CUSHING OK HISTORY BITS

Pioneer Couple Celebrated Golden Anniversary in Cushing

(The following information was obtained from an article which was published on the front page of the Cushing Daily Citizen’s April 20, 1944 edition. It was written by Hattie Mae Lachenmeyer. Only the quotes are verbatim – the remaining information has been revised)

Submitted by PATTI HARRIS Cimarron Valley Historical Society

A big celebration was held April 19, 1944 in Cushing. A pioneer couple was marking 50 years of marriage, all of it spent in the same town. And their family would continue to leave its mark on the city for decades to come.

According to a newspaper article published in 1944, a young C.C. “Charlie” Walters had arrived in Sac and Fox Territory in time for the 4th of July picnic in 1892. The Indians made bread and it was a “gala occasion.”

It was there that Miss Maude Fuson, daughter of a Baptist minister, met Charlie. The pair talked but then went their respective ways.

Charlie had come to the new territory with his cousin, Ed, from Iowa. He bought a relinquishment northeast of town and set about farming and helping out in a general store.

Maude’s family had come from Siloam Springs, Missouri to the Sac and Fox lands in October 1891 one month after had it had been opened to settlement. Her father, organizer of the First Baptist Church of Cushing, bought a relinquishment and settled on a piece of property 2 ½ miles south of town near the present day Cushing Regional Airport.

“I used to date quite a few of the girls at first,” Charlie told the newspaper reporter. “Ed and I would put a couple of springseats on that little spring wagon and get about considerable. But I finally settled down to the one handiest.”

Maude countered with “Don’t you believe it. I had beaus, too, and I settled down to him but for another reason.”

The couple courted for about a year before being married on April 19, 1894 in the home of the bride’s parents with Maude’s father, Sylvester W. Fuson, officiating. The bride wore a gray wedding dress but never liked the color.

Gray material was the only color the general store had that was suitable for a wedding dress. In honor of her 50th wedding anniversary, she wore blue – the color she couldn’t have on her wedding day.

Maude described the wedding as “really lovely. There were bouquets of white dogwood blossoms picked in the woods. My father knew how to have a nice wedding. He used his nicest ceremony and I had two attendants, Mrs. King Berry and Miss Nan Suman.” Charlie’s cousin, Ed, was his best man.

Charlie said Maude’s plain gold wedding band, typical of the rings of the 1890s, cost $4 which was “quite an investment with the license of $2. I was glad her father was a preacher and we didn’t need to pay him.”

“Why, my ring was $5,” Maude countered.

“Aw-w-w, Mother, that is just what I told you,” Charlie replied.

Gifts consisted of additional cakes and food for the wedding feast but as Maude pointed out “Charlie had everything. He had hams, chickens and a garden planted and up even with fruit trees and that was more than lots had in those days.”

Charlie related how he had been “batching over here on my claim with my cousin, Ed, when Maude and I were married. We had just two cups, two saucers, two knives, two forks and two chairs. When we got married, I bought one more of everything except the chairs. We didn’t need that for a while.”

By July, the couple had finally saved up enough money to take their honeymoon which turned into a month-long excursion to Iowa to visit Charlie’s folks.

“We had $10 cash and I threw 10 bushels of oats in the wagon bed to feed the mules, racked up a grub stake for the two of us and we set out for Iowa,” Charlie explained. “It was hot weather but we didn’t seem to mind the heat.”

That journey took 16 days. After a short visit, they made the trip back to Cushing in slightly less time.

Even after opening his own business (Walters Furniture and Undertaking), Charlie farmed for several years and they continued to live on the claim 2 ½ miles northeast of Cushing in a 14x18 weather-boarded house.

“We had a fine house,” Charlie said. “Bedroom, dining room and kitchen – all in one room!”

No one could recall just exactly when the young family outgrew that house and a side room eventually had to be added on. Three of the children were born in that house.

As the furniture and undertaking business expanded, the family moved into town and eventually settled into a house at 721 E. Broadway. All of their children would go on to assist in one way or another in the family business their father founded.

The children were: Alma Maude (Mrs. W.I. Usher), Gay (Mrs. George F. Bolinger), Louis Carl, Edward E. “Buster,” Irene N. (Mrs. W.C. Allder), C.C. Jr. and John F. “Jack.” All through the years, the Walters family was known for its close family ties. Charlie visited his family back in Iowa at least once a year and they would visit him here, too. But the young man who went pioneering to Oklahoma weathered the good years and the bad years without ever sending back home for help.

“I would have once though, but fate intervened,” he said. “One summer, there was no crop. The wife was not well. There was just no money left in the country. I didn’t see how we were going to make it. We had one nickel left. I wrote a letter home asking for help. But when we started to the post office, we dropped the nickel. It rolled through a crack in the floor and under the house. To have found it, we would have had to tear the whole floor out. We just decided to get along without the loan. That was a close call though.”

When asked by the interviewer about the length of time the couple had lived in Cushing, Maude responded with “Well, I don’t know where else anyone would want to live or how else one would want to be except married. I have had a happy life right here. It seems to me that I have had such a full, happy life right here in Cushing. I can’t imagine it being any better anywhere else in this world.” OC