There is was a tree stump, Of course, it was silent -- it could not say
it suffered when it was cut by fierce chain saws and felled and dismembered
across the ridge on which it had grown for 100 to 120 years. And
we worry about dailey problems -- yet in the life of a 120 year old tree
-- what is a day? What gentle hand had set it out? Or had it sprun from
a self- planted seed or acorn? And if a 100 year old, 1898 was it's
birth.
Carroll Welch 12 years of age, grabbed up a newspaper thrown off the train
at the sturgis depot -- "War with Spain" "Maine Explodes -- May lives
lost." And Caroll Welch said "I sold out of papers by 9:00."
1898 -- one of the Lindle boys joined up -- volunteered with Teddy Roosevelt
and went off to fight in Cuba. The Court house deed shows where he
made his interest in the family land to his mother before he left for the
volunteer army.
And Sturgis was an infant town -- strung out along the new railway which
had been buily in 1886 from Henderson to Princeton, KY. But who cares?
What is a day in the life of a tree? But time to absorb soil nutrients
and time to provide shade for a small family or playing children, or lounging
livestock. But that old tree stump had a lot of evidence of wet seasons,
dry seasons, floods, and droughts.
And I bent over and counted the tree rings and tried to do it accurately.
It was about the age of the old trees that circle McGill Hall (Old Ohio
Baptist College) in Sturgis, KY. For those years it must have become the
thing or style to set out trees for shade, for comfort, for wind screens;
to commemorate the loss of a deceased friend, or relative or spouse; and
maybe the old settlers had skinned the land of all the nice old shade trees
and line trees and line survey trees. But trees don't talk; don't keep
record; don't set down human doing and comings and goings -- they just
tolerate humans and storms and oerils and tornadoes and rain and snow and
dry spells. A tree's got no soul -- has it? It is neuter gender;
yet it is a very much a part of life -- through thick and thin.
And in 1900 John Wynn was born; the Governor of Kentucky. Gobel was shot
on the Capital grounds in Frankfort; and John Wynn's middle name was Gobel;
and the bulletts that killed the Governer of Kentucky went into a tree
on the Old Capital Ground in Frankfort and you can view the tree.
And in those years nancy Huston Banks (of Union County) hustled news stories
in South Africa; and she had known the easy life of Morganfield and had
attended the Old Presbyterian Church in Morganfield and her father -- Judge
George Huston -- had taken the time to put down his life's experiences
in Union County School and home in Daviess County, near Owensboro.
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