Sarah Eastin, my maternal grandmother, was born Sarah Todd, near Lexington, Ky., in 1820. She was the seventh of ten children who owned many Negroes who worked the Todd plantation. Her grandparents, Peter and Ms. Todd, had migrated overland by wagon train about 1785 from North Carolina in company with his two brothers, one of whom was Thomas Todd. They settled near Lexington, Ky., on what is now the Bluegrass Ordnance Depot, which supplies much of the needs of the U.S. Army.
Mrs. Everett Falder, my double cousin Louise (Switzer) Falder, deceased, vacationed in Kentucky with her husband in April 1961, and talked to many people, also searched records in the cities of Speedwell, Richmond, Kingston and Lexington. They found the following:
- First female Sabbath school in Kentucky was established in Kentucky in 1819. Elizabeth and Agnes Todd, older sisters of Sarah, attended it.
- Col. Chas. S. Todd, soldier and diplomat was the of U.S. Supreme Court Judge Thomas Todd. He was born near Danville, Ky., Jan. 22, 1791 and died as an army offer in battle at Baton Rouge, La. He was educated in the best Kentucky schools, then attended William and Mary College in Virginia in 1809. He studied law with his father and practiced law in Lexington, Ky., 1811-12. Entering the U.S. Army in 1812 he fought for the Patriot Army against England. In December 1812 he was promoted from acting quartermaster of the advance of the Northwestern army to Division Judge Advocate of the Kentucky troops and eventually became Inspector General with the rank of Lt. Colonel. In writing of the General’s service General Harrison addressed his letter to a member of President Madison’s Cabinet and said, “Colonel Todd is equal in bravery and superior in intelligence to any of the officer ranks in the U.S. army.” He was discharged in 1815 and a year later was married to Kentucky Governor Shelby’s daughter, Sarah. President Madison appointed him Secretary of State the same year and he was sent to Colombia, South America in 1818–25 as charge d’affairs. He next accepted the Minister’s post to Vienna, Austria, then to St. Petersburg, now Petrograd, U.S.S.R. He discussed diplomatic affairs with King Bernadotte of Sweden, who was the only Marshal of Napoleon’s army to retain his crown. The Colonel was treated as an equal by the King, who considered him a man of great intelligence.
- Col. John Todd, for whom Todd County in Kentucky is named, had a likewise brilliant career, starting as a lawyer. He was a close friend of Daniel Boone and other explorers. As a soldier he was a close friend of Gen. George Rogers Clark in the conquest of lower Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. He was made Commandant of the Counties of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio in 1777. At the battle of Blue Licks he fell mortally wounded and died, leaving a wife and young daughter. The widowed Mrs. Todd became the wife of State Senator Robert Wickliffe of Kentucky, and lived to be the oldest native-born woman of Lexington in 1847.
- Hon. Thomas Todd was born Jan. 23, 1765 in King and Queen county, Va., of parents who were descended from some of the best commoner families of England. He also graduated from William and Mary College in Virginia and made his way to Madison„ Ky., on horseback to plead his first case. He was so successful that he returned to Danville, Ky., with two cows and their calves for his fee, whereas he had had only his horse, bridle, saddle and 37 1/2 cents in cash before, as he schooling had nearly fully depleted his resources. He went on to become one of the best lawyers in the U.S. at that time. He was first married in 1788, but was widowered in 1811. The following year he married the widow of George Washington, the nephew of General George Washington. The new Mrs. Todd was a sister of Dolly Madison, the first lady of the land.
- The names of Todd, Tharp and Owens appear all through the early American history in that section. It is a matter for the Switzers to be proud of, who are descendants of Clara Belle Eastin of Bardolph. These men shaped Kentucky and the central U.S. in the formative years in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
Now to get back to my grandparents’ lives. He was born February 29, 1818, one of a family who owned slaves. A Negress nurse dropped him accidentally when he was very young and broke one of his legs near the ankle. When his mother took notice of his continual crying, it was too late to remedy the situation properly as they did not know nearly so much as they now know in medicine. The bones had started to knit without the legging bandages, so grandfather went through life with one leg shorter than the other by two inches.
He and Sarah Todd were married about 1838 and two years later migrated to Indiana, each riding a horse as part of a wagon train, and Sally carried her first born in her arms. What few possessions they took with them were stowed safely in a friend’s wagon. Life could have been quite easy for them, as slavery was at hits height and they would not have needed to have worked, but they rode away from it all with little more than they could carry on their two horses.
In two more moves the Eastins reached Bardolph in 1865 with a wagonload of children and furniture. Some of their brood were grown up so the boys helped their father build their home, while the larger girls hired out to people to work in their homes. When Ken was in Illinois in 1965 he thought the little home was in excellent repair despite its life of one hundred years.
The little lame man, all 140 pounds of him with white chin whiskers and pink scalp under white hair, fathered 12 children to maturity. Lou, a daughter, passed away at 20, before I was born. Grandfather and grandmother had a self-sufficient spot in Bardolph. He was a carpenter and trained all four of his sons to carpenter. Three of them remained in Bardolph and worked with their father, while William went to Macomb to marry and live.
The lot was about 200 feet wide by 300 feet long. It had a carpenter shop, about 16 by 32 feet in size, barn for four head carriage shed and lot, threshing steam engine and separator shed, small chicken house and yard, biffy, rain barrel, barrel stave swing, grape arbour, two apple trees, two cherry trees„ two large maple trees, two lilac bushes and a cellar under the house as well as an extra large garden. There was a fine well and pump outside the backdoor and a front and two side porches.
