gray – she apparently preferred to be called Alice – was born about 1852 in Oswego, the daughter Daniel and Esther (Pearce) Gray. She either married C.H. Dickerson about 1870—we haven’t found any marriage record—or began living as his common law wife about then. The couple had two children, William, born in 1877 and Harvey born May 4, 1871.

By 1880, Dickerson had vanished from the record, and Alice Gray was, according to the U.S. Census, living in Oswego with her mother. Esther Gray, was listed at 50 years of age and unmarried, Daniel apparently having died. The pair of single women lived with two young children, Harvey and William ‘Dickenson,’ listed as Alice’s sons. Harvey Dickerson, according to the class list in the museum’s collections, graduated from Oswego High School in 1890.

When Oswego census enumerator Lew Inman called at the Gray home to take the 1910 Census, Alice said her mother was born in Ohio, but said she did not know where her father had been born. In the 1900 Census, Alice had been listed as a housekeeper for a local butcher and his family. The 1910 Census reported that she was employed that year as a washerwoman, and had not been unemployed during the previous 12 months, suggesting she was resourceful at living as a single woman during an era when that was no easy thing to do. She was also listed in that census as owning her home on Washington Street.

A brass Chicago peddler’s license badge recovered from the remains of her house suggested Alice Gray may have also engaged in independent retailing as well as washing clothes.

Misfortune’s Mementos, the original Alice Gray exhibit in the museum gallery opened in May 1992. (Little White School Museum collection)

By the time of the fire in 1918, she was 69 years old, was apparently living alone at her Oswego home, and had one son living in Aurora.

After the fire, Alice was too poor to afford rebuilding. The remains of the house were simply shoveled into its former crawl space, covered over and forgotten for 73 years.

She moved into one of the Town Houses, homes at Ashland and Polk streets provided by Oswego Township for indigent people, where she lived for the rest of her life.  As noted above, she died at her home on Sept. 15, 1922 and is buried in the Oswego Township Cemetery.

We carefully cleaned, identified, and sorted the artifacts from our 1991 dig. John Samuel volunteered to produce nicely-lettered labels for many of them, in preparation for a new exhibit at the museum. It took a few months given the limited time we volunteers could devote to working up exhibits along with all the other necessary jobs there (we were still fully involved in the building’s restoration), but we were finally able to use selected materials and John’s labels to create the “Misfortune’s Mementos” exhibit in the museum gallery. We even invited the community to a formal grand opening celebration on May 3, 1992.

The 2018 edition of the Alice Gray exhibit tells more of her story. (Little White School Museum collection)

When the gallery was remodeled in 2018, most of the items in the exhibit were removed to storage. But a representative Alice Gray exhibit was designed for the gallery’s new core exhibit to make sure we continue to tell as much of Oswego’s story about as many of its people—rich or poor—as we can. Soldiers and civilians, townsfolk and farm families, business owners and their customers, the famous (at least at one time or another) and the infamous, it’s their stories that illustrate the Oswego community’s rich history.

You’re always welcome to stop on by to see what we’ve been up to, and learn how Oswego’s past has anchored and influenced what our community has become today. Hours are Thursday and Friday, 2-6:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; and Monday, 4-9 p.m. Admission is free, but donations are—and I cannot emphasize this too much—always greatly appreciated.

Observing Indigenous Peoples Day

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day. Or is it Columbus Day in your household?

Historians continually bicker about whether people are the driving force of history, or whether events drive history. In other words, do individuals create historical events or do historical events result in the creation of significant individuals?

Actually, when you get right down to it, a lot of history doesn’t seem to be much more than a series of accidents and mistakes that combine to form a historical context that lurches from one catastrophe to another. If that seems to be a trend in history, then the history of North America is certainly an excellent example.

On Aug. 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus left Spain to find a new, direct route to the East Indies. On Oct. 12, after more than two months at sea, Columbus walked ashore on an island he named San Salvador. The natives called it Guanahani. Thus began the approriation of the native cultures of the Americas. (Kean Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The New World’s accidental history began as soon as Christopher Columbus weighed anchor and headed west across the Atlantic, having won a contract from Spain to pave a new, quicker route to the Indies and the rich trade in silk and spices.

After spending more time at sea than he’d planned on and finally sighted land, he was positive he had discovered either China or India. But as one historian noted, he hadn’t discovered India; he hadn’t even discovered Indiana.

Instead, Columbus landed on an island off the coast of South America. He was nevertheless so convinced he had reached the mysterious East that he named the inhabitants of his new discovery Indians, a name they’ve been trying to live down ever since.

No matter their name, Columbus’s Spanish backers quickly came to consider Indian peoples as surplus population. Five hundred years before the Germans perfected the method, the Spanish practiced the Final Solution on entire peoples living in North and South America. But to be fair, the brutal violent Spain of the 15^th and 16^th centuries treated even their fellow Europeans much the same way as the Native People in what they called the New World. We’ve all heard about the astonishing brutality of the Spanish Inquisition, but most of us are probably ignorant of the almost unimaginable carnage wrought by the Spanish in the Netherlands also in the 1500s. Sent there by the Spanish Crown, the Duke of Alba massacred thousands of men, women, and children along the way to earning his nickname as the “Butcher of Flanders.”

Although Columbus thought he’d found India or China (he remained convinced until his death), it quickly became apparent that there seemed to be a large mass of land blocking the route from Europe to Asia. Due to miscalculations of the Earth’s diameter, early explorers thought their New World was a narrow island, with the Indies and China just a bit farther west.

In fact, stories of rich nations and cities just beyond the horizon became a staple of European colonization of the Americas. Many of these stories seem to have been concocted by Native People in an effort to persuade European invaders to move on and plague other areas.

The stories weren’t just told by the indigenous people in South and Central America, either. When the French landed in Canada and began exploring to the west, they were certain they would soon reach China. In fact, the five mile long series of rapids on the St. Lawrence River at Montreal was named La Chine because early colonists were sure China was just up the Ottawa River a few miles. With that as a precedent, every time a French adventurer took possession of land from the increasingly outraged indigenous residents as the boundaries of exploration were pushed ever farther westward, it was with one eye on anticipating meeting the Chinese.

In June 1671, when Daumont de St-Lusson claimed the region around Sault Ste. Marie, he wore court clothing on the off-chance a few representatives of the Chinese emperor might show up for the ceremony. The local indigenous people were pretty sure THEY owned the area, but apparently decided to let the European visitors have their party.

For instance, in 1671 when the French took possession of the Sault Ste. Marie rapids between Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay and Lake Superior, the official doing the taking had brought along rich robes for the ceremony because he was sure a few Chinese potentates would show up for the festivities.

The conviction that rich Asian markets lay just beyond next hill to the west drove two centuries’ worth of a search for the non-existent Northwest Passage, a search that even affected our corner of northern Illinois.

In 1673, French geographer Louis Jolliet and Jesuit missionary and linguist Father Jacques Marquette were sent to discover whether the Mississippi River was the Northwest Passage. Both had high hopes before discovering that the Mississippi didn’t flow southwest. Rather, they found, it headed pretty much directly south or even a bit southeast.

Jolliet and Marquette’s 1673 expedition to discover exactly where the Mississippi River flowed showed there was no easy passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The quest to find one would last for the next 150 years.

Jolliet was originally commissioned by the French governor of New France to find out exactly where the Mississippi went and to create maps of the river’s route. He and a few companions left Montreal, portaged around the La Chine rapids and paddled up the Ottawa River following the old trade route the Chippewa and Ottawa tribes had blazed centuries before.

The party crossed Rainy Lake and portaged into Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. And after a arduous trek, they arrived at the French post of St. Ignace at the straits between lakes Huron and Michigan, where they picked up Father Marquette, added to the expedition for his linguistic skills. The party paddled down the western shore of Lake Michigan to the Fox River of Wisconsin that empties into Green Bay. Paddling up the Fox, they portaged to the Wisconsin River at the site of today’s Portage, Wis., following the Wisconsin to its mouth on the Mississippi.

During their voyage down the Mississippi, Jolliet made navigational observations until, upon reaching the mouth of the Arkansas River, he realized the Mississippi flowed south into the Gulf of Mexico not, as hoped, southwest into the Gulf of California. In addition, at the mouth of the Arkansas, they found an Indian village whose residents were using Spanish trade goods. That was alarming because Spain and France were quarreling at the time, creating an unhealthy atmosphere for the French explorers.

So the expedition turned around and paddled back north. Reaching the mouth of the Illinois River, they were advised the smaller river was a shortcut to the lakes that could save them considerable time on their return trip. So they became the first Europeans to explore the Illinois River Valley. Both commented on the rich prairie land and wildlife they saw during their voyage north, and both correctly predicted the territory would prove to be a productive farming region.

Father Marquette lived just one more year before dying on the lonely coastline near Marquette, Mich. Jolliet was within sight of Montreal when his canoe upset in the rapids and he lost all of the journals and maps he had made during the expedition. However, he reconstructed much of the information, enough that he produced a map of the expedition’s travels.

Jolliet’s account and map eventually caught the attention of Robert René Cavalier, Seur de la Salle, who concocted a grand scheme in 1680 for the settlement of the lands Jolliet and Marquette had first explored, as well as lands along the shore of Lake Michigan east of the Chicago River.

Nearly 200 years after Columbus landed in the Americas, LaSalle finally discovered Indiana.

The last treaty between the indigenous people of Illinois was signed at Chicago in 1833. In 1836, the region’s resident Native People were forced to move west of the Mississippi River opening the entire area to White American settlement.

