 The
value of snapshots as a remembrance.
This snapshot was taken in the exact
location these Osage wedding snapshots were taken, twenty-three years
later. The front of the ranch house had been changed from wood to a rock
porch. Bertha died in 1938 making this some five years after her death.
The rock porch was added after her death.
Velma and Ura May stand in the middle. Ura
May is holding her hair against the ever present wind. Louise, Woodson's
wife is barely visible.
Woodson, Gertrude's son, is to the far
left. Lee Otis stands next to him. Dennis H. Jones is standing to the far
right holding gloves in his hand. The children are Dennis Michael Jones
and Donna Colleen Jones Flood. Bellzona is peeping into the window at the
back.
After Bertha's death the house remained
mostly unused except to house guests such as these kinfolk who flew their
light plane in and landed on the meadow beside the house. The last people
to occupy the house in it's fully furnished condition was Rodney and Donna
Jones Flood in 1958. The house was always kept in preparation for a guest
with towels and linens on the bed changed and in place. There was such a
strange feeling when one stepped into the door, almost as if a page in
history had been turned back to these years of 1920. After Dennis's death,
the house did fall into disrepair and stands alone now in the middle of
the vast grasslands of the Osages. The guest houses, the dairy barn, the
two car garage, the hay barn, the chicken house all have fallen either to
neglect or prairie fire.
A strange happening was the prairie fire of
the eighties which destroyed so many cattle, pastures and old buildings.
The fire burned to the front of the chain link fence, split directly in
front of the house and burned around the structures within the fenced
area. |
