The Writer’s Patriarchal Family
(Circa 1906)
Front row (left to right)Ezra Wright; Harry Wright; Andrew McClurkan; Glen McClurkan; Christine McClurkan.
Middle row (left to right)Willie Wright; Walter Wright; Cilla Wright; Aunt Mary Jane McClurkan; Elbert McClurkan with Pauline on lap; Pearl McClurkan; Mary McClurkan.
Back row (left to right)Walter McClurkan with Frank in arms; Addie McClurkan; Nannie McClurkan; __ Beulah McClurkan with twins Floyd and Lloyd; George McClurkan; Hobart McClurkan.
(George was married to Beulah) (Elbert was married to Nannie) (Walter was married to Addie)
(Willie Wright was married to Cilla Wright) (George, Elbert, Walter and Cilla were siblings)
(George and Beulah’s issue: Glen; twins, Andrew and Pearl; twins, Floyd and Lloyd)
George and Beulah later had issue of Waymon and J.D. (Pearl died in her teens)
Willie Wright was a locomotive engineer for NC&St.L (Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis R.R.)
George McClurkan went to school 2 days in his life and was illiterate. George was this writer’s grandfather, George’s son Floyd was this writer’s father.
The Hatfield and McCoy family had nothing on the feudin’ McClurkan Clan
My father and I will go down in the annals of Dickson County History as the only people ever “run out” of a funeral home!
I don’t know what the Hell it is or was that started the whole mess, but you can bet it was definitely a mess.On the Adams side of the family, ten children were born, nine lived to maturity. Four males and five females, (The Matriarchal Society). There was a set of twins, one of the twins was my mother.
On the McClurkan side of the family, seven children were born, six lived to maturity, six males. There were two sets of twins, one of the twins was my father.
For some reason, as I’ve discerned through listening and observation, the McClurkan hillbillies were pretty much lazy. I’ve heard my father tell of how in the winter he and his brothers would slip at night over to property his Uncle Loda Street owned and steal the rails from his rail fence to use as firewood.
I’ve heard tell of how they would make their father think they heard the dinner bell, therefore leaving the fields early to go to the house. However, I really think my father in his youth went hungry oft times because of the family’s not preparing properly with food staples.
I do know he was born into a house with a dirt floor and the house was moved from down in a hollow up to and across the Maysville Road in the early 1900s. As the house was moved using mules, a sump puller, and Oak Logs as rollers, his mother still prepared meals in the fireplace. My father never outgrew his “raising’” and still liked the old fashioned way of cooking and living until his final days.
Floyd McClurkan was the first member of the McClurkan Clan to traverse from Tennessee toward the northern cities. This was only after the beckon call of my mother’s brother which enticed Floyd to leave the tobacco fields and seek a better way of life.
Once Floyd had established himself in Chicago, more of the brood joined him for various periods of time. The second oldest, Andrew Brown, then Floyd’s twin, Lester Lloyd; Floyd was the only one who made a career of Chicago, the other hillbillies migrated South, back to Tennessee.
Maybe envy, maybe jealousy, maybe a little of both, but things began to unravel in the family of George Henry and Beaula Street McClurkan’s family.
Mary Lee Adams, from the Southern Agrarian family sporting a semblance of aristocracy migrated to Chicago and married Floyd, who, in Tennessee had been a neighbor.
Mary Lee had been engaged to Hugh Stone who became a prosperous business person in Michigan. He announced to her that after the wedding and the move to Michigan, she would have to give up her country ways and become a socialite in the context of his environs. Learn to drink cocktails, etc. etc. …. and I’m sure you get the drift of where I’m going with this!
Naturally, Mary Lee, the controller, was not in any way, shape, form or fashion going to be controlled by anyone; let alone her gentleman caller. So, they parted company with Mary Lee keeping the engagement ring, which she later lost down a bathtub drain in Chicago.
All of Floyd’s siblings came back to Tennessee and when he and Mary Lee came home for a short vacation, the McClurkan Clan really were, as we say in the South, “a little standoffish”
Floyd’s oldest sibling, M. G. McClurkan, “Morris Glen McClurkan”, I use to think his initials stood for “Mechanical Glen McClurkan”, opened a business in the Yellow Creek Valley. He became a Blacksmith, ran a garage to “work on” the 1920 and 1930 vintage automobiles, retire steel tired wagons, repair harness for mules, and also he ran a “grist mill” to grind corn into meal and all the other things associated with mill work.
His mill was powered by a single cylinder gasoline engine he had built. However M. G. was a cantankerous piece of crap. If you were in a hurry, better not “horn in” on him and what he was doing at the time or you would wait for hours. He could care less about anyone but himself. He also built the first radio in the Yellow Creek Valley, a crystal set that picked up only one radio station, WSM 650 AM, Clear Channel, out of Nashville! But, as I have been advised, he only would listen to this crystal set by himself, no other was allowed to listen to his contraption.
Oscar Ingram died and M.G. (Glen) Mcclurkan married the widow Pernie Ingram, they made a wonderful match, both had the personalities of a rock.
When I was 8 years old, Mary Lee and Floyd traversed to Tennessee on vacation from Chicago and brought me a gift. A wonderful bicycle, which I learned to ride on the gravel roads of the Yellow Creek Valley, mostly the Maysville Road and the Edgewood Road, within a two mile radius of the farm.
