Sweep at Western Montana State Fair

Before summer is completely gone -

Before our blog dies from lack of material -

And, before Patty gets around to writing on our Ireland/Iceland trip -

I thought I would post our winning entries at the 2011 Western Montana State Fair.

Jennifer won first place ribbons in Photography for


and from Ait Ben Haddou in Morocco,


Honorable mentions for the moth in Majorelle Gardens in Marrakkesh,


and her HomeCat (that's as in homeboy or "hommie"),


I took first place in Still Life for this spice shop in Marrakkesh,


and second place in People for these two camel herders on the road from El Er to Fes, Morocco.


Jennie tells me these first and second places were from hundreds of entries.

In addition, little Isabella took a first place in Art for an abstract piano, second place for a painting of a cactus and desert creature, third places for paintings of a chicken and abstract chalk drawing, and honorable mentions for a foil sculpture and Dragon named Steve.

Jennifer won a blue ribbon for her pickled beets, red for canned tomatoes, and yellow ribbon for strawberry jam. She won two first place ribbons for needlepoint tooth fairy pillow and crewel of garden gate with flowers. I shall have to get a photo of these, they are gorgeous.

Montana, watch out for all of us in 2012! We are getting ready for you!

Semper Semper Fi

We - my DAR buddies, that is - spent our usual Wednesday afternoon/evening cooking for the West Battalion Wounded Warriors. Let me say, if you are feeling you need a hug, cook for a bunch of Marines and there will be plenty. They certainly know how to show their gratitude.

I was looking for a new angle on photos. I mean, how many pics can you take of a bunch of ladies in red, white and blue aprons cooking? So I took a stroll through the parking lot.


Naturally, it was filled with a plethora of monster or just regular giant trucks that any self respecting Marine would be driving.

Some augmented with a macho motorcycle,


but it was the small details on the windows that belied the culture and warrior identity of the Marine.







Pray for our troops, Jesus. I could swear that's a take off of the St. James Cross in that design.

Grace Dillow, A Handsome Little Woman

Grace was our maternal grandmother, a "handsome little woman", said the Portsmouth Times in 1902 when she and Jacob with the blue, blue eyes eloped to get married. According to our mother, Grace's mother, Mary Jane, disapproved of the marriage. Why, we have not been able to imagine, and the dead don't talk. It turned out to be a long, fruitful, and happy marriage, and without it I wouldn't be writing this today.

Mary Jane had been through her share of tragedy by the time Grace was born in 1883 in Lewis County, Kentucky. When people ask what part of Kentucky you are from, you give your county - chances are unless you're from the big towns of Louisville or Lexington no one would know the hollow or farming settlement you were from. So, if you're from Lewis County, I could say I'm from out on Grassy and you would know it. If you're from Kentucky, I would say I'm from Lewis County and you would know. And if you're from anywhere else, I just say I'm from Kentucky.

Mary Jane was unmarried and widowed for three years when Grace was conceived. Family legend was that William Martin married the young widow while she was pregnant in order to give the child a legitimate name, but more than a hundred years later we have learned things did not happen that way. That, and Mary Jane's tragedies, are stories for another day.

At the time of Grace's birth, Mary Jane had come back from Illinois to Vanceburg with her two surviving young children, "Sis", age 7, and Jesse, age 4. Mary Jane was supporting her family working as a seamstress, and living next door to her father, George Caseman, who at age 53 was raising six of his children as a single parent and working as a farmer.

A History of Lewis County in 1912 described the area as "its surface is much diversified by hill and dale, and watered by many creeks whose sparkling depths, clear as crystal, are filled of fish of many kinds...a hill country with fertile valleys, the nest of the eagle and the den of the fox and mountain lion". Indeed, I can recall the neighbor men gathering at our farm to hunt down a mountain lion that had been spotted before it ate one of us kids.

