OK, folks. Since the list has been so quiet I hope no one minds too much if I post a story from one of the old settlers. Let me set the stage a bit. My great grandfather, HENRY SANDERS and his two brothers MAXWELL and THOMAS homesteaded in the Republican River valley in Clay County shortly after the civil war just a few miles southeast of Clay Center. They each built stone houses exactly alike near the now non-existent town of Broughton and fairly close to the river. The houses stand to this day and two of them are still kept up and occupied. Any Clay County residents on this list are probably familiar with those old houses which I think for many years were referred to as the "Sanders houses". In any event, my granddad, WILLIAM HENRY SANDERS, was born there in 1868 and lived in the area until he went to college at nearby Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. The INGERSOLS apparently also homesteaded near the Sanders. My granddad wrote down his recollections as follows: ----------------------- "In those early days, [1860's - 1880's] there was quite a good settlement near where my father lived. [This must be Broughton, KS]. There was one family in particular that insisted on helping to start the first school there. They had come on from Connecticut and among the young women in the family one of them had been a missionary to the Sandwich Islands to help teach those poor heathens how to wear clothes. One of the girls also took over organizing the school in our community. These people were named INGERSOL - the old gentlemen himself was a congregational minister, Rev. E. P. INGERSOL. He had written quite a book about the Great Pyramid of Egypt where he contended that there were certain measurements which measured up to the English ideas of inches and feet and so forth. One story that always interested me a great deal is the one about Theodore Ingersol. He was the oldest of the Reverend's sons and he lived down on the river bottom on a sandy knoll. He was not a very provident sort of a fellow and didn't have much of anything left when his crops were brought in because he didn't know how to farm very good. It was quite a common thing for him to come out to our homestead and visit around and talk to father about the time he thought there would be a dinner or supper ready. He became a rather interesting item. We always grinned and said "Here comes Theodore to find out if he can get his bread and sorghum to come out even." Sorghum was one of the sweets that was able to be made in those days. White sugar was very scarce. Father would invariably invite Theodore in to eat and he could never come out even on the sorghum or the bread that he had on his plate. Bread and his sweet was a great treat to him and he would say, "Mrs. Sanders, I've got more syrup here than bread. Can I have another piece of bread?" Then that bread would more than sop up the sorghum, so he would pour out some more sorghum and of course the bread would run out before that sorghum was lapped up. And the poor devil got quite a meal eaten that way by not finding that his sorghum and bread would ever come out even. There is another of the Ingersol family that I want to tell a story about. He was Fred Ingersol. When the threshing machines of the early days first came in, they didn't have to use the flail and cradle to harvest their wheat any more. Fred Ingersol was rather a daredevil sort of fellow. He took over part of the job of helping to lubricate the upper part of the threshing machine. In doing so, he inadvertently stepped down on the table on which the bound bundles were thrown to men with pitchforks. His feet slipped back to where the cylinder was rotating and it stripped most of the flesh off from his ankle bone up his calf to his knee completely. That was eventually cured up and my father made a peg leg for him. He bound the bottom of it which was probably two inches in diameter with an iron band that father forged for that purpose. He was tagged for this as Peg Leg Fred. Fred was quite a character in his day and was in to practically everything. Among other things, one time late in the fall one year, my father had some late watermelons that he was trying to keep covered up with grass and reeds against the frost. Poor old Fred, of course, knew what a watermelon patch was and he hunted out those watermelons of father's. In order to find out whether they were ripe enough he would punch his peg leg into one end of the watermelons. He plugged every watermelon in the patch. There was another girl in that Ingersol family whose name was Carrie. She married an expert carpenter who had settled in the valley by the name of Chapman. Chapman helped finish up some of the woodwork on not only the Ingersol house but my own maternal grandfather J. H. Simpson's house. The stairway from the lower story to the upper story was his handiwork. [Note: the Simpson house still stands today near the Gatesville Cemetery.] But he eventually went haywire about something or other - the worries of the day or the times or some such. They had to put him away in a crazy house in Topeka and poor Carrie was left to look after her two daughters as best she could. She moved to Clay Center and became a dressmaker." ---------------- Well, that's surely enough for now. I don't want to overstay my welcome. Hope you've enjoyed the stories, especially if you have any Clay Center Ingersols, Sanders, Simpsons or Chapmans in your family tree. I believe I have a picture of some of the Sanders and one of the Ingersol boys at a G.A.R. Meeting. The picture looks to have been taken in the 1870's. The names include: THEODORE INGERSOL, JESSE DEVER, JAKE PHILLIPS, FRANK SHEINKOENIG, JIM VERNER, TOM SANDERS AND HENRY SANDERS, all members of G.A.R. Post 338 of the District of Kansas (Broughton Area). Don't worry, I plan to leave copies of all my granddad's stories at the Clay Center Historical Society with Kathy Haney, whose ancestor, as I understand it, is the Frank Sheinkoenig listed above. Regards to all, Jack Sanders Eureka, Kansas ------------------------------- I am very proud of all of you, living or dead, and have reached the place where I see the uselessness of regrets for past mistakes and would not wish to try it all over again.² -William Henry Sanders (1957) Inverness, FL. Age 89