Volume 9, Number 7 - Spring 1987
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
My great aunt Margaret Gilmore Kelso began writing what she called a "memory story" of her life when she was eighty three years old. "I was born," she wrote, "on May 6, 1855 in the old log cabin home on Clear Creek. I was married in that same log cabin on February 9, 1872 to Jacob Thomas Kelso. Uncle Jack Justice read the ceremony. He came from the preaching service at Mt. Pleasant."
From her father, she had heard that her grandfather made "five trips from Tennessee to this country on horseback, all alone through the wilderness, to spy out the land. On the fifth trip he split rails and built a pen around the spring to hold down his clalin, then went back to Tennessee and brought his family."
It was a difficult but a beautiful land. She wrote about the abundant wildlife in the early days—deer, snakes, racoons, turkeys, and "wild ducks, prairie chicken and quail by the thousands. When we went to the spring of mornings, the ducks would be swimming up and down the creek, as far as we could see, and the prairie chickens would alight by the hundreds in the cornfields."
Life was not easy. One of her earliest memories of her mother was of "waking one night and seeing her sewing with her finger by the light of a grease lamp, stuck in a crack in the chimney wall. . . My father sat nearby making shoes for the family by the same poor light."
Some of Aunt Margaret’s warmest recollections were of people—Aunt Sallie Muers, Uncle Tommy Barha, Aunt Bettie Duncan, Uncle Spencer Watson took her on his shoulder once and ran to get inside before a rainstorm broke. "Those dear old pioneer fathers and mothers... how wonderful they were!" she exclaimed. "What a splendid heritage they have left us. How I wish my pen could do justice to their memory."
As I was rereading this remarkable journal the other day, (for about the twenty fifth time) I realized why I and others, not family members, have found it so interesting, and so enlightening.
Real Ozarks history, it seems to me, is not made up of the kinds of significant events that you can put dates on and require the school kids to memorize. A battle. A shootout. A hanging. A river dammed.
Instead, our history tends to be shaped by more subtle factors—the nature of the land we live in, a strong sense of home and belonging, and a firm belief in the worth of people, to mention only three examples. These influences are clear in Aunt Margaret’s "memory story." Her journal is important precisely because she wrote from the heart about everyday things.
The lesson for all of us interested in discovering and preserving our Ozarks heritage is clear. We do not have to be historians in the accepted sense, nor do we have to have momentous occasions to record. We are all capable. But we must do it.
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