| Notes |
- JONATHAN SUMMERS
SON OF
JOHN ROBERT SUMMERS and HARRIET ELEANOR BRISCOE
I. About Harriett Eleanor Briscoe
HARRIETTE ELEANOR BRISCOE, oldest of 5 children, was born on November 19, 1889 at Bristol, Tennessee. The following year she moved with her mother and father to the family farm at Boones Creek, near Johnson City, Tennessee. She started school at Boones Creek in the Fall of 1894, shortly before her 5th birthday. The next year because her mother was in poor health and expecting her 4th child. Eleanor went to live with her grandmother and grandfather Boy, who lived in Holston Valley along with 3 of her aunts and 2 uncles.
She went to school at Holston Institute until she graduated from the 11th grade at age 15. By that time her Uncle Sam Boy had married and moved to Bristol where he set up a studio and went into the photography business. In the fall of 1904 Eleanor entered Sullins College in Bristol. Staying with her Uncle Sam and working evenings in the studio to help pay her way. She finished school in 1909 and decided to go to Amarillo, Texas and teach school.
She went there mostly because her family had friends teaching in Amarillo who encouraged her to do so. She started her teaching career with a High School English Class in the fall of 1909 just a few weeks before her 20th birthday. That first year was a real trial for she was a small person, just over 5 feet tall and weighing less than 100 pounds. Most of her students were bigger than she was and some of them were older. Some of the students, especially the older boys, gave her a bad time.
She made it through the year with the sympathetic help of older teachers. At the end of the year she gave up teaching High Schooland never tried it again. In 1910 she went to a small country grade school near El Reno, Oklahoma and this worked out somewhat better. However, living conditions and some of the people in Oklahoma were too rough for her liking and so the following year she went back to Amarillo to teach the 3rd grade. She continued to teach there for the next 5 years at the Johnson Street School and seemed satisfied there.
She bought a small home near the school and boarded Mary Boyd to help pay expenses. The year she finished College her parents sold the family home in Tennessee and went to Gray County, Texas where they farmed a few years. Later they moved to Arkansas where they bought a farm at Sulphur City and Eleanor would visit her family most every year during Summer vacation . It was there, while visiting her folks in Arkansas in the summer of 1915, that she met John Summers and they started corresponding. They were together again in Arkansas in the summer of 1916. In October of that year they were married at Sulphur City, Arkansas and went at once to the ranch in Texas where they spent the winter. The next summer they went to Lake Arthur, New Mexico, near Artesia, where their first child was born (1917), a boy named Jonathan. They stayed in this area for several years and two more boys, Bradley in 1919 and Thomas in 1921, were born there.
At about the time John and Eleanor went to New Mexico John's parents -Thomas J. and his wife Sarah, (Thomas Jefferson Summers and Sarah Elvina Rush Summers - also grandparents of Jonat han) three brothers -Franklin, Jackson, and Ross, as well as a sister Trudy, all went to New Mexico. Within two years Eleanor's parents - Benjamin and Virginia Briscoe along with her brother Benjamin and three sisters, Ruth, Hannah, and Emma, also moved to New Mexico.
II. The Family
I Jonathan Summers, am the oldest son of John and Eleanor Summers. I am 63 years old now it seems a fitting time to remember and reflecton the lives and deeds of these two wonderful people, my father and my mother. (Estimate this manuscript was written in 1980)
I remember my early years as being a part of a large, quite close family. My 4 grandparents, 16 aunts and uncles, and many cousins all lived at Cotton Wood in an area covering about 4 square miles. To me life was most interesting and great fun. No matter whose house I wa sat, I was at home with cousins to play with and many things of interest to a young growing boy. I loved my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They were all wonderful to me . I hardly knew which house was home.
The Summers and the Briscoes cooperated and worked together very well.They were all farming folks and though none were rich, by each helping the others and looking after each others interests, they were all quite prosperous. The Briscoes were financilly better off than the Summers, also better educated and more sophisticated. The Summers were hard working people who put no time limits on anything. When there was work to do. They worked until the job was done, often working from morning until far into the night. However, the Summers were loud and boisterous in everything they did. Also, they were quite quarrelsome. This didn't seem to interfere with getting the job done, but when 2 or more of them got together, they took sides and couldn't even agree on the time of day.
