QUINCY EVERETT ROUTON & DESCENDANTS
QUINCY EVERETT ROUTON
(Son of Stephen Palmer Routon and Mary Catherine Haymes Routon)
Born: December 16, 1860 Died: September 27, 1949
Quincy Everett Routon was the oldest child of Stephen Palmer Routon and Mary Catherine Haymes Routon, born December 16, 1860. He married Laura Bowden, a school teacher. He was a small man. He served as County Court Clerk of Henry County, Tennessee, from 1899 to 1906. He served as clerk of Spring Hill Church for 58 years. He farmed and ran a store and was postmaster of Routon for many years.
The marriage license (# 67) for Quincy Everett Routon and Laura Bowden is on file in the Henry County Archives. The date of their marriage on the license is April 18, 1888. Their rites of marriage are dated April 19, 1888. Laura Bowden was the daughter of William Bowden and Sofronia Poe. Laura was born March 14, 1864 in Henry County, TN, and died September 19, 1929 in Paris, TN.
Quincy Everett Routon and his wife, Laura Bowden Routon, had five children:
1) Vera Poe Routon (never married).
2) Elbert Routon – married Tommy Simpson –
two children, Claire (Clara) and Dale.
3) Edward Routon (twin of Elbert) – married Philena Moore, and after her death, married Dorothy Oliver – children Bernice, Betty, and Donald.
4) Fuqua Routon – married Elizabeth Miller – one child, Betty (Ellsworth).
5) Ralph Routon – married Halle Pearl Wheat, one son, David Franklin Routon.
Quincy Everett Routon died September 27, 1949 in Routon, TN.
QUINCY EVERETT ROUTON – BRIEF SUMMARY
Quincy Everett and Laura Bowden Routon had five children:
1. Vera Poe Routon never married.
2. Elbert married Tommy Simpson – two children, Claire and Dale.
3. Edward married Philena Moore – after her death, married Dorothy Oliver.
Children (with Philena Moore) Bernice, Betty, and Donald.
4. Fuqua Routon married Elizabeth Miller – one child, Betty.
5. Ralph married Hallie Pearson – one son, David.
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Quince Everett Routon was the oldest child of S. P. and M. C. Routon.
Born 12-16-1860. He married Laura Bowden, a school teacher. He was a small man. He was County Court Clerk of Henry Co. from 1898 – 1906. He served as clerk of Spring Hill Church for 58 years. He farmed and ran a store and was postmaster of Routon for many years.
VERA POE ROUTON
Notes by Clara Routon Hart, Niece (2008)
Vera Poe Routon was born September 24, 1889, daughter of Quincy Everett Routon and Laura William Bowden Routon. Her mother, Laura, was a school teacher.
Vera started to school in a little school that was in walking distance from her home. She graduated from Grove High School as valedictorian in 1909 and took classes in Memphis in 1912 and other universities including Berea, Kentucky where she learned to weave
and make baskets. She had a big loom at home and did some weaving into the late 50’s. She took piano lessons and liked classical music.
She learned to paint with oils from Aunt Pearl (Pearl Sanders Routon, wife of Stephen James Routon, Sr.).
Vera’s first teaching job was in a teacher school in Whitlock, Tennessee, a small town in northeast Henry County, Tennessee. She taught with a young woman whose last name was Paschall. As time went on they lost touch, but as fate would have it, they wound up in the same hospital room in Henry County General Hospital when Aunt Vera broke her hip in 1967.
Vera taught school in Pinson, Tennessee in 1916 and at Union University in Jackson in 1928, 1932, and 1939. In 1935 Vera taught at Chickasaw College in Pontotoc, Mississippi.
During World War II at Camp Tyson at Routon, Tennessee, Vera was a bookkeeper at the P.X. She spoke and taught Spanish and used to read us stories from a Spanish reader.
As the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Quincy Everett
and Laura Routon grew up, Aunt Vera made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, grapefruit and orange peel candies, brown bread,
and sliced apples. All made her way.
Dale Routon, my brother, and I grew up with this school teacher and took her for granted as did my daughters. Vera crocheted and could knit and tat. She liked to read, work crossword puzzles, and raise flowers.
Clara Routon Hart
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See the powerpoint presentation on Vera Poe Routon, also in
the www.routonsofhenrycounty.com website – see under Slideshows,
Vera Poe Routon, 1889-1968, Family Historian.
