The Marmaton River remembers.
And on Easter Sunday as I stood on its northern banks, not far from the deep, rocky-bottomed section called the Kettle Hole, I swear I could hear it whispering.
It might have been ghosts of “the Holy-Rollers,” for as Minnie Munson recalled in the Marmaton Valley Sun, at the turn of last century and beyond, this was a place where church groups performed full-immersion baptisms.
“This was an exciting time for us kids, as it was for the ones who were saved,” she noted, along with pointing out how the “sinful men and boys” tended to watch wolfishly from the background.
Those set to be baptized typically dressed in white muslin, and without any undergarments.
This unwittingly produced quite the scene, it seems, as the faithful not only had on fewer clothes, they’d come out of the water with “garments sticking to every curve of their bodies.”
In some instances, this drew long stares of “admiration,” in others, “smiles and snickers.”
Given the potential for said mortification, Munson herself decided that “if God couldn’t forgive me and accept me by being sprinkled, He would never get me. If I had to be half drowned and snickered at, I’d just be a sinner.”
The RIVER also recalls the days when the nearby Rocklow schoolhouse, district No. 36, doubled as a church.
For as Munson points out, “it was during a church service one night that a shot was fired at a preacher in the Rocklow school house. He happened to turn and the bullet hit and lodged in the blackboard near where his head had been.”
Apparently the bullet-hole remained unmended for years.
“Some history has it that Columbus Carter fired his high-powered rifle through the school house trying to hit the minister,” Munson said, though given all the mythology surrounding the Allen County Land Leagues (and anti-Leaguers like Carter), it’s difficult to verify one way or another.
Long story short, if Carter did fire a shot, it would have likely been due to his opposition to the Leaguers who met at Rocklow and contended squatters could lay legal claim to land that was in fact owned by major railroads.
Speaking of transportation, in the pasture north of the Kettle Hole are remnants of the wagon trail that led from Fort Scott to Humboldt.
Munson adds as well that “at one time there was an inn there that travelers going from Fort Scott to Humboldt stopped at overnight to rest and feed horses.”
The inn may be long-gone now, but the wagon tracks are still apparent, especially given the way the grooves augment how the surrounding grass grows.
It might seem like a stretch to claim that gashes in a field have historical significance, but what truly supports the claim is lurking nearby.
