From 1858 to 1938
An Autobiography 
Thomas Harriman Crandall

The following information is a brief history of my life according to the best of my recollection of what my parents told me and of what I remember of my own boyhood experience.

I was born in Scotland County, Missouri about fifteen miles southeast of Memphis, on June 9, 1858. My parents being in sympathy with the southern cause migrated to Benton County, Missouri soon after the Civil War broke out and lived there until the war ended. We then migrated back to Howard County, Missouri and settled near Lisbon which was at that time on the Missouri River bank.

We lived in Howard County only one year at that time and then moved to Saline County near Cambridge on the Missouri River where my father bought an eighty-acre farm. We lived on this farm until father George Crandall died. I was about fourteen years old at his death and can quite well remember the occasion, the immediate cause being malaria fever. Malaria fever was a common cause of deaths in the Missouri River bottom lands at that time. We buried father the next day after his death. There was no funeral preached but I can remember that some of the neighbor men offered prayer and some songs were sung. We bought the casket at Marshall, Missouri. Father was buried in the Cambridge cemetery and in-so-far as I know, his grave was and still is unmarked. With the help of my mother and my brother, Ewing, who was about seven years old, I managed the farm for about a year and a half after father’s death.

At that time mother sold the farm and we all moved to North Salem in Linn County. We moved there because mother’s brother, Uncle Charley Harriman lived there. He was a doctor and one of the few doctors in that section at that time. We stayed in North Salem only one winter and moved from there back to Howard County near Lisbon and set up house-keeping in part of a large log house in which Uncle Bill Harriman and his family lived. This particular location was in a valley about two miles north of Lisbon which has since been identified as “Happy Hollow”. More mention will be made of that later.

About six months after we moved back to “Happy Hollow”, mother married a man by the name of George Farris. We then moved to Chariton County near Brunswick and lived there for about two and one half years. During this time two more children were born, George and Smoot. Mother died when Smoot was born and was buried at Brunswick. The same type of burial was given mother as has previously described for father. A tragic incident that made her death and burial more sad than ever was that my step-father, George Farris, had left mother before Smoot was born. He didn’t attend the funeral and I have never heard of him since.

Uncle Charles, the doctor, took my brother, Ewing Crandall and half brother, George Farris back to his home at North Salem and I took Smoot Farris who was then only two weeks old to the home of Aunt Martha Dye in Scotland County, Missouri. I went on the train from Brunswick to Moberly. When I got to Moberly I had a misfortune that I will always remember. It happened this way: while caring for the baby, I left my pocketbook lying in the seat of the train and when I got off the train and went into the station at Moberly I immediately missed it. It contained all the money I possessed which was something near ten or twelve dollars. I left the baby in the care of a lady in the station and went back to search for my money but I never found it. I was gone so long that the lady, a stranger to me, became fearful that she had a child left on her hands and not being willing to assume that responsibility placed the baby in a seat in the station and left him there to cry. However, another woman (evidently a kind soul) picked up the child and was taking good care of him when I got back in the station. When I told her my mission and my predicament she begged me to let her have the baby and promised to take good care of him but I had promised Uncle Charley that I would take him to Aunt Martha and I was determined to do it. So without any money or any ticket I got on the train at Moberly which was headed for Kirksville and thanks to the generosity of the conductor and some other people on the train, I managed to ride safely with the baby to Kirksville.

On arriving at Kirksville, I went immediately to the home of a Mr. Beard, whom Uncle Charles had advised me to find. I left the baby with them and borrowed a horse and rode twenty-five miles northeast to the home of Aunt Martha Dye. She lived near Bible Grove in Scotland County. (Aunt Martha was my mother’s sister.) They were surprised to see me and were greatly shocked to learn of mother’s death.

Early the next morning, I together with two of Aunt Martha’s daughters (Senora and Alice) started with a wagon and team back to Kirksville and the next day we brought baby Smoot back to his future home. We had been at Aunt Martha’s place for a week or more when my cousin Caleb, Aunt Lydia’s son, came to Aunt Martha’s to see me and I went home with him. I recall that on arriving there that a couple of the girls, Josie and Lena got off in the corner of the room behind the stove and snickered and giggled like a couple of young girls twelve or thirteen years old will do. 

Well, I stayed with Aunt Martha Dye the rest of the winter and worked in the timber for them and the following spring I hired out to Jerry Crandall, Aunt Lydia’s husband, and worked for him until the crop was laid by. I then “took to my heels” and walked back to Howard County and hired out to a farmer who lived five or six miles north of Glasgow and worked for him for several months.

One day while working for this farmer, Uncle Charley came by to talk to me about his being the guardian of us children. Mother had left a little money for us children. I was old enough that I didn’t need to have a guardian and therefore I was not willing to permit him to be my guardian. However, he became the guardian of the other three. It was during this visit that he asked me to go over to Pettis County near Sedalia to stay for a few months with Grandma, my mother’s mother and Aunt Sally, mother’s sister.