In the 1880's, Vanceburg was coming out of an era of being a booming Ohio River town to being a railroad town, both means to ship out the farm products and transport West those looking for adventure or better times. In 1880, Lewis County had a population of 12,.407, almost the same as today, 289,658 cultivated acres, 2,772 males over the age of 21, 4,653 horses, 306 mules, and 4,165 hogs. Chances were you came from a farming family and married a farmer.

Mary Jane had a marriage to a farmer from Fleming County soon after Grace was born but at this time we don't know how long he stayed around. Likely he had died by the time Mary Jane married again to William Martin in 1890. Almost all 1890 US Census records were destroyed in a fire, so we don't know where the family was living at that time, but by 1900 when Grace was 17, the family was living on a farm about six miles out of Vanceburg in Valley, Kentucky, so small it no longer is identified as a town or has a post office. All left identifying Valley is the cemetery. Grace's older half-sister "Sis" and half-brother Jessie had left the home by the time of this census.

Living in Valley in 1900 was a young and good looking teacher, Jacob, who would have been Grace's teacher at Clarksburg. Jacob was the first of many generations in his family to pursue a life other than farming. He was living on his father's farm while teaching, along with five siblings and two grandchildren of Abraham and Sarah Dillow. It must have been a lively place, but perhaps a pall hung over the farm as two other children of Abraham and Sarah, Dollie and Willard, had died in the 1890's.

Grace hung out with girlfriends before she was married,


but by age 19, she and the young teacher with the blue, blue eyes had eloped. As the paper said, she was a handsome little woman.


They stayed in Portsmouth for the next two years, Grace working in the shoe factory and Jacob in a steel mill, before they dared go home to Vanceburg. By that time, they had saved money to buy a 30 acre farm outside town. "We had the only brick house around", my mother said, so Jacob and Grace must have worked hard to save their money. They had the first of seven children in 1906 and the last in 1922, all born at the homestead. Mary Jane lived nearby across Dry Run Creek with William Martin, grandma-ing all these grandchildren from the marriage she had opposed, a melding of the Scotch Irish Dillows and German Casemans, and - as we may see in future stories - some English thrown in. Our mother remembers Mary Jane as "the best grandma you could want", so all those grandbabies and a settled life with William perhaps softened her up from the hardships of her own life.

Grace and Jacob raised all the children at the homestead, farming as well as Jacob going out to one room country school houses to educate the children of the hills and hollows. Our mother recalls that Grace "liked to keep the house nice" with wallpaper and rugs. The house was German style brick with five rooms downstairs and two upstairs, a potbellied stove in the living room for heat and a wood burning stove in the kitchen for cooking, and no indoor plumbing, so you know what that means. Elwood, their oldest child recalls the 1913 flood of the Ohio River, "waters were in this barn and Pa had placed planking to reach the barn. He removed some second floor boards from the barn loft, built a Jon boat in which we boated (across the flood waters) to grandparents' home".

Grace in the tobacco field at the homestead,


Grace and Jacob, a gentle couple


Grace in front of the homestead,


and in their later years.


Tragedy hit the family in 1925 when the second eldest, George Jacob, died at age 17 with complications of diabetes.

The six other children grew up and became teachers and farmers, providing Grace and Jacob with 14 grandchildren. Mary Jane lived nearby until her death in 1935. Jacob died in 1953, and Grace's letters from that time on speak of the sadness and loneliness she felt even though surrounded by family.

The homestead and farm was bought by the youngest child, Wilbur, a farmer, and one of his children tried to restore the house in the 1970's and 80's. I visited the homestead in 1984 and took this photo. Grace's gardens were gone, but the beauty of the setting is evident.


I also went out to our farmhouse on Grassy and found the one room school house where I started my education with my father as the teacher, eight grades in one room. It was those one room school houses in the hollows that kept most of the population of Kentucky from being illiterate.

Grace died in 1968 at age 85. The house was torn down to put through a freeway.

