REUNION

A year or two before we retired I received an important letter from Clayton, La., which in effect influenced the way Ellie and I spent much of our time for the next few years. Clayton Gibson, my second cousin, had lived at Clayton all his life. About my age, he had gone to La. Tech briefly, as did his brother Dr. Herman Gibson. One or both of them were in fact there while I was there, although I did not know them.

 

Clayton, as all the world knows, had been named for our common great grandfather, John McBride Clayton. Locally he was known as 'Captain Clayton'. The place got its name when Capt. Clayton gave land for the right of way of the railroad. That may have been about 1880. And now 100 years later the railroad discontinued, and the property reverted to the heirs of Capt. Clayton.

Capt. John McBride Clayton, my great grandfather, was the family patriarch. He had come to Concordia Parish, across the river from Natchez, as a young man. The Civil War broke out when he was about 30. He organized a company of infantry. He was undoubdtedly a man of exceptional talent. In addition he was the second cousin of the commanding general of the Alabama forces. So he might have expected higher rank, and in fact he was offered promotion to major, which he declined.

He declined because, when recruiting his company, he had promised the mothers of his recruits that he would stay with them through the whole war. Promotion would have taken him away from the close relationship he had with them; hence he declined. One of his men, named Oscar Estell, had been entrusted with a special mission at the end of the war. Rather than surrendering the company flag, Oscar had wrapped it around himself under his shirt, and had smuggled it back to Louisiana. It resides today in the Howard Tilton Library at Tulane, and as late as 1987 staff at the library offered to exhibit it on the wall of the building---for a fee. Family members did not feel like spending money for such a purpose.

Capt. Clayton and his first wife, Lucinda Gahagan, had five sons: Robert, who became a planter, James, who became a doctor, Oren Henry, and John Elliott, my grandfather, a lawyer. A fifth son, named Oscar Estell, lived only briefly. After Lucinda's death Capt. Clayton married again, Eudora Gibson. By her he had uncle Shelley--the only one of these people I ever met.

My grandfather and his brother Oren Henry married sisters, daughters of Capt. Bright, a steamboat man. (Steamboats used to come up the Black River, upon which the Clayton property fronted.) These two girls did not fit in too well with the Clayton culture. I knew my grandmother by reputation as a difficult person. Her husband died long before I was born. In my childhood Grandmother stayed primarily with her daughter, Aunt Ethel and Uncle Maurice, a most saintly, though not particularly religious man. When some problem in that family arose, Grandmother came to live with us (I may have been about 12), but we soon found it necessary to send her back to Aunt Ethel.

Grandmother's sister must have been a more severe person. Her husband, my great uncle Oren Henry, found it necessary to desert her and flee to Texas. This lady apparently followed him because the last we heard of her she was running a boarding house somewhere in Texas. All the family accounts that I heard strongly intimated that Uncle Henry was fully justified in his action. We often have a choice to fight or fly, and, being a man he peace, he chose to fly.

Clayton Gibson had been trying to locate all of his second cousins (on his mother's side). He found my address through the Methodist Church (they knew that I had been a Methodist minister). So out of the blue one day I found a letter from this kinsman informing me of the reversion of the railroad property; I was one of the heirs.

I immediately replied to his kind letter, and we began a correspondence. Unhappily I had known nothing about these Clayton cousins and had no interest whatever in such matters. But Clayton Gibson's letter reawakened that interest: blood is thicker than water. Before much time had elapsed, Ellie and I visited our old family seat. I had a very dim recollection of the place, and it looked much the same.

 

The first time we went there I went into the Post Office to get directions and told the postmaster who I was looking for. He told me where Clayton lived and also where "Miss Carrie" lived--his mother. Miss Carrie was my first cousin, once removed. She was about Daddy's age and remembered him well. She soon got to be one of my favorite relations.

For some years I have been accustomed to saying a special goodbye to friends who were up in years (Miss Carrie was in her 90's). I would tell the person, "If you get up there before me, prepare a place for me." I would usually get a rather quizzical look, but Miss Carrie had an immediately and lovely reply. She said, "You will be very dear to me." Although she couldn't attend to society for very long at a time, her mind was as sharp as a tack.

Her house was right beside the old tracks--and the property which we now jointly owned. As we were walking back toward our car, I made a rather joking remark: "I think I'll get the heirs to let me have some land right over there and build a house and there I'll be." Like a flash came her reply. "Yes, and your phone will ring, and you'll hear me saying, 'Lawrence, get over here'". She had taken my kidding and trumped it, a characteristic Clayton trait. A lovely old lady! I always enjoyed being in her presence. She is up there now, and hopefully I am very dear to her as she said. We hoped to visit her again in 1995, but she died a few months before our trip.

 

A couple of years later Margaret had plans to go to Kentwood for her 40th class reunion. So she and Cousin Dorothy Tatum (and Dorothy's husband Maurice Tatum) made plans for a family reunion at Natchez. Quite a few people converged on the place. We organized several carloads of people to visit Miss Carrie. I had the pleasure of introducing a lot of the family to her. Of course she knew who they all were, but it had been many a year since she had seen most of us. The reunion was a great success.

I felt really good about these new relationships. As a person without family roots of much consequence it was good to discover family abiding where their (our) great, great grandfather had lived well over a hundred years ago. My grandfather had been born there, and my father had been reared nearby.

 

Clayton Gibson's letter also aroused in me an interest in the family history that led to a pretty extensive amount of research over the next several years. I discovered first that those Claytons had come west from Butts County, Ga. A while later I traced the Butts Co Claytons back to Craven, and then Hyde Co., N.C. with 1744 as the earliest date.

Then, after four or five years of study, I determined that the NC Claytons had come from Kent County Delaware, and before that, in 1682, from Cheshire Co. England. Ellie began by going with me and worked on her own family, and we had a lot of fun. We visited every state archive from Pennsylvania to Texas.

 

I also worked on my mother's family--the Leeches. They appear to have come from Strabane, Ireland early in the 18th Century, and passed through York County, SC, Tenn., Ala, Miss, and finally back to Memphis, where mother was born. One important link came when I researched the Confederate army records. James McGrady Leech had been in Virginia during the war. Near the end he was listed as a deserter, and his birthplace was given as Lawrence Co., Ala. We knew he had later lived and enlisted from Lafayette Co., Miss.

 

All this stuff may seem trivial, even puerile to most people, but at a certain age it will become important--if your mind works anything like mine. One of my happiest discoveries was to learn that James Clayton, my great, great, great grandfather, had been a Methodist minister. As far as I know my father, although something of a Methodist historian, had been ignorant of that.