Re: Texas Rascos/Rascoes and Some Allied Families in the CSA
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In reply to:
Re: Texas Rascos/Rascoes and Some Allied Families in the CSA
Lisa Christie 1/06/06
Great to hear this story from you, Lisa, and I want to respond.First, however, a correction in my original post and a follow-up question:
Franklin L. Davis (my great-great-grandfather) did NOT die at the Battle of Honey Springs, as I indicated.His date of death was 12 February 1862, according to a privately published book by J. Elizabeth Harris, Muskogee, OK 1971 titled "Families of Brinkley Davis, David Faulkenberry, Joseph Adams Harris, and James Herod".This book was printed on mimeograph and I got a copy from Ms. Harris in the late 1980s before her death.It is well-researched, does not jump to conclusions, and is based in part on her direct interviews with Davis descendants -- she was descended I think from Franklin's elder half-brother John Votial Davis.I have found her dates and information to be reliable, so I trust this date of death for Franklin.She also gives a location, "Near Fort Smith, Arkansas."The unit he, and the rest of these men, were in was stationed out of Fort Smith, so this rings true as well.Likely he died of disease or the poor diet they were eating rather than a direct military action.However, apparently the news of his death did not get back to the folks in Limestone County until they heard likewise of the disastrous Battle of Honey Springs, and it got conflated with that.Letter writing paper was unbelievably hard to come by for Confederate troops, and the mail delivery routes were also severely affected by the war, so correspondence back home often simply did not occur from the time a soldier left until he came back (or didn't).This throws a new light on the hardships suffered by Southern families, and also must be taken into account when we realize that the "history" of what happened is based on incomplete accounts written either after the fact or by those few prosperous enough to keep journals, pay for mail delivery, etc.The "letters home" wartime source of information is very lacking on the Confederate side of history.
As for the question:I note that John Sylvanus Stokes, who joined up with the Rascos and Davises, and was married to Elvira Rasco, is not found on the 1870 census after the war.He and Elvira had no children after 1860.To me this raises the hypothesis that he, too, died in the war, possibly at Honey Springs (the death toll there was high for this unit) or after capture.I am putting this out there in hopes someone else will be able to answer the question.
The effect of the war, and in particular this battle, was almost entirely devastating for the Rascos, Davises, and those who married into this line.One account I read said that nobody knew what had happened to any of them until Solon Rasco came trudging home on crutches (one foot was missing) all the way from Indian Territory.What a terrible story that man had to tell his family.
And yes, Lisa, I too am researching this in hopes of understanding why my ancestors were so changed by the war.Franklin Davis and Nancy Rasco had two children, Leah Davis (my great-grandmother) and Henry Davis.
Henry became a educator who was well-read and very devout.He served two terms as a state representative from Van Zandt Co, Texas; he wrote books and served as a Baptist circuit minister.I lived mostly in Van Zandt and Travis Counties, Texas.He and Leah stayed in touch throughout their lives.
Leah Davis married Joseph Atkins, whose sister eventually married John B. "Jack" Rasco as his third wife.They began their married life and family in Limestone County.On the 1880 census, which is full of serious errors, they are listed in a household with Leah's younger half-sisters, since Nancy Rasco Davis Banks has died by that time and her second husband, Henry Banks, had predeceased her.Shortly after the census was taken, however, Joseph and Leah moved to Stoneburg, in Montague County, Texas.From that point on, Leah severed all ties with her family in Limestone County.I communicated in the late 1980s with a woman who was the widow of a grandson of one of Leah Davis's half-brothers, a Banks.She said that the family always wondered what happened to Leah -- as far as her half-siblings were concerned, they could not understand the rupture.Leah did not tell her chlidren even the names of their own grandparents.Joseph Atkins did pass on his family heritage to his children, but Leah created a brick wall.Since the overwhelming norm at this point in America was for folks to live in strong ties of community and family, and since the Limestone County clan ties among the Rascos, Davises, etc. was vibrant and properous, the question that plagues me is "Why did Leah leave her family?"
Leah was a very well-read woman, highly intelligent and thoughtful.She scandalized the small town of Stoneburg because in the afternoons, instead of doing housework as a woman was expected to fill her time with, she would lie down and read for a few hours.Her five surviving children were likewise voracious readers.Joseph Atkins was a blacksmith who loved to go fishing and camping, and was by all accounts a remarkably mild-mannered, easy-going man.Leah clearly made the decisions for the family.Her children all adored her, and they grew up to be a fascinating array of free thinkers.They were all over 6 feet tall, red-haired except for Bill, and had strong bonds with one another.
The eldest (surviving) children, Auther Hulbert Atkins, was a Wobbly.He agitated for a Socialist revolution during the 1930s and hated FDR as a result.He was, as far as we can tell, the only Socialist in Montague County.His nickname was Red Atkins, and this was likely as much for his politics as for his hair color.He was enormously popular and respected in Stoneburg, because of his kindness and generosity.He was an herbalist, growing and dispensing folk remedies; his wife, Zura, was the local midwife.Zura was a devout Baptist and as conservative as Auther was radical.Their marriage appears to have come about because of Zura getting pregnant at 18; she had their first baby less than eight months later.They were not an especially compatible match, although they made a go of it.Auther believed strongly in women's rights (which Zura most emphatically did not -- she believed in women's inferiority and that they were placed on earth to serve men).They raised two sons, one of whom (Joseph) became deaf as an infant after a fever and, with enormous reluctance, had to be sent to board at the State School for the Deaf in Austin.Later, during the Depression, when the only employment Auther had was part-time work as the depot agent for the railroad in Stoneburg (but glad to have even that), they took in two children to raise as their own, their grandson Bobby Joe Atkins and their niece Mary Jo Atkins.Mary Jo was my mother, and she considered herself lucky to have been raised by Auther and Zura.She was especially close to Auther, who encouraged her to assert herself as a girl and woman, to read and think and take pride in her accomplishments.My mother was a brillliant woman, valedictorian, incessant reader, open-minded and big-hearted and the great love of my life.I never got to know Auther but I gather she was definitely his daughter in every important aspect.
