This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list.
Surnames: CADE, MALBY, SUMMERS, WILLIAMSON
Classification: Obituary
Message Board URL:
http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/CNH.2ACIB/221
Message Board Post:
"The Kansas City Times" (Missouri) Thursday, March 2, 1893
IN HIS HUNDREDTH YEAR.
Thomas CADE, the oldest resident of Harlem and for forty
years a resident in this immediate vicinity living either in
Kansas City, Leavenworth, Weston or in Kickapoo county,
Kansas, died at his home in Harlem on Monday and was
buried in the family burying ground at Leavenworth yesterday.
He was the father of Captain W. A. CADE, owner of the
Missouri river ferry at this point, and leaves besides this son,
a widow and three children and a host of grandchildren and
great grandchildren.
The children are: W. A. and Thomas CADE of Kansas City,
Mrs. MALBY of Leavenworth and Mrs. WILLIAMSON of
Holton, Kan. His widow, a hale and hearty little woman of 79,
attended the funeral yesterday, but has been very much
affected by her husband's death, as the couple had lived
together for over sixty years.
There is some dispute as to the patriarch, Thomas CADE's,
age. He himself claimed that he was 99 and as his faculties
were unimpaired up to within a week of his death, it would
seem that he ought to have been authority on this point. The
old family Bible of the CADEs contain these entries:
"Thomas CADE, born July 25, 1798"
"Margaret H. CADE, born January 26, 1814"
It is admitted, however, that the names written in the family
Bible by a relative long after many children had been born to
the couple and the old man always claimed that the record
was incorrect.
"Father always said he was born on turnip day," said Captain
CADE last night. "Turnip day is the day when old Virginia
farmers used to plant turnips. It falls on August 25."
But whether it was in 1793 or 1798, Thomas CADE was born
in Virginia, and as a boy was wont to run barefooted over the
rugged hills of his native county. The shoemaker, in his boy-
hood days, came around in the fall, the farmers furnished the
leather and the cobbler made shoes enough to last through
the winter. If they didn't last they were all they got, anyway,
for old Thomas CADE has often told his sons how he would
run barefooted in the snow and experience no very great
physical discomfort. There were caves from which warm air
issued near his home, and when the boy's feet got cold, they
would warm them in these caves.
Leaving Virginia when a boy, his parents moved to Ohio, and
here along the banks of the Ohio river Thomas CADE grew up
to manhood. He married Margaret SUMMERS, and in Ohio
his elder children were born. In his earlier years, Mr. CADE
followed flatboating and later steamboating on the Ohio and
Mississippi rivers. He often told his children of the wonder
and awe with which he gazed on the first steamboat he ever
saw. He and his neighbors thought the boat was propelled
up stream by steam from a nozzle in the stern which blew
against the boat with terrific force and pushed it against the
current, very much as a man would lift himself by his boot
straps.
The enterprising floatboatman had many narrow escapes
from Indians when making excursions to some of the wilder
parts of the country for lead and zinc ore, and once he met
an enemy which was worse than the Indians and which is
attracting a great deal of attention in these latter days. He
went to New Orleans with a load of furs and produce and
came back with the cholera.
"He recovered," says Captain CADE in narrating the story,
"but ever afterward he was subject to the severest cramps."
The old man was a natural pioneer, one of that grand class of
men who settled the wilderness all through this western country
and made it to blossom as the rose. When the town of Ironton, O.,
was laid out it almost absorbed his farm. Civilization was treading
on his toes and with his large family --- he had eleven children in
all --- he removed to a place called Manda Furnace in Kentucky
on the Ohio river. He still followed steamboating and flatboating
at intervals and was wont to tell how, once upon a time when he
was a boy, he was taken with the measles at St. Louis. St. Louis
was then a straggling village along the river front. The old time cure
was "Nannie tea," a decoction made from sheep dung. His
sympathizing companions made him the "Nannie tea" and gathered
the materiel for it on the rocky bluffs just back of the town where
Third street now rears its masses of brick and marble. This was
seventy-five years ago.
In 1850, he steamed up the Missouri on the steamboat Minnesota,
an old single engine side-wheeler and landed at Weston. Since that
time, he had lived in this part of the country. His son, Captain CADE,
carried the chain when the town of Leavenworth was laid out. "Old
Man CADE" went up the Kaw river on the first boat that ever ascended
that stream, the Excell, with Captain Charles K. BAKER. This was in
the spring of '54 and it is noticeable that the Excell was the only boat
that ever made any money on the Kaw. Too many boats went up the
river that could not get back and the trade was abandoned.
In 1873 he lived in Kansas City, but lost his money in one of the bank
failures of that year of panic and again went back to Leavenworth.
A year ago last October, he removed to Harlem. He was remarkably
spry and well preserved for a man of his years up to the time of his last
illness. He voted for Cleveland and Stone at the last election, this being
the first vote he had cast since the "niggers" were enfranchised. He was
a union man during the war, but declared he would never vote at the same
polls with a colored man. He yielded to the arguments of his son at the
last election.
Although supplied with every want by his sons, the old man could not
throw off old tendencies, and at every rise he liked to go to the river and
catch drift wood, at which he was very expert.
He would not live away from the river. Although run out by the high water
a year ago and supplied with a comfortable cottage in Kansas City, he
insisted on going back to Harlem as soon as the river subsided.
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(I have no connection with this family but I'd appreciate
knowing if you found this posting helpful.)
johnobrien(a)kc.rr.com
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neirbo5