Also see pictures of Vera Routon under Routon Pictures, section for Quincy Everett Routon Family and Descendants and under Remembering the Routons, Obituaries, Quincy Everett section.
EDWARD STEPHEN ROUTON
PROFILE
Edward S. Routon was born at Routon, Tennessee on September 24, 1892, one of six children born to Quincy Everett Routon and Laura William Bowden Routon. Ed also was a twin to his brother, Elbert Haymes Routon.
Ed worked around the farm in his early years and he graduated from Grove High School in Paris, Tennessee around 1910 or 1911. After high school Ed worked in a pharmacy and also taught school in the Paris, Tennessee area but I do not know how long or when he worked with either vocation. However, I am sure he worked for a pharmacist named McSwain who had a drug store in Paris.
Ed married Philena Carolyn Moore on September 17, 1918 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Philena’s father, Francis Moore, was an Episcopalian Minister and I was told he was with a church in the Paris area. I assume Ed met her while her father was preaching in the Paris locale, and later moved to Arkansas. Hence, that explains why they were married in Little Rock.
Ed had three children. Bernice Francis Routon was born on November 28, 1919 in Paris, Tennessee. Carolyn Elizabeth Routon was born on April 13, 1929 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Donald Edward Routon was born February 4, 1932 in Salisbury, Maryland.
Ed tried farming around 1926 or 1927 and maybe earlier. A news clipping from 1927 said he was one of several farmers who lost mules to a sickness that hit the area. It was about 1927 that Ed went to work for Fruit Growers Express Co. Shortly after beginning employment with Fruit Growers Express, Ed was transferred to Pittsburg, PA. The company sent him to Buffalo, NY for short period around 1929 or 1930. They moved Ed again to Salisbury, MD where Ed worked for a number years. Ed’s job in Salisbury covered the DelMarVa peninsula providing refrigerated railroad cars to the produce growers and packers and servicing these cars as they passed through Salisbury.
Ed’s first wife, Philena Moore Routon, passed away in March of 1937 after a long bout with cancer. Ed remarried around 1940 to Dorothy Oliver Jones. Ed continued his work with Fruit Growers Express in Salisbury until 1945 when he was transferred to Roanoke, VA as their District Agent. Ed provided refrigerated railroad cars to various growers throughout Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio as well providing service to the equipment in Roanoke.
Ed was transferred to Pittsburg, PA in 1951 where he functioned as an agent and district agent for Fruit Growers Express Company. Ed was in Pittsburg until 1957 when he was transferred to Potomac Yards in Alexandria, VA where he worked until retirement at age 70 around 1965. Ed had several heart attacks shortly before retirement dashing his hopes to work until he was 75. Ed enjoyed doing carpentry work in his retirement year but nothing big.
Ed had massive stroke and became totally paralyzed in 1971. After three weeks in a comatose state, Ed passed away on June 29, 1971. Ed was a very strong man with lots of stamina. He worked very hard most of his life and had little time for very many of the pleasures of life.
MEMORIES OF FUQUA JOSEPH ROUTON
FROM HIS DAUGHTER, BETTY ROUTON ELLSWORTH
April, 2007
"Dad was in World War I and soon after his return, moved to Miami,
Florida to work for a Paris friend, R. A. Mooney in the car business. He later opened his own real estate agency and auto tag agency.
My father was my childhood idol and I was his boy. Some of my favorite memories are of trout fishing in the North Carolina mountains every summer with Ralph (his young brother) and Hallie Routon. We continued this until a year before Dad died in 1969, with my mother doing the baby sitting for four active children.
My father taught me truth and dependability and all the other characteristics of Christian integrity.
He taught me by his example.
Dad raised orchids as his hobby. He was active in men's clubs that had a ministry with boys' clubs. He believed in helping others and pursued this through his business office as well.
Dad died December 21, 1969 in Miami, Florida."
Betty Routon Ellsworth
IN UNCLE FUQUA'S TROPICAL GARDEN
I met Uncle Fuqua (what Mother called him - Mary Helen Routon Pemberton) when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old. Our family visited Uncle Fuqua on our way to Miami Beach. Uncle Fuqua gave me a brown paper bag and said "This is your bag and we are going to pick some fruit for you." He was very emphatic that is was all for me! He took me out into the garden and we picked finger bananas, mangos, I think papayas - I don't know what else. To a little child, this was an adventure in a tropical garden! Uncle Fuqua was so stately and dignified and courtly! That he would take time to pay attention to me was such a treat. I think I remember his having a greenhouse where he bred orchids but I don't remember going into the greenhouse - maybe I saw it from a distance. Now it all seems like a dream in a tropical setting. I have never forgotten this visit with Uncle Fuqua and I can clearly remember him and the fruit trees in his garden.
