When one takes a journey along a literary path, the discoveries may be surprising and somewhat amusing or sorrowful. To visit a locale made famous or infamous, depending on the time period, proffers insights into what human history and life were, as played out on the river of life’s stage, from the perspective of a skilled artisan of words.
So it was when we pulled into Lewistown, Illinois, USA one late Spring day. The town of 2400 in Fulton County was named in the 1830s for Lewis Winans Ross, the son of the town founder Ossian Major Ross, veteran of the War of 1812.
It was a pleasant town. Truly, it was a slice of Americana, as one would imagine of a town located along United States Highway 24.
Before the interstate system, US highways connected the communities of the United States, where one could and still can drive through beautiful communities along these routes. To experience the genuineness of the American way of life, it is found along the routes connecting the present and past in the patchwork quilt of intricate design and diligent attention to detail.
If you truly want to see the country, get off the interstates and travel the routes of connection. The heritage of a nation is its people who still live in the villages and towns of their progenitors.
Lewistown is the setting of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. In it Masters created a tapestry of words enrobed with the lives of the local denizens.
In 1914 when the Reedy’s Mirror (publisher: William Marion Reedy of Saint Louis) began printing poems by “Webster Ford”, they caused quite a stir or, as a student once said to me as we discussed good teaching, “stirring the pot to see what bubbles to the top”. Bubbles did rise to the top in Lewistown, especially in 1915 when it was revealed that Edgar Lee Masters was the mysterious Webster Ford who had pulled the bed quilts from the secrets of the town.
When the book came out it was banned from the town. Masters’ mother was the librarian in the Lewistown Carnegie Library. This caused her some consternation, to say the least.
This did not stop people from traveling to other locales and procuring the book. Masters may have pulled back the quilts of secrets, but many people read his book under their quilts at night where the outraged citizens could not peel the covers back with their censuring eyes and words.
Masters depicted life as it was from his exhaustive research of the people and their guilty pleasures as well as their judgmental attitudes toward their neighbors. Of course touching the nerve center of a community with unabashed fervor is not always an enjoyable exercise.
Secrets are just part of the human experiment on this planet traversing the cosmos. Each community is a minuscule microcosm of the whole.
I chose one poem from the book. It is from the grave of Nicholas Bindle and his final sentiments about the people of his town “Spoon River”.
Were you not ashamed, fellow citizens,
When my estate was probated and everyone knew
How small a fortune I left?—
You who hounded me in life,
To give, give, give to the churches, to the poor,
To the village!—me who had already given much.
And think you not I did not know
That the pipe-organ, which I gave to the church,
Played its christening songs when Deacon Rhodes,
Who broke the bank and all but ruined me,
Worshipped for the first time after his acquittal?
It seems the path of life, when one has wealth or is believed to have wealth, a number of people in the community expect the person to “bless” their community. Hoarders and misers are not respected or well liked.
However, Mr. Bindle had the last word to his community. Being buried on The Hill, he finally found peace.
The only hounding heard was from a stray hound who spied a fox or a rabbit. For it is the nature of hounds to sound the call of the chase.
Based on others’ analyses Nicholas Bindle was Nathan Beadles. Beadles was a wealthy builder and merchant who had a mansion on the northeast corner of North Main Street and Milton Avenue.
Like Mr. Beadles the mansion is only a memory. The Post Office occupies the space where the unassuming and shy Mr. Beadles lived.
This picture of Nathan Beadles’ family plot in the Oak Hill Cemetery would be just another family plot of ground if not for the Spoon River Anthology. It serves to remind people there were people who once enjoyed life and work.
Perhaps, there is no better remembrance than to be immortalized in a poem and the town you once called home. Legacy is only essential for the dead if one is remembered after their friends and family have passed into the cosmic ocean.
For over a century the Spoon River Anthology has pricked and entertained readers about the follies of life as well as the joys. May you find it its pages stories of your own home town, be it on a secondary road or in a hamlet encased in the mountains where the snows of secrets are revealed in the springtime when melting begins.
In my old book collection I have a 1928 Edition of the Spoon Rive Anthology from The Macmillan Company. In nine years it will reach its century mark.
One day as we rest on our hill with many others, the opening words of the “THE HILL” will ring true:
“Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and Charley,
“The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
“All, all, are sleeping on the hill.”
G. D. Williams © 2019
POST 788
NOTE:
All pictures are from my collection. They may be used freely if credit is given to Lochgarry Blog.
Lewistown
http://lewistownillinois.org/wp/
Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868-March 5, 1950)
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edgar-lee-masters
Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, the son of Hardin Wallace Masters, a lawyer, and Emma J. Dexter. Though his father had moved the family briefly to Kansas to set up a law practice, Masters grew up in the western Illinois farmlands where his grandparents had settled in the 1820s. He was educated in the public schools in Petersburg and Lewistown (where he worked as a newspaper printer after school) and spent a year in an academy school hoping to gain admission to Knox College. Instead of entering college, he read law with his father and, after a brief stint as a bill collector in Chicago, formed a law partnership in 1893 with Kickham Scanlan.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/masters/life.htm
American Poet, Biographer, Dramatist, Attorney. He published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/682/edgar-lee-masters
Spoon River Anthology
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1280
Nathan Beadles
http://www.illinoisancestors.org/fulton/Biographies/1908_beadles_nathan.html
The Ross Family
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/113009097/ossian-m.-ross
http://www.illinoisancestors.org/fulton/Biographies/1908_ross_ossian.html
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