Caldwell County MO Archives History .....THE MURRELLS IN GOMER TOWNSHIP IN THE SEVENTIES 
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Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com August 30, 2008, 4:02 pm

		THE MURRELLS IN GOMER TOWNSHIP IN THE SEVENTIES
	Narrator:  James I. Murrell, 76, of Hamilton, Missouri

            The Murrell Farm                      Locust Grove 
School                          Easy Credit                           The 
O'Neil Home
                              Country Schools

     Mr. Murrell, now a retired farmer was born in Ripley County south east 
Missouri of southern parentage.  His father was Benjamin Murrell and his 
mother Mary Everett Galpin, who with a daughter is buried in McCrary cemetery 
in Daviess County.  The father was a southern soldier (as Mr. Murrell says "it 
was all the way we knew") and died in a Little Rock Hospital.  The Mother had 
four children to support and they were lucky if they had corn bread to eat.
     In 1874, James I. his Mother and the other children came to Caldwell 
County where he worked on two farms east of Hamilton - on one he worked for 
J.C. Penney Sr. (father of the Penney Store man) on the other for the Paxton 
Brothers, farmers of Mirabile township and liverymen of Hamilton.  Then fifty 
two years ago he bought a farm without a cent in hand, eighty acres at $30 an 
acre from Judge McMillan and paid off the mortgage.  Credit was easy then for 
every borrower paid his debts.  To be sold out was a disgrace.  Later he 
bought forty more acres at $87.50 which shows how land values increased.
     Those days farmers did not need to use fertilizer, corn grew easily for 
the soil was almost virgin.  At first in his farming he used a walking plow.  
It was in 1874 that he first shucked corn.  Before that time in Ripley County, 
they had pulled corn and stalk off together.
     His farm was near the Locust Grove School four miles north east of 
Hamilton.  An early teacher there was Eva Glasener of Hamilton who got $20 a 
month, did her own janitor work and walked out each day from home, a good four 
miles. Another teacher was Jim Wilson of Kidder.  They had big country schools 
then forty two to fifty.  Nowadays the same school has seven to twelve.  
Families were large and the big boys and girls kept on going even after they 
had finished their books, sometimes till they were twenty, especially in the 
winter when there was little farm work.  There were two terms; winter 
ordinarily four possibly five months; summer - three months.  Pupils were 
ranked by the reader they used.  The remark "He is in the third reader" really 
showed his class.  Each country school was a law to itself.  No rules existed 
to make it work like some other school.  Consequently the country pupils were 
in hard luck when they came to town school.
     Mr. and Mrs. Murrell gave up farming a few years ago and bought a home 
east of the Federated Church.  This house originally smaller than now is one 
of Hamiltons old homes.  They bought it of Mrs. H.B. O'Neil whose husband was 
in the Dry Goods firm of O'Neil and Wilson in the seventies, located at the 
Penney Store site.  The O'Neils bought their home of Wm. Partin and wife who 
inherited it from Mrs. Partin's father, Rev. Eli Penney, who gave them the 
home for taking care of himself and wife in their old age.
     Interviewed  July 1934.


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