Preface:
I have a very old roll top oak desk that has been in my family for generations. It actually played an important role in my becoming an engineer, and I wanted to write its story. So this is my attempt. Almost all of it is true, but I have done just a little stretching for color. It was difficult to transition from old history to new history. I hope I was successful. Here it is, the:
GENEALOGY OF THE DESK
Levi Cox ~ Lucy Burgess
Morgan Anderson Cox ~ Sarah Jane Griffin
William Green Cox ~ Susan Delaney McAdam
Roy Raymond Cox ~ Freddie Grace Bell
Marie Delane Cox ~ Lawson Bond Obermiller
Roy Eugene Obermiller
Ten miles east of the Mississippi River along the Buffalo the oak tree stood on the south bank. It had grown old standing at this spot for the past 200 years. The axes bit into its huge four-foot diameter trunk in May 1865. It took two days, but the tree fell and was trimmed up by the loggers. The trunk, too heavy to move whole, was split into quarters dragged to the river where it could be rafted to the mill.
The sawmill tended to the logs in Tell City, Wisconsin. Then, accessible only by river, now at the cross-roads of Wisconsin Trunk 37 and Buffalo County Road 11, about 4.5 miles east of the old Mormon town of Alma and the Mississippi River. Today, it consists of two houses and a country store, but in the past it was larger. In the 1830’s, the land along the Mississippi was settling. The Wisconsin forests supplied the growing west with lumber from vast forests of Pine and Oak. Tell City sprang into existence at a location on the Buffalo River that would support a sawmill, and was readily accessible to the surrounding Oak forests. The Buffalo provided easy water transportation to the Mississippi for finished and unfinished wood products.
The City survived the War Between the States with the mill producing lumber, and a small factory making furniture with the Oak and Pine lumber. The factory made common items such as dressers, tables and chairs. It also made less common items such as roll top desks. In 1866, a roll top desk was made from the 200 year old oak. In December of that year it was finished and shipped by barge to Hannibal, Missouri, to wait for a buyer.
. . . . . . .
Gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California by two Mormon workers in 1849. At the time, great, great, great grandfather Levi Cox and his brother Lewis were raising families in Hannibal, Missouri. Gold fever swept into Hannibal in 1850 with a troop of men riding in Conestoga wagons with fanciful pictures of Indians on ponies chasing buffalo painted on the canvas sides. Levi and Lewis were infected with the Gold Fever and determined to head for California. Levi would leave five boys and five girls with his wife Lucy. Lewis four boys and one girl with his wife Emily. With families abandoned, Levi’s brother Marion Cox came over from Macon, Missouri, and took them all to live on his farm in Macon County. Marion made a doleful prophesy: the brothers would make less money mining for gold than he would farming.
But the pull of gold was too strong. Levi and Lewis outfitted a wagon pulled by four oxen and joined a wagon train heading west across Iowa on the Mormon Trail toward Omaha and the Oregon Trail. From Omaha, it took six grueling months to cross the plains following the Platte River, facing hostile Indians and adverse weather, to Salt Lake City where the crew wintered amongst even more hostile Mormons. The following spring they continued to California on the south trail, having picked up several more wagons full of prospectors from the Salt Lake valley (in spite of strict orders from the Prophet Brigham Young not to go), reaching the Gold Fields in 1852.
The partners panned for gold for the next four years before breaking up. Lewis traveled north into Wyoming and the Black Hills still looking for the elusive fortune in gold. Grandfather Levi stayed in California, seeking his fortune. Lewis had moderate success in South Dakota Territory, and returned to Hannibal in 1866 by steamboat, having missed the War Between the States entirely. He had been gone 16 years, but he had made enough to contribute to the Cox family farms east of Macon, where he settled.
Uncle Lewis took the place of Uncle Marion in managing the business affairs of the Cox farms, setting up his office in the Town of Cox, near Excello, about halfway between Macon and Moberly. Taking a wagon and his money, he journeyed to Hannibal, a trip of 65 miles, which amounted to nothing compared to his recent travels. A furniture store in Hannibal supplied all his needs. He bought fancy lamps, a glass door bookcase, and a brand new oak roll top desk with matching swivel cane bottomed chair. The desk was just in from Tell City, Wisconsin, and still smelled of varnish. The desk and chair were just what Lewis needed to encourage him as the business manager for the Cox Farms, which by now consisted of some 1600 acres, a patchwork of 160-acre homestead farms. A roll top gives a businessman a since of importance in the world.
