The Widow Adkins
On the evening of May 3, 1890, James Wiley Adkins, 31, left an Elm Street saloon called the Blue Front* and headed home to his family in West Dallas. Unwisely, he attempted to cross the Texas and Pacific trestle at the Trinity River just as a train was backing up.
A rail worker reported hearing a loud splash, but it was a full week before folks standing on the bridge at Commerce Street spotted a corpse floating in the river. One observer secured a boat and brought the body to the banks.
Not only was Adkins’ chin “mashed in,” reported The Dallas Morning News, but his body was “so swollen that the lid of the coffin could not be closed.”
Adkins was a 31-year-old harness maker for Tenison Brothers Saddlery Company. The husband and father of three had promised his wife, Maggie, he wouldn’t drink when he went into town that Saturday night, a family acquaintance told the press, adding that Adkins “always kept his word.”
Nonetheless, when authorities pulled Adkins from the river, they found on his body a bottle of whisky, a broken bottle, a beer check and 50 cents. Remembered in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette as a “steady, hard-working man,” it was also noted that he left a wife and children in “needy circumstances.”
Waiting that week at home for news of her husband’s fate, Maggie (nee Cloyd) Adkins, tended to Wiley James, 5; Harry, 3; and Dollie, 3 months. Their need for meals and baths and playtime likely distracted the very worried wife and mother. It was one thing, after all, to lose a husband; it was another to imagine a future with three children and no provider.
It may have been easy for Maggie to imagine such a scenario. When she was six, her father Phillip Cloyd, a Tennessee-born mechanic, died at age 45 in Camden, Arkansas. Her mother, Rebecca Mary (nee Ives) was left alone to raise their four little girls: Nannie, Maggie, Callie and Effie.
The girls’ mother did as many young widows and widowers have done: She found another spouse. Rebecca, 25, and G.W. Cupinall, a 31-year-old carpenter, married in 1867. The 1870 census shows them living in Camden with their three-year-old son, as well as Rebecca’s four girls and her 60-year-old mother.
It was likely Cupinall who decided the family would become Texans. A Canadian farmer who fought for the Union in the American Civil War, Cupinall was accustomed to staying on the move. Tax rolls put him in the growing city of Dallas as early as 1878, where his skills as a carpenter undoubtedly kept him employed.
He wasn’t the only working family member. In 1880, Maggie’s younger sister, Callie, then 16, was a servant in the Griffith Street home of Moses D. Garlington, who parlayed his success as a merchant into a fortune estimated at $1 million at the time of his death in 1894.
Callie possibly parlayed her employment as Garlington’s servant into marriage to one of his employees: In 1881, when she was 17, Callie married a Swede named John Swenson, a 22-year-old store clerk. Callie beat her big sister, Maggie, to the altar by three years: Maggie Cloyd and James Wiley Adkins married in 1884.
Maggie likely turned to the Swensons during that agonizing week of not knowing her husband’s whereabouts; she surely sought their comfort after learning he was dead.
Did she have to identify the body of the man she loved? Did she witness the effects of his long submersion — the way gases released during decomposition caused his body to expand until it finally rose to the surface of the Trinity River? Or did her sister and brother-in-law spare her that ghastly sight?
Maggie had much to bear. Married only six years, she was a widow at 30; her children were fatherless. It’s unclear what happened immediately after Adkins’ death. Certainly, Maggie’s family would have offered a hand. It’s possible Tenison Brothers stepped up to help their employee’s survivors. It’s also possible Adkins left his wife and children with no more ready cash than the 50 cents found on his bloated corpse.
With no census records available in the key years (1890–1899), Maggie and young Wiley, Harry and Dollie seemingly vanished for a time. Happily, three of the four re-appeared in the 1900 census. Wiley, 15, was a resident of the State Orphan Home three miles west of Corsicana; the census notes that he could read and write. It’s unclear where Wiley’s younger brother, Harry, resided in 1900.
That same census reports that Maggie married Lewis Washington “Wash” Wells in 1884. That date must be a transcription error caused by the census taker’s poor penmanship, since Maggie was married to Adkins that year. Maggie and Wash’s wedding date more likely was 1894, which aligns with the ages of the children living with them in 1900.
Wash Wells was a machinist 10 years younger than his bride. In 1900, they shared their home on Chestnut Street in Dallas with 10-year-old Dollie, the youngest of the Adkins’ three children, and Minnie Wells, born to Maggie and Wash in 1896. The couple added a son, Eddie Bobbin Wells, in 1902.
And then — as if ordained that none of her children would be allowed to have both father and mother throughout childhood — Maggie Cloyd Adkins Wells died April 23, 1907. She was 47 years old.
She is buried in an unmarked grave in Dallas’s Oakland Cemetery.
Wash Wells carried on for a time. In 1910, he was living alone in a Main Street boarding house, working as a machinist in a mattress factory. It’s unclear where his and Maggie’s daughter, Minnie, then 14, and son Eddie, 8, were. By 1920, however, he had remarried, and Eddie not only resided with his father and step-mother, he worked as a laborer in the mattress factory.
At the time of his death in 1930, Wash was a widower for a second time. He moved in with son Eddie and his wife and two children in the Eagle Ford community of West Dallas. He was working as a night watchman when, at 60, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. It seems Maggie was drawn to men whose fondness for liquor proved fatal.
Eddie’s big sister, Minnie, may have been living in north Texas when their father died. What is known is that she and husband J.P. Kelley had made Mineral Wells their home by 1942. J.P. worked as a warehouse foreman at Camp Wolters, a nearby military installation where, ironically, both Audie Murphy, the most highly decorated hero of World War II, and Eddie Slovik, famously executed for desertion, did their basic training.
In the late 1940’s, J.P. worked as a bartender in town; by 1953, he and Minnie owned and operated the cafe at the Handy Drive Inn west of town. In 1955, Minnie died, at age 57. Oddly, since brother Eddie lived another 15 years, her obituary named her husband as her only survivor. The couple apparently had no children.
The last-born of Maggie’s five children, Eddie, seems to have worked hardest at maintaining contact with not only his father, but with his half-siblings, an obvious extension of Maggie, the mother he lost when he was only five. His obituary names three survivors: his son, Freddie, and his half-brothers, Wiley and Harry Adkins.
It’s easy to imagine that Eddie Wells felt a kinship with Wiley Adkins: Sons of the same mother, they both lost a parent at age 5. For Wiley, of course, it was his father, a growing boy’s role model. Despite that, he seemingly had a good life, as did his younger brother, Harry.
In 1907 — the same year his mother died — Wiley Adkins fully entered adult life: He married Belle Webster and their son, Haskell, was born. By 1910, Belle was tending two boys on the family’s rented farm in Stratford, Oklahoma. The couple named their second-born Harry, after his uncle. Apparently, Wiley was sentimental that way. When their first girl came along, he honored his half-brother Eddie Wells by naming her Eddie Lee. A second daughter, Elva, joined them in 1926.
Wiley and Belle remained in Oklahoma, and only death did them part. When Wiley died in 1954, at age 70, they had been married 47 years. According to his obituary, he and Belle had 13 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. He named as one of his survivors his half-brother, Eddie Wells.
Maggie’s second-born son, Harry, also wound up in Oklahoma after his father’s death. In 1918–19, he served in World War I (Company A, 357 Infantry). Soon after resuming life stateside, he married Edna Smith; the two settled on a farm in Garvin County, Oklahoma, and produced two daughters, Naomi and Jewel, and one son, Edward Jackson. Was their boy’s name another nod to half-brother Eddie?
By 1950, Harry was living in a heavily female household — his divorced daughter Jewel and her three daughters shared his household — and he had forsaken farming to work as a warehouse repairman at the Carbon Black plant in Hobbs, New Mexico. Five years later, Harry and Edna were back home in Garvin County, Oklahoma. Harry died there in 1962, at age 75.
Neither James Wiley Adkins nor his widow Maggie would live long enough to know their sons forsook Texas for Oklahoma, enjoyed more than four decades of marriage, nurtured children and grandchildren in their homes, and went to their graves as septuagenarians. Despite their losses as little boys, Wiley and Harry Adkins lived full adult lives.
And what of little Dollie? She was in the world scarcely 3 months when her father drowned in the Trinity River; she was motherless by age 17. Was her life as an adult as rewarding as her brothers’?
As is often the case with women in any ancestry search, their fathers, brothers, and husbands are better documented. That’s certainly true of Dollie.
She married a man named Dee Price Duff in December 12, 1912, in Dallas County. City directories show he was a Dallas metal worker, a “tinner,” as early as 1904. In July 1918, he was inducted into the U.S. Army as a private in the 9th Division, 68th Texas Infantry, Company G and honorably discharged in February 1919.
A decade later, Dee and Dollie were living in Fort Worth, where he was employed as a sheet metal worker. By 1932, the Duffs had returned to Dallas. Dee died of heart disease in 1941, at age 50.
The Duffs were divorced some time before 1941. And, Dee suffered not only from the disease that killed him, but he also was diagnosed with “psychosis with psychopathic personality,” which contributed to his death. He was buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio.
There is no indication that Dee and Dollie had children. And these details in Dee’s death certificate suggest that Dollie, in fact, did not have the stable marriage her brothers enjoyed. It’s unclear whether she remarried and where she is buried.
NOTES: Opened by a German immigrant in 1877, the Blue Front first was a bar where sandwiches were sold. It grew into a full restaurant that remained in business in downtown Dallas until 1992, making it the city’s oldest eatery.
The spelling of Maggie’s maiden name Cloyd: Cloud is a common variant, and Claud is a variant found on her father’s grave.
Maggie’s sister, Callie, and her husband, J.E. Swenson, are buried at Oakland Cemetery in Dallas. Swenson, who died in May 1908, is buried in section 7, tier 0, space G-1. Callie Swenson died of uterine cancer in 1911, and she rests in section 18, tier 9, space 31 G. In addition, Dee Duff’s grandmother, Julia Gardner, who died in 1907, is buried at Oakland, in section 8, upper tier 4, grave #24.
