The Story of My Life, 1883 to January 9, 1965
By Addie May Taylor Ruehlen
My sole object in writing this story is to preserve a few facts of knowledge about my father’s and mother’s family histories. I am only sorry I have delayed so long in starting it.
Addie May Taylor Ruehlen
Since Father died before I was married and up to that time I had little interest in past events, much valuable information about my father’s early life is only conjecture pieced together from stories he love to tell us when we were children. Father was one of a large family. I can remember only two of his brothers, Uncle Warren Taylor [Rev. Nicholas Wren Taylor] was an ordained Methodist minister, and Uncle Joe [Joseph Irven Taylor] was a very devout man. Taylor Hall at Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas, was named for him. He bought large acres of land, became a wealthy farmer, and contributed generously to the Church and College.
My father, Jim Taylor, was a very patriotic man and loved his country. As a boy he loved hunting and fishing; he also loved a good horse and was fond of an intelligent dog and was a crack shot with his gun. As could be expected from a man like that, he was among the first to volunteer when the Civil War broke out in 1861. He fought on the Union side, saw some of the hardest fighting of the War, but his greatest suffering and the real cause of his death was incurred while he was held a prisoner in Andersonville prison. He was held a captive for over a year. During the heat of the summer and cold of the winter and because of insufficient food and water, men died by the thousands. The prison overseer boasted he was killing more Union men than the rebels were on the battlefields. Only the strongest could survive, and Father lived through it all, but his health was ruined. He contracted rheumatism and tuberculosis, from which he never fully recovered. He ranked first sergeant in Company G at the close of the War and eventually was given a pension.
My mother’s name was Louisa Ellen Whalen, before she married my father. She was one of a family of six, four girls and two boys. Her mother died when she was ten years old and she never had the advantages of a home and Mother’s care. Her early life in the teens was very unhappy, but her Irish ancestry and having to shift for herself at an early age were two factors that helped her to see the bright side of life and solve her problems.
My mother’s Father was of Irish descent. He lived near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Kentucky and he rode on horseback all over those rugged hills preaching to the mountaineers, sometimes being gone from home for weeks at a time.
When my father’s health broke, Mother was left with the management of the farm. With the help of my four older sisters we carried on. My sisters’ names were Clara, Sarah, Isa, Florence, and I was the youngest girl, Addie. Three brothers followed me in age: Albert, Fred, and Arch. My younger brother Albert and I were great pals. He was a very adventuresome boy and it was my duty to keep him out of trouble. We fed the pigs, milked the cows and drove the horses. We were so close through the teenage experiences that he cried when I got married and left the old homestead.
Father was 48 years old and Mother was 24 years old when they were married in the winter of 1872 near Green River, Kentucky. Father had been left a widower with a family of small children to care for, so Mother really reared two families for him. Because of my father’s failing health, his doctor advised him to go out West to the high plains country. He sold his Kentucky farm and started west with my mother and her new baby, Clara.
They crossed the Mississippi River in a covered wagon by ferry boat and started on west. The baby became sick and they stopped at West Plains in Howell County, Missouri. Here Father bought a farm, and five of the children were born in the foothills of the Ozarks, a lovely place, but again my father’s health became worse and his doctor advised him to go on farther west.
So Father again traded for a farm in western Kansas out on the frontier plains near Dodge City. Again the family prepared to move. Father and Clara who now was a strong, healthy girl fourteen years old, went on the covered wagon while the rest of us went on the train. I will never forget that train ride. I was four years old and had never seen a railroad train. We children were just getting over the whooping cough and everyone on the train was afraid of us. Of course the moment that we entered the train we all began to cough. To get even with us someone gave us the measles and when we reached Fort Scott, Kansas, where a relative lived, they put all of us to bed in an upstairs room. In the meantime this relative told our father we would starve to death out on the plains of Western Kansas. He told us that only rattlesnakes, coyotes, and grasshoppers could exist out there.
So we visited a while with Uncle Joe and Uncle Wren Taylor and Father rented a farm and we lived there a few years not far from Pittsburg, Kansas. I started my first year n school there, before I was quite five years old. From the start I loved to go to school. I had an abnormal thirst for knowledge. I was scolded for asking so many questions both at home and at school.
