Henry Cline Almost Reached His Goal

     

Henry Cline - 1918

       William Henry Cline

 1859-1949

Photos from

1918 and 1947
He was my grandpa!

Henry Cline
1947

The photo above is how my father remembers his father.  The picture on the left is the last known photo of Henry Cline, taken in 1947.  He was eight-seven-years-old in the photograph on the left.  I only have a faint memory of my grandpa Cline.  I was five-years-old when he died, and he was in a nursing home the last six months of his life.  I do remember climbing a very steep hill to reach the nursing home where he lived at the time of his death.  My brothers remember him more.  I also remember family members use to ask him what time it was and he would pull his watch out and tell them.  It was an elegant gold pocket watch with a gold chain.  I also remember he had bandages on his face and arm when I saw him.  He had skin cancer, and then he had to have one arm taken off above his elbow due to cancer.  In the 1940s they did not have the medical procedures they do now.  They just removed the body part that was cancerous.  

Henry Cline was born in 1859 in the town of Moscow, Kentucky.  The mode of transportation then was a horse, horse and buggies, steamboats, or trains.  In his early years, he saw both Union and Confederate soldiers traversing through or by his family farm in Hickman County, Kentucky. His Tickell grandparents lived only five or six miles away in Fulton County, and his Cline grandpa lived on the adjoining farm to his family.  The town of Moscow was thriving in the 1860s until the turn of the century.  Moscow had a train depot, hotel, bank and more than one store that carried groceries, excellent dress materials and quality China, as well as other things that families needed.  Henry's father, William, took over his father's (Aaron) business in town when he died.  I counted over 60 families living in Moscow on the 1870 census records.  Today, there is less than a dozen families in Moscow. 

Henry was educated in the public schools in Moscow.  After graduation, he helped his father on the farm and dating a few young ladies in the community.  When his father died in 1885, Henry and his siblings moved across the Mississippi River to New Madrid, Missouri where his mother's (Tickell) family lived.  It was there that he met his second cousin, Lena Kline.  They fell in love, and in 1888, they married in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in New Madrid.  That church still stands today.

Henry and Lena had three daughters and five sons.  My father, Curtis H. Cline, was one of their sons.  Henry and his family were a prominent family in New Madrid County, Missouri.  Henry had a good life where his generation saw travel change from horse and buggies to airplanes.  

One of my grandpa Cline's goals was to reach ninety-years-of-age.  He died on the 17th of August 1949, and he would have been ninety on the 29th of December, 1949.  He missed his goal by a little over four months.  Had he not set that goal, he could have died much sooner based on the cancerous issue he suffered.  The fact that Henry lived so long is a lesson on the importance of setting goals.  I wish he could have lived a healthy life well into his nineties so I could have gotten to know him well.  God's blessings Henry Cline, I know you are enjoying heaven cancer free.