John Wesley Porter

1863 - 1947  (84 years)

• Name	John Wesley Porter
  Birth	11 Oct 1863	Allegany County, Maryland
  Gender	Male
  Death	20 Nov 1947	Allegany County, Maryland
  Notes	John Wesley Porter, 84, Route 5, Winchester Road, died this morning in Allegany Hospital where he was admitted Wednesday. He had been ill a short time. Mr. Porter was born in Maryland, a son of the late John S. and Rebecca Porter. He belonged to Cresaptown Methodist Church and the Woodmen of the World. Surviving are two daughters, Mrs. Trubadour Lewis, Route 5, and Mrs. Walter Yoder, McMullen Highway; a son, Marshall Porter, Route 5, and 12 grandchildren. The body was removed to the Hafer Funeral Home in Frostburg. The Cumberland Evening Times, November 21, 1947 John Wesley PORTER and Rosa Anna TRESCHER were married in Sep 1895 in Allegany Co., Maryland The following excerpt is from John Marshall Porter's "Sketches of Maryland Porters", circa 1976. Scott Carter Williams brought it to the attenetion of Michael A. McKenzie in 2018. John Wesley Porter My Father 1863...1947 Youngest son of John S. and Rebecca Porter Grandma Rebecca was 39 when my father was born, and that was nearly past time of giving birth by women who had worked so hard in those days. Grandma came down with a condition called "Milk leg" after giving birth, and when that was cured she haH a runn'.ng sore on her leg from a ruptured vein to the end of her life. But a new baby in the house after Uncle Mike was seven years old was a ioy to everyone. He grew up with aging parents and older brothers and a sister who loved him dearly. As did all boys and girls in those days, he began working at light tasks as soon as he was big enough to do them. And on that farm he was soon big enough to hoe corn and potatoes and bug potatoes and pick them up after they were plowed out. The result was that he grew to manhood with a slight hump on his back from long days of stooping work in the potato fields. Like Uncle Si, he never got very big. He was about five feet, seven inches tall, and hardly ever weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds. I have heard many people say, "Wes and Si looked a lot alike." He stayed on Piney Mountain farm and worked willingly at any task his older brothers gave him. Being the youngest, he depended upon their judgment and management, never taking any part in management himself. As a result, he never learned to do much thinking or management on his own. This made of him a man almost afraid to trust his own judgment in farm management and business matters. When he was 33, he married Rosa Anna Trescher, who was 7 years younger than himself, and left Piney Mountain farm. He and my mother took over the operation of the Trescher farm near Cresaptown. The aging parents of his wife were past their youth and ability to continue farming, and had wanted to unburden themselves of the farm for years. Their daughter had married a farmer. This was their opportunity. That was in September of 1895. The following November of 1896 my sister Bertie was born. Then in September of 1898 I was born. When my father left Piney Mountain farm, both Uncle Will and Uncle Si were ailing. And for the next several years, in addition to doing his own planting and harvesting, he would take his teams and implements and hired men over the six dirt road miles to Piney Mountain and help his brothers do their planting and harvesting. Then in January of 1900, Uncle Si died of pneumonia. Grandma Rebecca died in March of the same year, and the following August Uncle Will died. Before that winter, the widows of Uncle Si and Uncle Will moved their children to Eckhart and did the best they could to support them. Aunt Mary opened a small store, and kept boarders. Uncle Si had always been able to save a little money, and Aunt Lizzie was able to manage to get along, by the hardest. The widows had received the money from sale of the livestock and machinery Uncle Will and Uncle Si had accumulated. But after a century and a half of Porter ownership and operation of the Piney Mountain farm, no Porter ever lived there again. The Porters had loved and cherished and taken pride in the rocky, hilly acres that had rewarded four generations of them with, if not riches, an abundant living. My father and Uncle Mike bought the farm, which had been owned by Grandma Rebecca, and was to be divided equally between her four sons at her death. When it was offered for sale at public auction, no bid reached $1200.00. That was what my father and Uncle Mike paid for it. The location and terrain didn't appeal to many men who wanted to buy a farm. There was less than $300.00 each for the widows and two surviving sons after the cost of selling was paid. Uncle Mike and my father rented the farm to first one man and then another for a few years, and eventually sold it for exactly what they paid for it. It changed hands several times after that, and the land grew poorer and fields grew over with brush. It seemed that no one but Porters could make the old fields blossom and yield their harvest...perhaps because no one ever cared for the place like the Porters had. The nice new six room house that was finished and occupied scon after Grandfather died had stood all those