Later on through a real estate transaction we traded our western Kansas land for a farm in Woodson County near Yates Center, Kansas. Here we built a new home, turned the virgin soil, planted an orchard of apple, peach, and cherry trees. This was the first permanent home I can remember. I grew up in a community called Pleasant Valley. It was almost entirely surrounded by green hills in the summer time.
The school house stood on an elevation from which the entire valley could be seen. The cemetery was just south across the highway from the school house. My father and mother and two sisters are buried there. My son Orville and I visited their graves the first of May, 1964, as we were returning from the burial of my brother, Albert Taylor at Cassville, Missouri.
Most of the friends and neighbors are gone from the valley, and even the old schoolhouse stands empty now. School buses take the children to school in Yates Center. The sight of the old stone schoolhouse brought back memories of my childhood days. It was there we held church and Sunday School, Literary societies, singing school, and political rallies. I attended school there from the time I was five years old until I was sixteen. At sixteen I was able to pass the Teacher’s Examination and was given a third grade certificate.
I kept on studying and the next year I was granted a second grade certificate and began to teach school. After that year it was easy to secure a first grade certificate. I wanted to enter college at Emporia and did go to spring terms, but my father’s death caused me to give up teaching, but I taught one more term after I was married.
I was a happy, carefree girl in my early teens, running errands for the rest of the family, acting as chore boy, milkmaid, Father’s helper. I read his letters and the daily newspaper to him. The only time he ever punished me was one morning in the spring when he was planting sweet corn with his little diamond ploy and old Jake for the motive power. He was so feeble he no longer could manage the larger horses. Father drew a furrow and dropped the corn and told me to keep the chickens away until he could get the corn covered. But I forgot and was picking Easter lilies across the road. He took a little peach tree switch and switched it across my bare legs, but it didn’t hurt at all. The old hens got the corn and I got the switching.
When I was eighteen years old I met my future husband, Thomas Jefferson Ruehlen, under rather peculiar circumstances. I was teaching the young people’s class, when a strange young man came in and sat down in the class. Something about his dark curly hair and dark brown eyes impressed me, but his clothes didn’t fit. His sleeves and pant legs were far too short, but he seemed perfectly at ease. Later on his older brother told me that his brother had lost his own clothing down in Oklahoma where Tom had gone to enter the race for a homestead across a strip of government-owner land. While he was asleep someone stole his good clothes, money, and watch. Tom had lost the race and had come to his brother Forest’s home at Yates Center wearing overalls. His brother being a small man loaned him a suit and brought Tom to Sunday School and Church. It was love at first sight and we were married a year later on May 1, 1902. I regretted leaving Mother as Father had died a year previously, but she said that Tom was a good, clean Christian man, with industrious and progressive parents. She gave us her blessing. Mo mother lived to be 84 years old. She was a wonderful Mother.
Tom and I were happy together and reared three boys and four girls, but on August 6, 1943, the Grim Reaper snatched him away from us in almost an instant, his death caused by a heart attack.
Out first home was in Brown County near Hiawatha. This was a very rich agricultural community. Tom was a good farmer and we soon had cribs full of corn and bins full of wheat. Almost from the start I had eggs and butter to sell. We butchered our own meat, canned hundreds of quarts of fruit. The cellar had plenty of potatoes and apples stored for winter. Brown County has been called the garden spot of Kansas, and I feel it was a privilege to have been permitted to live there five years. Our first two children were born in Brown County. Both had red hair—Orville was a big baby weighing ten pounds at birth, and Hazel was smaller, weighing seven pounds. She was very active and into everything. Orville would sit quietly by me in church, but Hazel persisted in standing up in the seat trying to talk to me. Once she embarrassed me by yelling, “I want to whisper in your ear.” Of course everybody in church just laughed, but me. She always was a chatterbox.
Orville gave me an awful fright. I had gone upstairs to put Hazel to bed for her afternoon nap. When I came down, Orville was gone and also his big Newfoundland dog. I had left them playing on the porch while I was upstairs putting Hazel to sleep. I called the dog but he didn’t come. I ran around the house calling Orville, but no answer. I ran to the creek nearby. The creek was deep with steep banks. A little neighbor girl had drowned in it. I was so frightened that I called the neighbors by telephone, but no one had seen a little boy. After about an hour of frantic search, Orville and his big dog came toddling along. He had wandered back into a blue grass pasture and fallen asleep. The faithful big dog looked up at me as much as to say, “I was watching him.”
