My grandfather had a younger brother, named Elmer, who volunteered for service in World War One. Elmer was 31 in 1917, married with two children, and the agonies of his pacifist old time Christian mother at her youngest volunteering for overseas service can only be imagined.
The pride of his veteran father, who volunteered for the 12th Missouri United States Volunteer cavalry, and rode hind guard at Broadus in Company M, to face Roman Nose, can also only be speculated.
Pvt. Reuben B. Cavender, a native of Tennessee, enlisted to serve in the Union during the Civil War in March 1865.
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My grandfather stayed home to farm, and Elmer went to war.
When Elmer returned to the farm in 1919 his mother was dead of the Spanish flu and his father left an invalid, who would die still bedridden in 1920.
When the old man died, my grandfather got a government loan to buy out the other heirs and Elmer received 60 acres as his share. He and my grandfather fenced the entire place, at that time.
Every big hedge corner post they set, I still use today, not counting those removed when a black top road divided the farm in 1952. I had one pulled that was older than 1920, that was by a big red barn built in 1903 and visible in a period photograph.. The part underground was still fresh. I had it used somewhere else, I needed fenced.
A big hedge post lasts so long and gets so hard, you can’t drive a steeple in it. I leave one strand of the old wire as a reminder of how many fence wires those corner posts have outlasted. Some are on their third fence, others on four. My father told me all this, and he’s in Plum Grove now for fifty years.
Will a hedge corner post last forever?
They are looking sort of rough and ragged after a century, and I suppose eventually they’ll rot away, maybe an inch every century, or something on that order. It will take awhile.
They should last me my time, and my children’s time, for sure. After that surely my heirs can buy another one for about $20, and replace them.
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Elmer lost his sixty acres to his sister, in 1936 for the sum of $200, which enabled him to make a fresh start in Bakersfield California.
He died in 1946, and he never saw Humansville again.
My father raised and sold enough hogs in 1943, to buy back Elmer’s sixty for $900. His mother was so furious at the aunt who demanded a $700 profit she had to be restrained from taking a gun and killing her. She never forgave or forgot such profiteering, but my father did. We were there at her bedside when she died in 1966.
I think of that, as I drive by the corner posts that Elmer and my grandfather set, still in service a century later.
Nothing lasts forever, except old Fords, and a natural stone.
OLD FORDS AND A NAURAL STONE