years since, (91) to be exact, and then burned in the spring of 1975. The lilac bush still blossoms every spring, and the old fashioned roses and yard flowers that Grandma Rebecca planted still bloom in season, but one must know where they are to find them because the forest has now grown back over the land that was once "Play Place." To this time in my story I have written only from hear-say and what my father and others told me. Now I shall write from memory. Until I was half grown I called my father "Papa." After that I began calling him "Dad," and I shall use that term in my writing from here on. My earliest recollections go back to June 1903 when my youngest sister Pearl was born. I was four and a half years old, and my older sister Bertie was seven. We were in our two acre black raspberry patch along with several other half grown youngsters of the neighborhood picking berrie3 for market. The farm that Dad moved to from Piney Mountain was not good potato land, so he had turned to growing raspberries as one of his income crops. When I picked berries then I picked rrom the low branches of the bushes that Dad picked from and he picked from the higher branches. As all who read my story will note, the companionship that grew between Dad and me, and lasted to the end of his life began very early. Our old family doctor drove into our yard that morning before we went to the berry field, and from where we were working I could see his horse and buggy for what, in my young mind I thought was a long time. Dad left the berry field and went to the house for several short periods, and then he would return to pick berries. I thought he acted excited, but had no idea that a baby was expected. Parents of those days never spoke of mother's pregnancies. We were told--if we were told anything about new babies when we became curious and asked where babies came from that "The Doctors brought them." When we all went to the house for dinner that day, the neighborhood mid-wife told me, "Marshall you won't be the baby any longer. You have a baby sister." From that age on I had small tasks to do around the farm. Before I was half as tall as my hoe handle, I was with Dad and helping to hoe all the cultivated crops. Dad was of the old farmers who believed that to grow good crops, every weed had to be taken from around the young growing plants. And he would stand for no 'sloppy' use of the hoe. He patiently showed me how to use a hoe effectively. "Stand wide legged and bend over and put your weight on the handle. You'll do better hoeing, and you won't tire so quickly," he showed and told me. "The way you learn to work now is the way you will work when you grow up." He was right, because if I hoe in the garden now yet, I can only do it the way he taught me. By early July, most of the hoeing was over, and the wheat and rye harvesting was at hand. And I was small, but big enough to learn to rake grain after it was cut with the cradle. Here again, Dad had only one way of raking. He taught me how to rake the swaths in uniform sheaves that he tied with the grain straw, making them into neat bundles as if they were to be entered in a contest for perfection. He showed me how to rake so there was no grain left on the field. It's always easier to do your work right," he often told me. Then when I gathered the sheaves, one at a time, because I was too small to carry two, he showed me how to stand them up in groups of 12 to make a shock. Then he would break the heads of a sheaf apart to make a 'cover cap' as he called it to shelter the shock to turn rain until the grain was ready to be hauled in to the barn for threashing. He was simply working as his father and older brothers had taught him, and was passing his training on to me. From him, I learned the same Porter traits and customs and methods of raising and saving crops on hilly farms. And I practiced them all the years I farmed afterward. I could still cradle grain and rake and tie it into beautiful sheaves the way I learned it sixty five years ago. There are few men left in our county who could do that, and I am not boasting about my abilities...simply making a point of 'As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.' By the time I was eight years old it became my daily summer chore to drive the cows to a hilly mountain pasture a mile away every morning, and to drive them home for milking every evening. If I encountered a copperhead or rattle¬ snake along the way, which I did numerous times every summer, I used stones or a club and killed it. I nearly always cut the rattles off a rattlesnake's tail and brought them home. I believed that as many rattles as a snake had, that was how old it was. If a snake had ten rattles it was ten years old. At one time I had nearly a pint fruit jar full of rattles I had taken from the rattlesnakes I killed after several summers driving cows. It would have been useless for me to have been afraid of snakes then. It could have been debated whether we were in the snake's territory, or they were in ours. We were both in the same locality and we killed them when we came in contact with them. From earliest childhood we had been warned to "Watch for snakes," by our parents, and we were ever conscious of our