Levi continued to search for gold until he grew old. He did not find it, and decided to follow brother Lewis’s trail to the Black Hills. Unfortunately, he was three years too late to stake a good claim, and, after an absence of 21 years, returned home in 1871 without any money. His wife, Lucy, also old by now had long since gone into farming. She had 160 acres of Cox land just east of Macon and was living comfortably. Four of the five boys had died of measles, small pox and scarlet fever, leaving only Morgan to carry on the family name. All four girls were married with families of their own.
Levi decided to throw in his lot with his son and help with the family farming enterprise. With modern farming equipment and plenty of help available in Civil War veterans, it was possible to obtain more ‘homestead’ 160-acre tracts that had proved up but were now abandoned. Levi did considerably better in the farming business where one worked hard for their income, as opposed to mining for gold where one worked hard for no income. The Cox family along with their neighbors, the McAdam family, owned or leased some 15,000 acres of Macon and Randolf Counties, growing primarily wheat. It was a huge enterprise to manage. Levi decided to settle a few miles east of Moberly to work with the southern properties. Lewis sent him his office furniture from the Town of Cox. The Roll Top Desk moved again.
Levi did not last much longer. He was truly old now, and Morgan took over all his affairs. Morgan and his wife Sarah Jane had a son William Green Cox, who grew up intermingling with the McAdam clan from Moberly. Eventually, William married Susan Delaney McAdam and moved to Moberly where he maintained an office managing the Cox and McAdam properties. The desk followed William to Moberly. In 1897, William and Susan had a son, Roy Raymond Cox, my grandfather.
From his earliest childhood, Roy R. Cox was precocious. He was a math prodigy, and after racing through the lower grades and high school, he entered the University of Missouri in the College of Civil Engineering in 1914 at the age of 17. Three years later, he graduated, and took a job with Stone and Webster Engineers in Saint Louis. His first assignment was to survey the proposed high water elevation for the planned Lake of the Ozarks. Stone and Webster had the job of designing Bagnell Dam for Union Electric, creating the largest manmade lake in the world.
The high water line survey was 1300 miles long, and all of it had to be located and tied to property lines of landowners, and then the property taking or condemnation had to be accurately described. Running a level line for 1300 miles through trackless Ozark forest was a feat of its own. Two survey crews set out on the level lines, one for the south shore and one for the north, while a third traversed up the Osage River, also running levels. The instruments were primitive by our standards, ½ minute accuracy transits and Dumpy levels. North was determined by taking readings of the North Star at midnight as it rotates in a tight circle, latitude was determined by taking sun shots at noon, longitude was kept using chronometers or clocks. The three survey parties crosschecked their locations and elevations across the valley periodically.
The parties used mules to pack their instruments and supplies, and once they started on their traverses in the spring, they did not return to their base in Camdenton until fall. They set survey markers each mile or so which consisted of a posthole filled with charcoal and topped with a rock cairn. These can still be found today.
The Ozark forest was filled with copperhead snakes and timber rattlers, and Hillbillies distilling bootleg whiskey. The crews shot the snakes and negotiated with the Hillbillies who all thought they might just be revenuers looking for their stills. A surveyor’s manual used by Roy Cox contains all the useful mathematics for land surveying, railroad surveying and highway surveying. A large section of the manual covers first aid for crews caught far from civilization, but nothing on negotiating with backwoods hill people.
It took five years to complete the land survey for the Lake of the Ozarks. It took several more years to complete land acquisition, but in August of 1929, construction on the dam began. Roy took a new position, that of inspector for the massive project, which was to take four years to complete. During that time, he lived in Camdenton, a town just a few miles south of the project, renting a room in the Bell family house. In 1919, Roy Cox had married Freddie Grace Bell, and started a family while surveying. In 1922, his first child, Marie Delane Cox, was born.
