BACK IN THE EARLY DAYS

When Metamora Was the “Center of the Universe”

Old Settler’s Story

Rev. C. W. Whorrall Writes Some Remembrances, Telling of His First Trip To Metamora

Every native born resident of Woodford County remembers their first trip to Metamora and the awe which inspired them at the first sight of the old court house building. The following letter from C.W. Whorrall (Rev. Charles W. Whorrall) and J. C. Irving relates the incidents in the early days and is guaranteed to drive away the blues.

Dear old friend Cass:

In the Peoria Daily Star I notice a communication from your city copied from the Bloomington Bulletin in reference to old Metamora, and noting some interesting relics you have in your keeping.

Many things in that article took me back to the “good old days” and started a train of remembrances that prompts me to inflict this epistle upon my old friend Cass. Those were great days amidst a great people. We may have fallen upon degenerate times – have evolved senators and representatives that “represent” the “interests” and “misrepresent the people”. But in those good old days of Lincoln, Davis, Lovejoy, Yates (not little Jacksonville whippersnipe) but “honest old Dick”, with all his grievous faults and lapses of morale. These were the giants sent of Abraham’s God to lead a people in the perilous hours of their history. Strange isn’t it that so many of their activities should revolve about an old historic temple of justice in dear old Metamora?

Cass, I cannot write of these things and hold down the echoes that involuntarily kick out of the past and come on bidden trooping before me. It all rises before me as a dream. I remember just where you stood the first time I ever saw you – long time ago? I fear the Bulletin correspondent romances on your age, he says “56”. I am inclined to believe he slanders you. I shall be 51 the 13th day of next month. I don’t seem possible, Cass? But figures don’t lie, notwithstanding liars do sometimes figure. I feel just as young as I did when I used to take the train at Metamora of a bright September morning and hike me away to Bloomington to college. But when I recall that I have been “grand pa” for these two years and more, I know it’s not a dream, but one of the stern facts of life. Going back to the time I first saw you – you were standing in the door of an old store building on the west side of the public square, kept I believe by a Mr. Roman, or Robman. You were then a chunk of a boy, perhaps 15 years of age. As I recall, you clerked at that store for several years. Then I think of you over at the old court house.

There were many incidents in our associations while you clerked at Robman’s that imprinted themselves indelibly on my mind. You were in my childish imagination a “hero”. While I wrestled with the plow, followed the old Kirby self rake, binding by hand for six long seeks at a stretch, hustled up the hay with old fashioned ”Armstrong” hay derrick, or entering into the poetic dream that Riley so beautifully frames when he rants: “O the husky, rusty rustle of the tassels of the corn, and the raspin’ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn,” and a whole lot more kind of “rot” that is music to my ear today, but which would have been sufficient provocation to have caused me to have assisted in mobbing him at the time – I say in those days, while I disported myself thus in the field, out on the splendid quarter section of the S.E. ¼ of Sec. 12. Metamora Tp., there came to my mind’s eye times many and oft the picture of a fat, sleek, well groomed, black eyed boy behind Robman’s counter, shoveling sugar out of a barrel, and raveling off philosophy by the yard. Cass, you were the boy and you were every inch a hero. I dreamed of the time when I should be by the sugar barrel, and have my “philosophic reel” as well lubricated and geared on ball bearings so as to “astound” the country jokes.

Cass, I remember the first time I ever “made the memorable journey” to Metamora “alone”. My older brother, William H., now living bear Marshalltown, Iowa, got a little stubborn and my mother’s Scotch-Irish temper was stirred a bit, I was placed on “old Queen”, an old sorrel mare of blessed memory, and started to “town”. I would not have exchanged places that morning with the czars of all the Russias and Uncle Sam thrown in. I was quite certain that I would be able to “find the place’ but after traveling what seemed at that time a greater distance than it now seems to Chicago, I saw looming up athwart my path, gleaming in the morning sun, the gilded, golden colored ball of the flag staff of the court house. When I reined up front of that temple of justice, right south of Portman’s store. I put that building into my list of the “world’s greatest buildings”. I can see that gold colored ball gleam yet. One thing that comes to my mind in connection with your clerking at Robman’s – one day I was waiting while you dug the toothsome sugar out of the barrel – now if there was in those days any article that seemed to appeal to my taste more strongly than another, it was brown sugar, of the kind and grade you dug out of that old barrel. Well, as I was remarking, you finished “digging” and then stepped out at the back door for some article, and right there “the tempter”, the devil, an evil spirit, my fallen spirit or some depraved cuss – although mother usually insisted on calling him, or it “Charlie” bobbed up and the first thing I knew I had transferred a very fine toothsome lump of sugar into my side pocket. You finished my order and I “vamoosed” as quickly as possible. Just after I turned at Garmon Gish’s corner, I noticed someone approaching from behind, moneyed on a sorrel horse, riding Jehu like. The accusing spirit within “smote” me sore, and putting whip to old Queen, I covered the ground to Herin’s corner in about ten minutes, there I decided t leap on east and avoid my pursuer if possible. That took me half a mile out of my way, but the fiend kept right on after me. As I approached the residence of old Asa Capron, the horseman was so near that I listened to the “cautioning voice within”, and as a precautionary measure, I slipped that toothsome lump of sugar from my pocket and threw it into the weeds at the side of the road. Within twenty rods of that spot, my old “Queen” exhausted from the pace I kept, the avenging nemesis passed me, and I recognized, not an officer of the law, but our old “butcher” on an innocent mission of hustling “canners” for the slaughter pen. Cass, the only thing about that diabolical affair that I regretted for years and the loss of which stays with me even to this day, was the way I beat myself out of that lump of sugar.

But I’ll tire you with this nonsense. How I recall the places, names and faces of the grand old men mentioned in the article before me. I have satisfied the inner man time sundry and oft at the table of Grand Ma Spears. The last time I made the trip across country, I believe it was the spring of ’98. I took dinner at the “Spears hotel”. I used to see the old walnut bedstead in their parlor. I recall sitting by it and glaring at its old posts, the morning that I was “21” and submitting to the ordeal of allowing “Gray the Peoria dentist” to pull two ulcerated teeth.

But the names of those old “heroes”, Cass – when we call the roll, how few their responses. Old Jim Whitmire and his brother, Zac, your venerable father, old Father Rouse, the Pages, Painters, Martins, Wilsons, Morses, Parminer, Ranney Tanton. Boys – what a tribe of illustrious pioneers? A new generation has come that perhaps “knows not Joseph,” but how I would enjoy attending one your old settlers’ reunions and having the privilege of speaking to the second generation of “old settlers.” You and I would be rated amongst them, Cass.

Think of it Cass? You, the black eyed, sleek, well fed boy by the sugar barrel, and the “honorable mayor of the city”, and I am a humble Presbyterian preacher in Kansas loving sugar as dearly as ever, and incidentally pining over that lost lump yet.

[For more information on J. C. "Cass" Irving, click here.}