Edith McCullough Perry:
My Story

When Kathy called her mother from Chicago in the spring of 1971, she inquired about me: Was I getting well? Was I happy? Was I busy? Would I do something for her? What whe wanted me to do was to set down on paper all those things I have told them about my childhood, and that is what I have tried to do.

'Stranger's Home' -- in Eastern Arkansas -- Lawrence County -- is only a schoolhouse-churchhouse with a wide area for hitching teams, for having dinners on the ground, and of course, a cemetery. About ten miles west of Alicia, in a wide-spread community, it had no Post Office.

Papa remembered, and told us, that during the years following the close of the Civil War he was brought there on horseback as a child from his home in Jacksonport, Ark. to make his home with his Uncle Will Orr, whose first wife had been Papa's Aunt Julia. His Mother, Frances Orianna Woodard-McCullough, had died, leaving him and two older brothers: -- Evan Lynn, who settled in Kansas after the war, and Francis Orion, who was our Uncle Frank in Van Buren. Their mother was very musical, and graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory It was in going to and from Memphis and Cincinnati by boat on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers that she met Evan McCullough, who was Captain of a river steamer. She finally married him, and in my childhood enlarged photographs of them hung on the wall, and his blindness, from the glare of the sun on the water, was apparent.

I think it was Uncle Frank who told us that when she graduated, she was met in Memphis, as usual, and a piano was brought and hauled to Jacksonport, placed on the front porch and all the people from roundabout came to hear her play. No wonder we were all so musical. As the youngest of three boys, Papa was called Willie.

Stranger's Home is not important to this story except as the place where my parents met.

Uncle Will Orr was childless and could use another man on the place, so he welcomed the nephew who grew to be very handy. He learned to work hard about the farm with the animals, the chores and in the field. When he was about 19, a letter came from Galatia, Ill. about a girl cousin of Uncle Will's. Her mother, Eliza Upchurch-Smith, had died, leaving her and two older sisters: --Mary married Isaac Fife and Melissa Caroline married Randall Jones. The letter said she needed a place to live and wanted to know if Uncle Will could make her welcome. He did and she came. Her name was Nancy Vianna Smith and Papa was sent to meet her train at Alicia. When she saw him, she told us, she thought, "That's the whitest-headed boy I ever saw!" When he saw her, he thought, "That girl will be my wife."

One time when he was sent to Newport with a load of hogs, he bought her a present–a little Swiss music box, which he placed early one morning on a chest of drawers just outside her bedroom door, set playing, opened her door just a crack and hurried off to his work. She told us that when she awoke to it, she thought it the sweetest music she ever heard. That little music box now belongs to the first Nancy Granddaughter. We also have two little books that were mother's, and her little embroidery scissors.