Susan Pemberton
BERNICE FRANCES ROUTON SCOTT
Bernice was born November 28, 1919 in Paris, TN.
For most of her young life, she lived in the farming community of Routon, TN near Paris with her parents, Edward Stephen and Philena Moore Routon.
Around 1927 or 1928 her father was transferred by his employer to Pittsburgh, PA.
Bernice’s sister, Carolyn Elisabeth Routon Vogel,
was born on April 13, 1929.
Bernice’s father was subsequently transferred to Salisbury, Maryland where Bernice finished grade school and high school.
Bernice’s brother, Donald Edward Routon, was born on February 4, 1932 in Salisbury, MD.
Bernice’s mother, Philena Moore Routon, died in 1937. Bernice had just finished high school.
Bernice entered nursing school at Memorial Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. Bernice graduated from nursing school in 1941.
Bernice worked in the hospital where she graduated and for several doctors in the Wilmington, Delaware area.
Bernice went to the Army Nursing Corps in 1945. As the war was ending, she was released from the Army in 1946. I believe she was in the army about 2 years. She was at Ft. Lewis, WA
and later at an army hospital in Texas near Ft. Hood.
Discharge from the army was at Ft. Dix, NJ.
Bernice worked at a VA hospital between Elkton and Wilmington for a while. I believe she also worked for several doctors.
Bernice married Roger Biddle Williams, I believe in the mid-fifties. They had a home in Frenchtown Manor near Elkton. I don’t have a good date but Roger died on Christmas Eve in the late fifties or early sixties. During this period of time Bernice worked for the Elkton Hospital where she stayed until retirement. She sold her place in Frenchtown Manor and moved into Elkton, MD where she bought the house on Hermitage Drive.
Bernice married Horace Scott, a near neighbor, in the late sixties or early seventies.
Bernice and Scottie had a good life together. They traveled, played golf, went to dances, and of course Bernice was an avid bridge player.
Bernice died February 14, 2010, at age 90. Memorial services were held February 23, 2010, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Elkton, MD.
Don Routon
Autobiographic Sketch of David F. Routon
July 3, 2012
A faded xerox of my birth certificate specifies my entry into this world on December 6, 1931 (according to “Google”, a Sunday) at 8 a.m. in Jackson Tennessee. It identifies me as the second and final issue of Ralph Walters Routon and Halle Routon, nee Halle Pearl Wheat. Before my arrival, an earlier son (I believe named Robert) died in infancy.
At the time of my birth my parents were migrating from town to town in West Tennessee, as my father fulfilled a succession of work assignments by his employer, the Tennessee Highway Department. The fact that the attending doctor gave as his address the nearby town of Bells TN suggests that my parents may have resided in Bells at the time but sought the more sophisticated birthing facilities of an urban hospital in Jackson.
My earliest awareness of my family’s residency was during my pre-school years in a brick fourplex not too far east of downtown Paris TN, a town closely northeast of the farmsteads of many Routons including that of my paternal grandfather, Quincy Routon. At the fourplex residence I learned to tie my shoes, invented an imaginary playmate and sometimes played with children of a black family who resided in a wooden house behind the fourplex. Though Southern society at the time was firmly segregated racially, social mores permitted playtime black/white social integration among small children. I was struck by the presence in the front yard of that family’s house of an iron cauldron in which they heated water to aid in clothes laundering.
My next residency memory is a Memphis apartment. In Memphis I attended the first and second grades of public school and traversed some of the customary gamut of childhood diseases: measles, mumps, chicken pox and pink eye.
Following Memphis, I attended third and fourth grades during brief fragmentary residencies in, first Dyersburg TN, then Union City TN. In Union City we luxuriated in a house the normal rental of which surely would have fallen beyond the capacity of my father’s income. It was a palatial domicile equipped with a tennis court, a child’ free-standing playhouse and a large side yard with a small pool and fountain. We occupied only part of premises. In my play I was free to roam among the unused rooms. I believe a friend of my father provided this extravagant abode to us at a cut rate.