And so also began two centuries of the shameful treatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Here in North America, that meant completing what Columbus had begun, removing the region’s Native People by conquest, sometimes by treaty, and often by outright theft in contravention of those solemn treaties. And, in fact, litigation on those illegal acts continues to this day—including here in the Fox Valley Region.

While the history of those days when Native Americans peopled our region is recalled by numerous place names, from Waubonsee Community College to Half Day Road, it’s also useful to realize that thousands of indigenous people live among us today, enjoying life in northern Illinois’ cities, suburbs, and rural areas, blending in with their neighbors, descendants of the European stock that began arriving all those centuries ago.

The day my distant cousin talked Abraham Lincoln out of his autograph and fingerprint

Matiles aren’t really known for their pursuit of fame and really haven’t done much over the centuries since the late 1300s to seek it. That was the year two Matile brothers with military training from Lombardy in what’s today northern Italy, Jean and Jacques, signed on as mercenaries in the service of Jean d’Arberg de Vlangin in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. The two had enough experience to be hired as as military officers or governors of du Locle and La-Sagne in the canton.

Suggesting that my penchant for never moving farther than several hundred feet from my childhood home may be genetic, Matiles still live in that area today.

The Matiles’ ancestral home at the Castle of Valangin. It’s not elaborate as castles go, but we find it comfortable and cozy.

As a reward for the brothers’ services, the Matile family was given the hereditary title of Burghers of Valangin. Valangin–the name of both a castle and town–is located about three kilometers north of the city of Neuchâtel. The castle of Valangin was the military seat of government during Neuchâtel’s Prussian ownership. It was built in the Middle Ages as the main defensive works on the main route into the Val-de-Ruz, a fertile valley.

Matiles became local governmental officials, farmers, and, yes, Swiss watchmakers. In 1867, for reasons no one in the family ever recorded, my great-grandfather, Henri Francois Matile decided to immigrate to the United States with his wife and children. They first settled in Erie, Pennsylvania where my grandfather, William Matile, was born. Shortly afterwards, the family, strangely enough, moved west to the area near the eastern Kansas hamlet of Wellsville. Granted, land was cheap in the Kansas of the 1870s, but a spot more different from the Val-de-Ruz valley of Neuchâtel could hardly be found. There, Henri Francois farmed outside of town and made and repaired watches in his Wellsville shop. I still have a few of his watchmaking tools.

My grandfather married and settled on a farm just south of Emporia, Kansas and there my father lived until about 1919 when the combination of the post-World War I farm depression and the increasingly severe dust storms persuaded him to head east to Illinois to find work. Which he found, along with my mother and a new farming community to call home—and where I still live today.

Here in Illinois, we have a special fondness for President Abraham Lincoln, the Springfield lawyer and 16^th President of the United States who refused to acquiesce to Southern blackmail over the slavery question, and who fought a bloody war to keep the Union strong and undivided.

And strangely enough, it seems one of my distant cousins, Gustave Matile, served for a few months as one of Lincoln’s private secretaries during the Civil War. How that happened is a bit of historical serendipity itself. And how Gustave added an interesting chapter to the lore of Abraham Lincoln is another.

Gustave Eugene Matile was born Aug. 11, 1839 in the Canton of Neuchatel, Switzerland. Neuchatel, as I noted above, is the homeland of the “modern” Matile family.

George Agustus Matile, Gustave’s father, was a well-known Swiss academic. Among other luminaries, he was a good friend of Louis Agassiz, a fellow native of the French-speaking portion of Switzerland who science historians have dubbed one of the founding fathers of the American scientific tradition (he’s also an ancestor of tennis legend Andre Agassiz).

George Matile taught history at the University of Neuchatel as well as in other European universities before immigrating to the U.S. with his family in 1849. That branch of the family settled in New York State. He had two sons who made names for themselves, Gustave and Leon Albert. Gustave, we’ll get to in a minute. Leon Albert enlisted in the Union Army, served as a private during the Civil War and subsequently served during the Plains Indian Wars and in the Spanish American War, eventually retiring as a brigadier general.

George mostly worked for the U.S. Government with the exception of one year during which he worked as an “antiquarian” for the museum at Princeton University in New Jersey. After Lincoln’s election, George served as an advisor to Secretary of State William H. Seward, who he met while participating in New York Republican politics.

It’s likely George, with his connection to Seward, was able to get Gustave, who had just turned 21when the Civil War began, a job as a clerk at the Interior Department. Then, as now in Washington, it was who, not what, you knew that counted when seeking a job. Gustave apparently read law during his government service as well as carrying out whatever duties he was assigned at the Interior Department.

In 1863, the Lincoln Administration was not only fully engaged in fighting the Civil War, but it was also trying to start Lincoln’s reelection campaign. Today’s giant Presidential staff did not exist at the time, and, in fact, Lincoln’s staff consisted, essentially, of just two men. John Nicolay and John Hay. The two young men from Illinois loyally served Lincoln throughout his Presidency. But in 1863, with the press of campaigning, they needed some help with the day-to-day business of the office of the President. So they apparently put out feelers for a dependable temporary assistant, and Gustave’s name popped up.

Unofficially, Gustave was seconded from Interior to be employed as Hay’s undersecretary. While Nicolay was away on campaign and other business, Matile and Hay carried on the Administration’s staff work, the kind of work that now employs hundreds of people.

Because his transfer was unofficial and temporary, Matile’s name apparently does not appear on the White House employment roster. One of the only clues he worked for Hay at all is a passing reference in an Oct. 10, 1864 note from Hay to Nicolay published in Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay, compiled by Tyler Dennett and published in 1939. Wrote Hay: “Here are your mails for this morning. We are very busy. Mr. Matile is sick.”

And then, of course, there’s the Lincoln fingerprint.

A copy of the note Gustave sent along with Lincoln’s autograph and fingerprint to Samuel Holmes in 1864. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.

In late August 1864, Samuel Newell Holmes, one of Matile’s New York friends wrote to him asking if he could get an autograph from the President. Agreeable with doing a friend a favor, Gustave went ahead and asked the President. The accommodating Lincoln dipped his pen in his inkwell and signed his familiar “A. Lincoln” autograph on a scrap of paper and gave it back to Matile. But when he signed, Lincoln’s pen apparently left a drop of ink on the scrap, and as he handed the scrap back to Matile, Lincoln left his thumbprint in the ink on the paper.

When Matile sent the autograph back to Holmes, he included a short note explaining that the fingerprint inkblot was Lincoln’s: “The finger marks are also his. They will do as the olden times seals that were made by impressing the thumb on the wax.”

Holmes kept the autograph and passed it to his daughter when he died. It was sold upon her death and was acquired in 1949 by William A. Steiger, a Springfield, Illinois Lincoln collector. In 1953, Steiger sent our family a letter seeking information on Gustave, but since he was only a distant cousin of our branch and from the New York branch of the family to boot of which none of the Kansas Matiles even knew about, my parents were of no help.

Clipping from the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Jan. 28, 1957 illustrating the Lincoln fingerprint obtained by Gustave Matile.

For his part, Gustave continued reading law after the war and became a lawyer. He moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1865 where he practiced law. He also practiced law in Minneapolis and Duluth, Minnesota before moving back to Green Bay where he was appointed to the federal bench. There, he served as U.S. Court Commissioner for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. He was a member of the Wisconsin Bar and the Brown County Bar Association in Wisconsin and also served a stint as the Swiss counsel at Green Bay.

A cigar smoker, he died of cancer on June 17, 1908. The Green Bay Gazette, in Matile’s obituary, described him as “one of the best known lawyers who practiced during Green Bay’s early history.”

As a side note, when Gustave died, he left some of his possessions to the Green Bay public library. One of those possessions was an autographed photograph of Lincoln and his son, Tad. Only two original prints of the image are known to exist. The photograph was sold to a community group in 2006 as part of a collection of other historic materials, including a painting by the famous artist Howard Pyle, from the library for $1.2 million. The collection is on permanent loan to the Brown County, Wisconsin historical society where portions of it are occasionally placed on exhibit.

Today, while periodic questions arise about them, the Lincoln autograph and fingerprint firmly reside in the collections of the Illinois State Historical Society, proof positive that some mistakes, even ink blots, can have a historical value all their own.

The history of getting hitched around these parts has ranged from fleeing in terror to public entertainment

On May 1, 1831, young Edward G. Ament and Emily Ann Harris were married by pioneer Methodist Missionary Rev. Isaac Scarritt, and thereby became the first couple to be wed within the bounds of what eventually became Kendall County.

From that time on, weddings multiplied as the frontier first caught up to the lands along the Fox River here in northern Illinois, and then moved on ever farther west until the nation’s boundaries reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Rev. Scarritt had arrived in Illinois from Connecticut in 1818—the year the state was officially established by an act of Congress—first setting in Edwardsville before being assigned to take over dissolving the Methodists’ Fox River Mission in 1828. The joint Methodist-U.S. Government mission had been established on the Fox River at the mouth of Mission Creek in modern LaSalle County just south of the current Kendall County line. After winding up the mission’s affairs, Scarritt moved with his family to what is today’s DuPage Township in Will County, building his cabin near the forks of the DuPage River.

