The Marriage and Life of Daniel Hedges Spencer and Mattie Lyons Spencer

By Ella Spencer - 1946

Figure 1: Ella Spencer circa 1943

It was a cold and snowy Thanksgiving Day – November 28, 1889-when my parents were married.

How do I know it was cold?

How do I know that for two days snow had fallen and banked the roads until relatives and friends who attended the wedding at the Lyons farmhouse had to come on horseback, by foot, or, as Grandfather Spencer’s family and my father himself came, in the two-horse wagon?

I know these things because my mother was both a splendid story-teller and a very ingenious person, and many a time has held her youthful daughters spellbound to the task of doing some household job while she, working with us, told and retold incidents of her youth, and particularly of that eventful wedding day.

Piecing it all together the story is something like this-

It was fall, 1889.

My father, the oldest of five children, was living at home on the Spencer farm one mile southeast of Nashville, Illinois.  In June of that year his sister, May, had married John Paul and moved to Nashville.

“Now” thought my father, “what is to keep me from bringing a bride (my mother) to live at the house, at least for the winter and with spring other arrangements can be made”.

He discussed the thought with his family and they approved.

There were in the Spencer household, Grandfather and Grandmother, Aunt Maude, just younger than my father, and eleven year old William or “Uncle Will” as we now know him.

Uncle Burney had left home the year before to clerk in a men’s clothing store at Centralia, Illinois.  He was home on various week-ends and often brought some young lady with him, one and then another.  A few years later, however, he brought a girl with dark curly hair, cashier in the store where he worked.  Her name was Carrie Penn, youngest daughter of a family of six girls.  They were married February 22, 1898.

No doubt my father looked forward anxiously to Sunday afternoon when he would make his regular call at my mother’s home four miles southeast of Nashville, a community called Bethel, and talk the matter over with her.  The hour arrived and he hitched Fannie, his sorrel pony, to the buggy, gave her a few touches with the whip and soon drew up at the Lyons hitching post.  He opened the gate of the white picket fence and went up the walk.

The walk as I recall it in later years deserves a word of comment.

It was about forty feet long and all spring, summer and fall a variety of flowers grew along its border.  First out in spring were snowballs and purple iris, then white syringe or bridal wreath, yellow roses, and lots of red ones and close to the ground, little red bleeding hearts.

In the fall the walk was colorful with chrysanthemums.

The yard itself was large and inviting.  A half dozen or so tall maple trees provided shade for a hammock and chairs and lent themselves admirably for the crickets and July flies to carry on their summer evening concerts.

It all seemed to go toward making a hospitable family.

Buggy riding on late Sunday afternoon was the fashion for young couples and with that thought in mind my father came on to the porch and knocked at the front door.  It was opened, not by my mother but the two younger sisters, Emma and Nettie.  They were expecting their own beaus and so were dressed and ready for romance in any form it came.  With a bit of teasing from my father the room was soon merry with laughter, and then my mother appeared and the girls dutifully stepped aside.

To Emma and Nettie their older sister, Martha as she was called, was the most attractive young lady in the neighborhood.  They will tell you that she had more beaus than any other girl in Bethel.  She had fair skin and black hair and dark eyes.  In her school days she was considered a tomboy.  She was the fastest runner at school and when sides were chosen for ball games that boys always picked her as the first girl, which added to her popularity even then.

She was more dignified now, especially in the presence of this young man who had spent a year at McKendree College in Lebanon, Illinois and was well read and versed on things “intellectual.”  Just at the moment, however, he was anxious to start on the ride.  Soon they were off.

No doubt my mother’s brothers, Robert, about fifteen years old, and John, nine, were at home and George and Frank off to see their best girls.  George was going with Eva Meyer, who lived a few miles north and Frank calling at the Burton home to see Nora.  David, the oldest son, had left home a few years before on his way west.  At that date he was living in Parsons, Kansas, where he had married a young lady named Lucy Roberts and they were the parents of a small daughter, Mable.

These eight children, together with Pa and Ma, made up the Lyons household, and a rather jolly one it was.

Having started on the buggy ride my mother must have been surprised to hear my father say that he wanted to be married soon.  While they had gone together since she was sixteen years old and she was now twenty-two and he was twenty-eight, and they had planned to be married some day, no definite date had ever been set.

