"Lenna Earp" by Gerry Robideaux
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Black Cemetery, Stroud
Oklahoma
Lenna Earp,
1895-1914
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I was born in Adair County Kentucky in 1895. My parents
lived in Little Cake, if you can imagine a name like that. My dad was a day
laborer--didn’t have his own farm.
I don’t remember just when it
was that Daddy brought us all to Oklahoma Territory, but I do remember we lived
on a farm in North Keokuk Township in Lincoln County near the big town of
Stroud. I was fourteen and Daddy had his own farm.
On the next farm was a boy named
Hughie Earp, which was homesteaded by his parents, and he was seventeen. I liked
this blonde, blue-eyed man, so different from me with my brown eyes and long
dark hair. He must’ve felt the same way for we married in 1912. He was nineteen
and I was seventeen. Our parents thought we were too young to know what we were
doing, but Hughie did a man’s work all day with his dad in the fields and
raising horses, and I knew how to keep house and take care of kids. I had
little brothers and sisters.
Two years later we had a baby
boy, and we named him Kenneth Hugh. He had my brown eyes and dark hair. Then
eight days later I was dead from an infection. The doctor had come from
delivering a baby calf at a neighboring farm and hadn’t washed his hands good
afterward.
They buried me in Black Cemetery
northwest of Stroud. Hughie put up a beautiful tombstone there. It says, “We
Shall Meet Again,” and “Gone But Not Forgotten”.
And his sister Coy wrote a nice
obituary. It told how I was converted and joined the church, and about my
marriage and the birth of baby Kenny. I liked the little poem at the
end.
Heaven retaineth now our
treasure of earth. The lonely casket keeps
and the sunbeams love to linger
where our sainted loved one sleeps.”
I don’t know about “sainted,”
but Elder Perkins preached, it said, “in the presence of a large
audience.”
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| Lenna Earp 1912 on wedding day. Lenna Wilburn Earp was my grandfather Earp's first wife. |
