Dave Wood

My cousin Paul Back wonders about my failure to write much about his and my own side of our heritage. The answer is fairly simple: The Beswick side of the family, from which my mother descended, didn’t save every consarned written occurrence of their lives as did my father’s side, the Woods, something I lug around whenever I move, and now wonder if I can urge it all into either the Pearly Gates or Dante’s Inferno.

I must rely on a few tidbits passed on by my three aunts who lived into their late 80s and my uncle Chester who was the last of the family to live on the Wisconsin homestead the old folks settled in the 1850s. So this one’s for you Paulie Back, son of the last Chester.

The first Chester I could find a written record of was Chester Beswick, Sr., born in New York State in 1810, moved to what is now the Blair, Wis. in 1855 and died 40 years later. His wife Polly was born in 1834 in New York state. She was the mother of Chester Jr. who arrived with his parents in Wisconsin and spent most of his life farming and investing in land. He married the daughter of Blair’s first postmaster Ebenezer Thurston, and their union produced seven children including your father, Chester III, and my mother Florence.

My Aunt Hazel Briggs (b. 1892) remembered that as a retired farmer her father rarely left the dinner table, sliding his chair a foot away from the table and waiting for the next meal, a family trait shared by at least one descendant (me). Aunt Myrt remembered him as a stolid Anglo-Saxon. “One day he left the table to sit on the front porch with his dog when a neighbor recently from Norway came by, and greeted Grandpa, saying God Dag (“God Day”) and Grandpa replied ‘I guess, but he’s a lazy sonofabitch.’”

His daughter, our grandmother, was Alice Beswick, (b. 1870), known as Allie. She married Palmer Back, a farmer from nearby Burnside who died young and left her with several kids to raise. My Grandpa Wood remembers Allie driving a team and wagon loaded with offspring to have oats ground in town. “She was a tough customer, gripping the team’s reins, bare-handed, on the coldest day of the year.”

And, like her father, she too was plain-spoken. When my father was courting her daughter, he told of Allie inviting him to Sunday dinner. “Before the plates were cleared, I lit up a cigarette and flicked its ashes onto my plate, when her youngest daughter Wyliss looked at me and said “Ma says if you’re going to behave like that, you might as well crap on your plate!”

Dad got married to my mother anyway. Soon he found himself managing one of Allie’s farms and overheard a conversation between Allie and your father Chet III. “When Allie insisted they plant oats on the north-east forty, Chet, violently disagreed, and said ‘Ma, Someone should crap you a new set of brains!’” My gentlemanly father shook his head and said Allie didn’t bat an eyelash at the insult—and had her way.

Remembering these snippets prompted me to dig out my old and tattered 800-page county history. Sorting through a pile of loose pages I found an interview author Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge had with Chester Jr. who in 1916 was 82, “and could still read without glasses. When the family arrived in Wisconsin, he and four companions traveled to Texas to engage in sheep farming. When the Civil war broke out, they headed back to Wisconsin but were arrested by Confederate troops as spies and were thrown in prison. In order to gain their freedom, they enlisted in the Confederate army, but soon afterwards deserted. Retaken by a band of Osage Indians, Confederate allies, they were again imprisoned and sentenced to be shot…. Their captors made ready to hang them but were dissuaded by members of the Indian band. Later the Indians lined them up to be shot, and still later burned, but both times were dissuaded by their interpreter. It was in December 1862, when Mr. Beswick finally made it back to [Blair], Wisconsin and resumed life in a safer locality.”

That information, cousin Paulie, goes a long way why our mutual ancestor spent so much of his later life safely ensconced “at table.”