As I grow older and look back on it, I feel that none of it was serious but rather a pastime and a means of exploring a subject from different angles. Be that as it may, mother thought it was rude and uncivilized behavior as well as a bad influence on the children. She also thought the grandparents were spoiling the children so she thought she would like to take the family away from this environment and move somewhere that she could bring up her children according to her own wishes. She therefore persuaded Daddy that it was time to go. Dad found a job in California and decided to go there. At that time Dad traveled light, taking along his hand tools and a few necessities and leaving everything else behind just as if he would go back that evening. So, it happened that about midnight in late October Dad and Mother started loading some bedding, a change of clothes, Dad's tools, and us three boys - Thomas, Bradley, and myself - into the "Jingle Wagon", a 1913 Model T Ford. (With Jonathan's time frame they left New Mexico in 1922 - John Robert Summers time line they left New Mexico in 1923)
III. Going West
Long before daylight we were on the road going west. They told no one they were leaving. This had always been Dad's way for he didn't like the fuss of explaining where he was going or why. I remember that trip very well. The first day we made it to Duncan, New Mexico and that evening it started raining. In a short time the road was too muddy for travel so we stopped at a store that had a gasoline pumpout in front, the kind where the gas was pumped by manpower up into a glass jar overhead with a scale of one to ten gallons marked on the side of the jar with a hose to let the gas flow by gravity from the jar down into the gas tank in the car. This was very interesting to me for it was the first time I had ever seen such a contraption. I studied it until I was quite sure I knew just how it worked. In the store Dad found out there was a vacant house in Duncan where we could get in out of the storm so we moved in a stayed a couple of days until the roads were passable again.
Leaving Duncan, we went South and camped the next night beside a highway on the desert just a few miles east of El Paso, Texas. This was the first paved road I had ever seen and I was most impressed with the speed of the cars that went whizzing by several times that evening. The next day were on pavement all the way to Las Cruces, 30 or 40 miles, but going west from Las Cruces we were soon out on the dirt again. It was a single lane road with very little traffic, now and then a team and wagon as well as a few cars. You could tell if a car was coming to meet you many miles ahead by the cloud of dust it made. When the two cars would finally meet, both cars would get out of the road to pass.
We camped by the desert again the first night west of Las Cruces. By the 2nd night we were in Demming, New Mexico and spent the night at the home of Uncle Ben Briscoe who was living there at that time. I remember the fun us children had playing with our cousins that evening. I was then 5 years old, Bradley was 3, and Thomas was 1. Our cousins were in about the same age range. That night we all had a bath in a white bathtub, the first I had ever seen.
The next day, after breakfast and some visiting, we finally got on the road again. By evening we had reached the Arizona line and camped that night in Arizona. Dad and mother thought we were doing fine for we had crossed the State of New Mexico without any trouble in one week's time. Our first day in Arizona we had our first car trouble. We had traveled to the town of Bisbee, a copper mining town down in the bottom of Mule Shoe Canyon. Going up out of that canyon was along steep climb and before we reached the top, the old Model T lost its bearings. We got turned around and coasted back to the bottom of the canyon and camped by the road while dad took the engine apart.There was a shop at the mine where he got the connecting rods re-babbited and in a couple of days we were back on the road again.
This time we went all the way up the mountain backward so the front bearing would get enough oil and not burn out. Once out of the Mule Shoe Canyon we made our way to Tucson and the next day to Phoenix. Mother was not feeling well so we stopped at Phoenix to see a doctor. He told her that the traveling in the old Ford over the rough roads was bad and that she would have to rest a while before going on. Dad looked around for a place to stay and work he could do while mother had time to recover. (Apparently Eleanor was pregnant)
He found work as a maintenance blacksmith on the Goodyear Cotton farm at the nearby town of Tempe. The farm manager, a Mr. Hudson gave dad the job of running the blacksmith shop and a nearby house for the family to live in. It was Christmas time and mother decorated the windows of the little house with colored paper. We went to a program at a nearby school. I remember several interesting things about the Hudson farm. The Hudson family lived in a large brick house with electric lights and running water. The electricity was produced by a very noisy kohler power plant on the back porch of the house. Mother thought, because of the noise, she preferred our kerosene lights. The highway ran by the farm and across the highway was an airport. The highway ran by the farm and across the highway was an airport.Planes went in and out daily and this was fascinating to us childrenf or we had not seen anything like it before. Almost as interesting was the traffic on the highway. At night the lights of the cars coming to meet each other looked like they would collide and as theymet we imagined that the one coming from the right jumped over the one coming from the left. We were only children but we were fast discovering that the world was full of exciting things. (Goodyear Farms were located west of Phoenix - Glendale, Arizona. This is opposite side of Phoenix, Tempe is East of Phoenix Goodyear west of Phoenix. Goodyear had an airport and in later years he used the Goodyear Blimp).
