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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