Billy Griffin Part 2 – Return to the Irish Wilderness after the Civil War

 Irish Wilderness, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 142021
 

When the Civil War ended, Billy Griffin mustered out of Gen. Marmaduke’s Confederate forces at Batesville, Arkansas, and returned to the Current River area. There he found the community of Irish scattered. His parents had held on but few others. Billy moved his parents to Ironton, but he returned to the area near Wilderness where he lived the rest of his life. Few of the other original settlers ever returned.

In 1868, Billy married Mary Ann Snider, widow of Samuel Cusic Snider and ten years Billy’s senior. Billy and Mary Ann Snider Griffin had three children, Mary Catherine (b. 1869, married name Mrs. Harvey Smith, of Fremont) and Patrick (b. 1871) and John Ruben (b. 1873). The only reference I’ve seen to the two daughters Mary Ann Snider brought into the marriage is in his obituary: “He is also survived by two step-daughters, Mrs. Cusic Brown of Dry Valley, and Mrs. Sarah Hanners of Rockford, Wash., to whom he was a kind and affectionate father.”

The article about their aging cabin made passing mention of the Irish Wilderness: “The Griffins and their neighbors had to travel many miles to mill with their wheat and corn. They went to the mill at Falling Springs or across the Irish Wilderness to Turner’s Mill on Eleven Point River.”

The article continued: “In 1885, the Frisco railroad built the Current River Branch road to Grandin from Willow Springs (see our post on lumber industry in the Wilderness) and the track ran through the Griffin farm on Pine Creek. The logging industry had come into the Ozarks and saw mills sprang up and the pine forests were stripped from the hills of Carter County around the old house.”

Billy Griffin became the source of knowledge about the early settlement for local historians and the curious. The Current Local newspaper in Van Buren interviewed him. Billy gave a detailed account of how the little settlement was created, their trials and difficulties, joys and romances.

But they were happy, those simple people. Happy and industrious in their wilderness. On the Sabbath they had religious services and the monotony of life in the woods was broken by merry making in their cabins. Into their life there came romances and there came sorrow. The young priest was called on to marry the young and to bury the dead. Faithfully he stood by them, cheerfully he encouraged them.

A few years later the sorrows of the civil war … found its way out into that wilderness and the little crops of those simple people were ruthlessly taken and their livestock driven away by skallawags who took advantage of the deplorable conditions of the time. … And the country that had begun to smile under their industrious efforts once more became a wilderness.

This story was told to the editor of Community a number of years ago by “Uncle Billy” Griffin, a respected citizen of Carter County, the last survivor of those colonists. To the writer it seemed a pathetic story and the pathos was all the greater when Uncle Billy said: ‘We came to America, fleeing from persecutions in Ireland. We came far out into the wilderness to make our homes. It was hard for us to understand why Americans, who had always stood for us as the greatest exponents of justice and chivalry, should have robbed us of our homes and our happiness.’

Billy’s two siblings, Thomas and Catherine, lived in the Pilot Knob area. Julia Billingsley shared that Thomas never married; Catherine married David Gunton and had two children who did not marry so the Griffin line continued through Billy.

Billy Griffin died January 4, 1918 at the Alexian Brothers’ Hospital in St. Louis. Blood poisoning was listed as the cause of death. His obituary in the Van Buren newspaper noted, “For fifty years Mr.Griffin was one of the foremost citizens of this section of the country. … Perhaps no man in this section had more friends than ‘Uncle Bill’ Griffin. … He was an honorable gentleman of strong convictions. … He will be greatly missed.”

Billy, Thomas, Catherine and her children, Emmet and Julia, are buried in Pilot Knob Catholic Cemetery – an unmarked cemetery on Middlebrook Road near Ironton. Elizabeth, Billy’s mother is buried in Middlebrook Cemetery about two miles north.

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Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness  and On the Mission in Missouri are available on amazon.com or discounted 50 percent on this website, postage paid.

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APPOLLINARIS – not a name you hear every day

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Jul 202017
 

Today’s soon-to-be parents research names for the next scion of the family from lists of  trendy baby names, popular fiction, rock/pop stars or the hottest chick flick of the season.  “Apollinaris” hasn’t made any of these lists for a long time. But in the mid-nineteenth century, naming sources were more limited. Family Bibles, occasionally Shakespeare’s characters, or – in this case – the early saints names were tapped.  Today, July 20, on the Catholic calendar is the feast day of Apollinaris, a Syrian saint of the second century, named bishop of Ravenna, Italy by St. Peter himself. He was the first of several Appollinarises who achieved sainthood over the early centuries of Christianity. An auspicious lineage for the name of a miller on clear stream in the mid-nineteenth century Ozarks

In the fall of 1857,  John Joseph Hogan made his first exploratory trip to the Ozarks in search of “land for people of small means” (poor Irish immigrants). He and a surveyor explored  from Greenville to west of the Eleven Point River and back. Near the Current River they came across a mill, owned by one Appollanaris Tucker:

Traveling by way of Brunswick, Jefferson City, St. Louis, Old Mines, Potosi, Iron Mountain and Frederick Town, I halted at Greenville, in Wayne County, where I hired a surveyor familiar with the country. I examined the lands on the head waters of Little Black River, Cane Creek, Brushy Creek, in Ripley (now Carter) County, and entered four hundred and eighty acres in a body on Ten Mile Creek, making arrangements at once to put men thereon, opening and cultivating it.

With the surveyor I rode westward, across the Current River, by Van Buren, up Pike Creek, thence southward over the great divide east of Eleven Points River as far as the head waters of Buffalo Creek, thence eastward along Buffalo Creek and its tributaries to a ford on Current River. At this place there was a mill and homestead owned and occupied by a man named Appollinaris Tucker; he and his family were the only Catholics known to be residing at that time in that district. At the time of my arrival, Mrs. Tucker was in the last stages of her mortal illness, in which it seemed God’s Holy Will that she should linger until her longings could be gratified to receive the last Sacraments; and, as it happened, from the hands, of the first priest known to have come into that region of country. After Mrs. Tucker’s death, I returned homewards, by way of Iron Mountain, St. Louis, and Hannibal, to Chillicothe.

Mystery of the Irish Wilderness

We tracked in our Jeep the areas that Hogan covered on horseback when we were working on Mystery of the Irish Wilderness. We did find record of the Tuckers’ land purchases, but little else.  One of the largest springs in Missouri is Tucker Bay Spring in Ripley County. Its average flow is 24 million gallons a day. Jo Schaper notes that “very little is known about this spring, either geologically or historically. The spring is a boggy, low area (locally known in the Ozarks as a ‘bay’).”

“Appollinaris and Ellen Tucker purchased government land in 1854 and 1856 in Ripley County.  . . .  There is no record of the mill after the Civil War or what became of Appollinaris. Tucker Bay Spring, large … but curiously unstudied, flows into the Current River.”

 Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, caption, page 25