Bits and Pieces

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 15

Well.  When I first started trying to figure out the Washington/Oregon phase of our Owens' lives, I wasn't confident that I was going to uncover much, but we actually managed to find enough primary source material to give us a pretty good picture of what was actually going on.  My search for a date on when Erasmus Miller Owen left Texas and headed on over there . . . not so much.  I spent all of my research and writing time this past week looking through a couple more years worth of articles about his son Edgar, and then trying to find newspapers from the Llano area, where his son Conrad had moved in 1905, hoping to find an article that said something, anything, about their father.  No such luck.  None of the ones about Edgar mentioned him, and there are no digitized newspapers online for Llano or any surrounding towns.  I hate those fruitless searches!

So here we are, seemingly stuck with a timeline with a mid-late 1905/early-mid 1906 listed as the date for his move.  How ridiculous is that?  It's not even going to fit into the chart.  Not only that, but here I am on Friday morning with nothing to put into this post which is supposed to be a conclusion to last week's timeline update.  

I was hoping to finish up the 1900-ish to 1909-ish period of Erasmus' life once and for all before moving back to earlier years, but I haven't had the time to contact the people in Texas about his time in Emma, either.  

I thought maybe we should take a look at some more Baptist records.  On the Baylor University Digital Collections website, you can search through all kinds of documents.  Since Baylor was founded as a Baptist institution, it has several different collections of Baptist records.  One of those is the Baptist General Convention of Texas Annuals, which are a summary of the proceedings of each year's convention in Texas.  Another is the Southern Baptist Convention Annuals, which was held in a different state each year, but, like the Baptist yearbooks, published a list of pastors in each edition. And then, there is also The Baptist Standard newspaper.  

Our Owens begin showing up in these records in 1897, but honestly, if we look at all of them together it is likely to be a giant mess.  Plus, I wanted to talk about the earlier years when I talk about Erasmus' time in Brown County, and if I talk about the later years now and then come up with just a little bit of information after contacting the church in Crosby County, I won't have enough for a full post about his time in Emma.  (I'm beginning to think I should have just covered his life in order!)

Add to that the fact that, while reading through what I found on the Baylor website last night, I kept getting these bright ideas for search terms to enter into the Portal to Texas History website to see if I could get any more hits on our family.  I did, but now my nicely organized document of Owen research links has a bunch of random newspaper links scattered throughout the Baptist document links.  (It seemed like a good idea to my chronically sleep-deprived brain at 10 p.m. to put things chronologically, but now those five pages of my thirty-eight page document are just confusing; I keep scrolling through the entries but tonight's 10 p.m. sleep-deprived brain can't seem to sort through the mess!)

And then, of course, since I have been looking at Erasmus Miller Owen's sons, Edgar and Conrad, I have come up with a few articles for them that have been quite helpful in understanding the big picture of Erasmus' life, but I'm not sure showing those out of context is going to make much sense to all of you.

What to do?  Well, since the research process is all about finding little bits and pieces and putting them all together, I guess I'll just throw a few of those bits and pieces at you. 

To recap where we left off last time:

The historian from the First Baptist Church of Ralls (formerly Emma) said that E. M. Owen was their pastor from 1901 - 1905.

A newspaper article from The Goldthwaite Eagle dated December 24, 1904, however, said that Rev. E. M. Owen was "late of Emma" where he "was" the pastor, but had decided to make his home "for a time" with his son in Goldthwaite.  This implies that he was no longer the pastor in Emma by the end of 1904.

A newspaper article from The Goldthwaite Eagle dated November 12, 1904 reported that Erasmus' daughter Orlena was preparing to move to Oregon. 

Erasmus' daughter Letitia had been in Oregon since 1904, but had actually moved to Idaho some time in 1903.

Erasmus last appeared in the Goldthwaite newspaper on May 13, 1905.

A newspaper article from The Goldthwaite Eagle dated August 12, 1905 reported that Conrad was taking up a pastorate in Llano, effective the following week.

Uncle Ras appeared in a Goldthwaite newspaper article dated May 5, 1906.

