Sarah Brogan McDonald

By Marji Smock Stewart in Finding the Rivers. This is the maternal side of her family history, centring on Sarah Brogan.

My grandmother was Sarah Clementine Brogan McDonald. She was Sally to friends and family, but Mamaw to me. I was the youngest of her many grandkids. Mamaw pampered me as only a grandmother will. Mine, I thought, was an exalted position!

Sarah’s skin and hair were fair but her eyes were her jewels; deep pools of blue violet. She was tall; almost 6 foot as was her youngest child, my mother Elizabeth.

Elijah Brogan and Jane Rutherford

Sarah’s dad was Elijah Brogan. He was born in 1832 either in Anderson County, Tennessee, or Ireland. He married Jane Rutherford in 1853. She was born in 1837 to Isaac Rutherford and Sarah Dew.

Probably the Dews and Rutherfords had been Tennesseans for years. Sarah Dew, so family said, was part or all Cherokee. My grandmother Sarah had so many skills and such knowledge of the woods, plants and natural things that I can believe that she learned these from her grandmother.

Elijah and Jane had four children. Sarah, born Mar 7 1855, was the eldest. Jane Rutherford died about 1865, near the end of the Civil War. Likely Sarah took over the care of her two younger brothers and sister, skills that would serve her well for the next 70 years.

Civil War Tennessee

There was turmoil and unrest in the States in the mid-1800s. Tennessee was a bloody battleground just waiting to happen. The climax came in 1861-1865 with the war between the North and South, aka the Civil War. Sarah told her children later that, as a child, she heard gunshots and sounds of war near her home.

The Brogan family lived in northeast Tennessee, near the Kentucky/Virginia line, almost in the Cumberland Gap area (Anderson and Campbell Counties). It was rugged territory then and still is. The people were warm, friendly and helpful. But most, including Elijah, struggled to make a living. Education was not readily available nor especially desirable. Independence and survival skills were.

Post-War Missouri

After Jane died and the war ended, Elijah moved his young family by open wagon to Missouri. Mamaw remembered that trip vividly. One can assume it wasn’t too comfy! Soon after arriving there, Elijah remarried. His new wife was Malinda Fickas, daughter of Adam Fickas and Susan McDonald.

MIssouri was rocky, alluvial ice age soil, with lakes and rivers providing wonderful opportunities for fish and game. Elijah and Malinda lived either in the village of Clinton or in Johnson County. Both are in the west central part of the state. Kansas City was the nearest big town.

Aunt Matt

Ellijah and Malinda soon had four children, so Sarah had a new set of siblings to nurture. Elijah died in Warrensburg MO in 1874 about age 40. Their eldest child was Martha, called Matt. She and her husband, George McDonald, homesteaded and raised a fine family in El Reno OK.

Aunt Matt visited us in Wilmington CA in the early 1950s. Two of their sons lived in Fallbrook near San Diego. So son Baylis McDonald, an avocado rancher, brought Aunt Matt to meet me – her niece Elizabeth’s daughter. I was honoured to have such an elder visit my home. Aunt Matt was wrinkled and darkened by working in the Oklahoma sun. Her naturally black hair was pulled back in a knot. Homesteading in Oklahoma was not a soft life in the early twentieth century!

Brothers hope to strike it rich

Sarah’s brothers, Broun and Isaac Brogan, went to Colorado when young men in the late 1880s. They hoped to strike it rich in silver and gold. I doubt that they ever saw their father Elijah or sister Sarah again. They probably never struck it rich either. On a postcard they sent to Sarah from Leadville CO, they said they were homesick. Life in the raw mining towns and mountains was rough compared to the warm nests in Tennessee and Missouri.

Hiram McDonald

I don’t know if my grandmother ever went to school, but she could write nicely and was an avid reader of the Bible. She was gifted artistically and had talents not easily explained. Maybe her years of nurturing young ones, plus what she had learned from her mother Jane and grandmother Sarah Dew, gave her a broad education in life.

At 17, Sarah’s life took another direction. A tall young widower from Kentucky came to visit the Brogans in Missouri. He was Hiram Columbus McDonald, known as Lum. Of a Scottish immigrant family, he was a great-nephew of Malinda’s mother. He had three young children, aged 6, 7 and 9.

Lum was thirteen years Sarah’s senior. But apparently the chemistry between them was right. They married in 1872. The Civil War had been over for 7 years. The South was in the Reconstruction period.

Kentucky

Sarah would return to the South where Lum lived in Daviess County, Kentucky. The seventeen year old would assume a new role, stepmother and wife. Sarah would epitomize the words of Proverbs 31:10-31: “Who can find a strong wife; her price is far above rubies…” Lum had found himself a ruby!

Their first child was born 13 months later. There would be ten more in 26 years until Mamaw was 44. In early 1899 my grandmother announced she was pregnant. Two of her sons, disgusted that their parents would “do such things,” left home and joined the army to fight in the Spanish American War! That baby whose birth they so resented turned out to be their favorite in later life – my mother Elizabeth.

Marji’s McDonald Family Tree has much more on Lum’s family.

Next time: Elizabeth grows up.