Volume 2, Number 9 - Fall 1966
My Family
By Frances L. Hires
My father, Alvah H. Wilson, was the son of Sgt. Solomon S. Wilson, Civil war veteran of the 78th volunteer Ohio Regiment. He enlisted at Zanesville, Ohio, October 30, 1861. He fought in the battle of Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, it is sometimes called. He re-enlisted, was with General Grant’s army, with Sheridan, then with Sherman’s army in the march to the sea.
After the war he married Martha Blunt of Zanesville, Ohio. She was Pennsylvania Dutch and English descent. They had four children, three boys and one girl.
My mother was Emily Ada Kilby, third daughter of Richard Kilby and Mercy Marshall who were married in Westbury, England, March 11, 1871. After coming to America, they first lived near Navoo, Illinois. Their first two children were born there. They moved to Kansas where the other six children were born. They lived on a farm at first. There Richard grew fruit, castor beans and flax for a cash crop. Later they moved to Chanute where they built a house and Richard worked in Truet’s green house.
Two of Richard Kilby’s brothers came to America, Tom and John Kilby. Uncle Tom died and is buried in Chanute, Kansas. John Kilby came to Taney county with the family. Richard and John Kilby drove two wagons through, bringing the three older girls, Flo, Nellie, and Emily along with household goods, meat, barrels of dried fruit and a cow. Mercy Kilby came on the train with the three younger children, John, Violet, and Alice.
Grandfather had bought the place at Taney City, now known as the Harry Bennett farm. There he started his nursery. Finding the ground rough he later bought a small tract of land in south Taneyville where the nursery stock flourished, where every kind of fruit tree, berry bushes, currants, and always an acre of strawberries grew. He propagated two new strawberries, called the "Truets Surprise" and "Senator Dunlap", both very good shippers.
My parents, Alvah H. Wilson and Emily Kilby, were married on July 4, 1895 at the Kilby home in Taney City. They had three children. These were: Eva May, Richard Solomon, who died in infancy in 1900, and Frances Leorah was born on the Wilson Homestead 3½ miles east of Taneyville, now a part of the Mark Twain National forest.
Oh the Homestead, Alvah Wilson built a lime kiln and with the help of Bert Stout, they burned lime. They hauled the lime by the barrel to Forsyth, for the building of the first School of the Ozarks that later burned.
To get us girls closer to school, the homestead was sold. Then my father bought 40 acres of the Solomon Hires homestead near the Helphrey school.
Alvah Wilson was an engineer, starting in the round house in Ottawa, Kansas. He fired the boiler at the Taneyville Flour and Feed Mill and fired the boiler at the Forsyth Mill on Swan Creek, when the water would be too low to use the wheel. He was water-service man for several years on the Missouri Pacific and Iron Mountain R.R. In 1917 he and Sam Brown made the first graded road, from Bradleyville to Walnut Shade with a traction engine and road grader. He worked a few years as highway engineer at Wichita and Newton Kansas, and died on his farm east of Taneyville in 1933.
After caring for her widowed mother until her death, Emily Wilson died at the Kilby home in Taneyville in 1962.
Eva May Wilson married Henry H. Garrett, a World War I veteran, son of Louis and Elizabeth Hires. They had three children, the two girls attended high school at School of the Ozarks, their son, Jack, was in World War II. He re-enlisted and was sent to Germany for another year.
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