I quite well remember that I accepted this invitation and started on a horse from the farm on which I worked to Sedalia and in doing so I had to cross the Missouri River. It was in the dead of winter and I will ever remember that I rode to a point east of Arrow Rock and from there the horse and I crossed the river on the ice. The water wasn’t frozen solid to the shore so I put a plank from the shore to the ice and walked over to where the ice was solid. The horse followed through the water and jumped up on the ice. I led the horse the rest of the way across and I recall that it was near sundown when I reached the western shore. I rode the rest of the way and came to grandma’s farm about the break of dswn.

I stayed with grandma and Aunt Sally the rest of the winter and the next summer and then went back to Scotland County because I had continued to be very much interested in one of those giggling girls that stood in the corner behind the stove at Aunt Lydia’s house. I stayed at her home and farmed on the shares with her father for the next three years.

It was on December 18th, 1880 that I got on a horse and went to Edina and engaged a liveryman to come the next night to the home of neighbor Helmic who lived about a quarter of a mile west of our house. In the meantime I was to advise neighbor Helmic how to direct the livery man after he arrived at his house. How well I remember how I had told the folks that I was going to Hoop Pole School house to a “Spelling Bee” and instead I met the livery man soon after dark and directed him to drive down the road and stop behind some brush that was there. I then rode back near the house and tied the horse to a haystack so that it would be sure and have enough to eat until the next day. Then I went to the yard gate and waited until Lena came out to meet me. She was very nervous and excited and I almost had to carry her from there down to the road where the liver carriage was waiting. We then hurried to Edina and from there went to Kirksville by train and on to Keytesville by way of Moberly. The next day my cousin Bill Harriman helped us to go back to Moberly where we were married about noon on December 20, 1880. We were married by a Justice of the Peace in a hotel at Moberly. Our wedding dinner was just a common ordinary hotel mean but they, knowing that it was our wedding dinner, did put a clean white table cloth on the table.

We then went to Glasgow, Missouri in Howard County again and set up housekeeping. I went to work in a veneering mill but not long after that I began working in a livery barn. Still later both Lena and I went out on a farm and began working for General Price, she doing the cooking and housework and I doing the general farm work. I recall that General Price once said that my wife was the best cook that he had ever eaten after. Previous to our relationship with him, he had employed all negro help but upon learning that we were coming he turned off some of his negro help and engaged us. Nevertheless, there were still many negros all about the plantation and they frightened Lena so much that she refused to stay there very long.

One more interesting thing happened in our early married life at Glasgow. The first Christmas there was promising to be a long and lonely one for Lena because I had to work during the day. However, she had become acquainted with a German girl whose family lived across the river in Salene County and the two of them walked across the river on the ice and spent the day with this girl’s family.

It is perhaps worth while to mention that the farm on which we worked for General Price was located in Sheridan County on the Bowling Green prarie near Brunswick. After leaving the employment of General Price, we went back to Scotland County and engaged in farming for ourselves. It was just a year to the day after we were married until our first and only child was born. She was a beautiful, red-haired, blue-eyed baby which we named Lydia Lola.

Our life proved out to be no bed of roses. We experienced many troubles and hardships. Most of the next thirty-six years we spent in Scotland County, Missouri. However, like a great many other young men of my day I was stimulated by the westward movement to go west and so about 1886 or 1887 I left my wife and child and went to California to seek a fortune. We had planned that if I was successful, the family would come later. I succeeded in finding a good job in a livery stable and later I found employment on a large wheat ranch. Realizing that I wasn’t going to make a fortune at it and because I was lonesome for my wife and baby, I returned to Scotland County, Missouri, about six months after I had left there. It should be mentioned that the place whare I went to in California was Medesto in Stannish Law County.

The years passed and I had my ups and downs. Many disappointments and sorrows came my way but I kept plugging away all the time trying to make a decent living and lay a little something away. I bought a rough, timbered hundred-acre farm in the southwest corner of Scotland County and continued to live there for the next thirty years. This farm was located about two miles south of Bible Grove.

I think I should mention that there was a two year period near the beginning of the century that the wife and I together with our daughter and her husband and their two children, Maurice and Doris, moved to Lamar , Colorado in search of greater opportunities. We failed to find them however, and being more or less home sick for Missouri we returned and resumed our tasks of clearing and improving our farm which we had kept.

In 1916, we sold our farm near Bible Grove in Scotland County, Missouri and immigrated to Bent County, Colorado, thirty-nine miles southeast of Las Animas and took up a homestead on which we lived for the next twenty one years. A world wide economic depression together with a six year extreme drought plus old age forced us to have to leave our 440 acre homestead a move to a small farm one mile south of Las Animas.