We were at the Hudson farm less than 3 months. I'm sure we could have been there much longer but Dad and Mother had other objectives and were anxious to be moving on. While we were there two things happened that I shall never forget. The one was one day when mother filled the kerosene lamps from a gallon can. There was just a littlel eft in the bottom of the can which she poured into a water glass and set in the window sill. She gave me the empty can to take to the shop for dad to refill from the barrell kept in a storage shed. When mother was not looking Tommy, who was just two years old, drank the glass of kerosene. When mother discovered it, he had the glass in his hands and was vomiting on the floor. Mother grabbed him up andrushed to Mrs. Hudson's house where they telephoned Dr. Moore who was there on his motorcycle in a very few minutes. He made a solution of warm water which he pumped into Tommy' s stomach and then pumped it out again. He then gave him some medicine and left more medicine with mother to give to him later on. Mother then took him home and put him to bed. He had bad diarrhea and cried most all night. The next day he began getting better and soon was up and playing as if nothing had happened. The 2nd event happened about the middle of February when another baby brother was born and they named him Marshall. (Marshall Middleton Summers was born 27 February 1923).
Dad was most anxious to get going again as it was getting late in the season for the job he was heading for. They were building a schoolhouse at Palm Springs (California) and it was a wintertime show because in mid and late summer it was too hot for men to work outside during the day. So, as soon as Mother and baby were able to travel we hit the road west of Phoenix. It was decided to take an unimproved route called the Parker cutoff that went directly to PalmSprings and was at least a hundred miles shorter than the alternative routes. It was a slow, rough ride. I remember having a flat tire on the left rear wheel and we pulled out of the road to fix it. While dad was working on the tire, us children were playing in the sand when a large touring car full of people came by. They stopped to offer assistance but dad assured them we were okay. They drove on but as they left they were all laughing, waving their hands, and pointing. Mother looked to see what it was they were pointing at. It was Tommy. He had taken off all of this clothing and spread it in a greasewood bush and was laying on the ground in the shade it provided. The tire was soon fixed and we moved on. As we approached the Colorado we traveled most of the day over very rough road. The road ahead would look perfectly smooth but in reality it was full of very deep ruts and chuck holes filled level full of a very light, fine dust that would puff out from under the wheels like clouds of smoke and the wheels would drop to the bottom of the holes as if nothing were there. When we reached the river it was late and everyone was tired so we camped for the night before crossing the river. The next morning someone said it was Easter and there should be an Easter Bunny around somewhere. Us children started looking. We didn't see any bunny but we found Easter eggs under bushes and in the sand all around the camp. It was fun and the first Easter egghunt that I can remember.
When we broke camp and got ready to cross the river there were a couple of cars and a truck a head of us waiting to get across on the little ferry. The ferry had no power source other than the current of the river to move it across. It was most interesting to me and I studied it until I figured out how it worked. There was a cable stretched across the river and the ferry boat was suspended from this cable, downstream, by two lines - one on each end of the boat. The lines were fastened to roller pulleys that would run along the cables when one line was let out so the current of the river pressed against the side of the boat at an angle. The boat would react by sailing along crosswise of the current. The ferry could only carry two cars at a time and the truck, though small, had to go alone. Thus, it took us a couple of hours to get across the Colorado river at the little town of Blythe.
IV. California
Arriving at Palm Springs the next day, we made camp in the shade of some pepper trees that lined a street that had been laidout and platted many years before but had sprouted very few homes or development over the years. Dad went to work at once on the schoolhouse which he found just about all framed up and soon made ready for the finishing work. There was still plenty of work to be done. We were there a little over three months and by the first of June it was getting quite hot in the daytime and many people were leaving for cooler places. About that time the Pickwick Stages bus service between Los Angeles and Phoenix switched from a daytime schedule tonight time schedule. I can still hear their exhaust whistle as the eastbound stage came through town around 10:00 PM and the same mournful sound would wake us up about 2:00 AM as the westbound stage went by.
About this time I saw the first airplane accident I had ever seen. This bi-plane circled over head and then came in to land in the field between our camp and the highway. When it touched down it kicked up a tremendous dust storm and all I could see was the tail go up high in the air. When the dust cleared out enough I could see that the plane was upside down and people were running from town and from cars that stopped on the highway. I didn't hear what happened to the pilot and when I think of it, I still wonder if he lived or not. If he did he surely must have been badly hurt.