Channeling Our Mothers

Who among us has not heard her mother’s words coming from her own mouth? It can be startling, especially when the daughter has promised herself she would never act or speak like her mother. My own children frequently say to me, “OK, Ramona,” which I can sometimes blow off with a chuckle and grin. Sometimes.

When I pass away – and even before then – I hope my daughters will be able to channel me with:

• “I love you.”


• “You are SO smart!”


• “You are beautiful.”


• “I don’t agree with your choice (career, shampoo, spouse/boyfriend, moving, parenting - whatever) but it is your choice and I approve of YOU no matter what.”


• “I’m sorry. What can I do to make it up to you?”


• “Thank you.”


• “Be kind to your sister.”


• “Have fun!”


• “I am so proud of you.”

In one way or another, I learned these from my own mother.

Rest in peace, Mom.

A Letter from Staff Sgt. Allen Dillow, Vietnam, February 9, 1966

Going through my mother's letters this weekend, I came across a letter written to her from Staff Sargeant Allen Dillow, her nephew and our cousin. I always joked about having a crush on him when we were kids, so handsome was he in his uniform.

He writes to her from Vietnam in February 1966,

Dear Aunt Ramona and Girls,

I would like to express my sincere thanks for your thoughtfulness at Christmas time, a card, note, or just about anything is appreciated over here. We service men are not robots taught to kill. We still have a heart, and like to be thought of at such times. We are over here half way around the world, in a hostile land, not only a foreign land, away from our loved ones. Where every day things seem as such to you, they would be like a gift from heaven to us. Hot water, cold glass of milk, cold can of beer, seeing friendly eyes, someone that you could reach out and touch, or maybe even kiss, that are only gleams in our eyes that we have to wait a year for. But being what it is, and being the kind of men we are "supposed" to be, we must never complain, even though at nights you still hear sniffles from these men, not excluding me.

I don't hear much from home but I do hope things have worked out for the best. Daddy is the greatest as far as I am concerned. He has his faults, but we all do, none of us are perfect. If we were we would not be on this earth.

Do tell grandmother I said hello and hope this finds her in good health.

Tell Ray (our brother who was in the Ohio National Guard) that if it is at all possible not to get messed up with this over here. May he stay home as long as possible, and for God's sake don't volunteer, don't get star struck by some John Wayne type movie, it isn't fought that way.

Do take care, and thank you again for your kind and warm thoughts.

Allen

Ramona Dillow Nute, 1914-2011, Remembrance

The mortal life of our mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother came to an end yesterday afternoon but not without a gathering of the clan for company. She was almost 97 years old and, at her insistence, remained in her own home until her last days. She was still playing bridge with her buddies every week, watching CNN, and disdaining the Meals on Wheels brought to the house. She would have been driving the car in her garage were it not for the watchfulness of the family. Indeed, in her 90's she managed to sneak over to the DMV and convince the lady to re-issue her driver's license.

She was descended from Scotch-Irish Virginian frontiersmen and women, French Huguenots, that rash of Germans who settled Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky, Revolutionary War fighters, a teenage associate of George Washington, a Crockett from the Davy Crockett family, and civil war soldiers who fought at Bull Run and marched with Sherman through Georgia.

In her father's footsteps, she taught for 39 years beginning in one room school houses in Appalachian Kentucky. She traveled the US, Europe, and Middle East, starting with hitchhiking with her girl buddies in the 1930's.

She had four children, six grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.

In the last week of her life, she fell in her home and was not found for at least several hours. Although without serious injury, as often happens with the elderly, the trauma set off a chain of irreversible physical events. The family was called to gather as she was moved into Hospice of Charleston, and we kept vigil in her final hours which ran into three days. Two of her nurse grandgirls provided the care usually given by strangers. They turned her, bathed her, and painted her fingernails and toenails. A recording by her rock singer great granddaughter was played for her. We all talked to her even as she became less and less conscious. The doctor advised us to keep down the level of conversation as she could likely still hear us and didn't want to leave the party.

Finally, as it came time for me to return home, I told her I was leaving and it was time for her to leave. She died an hour and a half later.

