My mother thought that reading was an escape from chores and that one must never read until all chores were done. As I child, and as an adult, I viewed my mother’s world as one in which chores were never done. If I settled down to read, she would find me and a chore list would materialize. So, I wasn’t a reader as a kid, but what I did read, or have read to me, had an interesting flavor to it. Horse stories, dog stories, a brief stint with Nancy Drew and Beverly Gray, and of course, readings from my grandmother’s Elocution book, and poets of the 17th, 18th , and 19th century.
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circa 1930 Agnes Laura Sigford, nee Keyes, Courtesy of J. G. Hill and Roots'n'Leaves Production. |
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Agnes Laura Keyes was born and raised in the Mitchell area of Eastern Oregon, where the wind blew across the hills and gulches, according to my Grandmother, all the time, and grassy hills were often painted in hues of red, orange, green and blue. Now the area is known for its Painted Hills and fossil beds. It was a hash land, hot in the summer, cold and snowy in the winter, and a lovely spring was very shortly interspersed between the two. My Grandmother rode her horse to school as did most of the students, unless they lived close enough to walk to school. The schools were of the one-room vintage and scattered across the hillsides. Agnes Laura went to the Waldron School, which was a few miles north of their Mitchell homestead and a few miles south of the village of Richmond, which also had a school. One of the following photos is of “Pet’s school- Waldron.” Pet was the name by which Agnes Laura’s father called her, from the time she was a wee babe until his death. Unfortunately, the back of the photo did not name the students, but it looks to me like Agnes Laura is the 3th girl from the left in the back row. Her teacher, May Holloway, is standing 2nd from the left in the back row. It is also likely, that the students include several of her brothers and sisters – Allie, Olga, Ray, Philip, Echo, and Inny.
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Circa 1895 photo was found on the back wall of a Mitchell cafe during a lunch on one of our treks to Mitchell. What a treasure! A photo of my grandmother's teacher. Courtesy of J. G. Hill and Roots'n'Leaves Production. |
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Circa 1895, Waldron School Picture. Although it is hard to tell, as Allie, Agnes Laura, Olga, and Echo are likely in this photo, it looks like Agnes Laura Keyes might be the girl in white skirt standing 3rd from the right. Teacher May Holloway is standing far left. Courtesy of J. G. Hill and Roots'n'Leaves Production.
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circa 1896, The James E.
L. Keyes homestead house. A treasure trove photo as most of the
family is shown here .: James E. L, Sarah Ellen, Olga, Ray, Allie,
Inny, Echo, Agnes Laura, David and Philip. May Holloway also
boarded with the Keyes family in this home.
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Agnes Laura caught the attention on the young teacher, May Holloway, who boarded with the Keyes family. She convinced Agnes Laura’s father, James E. L. Keyes to send the young girl to the Willamette Valley to finish her schooling. Agnes Laura could have gone to school in Salem or Corvallis or Philomath, all a far piece from the grass covered hills of eastern Oregon.
The Keyes had relatives in Corvallis, Philomath, and Salem, so she could have been sent to stay with relatives and go to school in Salem, Philomath, or even Corvallis. Agnes Laura was intelligent and quick to learn, and her memories of her schooling in the Willamette Valley stayed with her for all of her life. The following photo is a pen and ink drawing of the Philomath home of Agnes Laura’s grandfather, David Lowery Keyes. He was born in Johnson County, Tennessee in 1822 and a grandson of Alexander Doran. He married Susan J. Ward, a granddaughter of Alexander Doran, on January 3, 1849. The couple and their first two sons, followed his older brothers, James and John to Oregon in 1852. Their travel took them to New York City from Tennessee, then by ship to the Isthmus of Panama, overland to the Pacific Ocean and up the coast by ship to Portland. It has been said that they traveled from Portland by boat along the Willamette River and its tributaries.