Thoughts whirled in her head, a proper wedding dress and the many other arrangements that would have to be made.  In the end, however, they returned to the house and startled the family by announcing they had decided to be married on Thanksgiving Day and wanted the wedding at her home.

Pa and Ma approved and to say that the children approved and were excited when they heard the news would be putting it mildly.  Numerous affairs had taken place in that household, parties, celebrations of various kinds, entertaining of guests, and most every year Ma had had a Methodist minister pushed upon her for a stay of anywhere from a chicken dinner for a District Elder who preached at the Bethel church once a year, to a traveling evangelist who would spend two weeks there while he held a revival meeting – but there had never been a wedding.

The next day George and Frank in there excitement took my mother, one by her head and the other by her feet, and threw her into the air a few times to show their approval.  But the excitement of all the rest of the children put together could not equal that of Emma and Nettie.  They were jubilant, yet they had a problem.  They and the two older boys were told they might invite their best girl or beau to attend the wedding.  George and Frank promptly asked Eva and Nora, but Emma and Nettie had a number of boy friends and to choose one from among them had its drawbacks.

Finally Emma invited a young man from Nashville, Otto Bimmerman, whose father owed a jewelry store.  Whether this was because she liked him best or because Christmas was near, I don’t know.  At any rate when Christmas came he gave her one of the loveliest gold watches in his father’s store, engraved with flowers on the back and closed front.  As time went on they drifted apart, he was not well and a few years later died, but Emma, who later married George Meyer, always carried the watch in her purse.  When she died December 25^th, 1946, she had the watch sent to me and I have it.

Nettie couldn’t decide between Louie Meyer, Eva’s brother and Homer Jack.  So the family stepped in and said that for Eva’s sake Louie should be invited, and he was.  However, after the wedding, when the cake was passed, Nettie managed to get an extra slice, wrapped it carefully and asked Uncle Ervin Jack, one of the guests, to see that his cousin Homer got it.  So, in a small way, it compensated for Homer not being invited.

Thanksgiving Day arrived.

The wedding was set for two o’clock in the afternoon with the Beaucoup, Illinois minister, Rev. Yingks, to perform the ceremony.  My mother put on her wedding dress.

A word must be said about this dress.

For a number of years Aunt May Paul and my mother had been friends.  After Aunt May’s marriage in June her long cream colored wedding dress made of bolting cloth had been carefully packed away.  When she learned that my mother was to need a bridal gown this dress came to her mind and she promptly offered to loan it to her.

To have a wedding dress made of bolting cloth was the pride of every girl in Nashville, yet few could have it.  This was not because the material was too expensive, but the fact that it was not on sale in department stores.  Bolting cloth is a fine silk fabric of open weave used in flour mills for the sifting of flour products, and to secure it for use outside the mill took something of a pull.  Uncle John Paul worked for Huegley’s Milling Company in Nashville and, apparently, had the necessary pull as he produced the material for his bride’s wedding gown, and now my mother was to wear it.

Figure 2: Martha (Mattie) Lyons-Spencer's wedding dress.

The hour arrived, the guests were in their places, and there in the large parlor before the east window with its small panes and freshly starched lace curtains, the wedding took place.

After the ceremony there was a “reception” with cake and coffee and a general good time.  Then the guests, mindful of the weather, departed.  My father stayed until the following day when the boys took him and my mother with her belongings to the Spencer home.  And really they must get there to start preparing for the shivaree.

Now a reception after a wedding was all right to far as it went, but the big event was the shivaree.  To this came men and boys from over the neighborhood, - anyone could come to this, and come they usually did with tin pans, cow bells, shot guns or anything to make a noise.  As was the custom, a few nights after a wedding they would gather and quietly surround the house, then all together break forth with bells ringing, pans beating, guns shot for fifteen minutes or more until one would surely be reminded of the falling of the walls of Jericho.  Then the wedded couple, smiling and excited, would open the door and invite them to come in and be served.

There would be cider and doughnuts in the fall, with apples and no doubt, cigars.  There was always a handshaking and fun, and after this one might say that the wedding was officially over.  Just such a shivaree took place at the Spencer home.