Next in the beginning of the 1940's came a second Paris TN residency. There I attended fifth grade and inaugurated my teen years, a stage, as expected, accompanied by maturation into greater freedom of movement. Regularly I walked alone to the small downtown district to attend Saturday children’s movies, mainly “B” cowboy dramas, “Three Stooges” episodes and serial adventure stories (Flash Gordon, Zorro). I sometimes visited with the adolescent children of my great Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Pearl, who resided just a block or so away on the same street upon which my family lived, Dunlap. On those occasions I may have had my first experience of listening to classical music recordings.
During this time, an abrupt intrusion interrupted the societal fabric of Paris and Henry County, then, a few years later, as suddenly withdrew. The U.S. Government War Department plunked down upon the nearby “Routon” area an expansive military base eventually more populous than the town of Paris itself. This was Camp Tyson, purposed to train troops in the deployment of what were called Barrage Balloons during World War II. The function of these balloons was to fend off enemy aircraft by floating tethered by cables over potential wartime targets.
The camp’s materialization generated overall social turmoil, including the effects of abrupt population inflation and economic prosperity. A housing shortage resulting from the influx of army personnel impelled many families to host camp-connected lodgers. For a while my parents and I shared our house with a pleasant, taciturn Army Colonel. The camp’s presence affected the Routon vicinity population in varied ways. Some were compelled to sell their farmland, typically owned for generations, to the government. It partly shaped my father’s professional work. By the time I was old enough to understand my father’s vocation, it had risen from road-building worker to construction supervisor. At the beginning of this my second Paris residency my father, as a Tennessee Highway Department employee, supervised the building of a segment of Highway 79 south of Paris, which generally bisected the Routon clan enclave and specifically thrust close by his boyhood environment. Later, as a private construction firm employee, he helped manage the establishment of Camp Tyson’s network of blacktop streets. And the camp’s proximity provided my Aunt Vera, residing at the Quincy farm, with a well-paying job as a civilian employee of the Army. Upon coming of age Vera had ventured from her childhood home and pursued various objectives including study at college – I believe, in Kentucky – but reverted to residence at the parental nest for the rest of her life, a time span which included the tenure of Camp Tyson.
The brevity of the camp’s existence and its social and economic impact on Henry County was due to a realization that combat developments suggested that no enemy attacks would threaten territorial United States, a circumstance which obviated the need for Barrage Balloons. The U.S. Army packed up, sold off the land and departed, leaving a purposeless grid of blacktop streets networking acreage which in due time reverted to its former farm use.
Amid the tumult of the U.S. entry into the war, my family and I moved from Paris to Nashville, where I experienced the bulk of my adolescence and executed the remainder of my compulsory schooling at several schools, ultimately to obtain my high school diploma in 1949 from a private prep school, Montgomery Bell Academy. Nashville offered as well opportunities to pursue my personal education. This being a time before the widespread presence of television, radio listening and movie attendance became a great part of my inculcation into adult social life. Film gave me a taste for film noire. I renewed an interest in classical music, mostly symphonic, by amassing a modest record collect – first 78 rpm records and later LPs. And I was able to confirm my predilection for spicy food at restaurants some of which my parents probably viewed as not rising to the level of middle class respectability.
I attended a summer camp for several years.
Like most people, as a child I enjoyed drawing. Unlike most I kept up the practice. In my school or summer camp activities any favorable distinction I enjoyed was as “the kid (or one of the kids) who could draw”. During my junior high years that interest got a boost by an opportunity to attend art classes at a remarkable free school in downtown Nashville, Watkins Institute, which is still thriving.
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my family would frequently visit my Grandfather Quincy Routon at the farm where my father and his siblings grew up. In these years, my grandfather shared in retirement his longtime home with one of my father’s brothers, Elbert, and his wife, Tommie (nee Simpson), their children, Claire (later, Clara) and Dale, and my father’s sister, my Aunt Vera. Elbert and Tommie ran the farm.
Other regular visitors to West Tennessee and the Quincy homestead were the families of my father’s two brothers who had gone to live far afield, Ed and Fuqua. Ed’s nuclear family resided in Maryland and Fuqua’s in Miami. Ed visited accompanied by his son, Don, and his daughter, Betty. I believe that in early years the soon-deceased mother of his children, Philena, came with them, but I don’t remember ever meeting her. Fuqua and sometimes his wife, Elizabeth, came with their only child, daughter Betty. We all came to nickname the two Bettys: Betty Maryland and Betty Florida.