When it got too hot for comfort we left Palm Springs and went to San Bernardino where Dad got a job building a house. When this job was finished mother read in the paper that the State of California had passed a law against selling milk that was milked by hand in open outdoor corrals. The Borden Milk Co. was asking the state to help the dairymen of the Salinas Valley to build milking barns for the thousands of cows that were being milked in open corrals and the new law was ruinous to both the farmers and the milk company. With this bit of news we took off for the Salinas Valley where Dad teamed up with a partner, Mr. Fleet, to build 12 dairy barns in the valley. They also built a school house at Soledad and an addition to the Spreckles Sugar Mill at Gonzales including a pulp conveyor that was said to be the longest single belt conveyor in the world at that time.
We lived first in a camp ground and then a rented house in Soledad. While we were at the camp ground, a man came there with a 1920 Maxwell 1 ton truck. The engine was shot. Dad thought he could put a new engine in it and he needed a truck for his construction projects. So, he traded our old Ford for it. I remember dad saying that the Ford had the very best Red-Fisk chain tread tires. The front tires were two years old and still had New Mexico air in them.
When work closed down in the Salinas Valley Dad moved on to a job at Roseville where they built an ice and cold storage plant for the railroad company and later worked a while for the city. While there Dad built a small house on the bed of the Maxwell truck. It was convenient and comfortable. A forerunner of the modern motor home.In the fall and winter of 1923 we camped in our motor home on the banks of the San Joaquin River on the Thompson ranch near Stockton where Dad had a job clearing several hundred acres of land and planting it in walnuts . Mother still had in mind that she wanted to go to Oregon.
V. Oregon - Cottage Grove
So in the spring when the walnut job was finished we moved on to Cottage Grove, Oregon where dad built a house for an elderly widow, Mrs. Herman Farnwald, who had lived and raised her family in a 2-room log cabin until Farnwald died, leaving her some insurance.
Cottage Grove was a milepost in our history. Though we only lived there two years, many things happened. Eleanor was born there in the fall of 1925. About that time Bradley and I started to school. We all had whooping cough, including Eleanor who was less than one month old . The Dr. said he didn't think she would survive because it was impossible to watch her close enough to keep her from strangling to death. Mother worked desperately night and day to save the baby. Iremember her holding the baby upside down and thumping her back then, taking a syringe hose to suck the flem from her mouth and throat. Mother won the battle and Eleanor never knew or appreciated the anxious hours and effort made to save her life. I don't know if Eleanor ever appreciated anything mother ever did for her. If so, it didn't show for she was seemingly contemptuous and rebellious of mother to the day she died.
Also at Cottage Grove, Bradley contracted Bovine tuberculosis of the thyroid gland by drinking milk from Mrs. Farwald's cow. He later had an operation to remove the tubercles. Also Eleanor, when about a year old, fell off the bed landing on a spool of thread. It made a knot on her hip that did not go away. Later when it was seen the leg on that side was not growing as it should, she was operated on to remove the knot.
After we came to Oregon, Dad was never able to get his act together financially again. He went into the logging business at Cottage Grove with a partner named Mr. Fuston. They pooled the capital to get equipment and buy timber. They sold the logs to some Jews who had a sawmill at Analoft. The Jews went broke taking bankruptcy and owing several thousand dollars for the logs. Much of the logs were still in stockpile at the mill a brought a fair price at the sale. Dad thought that they would come out okay. Then came the joker. A check was made to Summers and Fuston Logging Company. John Fuston picked up the check, cashed it at the bank in Eugene, and disappeared leaving his wife behind. The police found where a car with his license went through the border check point into Canada. That was the last he was ever heard of. It was a severe blow to Dad. He left for Coos Bay looking for work, leaving mother and five children in a small rented house at Cottage Grove. Dad did find work on a construction job, building a road along the Coos River. In thosedays jobs only paid once a month and Dad decided not to write home until he could send some money which was several weeks.
In the meantime mother became desperate and took the matter in hand. She had a sale, sold all the household goods except her new sewing machine and the cook stove which she latter shipped to Coos Bay. She also sold all of Dad's equipment and a shop full of tools at a fraction of their cost. This kept us going until we heard from Dad. It musthave been two or three months from the time he had left us. He sent $20.00 and said he could rent a house near the job if we could get there. Mother found out that there was a bus that went to North Bend twice a week by way of Roseburg and Myrtle Point. So, with the clothes on our backs and what we could carry in our arms, Mrs.Churchill a neighbor, took us to the bus station. Thus, we left Cottage Grove and moved to Coos River
VI. Coos Bay, Oregon - approximately 1925
(John Robert Summers father of Jonathan Summers would be 51 years old)
These were tough times for dad and mother but rougher times were still ahead. Us children didn't mind the tough times, we didn't know the difference. We lived on South Coos River for a year or so. Our youngest brother, Robert, was born while we lived there. Bradley and I went to school from there, riding the river boat back and forth daily, a distance of 3 or 4 miles around the river. That was great fun and a wonderful experience to us children who had not seen a boat before.
