Pioneers
My father's ancestors first came to the colony of Virginia from England in the middle of the 17th century, and their descendants pushed westward on the edge of the American frontier for generations. The following story is the history of the family reunion of one branch of the Collins family (the research was done by my father), but it's typical of the struggle of many, many pioneer families to survive on the American frontier.
The Sparks Family
James Cobb, his bride, Polly Peters, and her brother arrived in Lexington, Missouri on April 17, 1835. They had traveled overland for many weeks, by wagon, from their home in eastern Tennessee; they crossed the Mississippi River at St. Louis and followed the Missouri River west to their final destination.
Lexington is located in west-central Missouri, in a rolling open prairie under a pearl blue sky. James rented a small farm four miles south of Lexington in the Hall's Lane district. In 1839, he bought a tract of land from the U.S. Federal Government (at $1.25/acre) southwest of present-day Odessa. James and Polly were so pleased with the good land that they wrote to his parents, Morris and Rebecca, urging them to leave Tennessee (where they had moved from Surrey County, North Carolina in 1831), and join them in Missouri.
And so, in 1839, Morris Cobb, his wife Rebecca Godfrey, their son Alfred, and their three daughters Sarah, Minerva, and Letty arrived in Lafayette County, Missouri.
In 1842, John C. Sparks, a native of Surrey County, North Carolina, arrived in Lafayette County from Indiana, where he had lived since 1836. Introduced by mutual acquaintances, he and Sarah Cobb, daughter of Morris and Rebecca, were married on July 9, 1846. They raised thirteen children, including seven daughters (referred to as "the seven wonders" by neighbors). The eldest, born in 1847, was named Martha Marie.
An infant born to John and Sarah in 1949 died and was buried in a small meadow owned by Sarah's father; the infant was the first person buried in what became the Cobb Family Cemetery. The following year a service was held at the cemetery in memory of the child. This service eventually became an annual event that continues to this day, over one and a half centuries later.
Big events swirled around the quiet little cemetery in its meadow of Queen Anne's Lace and daisies. The great western trails to Santa Fe, Oregon, and California left from nearby Independence and Westport on the Missouri river; both towns were centers of industry and transportation. In 1854, the Border War flared in Kansas, and grew into a great conflagration. In late September, 1861, Martha Marie Sparks, 14 years old, went to Lexington to view the wreckage of a great battle and to care for wounded friends. (Did she perhaps meet Mary Ruffner, who was also there on a similar errand, neither of them realizing that their children would marry more than four decades later in far-off New Mexico?)
In 1871, John and Sarah Sparks relocated once more to Johnson County, Missouri. The old ways of living were being replaced, and the beginning of the modern era of railroads, telegraphs, industrial booms and busts, was getting underway. Through it all the family continued to hold memorials to its dead until, in the 1890's, the annual service was replaced by the observance of the national Memorial Day services.
In the early 1920's, the Sparks family members who had once gathered at the family cemetary for the old memorial service began to gather again occasionally for their own family reunions. Of the thirteen Sparks children, some were dead and the living were scattered; those remaining found it good to see one another again, to let the cousins become acquainted, to remember the dead. And in 1929, they agreed to assemble once more on an annual basis.
Their descendants have continued to gather once a year in Odessa, under the pearl blue Missouri sky, in the ripeness of the harvest season. There are usually several dozen folks of all ages. We sit under the big shady picnic pavilion and share a potluck supper: fried chicken, potato salad, green beans, peach pie, ice cream, etc. Some years we drive to the old cemetery to honor and remember the dead; there are now five generations of John and Sarah's descendants buried there.
The only concession to changing times is that the Sparks Family Reunion is now held in late August rather than September, so as not to interfere with Football Season. @:)
This year, 2008, marks the 159th anniversary of the first memorial service.
– by Mary Collins Ecsedy, great-great granddaughter of Martha Marie Sparks Collins and Mary Ruffner