Selected Families and Individuals

Notes


Elizabeth Jared SIMMONS

1.  Frank A. Roinett wrote about his grandmother, Elizabeth Jared Simmons as follows:

    Elizabeth Jared Simmons was as courageous a character as her time produced.  As a widow with a number of small children she lived in a newly settled area during the turbulent times leading up to the Civil War.  She then married Perry Upton, a Methodist preacher.  When the tides of war threatened them with starvation, the family was loaded into a covered wagon and driven to Arkansas to be near relatives.  He later died there.  Before leaving Missouri they hid their valuables, such as they were, in what she called a “bee-gum” tree.

    After the war she drove home and found everything she had owned burned and stripped.  She drove sixty miles through the woods to get salt for her family and use and to buy a cow, which she led home on foot.

    Wild fruit, berries, wild game and corn furnished the family’s food.  She carded her wool and wove it, and she raised and wove cotton for cloth.  The family made all the clothes they wore.

    She used the hlep of her children and built a log house.  Later on she made her home for thirty years with my mother, and grandma was a respected person in our household.  Never do I reall my father ever showing any displeasure at having a mother-in-law permanently living in his home.  She alway took first place.

    She lived a great life and died on her birthday---89 years old.

    She was a devout Southern Methodist and was always seen in her place in church.