Part 6 and Final Segment of Anna Eliza Blount

Part 6 of 6

Anna Eliza Blount Kline and Her Swamp Land Grant

I hope you have enjoyed learning about my great-grandmother Anna Eliza Kline.  She was an educated pioneer lady who enjoyed life to the best of her ability in the swamps of Southeast Missouri. 

In 1907, a group of men formed an organization called the Little River Drainage District to take on the swamp. They issued bonds and taxed landowners in the district for the benefits derived. From topographical maps, they knew that the elevation of the land falls one foot per mile from Cape Girardeau to the Arkansas border. They devised a system of levees and ditches that relied heavily on gravity.

By 1928, the district had built nearly 1,000 miles of ditches, more than 300 miles of levees and had drained 1.2 million acres of land in a drainage project that at the time was the largest in the history of the world. The district drains 750,000 acres upland of the drainage system and 1.2 million acres total.  Houseboats were home to many of the men and women who dug canals and built the levees.  My Dad remembered some of the children who lived on the houseboats parked not far from his house.   Land, once 95 percent covered in water and trees, is now largely cleared and free of water most of the year.  Draining the earthquake swamp became one of the greatest engineering marvels of the 20th century.  The project moved more earth than was moved in digging the Panama Canal. [1]

Sadly, Anna Eliza Blount Kline never got to enjoy the fruits of her portion of tax money spent on draining the swamps.  The money she invested in the Stock Market provided generous dividends for many years until the 1929 Stock Market Crash.  With the onset of the Great Depression and the loss of her money in the market, she was forced to use what funds she had on hand to support the family and see her last two grandsons through high school.  My father was very disappointed he was unable to go college as did his three older siblings.  He wanted to obtain a degree in the field of mathematics.  

  

In the end, the combination of Anna losing her money in the crash of the Stock Market, coupled with the fact previous customers could no longer afford to purchase dairy products from the family dairy farm, and Henry Cline’s siblings coming to visit, while expecting to be fed for weeks and months at a time, made Anna flat broke within three years.  My dad told my brothers and me that he recalled his father’s brothers and sisters coming to visit for extended stays because his family had a large garden, fruit trees, and dairy cows to feed them.  Some of his father’s siblings could not find work and had no food.  During the Great Depression, many people had no food and had to wait in bread lines to keep from starving.  Henry took care of his brother Bedford when he became elderly and had no means of support, in addition to raising his half-brother Sam.

Anna first sold off portions of her Swamp Land Patent, then by late 1932, she lost the land in total.  She and her son-in-law Henry had to move in with his son, and her grandson Ed Cline in McMullin, Missouri.  She took pride in the fact she saw all her grandchildren finish high school and three of the older grandchildren went to college.  People who knew her well said that even after she lost her money and property, she held her head high and entered a room like she owned it up until her death on 29 June 1934.  She was quite a lady, and I wish I could have met her.

Researched and written by Anna Eliza’s great-granddaughter, Margaret Cline Harmon.  Contact – mcharmon1@gmail.com, 225-788-5999.  Any reproduction of this article should give credit to the author, dated February 2017.

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1  The Little River Drainage District – Sam Blackwell article in the Sunday, November 4, 2007, Southeast Missourian, Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Part 5 of the Saga of Anna Eliza Blount Kline

Part 5 of 6

Anna Eliza Blount Kline

And Her Swamp Land Patent

The relationship between Anna Eliza and Henry Cline was a complicated one.  First, they were first cousins.  His mother was Sophronia Tickell-Cline, and her mother was Elizabeth Tickell-Jones-Moore-Blount-Mosier, who were sisters.  Anna was born in 1846, and William Henry Cline was born in 1859.  Due to the timing of Elizabeth moving to Cheatham, Tennessee about the time Henry was born, Anna and Henry were not around each other as children, except for possible family trips to visit each other’s families.  Henry moved from Hickman County, Kentucky to New Madrid, after his father died in 1885.  His move was two years after Anna secured her Swamp Land Patent in Morehouse.  Secondly, at some point, he started dating Anna’s daughter Lena, and they married on 1888 at the New Madrid Methodist Episcopal Church, South.  Henry was twelve years older than Lena.  I don’t know what Anna thought about the marriage between the second cousins. However, we are aware she changed the spelling of Gazwell’s last name from Cline to Kline after the couple married.  I imagine that was to direct misgivings from the two of them being cousins.  Thirdly, we are not certain, but we believe Henry used some of his inheritance money to build the two-story home for his family on Anna’s Swamp Land Patent property.  This action starts to complicate the family finances.  We know Anna had much more money available than Henry; however, he had enough money to start a dairy farm shortly after building a house on Anna’s land, and he provided for the family with the dairy farm.  Grandma Anna was there for piano lessons, trips and other extras her grandchildren needed or wanted.  My dad said he thought his grandmother bought the beautiful furniture in their home from a firm in St. Louis and had it shipped down the Mississippi River to New Madrid.  Henry and Anna both dressed well and wrote expensive jewelry.  When it came to who had the last word, though, money usually won the issue, and Anna had the most money.  Henry was said to be overly strict, physically, to his children, like his father was to him, but Grandma protected them as much as possible.