Kicking Butt on El Cajon Mountain

It was a cool and foggy morning when Kathleen and I set off to bag the summit of El Cajon Mountain at El Capitan this weekend. East County being located in the Peninsular mountain foothills between Lakeside and Ramona, this is not usually a trek taken this late in the season when temperatures can be in the 90's. We had to cover 10 miles of rugged terrain before the heat set in. I was hoping to get a photo of El Cajon that would count toward my project of finding and hiking all the ranchos of San Diego.

We had a beautiful hike in, through corridors of California lilacs,





up and around and about the stone mountains,


past the remnants of the Cedar Fire that raged through here in 2003, burning 90% of the habitat.


"The Jeep" landmark, nice sculptural art for the area, looks to have been left there in the 1940's.


We chatted up the usual topics - the flora, what to do for a rattlesnake bite, where was the helicopter landing for all the injured hiker rescues you read about from this area - the last thing we wanted was again to be on News at 6 - until we reached the summit. We needed a little chatter. El Cajon Mountain with its steeps, boulders, chaparral, and distance is reviewed as the most kick-butt hike in the county.

Proof of arrival:


Unfortunately, I wasn't going to get a view of Rancho El Cajon through the fog.


On the way down, the fog cleared enough that I could get a shot of El Monte, but El Cajon city was so far off I wondered whether the El Cap had been part of the Rancho.


The afternoon brought the sun and blistering heat, but until the last couple miles I was still taking flower photos,







and finally, on the way out, a shot back at the behemoth that is El Capitan and the summit of El Cajon Mountain just up the ridge.



Rancho El Cajon was a huge ranch in the mid 1800's, including El Cajon city, Santee, Lakeside, Le Mesa and Flinn Springs. Did it include El Capitan? I think so. I could see Rancho del los Cochas just below in the valley, and I know a lot of Rancho El Cajon surrounded the little pig ranch. I think I feel a trip to the El Cajon Historical Society coming up.

Thank God for Rancho Santa Margarita - She Saved Us from Los Angeles

There's something about summer coming that lights my fire to check out the missions and ranchos of San Diego. When I got a last minute invitation to the Wounded Warrior Battalion's changing of command this week at Camp Pendleton, I grabbed my camera out the door because I knew I could get in the West Gate and do a bit of exploring by myself on the way out. Between the Battalion and the West Gate are the historic buildings of Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores.

The Rancho has a complicated history from the time the San Luis Rey Mission friars used the land for sheep and cattle early in the 1800's. After the Spanish mission days, the land became a huge rancho owned by Pio Pico, the first governor of California, and changed hands several times over the next 100 years. Read here for a nice history of the Rancho lands.

The land of what is now Camp Pendleton - 123,00 + acres between Oceanside and San Clemente, and eastward -was bought from the last rancho owner by the US Navy for an aircraft field and access to the ocean in 1942 and is now occupied by the Marines. This little strip of land has saved us from the sprawl of Los Angeles and Orange Counties. If there's going to be sprawl, we want to do it ourselves. The Marines, bless their hearts, have made a commitment to preserve the rancho buildings in the middle of the base.

The ranch house is closed except the second Wednesday of month and no way I'll make it up there on a Wednesday. I thought I could at least take a look around, but when I arrived the gate was closed. I parked the car anyway, and started to look around. The first thing I came across was a stone marker,


Beneath a nearby sycamore tree
Two of Andres Pico's officers
Leonardo Cota and Jose Alipas
Planned their successful strategy
Against the American forces
They battled at San Pasqual on
December 6, 1846

Remember I told the reader about General Kearny's retreat from San Pasqual to San Diego, passing through the Los Penasquitos rancho?

Here is an excellent account of the Mexican and American conflict in San Diego. We tend to not be aware of how much history there is in our little town.

As Patty knows I would, I looked around for that sycamore tree - gotta stand just where this happened and get the vibes. Uttered a little expletive known to be used by just every pilot whose plane is going down. Not that I don't know a sycamore tree when I see one, but they were all over the place.


