Given the many moves my family has made over the generations, the number of children in each generation, and the fact that we were never awash in finery, I don’t have many heirlooms with clear and definite family ties. Maybe one or two come close. There is a plate decorated with old-fashioned “ABCs” that my mother said came to Missouri in a covered wagon. I’m not entirely sure whether that story originated in our family or in an antique shop, or whether there truly was a Reed ancestor who traveled west before the age of railroads. From what I’ve been able to determine from my family tree, the earliest Missouri pioneers were on my paternal side.
My father passed along a number of useful items. As a millwright, he accumulated a wide collection of tools, including a formidable ½-inch drill with a yoke and side handle that can power its way through just about anything. One item he gave me was an Eclipse shoe cobbler stand (see above), said to have belonged to my great-grandfather, likely Henry Yount. Like my other paternal great-grandfather, David Cassatt—who ran a home broom-making operation—I suppose Henry “Skinhorn” (and there must be a story behind that nickname) Yount may have worked on shoes.
But there is one heirloom I truly wish I had.
My second-great-grandfather, Ben McWilliams, described a cane he had made by a German woodcarver during the Civil War. In 1862, he worked for a sutler, John H. Gotshall of the 172nd Pennsylvania Regiment, near Yorktown, Virginia. He described the area this way:
There was a monument standing there marking the place where Cornwallis surrendered to Gen Washington. It had a fence made of red Cedar pickets run in around same.
The site had also seen fighting during the Peninsula Campaign.
After the battle of Yorktown the fence was badly destroyed; but upon looking around I found a thin detached 2x4 rail covered with grass that had escaped destruction. I found a knot in center which enabled me to break in in two, which gave me a pied enough to make four canes. I gave half of it away, found a German wood carver in the Regiment, and gave him the other half in payment for his services in carving me a cane. He carved me out a cane, with the Goddess of Liberty on the head on one side and the Eagle and a copperhead on the other side. He then carved a union soldier standing up, under them, standing upon a cannon ball, and a big snake wound around the cane, which represented the copperhead trying to bite him (2 feet long.) I took it home and gave it to my grandfather, who returned it to me just before his death. I still have it.
I asked both ChatGPT and Gemini to generate renderings of the cane based on this description.
Gemini:
To me, the results seem more decorative than practical—but it’s hard not to imagine what that cane must have looked like, and what it would feel like to hold an heirloom so vividly tied to both family and national history.
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