What do you do when there is no more corn to harvest? When the last
cow has been milked, and the milk pail hung on a peg for the last time? When
your farm machinery has been put on the auction block and the keys to your truck
given to the new owner? If you're Galen Eddy, you tell stories. Stories about
Havensville, the people who once lived there, the businesses that lined
Commercial Street and made it a thriving communtiy, the churches and schools and
homes where the residents were nurtured, educated, baptized and married.
Havensville was quite a place, all right, according to my father.
Galen was born October 25, 1906, in a frame house a quarter mile south of
Havensville. Maybe you know the place. On the west side of Hwy 63 south of
town there's Cow Creek Road. Follow Cow Creek Road to the top of the hill to
where it takes a lazy curve and heads west. The house and farm buildings used
to be south of the road on that corner. The corner was different then, of
course. For well over fifty years there was a straight road that went south out
of Havensville, over the bridge, up the hill and made a turn to the west which
was the main route to Onaga. There have been a lot of changes.
My
dad's parents were Ernest Eddy and Ella Coates Eddy. Galen says he gets his love
of storytelling from his grandfather, Bill Coates. Bill and his family,
including Ella, came to Kansas from Ohio in 1871. They first settled in
Centralia but moved to a farm in Pottawatomie County five years later when they
heard the Kansas Railway Company planned to move the railroad west from Holton
through a place called Havens. I suppose they figured there'd be plenty of
business opportunities and maybe a way to make a little money in the newly
developing area.
I doubt if getting rich was a goal of the Coateses.
Perhaps they were more interested in security and a good environment in which to
raise their children. Ella's grandparents had come from seven years of traveling
for the American Bible Society to settle down in what was then Havens. Before
that, Moses, a carpenter by trade, and an ordained Methodist preacher, had spent
twenty-five years pastoring Church of God congregations in Ohio.
He
and wife Mary Ann Parmer Coates were called to minister to a congregation in
Wharton, Ohio, while Bill was serving the Union Army during the Civil War. This
proved to be a good move for it was here, while on leave, Bill met Susannah
Yambert. When the war was over, Bill united in marriage to the stately
Susan, then nineteen years old, by his father, the Reverend Moses Clark Coates.
If Clark and Coates ring a bell with you, you are old enough to
remember the spools of thread we used to buy that had Coates and Clark printed
on the ends. Same family. Moses' Grandpa Moses is said to have acquired the
land and laid out the town of Coatesville in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
According to legend, General Washington was entertained at Brandywine Mansion,
built by the Coates. Maybe that was one of the many places George Washington
supposedly slept.
Back to Havensville. Apparently, Bill Coates
didn't have the calling his father did, but religious upbringing was quite
evident in the lives of Bill and Susan Coates. According to the June 1900
copy of the Havensville Torchlight William and Susan Coates were very
active in the Havensville Baptist Church. He superintended Sunday school in
Lincoln Township, conducted song services and taught a singing school. He
became a farmer after the Civil War, and farmed in Wyandot County, OH, and in
the Centralia area before buying a farm in Pottawatomie County near Havens. In
1892, the Coates sold the farm and moved into Havensville.
One
hundred years ago there was really no such thing as "retirement." Moses and
Mary Ann ran a lodging house in Havensville: . C. Coates, proprietor of Coates
House--Board $1.00 per day or $3.50 per week." Bill established his own
business, the "City Restaurant and Farmer's Home." The younger Coates family
provided meals and a place to stay; as well as a place to buy groceries and to
purchase meat in the family run buthcher's shop.
Galen figures Bill
put the whole family to work in the place of business. There were nine children
in the family, six of them girls, and what better way for them to learn about
finance as well as the housekeeping skills that go along with running a
restaurant and lodging place? Of course, by the time the family got into the
restaurant business, the older three egirls, who'd come to Kansas with them in
the covered wagon, were married.
I don't know about Dollie and
Cornelia, but I do know my grandma Ella was plenty busy in her own right during
those early years of the "City Restaurant and Farmer's Home." Grandmother
married my grandfather Ernest Eddy in 1891, had three children and lived in at
least three different homes by the time Grandpa was ready to settle down in the
home on the hill south of Havensville.
My father Galen remembers his
granddad, Bill Coates as being a great talker. Galen says Bill loaded up items
from his store into a horse drawn wagon which he drove around the countryside,
selling what they needed to the farm folks in the area. Galen figures Bill
loved getting away from the business when the weather was nice, rambling along
the crop-lined roads, and talking to the people he met during his travels. If
he sold something, so much the better.
Looking back, Galen wishes
he'd spent more time talking to his Grandfather William Coates, asking him
questions about his childhood, his war years, and about Ella. He would have
like to know more about the mother who died when he was six years old. No doubt
Bill would have been happy to know Galen cared about these things, and it would
have added to the store of Galen's memories.
Bill Coates died shortly
before his 90th birthday in 1934. More later about Havensville and
the good folks who lived there.