Lincoln County News, March 2, 1942

War-time hardship is no new story to A.W. Woody, one of whose earliest memories is Sherman's march through Georgia, when a strip of crops and property 30 miles wide was utterly destroyed by the Union army. At that time Mr. Woody's parents and their 11 children, parents and grandparents of all the Woodys of Lincoln County, lived within that 30-mile strip. Mr. Woody was only four years old at the time, but he still remembers the army and the hardship the people suffered from the loss of their homes and other property. To add to the war-time experience of the Woody family, the parents sold their farm for Confederate currency and still had the currency when the southern army surrendered and the money became worthless. For several years the whole famly worked. Mr. Woody started picking cotton at the age of 7 and his brothers at a similar early age, and the family saved till 1869 to get together enough money to come to Missouri and later to Kansas. The high price of cotton after the war was one piece of good fortune that helped offset the war's calamity. The first bale of cotton the elder Mr. Woody sold after the war brought him $500 -- not Confederate currency but gold. The Woodys later came on to Kansas, and after they arrived in Lincoln County they still had a big roll of Confederate bills, which they used for decorative purposes. One of the decorations was a fire screen, about 4 by 5 feet in size, the surface of which was solid Confederate currency pasted onto a background, the bigger bills interspersed with the small to add a pleasing variety to the looks of the thing.