You can't make this stuff up! The "disciple of Blackstone" didn't "take hold" in Harrisonville as he had in Pleasant Hill. These towns are just a few miles from each other, but H'ville was the county seat and perhaps more competitive. Or perhaps something happened that he stopped living with his wife, took a last stab at a career in OK? John F. had arrived in Missouri at a time of great opportunity and chickanery. I didn't follow it all, but in one day in 1869, he bought 110 properties "on the courthouse steps", i.e., from foreclosures. Yet there was no family fortune available later to take care of his children in their old age. Their costs of education would have been great, I suppose, at the residential schools for the deaf, but still.... there's more to this story. He left a mark, he "had his friends and his enemies", and he was a "picturesque character". Did his son Paul, Papa's father, show any of John's entrepreneurial and "picturesque" characteristics? Certainly Papa did. We may need a novelist in the family to weave this story beyond the bare bones. If only Papa had written this story!!!
Note: if you want to enlarge the image (who doesn't?), click on it and use your computer's zoom in features).
2 comments:
In the obit, John F. is referred to as, Col. John F. Lawder. Colonel? Civil War? Susan
I don't know if you monitor this blog still but I am trying to solve a longstanding family riddle. I might be related to your Rynd Henry Lawder, unless there was another one floating about central Missouri around the same time that would have been labelled "troubled" and left his family.
Post a Comment