Scarritt was appointed the first justice of the peace in the area and so was the closest legal authority to legally conduct the Ament-Harris marriage. The U.S. has always maintained a somewhat curious official attitude towards marriage. It has always been considered a binding legal contract between two people (and, by association, their families), and so unlike births and deaths records of them have always been carefully kept. A legal marriage conducted by a justice of the peace or other officer of the court does not need a religious blessing to be legal. Nor does a religious wedding conducted by a minister or briest need to be blessed by an officer of the government. But both are considered to be legal unions in the eyes of the law.

So with Edward and Emily Ann’s marriage conducted by Isaac Scarritt, who was both a Methodist minister of the gospel and a justice of the peace, their union was doubly safe.

Just a few days after the young couple was married, the Black Hawk War broke out, and all the White settlers in the Fox, DuPage, and Des Plaines valleys fled for their lives, those on the northern reaches of the streams heading first to the cabin of Stephen Beggs—another Methodist missionary making his home where Plainfield is located today—and those on the southern reaches of the rivers getting to Ottawa as quickly as possible.

In an interesting note on the living conditions of those early settlers on the Illinois prairie, Scarritt left his claim so quickly he didn’t have time to grab a pair of shoes, suggesting a lot of those settlers went barefoot in warmer weather to save expensive footwear. The tradition is that when he eventually got to Chicago’s Fort Dearborn and safety, he was asked to preach a Sunday sermon for which he had to borrow a pair of shoes to avoid the embarrassment of speaking to a crowd shoeless.

As for Edward and Emily Ann, early Kendall County historian the Rev. E.W. Hicks dryly reported “…they took their wedding trip two weeks afterward, when they fled from the Indians.”

And then there was the no less interesting wedding when early Montgomery settler William T. Elliott decided to marry the lovely Rebecca Pearce, daughter of Elijah Pearce, a member of the numerous extended Pearce family that also were the first settlers here in Oswego Township.

This plaque near the Dieterle Memorial Home in Montgomery marks Elliott Creek where William Elliott built the cabin he and Rebecca Pearce Elliott called home. (Montgomery Patch photo)

Seventeen year-old Rebecca was more than willing to marry Elliott, a 19 year-old go-getter. But her father, when asked, was not yet willing to let the young lady leave his household. At that time, 1834, neither Kane nor Kendall County had yet been established, and the nearest place to get legally married was Ottawa. So Elliott walked the roughly 40 miles where the county clerk told him that since Rebecca was only 17, the bans would have to be announced in a church for two weeks before a license could be issued.

With no churches yet established in the Fox Valley, Elliott despondently trudged back upriver to Montgomery. But shortly before he reached his cabin, he happened on the Rev. N.C. Clark, one of the region’s earliest Congregational ministers, known by one and all as “the kindly Father Clark.” After hearing Elliott’s story, Rev. Clark suggested that on Sunday Elliott come over to the Naperville cabin where Clark’s nascent congregation was meeting, and announce the bans. Rev. Clark said he’d take care of making sure the second announcement was made as well.

In the meantime, Elijah Pearce had heard that the bans had been announced over in Naperville, but was under the impression they’d only been announced once. Thinking he had an entire week to go over to Naperville to protest on the second reading—which had already taken place—Pearce headed into Chicago for supplies. Meanwhile Elliott had hustled back down to Ottawa, obtained, the marriage license from the LaSalle County Clerk, hustled back upriver to Montgomery where Rev. Clark happily married William and Rebecca.

Elijah was reportedly pretty upset when he got back from Chicago to find his daughter was now Mrs. Elliott, but after a night’s sleep decided maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to happen. And thereby on Aug. 3, 1835, William and Rebecca’s marriage became the first in what eventually became Aurora Township.

Tom (Charles Sherwood Stratton) Thumb’s wedding to bride Lavinia Warren on Feb. 10, 1863 at Grace Episcopal Church in New York City proved a wild financial success for showman P.T. Barnum, Stratton’s boss. Eventually, Stratton financially bailed Barnum out and the two became partners. (Costume Cocktail image)

Over the next several decades, weddings became quite a bit less exciting, with no Indian wars to cope with and a much shorter walk to the county seat to get a license. Church weddings gradually more popular, although marriages at home and in church parsonages seem to have been more the rule than the exception until after World War II when more elaborate marriages became the norm.

And, in fact, weddings eventually became the basis for some popular—if fairly unusual—community fundraisers in the early years of the 20^th Century.

In the Feb. 25, 1914 Kendall County Record, the Oswego Parent-Teachers Club—ancestor of today’s PTAs and PTOs—announced plans to present a Tom Thumb Wedding fundraiser. Tom Thumb Weddings had been developed as comedic musical entertainment events with a community’s school children playing the parts of the groom and bride—based on the 1863 marriage of P.T. Barnum’s diminutive cast member, the wildly popular Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton) and his real life bride Lavinia Warren—as well as a large cast of other members of the wedding party and guests.

Photographer Dwight Young snapped this photo of the 1914 “Tom Thumb Wedding” performance in downtown Oswego’s Woodmen’s Hall. (Little White School Museum collection)

Performances of Tom Thumb Wedding fundraisers began in the 1890s in Pennsylvania, but then gradually spread as their success began to become more widely known. As an indication of the productions’ rising popularity, Walter H. Baker & Co. of Boston, Massachusetts published “The Tom Thumb wedding” script in 1898. Concerning the cast according to the Baker script, “there should be a minister, bride and groom, maid of honor, groomsman, father and mother, bridesmaids, ushers, guests, and flower girls.”

A Tom Thumb Wedding script published in 1895 by Eldridge Entertainment House, Inc. of Franklin, Ohio and Denver, Colorado.

The Oswego performance was an apparent success, the next week’s Record reporting: “The Tom Thumb wedding at the Woodman Hall Tuesday evening was well attended and a pleasant affair. Clement Burkhart as groom and Gladys Parkhurst as the bride, with their attendants made an interesting bridal party. Too much credit cannot be given all those participating.”

Apparently adults couldn’t wait to get in on the mock wedding fun, and within a few years, “womanless weddings” became popular amateur fundraising events where prominent local business owners and other luminaries—all men—dressed in costume and participated in the all-male events. The events proved popular in the Midwest during the years of the Great Depression.

On Feb. 19, 1930, the Record announced that “The XIX Century club of Oswego have procured the services of the Sympson Levi Producing company of Bardstown, Ky. to stage “The Womanless Wedding,” which has been put on so successfully in our neighboring towns. The dates will be March 17 and 18.”

The all-male cast of the 1930 Oswego “Womanless Wedding” production performed twice on successive nights in March 1930 on stage in the Red Brick School gym. (Little White School Museum collection)

According one script, “As title indicates, no women are to be used in this play, unless desired. Special care should be exercised in the selection of the cast. Use prominent men. Men taking ladies’ parts should wear ladies’ shoes if possible.  A small groom and large bride will prove effective. Have costumes and stage effects as elaborate as possible. An altar draped in red, white and blue is appropriate.”

Unlike the Tom Thumb Weddings, a professional director came as part of the production and there was little music and much more dialog by the characters in Womanless Wedding scripts, including racist depiction in blackface by Black participants.

By all accounts, the community found the production highly entertaining, especially given the prominence of men portraying the cross-dressing “women” in the cast.

The cast of the 1930 “Womanless Wedding” presented on stage in the Red Brick School gym included about every prominent man and boy in Oswego, from schoolboys to bankers to doctors. (Little White School Museum collection)

Reported the March 26, 1930 Kendall County Record: “The Womanless Wedding” has passed into history. It was one of the most talked of and enjoyable events in Oswego for some time. Many were unable to obtain seats. The parts were very well taken.”

In fact, the community had such a good time, they decided to produce their own version of the production, although this time not a wedding spoof. The Record’s Oswego correspondent reported on Jan. 27, 1937 that “The womanless play, “Ladies for a Night,” given at the high school gym last Thursday and Friday, netted nearly $100 and everyone a lot of fun.” It doesn’t sound like a lot to us today, but back during the late Depression years, $100 was pretty big money—roughly $2,000 in 2022 dollars.

These days, although some communities still do produce variations on Tom Thumb Weddings, the political struggle over LGTBQ rights have pretty much put paid to womanless wedding productions. And when it comes to actual marriages, “destination weddings” seem to be all the rage nowadays, with people dragging friends and relatives all over the country and even off to foreign climes to witness two people getting hitched for better or worse. The good news is at least most of those newly married couples won’t spend their honeymoons fleeing to the nearest fort.

If you’re interested in chatting about some more entertaining Oswego wedding history, don’t miss Little White School Museum Manager Anne Jordan’s next History Happy Hour at the Fox Valley Winery (in the old Main Street fire station), set for 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 8. Residents of the Oswegoland Park District can register for $15 and non-residents for $25–registration includes one glass of wine to enjoy during the evening’s discussion about Oswego wedding history. Preregistration is required by calling the park district at 630-554-2999 or visit their web site at https://www.oswegolandparkdistrict.org/.

The food’s the thing, no matter what season it is

The phenomenon of working mothers seems considered by many to be a relatively new one, but anyone who grew up on a farm lived with a working mother, whether she left the farm to work part- or full-time in an office or factory or whether she raised chickens to sell eggs, gardened, and did the other things farm wives and mothers do.

My wife and I are, I understand from stories that pop up from time to time, unusual in that both of us grew up in 1950s households where our mothers held full-time jobs outside the home—both working as small business bookkeepers.

