Life Story of William
(Bill) Jasper Hildebrand
William was the oldest son of eleven children and was born
on September 26, 1893 in Tuscumbia, Miller County, Missouri to Joseph Henry
Hildebrand and Ida Bell Witt.
Bill’s father, Joseph Henry, was a lumber worker and
carpenter and taught Bill from the time he could hold an axe in his hands how
to use it. Bill’s parents, Joseph Henry
and Ida Bell, moved to a place they homesteaded in Texas County, Missouri. Bill had to walk several miles to
school. When the weather was nice, he
worked with his father, but when it was too cold to work the timber, he went to
school. Under these conditions, he was
only able to finish the third grade.
Even so, Bill became very adept at arithmetic. He understood square feet, cubic feet, rods,
miles, quarters, and what a section of land was. He could calculate equations, find area
measurements, and evaluate mathematical terms better than most young people his
age, even though they had more formal education. He could look at a section of land with
timber and was able to estimate quite accurately how many square feet of timber
could be harvested. He could work a hand
grain sickle, and was a master at farming using a horse and handmade
tools. While his practical skills and
his accomplishments in math soared, his reading skills were not very good. He did, however, learn to read the Bible and
understood it. Bill grew in stature and
even though he wasn’t a huge man, standing a little less than six feet, he
became very strong and could man handle most others in a good arm wrestling
competition.
He met and married Sadie Alice Barnhart when he was
twenty-four years old on July 15, 1917.
She was a beautiful young girl of the ripe old age of fifteen. To show
how thoughtful and practical Bill was their first Christmas, he bought his
bride a set of long underwear to keep her warm.
Sadie cried because she was really hoping for something more feminine,
such as jewelry or silk stockings. His
thinking was: You buy what is needed.
Over the years the Christmases were very enjoyable and they had to be
practical as everyone in that era of time was.
They always had a tree and lots of love, good will, and homemade
decorations.
Their first child, Lenora Pearl, was born the next
June. When Pearl was born they lived in
a log home. Bill worked at all sorts of
jobs to make a living. In the winter he
caught furbearing animals and sold their pelts to supplement their income. When World War I broke out, he went into the
army, leaving his young wife and their baby behind. He only served three months because the war
ended. Bill said that they ended the war
when they heard that he was in the army.
When he returned home, he went about his usual chores. Not long after Bill returned from the war,
little Pearl came down with scarlet fever.
They almost lost her. It was a
trying time for Bill and Sadie.
Three years after Pearl’s birth, a son, Lindsey Arthur was
born. Now Bill had a son who would grow
up to help him clear the land. Bill
bought 120 acres of timber land with no buildings on it. He built a three room house out of rough
lumber that he sawed off his own land.
For a living, he made railroad ties with a broad axe or a buck saw, and
carried the ties on his shoulders out of a rough ravine and loaded them on to a
wagon. Back breaking work. When he was having back problems in his later
years, a doctor said, “When you were young, or sometime during your life did
you have to lift some heavy objects?”
Bill just looked at him and said, “I don’t think so.”
Bill eventually cleared the 120 acres and made a good
producing farm out of it. All the
buildings on the place were built by him.
The barn was built from his own logs.
He made the fanciest gate latches anyone could have ever of hoped to
see. He dug ponds with a horse drawn
scoop so there would be water for the live stock. There were a total of four ponds on the 120
acres. He hand dug a cistern for the
family’s water supply. It was about
twenty or thirty feet deep and he cemented the sides and bottom. A drop bucket, tied to a rope, drew the water
up from the cistern. To keep the water
pure, he built a filter system of charcoal, sand and gravel that the water
filtered through as it went into the cistern when it drained the rain fall from
the gutters around the roof of the house.
He built a storm cellar with a smokehouse on top, so the family would
find shelter from the tornadoes. Food
was also stored in the cellar.
Bill butchered his own hogs and wild animals that the family
ate, curing his hams and bacon in the smokehouse. He stretched and tanned the hides of all wild
animals and then sold them making extra cash.
Four years after Lindsey was born, Bill and Sadie’s third
child, Thelma Marie, came along. They
all felt the crunch of the small house, so Bill closed in the back porch and
made another room. Three years later, on
Bill’s birthday, their third daughter, Lela Mae was born. It didn’t take long to realize that Lela Mae
should have been a boy. She was the busiest
little girl imaginable and was always going here and there and could not sit
still.