They were carpenters of the old school, who sharpened their own saws, and their planes and chisels, giving the last honing to the bladed tools by rubbing them on the soles of their shoes. There must be many buildings around Bardolph yet, which were built by the Eastins, as their home was the first one which they built and they were kept busy all of the time, when not threshing or other jobs, which they considered necessary. If a man came to them with the dimensions of a building which he wanted them to build, they discussed it for about fifteen minutes, then gave him the price. This figure was arrived at without the aid of pencil or paper. Uncle John and Aunt Amrette stayed with their parents and did not marry.
Their threshing machine was hauled out of the shed to the street and readied for the fall run of threshing. First the winter wheat was threshed and hauled to town by long strings of box wagons, as that was one of the cash crops of the Illinois farms. Then the run was repeated for oats to feed with the occasional field of barley or rye. They had their own team for the water wagon and used it about the town when required in off-season jobs.
Nick and Sally built, lived in and died in their house in Bardolph. Grandfather outlived his sweetheart wife by 20 years but now they lie side by side as they lived. It is a pretty spot where grandparents Eastin lie, also my father and mother and Stella’s, Ralph’s and Howard’s mother lie, at the northwest corner of Bardolph. In all of the time that I knew them, I did not hear one word spoken in a temper. I believe they lived that way, slow yet very efficient and friendly. I was honored as a small boy to be present at grandfather’s 20th birthday party, given on the occasion of his 80th birthday — he was a February twenty-niner.
It has seemed to me that a greater proportion of this large family had tragic things happen to them in life or died of something out of the ordinary. Grandmother half rose at the breakfast table and fell over into Uncle John’s arms, the victim of apoplexy; grandfather had a large purple swelling which covered his entire right cheek so he could not shave it. I believe it left him before his death. Uncle Will Eastin was nearing 60 when I was born. I remember him only as having a long gray beard and receiving eye drops from his wife.
Martha (Aunt Mattie) tried to out run the flames which had caught her clothes on fire, and burned to death. Elizabeth (Aunt Lib) was left a widow with two small, red-haired boys. She afterward married and raised two more boys and two girls. Aunt Anne Orr raised five sons and one daughter. Uncle Andy tried to shoot a lawyer when he foreclosed on Uncle’s farm. The bullet went through his cheek instead of his head and Uncle was incarcerated in a mental institute for some time.
Aunt Lou died at 20, I never knew her as she had passed before I was born. Uncle Charley was a well built man and healthy until his later years when he became ill, but hung on for five years to need to be rolled in sheets several times daily. Aunt Carried spent many years sitting in a chair or lying on a bed, unable to work. She recovered to be quite bright the last few years of her life. My own mother was sick for two years when her five babies in eight years were arriving. She recovered, however, to have happy years the remaining ones after Minnabel was born. She was killed by a cluster light standard on the curb of the public square in Macomb, when Dad lost control of the family car while going home from a church entertainment one night.
The evening was quite cool so the engine of the car did not respond quickly. As he was quite new at driving, he did not know any of the tricks of gunning the motor, running in first or second gear or other little things which would have warmed the motor to full operation. Instead he pushed the gasoline throttle on the quadrant on the top of the steering column until the car moved off. As it warmed, the engine started taking all of the gasoline and although Dad pulled his feet back as far from the foot pedals as he could, the hand gasoline feed on the wheel continued to feed whereas if he had been feeding with his foot, as everyone else does, the gasoline would have shut off automatically and mother would not have died then.
The car entered the public square at the northwestern corner and went faster and faster along the west side of the square, along the south side, then Dad tried to continue circling the square until possibly driving off on North Randolph street which would have been possible as it led off the square without any turning. As he neared the intersection of Jackson Street with the square, his momentum was so great the car careened over to the curb and cut off a tall light standard, made of iron, when the protruding axle came in contact with it.
It fell outwards and crushed the top of mother’s head and inflicted head injuries to Mrs. Henry Rheim, who was sitting in the middle of the three ladies in the back seat. The third lady escaped injury, as did Dad and Mr. Rheim in the front seat. The car continued out of control about forty feet farther and ran into an island light in the center of Jackson street at it’s intersection with the square, where it was stopped as the concrete base of the light was very heavy.
It was pushed off its base, although the concrete was about 4 feet long by 2 wide and 3 high. The two injured ladies were taken immediately to a hospital, where mother died in about an hour, although she was conscious at intervals during that time. The other lady eventually recovered. I was called to the door of my rooming house in Louisville, Ky., at 2:30 a.m. to receive a telegram from Ralph and caught a train at 7:30. I had been in Louisville for less than three weeks on my first school, in fact it was the first time I had been away for any length of time.
These incidents of the Eastin family seem to me to be more than passing occurrences to happen to the members of one family, which seemed to be very healthy. There were no malignant diseases, no wars, no train or plane accidents and no fatalities from one or more epidemics, yet one after another was stricken. I have thought my life was influenced by cross influences hereditarily. The German hustle and often arrogance is exactly opposite to the soft spoken, slow to anger Southerners. When I add the fact that I am ambidextrous in one way, yet am not since I can do some things with one hand, yet cannot with the other, and have been the possessor of an allergic nose which has kept me from inside positions, which I was trained for, I wonder I have been as successful as I have been.
It has also been a matter of passing note that father and his brother married two sisters and lived within two miles of each other while raising their children. The three boys of the Will Switzer family, who were approximately my age, had heart seizures in their mid-forties from which they did not recover, the oldest girl died at the birth of her first child and the other girl passed away from cancer at near 60. Minnabel and I, double cousins of the a/m are still living at 66 and 71 with little prospect of any natural demises in the near future. That is the way the world works, however. Possibly it is a good way, also, as lives must be influenced greatly if positive indications appear.