Charles C. Patton Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

orn over in Ireland near Belfast and, at the age of fifteen, he
came to the States. His father ran a pub over there in a little
town south of Belfast called Dromore. He stale all the money out
of his father's cash register, and he hopped a freighter for the
States, and he arrived in New York City, and got a job in a brick
yard. After working there for abaut a week, they didn't pay him,
and so he emigrated west, and came ta Springfield where his
brother, older brother John, had a grocery ators in Springfield,
on Washington Street, between fourth and fifth, on the south side
of the street, about where Myers Brothers now is. After working
with his brother for awhile, he went out to Riverton and
established a grocery and hardware store there. When Mr. Parley
L. Howlett, who dug the first coal mine in Sangamon County, went
bankrupt, then died. I guess he did pretty well, because his coal
mine was bought first by Jacob Bunn, then by my grandfather
Robert W. Jess, who owned several coal mines before he died, but
he. . .
&. What was his name, Chris ?
A. His name was Robert William Jess. Robert Williamson Jess.
And he married a local girl in Riverton, whose name was, last
name was Agee. (He spells the name) And I think that she also was
a second generation Irish girl, and he did quite well. He built
a house for himself and his wife on a hill in Riverton there, as
you go east into Riverton, cross the river on the highway and on
the big hill to the right, he owned that, and he built a large
hause there. A two story house with cupola, it had a long
walkway going up the hill to the house. It wasn't a very pretty
house, kind of ugly as far as I could see from the pictures, but
he built this house, and began raising his family there, and I
think my mother was born in that house, but the house eventually
burned down, and was replaced with a little one story cottage
and. . . after my grandfather died, it was rented out to George
Helmle of Helmle and Helmle architects. I remember George
Helmle. He was a friend of my mother's brother, Will Jess, who
took over the mining business when my grandfather died. George
lived there in that cottage, and he eventually got despondent and
shot himself there. Committed suicide. But getting back to my
grandfather, as I say, whom I never knew, was a cocky little
Irishman, and he came over sometime during the Civil War about
1863, and, back in those days, Irishmen were not well thought of,
as a matter of fact, most of them were on a social scale below
the Negro. I remember reading some entries in my great
grandfather Lanphier's diaries in which he noted occasionally
that he had given an Irishman a dollar. No name, just an
Irishman, he'd given a dollar to. Which was indicative of the
way people thought of Irishmen in those days. At any rate, my
grandfather apparently was rather successful and there was a
group of people who, a group of men who formed a hunt clpb on
Clear Lake. Clear Lake is south of Riverton, abaut a milel, and
Clear Lake has always been a sort of recreation area, a lpark