ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 21 (Spring 1962)

Life of an Arkansas Logger

In 1901

Edited By Walter L. Brown

Fayetteville

 

FROM MAY, 1899, UNTIL JUNE, 1902, ORMOND H. TWIFORD (May 16, 1869-November 9, 1913) kept a daily manuscript journal. When he began the journal, Orrmie was thirty years old and lived with his brother Eugene Twiford and a friend Ed Crowder on a farm near Knoxville, Missouri. Ormie and Gene had migrated from Pennsylvania in about 1893 and settled in Missouri on their Ray County farm the same year. They were well-to-do farmers in their community. Ormie was chairman of the local rural school board in 1900, recording in his journal under date of January 6 that he had just been instructed by the board "to tell Mr. Buxton who lives on the old Harper farm fighting the teacher." Their sawmill, operated on their farm during winters, furnished lumber both of repairing the school-house and for satisfying the needs of numerous friends.

Caught up in the war fever of 1898-1899, Gene joined the Thirty-Second Kansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment in September, 1899, and was soon sent to the Philippines. Six months later Ormie began trying to enlist in the Army, but at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in June, 1900, he was rejected because he did "not weigh enough in proportion to my hight [sic], according to the schedule of weights and measures for Uncle Sam men." Returning home, where he had leased the farm to a neighbor, Ormie considered in late 1900 moving to Florida, 1901, he and Ed Crowder went to Mena, Arkansas, to look into the possibility of "taking up Government land in the wild part of the state."

The article below is an excerpt from Ormie's journal

 
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