On July 21, 1938, we accompanied our grandson Fay Snyder and his wife Rena May on a motor trip back to Jefferson City, Missouri to visit with another grandson Wayne and his family. We arrived at their home Friday evening July 22 in time for supper. On Sunday afternoon July 25, Fay and Rena May, Wayne and Hazel, his wife, and Lena and I motored from Jefferson City, Missouri back to my early boyhood home near Lisbon in Howard County.

As soon as we arrived at Lisbon I recognized many familiar landmarks but aside from that everything had changed it’s course, and moved two and one half miles west of where the main current was when I was a boy. We talked to a few old timers at Lisbon and inquired about the other landmarks and old families. One of these men directed us to the place where I could probably find my original home place. We followed his directions and drove along the river road about two and one half miles north and turned to the right up a narrow valley and I think it was in this valley that my emotions were first deeply stirred because on arriving at the very spot where my mother and the other children and I had once lived they quote as having said in a rather excited tone “here is the spot!” “Here is the spot!” I climbed out of Wayne’s car as fast as I could and began to survey that familiar territory. I pointed out to them how the house was built and located. I explained to them that we had lived in part of the large house where grandmother and grandfather Harriman, Aunt Sally and Uncle Bill, together with his two children also lived. The house had long since burned down but the landmarks were still there, even the old well still remains. A depressing fact of the whole situation, however, was that it had grown up in weeds and brush until it was no longer the beautiful valley that it once was. In fact it was so rough and brushy that we didn’t go on up the valley and view the remaining part of it as I would liked to have done. 

I remember quite well that it was while living here about 1870 that I had the “buck ager”, (probably Malaria Fever). As I remember, I was sick a lot during my boyhood days with this fever and in so far as I know that was one of the reasons why I never attended school. After a while of reminiscing at this spot we motored on to Glasgow some eight miles farther north up the river.

On arriving at Glasgow we drove across a great highway bridge, the product of modern engineering, at about the same place where Lena had crossed the old Missouri on the ice on Christmas Day more than fifty seven years ago. We found the old brick building on the main street of Glasgow in which we had rented a one room apartment and first set up housekeeping. It was not a little touching to walk down the same street with the “Old Lady” and view the same stairway that we so sprightly walked up well over a half century ago.

This is being taken in short hand by a stenographer as I tell it and within a day or so we will go on back to Scotland County, Missouri and visit with our daughter and son-in-law and the other grandchildren who live in that community. We had only one child and she married Pearl Snyder at an early age and became the mother of twelve children, ten of which are living, the other two have died in infancy.

Life for me has had a lot of obstacles and stumbling blocks but I have done the best I could for the welfare of myself, my wife, my child, grandchildren and fellow citizens. Today I have nine great grandchildren and as I approach the century mark I realize that their lives, just beginning will be full of trials and tribulations. My advice to them is to stick to the GOLDEN RULE.

This is October 15, 1938 and I am back at my home at Las Animas, Colorado. Since returning home I have had the desire to continue this life story by relating some of the interesting things that transpired after we left Jefferson City, Missouri and continued our trip on to Scotland County, Missouri where we visited the rest of our family.
It was partly because of my grandson’s (Wayne Snyder) encouragement and help that I decided to write the first part of my autobiography and it is because another grandson (Fay Snyder) is interested in helping me now that I am able to write the following.

We left Jefferson City on Wednesday morning and drove to our daughter and son-in-law’s house. We stopped in Kirksville for a short time at the home of L.A. Wise and wife Josephine Wise, Lena’s only living sister. We found both of them rather feable and Joe’s eyesight seems to be failing rapidly. Armstrong was about the same as I always remembered him.

One incident is particular in connection with our visit with Lola and children I wish to add to this history. On the afternoon of August 8, 1938, our grandson Maurice Snyder and wife Bessie and their boys, Roger and Roderick, took Lena and I to my wife’s grandfather, Caleb Crandall’s old homestead on the north Fabius thirteen miles southeast of Memphis, County seat of Scotland County.

On the trip down we passed by many places which I had not seen for more than a quarter of a century. On most of these places there were some of the old familiar landmarks, but in general there had been many changes.

One place in particular I wish to mention was the Thomas Harriman (my grandfather’s) place the one on which I was born eighty years ago. From there we went still southeast into Gorin thence northward to the old “Crandall Homestead”. I saw some of our old neighbors. Among them…..

This is where the story stops. I am not sure if he did not finish telling the story or if the final pages were lost over the years of transfer from one family member to another. The pages are yellow with age and it is not difficult to see that they were typed at least those 70 years ago as it is now July 8, 2006. I read this recount of Tom’s life, he was my great uncle, the half brother of my grandfather George Washington Farris.