I gave up on trying to find which one of the sycamores might be 200 years old, and walked around the little chapel, originally a winery built by the friars in 1810. Yep, a winery up here in the middle of the padres' cow fields.


I was embolden by my foray around the chapel, and thought what could it hurt just to foray up the hill a little more to the bunkhouse and ranch house. If they bring out the Marines, I could always remind them "I cook for you guys every month!"

The bunk house, also from 1810, has those signature Spanish columns and outside hallway.


The ranch house sits up on a little hill, with a view out to the ocean. It was built in the 1840's by the Picos and added to by later owners.




I was this far and still not a soul in sight, I had the place to myself, so I wandered further, enjoying the wonderful breeze from the ocean. The ranch house had the same outdoor hallway. I understand the 31 rooms have no interior halls, just exterior halls and a central courtyard.


I walked down the porch/hall and a long set of steps with an overhead ranch bell,


out onto the grounds where I found a cannon and another bell. Hm-m-m. Wondered whether these were maybe from the Battle of San Pasqual, although there were some skirmishes at Rancho Las Flores nearby.


I came across some beautiful doors and arches and architectural details.





It was time to high tail it out of there. I'll have to wait until retirement to have a Wednesday free to see the courtyard and interior of the ranch house. Being in this historic spot totally alone was a different kind of experience. Imagine if you had Machu Picchu, or the pyramids, or the fields of Culloden totally to yourself. Where would you want to be, totally alone with history?

Antidote for Horrific Newsstory Fatigue

Overwhelmed by the seemingly neverending stream of newsstories about mankind's seemingly neverending atrocities? Here's a fix I picked up from the Presurfer.



We should all be so loving to each other as these two are.

Jacob With the Blue, Blue Eyes

I had only those few years to know our grandfather, from the time our family moved back to Kentucky after the war in 1946 until we migrated on to northern Ohio in 1950 looking for steady work for our father. Jacob had clear blue eyes, a gentle manner, and a way of gathering the grandchildren at his feet to listen to the Appalachian stories. I can hear him as though it were yesterday. 

With six children who made it to adulthood, married, and all had children, it was a good sized clan that got together at the old homestead on Sundays. The clan had been settled in Lewis County, Kentucky, for fifty years before our mother joined and married our father in Connecticut where he was building planes during World War II. They were all teachers, farmers, and factory workers - the salt of the Midwestern earth. 

The Civil War had left Kentucky poor. Previously a highly agricultural state, the size of farms dwindled, and the Great Depression took out many of the manufacturing jobs. By 1940 the per capita income had dropped to 54% of the national level. 

The patriarch of our clan was Jacob Dillow. He was born in 1875 in Greenup County, just east of Lewis County, the sixth of ten children of Abraham Dillow and Sarah Hall. Abraham's Scottish-Irish family had settled in frontier western Virginia in the 1700's, gradually making their way up to northeastern Kentucky over the next hundred years. Sarah's family was Pennsylvania Germans who followed the migration route of many Germans down the Ohio River Valley. Both families settled in East Little Sandy in Kentucky. Abraham and his three brothers went off to the Civil War, all on the Union side against their Virginia cousins on the Confederate side. More on Abraham and Sarah later. 

Jacob spent his first six years in Greenup, Daniel Boone country once inhabited by the Shawnee and the first white settlement in Kentucky. It would have been part of the bustling traffic on the Ohio River in the 1800s. His father, Abraham, was a farmer in Greenup; with his family of seven children, all under the age of 15, he pulled up stakes and moved the lot of them to Champaign, Illinois, in about 1881. 