The year 1906 saw bountiful crop yields all over the state of Kansas, especially in Western Kansas. ‘Twas said that one crop of wheat would pay for the land. Tom and his father went out to Plains, Kansas, and bought a quarter section of land and built a small house on it. We held a sale, sold all of our property but one team of mules, one brood sow, 100 hens and enough provisions and goods to last a year, for everyone said we would be back within a year. Tom went out in the fall and cleaned the house and put out 80 acres of wheat. About six months later on February 15 we chartered an immigrant car, loaded all of our worldly possessions and Tom and his brother Emery got into the car and started for our new home on the plains of Western Kansas in Seward County, not far from Liberal. The children, Orville and Hazel and I started the next day on the California Flyer train, leaving home friends, and a fine agricultural country, not knowing when the drouths would return. I was just sick at heart. And if it had been possible, I would have turned back but it was too late. We harvested one good crop and for four straight years the drouth was terrific. I had to go back to teaching school in order to hold the homestead. Many families just pulled up and returned to Eastern Kansas. Tom bought a herd of milk cows and a separator, and we shipped cream back to the eastern market. To make a long story short, our experience on the homestead was anything but happy. I taught school and Tom milked cows and the children grew, so after the five years required to prove up a homestead, we again packed up our belongings and moved back to Central Kansas where the children went to grade school, high school, and started to college.
Cecil, our third child, was born on the homestead out near Liberal, Kansas. When we moved back to Central Kansas, he had not started to school, but Orville and Hazel had prepared little poems to recite on Thanksgiving Day at school. Cecil begged to go with them. When all the pupils had recited their verses, the teacher asked Cecil if he had a verse. He got up from his seat, stuck his hands in his pockets and said:
“I’m a big fat turkey; I go gobble, gobble, gobble.
My knees are so shaky, they wobble, wobble, wobble!”
Of course everybody laughed. But I was amazed. No one had coached him. All through his teenage years he was his father’s standby, strong, dependable, trustworthy, and a good student.
But in 1929 we were hit by a great depression. Many banks were closed, and even those who had money could not draw their money out. Added to this came the “Dirty Thirties” drouth, dust storms, grasshoppers. Added to these plagues of Kansas, many lost their homes. We would have lost ours at 1503 East Euclid in McPherson but the Brethren Church College across the street wanted to buy our property and we were glad to sell it to them at a good price. Because of the depressions, our three older children never finished college but secured employment as teachers.
Later on Orville became a mail carrier, Hazel taught school in Little River, Kansas, and Cecil worked for the Globe Refinery at McPherson. Alice received a $1000 scholarship, contributed by the Women’s Society of Christian Service and went to Des Moines, Iowa, to be prepared for a Deaconess in the Methodist Church. The great depression caused the school to be closed and she came back home and taught school for a while. Alice eventually married Lt. Robert M. Hodgson, who lost his life on D-Day, June 7, 1944, on the Normandy Beach in France.
Nellie did not want to attend college at McPherson, so taught a year in rural cPherson County, then was married to Floyd Krehbiel, who was employed by an old drilling company. They eventually made Texas their permanent home and Nellie secured employment with the Bell Telephone Company. Now she drives all over Southwestern Texas, training telephone operators and improving public relations with their big customers who have private switchboards installed by Bell Telephone.
On July 1, 1941, Uncle Sam called all the 21 year old boys into the service and Billy, our youngest boy, was sent overseas as a paratrooper in the Marines. He saw service in every major invasion of the Southwest Pacific theater of war, was wounded in action, and sent home to recuperate in the Veterans Hospital in Wichita. He now lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he manages a shoe store, and is married to a wonderful wife, Pearl.
Maxine, our youngest child, graduated from McPherson College in 1944 and went to Minneapolis, Kansas, to teach English, speech, and Latin. There she married Richard Johnson, a young farmer, who had just returned from duty with the Merchant Marines. They continue to farm with their four sons near Minneapolis and Maxine is teaching here eleventh term in the local high school. I will be 82 years old on January 9, 1965, and I now have seven children living, 16 grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren.
