Kansas farm life: The John Alvin Spoon family

John Alvin Spoon poses for a tintype in his 20s

When John Alvin Spoon moved with his mother, brother and sisters from Indiana to Kansas in 1885, he was 21 years old -- virtually the same age his father Henry was when he made a similar relocation some 40 years before. From that point on, however, the two led very different lives. Relying on his solid work ethic and knowledge of livestock and agriculture, John became one of the most successful farmers in Kansas and was, by all accounts, a model citizen until his death in California at the age of 88.

Born Feb. 24, 1864 in Amo, Indiana, John was 13 when his father died trying to escape from the Indiana Hospital for the Insane. If John carried any emotional scars with him later in life, he never showed it. From the day he set out for Kansas, John Spoon pursued life with a sense of adventure that inspired those around him.

In a letter written to his hometown newspaper in Luray in 1945, long after he had moved to California, John recalled his train trip to Kansas, saying, "I left Plainfield, Indiana 60 years ago with a fine bird dog for my brother-in-law, who lived in Waterville, Kansas. The dog made the trip in the baggage car, with enough tips to satisfy the baggage man."

Within days of stepping off the train, John struck out on his own. Soon he had a job on a local farm, clearing the corn field. After working as a farm hand there and later on another farm stacking wheat, John rejoined his family at its new home in Luray, where his brother Oliver was handling the farm chores and his mother Sarah Catherine was, as always, the hard-working homemaker. According to a biography of John published in the Lucas Sentinel years later, he used the $11 he had saved doing odd jobs to purchase a quarter interest in a small bunch of hogs and went into partnership with Oliver running the family farm.

Times were tough in the next few years, but in 1892 the brothers' hard work paid off. Taking advantage of a good corn and wheat crop and livestock fattened up on the plentiful buffalo grass, John made a $900 profit that year. From that point on he began to purchase more livestock and soon had enough money to buy 130 acres of rich farm land. On April 16, 1893, he married Laura Jane Smith, a teacher who lived with her parents in a two-story stone house not far away from the Spoon farm.

Laura, born Sept. 15, 1871 in Chariton, Iowa, came from a Southern background. Her mother, Mary Persila Patrick, lived much of her life in her native Alabama. Her grandfather, Thomas W. Patrick, died in 1864 as a Rebel soldier in a prison camp during the Civil War. Once united with John in matrimony, Laura gave up her job as a teacher to become a homemaker and mother.

An early photo of John Alvin Spoon’s first ranch

The farm of John and Laura Spoon was located a short distance from the Sarah Spoon farm, about two miles south of Cheyenne, described by John as "a small burg out in the country. They had a rural phone office, a store, a blacksmith shop and a church up on the hill." It isn't even shown on today's maps. John built a small house on the land and went to work farming the land and raising livestock. He and Laura also began their family, welcoming their first child on March 20, 1894 -- a daughter, Carrie.

In April of 1895, on land he rented adjacent to his farm, John planted 175 acres of corn. Working with a team of four horses and employing just one farm hand for a short time, he harvested a crop of 7,000 bushels of corn. The job was completed about the time the couple's second child, a son named Cleo Harvey, was born on July 26.

John's knowledge of the farm industry continued to pay off. In 1898, he used part of his profits to buy another 160 acres of land. July 26, 1899, marked the birth of Lura Faye, named after the town of Luray. Shortly thereafter, construction began on a large two-story house that was completed in the summer of 1900 at a cost of $1,500. It was beautifully furnished and was a comfortable dwelling for the growing Spoon family. The first Spoon child born there was Floyd Otto, who came into the world on June 10, 1900.

Adding alfalfa to his crop, John discovered this to be the best feed for his hogs. Fattening them on alfalfa and corn, John sold $4,600 worth of hogs between 1894 and 1900. One carload of his hogs brought the top price in the Kansas City market around the turn of the century. A Lucas Sentinel article described the Spoon farm as being "a fine residence, with a large and roomy barn and numerous other outbuildings, and supplied with windmills, feed mills and everything that makes an up-to-date ranch or farm."

Back row: Faye, Cleo, Floyd, Carrie, Alvin. Front row: Adrian, John, Clifford, Laura

Apparently, John Spoon was known throughout the community as a model citizen as well as an excellent farmer. In the same newspaper article, he is described as "a man of high character, religious and capable. He is an active worker in the church and a man everyone trusts, of kindly disposition, generous to a fault and faithful in all his duties. He came here a mere lad, without money and without friends, and has made himself one of the most respected and prosperous men of this country."

As the years went by, John's success as a farmer multiplied. Soon he owned more than 100 head of cattle. At the same time, his family continued to grow. Alvin Lee Spoon was born Oct. 4, 1902. Adrian Oliver Spoon was born May 7, 1904. And the last member of the family, Clifford Valentine Spoon, was born Feb. 14, 1911.

Soon the older Spoon children began to strike out on their own. Carrie attended college in Salina, about 50 miles to the east, where she met a young man named Delbert Hartley Hooker. His parents had recently joined the increasing number of families moving to the west coast, settling in Alhambra, California, a suburb about 10 miles east of Los Angeles. After marrying in 1918, Hartley and Carrie B. Spoon Hooker moved to California, beginning a Spoon migration westward that soon involved most of the family.