As the dam was under construction, the United States slid into the Great Depression. The economy worsened, and after the dam was complete, Roy was fortunate to get another inspection job. This was for the construction of the Hurricane Deck Bridge at the Lake of the Ozarks, which was built while the lake was filling. This job ended in 1936, and Roy found it necessary to move to the family farm in Randolf County in order to survive. Soon he found another position, this with the Missouri Transportation Commission. His first assignment was the Atchison, Kansas bridge over the Missouri River, completed in 1938. He then moved the family to Columbia, Missouri, living in a large home on Fulton Gravel Road. The roll top desk moved with him from the family farm to become an engineer’s in-home workstation.
Roy stayed with the Transportation Commission through the war, living in Columbia, seeing his children through the university and marriages. After the war, the university was short of professors in the Civil Engineering College. Roy left the Transportation Commission to fill in as an adjunct structural design professor. His 88-year-old roll top desk now became a professor’s desk helping decide the fate of young engineering students. After five years at the university, the Transportation Commission called Roy back, making him the chief bridge designer for the State. His reduced family, two children having married, moved to a beautiful home on Vineyard Square in the Capitol, Jefferson City, Missouri. The desk found a new place of honor in Roy Cox’s den, a large room intended for the family cook, located off the kitchen with its own private entrance.
The den was my first acquaintance with the roll top desk. It was located against the north wall of the room. Above the desk mounted on the wall was Roy Cox’s, my grandfather and namesake, double-barreled shotgun. Also mounted on that wall was a deer head, a young four-point buck that he had shot. The room had several day beds scattered along the walls, and a gas fireplace. As children, we were generally not allowed to play in the den, but it was where we always hung out on Christmas Eve. I was allowed to light the gas burner in the fireplace with a long wooden match, and the cousins would gather on the day beds peering out the window for a glimpse of Santa Claus. I just wanted to get into the roll top desk, but it was always closed and locked.
One Christmas I snuck into the den to get away from the crowd. I am not sure how old I was, but I was small enough to hide under the desk. I noticed the brass lock catch protruding through the latch plate on the roll top from underneath, and figured out that the little locking dogs could be squeezed together and the top pushed up just a little. From above, the top could then be rolled up, which, of course, I did. This unlocked all the drawers as well. I explored.
There was a bank of pigeon holes all full, secret little drawers with pencils and drawing tools, file slots with lots of paper, drawings of bridges, a glass cover with business cards under it, a .32 caliber Nichol-plated pistol, a K&E slide rule. All in all, an amazing amount of fascinating stuff. I wanted to explore, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to be in the desk. After a while, I carefully lowered the top and it re-locked itself. I was hooked. The desk was now the single most interesting feature of my grandfather’s house.
I grew older. Our family went down to Jefferson City several times each year, and I was occasionally left there for a couple of weeks. I did not like this much. I had explored every corner of the huge old house, the interesting back yard, the woods behind the back yard. I spent boring hours at my Aunt and Uncles house, also in Jeff City, with their numerous children, all of whom were younger than me. I liked best spending some time sitting at the desk. Through part of this time, my grandfather was creating the conceptual design for the new Highway 63 Bridge crossing the Missouri River at Jeff City. The desk had several penciled drawings of bridges, including the graceful tied arch design, which was eventually built. This bridge design won several awards.
I liked to create my own drawings of bridges and buildings using the drafting tools kept in the desk. Eventually, I suppose my grandfather had noticed someone was getting into the desk. I begin to find it was left open when I came to visit. Drafting pencils were sharpened using a special penknife and left in their little sliding tray. Paper was kept handy, and my past drawings were placed in a file slot, not thrown away. Nothing was ever said about my getting into the desk and using my grandfather’s tools.
By the age of 12, I was an accomplished tree house builder, model dam builder, and balsa wood bridge and glider builder. I also had a chemistry set, microscope, and transistor radio kit. I built soapbox racers and rockets, and I hunted incessantly. After school I worked at my fathers shop on pinball machines, soldering broken ground wires and replacing burned out bulbs. Generally, just an all around boy. At school, however, I was a math prodigy, although I didn’t realize it.