The second son, Oscar, left home to become a cook in San Francisco at the turn of the century.He married a dance hall girl out there, of whom we know very little, and rode out the 1906 quake.When their marriage broke up, Oscar took off to homestead on the central prairies of Canada, which were a howling frozen wilderness at the time.I can't trace his location there.Eventually, as one aunt put it to me, when he got cold and hungry enough he came back to Texas, where he married late in life to a divorced woman with children.He settled in Lawton, Oklahoma, and I remember him as a sharp old man with a wicked sense of humor, a fund of wonderful stories, and the Atkins gift of language.
The next son was my grandfather, William Rusk "Bill" Atkins.Bill chafed at disciplined life.When he was 13, he ran away from home to join the Molly Bailey Traveling Show, a circus that traveled through North Texas and Arkansas.He came back home after six weeks complaining that they worked him too hard and didn't feed him enough.When he was 16, he lied about his age in order to join the Spanish-American War.He was injured and the doctors were careless about the administratio of morphine in his treatment; he became addicted and they wrote his family to say his addiction was hopeless, they would simply keep him in the army hospital in Brownsville until he died of an overdose.Auther refused to accept this verdict; his statement was "No Atkins will die an addict."He made arrangements through his job with the railroad, traveled down to Brownsville and checked Bill, a doped up zombie, out of the hospital.As he had arranged, he and Bill were locked into a freight car with food, water and blankets for the trip back home.Several days later, the freight car was unlocked in Stoneburg, and they emerged, Bill a raving lunatic at this point from going cold turkey off morphine.Auther took Bill home, where he had outfitted a shed behind the house with a cookstove, some beds and a table, bars on the windows and a locking door.He locked himself in with Bill, and only opened up once a day for Zura to give them fresh supplies.Bill ranted, sweated, and at times rained blows on Auther, but Auther never left his side.Two weeks later, Bill emerged alive and no longer an addict.He was eternally grateful to Auther.Bill was one of the first men to enlist for World War I, where he served as a medic and kept a little field journal that is heartbreaking in its descriptions of the death and destruction.He came back from the war in bad health, having been too close to a cloud of mustard gas at one point.He worked as a mechanic at the only gas station in the area, fished and hunted, and courted a young schoolteacher who would become my grandmother, Hettie Turner.Hettie had been raised to be an independent, well-educated woman, and she resisted Bill's courtship for a long time.She eventually consented to marry him only if she could continue her teaching and he would stay home with the children.Bill agreed, and they began married life that way, moving in with Hettie's grandmother in Stoneburg.But Hettie died young of tuberculosis, right after the death of my mother.Bill asked his brother Auther to take the new child in as his own; Bill was heartbroken, in increasingly bad health, and the Depression was on -- he would have all he could to raise the two older children.Bill died not long afterward at the V.A. Hospital in Muskogee, of heart failure probably brought on by the lung disease he had from the mustard gassing.The two older children, Sarah and Bill Jr., were given to Bill's two younger sisters to raise.
The first daughter, Zora Atkins, married young at around age 16 to Elmer Huff, a railroad worker.They had one daughter before divorcing, a rarity in those days.Zora moved up to Lawton, Oklahoma with her sister Annie, where she eventually met a WWI veteran, James Dossett, and married a second time.Annie and Zora remained close all their lives, living near one another in Lawton.Annie married late to Harry King.Zora and Annie both became avid Jehovah's Witnesses, which was a radical religion for that time period.Annie never had children, and Zora never had any more. Their husbands were both silent, passive men.Zora became a "crazy cat lady", filling her house with more than a dozen cats at any given time.Their adoption of Bill Atkin's children was done perhaps for good intentions, but neither of them were really suited to raising children.Sarah and Bill both felt they had abusive upbringing once they were settled in the Atkins' sisters households, and as soon as they could, they left home -- Sarah got a job, Bill joined the Air Force.They did not maintain contact with their adoptive parents and had little good to say about them.Sarah married happily and became the de facto head of the family once the siblings were grown, remaining a source of love and wisdom her entire life.Bill left the family entirely behind, except for rare occasions when he could be persuaded to write a letter or come for a visit -- he was that hurt by his childhood, the death of his parents at a tender age and adoption into a cold, harsh household.
My current theory is that Leah Davis left Limestone County behind because she, too, was a kind of free thinker and she wanted to raise her children away from the scars of the war.In particular, her children and their descendants were raised to work against racism in all its forms.I know the KKK was strong in Limestone County right after the Civil War, and perhaps Leah knew family members who were involved with it.Perhaps it was just all the cloud of death and loss.One thing I think she carried away with her was a good education and love of learning -- from what I can tell, the Rascos were a very literate, questing bunch who educated their daughters as well as their sons.
I put this out there because I am beginning to see a pattern in the stories coming my way, especially after hearing from you, Lisa.I hope others from this line may have light to shed.-- Meg
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