A year ago, while walking with my friend, we stopped to visit Frances Grove and her daughter, Sherry Bakotich, as they fixed fences around the Grove cow pasture northeast of Toledo.
A week later, we interrupted Fran at 91 while she was mowing the yard.
When she introduced us to her seven cows, a huge brown and white Beauty nestled her nose into Fran’s shoulder in an affectionate gesture of love.
I kept thinking I wanted to write about this amazing woman, and I finally sat down with her last month, but I had no idea how deep her roots and those of her late husband stretched into Lewis County.
In the midst of the Great Depression, Frances Linwood arrived on Sept. 7, 1932, in San Francisco, where her father, Frank, who had suffered partial paralysis in his legs after contracting polio as a child, worked as a carpenter. Her mother, Gwen (Smith) Linwood, was a housewife. After employment as a lineman for a dollar a day, Frank opted to work as a carpenter with his father, Arthur Oscar Linwood.
Her grandfather, Arthur, was born Sept. 15, 1878, in New York, but he traveled west to Washington, where he married Margaret Leatha Updike in 1900. They lived in Chehalis and raised five daughters and three sons. In 1925, they moved to the Cowlitz Prairie near Toledo, where Arthur had purchased 40 acres.
Arthur Linwood, who had brown hair, blue eyes and a medium build, worked as a carpenter, and with his son, Frank, constructed a home down the road for Joseph Matthews and his brother, Gus. The Mathews family’s history in Lewis County stretched back to the 1860s.
Joseph’s father Drewery “Dewey” Mathews, a Tennessee native, crossed the Oregon Trail from Missouri in 1849 and settled in the Willamette Valley on French Prairie near present-day Salem, Oregon. While there, he hauled a train of pack horses and mules, each loaded with 200 pounds of supplies, to the Caribou mines in British Columbia, earning a dollar a pound. He married Mary Martell and fathered five children.
In the early 1860s, the couple with their five children traveled by covered wagon to Washington Territory, crossing the Columbia River by ferry at Cathlamet. They settled on 80 acres of the Cowlitz Prairie above the Cowlitz River’s north bank. They initially built a log house with a mud fireplace, where Mary cooked meals in iron kettles and used tallow candles for light. They later constructed a wooden frame house.
Mary Mathews, who gave birth to seven more children on Cowlitz Prairie — a dozen altogether — served as a midwife, traveling by pony to help women in labor, according to her son, Joseph, who was born on the Cowlitz Prairie on June 27, 1875, and shared his family’s story in “The Toledo Community Story.” He spoke about clearing land with oxen, cradling grain by hand and the first threshing. A few years later, the Mathews family bought a horse-drawn reaper in Portland, hauling it to Toledo by boat. They took wheat to Montesano and Tumwater to be ground into flour, often clearing trails as they traveled.
They killed deer for venison to eat and sold pheasants and grouse for 20 cents each and quail for 10 cents each. The boys fished in the river, selling Coho salmon that they referred to as silversides for 25 cents each and hauling others home to feed the family.
The Linwoods had lived on Cowlitz Prairie only three years when, on June 23, 1928, they returned home one night to discover that flames had destroyed their house and all its contents. The home was partially insured, but the loss was estimated at about $1,000 (more than $18,000 in today’s dollars), according to the June 29, 1928, Chehalis Bee-Nugget. Although a devastating tragedy for the family, it likely paled in comparison to the death of their patriarch less than two months later at only 49. Arthur Linwood died in Centralia on Aug. 14. He’s buried at Claquato Cemetery.
Arthur’s death left Margaret a 42-year-old widow with children still at home to raise. A year later, on Dec. 31, 1929, Margaret Leatha (Updike) Linwood, who was born to Charles and Annie Updike in Overton, Nebraska, on July 25, 1886, married Joe Mathews, a longtime timber faller who embraced not only Margaret but her children and grandchildren as his own.
Margaret became a Gold Star Mother during World War II when her son, John Allen Linwood, a warrant officer, died in France from a bullet or missile on Aug. 11, 1944, at the age of 20. John was born on Oct. 9, 1923, in Chehalis and registered for the Army on June 30, 1942. Like his brother Frank, he had worked for C.C. Moore and Co. He stood five-foot-six, weighed 130 pounds, and had brown hair and blue eyes. He served with Company D of the 86th Chemical Battalion Mtz A/S. Chemical Warfare Service. He enlisted on Feb. 27, 1943. Like his father, he is buried at Claquato Cemetery.
Margaret Mathews belonged to the Cowlitz Prairie Grange, VFW Post No. 3429 of Toledo, and the American Legion Unit No. 101. When she died on March 7, 1971, in Chehalis at 84, she was survived by her husband, Joe, her son Frank, and five daughters — Zoe Brewer, Barbara Boggs, and Mary Ellen Hinkley, all of Winlock, Leva Berry of Elma, and Eva Davis of Longview — as well as 18 grandchildren and 39 great-grandchildren. She was buried at Sunset Memorial west of Chehalis with her husband, Joe, who died the following year in December at the age of 97.
But two decades before their deaths, while Margaret and Joseph Mathews enjoyed their lives together on the Cowlitz Prairie, they hosted a wedding on their lawn — the wedding of Margaret’s granddaughter Frances Linwood to the love of her life, Gerald “Jerry” Grove.
But that’s a story for next week.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
