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Some of those places flourished for many years, back east, Brook Farm was
one of the best known. Many of Boston’s intelligentsia were much interested,
especially the literary and educational ones. Oneida Community was perhaps
the best known, perhaps because of the good business sense of its founders.
They built and maintained the first silver plate factory in America, and for
many years it was the best of its kind in the country, always kept its high
standard.
These communal enterprises were always by intelligent, educated people, so
of course there was always a lot of ignorant hillbillies who could not see
anything good outside of what they had always been used to. They took the
attitude taken by the writer of the article clipped and enclosed in your
letter. That article sounds like the people our mother used to describe
as the native Arkansans.
You have a lot of personal family information in a box and drawer of your
desk that I copied for you years ago, and there is some on your Genealogical
chart that Mrs. Shields made for you. You will no doubt be surprised ...
“the wealth of material that I copied for you and much of which we have
forgotten or mislaid in our minds.
I was born on a farm ½ mile northeast of Moneka (cati cornered), where we
lived a short time till we could get into our own house – the former P. O.
of the town.
I think the Stites’s were related to Dr. Spencer but am not sure.
Major ... Colonel Price was ordered by the Federal Government to march thru
certain specified southern territory destroying everything, the mill
included. You have probably heard of the Price Raid Claims. Ernest and I
employed a lawyer, Prof. Brownell of the Law School, to learn all he could
of the status of these claims. He learned that the Government had sent to
Topeka funds covering all these claims, but that the crooked officials in
Topeka had bot up all they could, for a few cents on the ...
[ PAGE MISSING ]
... other half. She remembered (Uncle Will) his terrible temper, also what
a devoted family man he was when at his best.
Dr. Tenney learned to be a doctor just as 9/10ths of the others learned it,
by studying and practicing with another Dr. He learned it mostly with Dr.
(James E.) Spencer, at Harmony Springs. In the civil war he was commissioned
major in the 2nd Kansas Colored Regiment. There was no stigma attached to
that in Kansas.
Grandma Tenney practiced medicine also in Lawrence, mostly obstetrics. When
a law was passed in Kansas barring all but Med. School Grads, & those passing
special exams, Grandma entered and graduated from a Med. School in Chicago
when she was 62 years old, and she practiced medicine as long as she lived –-
to a good old age.
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