Lena and Henry’s family had grown to include three sons and a daughter by 1904, Howard Dennis Cline, born in 1891, William Edward Cline, born 1899, Gazwell Harold Cline, born 1903, and Eula Cline-Goolsby, born 1895.  Henry and Lena had two more sons and two more daughters after Anna moved in with the family, Curtis Henry Cline, born 1911, Vera Daugherty Cline, born 1905, and Lena Grace Cline-Dye, born 1907.  Lena gave birth to her last child, Clarence “Cotton” Cline, in 1913.  My dad and his sisters often talked about the beautiful dining room they had, with delicate china, and a player piano in the parlor.  Many enjoyable times were held in the home with Lena playing the piano, and Henry playing the violin or fiddle.  She became very ill on 30 August 1914, and was taken to the nearest hospital in Cairo, Illinois, but died from a ruptured hernia on 31 August 1914.[2]  At this point, Anna had only her grandchildren left in her life.  She considered it her responsibility and honor to raise her grandchildren to adulthood.  Henry Cline never remarried, and my father told me that it was because he and his siblings hated their last step-mother, Susan, and he would now put his children through living with a step-mother.  The family always had domestic help. A couple of cousins, who wish not to be identified, told me there were rumors that Henry became very friendly with the domestic help and the family found it difficult to keep the same maid and cook for any length of time.  My cousins inferred he might have tried to get too friendly with them, but it is only speculation.

  Tragedy came to Anna and the Cline family again on 5 March 1926.  It was about 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning when the Cline home burned to the ground.  My dad told me that his Uncle Madison’s house was identical to their house, but he had a metal roof.  The Cline home had a wood-shack roof and embers from the fireplace landed on the roof and caused the fire.  The fire was reported in the Sikeston Daily Standard the same day.  It stated, “Fire broke out in the home of Henry Cline Sunday morning about 11 o’clock, two miles southeast of Morehouse.  Help calls took the men from the churches and streets of Morehouse, but in the high winds, the house was soon beyond control and was practically a total loss together with the contents.”  The eight children, Henry and Anna were devastated by the loss of their home.  They loved it and my dad often talked about it in a loving way.  A much smaller single-story, six room house was built to replace the large two story home.  The family managed to save a few pieces of furniture from the parlor, but it was mostly a total loss.  Two chairs saved are now in possession of two of Gazwell Cline’s children.  I am sure they will remain in the family for many years to come.

My father, Curtis H. Cline, told many warm stories about his grandmother.  Above all else, he remembered her as a loving grandmother.  He remembered that she enjoyed entertaining in an elegant way and was generous with her family.  One remembrance he shared was the time his father had instructed him to do a chore, and he continued to play up in the barn loft.  He was about nine or ten years old at the time.  He made a misstep and fell out of the loft and hurt himself.  His father came at him with a horsewhip ready to discipline him, but his grandma ran out and threw her apron over him and told his dad, “don’t you touch this boy, can’t you see he is hurt?”  Every time he told the story he got tears in his eyes and almost cried.  He thought the world of Anna Eliza Blount Kline.  Another thing he recalled was that Anna looked very elegant and aristocratic.   He also told my brothers and me that his grandma had the ability to look taller than she was, and she drew everyone’s attention when she walked into a room.  My cousin Sam Goolsby, son of Eula Cline Goolsby, is the only great-grandchild living that remembers Anna Blount Kline.  He was born in 1929, and what he remembers most is that she was a “lady” in every sense of the word, and that she was very aristocratic in the way she walked, looked, and conducted herself.

My dad also remembered walking on raised boardwalks around Morehouse when the Little River flooded the area every spring.  He also told me he remembers hearing panthers scream and it sounded a lot like a woman screaming.  He said the scream made his hair stand on end.  He remembered watching the workers digging up stumps and making the ditches related the Little River Drainage District when he was growing up in Morehouse.  Families working in the drainage district lived in houseboats, and a few children of the workers attended the Morehouse schools.

Plans to turn the swamp into farmland date to the 1840s, but the job seemed too big. Not even the government had ever undertaken anything of that magnitude before. But in 1907, a group of men formed an organization called the Little River Drainage District to take on the swamp. They issued bonds and taxed landowners in the district for the benefits derived.  In our last segment on Anna and her Swamp Land Patent we will learn if she benefited from the draining of the swamps.  How did this fine lady live out her life?  Come back tomorrow for the final part of the saga of Anna Eliza Blount Kline.