I got to thinking about the subject because of food. My wife suggests this is the usual motivation for my thought process on virtually any subject. Take Delaware: crab boil. The Chesapeake Bay area: crab cakes. Columbus, Ohio: Schmidt’s German Restaurant. Missouri: barbecue. Kansas City: Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue (Bryant’s is to barbecue as Tiffany is to diamond watches—only more so). Iowa: Maid-Rites; Ottumwa, IA: Canteens (which are to Maid-Rites as Bryant’s BBQ is to a McRib). California: don’t go there; they can’t even make decent pizza.

Our farm out in Wheatland Township a few years before we moved.

So anyway, I was thinking about food. My wife, during her working years as an elementary school learning center director, perfected cooking supper in no more than 20 minutes, and even better, making things we both really liked.

After my family moved off the farm to town back in 1954, my mother, on the other hand, prepared food that was virtually identical to the things we ate when we lived on the farm, despite working a full 40-hour week. No one ever accused my wife of being a sluggard, but my mother was a sort of human dynamo who took her housework duties very seriously indeed and who loved cooking, eating and get this—washing dishes!

Somehow, every morning before I left for school, she cooked a full breakfast: cereal, eggs, bacon, toast, juice…the works. That, of course, was left over from our days on the farm. Back in those days, my folks got up early, dad off to feeding livestock and milking our cow (when we had one) and my mom down to the kitchen where she baked a pie and started preparing breakfast for my dad, my two sisters and me, so that my sisters could catch the bus for school. By the time my dad came in to eat, he’d already been up for a couple hours doing hard work, and he was hungry. A full breakfast always included pie for dessert. Because we always had dessert.

Somehow, somebody got my mom to stop for a moment for this photo taken at my folks’ 25th anniversary celebration after we moved into town. Those are my two sisters and my dad, with me in the middle looking for some cake.

At noon, there was no lunch on the farm—dinner was at noon. After we moved to town, I was surprised to find that city folks called their evening meal dinner. It was supposed to be called supper, of course. Dinner was at noon. After all, “Dinner Bell Time,” the popular farm radio show on WLS radio out of Chicago, wasn’t called “Lunch Bell Time,” was it? And the “Suppertime Frolic” that my sisters listened to on WJJD every evening as they were doing dishes was at night and it certainly wasn’t called “Dinnertime Frolic.”

Supper was often left-overs from dinner. A lunch was something you had after school or before you went to bed to stave off starvation until it was time to get up and start doing chores again.

After we moved to town, mom still cooked those full breakfasts, so I went to school well filled with good food like all the experts say you’re supposed to. When I left the house every morning, all the dishes were done, and the kitchen nicely tidied up as mom left for her office job and dad headed off to sell livestock feed to farmers. Mother cooked dinner at night after we moved to town, although the number of full course meals was cut down. But she liked to eat, as did my father, although he lived with serious health problems most of his life. With all the pain and discomfort, eating was one thing he could still enjoy without reservation.

We moved off the farm into this house, built in 1908 by my great-grandparents.

So in the late 1950s, those non-working mothers on “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” were not what I experienced. Instead, my mother worked outside the home, and then came home to work much the same way she had on the farm. She still canned fruit and vegetables in summer, cleaned house, washed the family’s clothes, and cooked, all at top speed.

Modern moms work hard too, and have even more going on because there is so much more for their kids to be involved in. Just go to the grocery store on a Friday night and watch the working moms trudge in and out, leaning forward as if struggling against a stiff wind, slowed by a week’s worth of hard work and the prospect of a weekend trying to catch up.

A time to honor the nation’s veterans…

The Little White School Museum, here in Oswego, is once again hosting their “Remembering Our Veterans” exhibit to honor those who’ve served during the nation’s wars. This year’s exhibit, curated by Bob Stekl, the museum’s former volunteer assistant director, will run from Nov. 11-28, plus a special members-only Oswego Chamber of Commerce preview on Wednesday morning, Nov. 10.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event had to be canceled last year, but this year’s exhibit will once again fill the museum’s main room with uniforms, equipment, souvenirs, photographs, and documents related to the military service of Oswego area residents.

A special exhibit-with-the-exhibit each year is the commemoration of the community’s residents who were killed in action from the Civil War through the present day. I thought explaining who these young men were and how they died might be a good way to memorialize their service, with Veterans Day—and the exhibit—nearly here. So here’s the honor roll of our community’s residents who gave their full measure to defending our nation:

Civil War

Seventeen year-old Alfred X. Murdock enlisted in the late summer of 1862 when Oswego businessman William F. Fowler recruited what eventually became Company A, 127th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. The company was comprised mostly of Oswego men and boys.

Alfred X. Murdock

The 127th participated in some of the fiercest combat in the western theatre of operations, including the Battle of Arkansas Post and the Siege of Vicksburg. Murdock was on hand for the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863. On the day of the surrender, Murdock wrote his parents in Oswego:

“This is the greatest day of the year, and we had ought to celebrate it with new vigor and honor….This is the hardest blow that has been struck for the Rebels. With Vicksburg in our hands Port Hudson must surly fall and then the Miss. River will be open… I hope this war will soon end and we can go home—what is left of us.”

By the end of the battle, the entire 127th Infantry, originally nearly 1,000 strong, only had 50 men fit for duty, the others either dead or recovering from wounds or sickness.

As the sick and wounded gradually filtered back, the 127th continued more hard campaigning through Mississippi and Tennessee, including the Chattanooga-Ringgold Campaign and the relief of Gen. Burnside, who was besieged by Gen. James Longstreet at Knoxville, Tenn.

In May 1864, the 127th was assigned to Sherman’s effort to capture Atlanta, fighting in the battle of Resaca, May 8-13. As the Atlanta campaign ground on the 127th saw much more action, including the Battle of Atlanta on July 22. Then on July 28, at a place outside Atlanta called Ezra Church, Confederate John Bell Hood assaulted the far right of the Union line, a position held by the 127th. By that time, there were only eight soldiers out of the original 109 in Company A fit for duty and in the desperate fighting, two were killed—Alfred X. Murdock and William Pooley. Murdock was buried on the battlefield, but later his body was removed and taken to Oswego where he is buried in the Oswego Township Cemetery.

William Pooley and his brother, John, were recruited by Capt. William Fowler when he formed Company A, 127th Illinois Volunteer Infantry in and around Oswego in August 1863. The brothers had immigrated from England with their parents and their nine siblings in 1855, settling at Oswego where the brothers’ grandparents had settled in 1841.

William Pooley

The Pooley brothers’ father, William, was a blacksmith, a trade his son, William, also followed, John farmed. When the pair enlisted, William was 23 and John was just 18.

The 127th Illinois saw hard soldiering starting shortly after the regiment’s formation. After being sworn into Federal service in September 1862, the regiment was detailed as prisoner-of-war guards at Camp Douglas near Chicago before being sent south to fight.

John Pooley died in a military hospital at Memphis, Tennessee on March 16, 1863 after participating in action in Mississippi and Arkansas.

William soldiered on as the 127th marched and fought with Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee throughout the middle South, surviving battles at Jackson, Mississippi, Champion’s Mill, and the siege of Vicksburg.

After Vicksburg fell on July 4, 1863, Sherman turned his attention towards the Confederate stronghold at Atlanta. From May to November, Sherman’s Union Army fought dozens of actions ranging from skirmishes to full-blown battles.

At the Battle of Ezra Church south of Atlanta on July 28, Confederate General John Bell Hood attempted to outflank the Union Army. The 127th Illinois formed the right end of the Union line, and Hood’s attack nearly overwhelmed the few soldiers still fit for duty. The timely arrival of reinforcements, led to the 127th position by 15 year-old Oswegoan Robinson Barr Murphy, saved the Union line from disaster.

But during the battle, William Pooley was killed, along with his fellow Oswegoan, Alfred X. Murdock. For his efforts to save the Union line, Murphy was awarded the Medal of Honor, the only Kendall County resident ever to have earned the honor.

Johann Wilhelm Schoger was the first child born to Georg Michael Schoger, Jr. and his second wife, Eva Maria Brunner on April 15, 1841 in the village of Marktlustenau in the Crailsheim District, Kingdom of Wuerttemberg, Germany.  George Michael had 13 sons, 10 of whom were named Johann and all of whom therefore went by their middle names. 

William Shoger

The family farmed in and around Marktlustenau. In 1854, at age 13, Johann Wilhelm emigrated to the United States with two older brothers, John Frederick, 20, and John Andrew, 17, to Oswego, Illinois. They made the crossing together with three cousins as a scouting party to meet Brunner relatives living in the Oswego area. Once in Kendall County, they searched for likely places for their father to locate, and selected land on the border of Bristol and Oswego townships, just west of the village.

Their reports of good land to be had led to the arrival in 1856 of nine remaining members of the Georg Michael Schoger Jr. family. Upon arrival, most of the family Anglicized their names, with Johann Wilhelm Schoger becoming William Shoger.

After the Civil War broke out, William traveled to Joliet and on May 14, 1861 enlisted for a three-year hitch in Company K, 20th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. At his enlistment, he was described as 5 feet, 9 inches tall with dark hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion.

The 20th Illinois saw some of the fiercest combat of the war, including fights in Missouri, the campaigns to capture Forts Henry and Donelson in Mississippi, the Battle of Shiloh, and the grueling Vicksburg campaign. William was killed in action May 12, 1863 along with two of his friends at the Battle of Raymond as Gen. U.S. Grant tightened the noose around the fortress city of Vicksburg. Reported his friend, Andrew Brown in his 1894 history of Company K, “Comrades [Israel] Waters, Shoger and [David] Barrows were at my right [at the Battle of Raymond]. They were all shot through the head and, when killed, lay touching each other.” Brown helped bury the three near where they fell on the Raymond battlefield. Later, William’s family erected a monument to his memory in the Oswego Township Cemetery. In addition, they sponsored a stained glass window in his memory when the new German Evangelical Church–now the Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist–was built in Oswego in 1896.