First, however, came the winds of war. Just as Carrie and her new husband were preparing to move out west, the United States was sending young men to Europe to fight in World War I. Cleo Spoon, now 22 years, old, was among those brave soldiers. Taking a break from his job as a teacher in the local schoolhouse, Cleo left home one cold January morning in 1918 and traveled to nearby Salina to a U.S. Army recruiting station. That was the beginning of an adventure that led him to France, where he served as an Army mechanic. Decades later, Cleo still had the helmet and gas mask he was issued, tucked away among the many treasures his grandchildren delighted in examining. In those later years he never volunteered information about the war unless asked , but at the time he sent home entertaining letters that reveal the great sense of humor he possessed.

The first letter Cleo sent home to Kansas described a layover in Denver while his unit was being processed. It included this passage:

“While waiting in Denver, about 4,000 in number, all the stenographers, bookkeepers and all the other women that worked there came out about three stories above and began to have sport with us. They cheered us when we sang, throwed kisses at us, when finally some of the boys found a way up. They loved them around awhile when the police found their way up and told the boys to get the hell out of there and the girls to get to work and stay there."

Cleo Spoon during World War I, 1918

Cleo closed that letter by asking his family members to "let Edna read this." Presumably, Edna was a love interest back home.

Back in Luray, John continued to work the farm, making a comfortable living for his wife Laura and the five children still at home. Floyd, 18 by the time his older brother Cleo left to join the army, worked hard on the farm but was already developing a similar sense of adventure. Eventually, he spent time working oil wells and was an amateur inventor. Alvin, 16 at the time, had already quit high school once but returned that year, only to quit again after getting a bad case of the flu. Adrian, 14, and Clifford, 7, enjoyed the life of a Kansas farm boy when they weren't busy with chores or studying in a one-room school house.

Laura kept busy tending house and writing creative letters to Cleo, matching his humor word for word. In one 1918 letter, she cut out pictures from cards and newspapers and pasted them in place of certain words to tell her son what was happening back home. Using drawings of rain and snow, Laura told Cleo, "Such weather I have never seen since 1886. The barn and cattle shed and implement shed were blown full. The boys had to dig two heifers out of a drift. Papa was about sick during the storm and Floyd just came in handy. I think we will have papa in the notion to go to (a big picture of California)."

Soon Faye married Forrest Applegate, with whom she lived on a Kansas farm the rest of her life. But while Faye was adamant about remaining in the place of her birth, the seeds of change were rapidly being planted in the minds of the other Spoons.

Carrie soon began to send home correspondence singing the praises of sunny Southern California. She had found work as secretary to the president of the Los Angeles Medical School of Ophthalmology and Optometry. John and Laura were already intrigued by dreams of California living, having visited friends in San Diego and San Francisco in 1915.

Meanwhile, Cleo continued to write home with army stories. One of his training locations was Augusta, Georgia, where he wrote, "Don't ever come down here and try to find me. The Kaiser himself couldn't." Again he mentioned Edna, to whom he was writing privately.

Receiving training as a motor mechanic, Cleo soon arrived at one of his last stops before heading overseas -- Charlotte, North Carolina, a city less than 100 miles from the farm where his great grandfather David Spoon had grown up. Apparently, Cleo was not fond of his ancestors' homeland. "Oh, mama, come get me," one letter began. "Walking from the train over here, you couldn't walk with your head up like a solider. You had to watch where you were going, it was so rutty and cut up."

At this point, Cleo's letters began to indicate more than one love interest back home. "Do you have any idea when that Edna Moss is going to have her picture taken and send to me?" he asked in a letter dated April 21, 1918. Yet in the same letter he wrote, "Alta C. gets her school back at $65 per (month). Pretty good." This is a reference to Alta Carswell, a local teacher Cleo would eventually marry -- once he finally settled on one woman.

Cleo never forgot his siblings in his letters, either. "That Alvin is the craziest nut I ever had write to me," he said in one letter. "I thought I would die when I read his letter. Make him write more of them." And this: "Tell that Floyd if he can't write to send his breath on a ribbon so I'll know that he is alive, at least." Cleo also loved directing comments to "babe," youngest brother Clifford. In closing one letter, he wrote, "Ask babe if worms are snakes' puppies."

Kansas map shows the location of Luray (upper middle)

It was likely one of the older brothers, however, to whom he directed a July 1918 letter that began, "Dear Bro, come to NY for the women. Oh boy! This camp is lousy and such pretty ones you never cast a lamp on, you get weak in the knees right off the bat. And talk about shape -- they are built from the ground up."

It was clear even then, however, that Cleo had a soft spot in his heart for Alta Carswell, whom he wrote was hoping for a teaching job in Idaho but instead decided to teach in Luray. Soon after his return from France, Cleo began seeing Alta exclusively. On Aug. 27, 1920, they were married in Superior, Nebraska.

The Carswell family immigrated to America from Scotland. Alta's great grandfather, John Carswell, was born in Glasgow on Feb. 14, 1795 -- 102 years to the day before her own birth in Lawrence, Nebraska. Together with his wife Elizabeth and their sons John, Robert and David, John Carswell sailed on the ship Tropic to America, arriving in New York on June 17, 1837. Robert Carswell married Margaret B. Edgar in 1852, and one of their eight children was David Carswell, born Feb. 22, 1860. David married Pearlie Shelton on April 19, 1888, and nine years later Alta (no middle name) Carswell was born as the fifth of 10 children.

Feeling right at home in the midwest, Cleo and Alta began to make a home for themselves and resumed their teaching careers. But before 1920 was over, John had decided to take the big step. Taking with him his wife and the three children still living at home -- Alvin (18), Adrian (16) and Clifford (9) -- John Spoon left the land where he had carved out such a wonderful life, setting out for the warm climate of Southern California and a place where he would spend an enjoyable life of retirement.

Douglas Spoon

25 November 2008