"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. ====================================================== (I have no connection with this family but I'd appreciate knowing if you found this posting helpful.) johnobrien@kc.rr.com ======================================================