World War I

Pvt. Archie Lewis Lake served in the 97th Company, 6th Regiment, 2nd U.S. Marine Division. He was killed in action during the Aisne-Marne Offensive in France on July 19, 1918.

Archie Lake was born in Oswego on Aug. 5, 1893. His father, Archibald “Archie” Lake was a barber in Oswego, whose mother was a member of the prominent Fox family in Oswego. Throughout his childhood, as his father moved to find better business opportunities, Archie frequently visited his Oswego relatives. In addition, the family occasionally lived in Oswego. In 1905, the elder Archie Lake was serving as Oswego Township Clerk as well as working in the Figge Barbershop in town. The family moved to LaGrange in August 1907, and that’s where Archie Lake was living when he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I.

During the Aisne-Marne Offensive the U.S. 2nd Division, including the Marine Brigade, was attached to the French XX Corps to conduct a counterattack near Soissons about 75 miles northeast of Paris in mid-July 1918. The 6th Regiment was held in reserve when the initial assault waves went over the top on July 18. The next day, July 19, the 6th Marines advanced alone from Vierzy toward Tigny, but it was stopped short of the objective by intense artillery and machine gun fire. It was during this assault that 24 year-old Archie Lake was killed in action.

6th Marine casualties were estimated at 50–70%. First Lt. Clifton B. Cates (a future commandant of the Marine Corps) reported to headquarters that only about two dozen of more than 400 men survived, adding: “… There is no one on my left, and only a few on my right. I will hold.”

Regimental losses during the Aisne-Marne Offensive numbered 1,431; July 19, 1918 was the single costliest day of fighting in the history of the 6th Marine Regiment.

Pvt. Archie Lake was buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in Fere-en-Tardenois, France. After the war, a memorial marker was placed in the Oswego Township Cemetery by his family.

World War II

Frank Clauser was born in Oswego in 1912. He grew up in Oswego and attended Oswego High School, where he excelled in football. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in April 1942, and moved up through the ranks to staff sergeant.

Sgt. Frank Clauser

After basic and advanced training, Clauser was assigned to the newly activated 438th Bomb Squadron, part of the 319th Bomb Group. Clauser was trained, and when the 438th received its B-26 Marauder aircraft, he became an engineer-gunner. Designed and built by the Martin Aircraft Corporation, the B-26 was a medium bomber with a range of 1,100 miles and a top speed of 310 mph carrying a bomb load of 5,200 lbs. It was also armed with 11 .50 cal. machine guns.

The men of the 319th Bomb Group trained with their B-26’s as low-level raiders, and then flew their aircraft to England in September 1942 before flying on to North Africa to operate against Italian and German forces.

In February of 1943 the 438th was re-trained to bomb from medium levels and then went into action against Italian targets across the Mediterranean. On Aug. 22, 1943, the 438th was assigned to attack railroad marshaling yards at Salerno, just down the coast from Naples, Italy.

The B-26 Invader’s crew consisted of Lt. William Brown, pilot; co-pilot 2nd Lt. Richard Lobdell, navigator/bombardier 2nd Lt. Charles McVaughan; radio operator and waist gunner Staff Sgt. Alfred Conz,; tailgunner Staff Sgt. Sidney Gibbs, and engineer and turret gunner Staff Sgt. Frank Clauser. During the raid, Sgt. Clauser’s plane was attacked by several German fighters and shot down. According to an eyewitness account, the plane crashed into the Mediterranean and there were no survivors.

Sgt. Clauser’s name is inscribed on The Wall of the Missing in the North Africa American Cemetery in Tunisia, along with the names of 3,723 other missing U.S. servicemen.

Kay Ivan Fugate was born November 16, 1917 in North Dakota to Ivan and Sylvia (Shoger) Fugate. He grew up on the Fugates’ North Dakota farm, but maintained close ties to his relatives, the extended Shoger family living in and around Oswego. As a child, he traveled to Oswego frequently to visit, particularly with his grandmother, Mary (Stacy) Shoger, who continued to live in Oswego after her husband, William’s, death in 1912.

Kay Ivan Fugate

Fugate enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1940 at Aurora, Illinois, and was eventually stationed aboard the battleship USS Nevada.

Launched in 1914, the Nevada was a leap forward in battleship technology for the U.S. Navy. In fact, three of her new features would be included on almost every subsequent US battleship: triple gun turrets, oil in place of coal for fuel, and geared steam turbines for greater range and speed. Serving briefly during World War I protecting convoys to England, the Nevada was assigned to the Pacific Fleet and was based at Pearl Harbor.

When the Japanese attacked the Pearl Harbor fleet base on Dec. 7, 1941, the Nevada was the only U.S. battleship to get underway. Although she managed to get away from “Battleship Row,” the Nevada was hit by at least one torpedo and six bombs. Her crew beached her to keep her from sinking and blocking Pearl Harbor’s main ship channel. Seaman First Class Kay Fugate was one of 69 killed and 109 wounded in action aboard the Nevada during the Japanese attack.

The Kendall County Record reported from Oswego in their Jan. 28, 1942 edition that: “Mrs. Mary Shoger received a message telling of the death of her grandson, Kay Fugate, 24 years old, who was killed in action at Pearl Harbor. He enlisted two years ago in Aurora.”

Kay Fugate is buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Honolulu, Hawaii.

The Nevada was raised, repaired, and returned to fight to the end of World War II. She was sunk after the war in July 1946 as part of Operation Crossroads, the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.

Elwyn Holdiman was born on the farm his father was renting in Oswego Township on Jan. 22, 1920. He attended Squires School, a rural one-room school at the intersection of Douglas Road and U.S. Route 34 just east of Oswego, and also worked for various farmers around the Oswego area. On Jan. 21, 1942, the Kendall County Record’s “Oswego” news column reported that: “Oswego men selected for induction from the local draft included Cecil E. Carlson, Paul T. Krug, John Lewis, Elwyn Holdiman, and Charles Sleezer.”

Elwyn Holdiman

After basic training, Pvt. Holdiman was assigned to the tank corps and was trained as a gunner on the M-4 Sherman Tank, the standard U.S. tank of World War II.

He was sent to Company C, in the 17th Tank Battalion, part of the brand new 7th Armored Division, activated at Camp Polk, Louisiana, under command of Gen. Lindsay Silvester on March 1, 1942. The division trained in Louisiana and Texas through early November 1942 and then underwent desert training in California. Then it was back east for more training at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Along the way, Pvt. Holdiman was promoted to Corporal Holdiman.

On June 6, 1944, the day the Allies waded ashore on the beaches at Normandy, Elwyn Holdiman and the rest of the men of the 7th Armored Division were embarking on the SS Queen Mary in New York harbor for a fast trip across the Atlantic to England. After final training in England, they boarded landing craft for Normandy, and landed on Omaha and Utah Beaches, Aug. 13-14. There, they were assigned to Gen. George S. Patton’s newly activated U.S. Third Army. The division drove through Nogent-le-Rotrou to take Chartres on Aug. 18, then on to Verdun, and finally across the Moselle River.

In late September, the 7th Armored Division was tasked with supporting Operation Market Garden, the combined arms invasion of the Netherlands recounted in the movie, “A Bridge Too Far.” From Sept. 29 to Oct. 6, they fought in the Battle for Overloon and from Oct. 7-26 were in action around Griendtsveen and patrolling around Ell-Weert-Meijel-Deurne, before they were engaged in the Battle of the Canals starting Oct. 27.

In a tank battle on Oct. 29 against German armored forces a couple miles from Heusden west of the Asten/Meijel Road, Cpl. Holdiman’s Sherman tank was destroyed by enemy fire, killing him in action. His parents, Albert and Hazel Holdiman, were first notified that he was missing in action before they finally learned he had ben killed. The family erected a marker in the memory of his sacrifice in Lincoln Memorial Park.

Donald A. Johnson, was born in 1923. During his boyhood he lived in Oswego with his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. John Van Ault, where he attended Oswego schools before moving to Aurora, where he finished his junior year of high school. The lanky 6-footer enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on Sept. 2, 1941 in Chicago, exactly three months before Pearl Harbor.

Donald A. Johnson

Johnson was assigned as a crew chief aboard a C-87 Consolidated Liberator Express, a transport modification of the Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber, in the 77th Transport Squadron, 22nd Transportation Group. The 22nd Transportation Group flew cargo “over the hump” across the Himalaya Mountains from western India to eastern China in support of Chinese forces fighting Japanese invaders.

The C-87 was an ill-fated stop-gap aircraft designed to allow the U.S. Army Air Forces to fly cargo at high altitudes. On the bomber assembly lines, C-87’s were created by eliminating the B-24’s defensive machine gun armament, replacing the nose bombardier position with a hinged door, adding a cargo door to the side, and reinforcing the floor to handle up to 12,000 lbs. of cargo. The resulting changes in the aircraft’s balance made it difficult to fly. Other problems included a clumsy flight control layout, frequent engine problems, hydraulic leaks, and frequent electrical power losses in the cockpit during takeoffs and landings. The C-87 was withdrawn as soon as sufficient C-54 and C-46 cargo aircraft were available.