Bill and Sadie were devout Christians. Traveling preachers, ministers, and
missionaries who passed through the area were always invited to stay with
them. It was not unusual to have some
stay for a month or longer. Bill and
Sadie’s home was the closest to the Long Hollow Church where revivals were
held.
Missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (Mormon) eventually traveled through the area and Bill became quite
adept at discussing religious concepts with the Mormon missionaries. Eventually, in late October, Bill, Sadie, and
Pearl were baptized members of the Mormon Church in an icy pond near their
home. Bill and Sadie’s home became the
meeting house where worship services were held.
At the time there were four families in the county that were members of
the Mormon faith. The missionaries kept
encouraging Bill to move his family to Utah so his kids could meet and marry
other church members. Try as they would,
Bill would not be moved from his home state of Missouri.
Bill did teach the adult Sunday school class for many, many
years. Because there was only one
organized congregation in the area for miles and miles around, Bill was not
made an elder in the church for several years.
Thus he was not able to baptize his own children. He did, however, baptize his grandson, David
Smith, the youngest son of Lela Mae.
Bill never worked on Sundays, except chores that had to be
done. Sunday was a day of serious
scripture reading and being with family and visiting the sick. If anyone ever came to see Bill on any other
day of the week, they would find him busy and would have to follow him around
while he plowed, picked up rocks, cut timber, or whatever else he was tending
to.
In the summer the family would sit out in the yard until the
house cooled off. They would watch the
falling stars and the lightning bugs, talk about the heavens, the planets, the
Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and find the North Star, the Seven Little
Sisters and the Milky Way. In the
winter, Bill gathered his family around the dining room table and read and
discussed various pieces of literature including, but not limited to, the Holy
Scriptures.
Bill was also a grave digger, and as such, was quite
proficient with dynamite. Many areas in
the Ozarks are comprised of large, solid pieces of rock, sometimes as large as
a big room. Without the knowledge and expertise
of explosives, digging graves can be a very difficult, if not impossible,
undertaking. (No pun intended.)
Bill also drove a school bus for several years and he also
graded roads in that township with a horse-drawn grader. In 1949, he purchased the first tractor in the
county. It was very intense and at times
a little frightening to learn how to drive the tractor and actually farm with
it. He also bought a milking machine,
which sped up the milking process exponentially. Until then, the cows were all milked by hand,
which was a long, difficult, tedious job.
In 1930 the depression had the country on its knees. Bill bid on a mail route for the US Postal
Service and after receiving word that his bid was accepted, he came to the
realization that he was going to have to get a more reliable form of
transportation. He purchased a Model-A
Ford pickup and moved his family to Plato, Missouri. The postal job was a four year contract and
Bill never missed a day of delivering the mail during that four year
commitment.
In 1931 his youngest son, Loran Jasper, was born. Loran was not an easy delivery for Sadie, as
he weighed in at fourteen plus pounds.
When his four year contract with the Postal Service expired,
he bought a general merchandise store in Upton, Missouri for $300. He sold everything a household needed from
candy to chicken feed, gasoline for cars and kerosene for lamps. There was a cream room in the store where
locals brought their cream to sell. Bill
hired a man take care of that part of the operation. The store managing only lasted for one
year. He missed the farm. He came to the realization that a farmer was
what he was and he didn’t really want to do anything else but work and till the
ground. He sold the store for $300 and a
team of horses and a small herd of cows and went back to the farm, which he
still owned.
He busied himself building a mill to grind grains of all
kinds. He could now make his own
cornmeal, and his own animal feed. There
were a couple of hundred chickens to feed, several hogs, sheep, cows and
horses. He also had a blacksmith shop,
and was his own smithy. He was ingenious
enough to build his own bellows to fan the smithy’s flame. He also designed and built a contraption
called a shaving horse. This machine
made shingles in which he used to shingle the buildings he built. They were smooth and reliable and as
professional looking as the ones purchased at the store.
At his blacksmith shop he shod horses for everyone for miles
around, ground the grain for neighbors to feed their animals, and did his own
sheep shearing. He built his own
beehives and would watch for swarms of bees in the spring and early summer. He would put them into his hives and set them
on his farm to make honey for his family.
Bill enjoyed his bees throughout his life. Bill could be seen tending his bees when he
was in his 90’s. He designed and built
his own honey extractor that worked as well, if not better than the store
bought brands. Bill’s extractor would
allow the sun to separate the honey from the comb and designed it so the honey
would drain down into the jars to be preserved.
Bill suffered from heat stroke on two different occasions while
in the field tending to chores on the farm.
They were severe enough that both times he was bed ridden and doctors
and family members were afraid they were going to lose him at any time. Because Bill was as tough as those nails he
had his children straighten, and because he was a fighter, he recovered and was
back in the fields working his farm.
Bill may not have been the best patient a nurse ever attended to, but
that did not deter his commitment to helping others who were sick. It was nothing for Bill to go miles to fetch a
doctor in order to deliver a baby. He
would sit up with children all night long so the rest of the family could
rest. He helped nurse his family though tonsillitis,
toothaches, earaches, pneumonia, split heads, bruises and cuts without the aid
of a doctor. His medical prowess did not
end with his family. He even treated his
own animals, for the expenses of a veterinarian were considered a luxury.
Bill considered his animals, especially his horses, as
extended members of his family. He had a
beautiful horse named Barney. Barney was
a large hard working draft horse. He was
very intelligent and a friend to all. At
one point in Barney’s life he came down with the horse version of sleeping
sickness. While Bill was a proud, stoic
man, he actually broke down and cried when he thought Barney was going to
die. He built a sling out of small trees
that he cut and trimmed down to make poles.
He made braces to hold the poles up and used burlap sacks and ropes to
make the sling that held the horse up so he wouldn’t lie down and die. Bill sat up at night with the horse to keep
him awake, and the children took turns keeping the horse awake during the
day. A young neighbor boy brought his
old guitar and Lindsey, Pearl and Thelma would sing as the neighbor accompanied
them. Barney lived through the whole
ordeal even though the Vet told Bill the horse wouldn’t make it through the
week. Many personal and family prayers
went up for Barney during that critical week.
As busy as Bill was tending to his farm, he managed to find
time to work on behalf of the community as well. He served on the school board at Long Hollow
School for many years and did most of the hiring of the teachers and choosing of
the text books the children used for their lessons.
In 1938, Bill bought a big two-story house and promptly tore
it down and had his children straighten the nails that came out of the boards
so he could re-use them. A practice
which would not even be considered in today’s world. He hauled the torn down house by wagon to his
home, which was about two and a half miles away. He then built three rooms on to his
house. Now there were four bedrooms, a
large upstairs room, a dining room, and a large living room.
A few years after the additions were built World War II
broke out and he and Sadie would have several army camp boarders at a time
while Fort Leonard Wood was being built.
Bill worked at the Fort and Sadie worked there during the war while her
oldest son, Lindsey was fighting in Germany.
The oldest daughter, Pearl, came to stay with them while her husband,
Milton, fought in the South Pacific.
During World War II Bill bought his first radio and operated
it on a wet cell car battery. The family
was very limited to what they could listen to as he wanted to listen to the war
news every night. He traded a cow for a
windmill and used the wind-power to keep the battery charged. Bill thought if the volume was turned up, it
would use more energy, so the family had to sit very close to the radio and
remain quiet so they could hear what was being said.
Bill was a typical woodworker and experienced some of the
challenges that most woodworkers face during their working years. While he was able to keep himself safe from
serious accidents, he was missing part of one finger. This happened in 1952. A windstorm had blown the grain stalks down
and he was out in the field trying desperately to save the crop. Lela Mae was driving the combine. Weeds were choking up the sickle, so Lela
stopped the combine so her father could un-choke the sickle that by this time
had frozen up from its heavy load. When
he finally pulled the sickle free, he didn’t get his hand away from the sickle
blades in time and soon part of the grain harvest included the upper portion of
his right pointer finger. Bill
considered this incident a minor accident, as he still had nine and a half
fingers left to do the job.
Bill and Sadie and the children had moved a total of four
times, all within Texas County, Missouri, during the years the children were
growing up. Now all the kids were grown
and all living in California except Pearl, who lived for a time in Arkansas
before finally moving to California, as well.
Eventually Sadie’s health started to fail her and they decided to move
to California to be closer to their children.