One day my grandfather, whom I called ‘Daddy Roy’ said, “Eikleburger, do you ever go over to the ‘Engine School’.” He always called me Eikleburger, which might have meant something to him, but means nothing in German. By ‘Engine School’, he, of course, meant the Engineering School at the University. I did go over to the Red Campus and had even gone to Engineer’s Week exhibits a couple of times. It dawned on me that my grandfather anticipated that I would go to the Engine School and be a Civil Engineer. He wanted this, and was doing his part with the desk, and the drawings, and the tools.
The years progressed. I did not like school. It was boring and I would much rather be pursuing my extracurricular activities. High school was the worse. Hormone ridden teenagers only interested in the opposite sex, and fighting for favors. I did not date a single high school girl for the entire time I was there. But don’t misconstrue. I did date the junior college girls at Christian College quite a bit. The only high spot in all those years before the university was a strange math class I took as a senior. This class did not have a name, only had 6 pupils, and was taught by a professor from the university. I didn’t do too well in the class, but none of us did. It was math of a different color, and none of us had seen anything like it before.
My junior year I took the PSAT ~ Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test. This test went on for three days and was grueling. The day we took the math part, I finished 45 minutes early, and sat there looking around wondering if I had missed some pages. The results of this testing was sent out to universities, and before long I was getting hand typed invitations to attend various engineering schools, some prestigious, like MIT. I did not place much significance or importance on this at the time. I might look differently on it today. But, I received a letter from the Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Missouri inviting my attendance. For me, it was a forgone conclusion that I would go right on into engineering school at MU since I was 12 years old.
Now, my trips to Jeff City always involved a brief discussion about “How is Engine School?” with Daddy Roy. I know that he, along with my father, got ongoing reports from my professors, because they were all acquainted. Neither one of them was particularly communicative, so discussions were short. I guess it was enough that I was just doing it. If I had known how mindboggling hard it was, and the incredible 98% drop out rate among students, (I graduated in a civil engineering class of 11 members) I may not have tried.
I got down to my grandfathers less and less as I progressed through school. Toward the end, it was only a couple of times a year. Daddy Roy had retired in 1969 at the ripe old age of 72, and the desk wasn’t getting the attention it had in the past. In 1971 I moved to Florida with my girlfriend to take a job with Lloyd and Associates in Vero Beach. A year later, we moved to Kansas City for another job, and time flowed on. I hardly ever got down to Jefferson City in the 70’s. One of my cousins had moved into the house with her kids to take care of the grandparents. Daddy Roy gradually became bedridden. They set up one of the day beds in the beautiful formal dining room for him, and there he stayed. Then he was moved to the hospital. In 1982, I went to see him there. He was not really conscious, but I sat by the bed telling him all about my new engineering business I had started. I think he liked to hear that. In February of 1983, he was gone. I was a pallbearer at his funeral.
My grandmother started down the final road almost immediately after. They had been married 64 years, and parting was perhaps too much. My mother was the oldest child, and shortly after grandmother had to move to a nursing home, mom started disbursing the estate. She asked me to come down to Jeff City and select what I wanted from the house. She knew, of course, that I wanted the desk. So Cheryl (my second wife, the first having gone the way of first wives) and I took my small pickup and headed out. We loaded up the desk and my aunt’s four-poster bed with matching dresser and took them home to the Victorian house we had bought in Harrisonville. I also took the old double-barreled shotgun, but the mounted deer head had disappeared..
The desk was battered from unrestrained exposure to my cousin’s children for ten years. At some point the canvas backing to the roll top slats had given out and all the slats had accumulated behind the pigeonholes. The finish was marred and worn, but underneath it was still solid oak. We took the desk completely apart on the front porch and refinished it. It was then that I found just when and where it was made. For while the desk lived in our foyer, being too large to go anywhere else. I even used it as my work desk for a year while I was reconstructing my business. Things improved and kids grew up and left. Eventually I was able to lay claim to the west bedroom on the second floor and make my den/library. I had to completely disassemble the desk to move it upstairs, but now it is installed in a permanent place of honor. The pigeonholes are full of stuff, the little drawers hide things, and I can sit at it drawing inspiration for doing things like writing this story. As I pen this, the Desk is 147 years old. I will leave it to my eldest son, who is also a civil engineer, with strict instruction that it is to remain in the family, hopefully to inspire future engineers.
March 6, 2013
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