But on August 9, 1943, Johnson’s C-87 was reported missing on a flight returning west from Yangkai, China to Jorhat, India.

On Aug. 25, 1943, the Kendall County Record reported in its “Oswego” news column: “Pfc. Donald A. Johnson, an Air Corps mechanic, is reported missing in action while on a flight from India to China [sic]. Donald is an Oswego boy, having been brought up by his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. John VanAult, and attending the Oswego school and East Aurora high school.”

Nothing further was heard of the plane or its five-man crew, including pilot, Capt. Tom Perry, co-pilot, First Lt. John T. Tennison, navigator, Second Lt. John W. Funk, radio operator, Staff Sgt. Alvin J. Lenox, and Johnson, the plane’s crew chief.

After the war, and as a service member declared missing in action, his name was inscribed on the “Tablets of the Missing” at Manila American Cemetery, Manila, Philippines.

On Oct. 3, 2008, independent crashed aircraft investigator Clayton Kuhles tracked down the crash site of Johnson’s aircraft. He found the C-87 had crashed into a forested mountainside at an altitude of 8,018 feet. Kuhles said the wreck is located a four-day hike southeast of Donli, Arunachal Pradesh, India. Kuhles interviewed an elderly resident of Donli who said he reached the site five days after the 1943 crash–the wreck was still smoldering–and buried the crew next to their crashed aircraft.

Stuart Amos Parkhurst was born Feb. 13, 1923 in Oswego to Clarence and Lillian (Shoger) Parkhurst. He was active in school and Presbyterian Church activities in Oswego. In November 1939, he was chosen by his high school classmates to represent the community as “Oswego Boy Mayor,” during the annual Aurora Christmas Parade. He graduated from Oswego High School in 1941.

Stuart Amos Parkhurst

He was drafted into the U.S. Army on January 21,1943 and was eventually assigned to headquarters company, 2nd Battalion, 345th Infantry Regiment, 87th “Golden Acorn” Infantry Division, where he rose to the rank of sergeant.

The regiment sailed for England aboard the Queen Elizabeth, leaving New York harbor at 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 17, 1944. On Oct. 22, the ship anchored in the Clyde River, Scotland and the 345th disembarked, traveling by train to their billet, a 20 square-mile area of England’s Midlands in the villages of Biddulph, Stone, Leek, and Peover Hall.

The regiment enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner Nov. 23, but that night the 345th moved out by train to Southampton, then marching to the docks the morning of their arrival. Within two days they arrived at St. Saens near Rouen, France greeted by rain, cold, fog, and mud.

On the morning of Dec. 15, the 345th relieved the 346th Infantry’s 1st and 2nd battalions in the vicinity of Rimling, France on the German border. The regiment’s 1st and 3rd Battalions attacked German positions that afternoon and the next day, taking heavy enemy fire. Parkhurst’s 2nd Battalion was placed in regimental reserve.

On Sunday, Dec. 17, the 2nd Battalion relieved 3rd Battalion and advanced on a densely wooded area west of Medelsheim, Germany. The initial advance went well, despite the failure of promised tank support to appear. But then, shortly before noon, the battalion ran into German machine guns supported by two tanks. Tank and machine gun fire swept the entire battalion, including the unit’s headquarters. Maj. Anthony Airoldt, battalion executive officer and Capt. Clarence Patten, battalion intelligence officer, were seriously wounded. It’s probable the heavy fire sweeping the headquarters area seriously wounded Sgt. Parkhurst—exactly two months after he had left New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth. The day was forever after known as “Bloody Sunday” to the men of the 345th Infantry.

Sgt. Parkhurst died of his wounds two days later and his body was buried in the Limey Temporary Military Cemetery at Toul, France. In 1948, at the request of his family, his body was home to Illinois, where he was buried with full military honors at the Camp Butler National Cemetery near Springfield, on Aug. 11, 1948.

From the April 24, 1946 Kendall County Record:

Second Lt. Paul Ellsworth Zwoyer Jr., 22, of Oswego, a member of the crew of a B-29 Superfortress who has been listed as missing in action for more than a year, was killed when his bomber was shot down April 15, 1945 over Toyko, according to official word received from the War department by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Paul E. Zwoyer Sr., of Oswego and his wife Mrs. Mary C. Zwoyer of Chicago.

Paul Ellsworth Zwoyer Jr.

Describing the action in which the Oswego flier lost his life, the War department letter to his wife says: “The records concerning your husband show he was a crew member of a B-29 Superfortress bomber which took off from Isley Field, Saipan, Marianas Islands, enroute to Tokyo, Japan.  The aircraft was on a night raid in which radio silence was maintained unless an emergency occurred.  No radio contact was made with the aircraft.  Two B-29 aircraft were seen to go down over the target as a result of accurate anti-aircraft fire and night fighter opposition.  One aircraft was seen to explode in midair just on the bomb run and the other was on fire and crashed after bombs away.  It is presumed that his aircraft was one of the two as no message was received from it.”

 Lt. Zwoyer, whose father is a war veteran and active in the American Legion in Kendall County, was born July 18, 1923. He graduated from Yorkville High School in 1941.  At the time of his enlistment in Company E of the 129th Infantry at Plattville, he was attending the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Missing Aircraft Report

B29 #42-65344, “Ball of Fire,” with Japanese Report information

Crash time: April 13, 1945

Crash position: Ajiki town Yaguchi Imba-gun, Chiba-pref (Now Ajiki Yaguchi, Sakaemachi, Imba-gun, Chiba-pref)

Affiliation: 879 bombing party, 499th Bomb Group, 73rd Bomb Wing, Air Force

Attack target: The Tokyo Army Factory

Cause of crash: Fighter

Nickname: Ball of Fire

Pilot RUBINSTEIN, Douglas H. first lieutenant

Copilot ZWOYER, Paul E. Jr., Second lieutenant

CROOK, Raw W., first lieutenant

WOLFE, Jack P. first lieutenant

HARTLEY, David B., first lieutenant

RYAN, John J., Second grade staff sergeant

McNAMARA, Alfred J. Second grade staff sergeant

GRAHAN, Arnold C., Technical staff sergeant

WALLACE, William T., Technical staff sergeant

TOOEY, Harold K., staff sergeant

NYATROM, George W., Second grade staff sergeant

A total of 327 B-29 bombers participated in the Friday, April 13, 1945 raid on the Tokyo Army Factory. Seven U.S. aircraft were shot down on the raid. “Ball of Fire” was attacked at about 11 p.m. over Matsudo—City, Chiba—prefecture by fighters of the 53rd Squadron, Japanese Army Air Force. “Ball of Fire” exploded in midair in an area over Ajiki town Yaguchi’s Tonegwa shore. Staff Sgt. Alfred McNamara was the only survivor. He was captured by Japanese military police and was sent to the Tokyo arm prison. He was reportedly killed in the firebombing raid of Tokyo by U.S. bombers on May 25, 1945.

Vietnam

Oswego resident E4 (Corporal) Hans Wolfgang “John” Brunner, a German national, was killed in action on March 29, 1968 at Pleiku, Vietnam by a grenade.

Hans Wolfgang “John” Brunner

Born Dec. 24, 1944 in Herford, West Germany, he immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1957 and graduated from West Aurora High in 1963. He married Patricia Kifowit June 3, 1967 and the couple moved to Oswego.

Brunner was drafted into the U.S. Army, leaving for duty just 10 days after his marriage. He served with B Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Artillery Regiment, First Field Force.

The South Vietnamese air base at Pleiku was under construction by U.S. military personnel when it was attacked by the Viet Cong on Feb. 6, 1965, which led to the commitment of U.S. ground forces to Vietnam. The 3rd Battalion, 6th Artillery was deployed to the Republic of Vietnam in 1966 as part of the initial U.S. build-up. The battalion, equipped with M108 Self-Propelled Howitzers, was based at Camp Saint Barbara (later called Artillery Hill) outside of Pleiku. Its task, along with other Army units assigned to Pleiku, was to support and protect the air base from Viet Cong attacks.

The Pleiku Air Base dispatched forward air controller missions, coordinated with South Vietnamese forces, and was a base for U.S.  special operations forces in the Central Highlands. Units from the Army, Navy, and Marines were stationed there with the Air Force, which operated and maintained the base.

E4 Brunner earned a posthumous Purple Heart, plus the Good Conduct Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, the Vietnam Campaign ribbon, and the Marksman Badge with Rifle Bar.

PFC Fred Heriaud was Kendall County’s first Vietnam War casualty, dying in battle on November 17, 1965 during the fierce Battle of the Ia Drang Valley.

Fred Heriaud

PFC Heriaud was born December 4, 1943, and lived with his family on various farms in the Yorkville and Oswego areas. He graduated from Yorkville High School. When he was drafted into the U.S. Army, his family was living on a farm at the northeast corner of the current intersection of Orchard Road and U.S. Route 34 in Bristol Township, where his siblings attended Oswego schools. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and was sent to Vietnam, arriving on August 16, 1965.

Assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division, Airmobile, he was among the troops airlifted into Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang River Valley in mid-November 1965, where U.S. forces encountered an entire regiment and elements of two additional regiments of the regular People’s Army of North Vietnam.

The battle, one of the first using the new air mobile tactics developed by the U.S. Army, was commemorated in Lt. Gen. Howard G. Moore’s book, We Were Soldiers Once – And Young, the inspiration for the 2002 motion picture, “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson.