Jacob grew up on the farm in Illinois, no doubt working the farm with his father, raising cattle and poultry in Illinois until he was 15 years old. Abraham again uprooted the family, by now with three more children, and moved all 10 children to Lewis County in 1891. Along the way, Jacob had been able to get some education, for by the time he was grown he was able to attend "Normal School" in Lewis County to get a teaching credential in the 1890s. A five-year older brother, Willard, died about this time at age 25, and three years later his next younger sister, Dolly, died at age 20. This must have been a difficult time for this family and for Jacob. Jacob taught school as an itinerant teacher through those years, going to live in a community that needed a teacher, often in a one room school house. One of his teaching assignments was at Clarksburg and one of his students there was Grace Martin, 8 years his junior. A Portsmouth Times article on December 8, 1902, announced "The Eloping Couple". Jacob Dillon, age 26, and Miss Grace Martin, age, 19, of near Vanceburg, Ky., were married at the probate office this afternoon by Rev. Henry W. Hargett. The bride was a handsome little woman. They ran away because her parents objected to the match. She left home ostensibly to go to Cincinnati, but instead joined her lover and came to this city. There will be some surprised parents at Vanceburg, tomorrow. Why did they have to run away? Grace was 19 by now, not too young to marry in those days. She wasn't pregnant - they didn't have their first child until 4 years later. He would have been on a social par with her family, respectable as a teacher. About this our mother says, "Mary Jane (Grace's mother) didn't want any man to have her". In any event, the eloped couple remained in Portsmouth for the next two years. He gave up teaching to work for two years in a steel mill and she worked in a shoe factory, saving their money until they could return to Lewis County. In 1909, Jacob bought a thirty acre farm with a brick farmhouse on Dry Run. "We had the only brick house around," says our mother. In 1912, Jacob bought another 25 acres from John Kline on Dry Run. Jacob went back to teaching and farming, mostly tobacco. Over the sixteen years from 1906 to 1922 they had seven children, all born at home with a midwife. One of the children, George, died in the home in 1925 at age 17 from diabetes and pneumonia, both treatable these days. I know this was tragic for the family; our mother, now 96, still talks of him. Five of the seven children, in 1918: About life at the farm, the oldest brother, Elwood, wrote to our mother, Ramona: I can remember my dad dismanteling an old barn between our garden and Dry Run. I also recall grandfather Martin with a slip scraper and team removing a bank in our front yard. I am almost certain that the barn was built after Pa bought the farm. During the 1913 flood, waters were in this barn and Pa had placed planking to reach the barn. He removed some second floor boards from the barn loft, built a Jon boat in which we boated across the backwater to grandparents’ home. Do you remember the foot log Pa built across Dry Run Creek? It was from this crude foot log that I fell with my bicycle on top of me. It was at the confluence of Gander Branch and Dry Run Creek that Pa lost his “9” Ford Coupe. This car was washed about two hundred yards down stream. Later, I bought the damaged Ford, put another body on it and had a serviceable auto. Was this that "9" Ford Coupe lost in the creek? Jacob passed an agricultural examination in May 1919, and continued to teach in one-room school houses. He taught at Quincy 1926-1930 and lived during the week with Lucy Marie Wooten Skeins while Grace maintained the farm on Dry Run. In the 1940 census, Jacob and Grace were living on the farm in Kentucky with young Ramona, Eloise, and Wilbur, but from about 1941-1945 during the war, the family including Jacob and Grace, Martin and his family, Eloise, and Wilbur lived in company trailers in Cleveland making shelling for WWII as there was no income from farming; they returned to Vanceburg in the other months. Ramona went to Connecticut in 1941 where she married our father, Raymond, then working at Pratt and Whitney building war planes.

 

Jacob died in 1953 with a heart attack, and Grace followed 15 years later from heart disease and pneumonia, both buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. Together they raised seven children who had 14 grandchildren. Jacob educated many of the children of Lewis County, Kentucky. All of his children but Ramona remained in the Lewis County area, though many of the grandchildren have scattered. The old homestead was torn down to put a freeway through, but I can still remember the grandfather with the blue, blue eyes, and the nights catching fireflies down the front lawn of the homestead with all the cousins.