When the job on the Coos River was finished, Dad found work at a rock quarry on North Coos River which lasted several years. He also found 160 acres of government land open for homestead not far from the forks of the river. For mother, I'm sure that living and raising a family on that homestead was the hardest trial of her lifetime and a source of many troubles and heartaches. It was here that she would cry in grief for the family home and security she had left behind in the Southwest, never to return again. The influences she had condemned as bad for her children were exchanged for an environment in a harsh land among alien peoples that were much more devastating than anything she could ever have imagined. For one thing, Dad was never able to provide adequate housing for his family there. The first winter we lived there in a tent - mother, father, and 6 children. This tent was on a pole frame with a floor up off the ground on a side hill. The hill was dug away under the tent floor to make space for the cook stove and a table to eat on. The stove, our only source of heat, was very difficult to keep a fire in because the wood was wet. Mother often said she came to Oregon because there is plenty of wood and water here, a scarce resource in the Southwest, but she didn' t think of both being in the same package.
The next year Dad tried to build a log house. Dad was a good carpenter and a diligent hard worker but a poor engineer. In the past, most of his construction work was done according to someone else's plans, often to mother's plans for she had a much better understanding of physics and engineering than he did. Dad's idea was to build a log house on the hillside with the back side at ground level and the front up off the ground. When the house was done and the family moved in he planned to take his time and finish up a lowerlevel. The idea seemed okay so he dug two ditches in the hillside with level bottoms so he could put four 8 ft. b y 12 or 14 inch logs vertical to support the four corners of the house. These corner posts were stood on large rocks set in the ground with the flat side up. This done, he built his log house on top of these four posts.
As the oldest boy, I worked day after day with dad helping to build the house while the younger children dug away at excess dirt under the house. We were all proud of our work when Bill and Velma from New Mexico came to visit and Bill was helping us finish the job(Velma, John Robert Summers daughter by his 1st marriage to Lula Taylor). However, dad had failed to comprehend how heavy a green loghouse was and how feeble was his bracing on the four corner posts. As the rocks settled into the ground moving the house off balance, on the day we were moving into the house the whole thing fell down. The logs were salvaged, enough to build a one room cabin on the spot where the children had dug away dirt from under the house. Later 8 'by 14' shanty was moved in alongside and that was all the home we ever had on the homestead . It was surely the hand of God that saved us. No one was seriously injured or killed in the accident.
While living on the homestead our youngest sister, Katherine, was born. I remember borrowing a team of horses and a sled from a neighbor, Mr.MacClean, making a bed on it with mattress , pillow, and covers to take mother to the boat landing. She was then transferred to the boat ___? for the 8 mile trip to Marshfield and the Westly Hospital where Katherine was born. Of the 7 children of Harriette Eleanor Summers, Robert and Katherine were born in hospitals. The other 5 were born at home. Thus, both Robert and Katherine got their first boat ride before they were born and the 2nd a few days later when they came home from the hospital.
After the Coos Bay Jetty was finished work ran out at the Rock Quarry, Dad was well past sixty, (possibly John Robert's age is not "well past 60" based on Thomas's age in the following paragraphs. - In 1934 John Robert would be 60) had lost all of his teeth and much of his ambition, and was getting deaf. (according to John Robert's manuscript he had been operated on for a hernia and thought it best not to return to the rock quarry.) He made little or no attempt to land steady work but seemed content to live off what wood products such as fence posts, ditch lids, chittum bark,(also known as Cascara Sagrada - when bark is dried it is used as a cathartic) and firewood that he could harvest off the homestead with the help of his boys. From time to time he picked up odd jobs among the farmers of the valley. One summer dad , Grad, and I helped build a new barn for Charle MaHaffy.
During those times, one day the county nurse came to mother and said that Thomas had reacted to a tuberculosis test at school and that he should go to a R.B. hospital for proper care so that he would not contaminate the rest of the family with the disease. Tommy was about___ ? then (probably about 12) and mother cried to see him go. But really, it was a relief to have to look after him for Tommy was an impulsive, nervous and slow who did everything first and thought about it later, if at all. It was impossible to keep a hat and coat on him, he was always wet from head to toe. He couldn't cross a creek without getting wet. With a new pair of boots he would try to see how deep the water was until it went over to top. If he sa
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RNT Family History
1889 - 1946 (56 years)
