Having completed our preparations for our removal from Gentry, we shipped our unsold household goods including a piano, to our daughter Bernice in Washington, D. C., and bidding our good Gentry friends good-bye, started on train about April 3rd, 1920 on our journey to the East. While en route we stopped in Springfield a few days and visited Eugene Lindsey and family, James and Zena Slavens and wives, and their sister, Mrs. Laura McReynolds, her husband, Jesse, and son, Paul, of near Morrisville, Missouri, who had came to the city to see us before we went to the National Capital.

While in Springfield, in company with James Slavens and wife, Mary, Nelle, Irene and I went to the Grandfather Rountree home about two miles southwest of Springfield. It had been more than forty years since I was last there and many changes had occurred during that time. All of the old log dwelling, and the kitchen part of the frame part of the dwelling adjoining Grandfather’s room, were gone. Only his room and the chimney remained. A new frame addition of about three rooms adjoining Grandfather's room on the west had been built. The family graveyard, near the dwelling where Grandfather, Grandmother and some of their children were buried, which was fenced and well-kept while Grandfather lived, had been badly neglected, their tombstones had fallen down, the fence was gone and the graves were overgrown with weeds. I regretted to see its deplorable condition. The old barn and the big apple orchard were gone, and few of the old landmarks remained.

While we were in Springfield I saw a few friends I had known before they became residents of Springfield, among whom were William Benton Coon and wife, and his brother, Dr. James Coon, and William Tharp and wife, also Attorneys Riley Self and Ollie Lovan, whom I knew when they were young men in Buffalo, Missouri. I also called at the wholesale establishment of the Keet and Rountree Dry Goods Company and saw the manager, Joel Rountree and his brother Charles. They are sons of Newton M. Rountree, deceased, who was my cousin.

After our delightful visit with our relatives in Springfield, whom some of us would probably never see again. We bid them an affectionate farewell and resumed our journey to the East. We went from Springfield to St. Louis on the Frisco Railroad and we got a drawing room, a separate apartment on the sleeping car, provided with a bed and a small couch, so that my wife could lie down when she desired and have a comfortable sleeping place at night and she stood the trip to St. Louis during the night fine and we arrived in the Missouri metropolis early the next morning. There we transferred to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and after a short delay in the Union Depot entrained on the B.& O. We left St. Louis early in the morning and passing through the states of Illinois and Indiana, and into the southwest part of Ohio we arrived at Cincinnati, Ohio just after dark that evening. We wouid have been very much pleased to have stopped there and visited our niece Mrs. Charles E. (Nona) Kilgour and her family who resided in that city, but my wife was so badly crippled, to walk without assistance, that it would have been much trouble to take her from the train and back after a short stay, so we thaught it best not to stop. Continuing our trip through Ohio and parts of West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia, we arrived at the big Union Station in Washington, D. C. in the afternoon of the second day after leaving St. Louis, Missouri.

After leaving Cincinnati, Ohio we passed through Ohio during the night and saw no other Ohio cities through which the B. & O. ran, but early the next morning we passed through the town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, famous as the scene of John Brown's raid before the Civil War; Cumberland, a large city in Maryland; and the old historic city of Alexandria, Virginia, near the nation’s capital where first President George Washington frequently attended Christ Episcopal Church and where he attended the Masonic Lodge of which he was a worshipful master. We passed through many smaller towns on our trip, the names of which I do not remember.

Our daughter, Bernice, met us at the station in Washington, D. C. and using the wheel chair which we brought along in the baggage car of our trains, we transferred my wife from the train to a taxi cab and we were all taken to the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Frydell, 1225 C Street Southeast, where Bernice was staying and where she had got rooms for us. The Frydells were very nice people and we were glad to obtain comfortable rooms in their home and truly glad to have reached the end of our long journey. The next day after we got to our destination our household goods were brought to our temporary home and stored in the basement thereof.

Copyright ©2005 Larry Slavens. All rights reserved.