JACOB WILLIAM RAGAN (1894 - 1972)

 Jacob William Ragan (1894 - 1972)

Jacob William "Poppa" Ragan 1963

I remember my grandfather as "Poppa" and grandmother as "Momma".

Poppa was born July 21, 1894 in Toone, Hardeman County, Tennessee to Nathaniel Francis Ragan and "Nannie" Nancy Catherine McClendon Ragan, the fifth child of the ten children of this union. After his mother's death in 1906, his father remarried to Maggie Loney McCoy, and he was to share biscuits with yet another six half-brothers and one half-sister.  He was named for his maternal great-grandfather, Jacob McClendon, believed to have been properly Jacob William McClendon.

His father Nathaniel was a very successful man, owning vast acreage of farm and timber, and substantial numbers of beef cattle.  Hundreds of acres were always in cotton.  He owned meat markets and grocery stores in Hardeman and Madison County, Tennessee to market his own as well as neighboring farms produce.  

Unlike his own father, Nathaniel Francis (Thannie) Ragan, "Poppa" Jacob William Ragan was not an ambitious man; Nor was he an educated man, except in matters of agriculture and livestock.  It is thought that he probably completed only four or five grades of school, preferring, or perhaps being required to work, on the never-ending chores of the family farm and ranch.

Jacob William Ragan probably knew his life mate all of his life.  On a neighboring farm lived his first and only love, a lass of Scotch descent named Lizzie Ann Jackson, born also in 1894.  At 19 years of age they decided to make a life together and were married on 6 April, 1913 in Hardeman County.

Jacob Ragan and Lizzie Jackson Wedding Day, 6 April 1913.  Aunt Janie Ragan Bunn said it was commonly known that Jacob Ragan married the prettiest girl in the county.

During the early years of his marriage in Hardeman County, times were tough, and Poppa often would share-crop in addition to the crops he raised to feed the family, according to my father's recollections.  During prohibition he was remembered by my father as being a skilled moon-shiner, with brew that was much sought after by the local populace.  He did what he had to do to support a large and growing family, my father the oldest of nine children in the family unit.  No one would ever convince the old Scotch-Irishman that there was anything wrong with "spirits of the grain".  Since the local sheriff preferred my grandfather's distilled nectar, the only danger of incarceration was from the revenuers scouring the countryside.  My dad recalls the still was located in a small spring-fed creek some distance behind the hen house.  Dad, as the oldest child in recorded memoirs, was always posted as a sentry beside the chicken's quarters on the narrow path winding it's way down to the distillery.

The first several of the homes Poppa acquired for the family were log houses or bark or "slab" houses, according to my father.  My father, Robert "Bob" Nathaniel Ragan remembered Poppa always having a lot of fruit trees wherever they lived and farmed, and Poppa always planted plenty of watermelons.  My older cousin, Gene Guiren, once speculated he grew them for my grandmother, Lizzie (Momma) who had a passion for them, as much as the money the crop provided. Cotton was often a cash crop for them. Poppa loved the land.  How could he not?  He was from a long line of planters/farmers that plied the trade since their arrival in the new world from Ireland in the 1600's.

Poppa usually raised a number hogs each year to put up hams, bacon, and pork chops for the winter months. My dad hated the first week of frost, because it meant it was time to kill and butcher the fattened livestock.  As I boy, I innocently asked Dad if he hated butchering the hogs in cold weather so much, "why didn't they just do it on a sunny day instead".  I did not understand the necessity of timing the chore with freezing weather, in a time before freezers and refrigeration.

The 1930 census lists Jacob William Ragan by an often mistaken spelling of the last name, as William Regan.  He is living in Dyer County, Tennessee and it is from this family home that most of the children attended grade school in Miston and high school in Ridgely just across Dyer/Obion line into Lake County, Tennessee.  He is listed as a general farmer, and wife Lizzie and all children are living in the household.

Miston School classes of 1930.  Though the boys, Bob, Lacy, and Neal were always in bare feet (except winter) and overalls...they rounded up enough jackets for this photo.  

Jacob and Lizzie, probably in Dyer County, Tennessee on the family farm, circa 1930-1935.

"William" as Momma called him, would love to tell stories to both Keith and Kenneth.  He loved to tell of the times when the Mississippi River would flood and he and his older sons, when living in the area around Dyer and Lake Counties, Tennessee, would form a circle in the inundated fields to harvest fish.  After forming a large circle initially, they would shrink the circle until the trapped fish, buffalo fish, carp, freshwater drum, and channel and flathead catfish could be wrestled out of the water.  On one occasion a behemoth buffalo fish targeted dad's location as the place for escape, leaping into the air and hitting him smack in the center of his chest and continued back towards the deep waters of the main Mississippi River channel.  Aunt Janie Ragan Bunn, dad's sister,  remembers them all coming home, the wagon full of wash tubs and wriggling fish tails. Poppa once told me how he would hang the carp on the closeline and bleed them out and then soaked them in salted water before butchering. Nothing was wasted with so many mouths to feed.

During the years beginning around 1940 Poppa had moved Lizzie and the remaining children to St. Louis, Missouri and he went to work for the railroad.  My mother's brother, my uncle Clarence Madison Wilson, JR recalled him sitting outside the lumber yard there every morning as he went to work, sitting in a chair and smoking his pipe.  My Uncle "Junior" would speak and my grandfather would nod, this being a ritual of some endurance.  Poppa was the supervisor of the lumber yard and my uncle recalls him as having a very important job at that time for the railroad, directing the kiln for drying rail ties and supervising a number of men.  As Poppa got older, he became a security guard for the railroad and in his senior years he also was employed by Anheiser Busch in St. Louis, MO. in their main plant as a night security guard.