One particular day which will always stay in the canyons of my mind, my bicycle’s rear tire went flat. I pushed the bicycle over to my Uncle Glen’s blacksmith shop to see if he would “air up” my tire. After making me wait for a long time, he finally came out of the shop with his sly grin and began filling the tire’s inner tube with air. The tire ballooned bigger and bigger and finally exploded.
Mechanical Glen laughed and bellowed, “ Well, I guess you are going to need a new one now, huh? He knew what he was doing and he did it on purpose, back in 1957 he died from an aneurysm in his brain.
I was told when the surgeon drilled into his skull, blood shot across the operating room and splattered against the wall, maybe the pressure was akin to what he did to my bicycle tire back in 1947, yep, he died and I did not attend his funeral.
Floyd’s second oldest brother, Andrew Brown McClurkan with his wife Bessie Seals lived with their three children up in Union Hollow. Andrew was very poor, was share cropping on the land where they lived in a ram shackled dwelling. Whenever Floyd, my father, came to Tennessee on a vacation, (why did all the hillbillies go back to their ancestral homes on vacation?), he would bring “hand me down” clothing from Chicago for Andrew’s family. At one time Floyd loaned Andrew a sum of money without interest and without a payback deadline.
Now to cut to the chase on this McClurkan scenario:
After Beulah died, (remember Beulah? She’s the one who was rotting in the coffin!), Mr. George was living in his home alone and growing older, he was 73 years in age; therefore all his sons gathered and decided to “sign off” on any of their inheritance to the family farm and give their interest to Andrew. Andrew did not have any property of his own.
Only one catch to this gift from his brothers, Andrew and his family would have to live with my grandfather, Mr. George. Mr. George would maintain two rooms in the house and share meals with Andrew’s family. The brothers “shook hands” and the agreement was finalized.
My father’s youngest brother Jarvis David Mclurkan, better known as J. D. (He hated the name Jarvis) had a daughter and Mr. George would go and spend some time at J. D.’s home and watch over the granddaughter while they worked or were away from home. On one particular day he notified J. D. he needed to get on back to his house, when asked why the rush, Mr. George replied, “I have to get back so as to pay my board”.
“Pay your what?”, J. D. yelled out.
“I have to pay Andrew board to stay with them”, Mr. George replied..
“The Hell you say”, J. D. responded, “You have two rooms in that house for as long as you live, and we’ll see about this”!
So, J. D. loaded Mr. George into his car, took him home, gathered all his belongings and brought him to his house where Mr. George lived until his late nineties and his health began to deteriorate.
Because he was beginning to become quite a burden and J. D. and his wife both worked, all the brothers, including my father, Floyd, went to the home place where Andrew and his wife were now living and told them that time had come for them to keep their part of the agreement. Mr. George would be staying at their home and they would be responsible to care for him. He lived there until just prior to his death which came on the eve of his one hundredth birthday.
To make a long story short, that was another spear driven deep into the heart of the McClurkan relationships, a wound that festered and spread until the family was consumed by hatred.
The year 1972, when my first wife and I divorced, I stopped by my father’s twin brother’s house to visit on my way back to Nashville. He came to the door and the first thing said to me was, “Robert, I hear you and your wife have separated”! I responded, “Yes, we are going to get a divorce”. Lester Lloyd McClurkan advised me, “Well, it that case don’t you ever come back to my house again”. I bid him a “sweet adieu”, and never did I darken the door of his house again.
He died in January 1992, I had not been in his home for twenty years, and his only son, my first cousin doesn’t speak to me to this day. Typical McClurkan style.
The year, 1996, Andrew McClurkan’s wife, Bessie died. Andrew’s brother Floyd wanted to attend the funeral, I told him I thought it would be better not to attend, but Floyd would not hear of his not attending Andrew’s wife’s funeral. Well, hell broke loose at the funeral home and my cousins told me their family did not want Floyd there and since I was his son, they didn’t want me there either. So, we left the Dickson Funeral Home on College Street in Dickson TN, 37055 and can be recorded as the first known family members ever to be kicked out of a funeral home.
As I left I vocalized, (because that is what I do best, I do it so you’ll know where I’m coming from), “I’ve been removed from the best drinking establishments in the country, but this was a first, being removed from a funeral home”! Personally, I was happy, because I didn’t want to attend in the first place and most of all didn’t want to spend any quality hours of daylight in the company of the McClurkan Clan.
Many more skirmishes between family members occurred throughout the years to increase the momentum in the deterioration of social intercourse among the relatives. Although I have touched on “just the tip of the iceberg“, I think it is just enough to keep from driving the reader into complete and absolute boredom.
Still living in this, the year of 2007, I have in direct blood line, one McClurkan Uncle, and five McClurkan Cousins. To this very day we do not make contact with one another, and for that, I am most grateful.
They could care less about me and for me the feeling is mutual.
At least I have attended my last McClurkan funeral.
Historic House on West Main Street, Franklin, TN
Historic Downtown "Town Square", Historic Franklin, TN
Town Square, Historic Franklin, TN with Confederate Soldier Statue
Front Entrance to"The Factory at Franklin" on a cold snowy night
Building 3, "The Factory at Franklin"
Building 2, "The Factory at Franklin"
Building 2, Nortwest Side, "The Factory at Franklin"
The Boiler Room Theater, "The Factory at Franklin"
Free Standing Wall on the Northeast Side of "The Factory at Franklin"
