The Turnbo Manuscripts
by Silas Claiborne Turnbo
1844-1925
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A BEREAVED WIFE HAULS THE DEAD BODY OF HER HUSBAND
TO THE GRAVE YARD ON TRUCK WHEELS
By S. C. Turnbo
In the year 1851 Nathan Young and Annie Moriah Young, his wife,, with their children settled on Pond Fork one mile below the Rufe Haskins place in Ozark County, Missouri. Young’s wife was a daughter of Jerry Hutchison. They were married in east Tennessee and Annie Moriah was his second wife. Mr. Young was a native of Virginia, being born there soon after the closing scenes of the Revolutionary War. He and his family were living on Pond Fork at the breaking out of the War Between the States. He sympathized on the side of the stars and stripes but he was too old to serve in the army. But his age did not prevent him from suffering death from the hands of the irregulars.
Mrs. Mary Ann Sewell, daughter of Mr. Young, now the wife of Zeke Sewell and who was born on Pond Fork May the 2nd, 186o, furnished the details of her father’s death which was told her by her mother as she was too young to remember but little about it. She said that one morning in the spring of 1865 my father started out afoot to hunt the oxen which he used to plow with. He had not been gone from the house very long before a band of armed men rode up to the Yard gate and demanded the whereabouts of my father. Mother said she told them that he was not there but refused to tell them where he had went and they cursed and abused her for not telling them and ended by saying, "You shall never see his face anymore alive." John Asberry and my brother, Jerry Young, who was 14 years old and Charley Davis, all of which were only boys, were in the field at work and the ruffians went into the field where they were and told them if they did not tell them where my father was they would kill them all three immediately which frightened them so that they told them where he had gone—that he had went into the woods to drive up the oxen and give them the direction he had went and the men mounted their horses and hurried away to hunt him up. Shortly after they were gone my mother heard the report of guns and a half hour or more the same men come back and told my mother that they had killed father and went on. This occurred just two weeks before my sister Sarah was born. My poor mother and we children were in great distress. We all went out to hunt for his body but we did not succeed in finding it that day. But on the following morning my dear mother in company with old aunt Suky Asberry and Tilda Pitts found the body lying on a little bench of land on a hillside just east of Bear Hollow that runs into Pond. Fork. He had been shot 5 times. Knowing that he was dead they yoked up the oxen and hitched them to the truck cart and fastened a large wooden box on it and taken the oxen and cart with them into the woods and when they discovered the murdered remains of my father they lifted it up and placed it in the box and hauled it to the Haskins graveyard on the west side of North Fork 3 miles above the mouth of Pond Fork, where with the assistance of one man a grave was dug and the body of my dear old father was lowered into it. By this time the man was afraid to stay longer and hurried off and the women filled in the grave. My mother died in January, 1882, and is buried in the Tempy Hutchison graveyard one mile below the Haskins graveyard."
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