likelihood of encountering them. We simply watched the ground at all times in warm weather. And although I came in close contact with the woods camoflaged copperheads and timber rattlesnakes countless times I was never bitten by one of them. In fact, the only Porter of our long ancestry I ever heard of being bitten was Squire Mike's wife, Elizabeth Devore of whom I read, "She died of snake bite." Yet, many times while I was growing up I heard Dad say "There's not nearly as many snakes as there used to be." Before I was ten years old, Dad began letting me drive trusty horses on the County roads. I would take my mother or visitors to and from the street car at the Six Mile House, a distance of two miles. I also took grain to the mill for grinding in the spring wagon, a distance of three miles when I was too small to lift the sacks of grain on and off the wagon. The old miller did that for me. True to Porter tradition, Dad was a good horseman, and he was good to horses, In fact, I often thought he gave more consideration to his horses than he did to himself. In many cases, if he had to make a trip of a mile or two to see a neighbor on business, if the horses had worked all day he would walk rather than drive or ride one of the horses. He too, had worked all day. Dad would never go to bed at night without lighting the lantern and going out to the barn to be sure that the horses and cattle were all right. And countless times over the years he found a horse or cow sick. Then he would have me go along to the barn to hold the lantern while he gave them doses of medicine every hour. Sometimes it was three o'clock in the morning when the sick animal would seem well enough for us to go to bed. And sometimes a sick horse or cow died. Though Dad was always up before daylight and worked until after dark, it always seemed to me, even when I was only a half grown boy that his limited strength and endurance was being overworked. When we worked together in the fields he would have to rest frequently, but not for long periods. As he rested, he was restless; as if some inner drive or impulse was telling him "There's work to be done," would not let him feel free to rest. And soon, he Would be plodding along again. Already, I had begun to note that he seemed to be always tired, and I fell into the custom of never letting him make a step that I could save for him. A custom I continued to the end of his rather long life. Though neither Dad nor my mother had very good health, my strength and endurance seemed almost endless then, and has remained the same to this time in my life. Mother had frequently mentioned to me that Dad would likely be short-lived like his father and two brothers and his sister, who had died young. She had heard it said that it was an inherited weakness of that branch of the Porters because of intermarriage of close cousins. Also, before I was born, a doctor who had attended Dad through a severe siege of what was called "Grippe"...we call it (flu) now, confided in Mother's sister and said, "Wesley Porter will not live to see the leaves come out this spring." Yet, Dad lived thirty years after that doctor died. But hearing Mother say such things had a profound effect on my young mind. I couldn't remember when I hadn't dearly loved my Dad; not that I didn't love my Mother equally as much. It was just that a father and his only son's compan¬ ionship had grown between us. If he was away and was late coming, I worried about him. Remembering back now, it seems I was concerned about him any time he was out of sight. I silently imagined myself having to take over as head of the family, though I was hardly half grown. I knew one or two other boys who had to do that. We nearly always kept a hired man, sometimes two in busy seasons. But they came and went as notions hit them. Some were good men. Others were trifling and hardly worth having on the place. They would leave or fail to come to work in busy seasons, and that was a worry on Dad. He would try to work harder to plant or save the crops. In all my early years Dad tried to make me see that if I got a good education, I could make my living easier than he had. But my other love, next to what I felt for my parents was my love for that old hilly farm that was my birthplace. And as I sat in the one room school (the only school I ever attended), my mind was back there in the fields where I knew Dad was slowly and tiredly toiling alone, while I was sitting in school when I could have been helping him. The work didn't make me tired. By the time I was 15, and not big for my age, I did all the plowing. Dad wouldn't let me miss school except in the busiest seasons. But I worked after school, on Saturdays and holidays. By that time, I wouldn't start going to school until November, when most of the fall crops were in. Then I would quit school in March when it was time to begin getting ready for spring planting. Then the year I was 16, I went from November to March through the eighth grade a second time. That was the end of my attending school. Dad and Mother seemed to think they had failed me, and regretted that I didn't get more schooling. Yet, I had no preparation for high school, even if there had been one near enough to attend, (which