The design of this dissertation was to place a biographical sketch of some of my 19th Century ancestors into the context of the general history of their time. The two people selected were my paternal grandmother, Katherine Beckham Conner (Katy in the text), born September 3, 1820; died sometime near, but before, 1880, in Toledo, Arkansas. The other was Katy's middle son, William Lewis Conner (Lewis in the text), born in Mississippi, August 28, 1843; died in Fordyce, Arkansas, June 30, 1901. Lewis was my father. / Tradition has it that Katy migrated from Mississippi (Webster County) to Arkansas in 1848; that she drove and looked after her own covered wagon, traveling as a unit in a train that left Webster County leaving for the then newly discovered gold mines of California. / Katy probably had no intention of going all the way. She was a twenty-eight-year-old woman with three little boys. It was never explained why she left in Mississippi a husband, William Moore Connor, my grandfather. / Tradition also indicated that the place were she dropped out of the train was in Arkansas, at Toledo. The settlement was a rudimentary trading center in a pioneer farming community, sixteen miles South of Pine Bluff and located on the Old Military Road. / In this region, opened to white settlement in the 1820's, this old road seems to antedate acquisitions from the Indians and all other recorded events. It figures predominantly in the following story. / Katy remained in the vicinity of Toledo for the balance of her life, she became a successful farmer--possibly a prosperous one--all on her own. She brought her three boys to maturing--the oldest was Orlando Philemon (Lanny in the text), the youngest James Henry (Jim in the text). She died leaving all of them comfortably established in the community. / All their lives were rudely interrupted by the Civil War. Considerable space in the text is devoted to the experiences of Lewis and Lanny in the Confederate Armed Services. In the course of the service Lewis lost his left leg at the hip. / After Katy died the railroad came into this virgin territory. From Pine Bluff on the Arkansas River it followed generally the route of the Old Military Road, especially for the approximately seventy miles to Camden, another river town on the Ouachita River. The railroad's coming had the effect of revolutionizing the work and life styles of practically every inhabitant of this primitive wilderness. When the actual route of the road missed a town, as it did Toledo, which had become a county seat by that time, the population of the old established community would move to one of the towns newly created along the railroad. Today, just one hundred years later, Toledo, first a primitive village, then a bustling farming trading center, and finally county seat, has reverted to rural terrain. Its site is indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape. / The dissertation necessarily includes some discussion of land policy, farming and social, political and economic history that affected the family history. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-11, Section: A, page: 4810. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74335 |
| Contributors | CONNER, VIRGIL HENRY., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 210 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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