Maudie Grown

Maudie grew up. She was expected to find a nice young man that her father could approve, start a family, make her parents proud. Her sisters did. Maudie did not. She should have been destined to marry a man with an assured future, possibly already settled and moneyed. Certainly a carpenter born in Illinois and barely making enough to get by, was not the intended. She was marrying beneath her station, and while most of the family stuck by her, Father, aunts, uncles, did not. I imagine stormy scenes, harsh words, perhaps even ultimatums. Civil War sympathies still drew hard lines between people and might have increased the problem. But Maude never told me of any of that. Her stubborn choice and its consequences were only obliquely referred to, mostly gleaned from what was not said. Simply wanting out of that house, and from under that thumb, probably set her determination.

She and Dave, her chosen husband, must have stuck it out for years. And those years would have been hard to bear. Her sisters never deserted her. And I think she never regretted the choice.

There were four living boys born to the new family, scattered over the years, not one after another. I doubt the carpenter---he was good, I’ve seen his work---was able to open his own shop. To get work, he must have been away from home a lot of the time. Later years would suggest he perhaps grew up on a farm. At some point, I was told of the older males of his family leaving their plantation to join the battles---and never returning. Maybe he supplemented his income with farm work, at times. Maude raised her boys, and lost at least two other children. That was not uncommon at the time---stillborn, dying soon after birth, diseases in infancy.

During that time, the land rush and bidding in Oklahoma must have caught their attention, and then their imagination. While the two youngest boys were very small, David and Maude packed what they could into a covered wagon and set out to change their fortunes.