Poppa Ragan, February 1957, St. Louis, MO. during his time as a night Security Guard.  The calendar in the background is from Charles Todd Uniform Rental Company, for whom my father, Uncle Neal, and cousin Gene Guiren worked for many years.

In those years families took care of each other.  As Poppa and Momma reached an age that they no longer could provide for themselves as needed, my parents moved them from St. Louis to a home near Island Creek in Paducah, KY where they could monitor daily their health and well-being.  After a year or two, Dad's younger brother, Neal Ragan, took them to his home in Washington, IL.  After another short stay, dad brought Poppa and Momma to our home in McCracken County, KY.  In fact, my dad gave them our home and situated he and my mother into a new house trailer only a few dozen yards away on a slope overlooking it.  Looking back, it was a remarkable act of generosity and love, since my parents still owed huge debt from mother's cancer, back surgeries, and treatments for her mental breakdown.

Poppa loved his pipe and he loved his beer.  He would sit in his chair, always by a window in later years in McCracken County, Kentucky, at the junction of Kreb Station Road and Highway 45, with those two companions usually close at hand.  It was no different than the way I had seen him on those many occasions as a boy when we traveled to St. Louis for a visit;  Always by the upstairs apartment window; always with a glass of beer and his pipe. In the early days of my childhood on these visits, it was not uncommon for my brother Ken, or myself, or the both of us to accompany him to the corner tavern to "fetch" a couple of buckets of beer. Beer was sold by the bucket in those years. 

Before I was old enough to tag along, my brother recalls his toddler expeditions to the watering hole when Poppa would "plop" him up on the old bar to be be greeted by the bartender with "and who is this"?  In reply, Poppa had taught him to return the greeting with "I'm a little son of a gun!"  I guess Ken's delivery was pretty good because it never failed to crack them both up.

My interests and beliefs as a young boy and Poppa's differed on several occasions.  I studied and loved dinosaurs and was fascinated with our country's exploration of space.  He believed in things he himself, knew to be factual through his own life experiences.  He didn't believe there had been dinosaurs, or that the U.S.A. had ever actually put a man on the moon.  It must have been incredulous to him, a simple man of the land, to have witnessed the first automobile in Hardeman County, Tennessee to a stretch that required believing in an image on a television set proclaiming America's presence on the moon!

He was a quiet man, but happy by nature.  I never remember him any other way. He liked company and delighted in watching his grandchildren and their antics. He was a lifelong steadfast Republican, as was his father and grandfather. Poppa was a sturdy man, a farmer most of his life, and enjoyed gardening until the day he told us he needed to go to the hospital.  He told "Momma" that he would not be back home and where the important papers were as he got into the car.  Indeed he died in the hospital in but a few days of throat cancer, 16 July, 1972 in Western Baptist Hospital in Paducah, Kentucky.  The doctors were amazed that he could have waited so long to have such a painful condition acknowledged and treated.

He was buried in Lemay, St Louis, Missouri in Mount Hope Cemetery, in ensuing years joined by Lizzie. On the drive to the funeral with my wife Sandy, I recalled my arrival home from Vietnam only a little over three years prior.  He had not seen me a couple of years.  Seeing me then, His words were, "My God, that's no boy, that's a man'!  There is no way he could have known how much those simple words meant to me then, and are obviously, remembered still.  It was a long way from being called a "little monkey" to a man. Whatever he saw was not on display by his grandson as a physical specimen.  I was still pretty gaunt from my time in service, and not in the best physical form, and only beginning to understand the presence of my anxieties and depression from that time, and not even close to coping with them.

Poppa was an "agnostic" for most of his life, my father Robert Nathaniel (Bob) Ragan trying to affect his salvation for many years. As I've already explained, if Poppa could not "see it", he found it hard to "believe it". A few years before Poppa's death he began reading the Bible, and during his last days, my father led him to  his acceptance of Christ, and Christianity.

My grandfather did nothing unusual or spectacular in his life by most standards, not that I am aware of anyway. He would be amazed that this small part of his story and life was remembered.  He never took us fishing, played catch, or anything else of an entertaining nature other that tell us a few stories. But, he always had a big smile for us "little monkeys".  His story parallels that of a lot of all of our ancestors, if we are lucky.  He loved his wife and children, and worked to provide for them.  It wasn't so much that Jacob William Ragan wasn't a dreamer, it's just just that his dreams were reserved for the simple pleasures of loving Lizzie and their children, and what needed to be done to provide for them, and if he was lucky, a pork chop and fried egg breakfast accompanied by a couple of Momma's famous biscuits. 

And, without fail, a few glasses of beer in the afternoon by his place at the kitchen window.

Keith Wayne Ragan

27 December. 2009
Edited for Post on July 21, 2016, Poppa's 122nd birthday!

Copyright 27 December 2009 by the author, Keith Wayne Ragan.  The narrative and the photos are intended for family collection and use by descendants of Jacob William Ragan and Lizzie Ann Jackson Ragan, and neither all or portions of the narrative or photos may reproduced or published without the written consent of the author.