Okay.  That's what we have to work with.  I didn't find any other documents from within the 1905-1906 date range to help us figure out when Erasmus left Texas.  He wasn't in the annuals of the Texas General Convention for 1905 or 1906 (but had been in them for the preceding years), so I am taking that to mean that he had left Texas by November of 1905.  His absence from the annuals of the Southern Baptist Convention also indicate that he left Texas before the end of 1905.  And that actually makes sense, because nobody in their right mind is going to move to Grouse, Oregon in the middle of winter when they have to take a wagon or canvas-covered stage on mountain switchbacks when the temperature is well below freezing and a storm might drop two feet of snow in one go.  And now that I think of it, even though Orlena came to visit Conrad in November, it doesn't make sense that she would have headed up to Wallowa County in the winter (which lasted until April up there) either, so the fact that Erasmus disappears from the newspaper articles in mid-May totally points to a scenario where he made the move with his daughter's family.

So that allows us cut the end off of the date range, leaving us with something like "summer 1905."  Yay!

Perhaps the reason Erasmus was going to make his home with Conrad "for a time" was because a) he just needed a place to stay for a few months until he left for Oregon, and b) he preferred to have a mostly child-free place to stay, and c) none of his other sons or daughters actually had room for him at the time, and d) Conrad lived very close to his other son, Edgar, and e) he wanted to participate in the mission work his sons were involved with and f) who better for a minister to spend time with prior to embarking on his own mission work than other ministers also involved in mission work?

After I gave up looking for newspapers near Llano and switched to the Baptist records, I decided that maybe I should expand my date range, just in case there was a later reference made to E. M. Owen.  That's when I found this:

The Baptist Standard
2 May 1912

Luckily, this gentleman gave us the exact date of the edition in which Conrad's letter was published, because it didn't come up in my search results!  Here is his letter:

The Baptist Standard
4 April 1912

This talks about the conditions in the northwestern states in general, and makes it clear that there was a great need to be filled by the church, but that the work wasn't easy.  This was written after Conrad had traveled all across Oregon and spent time in numerous towns of varying sizes.  I'm guessing that the hostility toward religion was, similar to today, found in the larger cities.  I can imagine that in the Grouse area where mining and logging were two of the main industries and the population was skewed in favor of single men, the problem was more one of indifference or just lack of churches in the area.  I am now more convinced than ever that Erasmus Miller Owen moved to Oregon to help fill this need.  

But why did he return home to Texas just four years later?  And when exactly did he return?  Well, we are in luck, because I found a newspaper article that might just answer both of those questions:

The Texas Spur and Dickens Item
24 December 1909

The Mrs. W. J. Maben in this article was Erasmus' daughter, Clara.  Bud Morrison was the husband of Erasmus' granddaughter Josephine (Sam's daughter).  So here we see that after Erasmus Miller Owen returned to Texas, he was most likely living with his daughter Clara and her family in Rotan.  But exactly when did he leave Oregon?  Well, in case anyone has forgotten, Conrad became the pastor of the church in St. Johns in July of 1909, the Enterprise newspaper reported that Uncle Ras preached his farewell sermon in September of 1909, and all three Owen men were listed in the 1910 Baptist yearbook (reported near the end of the the year 1909) in the town of St. Johns.  That makes it sound like Erasmus was expecting to stay in St. Johns but for some reason abruptly returned to Texas instead.  St. Johns is a suburb of Portland, so the climate would have been much more temperate and conducive for winter travel.  In fact, a person could have caught a train in the city and ridden all the way to Texas.  (I found this nifty Official Rail Guide from 1910.  It has timetables and descriptions of regular and sleeper cars.  I tried to calculate the time it would take to make the trip and it was much too complicated, but I think maybe a few days would have been required with all of the stops along the way.  He may have even had to change trains once or twice - I'm  not sure.)

Maybe, after the move to St. Johns, Erasmus was doing poorly and getting worse instead of better, and they all thought the end was near, so he figured he'd better return home so that he could see the rest of his children again and be buried next to his wife.  Maybe that is why Clara brought him to see Sam and his children.  This doesn't say what was wrong with him, but it says he was quite sick since his arrival, implying that he already wasn't doing so well when they arrived (and therefore quite likely even before they left Rotan); yet, they travelled the 50 miles anyway, and everyone felt "considerable uneasiness" about his health, meaning that they thought there was a good chance he was going to die.  

Luckily, he managed to pull through and live another seven and a half years!  But that is a story for another day.  I'll leave you for now with this portion from our newly revised timeline:

If anyone sees any errors, please let me know!

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese