Aunt Ella

 


For 80 years there hung on the wall in my grandparents’ living room a sepia-toned photo of a little boy about eight years old in an oval wood frame. Also in the photo are a little girl about the same age and a small dog. The little girl is unidentified to this day, but the little boy was my grandfather’s first cousin. His name was Wayne and he died at the age of eight in 1919.  When I was a child I asked my grandfather how Wayne died and I was told that he died in an accident that involved a tree. Since then I have never looked at this photo without thinking about how heartbroken his mother must have been because at the time of his death Wayne was her only child.


Wayne’s mother was Ella Sherwood Eskridge, the older sister of my great-grandmother. No photos of
 the Sherwood sisters together have survived the century and a half that has passed since they were born. If there ever were any photos they may have perished in the bonfire that, in his grief, my great-grandfather lit in a field on his property in South Sacramento. He fueled the bonfire with many of my great-grandmother’s belongings, perhaps to rid their house of  painful reminders of her in the wake of her death in 1941. Ella’s name appears as Ella May in a couple of old census records, but from notations on photos that did survive she went only by Ella. Ella Sherwood was born about 1873 in Michigan Bar, California in Sacramento County.  (My great-grandmother, Etta, would come along less than two years later). Michigan Bar was once a mining camp along the Cosumnes River and the original site of the town no longer exists. Ella’s father, Jonathan Ogden Sherwood, was a true California pioneer, having traveled from New York to seek fortune and adventure during the California Gold Rush and the economic boom that followed in the area. He eventually came to own a massive ranch near the American River called The Buckeye Ranch, and there he raised cows and grew vast orchards of fruit and nuts. Ella’s mother was Jonathan’s second wife as he’d been a widower when he married Susan Emeline Woods in 1869 so when Ella was born she had four older half-siblings. 

Growing up I scanned past the few images of Ella as a young woman glued in an old family photo album, pages of 2” X 3” black and white photos probably taken with a Kodak Brownie, the ubiquitous camera of the day.  One photo taken shortly before she died in 1930 is an image of a tired, tiny, and worn woman who looks decades older than her 58 years. At the time this photo was taken Ella’s children are both dead as is her husband. 




Details of Ella’s childhood are left to theory and imagination. She went to school. Her father had donated the land and building supplies for the local schoolhouse years earlier. He also hired the first school teacher who ended up becoming his first wife. Census records state that Ella could read and write. Having spent my own childhood summers during the 1970s in South Sacramento on the same property where my great-grandfather lit the aforementioned bonfire, I imagine Ella on her father’s ranch in the 1870s breathing in the dusty dry air mixed with the scent of fruit ripening in the orchards, and seeking refuge from the scorching afternoon sun. Perhaps she and my great-grandmother sat in the shade of a giant oak tree and read, or cooled their feet on the banks of the river. A Sacramento City Directory from 1893 lists Ella as living in downtown Sacramento on 12th St., between K and L Streets with her older half-sister at an address that today is the site of a Hyatt Regency Hotel. Her occupation is listed as “student”. 

In 1907, around the age of 34, Ella married Charles Eskridge, a man 13 years her senior. There are two photos of Charles Eskridge in the old family photo album. One photo is of Charles in an open field, taken from a distance. He is standing with two horses, one on each side of him. Even from a distance one can tell that he is weather-worn and dirt-covered from working in the sun and soil.  Ella and Charles settled in an area east of Sacramento known as Brighton. It was here in 1910 that their first child, Wayne, was born. Three years later a daughter named Helen was born, and here is where Ella’s notable heartbreak begins. Helen lived just five days. 


The infant mortality rate through the early 20th century was approximately 135 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to The Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Additional information from the National Center for Biotechnology Information website states that  “In 1900 30% of all deaths in the U.S. occurred in children less than five years of age.” Anyone who strolls through cemeteries established before the turn of the last century will notice a sobering number of graves belonging to infants and small children. The death certificate for Helen Eskridge states her cause of death as “stomach had no outlet.” Therefore, it would seem that Ella, not knowing exactly what was wrong with her newborn daughter, had to stand by helplessly and witness her baby girl starve to death. Although California in 1913 is still very much the wild west where life was known to be brutish and short, surely Ella grieved her loss, but this would only be the beginning of Ella's grief.


We can imagine that Ella turns her attention toward her remaining child Wayne as solace, but in 1919 a freakish accident would take him from her. Newspaper accounts differ slightly. One says that while climbing outside by himself in a nearby fig  tree, Wayne somehow managed to get his head stuck in the crotch of two branches and could not extricate himself. Another account claims he managed to get tangled in wire. The death certificate lists Wayne’s cause of death as “strangulation.” His parents discovered him hanging in the tree in what had to have been a horrifying scene and a nightmare from which poor Ella could never awaken. I imagine Ella and Charles living out their remaining years in silence, not knowing how to wade through the unspeakable sadness that descended on their home. 

Charles died  seven years after Wayne, and Ella died four years after her husband.  The 1930 census shows Ella living in El Dorado County, California. Her occupation is listed as “stock hand,” but the truth is she owned two ranches in Folsom and took care of both.  According to The Sacramento Bee, at around 6:00 in the evening on November 21, 1930, Ella Sherwood Eskridge was found dead in a barn on one of her ranches. Her body was discovered by a trapper who stayed on the property. It was not clear how long her body had been there, but the general conclusion was that she had been struck by a cow. The article states her age as 50, but she was in fact 57. I can’t help but wonder if her death was quick or if she lingered. I pray she did not suffer, and I hate that she died alone. Her funeral took place on the morning of Tuesday, November 25, 1930 in Folsom at the Oscar J. Miller “undertaking parlor”, most likely attended by very few besides her sister Etta Cooper, and her half-brother Harry Sherwood. 

The Eskridge family is buried side-by-side in the Mormon Island Relocation Cemetery in the hills of El Dorado County, a cemetery that has an interesting story of its own. The ranches that Ella owned, as well as the tree that her only son accidentally hung himself in, disappeared into the watery underworld of Folsom Lake, a reservoir formed by the building of the Folsom Dam in 1955 to retain some of the flow of the American River. 

At the time of Ella’s death the country was one year into The Great Depression. Drought conditions began on the Great Plains that would eventually send thousands west in search of respite from the Dust Bowl.  Prohibition was in effect, and war would soon ensue in Europe and eventually the rest of the world.

Ella’s face, in what may have been the last photograph of her ever taken, gives me pause. Her world was so different from mine and her face and posture reflect the tragedies she had endured. Yet, she kept going, working her ranches alone, until she died alone, and almost a century later there are no direct descendants to remember her, except for a distant niece whose curiosity always gets the best of her. The next time I am in the Sacramento area visiting the stomping grounds of my ancestors I am going to make a  special trip to the graveside of Ella and her family. I want to tell Ella that her life mattered, that it had meaning. Her hard work mattered because it matters to me all these years later. Her suffering mattered because I remember what strong stock I come from when things in my own life get rough or when I happen to glance at the photo of her son Wayne which now hangs in my home.


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