Every summer my mother would bring her children to spend a week with my Sigford grandparents. I was about twelve years old when my grandmother passed away, but I now realize the gifts that she bestowed upon me during those few short weeks. Grandmother Sigford (Agnes Laura) would open up her glass-fronted bookcase, which was hand-made by her only son Clemmon Russell, and carefully take out her treasured elocution book. By then, I may have been reading a sparse diet of horse and dog books, and later Nancy Drew and Beverly Gray books, but the book that I most remember is my grandmother’s elocution book. She took great pride in reading some of the passages to me in her best remembered elocution style. Elocution books of that era not only had “readings,” but a plethora of breathing, posture and voice exercises, in addition to a significant amount of gestures. I would sit at the kitchen table as she read to me. Later on, she would let me take out the elocution book and read to myself, or aloud to her, while she was cooking or baking. I remember feeling very grown up and worldly. My Grandmother liked to regale me with these elocution lessons. There were selections of poetry – I best remember the poetry of Emily Dickinson; also, excerpts from Shakespeare, and Henry James; and others which I no longer remember. I best remember carefully taking out the elocution book from the bookcase and being transported to another level of this everyday world.
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An elocution book from
the 1890's.
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My Grandmother Sigford gave me another view of reading. In 1945, for my mother’s 26th birthday, my grandmother sent a book of poetry to her - The Standard Book of British and American Verse, which began with the 14th century poem, “To Rosemounde, A Balade” by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340 – 1400) and ended with the 19th century verse, “Full Moon” by (Victoria Mary) Sackville West (1892 – 1962).
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My life long friend, The Standard Book of British and American Verse.
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This book of poetry was an important piece of my life as I was the older daughter and a most unwilling dishwasher of dishes left from the evening meals. My mother would set her book of poetry on the window sill above the kitchen sink to better tempt me with completing my evening chore. That poetry book worked a miracle. I no longer hated doing the evening dishes. Instead, I would read poems aloud while I slowly, very slowly, washed the dishes.
The first poem I memorized was Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Old Ironsides,” probably because this was a poem that my Grandmother had my mother learn when she was about 10 years old. Mother had rather horrible memories, or so she said, of my Grandmother taking her from room to room in Mills Elementary School to present her poem. My guess that there was more to this story - perhaps it was a speech contest or other event or perhaps my Grandmother Sigford had performed this epic poem in her day. For whatever reason, “Old Ironsides” the first of my memorized poem. It’s not the easiest poem to intone to a crowd, but I didn’t let a small thing like that stop me. Driving in the car, sitting along the lakeside or on the dock, trekking up a mountainside, I could and did launch, for decades, into Holmes’s words, “Aye, tear her tattered ensign down, Long it has waved on high, ….” So often I repeated these lines that Holmes penned, even my grandchildren learned these words. Even now, every once in awhile, the words of this poem will come to me unbidden.
After memorizing “Old Ironsides,” I went on to other poets and poems – Chaucer, Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Tennyson, Robert Herrick, Percy Shelley and Alfred Noyes, to name a few. My early reading influences were of long gone eras. My role models in the reading world came out of my grandmother’s elocution book and the book of poetry that she gave to my mother. Indeed, my role models were writers of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
MY grandmother also imparted the story of Madame X to my mother and I. I believe this reading came from her elocution book and my mother won first place with her reading of this old fashioned story in a speech contest. Years later, I too won a first with this reading.
I didn’t think much about this peculiarity of reading materials. I just thought that was how everyone learned to read, until much later when a friend in my writing group mentioned that I often had an old-fashioned way of speaking and writing. About the same time, whilst organizing some of my old books, I noticed an old (out of date) history book that had belonged to my husband’s grandfather – Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. It was published in a hard-bound book in 1926 from a series of educational pamphlets. I did not read the book in its entirety, but I did recognize that I was strangely comfortable with that old fashioned way of writing; embedded clauses ending with semi-colons that went on for entire paragraphs – lengthy paragraphs. Noteworthy, it has taken me years to weed out excessive punctuation and to get a cleaner my understandable writing form.
My childhood history with books was rather sparse in number. However, the breadth of the world of words brought to me by my grandmother, Agnes Laura Sigford, nee Keyes, set a wide swathe for me to later follow in the world of books, stories and letters, albeit a tad old fashioned by today’s reading fashions.
I traveled this path, mostly unknowingly, for the rest of my life.
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© Joan G. Hill, Roots'n'Leaves Publications
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