The October blog was submitted by one of our amazing customers, who is a published writer and who took an interest in the picture we display next to the counter.
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Settling Bees
The family was at the home place, in the fullness of the day. Their home was outside of Jay, at the peak of the hills. This was on a property that was given to the youngest daughter, Cherokee Rose, by the Cherokee Nation.
The beehives, on platforms, were built behind the wooden fence, woven from limbs and logs, chopped, cleaned, and stripped of their bark, and stacked across the line of the property.
James LaFette Fields and his family were playing two roles that day in 1902, as they all stood there, faces pinched down and made to look unreal and unhappy, as the man with the camera stood back and counted so slowly, to make sure the picture was made, clear and lasting forever. Their dower faces precluded the ultimate viewer from seeing the personalities that gleamed inside them, as their frozen faces gave the camera time to work its magic, with no loss of the pictures sight.
Looking at the camera, from the right, were his daughter Ruth, the baby, Cherokee Rose, his wife Sara Francis, daughter Rachel, James, and his far-right Henry.
James had been born on the West Bank of the Grand River, in the town area called Boat Man, near Salina. Here, in the picture it could be seen that there were chairs set up outside the house, outside living for the heat of the summer.
James and his family were at Mose Ridge, later to be called Topsy, (near what is now Jay, Oklahoma) standing next to their home and his small country store and Post Office, and just out of sight of the camera capture, was Mose Ridge Cemetery.
James held a washtub, bent and cleaned, and pounded gently on the bottom of it, creating a metallic bass-like noise, keeping rhythm, wooing the bees out of their fractious calamity, and bringing them to their separate hives, calming them, pulling them back to the work they must have done to make the honey, and provide for the family.
He was a farmer, and store owner, and raised the bees, as well as his apple orchard, which provided bushels of apples from atop of the hill.
As Cherokee got older, he and her would load up the apples in the farm wagon and would head to Pryor Creek (Pryor, Oklahoma) for a long two days for a hard and difficult ride, and back-breaking discomfort from their farm.
There were so many hills that he would stop at the top of some, and five-year-old Cherokee would climb down and position rocks behind the wooden wheels of the wagon and let the horse take a rest. They would travel bad roads, “crocky” hills, and wind through the Spavinaw Sawmill Road.
They would spend the night with relatives and go on into Pryor Creek the next day, sell their apples, pick up what they needed and head back home.
The family stayed together, and he put his place in a trade for land and property in 1908, in Arkansas. While several people were coming to Oklahoma, James packed his family in a covered wagon, and they all eventually took their place in Arkansas.
— Ralph E Peck