The Old Homestead

Information provided by Bill Burris Sr.
The big house on the hill had a well-water pump on the front porch, used a large wood stove (with big tins filled with sugar cookies and home-made rolls for visiting grandchildren) and had a very long table with wooden benches along both sides in the oblong dining room. During the summer, the front of the house was covered by leaves from vines that grew up strings to the top of the second story. You could sleep out on the upper porch to keep cooler and look out through the leaves while concealed from outside view.
Long before Tom Crapper's commodes made it to Appleton, each of the four bedrooms at Lattie's and Kate's had a concealed “appurtenance.” That was a large white-enameled tin bucket that was used at night by the occupants then had to be dumped and washed out at daybreak. The older kids had that undesirable cleaning chore for years. The real outhouse – a two-room, two-hole facility – was what seemed like a long way down a path to the east and in the garden. It was equipped with the latest of toilet tissues (Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs) and bags of lime (with scoops) to be dumped down the holes to eat away the residue and kill vermin that otherwise would multiply there. Real bathrooms came to the home in a remodeling project after Lattie and Kate had passed on and the house became the home of the young Cumberland Presbyterian preacher and his family.
There are rumors that some of the cousins have “rescued” some “memorabilia” from the old homestead. I don’t know if Lattie and Kate would approved, but I am sure they would be happy to know that their family treasures their heritage.

The Town of Appleton, Arkansas

Story provided by Bill Burris, Sr. Photos provided by Faye Sauerbrun.
If you've never visited Appleton, Arkansas, the hometown of your forefathers L.B. and F.D.E. Montgomery, you haven't missed much – a grocery store with post office, a general store, a gas station, a school, a couple of churches and widely separated homes and ranches (many of which now grow chickens for the big Tyson plant in Russellville, the world's largest producer of packaged frozen Chinese egg rolls). The little town comes to life one weekend each summer with a homecoming at the school and parade down the main street. It was a bigger community in Lattie's and Fernando's days.
Appleton got its name when its first Post Office was established in 1879 in the apple orchard of Reuben Rankin. It was incorporated in 1892 with 29 square blocks and streets named Stone, Pine, Main, Tate, Burris, Buckeye, Cherry, Mill and Kuhn. Only portions of some of the streets still exist. As the town grew after the Civil War, it had four business buildings, a drug store and the Brant Hotel. It was best known for its wheat mill, run by a large steam engine (from a steamboat) that had been hauled from the Arkansas River on a wagon pulled by two yoke of oxen. The same steam engine also powered a grist mill and a cotton gin. People from miles around brought their wheat to be ground at the mill, sometimes camping out several days while waiting for their turn at the mill.
At one time Appleton had two Rural and two Star mail routes being delivered from its Post Office. Two of our distant relatives, Tom Spears and Blaine Spears, were among the mail carriers.

Here are two pictures from Homecoming 2000.  It was the last year that both Aunt Euna and Uncle Joe were able to attend. 

The Story of Lattie and Kate

Lattie Buchanan Montgomery was born July 26, 1877, in Appleton, Arkansas, and was married Nov. 8, 1896, to Katharine (Kate) Louether Rowland, 17-year-old daughter of Josiah and Rebecca Jane Rowland of Appleton.

Lattie and Kate had these children: 

• Lattie Bliss Montgomery
• Beatrice Kathryn Griffin
• Moody Everett Montgomery
• Rowland Fernando Montgomery
• Mary Willie Lee (Bill) Crawford
• Edna Evelyn Burris
• Joseph Dee Montgomery
• Euna May Spears
• Naomi Jack Gilbert
• Scottie Hope Allen
• Buchanan Montgomery

Lattie, like his father, Fernando Dee Montgomery, was a farmer in Appleton. Lattie, in time, also raised cattle and sorghum cane, sent large cans of milk by bus to the Russellville Creamery for use in ice cream, and was noted for hosting periodic auctions of horses and other farm animals in the corral near his big two-story home on the hill in Appleton.

Kate, a true Proverbs 31 woman, raised children and chickens, helped manage a big garden, assisted in making sausage when hogs were slaughtered, helped cure hams in the family smokehouse and kept everyone well fed and well dressed for church on Sunday.

Lattie was a principal in establishment and construction of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Appleton (his name is in a list of founding elders on the cornerstone). A coal-oil (kerosene) lamp provided light for him to read from the Bible almost every evening near a large fireplace used for heating the living room on cold winter evenings. (Electricity for lights, and a radio, arrived in the early 1940s.)

Kate died April 29, 1947, in the family home. Lattie died May 30, 1958. Both are buried in the graveyard adjacent to the church. (Fernando Montgomery also is buried there.)