Kinfolks
by Evelyn Flood
Am deeply grateful that I can share some of these stories with the readers of the Newton County Times and Internet readers.

Absalom "Ab" Phillps in this story was the great uncle of V N "Bud" Phillips,both kinfolks.
From Bud Phillips' book "Buffalo Tales"comes this story titled "They Shared a Secret." It has been edited and some parts left out to make it shorter.

Many of the early residents of the upper Big Buffalo Valley use to sit for hours in the old Beechwoods school house, listening to Uncle AB Phillips as he delivered his long sermons.

This old Methodist Circuit Rider often preached there, and when he came he was always sure to have in the people gathered there, an old and honored man of that area with whom he shared a special secret. The man often sat with glistening eyes as the old minister spoke words on his hopes for, and description of New Jerusalem or led the group in singing of their journey to the Promised Land.
Few knew though, that the moistened eyes, unlike those around him, represented thankfulness that he was in the present land and not in the New Jerusalem. And when the rejoicing preacher came down from the stand he was preaching from, passing among the crowd and shaking hands singing as he went, he always found an eager hand extended by the old resident from down near the mouth of Add's Creek. It was then that a certain look passed between the the two....a look that spoke more of earthly remembrance than of heavenly expectation.

During Civil War times, AB Phillips was traveling over and around Newton County, not as a preaching circuit rider, but as the leader of a group of Union soldiers.
During that war, Newton County was largely Union, and for that reason was a prime target of raiders from the Confederate area round it.
Phillips and his band patrolled the borders of Newton County, on the watch for these raiders and sometimes planned and made counter-raids into enemy territory.

Part of their mission was also to hunt out, harass, and sometimes kill Confederate sympathizers or supporters within the county.

On one of these missions they approached the home of the occupant of a farm near the mouth of Add's Creek (Ponca City). Fearing for his life the man of the house quickly fled to the wooded mountainside in the back of his home.

Phillips and his men rode quickly past the screaming wife and family in the homestead yard and spread out over the mountain side.
Phillips, walking a few yards from his nearest soldier, parted brush and looked into a fallen tree top. There he came face to face with the object of his search. He straightened, looked left and right and then back straight at the trembling rebel before him. Instead of an order to his soldiers, there spread a strange smile over Captain Phillips' face.
In a moment he whirled, ordered his men to hasten over a little ridge, into and down a little hollow on the far side.
They never appeared on that farm again.

Did Captain PHILLIPS in that instant, suddenly recognize the folly of war; did he see himself cornered as a hunted animal; did he remember the pitiful screams of the wife and children in the rebels yard?
No one ever knew.

It was well over a half century before more than two people knew of the strange happening. But every time the beloved old minister rode his faithful horse across Mount Sherman and up Big Buffalo to Beechwoods, he was sure to see in the congregation, the same face he had seen in the fallen tree top so many years before.
And when their hands clasped in a friendly greeting their minds united in secret memories and AB PHILLIPS always gave that strange smile of long ago.

Evelyn Flood
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29May2016
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