PFC Heriaud was killed by mortar fire on the third day of intense fighting at Landing Zone X-Ray as he lay next to his buddy, Brian Ripley.

His body was recovered and sent back to the U.S. for burial. A funeral service was held December 4, 1965—he would have been 22 the day of his funeral—at the Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist in downtown Oswego. Burial at the Oswego Township Cemetery, with full military honors provided by Oswego American Legion Post 675, followed the service.

Robert Charles Rogers grew up in Wheatland Township, and attended Oswego School District schools, graduating with the Oswego High School Class of 1966.

Robert C. Rogers

He was drafted April 10, 1968, and was assigned to the 11th Light Infantry Brigade in Vietnam on Sept. 9, 1968.

Beginning in early 1967, the brigade had trained extensively in jungle operations in preparation for its role in Vietnam. To stress realism in the Vietnam-oriented tactical training, the brigade conducted live-fire operations in the rugged terrain of the Koolau Mountains on the island of Oahu.

After arriving in Vietnam and prior to joining the Americal Division, intensive training was conducted for a month. In late January 1968, upon completion of this training, the 11th Infantry Brigade moved from Landing Zone Carentan to their permanent base camp at Landing Zone Bronco, near Duc Pho.

SP4 Rogers was killed in action by mortar fire on March 19, 1969 in Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam during Phase I of Operation Iron Mountain, one of 348 U.S. servicemen to die during that phase of the operation.

The Army described the goal of Iron Mountain as conducting “unilateral and combined operations with ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] and provincial forces to find, fix and destroy enemy main force and local force units” in the area for which the 11th Light Infantry Brigade was responsible, as well as to “interdict enemy supply and communication lines” while supporting the Government of Vietnam’s Pacification and Revolutionary Development Program.

SP4 Rogers’ body was recovered and returned to the U.S. where his funeral was held on Monday, March 31, 1969, at the Wheatland United Presbyterian “Scotch” Church in Wheatland Township. He is buried in the church cemetery, just a few miles from his boyhood home.

Two of the World War II killed in action, Frank Clauser and Elwyn Holdiman, turn out to have been cousins of mine, related through my maternal grandmother. And I went to grade and high school with one of the Vietnam casualties, Bobby Rogers, who lived just across the field from our farm out in Wheatland Township.

Which really tends to bring home the effect war has on what was at the time a small farming community.

As we observe this year’s Veterans Day and take in the “Remembering Our Veterans” exhibit at the Little White School Museum it will be an excellent time to again revisit General William T. Sherman’s warning about war made in a speech to Michigan Military Academy cadets in 1879. It ought to be engraved in the halls of Congress: “You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!”

There was a time when apples were a cash crop in the Fox Valley

It’s fall here in northern Illinois, and that means it’s apple season.

Most of us figure there’s nothing quite as American as a good, fresh crisp apple. But the fact is, the eating and cooking apples we enjoy so much these days are descended from European imports. Only the lowly crabapple is actually native to North America.

The wild, ancient ancestor of virtually all of today’s apple varieties originally evolved in the mountains of Central Asia in the area today occupied by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and the Xinjiang region of China. Apples appear to have been actually cultivated first in Turkey. Alexander the Great is generally given credit for introducing the fruit to Europe.

Although not native, apples were one of the first fruit crops brought to the New World by Europeans, who heavily relied on the fruit to produce cider for drinking and vinegar for food preservation, as well as a popular fruit for eating fresh.

The first apple seeds were brought across the Atlantic to North America by French Jesuits in the late sixteenth century. The religious separatists who settled Massachusetts starting in 1620 brought apple seeds and seedlings with them and immediately began planting orchards throughout the region when they arrived.

Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore

In the 1630s, Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore advised Maryland settlers to bring with them “kernalls of pears and apples, especially of Pipins, Pearmains and Deesons, for making thereafter of Cider and Perry.” Perry is a fermented drink made from pears. According to survey records of 1644, just ten years after Lord Baltimore’s decree, more than 90 percent of Maryland’s farms had apple orchards.

Pennsylvania’s German settlers, called Pennsylvania Dutch by their English neighbors, became famous for using apples to make a wide variety of food, including apple pie and apple butter.

In the early 1800s, John Chapman, a former resident of Massachusetts and Connecticut, began planting apple seedlings throughout Ohio and, eventually, Indiana. Looked upon with affection by the early settlers of those areas, the eccentric Chapman soon received his nickname, Johnny Appleseed. In addition to planting apple orchards from seeds retrieved from cider-making operations, Chapman also planted pennyroyal, catnip, and horehound on his tree-planting journeys. Besides planting orchards in unsettled areas, Chapman also regularly returned and pruned the trees to assure their productivity.

By planting the seeds instead of reproducing them by grafting (which he opposed on religious grounds), Chapman spread a huge variety of apple trees in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and as far west as eastern Illinois. Apples do not reproduce true from their seeds, meaning seeds from, say, a Pippin, do not necessarily produce Pippins. What Chapman really did was to spread a huge variety of apple rootstock all over the areas of the then fast-growing western frontier. As a result, when settlers did arrive, they could graft on desired varieties but they could also select the best of the varieties that grew from Chapman’s random seeding.

Here in Kendall County, like every other frontier community, apple trees were prized possessions, and joined cherry and plum trees in the orchards planted by the earliest settlers.

Elvirah Walker Shumway and her husband James emigrated from Massachusetts to Kendall County in 1847, settling near her brothers, Seth and Lauriston Walker, on a farm just east of the intersection of Douglas and Simons Road in Oswego Township. On their arrival, Elvirah discovered one of the hardships she had to endure on the Illinois frontier was a serious lack of apple trees with which to produce vinegar. She didn’t let that stop her, though, from preserving food by pickling. In a letter written to her sister back in Massachusetts in September 1847, she reported she had “two three gallon pots of pickles stewing—if you ask what I do for vinegar! Oh I use whiskey and water.” Which may help explain some of those wild pioneer parties.

Apples were grown to be eaten fresh, but also to be dried for use during the Fox Valley’s long winters. The fruit was also turned into apple butter, jelly, and cider.

As the 19th Century progressed, apples became fairly big business here in Kendall County and the rest of the region. On Nov. 14, 1872, the Kendall County Record reported that “Dr. J.A. Cook has shipped 1,750 bushels of apples from his farm in Fox this fall, and made 50 barrels of cider.”

Many farmers owned their own small cider presses, but for processing serious quantities of apples, steam powered presses were used to squeeze cider out of apples.

In 1884, Kendall County produced nearly 25,000 bushels of apples according to state agricultural officials.

Cider itself, long a staple of the American diet, was served both fresh and fermented. Cider appeared on the table in virtually every American household in the first half of the 19th Century, as a good tasting and mildly alcoholic beverage enjoyed by all members of the family, no matter how young. Cider was also safer to drink than the water available in most of the era’s towns and villages.

After fermenting, hard cider was sometimes distilled into hard liquor. More often it was simply processed into applejack during the winter by allowing a keg of fermented cider to freeze, driving the alcohol to the center. The center was then tapped, producing a strong alcoholic drink.

Vinegar was the other major product made from apple cider. Since vinegar was one of the primary food preserving tools of early householders (everything from meat to vegetables to eggs were pickled in vinegar), its manufacture was an important early industry.

Besides merely reproducing popular varieties of apple trees, at least one Kendall County farmer developed his own variety. Smith G. Minkler, who farmed along what is now Minkler Road in Oswego and NaAuSay townships, perfected the Minkler Apple, and it proved to be a favorite of local orchardists. As a young man, Minkler received his first seedlings as payment for helping break prairie sod for early Kendall County entrepreneur Peter Specie. Specie apparently got the seedlings from the Detroit area’s French settlements.

Today, the Kendall County Historical Society still has a few Minkler apple trees at the Lyon Farm and Village, and there are a few Minkler apple trees still growing on area farmsteads.

Some of the apples Minkler produced were giants. The Kendall County Record reported in the fall of 1881 that apples weighing a pound each and measuring 14 inches in circumference were being picked in the Minkler orchards.

In January of 1889, Minkler printed a “Plea for an Old Orchard” in the Record. He urged county farmers to prune their trees, “plow the ground shallow” in their orchards, and then apply manure to feed the trees. “The orchard is the most abused piece of ground on the farm,” Minkler complained. “You expect it to produce a crop of apples, a crop of hay, and a pasture besides, and make no return to the land.”

A nice selection of Minkler apples from Eastman’s Antique Apples, Wheeler, Michigan. Minklers are large, juicy, and crisp, good for both eating and cider.

Apples harvested each fall were either pressed on-site in individual orchards or taken to the many local cider-pressing businesses. In the Oswego area, a number of pressing operations were in operation in the late 1800s, including at the Wormley farm on Ill. Route 31 and the Wayne farm on Ill. Route 71. In addition, Oswego businessman David Hall had two presses in operation in 1889. All were powered by small stationary steam engines.

All those apples grown in farm orchards had to be hauled to the presses by the wagonload for processing, and that offered numerous opportunities for mischief-inclined youngsters. From the Oct. 23, 1889 Record: “Owing to the making of much cider now, many loads of apples are being carried through town and whenever one is spied by the small boys, they swarm upon it filling their pockets, biting into a few, and then pelting each other with them so that the streets are strewn with apples. This raiding upon their loads causes farmers to get through town as quick as possible and Monday, as Charles Stiefbold was coming along at a trot with a load upon wish some boys jumped and by some means let down the end board, a patent device, and the first thing the owner knew was that most of the apples were strewn along the street the length of a block or more. As fathers don’t exercise the least control over their boys on the street, the formation of a society for such control would be much in order.

