Her Father John Allen McClelland

John Allen McClelland

This post has been revised because I originally misidentified the people in the daguerreotype.

Anna Mae's father was John Allen McClelland. My grandmother never spoke about her father. Her sister would walk out of the room if you asked her about him. Lord knows my mother tried often enough. Mom never found out what happened to him. All she could get out of anyone was "He was there and when I turned around he was gone." Grandmother's DAR application was no help. The McClelland cousin who prepared wrote in the margin next to the blank where John's death information should be written: "Just write down what you remember."

When I was in high school Mom and I drove out to the Centralia Public Library. She went through the local newspapers on microfilm and found her grandfather was the main suspect in the notorious McClelland Pond Mystery. In November 1893 two skeletons were found staked down on the bottom of a pond on the farm her family used to own and they were assumed to be her great-grandfather and one of his sons, who were last seen in 1881.

The McClelland Pond Mystery became the news sensation of November 1893. Reporters from all over the US flooded into the area and articles were published everywhere. I've found them in more than 300 papers. Theodore Dreiser covered it for the St. Louis Republic. The story deserves its own blog post and I'll write one someday.

John Allen McClelland was never tried for the murder of his father and brother, but he was arrested twice. Both times his brothers and brother-in-law posted his bail, so clearly his family didn't believe he'd killed anyone. The case lingered in the courts for years, coming up every six months only to be postponed at the request of the States Attorney. It was finally dismissed in 1897.

In the meantime, John lost an arm in an accident at the Centralia rail yards where he worked. Unable to work there, he tried running a store in Lebanon, but it failed. I have the big glass bowl Mom said held fruit on the store's counter.

Eventually John moved his family to East St. Louis. The DAR application says he died 22 April 1907, the date Grandmother wrote down, but I have never found any proof of it. He's listed in the 1906 East St. Louis City Directory, but the 1907 edition lists his wife as a widow. Notes on the McClelland family in the Marion County (Illinois) Genealogical Society say he jumped off a bridge over the Mississippi, but they have no dates or supporting evidence. I did find a man had jumped off the bridge on that date, but the newspaper articles don't contain enough information to confirm it was John Allen.

John's early life was sad as well as his adulthood. He was the fourth of twelve children. From what I can tell from the records, his father Alexander was an unreliable speculator, always in debt. John's John's grandfather Isaac was one of the original settlers in Marion County, Illinois (his mother and siblings followed his example) and prospered. Perhaps Alexander was always living under his father's shadow. He & Lucinda certainly mortgaged his farm often enough.

Eventually Alexander signed the farm over to John and the courts appointed John guardian of his youngest siblings, Marion and Otto. He raised them on the family farm and married Margaret Felton, who lived on her family's farm just across the border in Clinton County. They lost the farm when they couldn't keep up with the payments on the loans that Alexander had taken out. John moved his family to Centralia and went to work in the railyards there. The farm's new owner was the one who dredged the pond.

John never prospered. My great-aunts and uncle quit high school and took jobs to support their mother and younger siblings. Aunt Vivian told me her mother would always tell her daughters, "Don't ever laugh or tell stories about someone because of the clothes they wear." 

This daguerreotype shows John Allen, seated on the left. He bears a clear resemblance to the picture above. A piece of masking tape on the back of the plate identifies the woman as Celia McCleland and the other man as Ollo. 

Celia is probably Lydia Celia Williams Geary McClelland, John A's stepmother. She married Alexander McClelland 11 December 1873, 21 months after his first wife, Lucinda Ann Rogers, died. John A. was 21 at the time. Celia and Alexander had one child together, a daughter named Olive. Apparently the marriage was not a happy one because they were not living together in the 1880 census and newspaper articles about the McClelland Pond Mystery say this second marriage was the cause of much friction in the family. Maybe that's true because John A. does not look happy in this picture. Celia died in 1887.

There are no ditto marks next to Ollo's name, so he may not have been a McClelland. None of Celia's children by James Geary were named anything like Ollo, as far as I know. John A's brother Oliver was too young to be the man in the photo since it must have been taken between 1873 and 1880. I haven't researched her family, so maybe Ollo is one of her relatives.