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Half century of history saved
An early 1800s log cabin, originally owned by Josiah and Lucy Mathews was recently donated to the Clarke County Museum by a descendent and its most recent owner, Lucy Oliver Dortch. While movers were in the process of preparing the cabin to be moved to the museum grounds, another descendant, Hearn, a Mathews descendant, began photographing the progress.
Found package thrown out The cabin had been on Mathews Cemetery Road south of Grove Hill and had been used for storage over the years. On one of his visits to the cabin Hearn noticed the contents of the cabin had been thrown into the yard. "I walked around and looked at the stuff. I got to the northeast corner of the cabin and I noticed a shallow box, like, something you would find in the top of an old trunk. Then I noticed part of the trunk, but it was empty.
Hearn then looked to his left, and under some brush he noticed a stack of letters, tied with string, and decided to save those too. "It never crossed my mind it could be something like this," he laughed. He cut the string on the letters and went through them to try and find one that wouldn't disintegrate when he opened it. The letter he found was from J. L. Hicks, who was asking about relatives in Clarke County. Hearn remembered another letter from Hicks in the family archives and thought there might be more in the bundle. For the time being he placed them in a plastic bag with some baking soda and set them out on his front porch, where they remained for two or three months.
Hearn told his cousin, David Mathews about the letters and when Mathews came to visit he took the letters back to his home in Ohio and spent several days reading them.
Included Civil War letters "He called me and told me I had found a treasure. Our great-great-grandfather, David Mathews, fought in the Civil War and was at the Battle of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, where he was captured. There were letters from him to his family." The letters span over a half a century, from 1863 until 1918. The 1863 Civil War letters are the earliest in the collection. The Confederate soldier is short on war talk, focusing mostly on family and the prospects for peace and his return home. He tells his children to behave and continue their education and attempts to manage the farm from Tennessee.
Letters given to museum "Our desire was to give the letters to the museum for future reference. They are all tied to the Mathews cabin, which is being restored here at the museum," Hearn said. One of the letters includes a marriage proposal to Ellen Mathews, daughter of David and Rebecca Mathews, from A. Monroe Hallford. Another letter indicates she accepted his proposal and from that time on, in their correspondence, instead of referring to each other as Madam and Mr. Hallford, they called each other Ellen and Monroe. The J. L. Hicks in the first letter opened by Hearn was "Josh" Hicks. His mother was a Mathews and the family moved to Texas in the late 1800s where he became a newspaper editor and a staunch follower of the Populist Party. He wrote his second cousin, Eleanor Elizabeth "Ellen" Mathews steadily over a period of 30 years, from 1883 until 1912. Topics included family, religion, politics and much more. Hearn said, "I believe these letters were in the sleeping loft of the cabin. They were not damaged, so they couldn't have been stored with everything else that was in the cabin downstairs or they would have been destroyed. "We hope people will come to the museum and read the letters. There are a lot of connections to families in the county."
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