Family is Forever
My great grandfathers, my grandmother, my mama and me
The man seated in the photo to the right is my 2nd Great Grandfather John Henry Coker about the time of his mid-forties surrounded by his children. At 17 years of age he enlisted in the 3rd Mississippi Battalion with his uncle Albert of the same age in December of 1861. I came to learn of him through the family tales primarily related from my grandmother, Mrs. Clara Clytee Pannell Coker. Carrying on the history of my mother’s side of the family largely fell to my mother and grandmother as my grandfather, Wesley Allen Coker, was struck down early in life with a series of severe strokes. Each one a little worse than the one before, by the time I was ten his physical body was permanently effected. Eventually we could only communicate in touch and feeble attempts at speech until he passed away in 1983. However, it was my grandmother, as well as my mother, who were the natural born historians of our family.
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As a teenager with new found responsibilities of employment and the freedom of the road before me, I chose to leave work and drive over to my Mema Coker’s house during the week for lunch. Living alone after my granddaddy’s passing, she looked forward to the twelve o’clock hour every day when the solitude would be broken for a short while. Often she’d make potato soup, a dish she called soupy taters, which I loved. During those visits our conversation always seemed to find its way to stories of “the war” and the trials, tribulations, and adventures of our people. Chiefly those stories revolved around my third great grandfather, Elias Mitchell Pannell. He was a patriarch on my Mema Coker’s side of the family. A great grandfather to her whose children, at least some, she knew well. Always referred to as Capt. Pannell, Elias Mitchell had served in the war and many of the tales I heard were related to him.
There were also the stories of Nancy, his wife, and the trying times she spent on the home front simply trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. No easy task when marauding Yankee cavalry is about. Still, my mema was honest and did on at least one occasion indict Confederate soldiers for requisitioning needed supplies from Nancy’s farm. A request complied with sullenly as it meant compounded hardship; nevertheless a request complied with dutifully as these were “our boys”. There were the stories too of Parthenia Jane Pickens Bell Pannell my second great grandmother and her attempt to relieve a dead Union soldier of his wedding ring; a chore halted by her mother when the owner’s finger began to separate from his hand rather than surrender the ring to the intrepid little girl. That was always one of my favorite stories growing up and one my mother heard first hand from Parthenia herself, my mother reaching the inquisitive age of 15 before Parthenia died. Parthenia lived out her last years off and on in the same house as my mother. Her residence was divided between a son from her first marriage and her son, my second great grandfather Patrick Henry Pannell, from her second marriage. When living with Patrick Henry, she spent her daily company in the presence of the family often with my mother at her feet hanging on every old tale she told. Often her stories of the more gruesome nature would be cut short at the insistence of my grandmother claiming the tales were “scaring Julia”. However, rather than fear, my mother as early as the tender age of 7, delighted in the family history and so the torch was passed to Julia Ann Coker, my mother, and so too at an early age, to me. In my life it has been a privilege to hand that legacy down to my four sons. Now I share it with anyone who’ll listen as I feel our past is essential to who we are and must not be forgotten.
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John Henry Coker
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Amid all the stories of family long ago there arose one character whose exploits captured my attention above all the rest. As previously stated, John Henry Coker was my second great grandfather. He was born in 1844 in Alabama to Mary M. Coker and moved to Mississippi it is believed sometime between 1846 and 1850. His grandparents were Robert and Sarah but sadly there is little hope of ever learning the name of his father, most likely the eldest son of Robert. Absent a family Bible, marriage records, or birth records, the difficulty mounts prior to 1850 as at that time only the name of the head of the household was recorded by census takers; an oversight thankfully corrected by 1850. My Mema Coker always said of my granddaddy that he never knew much about his family beyond his grandfather. I never knew why until time and research revealed Mary on the 1850 census for Mississippi’s Tippah County. The census taker recorded Mary’s home as house number 526 adjacent to 525 in which Mary’s Father-in-law was head of household.
As was common in earlier times, children born to a single household were plenty and fathered as long as the parents could endure. Children were not accessories to complement a new couple. They were necessities to run the family farm and in time care for the older members of the family in their later years. Another factor in late parentage was the infant mortality rate. In the 1840’s life was hard, as it always had been. To better understand this, one only needs to walk the old cemeteries and notice the little graves among the family plots.
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My second Great Grandfather John Henry Coker and his children. My Great Grandfather Joel Hardy is the taller young man standing in the back.
Note: I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my Cousin Jimmy Coker for providing many of these photographs.
Often the only inscription is “Infant” followed by the last name. It was in this environment that Robert, John Henry’s grandfather, produced his youngest son at the time of the census, Albert, John Henry’s deceased father’s youngest sibling and John Henry’s uncle. No doubt the two grew up more like brothers as they were both born in 1844 and Mary, at least by 1850, had never remarried. She had opted to stay close to her husband’s family no doubt for the security and stability offered by her Father-in-law.
Yeoman Farmers
Robert Coker, as most of the residents of the area, had ‘Farmer’ listed as his occupation with his land recorded as being worth $500 in 1850. At that time the average cost of an acre of land in Tippah County was $4 which would work out to a farmstead of about 125 acres. Within ten years Robert’s land value would double which reflected the growing prosperity of the South, the wealthiest region in the United States at that time. By 1860 the poorest southern state, Arkansas, was richer than the wealthiest northern state of Connecticut; a historical fact that leaves the average hearer in our day dumbstruck when learning. As a testament to the utter devastation suffered by the South, by 1870 land values in much of the South in general and most of Mississippi specifically had fallen by 50%, in some places more as the South buckled under the financial and economic ruin of the post war years.
Owing to the limited technology of the time, farms required man power to work the fields. While the antebellum world recalls to popular memory images of vast cotton plantations teaming with slaves, much of the South was populated by Yeoman farmers, a term reaching back to the medieval age in England. These people owned little if any slaves. Usually if a slave did become part of a Yeoman’s farm, it was late in the landowner’s life and the children for one reason or another had moved on or died. Such a situation was difficult if not impossible to maintain in a solitary manner. In such a case at such a time a Yeoman might purchase a slave or two. However, the usual method for running the family farm was by the family itself, boys and girls. Each had their assigned daily chores that normally would occupy them from sun up to sun down and often left little time for play or the lighter activities of childhood.
Neither John Henry’s mother nor his grandfather Robert show any ownership of slaves. There’s little doubt that John Henry and Albert formed a close bond due to shared labor in the various daily drudgery that goes along with farming. An interesting side note is that while Albert shows school attendance for at least part of the year in 1850 John Henry shows none. This detail just reinforces the absence of John Henry’s father. As one of two boys with no father, it is understandable by the convention of the day there was little time for formal education. John Henry was the man of the house as a young boy. A farmer in a family of farmers, John Henry is listed as a single head of household in 1860 at the age of 16. His occupation at that time was still a farmer. At this early time in his life evidenced by shouldering the responsibility alone, John Henry’s acquisition of his own property near the county line separating Tippah County from Pontotoc County, showed him to be ambitious and eager to make his own way in the world. As any new land owner does, walking his property and surveying the imagined future prosperity linked to his “little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead” he could never have known what lay ahead and how his life would be shaped by the coming events soon to unfold a thousand miles away.