there wasn't). Neither did they have the means to pay for more schooling if I had chosen to pursue higher education. I saw to it that Dad got any easy job that was to be done after that, and he was nearly always in the fields where there was work to be done. He could ride to mow and rake the hay. And crating fruit and vegetables was light, easy work for him. My taking the lead and going ahead with the work seemed to relieve him of a burden, and before long he didn't look so tired as he always had when he was managing the work and taking the lead as he did in earlier years. But we needed so many things on the farm to run it full scale as I had in mind. And Dad was terribly afraid of debt. He would never obligate himself with more borrowing money than he felt certain we could pay back with the fruit and vegetable crops every fall. But then, I worked in timber cutting mine posts during the winters, and we slowly but surely began to make progress in getting better and younger horses and newer and better farming implements. I didn't expect any wages because there wouldn't have been any if I had expected them. I was content with a little spending money on the few occasions I went for social events and recreations. That was the life I had chosen, and I had endurance, ambition and confidence that if I worked hard enough, I could surely make a success of it. Although I had never been a good scholar, mainly I believe because I didn't like school for reasons I mentioned before. I always did my work and made passing grades, (such as grades went in a one room school.) But that didn't mean I was averse to learning and knowledge. I loved reading, and spent almost all my spare moments reading everything I thought would broaden my vision and mind. Then when my younger sister Pearl entered high school in 1918, I made more use of the books she brought home than she did, and frequently wrote poems and themes and book reports for her. It must have been somewhere around that time that I formed the idea that since I could read, and liked to read, and there were books on almost any subject, I could be selective and teach myself anything I felt would be useful to me. And that is the course I have followed all through my adult life. Happenings over the more than half century since that time could run into several full sized books, that will never be written because they would interest very few people. So from here I will relate sketchily and briefly to that period of time. In June of 1924, I married Elizabeth Jeffries, only daughter of Thomas and Mary Sittig Jeffries of Frostburg after a three year courtship. Elizabeth was a pianoist and music teacher. She had never spent a night of her life on a farm before we returned from our brief honeymoon in Shenandoah Valley. Then following the pattern of a number of our Porter ancestors, we made our home in the eight room farmhouse living in with Mother and Dad. Also, at that time, my oldest sister and her family lived there. There were three women in the kitchen then for a few years. But we got along very well...better than most such cases, I will say. My sister moved into her new home in November of1927, and that same fall Mother had a stroke that left her a semi-invalid until August of 1932 when she passed away. Mother's health had never been good, and such a condition often strains the patience of the most amiable of men. Yet, over the thirty seven years of life with my ailing mother, Dad's disposition never changed. He believed or hoped and likely prayed that some doctor, some medicine or some miracle might restore her to good health, and he tried all of them. We had two children then, Betty aged seven and Mary around sixteen months, the latter just old enough to begin responding to attentions and affections. And Dad turned all the affections he had had for Mother on what was left of his family. The two little girls followed him about the farm as if they were his shadow. Dad's being the baby in his home, and the idol of his aging parents and older brothers and sister made of him a man respectful of and dependent upon others. He was almost helpless as far as making his own decisions were concerned. He would never do anything, even to deciding which shirt or tie to wear without consulting Mother. And he was dependent upon her judgment in every other decision that was to be made. Through the years in our home while Mother lived, Dad had come to love Elizabeth as if she were his own daughter. And I doubt that she loved him any less than she did her own father. Dad became doubly dear to all of us after Mother was gone, and we all did jur best to heal the grief and fill the emptiness that had come into his life. Elizabeth knew of his helplessness in doing things for himself, and she simply carried on as Mother had done. Dad's health seemed to improve after that, perhaps because he no longer lived with anxiety and concern for Mother's health and well being. After Mother was gone, we never went anywhere without taking Dad with us. He would sit in the rear seat of the car with a cherished grandaughter on each side. In his way, Dad was equally as helpful and considerate of Elizabeth. From long years of practice of helping his mother, and later my