The two Bettys, Don, Claire and I made up the childhood participants in these visitations, because we were close in age. Don and Claire are in varying degrees younger than I, and the two Bettys are more or less a couple of years older than I. Dale and another daughter of Ed, Bernice, were not a part of these childhood get-togethers. Dale, though he was around, did not participate because he was much younger than we were and Bernice did not because she was a good deal older and, indeed, did not attend these visits. These invasions of the Routon homestead by me and the non-Tennessee cousins probably did not occur during my earliest years, but they continued into my high school days. In these visits the out-of-state children never saw their non-Tennessee cousins, because, as far as I can remember, the avuncular visits never coincided, but I and Claire, living in-state, visited with everyone.
The visits were usually in the summer. When either entourage materialized I would join them at the Quincy farm overnight as a playmate and companion to the visiting cousins and Claire. The out-of-state cousins were a special treat for me and surely for Claire, because their appearances, though regular, were infrequent.
We hiked the woods and fields, rode horses and explored the upper floors of the old farm house. I remember us finding World War I artifacts: an American army uniform, perhaps a saber and a World War One German ceremonial metal helmet. Also, a regular record of our ascending heights was kept by pencil markings on an interior door.
In the fall of 1949 I inaugurated my higher education career which was at first hampered by my less than ideal intellectual focus and concomitant indifferent academic accomplishment. In two years I enrolled in a succession of three universities: Cornell University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and finally Vanderbilt University. My shaky performance persuaded me that my current mind-set augured poorly for academic success, so I dropped out of school. This being at the time of the Korean War; my college attendance was made possible by deferment from military service draft. So I knew abandonment of college enrollment would leave me vulnerable to the draft, an event which I believed to be inevitable anyway eventually. After a while I was duly inducted and served the obligatory two years while neither facing the hazards of combat nor disgracing myself in any detectable way, and was mustered out in February 1954. I spent most of my tour of duty in North Carolina with excursions for maneuvers to Puerto Rico. But my last few months perked up. I spent them stationed in Japan.
After service a friend fed me the appealing idea to seek a job on a small town newspaper. During those years one could obtain apprentice journalistic jobs without journalistic training in college. As a consequence, I worked for a year and three months for the News Journal in Radford, Virginia. I found I enjoyed writing, particularly feature stories, and my visual interests led me to become the primary person on the paper’s small staff to take local news photos.
My next step was to pursue a goal to break into documentary motion picture work. I went to New York City and worked at a series of apprentice jobs with small film production studios. After a year and nine months I switched goals and decided to resume college work in the making of visual art, specifically drawing and painting. I had learned that there existed in Mexico an English-language college which was approved for use of my military service financial support, the G.I. Bill. So in the fall of 1957 I journeyed to Mexico City and enrolled at Mexico City College, joining many other U.S. veterans. In December 1959 I obtained a B.F.A. in studio art and returned to Nashville.
In Nashville I worked for a while at two jobs: first for the Associated Press and then for the 1960 census.
In fall of 1960 I began graduate study in art practice at the University of Iowa in Iowa City In graduate work I continued my concentration on pictorial imagery, drawing, painting and printmaking. In the summer of 1963 I obtained my M.F.A. degree with an emphasis in painting and inaugurated a college teaching career.
My first year I taught at Michigan State University, then taught two years at the State University College of New York in Plattsburgh NY and about six years at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
In parallel with these professional activities, I married a fellow Iowa student, Carol Anne Wieck of St. Louis MO. Our two daughters, Claudia Joan and Anne Katherine, were born in Plattsburgh. My marriage deteriorated during the family’s Minneapolis residency, specifically when we were traveling in Europe during a sabbatical leave I obtained while teaching at the Studio Arts Department of the University of Minnesota. I obtained a divorce in 1972. My wife went to live in Spain and so took my daughters to live there from first grade through high school. During their Spanish residency, they visited with me about once a year. After their high school work,, my daughters did what I hoped and assumed they would do: they came to where I was (which turned out to be Lincoln NE), and did their college work.
In the summer of 1976 I moved to Lincoln to take up teaching duties in the Art Department of the University of Nebraska at its main campus in Lincoln NE. In the spring of 1997, after teaching there 20 years, I retired with the status of emeritus professor and have resided in Lincoln since then.