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Adams Stories |
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Adams Told to Charlotte Ritter
Florence Adams was the one in the family to which something invariably happened and was always the clown and the fastest moving spirit of the children. When she was quite a small child (living in Lawrence) she had fallen while playing and struck her nose at the base of the septum and sliced it off cleanly. Grandmother Adams who was working just inside the back door of the house, saw what had happened, grabbed a handful of flour from the flour barrel in the storeroom, and stuck the nose back on with the flour as a binder. In the meantime, on of the boys had been sent to find a ride to the doctor’s office and had hailed a passing dray. Holding the child’s nose in place, Harriett Ann Welch Adams calmly rode to the doctor’s office, the nose was sutured in place and it was never obvious in later years that the accident had occurred.. (Harriett Ann Adams Fronk to Charlotte Ritter)
Grandmother Adams had set her girls to hemming sheets. Aunt Florence (later Mrs. Nathan Messer) was by far the fastest and most sure with the needle, so when she would get ahead, on the premise that she was doing more work than the rest, she would stop, tell jokes, and clown. This particular time, she did stop, put the needle in the corner of her mouth, and when someone else said something funny enough to take her by surprise, she inhaled, swallowing the needle. Her mother had cooked mush for frying for the following day’s breakfast, worked all the butter she had at hand into it and adamantly fed the frightened Florence, buttered mush until she would never again touch it. There was no trouble from the swallowed needle. However, almost forty years later, when her neice, Zella Fronk, (dau. Of her sis, Harriett Ann Adams Fronk) was staying at her home while she attended Kansas University, Aunt Florence Adams Messer went to the doctory and happened to mention coincidently that she wished he would look at the odd spot on the top of her right foot. His opinion was that it was a thorn she’d managed to pick up and on beginning to remove the “thorn” he became more and more excited until he held the offending object up for exhibit. There was the needle, very nearly corroded into pieces, thought not rusty and still very identifiable! So great a curiousity was it that he put it on a bed of cotton and kept it on display in his window for a number of years. (Zella Fronk Burtnett to Charlotte Burtnett)
James Achilles Adams was probably reared in the Methodist faith, through his wife, Harriett Ann Welch was Cumberland Presbyterian. She heard John Campbell speak on the problem of immersion and became a Campbellite. Because of her extremely strict beliefs, all of the members of the Adams family were members of the Christian Church (outgrowth of the Campbell Group) with the exception of Harriet Ann Adams Fronk, who attended the Congregational Church in Lawrence for convieniece sake, but adhered to the tenets of Methodism. In referring to the difference in church affiliation she always laughterd and said the others considered themselves the “Lambs of God”, laughed and said she was afraid that in their eyes, she had always been the Goat”. (Zella Fronk Burtnett to Charlotte Ritter) |