Bill became close friends with a man from the church who helped Bill get
a job as a ranch caretaker and Sadie a ranch hand cook on the Faye Creek Ranch
near Weldon, California. Sadie’s health
continued to decline, so they moved from the ranch back into Bakersfield where
Bill became the custodian and gardener for the church building and
grounds. Not long afterwards, Sadie’s
health was critical enough that Bill had to give up his custodian job so he
could spend more time with her. Bill did
manage to buy a burned-damaged house and completely restore it. He made a rental unit out of it to supplement
their income.
Finally, on March 10, 1971, after more than fifty years together,
Bill lost his beloved wife, Sadie. He
said he was relieved, because he knew the diabetes that she had fought for so
many years would not hurt her anymore.
With urging from his children, Bill began seeing a widowed
lady named Sybil Dunaway. With Bill
almost in his eighties and Sybil nearly the same age, they surprised several
friends when they announced their engagement and were soon married in
1972.
Bill’s favorite sports when growing up were playing
baseball, wrestling, gigging for fish, and hunting possums, coons, and
deer. In his later years, he became a
master at checkers, dominoes, and rook.
If you ever decided to sit down with Bill and challenge him to a game of
rook, you needed to be prepared for a battle.
He was tenacious in his competitions. While Bill was an avid board game and card
game fan, he never gambled. The story is
told of how his youngest son, Lorin and his wife took Bill and Sybil on a trip
to Reno. Loran had given both Bill and
Sybil a role of nickels to play the slot machines. Everyone eventually lost their roll of coins
to the one-arm-bandits except Bill. He
came home with his roll of coins intact in his coat pocket.
Bill was also an accomplished harmonica player. He was often called upon to play at family
gatherings and at other social gatherings.
Jig dancing and Square dancing were two things that Bill enjoyed and
became very accomplished at.
Bill has seen the coming of cars, the locomotive, airplanes,
jets, rockets, and space shuttles. He
was invited to see the first shuttle landing at Edwards Air Force Base and sat
up front to see that beautiful bird land so gracefully. He made two airplane flights and thought
riding in a jet was just too fast. “You
can’t see anything.” He preferred riding
the train or going in a car.
Bill was also a man of deep integrity. During the depression he was never on
government aid. He always owned a car.
His family never thought they were poor.
They ate like kings and there was always an abundant amount of love and
all the clothes they needed. He and
Sadie were the first people in the area to own a gas-powered washing machine,
which their daughter, Pearl, bought for them.
They were also the first family to own a gas iron and a gas lamp. There was one time in Bill’s life that it
became necessary to borrow some money.
He was not asked to sign a note.
In fact when Bill asked the man where he was supposed to sign, the man
looked at Bill and chuckled. “You don’t
need to sign anything,” he told him. “Your
word is good enough in these parts.”
Bill kept himself busy as he grew older and older. Even in his 90’s, Bill could be seen working on
one of the lawn mowers he had purchased at a garage sale, getting it tuned up
so it could be resold to someone in need of a good running machine. In between garage sales and rebuilding small
engines, he managed to keep a hearty winter and summer garden that was the envy
of everyone in the neighborhood.
Bill and Sadie had five children, twenty-one grandchildren, and
many great grandchildren. Through Sybil,
he has seven step children, twenty eight step grand children and many more step
great grand children.
To sum up the life of William Jasper Hildebrand, he was a
lumber jack, carpenter, gardener, farmer, miller, inventor, bus driver, mail
man, store owner, grave digger, mechanic, electrician, veterinarian,
blacksmith, sheep herder and shearer, butcher, ranch caretaker, building
custodian, well digger, landscaper, and small engine repairman. It should be noted that as a blacksmith, Bill also
made picks, shovels, hoes, plow points, and repaired iron wagon wheels. In short, there wasn’t much Bill could not
do.
If one could ask Bill today, what his greatest
accomplishment was in life, he would say without hesitation…being a father to
my children and a husband to my wife.
Bill left this life in March of 1991 at the age of 98.
This overview of the life of William Jasper Hildebrand was
compiled by his grandson Charles Hildebrand, oldest son of Lindsey Arthur
Hildebrand, who was Bill and Sadie’s oldest son. The contents of this bio was gathered by
reviewing other materials written and published by various family and friends as
well as word of mouth stories recalled by the author.
