Following is one of the Biographies and Stories which where gathered by Charles Sumner McKamy in the 1950s for publication in a Crawford County History Book. Unfortunately he passed away before the book was published.
The youngest of the three children and only daughter of J. William and Rachel Jane Jones, was born in 1876 on the farm home which they established tree miles north of Flat Rock, Illinois, soon after the civil war. My Father's people, who were of Welsh descent, came to Illinois from Ohio. My Mother's parents, William and Margaret Thompson, were of Scotch-Irish descent and came form Tennessee.
Rural Schools were the only available means of securing an education for most farm children during my early childhood. For this reason, many young people continued to attend theses schools until they reached the age limit of twenty-one years. For reasons of economy, the board of Directors usually divided the school year time into two or three terms, a spring and maybe a fall term, attended by only the smaller children and taught by some young beginning-teacher at a salary of about twenty dollars a month. For the longer winter term a more experienced teacher was provided, preferably a man, at what was considered to be a top salary of about forty dollars a month.
Mr. Ira Bussard, and one of the delights of my childhood, was to listen to a line of young men and women, stretching across the front of the school room, reading in concert the poems from the old "McGuffey's Reader". The Meskimen school, which I attended, was taught by Mr. Bussard.
The elementary school was not divided into the eight grades, there being an "A Class" making work similar to the present 7th and 8th grades; the "B Class" doing work something like the 5th and 6th grades; and the "C Class" resembling the 3rd and 4th grades. However, much has been added to the work of all these grades were the "Chart Class" and the first and second grades that were not taught then, which were below the first and second grades. Pupils were not rushed and not expected to finish at fourteen years of age. I was never given the privilege of attending high school but instead I followed in the footsteps of some of my teachers and entered Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana where I met some wonderful friends. I took some work there that was accepted as equivalent to a high school course.
After a few years of teaching, I entered the Sate University at Bloomington, Ind. where I was allowed to graduate with the class of 1913. I counted it a real privilege because it was an outstanding class on account of its leadership. Paul V. McNutt, later Governor of Indiana and still later Governor if the Philippines, was the Class President. The most noted member of the Class was Wendell L. Willkie, who dreamed of "One World".
Swearingen Chapel M.E. Church and Beckwith Presbyterian Church were each in walking distance of my home where I attended Sunday School at the former on Sunday morning, and at the latter in the afternoon. My Father, who was a member of the United Brethren Church, was a teacher in both these Sunday Schools.
I taught several years in the rural schools, ten of them in my home school, Meskimen. It was a delightful school to work with because the pupils were so co-operative and so interested in all the instruction offered to them.
My Father died in 1921 and Mother in 1931. After my Father's death the management of the old home farm fell to me. After my Mother's death, a former teacher in our County Schools, Miss Frances Hopkins, who was also left alone, came to live with me. Together we cared for farm livestock, which grew to seem almost human to us. After nearly sixteen years, Miss Hopkins was taken ill from which she never recovered. In order to be near her brother and his family, her only immediate relatives, she was taken to a hospital close to Chicago and after nearly eleven months of intense suffering she passed away. After she left my home at the beginning of March 1949 until June 1950, I lived alone. Then in an instant the whole course of life changed. All alone in the dark, I had a hard fall that injured me so severely that since then, with the exception of a few weeks, I have been in hospitals and nursing home.
My old home was locked up as securely as possible, but thieves and vandals broke in. They looted and demolished until now I can't go back -- must finish my years, I suppose, an exile from the old familiar scenes.