My grandfather, Colby Hammon (1850-1918), his wife, Laura (Lambert) Hammon (1856--abt 1901), and Laura's mother, Mary (Brown) Lambert, (1815-1905), along with their children, Mary, Frank, Jessie, John, Emma, Ellen, Colby Jr., and Randol were early residents of Poinsett County. Colby, Laura, Frank, Emma, Jessie, Colby Jr., and Randol are buried in the Fisher cemetery. All in unmarked graves except for Randol.
They made the move from Randolph County, Missouri, by covered wagon, to a homestead place on the Bayou de View near Fisher in 1894. They moved not only for the homestead land, but mainly because the burgeoning railroad industry had a voracious appetite for cross-ties and the year around going price at the time, was twenty cents apiece for Ties delivered to the railhead in Fisher. From 1900 until 1912, my father, John, hunted to supply meat for the men in the timber camps. I have an audio tape of him briefly telling about once having to climb a tree to escape a pack of Red Wolves after he had killed a deer near the "upper lake". He was also hired to patrol the vast hardwood forests of Poinsett County in an attempt to thwart timber hijackers. He was a terrific narrator of family history and the experiences they had after the family moved to Poinsett County from "the state of misery" (Missouri). His close friends in his youth were John and George Horst, and especially John Jackson, who married his sister Ellen.
John Hammon married my mother, Nellie Sadler (1897-1995) in 1912. He was 27 and she was 14. That age difference at marriage was not at all uncommon in the sparsely populated areas of that era. The news of the sinking of the Titanic had just recently reached the community. Among other historic events on the day they spoke of the devastation of the "Spanish flu" pandemic which decimated their community around Fisher. Grandpa Colby was one of it's victims.