mother when she was sick, he could do housework, cook and wash dishes almost as well as any woman. And many were the times that he would get dinner for me and any hired men when Elizabeth was busy doing the washing or if a sick child needed her attention. In 1938 our son Marshall Wesley was born. His coming was a special joy to Dad, and for what he thought was a special reason. As all who have followed the sketches I have written may note, the descendants of John S. produced only two sons, Uncle Si's son Gilbert who died in 1935 and had no children, and myself. And it seemed almost a certainty Grandfather John's branch of the family would produce no sons to carry on the name of Porter for him. Dad was so pleased that although he had smoked a pipe moderately most of his life, he quit October 3, 1938, and never smoked again. He said, "I don't want this boy to ever see me smoke, and I hope he will never get the habit."... He never has. Dad aad his grandson became the best of companions over the next nine years of his life. And anyone having known Dad then, and Marshall now at 38, they would note a striking resemblance of dispositions and personalities. They would note a feeling of kindness and concern for all living creatures. They would note a man who "If he has nothing good to say about a person, he doesn't say anything." Does this sound familiar? Then on October 15, 1944 Elaine, our youngest child was born. Dad's birthday was Oct. 11, and during the last weeks he spoke hopefully that maybe the baby would be born on his birthday. It missed by only four days. This tiny featured baby girl came to aging parents, two older sisters and a brother and a doting grandfather. Dad was past the time of working outside much, except to sometimes hoe a row in the garden, and occasionally feed and water the chickens, and so spent much of his time in the house. He would hold the baby for hours and amuse her when Elizabeth did the housework. He was almost as good as a mother at amusing or pacifying a child. Over all the years that Dad and I worked together, he seemed always ready to call out my name, "Ah Marshall." He wouldn't try doing anything alone, and he would call for me. After he became inactive and couldn't go to the fields or barn any longer he could plan more work for me while we were eating breakfast than I could have done in a week. It was just his way of trying to continue being a part of the out-door activities, even though he could no longer take part in them. To sum up Dad in a few short paragraphs I will say, he was a man whom I never knew to have a close, warm friendship with anyone. Yet he never had an enemy. With him, no one was all important, yet no one was unimportant regrardless of standing or station in life. He asked few favors, yet he would chance hurting himself to do favors for all who asked favors of him, and in a few cases he did hurt himself. But no one ever heard about it. He had a reserve that no one, not :ven myself ever got entirely through, and no one ever got closer than I did. Everyone who met him enjoyed talking with him. He was a common man who never acquired much of this worlds riches. He didn't ask nor expect much from life, only to be permitted to live it in peace. It took so little to keep him content. He was very slow to anger and would nearly always turn away wrath with a soft answer. He was not necessarily a father who did a lot of teaching while we were growing up. His pattern of living was an example for us to follow. By 1940 our family was growing up. Farm help was becoming harder to get because the war boom was coming on, and the farm was simply not producing to give our children the education we figured they should have. So I began selling dairy 'arm equipment on days that I could spare away from the farm work. I surprised even myself with the progress I made tin the first two years. The farmers began feeling the labor shortage and they bought milking machines. I had orders for more machines than I could readily get because of shortages caused by the war. I nearly worked myself to death for about three years, trying to keep up with the farm work and installing milking machines. Then, at Dad's suggestion that I put more time on the road job and sell our cows so as to lessen the work on the farm, I sold them, and turned the farm into hay and pasture land. That gave more time to attend the business of the selling job. And relieved me of the overwork of keeping two jobs going. Here I should say that my knowledge of the farmer's and their business and problems was a great help to me when I began calling at their farms to sell them dairy farm equipment. I could talk their language, and meet them on a conation level of understanding. None of them ever treated me as a stranger or as if they felt any mistrust of me, as is often the case when many strangers call on farmers to make sales. I could talk crops and stock and dairy cows and in a short time we were no longer strangers. He needed what I had to sell, and I dealt fairly vith him. The half mile of hilly dirt road, had always been a handicap to our farm. I have spent whole winters hauling gravel on that road and having it in excellent condition, only to have a few heavy electric storms