The cider-making season usually ran from September through November. Here’s what the Nov. 11, 1891 Record had to say about that year’s cider season in Oswego: “The end of cider making has not been reached. David Hall has made over 1,500 barrels so far…John Wormley, with his celebrated cider press, has managed to make about 1,700 barrels this season. The largest amount of cider to the bushel was made for S.B. English—from 50 bushels of Minkler apples, 252 gallons of cider was extracted.”

Much of the cider pressed locally went to make vinegar. David M. Haight, who owned the general store at the northeast comer of Washington Street (Route 34) and Main Street in Oswego, operated a large vinegar fermenting room in his store basement. One of Haight’s vinegar jugs is in the collections of the Little White School Museum in Oswego.

Nowadays, many county residents have an apple tree or two on their property, but the days when thousands of gallons of cider were processed from local trees is long gone.

This fall, some hardy folks will still press fresh cider from local apples while the rest of us pick up a gallon or so at the grocery store or a farmer’s market while we reflect on the days when the Wormleys, the Waynes, and the Halls made apples one of the county’s commercial mainstays.

Good old days: Going to the barber shop for an appendectomy

Back when I was a youngster, a guy by the name of Hal Boyle wrote a column that was syndicated by the Associated Press and which was carried in the Beacon-News up in Aurora. I liked Boyle’s column and read it regularly. Later, I found out he was an award-winning World War II correspondent who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. So, yes, I wasn’t the only one who liked Boyle’s stuff.

Every once in a while, Boyle would write a sort of trivia column with odd facts and short stories. And while I liked his regular columns, I loved those trivia pieces. I liked them so much, in fact, that when I started writing my own column, I stole the idea from him, stealing ideas being journalism’s highest form of flattery.

Back in those pre-computerized layout newspaper days, pages were physically pasted up. A few companies decided they could make a little money by supplying bits of miscellaneous information called fillers, from recipes to ads to trivia clips printed on heavy paper, ready to be clipped and waxed down on the paste-up sheet to fill in the occasional void on the page paste-up. The material was supplied free to everyone, from small weeklies to dailies, with the costs paid for by the companies whose advertising materials (which ranged from feature stories to short squibs featuring their brands) appeared in each week’s issue.

Hal Boyle’s idea of a trivia column combined with the availability of free fillers resulted in my junk mail columns—which proved popular among our paper’s readers.

So I had Hal Boyle’s idea, and a free, regular source of trivia and other basically useless information that I could use to fill a column once or so a month. Not that I didn’t like writing about local, regional, and state history, of course. But at the time besides writing my column, I was covering the local school board and other breaking news stories, editing the big pile of news releases that arrived every week, taking photos, and writing up to three editorials each week. So a trivia column gave me a bit of breathing room.

Since the trivia arrived along with all the rest of the junk mail at the newspaper, I decided to characterize the columns I wrote using that stuff as interesting bits of junk mail I’d mined out of the stack that was on my desk every week. And fortunately, the idea proved popular among the paper’s readers.

I still do one occasionally, although far less frequently since my column has been cut to twice monthly instead of weekly. But the things are fun, and I sort of miss doing them, so I thought to myself, why not do one for “History on the Fox” just for fun? And with no further ado, here’s my first junk mail blog post, which kicks off right at the start of the dog days of summer.

What, you may be wondering, are the dog days? Glad you asked. We used to joke they were they days during an Illinois summer when it was too hot for the dog to go outside. But really, the dog days are generally considered to last from about July 3 to Aug. 11 or so, and the name goes back in time to the ancients.

In the summer, Sirius, called the Dog Star, rises and sets with the sun. During late July Sirius is closest in motion with the sun, so the ancients, not having a concept of how far away other stars are from our own, believed that Sirius’s heat added to the heat of the sun. That, they believed, created a stretch of hot and sultry weather, which they named the “dog days” after Sirius, the Dog Star.

But July isn’t only famous as the start of the dog days. Lots of other stuff, as I’m sure you know, happened in July. For instance, on July 8 in 1777 Vermont abolished slavery. The temperature hit 134 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley on July 10, 1913. The first man landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—NASA—was established on July 29, 1958. And also in space-related news, the Telstar communications satellite relayed the first publicly-transmitted, live trans-Atlantic television program (featuring Walter Cronkite). In something that may or may not be related, this year’s full July moon will float across the heavens on July 23 as well. And don’t forget that during the Civil War, the U.S. Army won both the battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July 1863, Vicksburg on July 4 and and Gettysburg on July 3. President Lincoln had a very good July in 1863. And let’s not forget the U.S. Post Office was established on July 26, 1775.

Where would we all be, after all, had Congress not established the U.S. Post Office? While Republicans in Congress keep trying to kill it off and replace it with expensive private contractors, the rest of us like it just fine. Because the point is that we get a lot of mail. Every day except Sunday. And some of it is actually mail we want to get. Here at History Central, I pretty much like all the mail I get, even the junk mail, because even there are a few nuggets of knowledge. In fact, here are bunch of things I never would have found out if I hadn’t opened all our mail (each and every day the mail carrier showed up out in front at our mailbox):

There are 40 spaces around a Monopoly game board, 22 of them properties. Hint: Always buy Marvin Gardens when you get the chance.

There are 40 spaces around the perimeter of the Monopoly board, and 22 of them are properties.

Before he left the boxing ring for his acting career, Tony Danza’s record as a middleweight fighter was 12 wins and three losses.

In 1964, golfer Norman Manley achieved consecutive holes-in-one on a golf course in Saugus, Calif. Both were par 4 holes, which probably means something to the golfers reading this.

On Nov. 28, 1929, Ernie Nevers of the Chicago Cardinals football team celebrated Thanksgiving Day by scoring all 40 points (six touchdowns and 4 points-after) in the Cards’ 40-6 win at old Comiskey Park.

A shark’s skeleton has no bones. It is made entirely of cartilage.

The first—and so far the only—President to be married in the White House was Grover Cleveland. During his second year in office, he married Frances Folsom, a young lady 27 years the President’s junior.

The Electoral College system of electing U.S. Presidents has enabled five candidates to become President whose opponents won the popular vote: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016.

The Great Pyramids in Egypt are the only surviving sites considered to be among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Barnacles have three stages of life. In the first, they swim, have six legs, and one eye. In the second stage, they have 12 legs and two more eyes (total three). In the third stage, they have 24 legs but lose all their eyes.

Making sense of the heat index: When the air temperature is 85 degrees, it feels like 78 when the humidity is at zero percent; 88 when the humidity is 50 percent; and 108 when the humidity is at 100 percent.

Of the 10 tallest buildings in the world, only one, New York’s One World Trade Center, is in the U.S. Of the rest, 5 are in China and one each are in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Taiwan. The world’s tallest building, measuring more than a half-mile in height at 2,717 feet, is Burj Khalifa (named after the country’s ruler) in Dubai.

Monaco has the shortest coastline—2.38 miles—of any sovereign nation that’s not landlocked.

The busiest ship canal in the world is the Kiel Canal linking the North Sea with the Baltic Sea in Germany.

The Alaska pipeline carries 2.1 million barrels of oil a day—when it’s not springing leaks—to the Valdez Oil Terminal.

A normal adult pulse rate is 70 to 78 beats per minute at rest for men and 78 to 85 for women.

The earliest known zoo was created by Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt about 1500 B.C.E. About 500 years later, the Chinese Emperor Wen Wang founded the Garden of Intelligence, a huge zoo covering 1,500 acres.

The Tarantella is a popular folk dance that gets its name from the city of Taranto, Italy. The people there used to dance the Tarantella as a supposed cure for tarantula bites. Today, of course, we know the correct dance for curing tarantula bites is the Locomotion.

The first cartoon with Democrats portrayed as donkeys was published in Harper’s Weekly by pioneering cartoonist Thomas Nast on Jan. 15, 1870.

During the 1828 presidential election, the opponents of Andrew Jackson had insultingly called him a jackass, and Jackson decided to turn the tables on those opponents. Instead of opposing the characterization, Jackson used the symbol in his campaign materials, agreeing at least in part with his opponents that he was “stubborn.” On Jan. 15, 1870, the first recorded use of a donkey cartoon to represent the Democratic Party appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The cartoon was drawn by political illustrator Thomas Nast, and was titled “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion.”

President Theodore Roosevelt designated Devils Tower National monument in northeastern Wyoming as the nation’s first national monument. Devils Tower is a volcanic tower standing 865 feet above its base, which is 415 feet high.

Almost all large metropolitan newspapers—the ones still publishing—now publish in the morning. As late as 1996, there were 846 afternoon dailies and 686 morning papers. There now about 1,260 dailies in the U.S.

Until Henry VIII passed an act separating the professions, barbers were also surgeons. After that, the only surgical operations barbers could legally perform were bloodletting and tooth-pulling. On the other hand, surgeons were no longer allowed to give anyone a shave and a haircut—even for two bits.

Finally, Jefferson Davis, the traitorous president of the Confederate States of America during the U.S. Civil War, was U.S. Secretary of War in 1853. While in office, he improved infantry tactics and brought in new and better weapons that were eventually used against him and the Confederate cause. Although briefly imprisoned, Davis never had to account for his treason that resulted in the deaths of 620,000 U.S. and Confederate soldiers, sailors, and marines.