366                 HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY

principles of the Democratic party. Mrs. Brown is a member of the
United Brethren church.

    JOHN FRUMP.—On January 29, 1908, John Frump, of Bowling
Green, Clay county, celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday in his spacious
and beautiful country residence, which is almost literally the work of his
hands, and, as such, is strikingly illustrative of his independent, sturdy,
determined and unique character. Thirty-two years before he had burned
the brick for the house on his own farm, cut the timber and had the
lumber sawed which was to enter into the construction of his home, and
to the minutest detail saw to it that the material was sound and the build-
ing was honest. As it stands to-day, with its neat sandstone trimmings
and its substantial appearance, an acre of velvet lawn, graceful shade
trees and pretty flower beds for a frame, the homestead is a symbol of
the industrious, solid, bright and mellow old gentleman, whose hard-
working, venturesome and useful life has been crowned by the admira-
tion and affection of his associates. At the age when many men are
huddled in a corner, mumbling absently of the past, John Frump is
actively alive to the present, tending his flowers with loving care, driving
briskly over the country in his rounds of relatives and friends, or sitting
at his desk and writing letters of friendship or business with the same
clear-cut and bold hand which adorns the books of the county treasurer of
more than forty years ago; and this latter accomplished without glasses!
In alluding to this unusual retention of physical and mental strength a
close friend gives the following gentle touch to his character: “As a
memorist he is phenomenally endowed, his retentiveness so acute that he
recites readily without reference or prompting, declamations committed
in his schoolboy days more than seventy years ago. It is an unusual
spectacle to see a man of eighty-six years repairing to the village or rural
school house, in response to an invitation to recite for the entertainment
and edification of the children, which Mr. Frump frequently does. When
but ten or twelve years of age, when he began reading in the old English
reader, then the only reader in the public schools of the west, he com-
mitted a somewhat lengthy composition entitled ‘An Address to the
Young,’ which he delivers to schools and parties at this time with
apparently as much avidity and, delight as in the days of his youth. ‘At
no time,’ says Mr. Frump, during the lapse of more than seventy years
since I memorized this address have I ever been in any way embarrassed
or at any loss to reproduce and declaim it word for word.’ In his retire-
ment from the activities of farm life Mr. Frump devotes his time to
reading and floriculture, his flower gardens being the admiration and envy
of all passers-by.”
    This fine old pioneer of Clay county is a native of Highland county,
Ohio, born near Hillsboro on the 29th of January, 1822, just twenty years
prior to the birth of William H. McKinley. His parents were John and
Mary Ann (Crabb) Frump, natives respectively of Delaware and Ohio.
In 1835, when he was but thirteen years of age, the family came to Clay
county and located on an eighty-acre farm in Posey township near the
present site of Brazil. There the mother died in 1849, her husband sur-
viving her until 1867, when he passed away at the age of seventy-six
years. Both were buried in the Hill cemetery, Brazil. Eight children
were born to them, of whom two sons and two daughters are living, John
Frump being the eldest of the family.