come the following summer and wash it to gullies again. During winters, snow and ice lay long on the north slope and we would have to put chains on the car and truck to get up as long as the ice stayed. The road was also bad to drift whei we had snow and high winds. It was during the heavy snows of 1945, after I had been shoveling snow for nearly two weeks that I decided it would be much more convenient for all the family if we would build a house near the highway and leave the farm. There wasn't really any reason to stay there then. But I had always dreaded the thoughts of leaving that old farm in fact I had never given a thought to leaving it before. When I told Elizabeth of my thoughts of building a house near the road, she asked "Now Marshall, are you sure you will be satisfied to leave the farm. You know how you have always felt about it." "Yes," I told her, "I have decided that is selfish of me to inconvenience the family for a whim of mine." The next day she set about to draw the plans for the new house, and it was the plan the carpenters built it by. All building material was in short supply because the war had just ended recently and building was a slow process. Though we began work on it in the spring of 1946, it was not ready to move into until early December of 1947. Dad had come down to the new house several times when it was nearlng completion. He had picked the room he wanted. "I can see the sun come up from these windows," He said. "I have always slept in a room that faced east." Dad hadn't seemed quite so well that fall, but we thought it was from a spell of flu he had had in late July, from which he was slow making a comeback. Then, Nov. 18, 1947 he woke me long before daylight and told me he was sick. I did what I could for him until morning, then called the doctor. It was noon before he arrived, and upon examination he told us he had prostate cancer. Dad had turned 84 the past October 11. "He's too old to operate," the doctor told us. "How do you account for that, Doctor?" I asked. "He has never mentioned anything about pain or trouble, and he hasn't had a splinter or a pimple in the past thirty years that he didn't come to me about it." "0. that's the way with such cancers. When you know you have it, it has you, the doctor replied." The doctor gave him a sedative and the pain subsided. Dad seemed to become himself after he awoke from sleeping a few hours. He became more talkative than was usual for him while I sat at his bedside. "I feel that my time has come. I have had a good life. I never expected to live this long. Now I know what Mother meant when she used to say 'The longest life is a short one'." When the doctor returned the next day he found Dad stronger than he had expected. "We'd better take him in to the hospital. He's stronger than I thought he was. Being a doctor, I feel that he deserved the chance that we might be able to do something for him yet," he said. I called an ambulance and he was taken in to the hospital. But he lapsed into a coma during that night. He lived through the next day, then slept away. Like his father, he died only a short time before he would have moved into a ' new house. Passing time becomes a sort of blur at times like that, and memories are not so clear. It seemed that my world had come apart, or had fallen on me for the next several weeks. I couldn't bring myself to realize that he was gone For months, yes years I could hear the familiar call "Ah Marshall'" In memory I can hear it still as clearly now as then. After most men pass away and the big funeral is over their names are not often mentioned again. But over the next ten years I met many who knew him and countless times I was told, "If ever there was man who lived and deserved to live again it was your father." . . . At the time of this writing, Our son Marshall Wesley has two sons, David 14 and Daniel 10... and it is likely that they will carry on Grandpap John's branch oi the family name for many generations, even though for a long time it seemed his branch was coming to an end.
  Person ID	I13377	McKenzie Genealogy
  Last Modified	29 Oct 2021

  
  

  Father	John Samuel Porter,   b. 27 Jan 1828, Play Place, Piney Mountain, Allegany County, Maryland d. 1882, Allegany County, Maryland (Age 53 years)
  Relationship	natural
  Mother	Rebecca Porter,   b. 1 Oct 1824, Eckhart Mines, Allegany County, Maryland d. 28 Mar 1900, Allegany County, Maryland (Age 75 years)
  Relationship	natural
  Marriage	6 Mar 1851	Allegany County, Maryland
  Family ID	F03993	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Rosa Ann Trescher,   b. Abt 1870   d. 10 Aug 1932, Allegany County, Maryland (Age ~ 62 years)
  Marriage	Sep 1895	Allegany County, Maryland
  Children	1. Bertie Elizabeth Porter,   b. 2 Nov 1896, Cresaptown, Allegany County, Maryland d. 28 Dec 1974, Frostburg, Allegany County, Maryland (Age 78 years)  [Father: natural]  [Mother: natural]   2. John Marshall Porter,   b. Sep 1898, Allegany County, Maryland d. 22 Apr 1988 (Age ~ 89 years)  [Father: natural]  [Mother: natural]   3. Lillian Pearl (Peg) Porter,   b. Jun 1903   d. UNKNOWN  [Father: natural]  [Mother: natural]
  Family ID	F06464	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	29 Oct 2021