"The School of Experience has been a good teacher," said the
94-year-old retired surveyor, Solomon David Moss of Kensett, Arkansas. Just
three years after the close of the Civil War, on November 3, 1868, Mr. Moss was
born near the mouth of Little Red River, about 10 miles from Kensett, at a place
now known as the "Nimo Place."
Reconstruction days in Arkansas brought bitter hardships, and
Mr. and Mrs. G. L Moss, Solomon's parents, decided that in Missouri life might
be a little less difficult. So in 1872, they loaded all their possessions and
the family into the covered tarpole wagon, hitched to it their team of huge,
long-horned oxen and started the trip into Missouri.
The first night out they pitched their camp at Whitney's Lane,
a Civil War battleground located about a mile northeast of Kensett. Although he
was just a small child, Mr. Moss remembers seeing his first locomotive there. He
recalls that it was an old wood-burning engine that had been abandoned after the
savage encounter seven or eight years previously, and that it was his first
glimpse of a powered machine. "But," he quickly added as an afterthought, "of
course, those old steamboats used to pass our home occasionally."
The next night the family stopped at the home of an uncle, who
lived about three miles west of Searcy. Here, for one reason or another, they
remained for about a month. In the meantime, the father decided that the trip to
Missouri was far too difficult, tiresome and hazardous for the family to
undertake at the present time. He searched around and found an unimproved farm
in the southwestern part of the county that he thought would make a good farm.
It was located in what is now known as the Gravel Hill community.
>With the help of the uncle, the elder Moss quickly erected a
very substantial and comfortable log cabin and moved his family into its new
home. Nearby he set up a sawmill, using an old engine he had salvaged from a
sunken steamboat. He repaired the engine and rigged it with a nine-foot drive
wheel.
During those early days in Arkansas, every member of the
family had to work, even the very young. And young Sol was put to work chopping
out the underbrush and helping to pile the brush as the trees were cleared from
the farmlands. With the coming of spring this small boy was assigned the task of
hitching up the huge, ferocious oxen and helping to break the newly cleared
ground. With the help of his mother he planted the cotton, corn, potatoes and
other vegetables needed by the family for its food and clothing supply. This
youngster was out of bed, breakfasted, and in the fields ready for work at the
very first streaks of light in the morning and he continued to work there in the
evenings as long as there was light enough to see to do the work.
About this time his father and the neighbors in the community pooled their
resources, erected a little log schoolhouse and hired a teacher to come in and
teach their children. Three months out of each year the children attended the
school. Solomon made rapid progress and soon he had completed four of the
McGuffey Readers. He was among the very best in cyphering.
"What a promotion!" Sol thought when his father told the 12-year old lad that he
thought he was old enough to help him at the sawmill. Here his first job was to
stack the lumber as it came off the saw. He was soon promoted to the job of
setting the head blocks. When he had learned these jobs to the satisfaction of
his father, he was put to firing the boiler and running the engine.
"The s-c-h-u-g-g s-c-h-u-g-g of that old long-stroke engine
was the sweetest music to my ears," Mr. Moss mused, closing his eyes and leaning
back in his chair. It was not long before the slender youth had mastered every
phase of the sawmill work, and throughout his life, he found that the days spent
toiling and learning the sawmill business were very profitable for their lessons
in mechanics, economy and even in cyphering.
In 1883, G. R. Moss decided that it was time for his children
to get the advantages of public school, so he moved to Searcy. Sol, with his
brothers and sisters, entered the Searcy Public School that fall, to learn that
only three of the 250 pupils in the two-room, three-teacher school were ahead of
him in cyphering and the McGuffey Readers. He continued his studies during the
six-month term of school. (This was all the public school held each year at this
time.) In the evenings and on Saturdays he helped in the gristmill and sawmill
his father founded in Searcy.
The next summer, the energetic young Moss took a job
delivering water from the White Sulphur Springs just south of the village to the
seven business establishments that made up the business district of the town of
Searcy. For this he was paid a nickel per pail. Before the summer was over, he
learned that the first village lamplighter had resigned, and he applied for and
became Searcy 's second lamplighter. Each evening he would take his stepladder
and a torch, climb up to each of the kerosene lamps and light it. Each morning
he would again take the ladder, climb up and extinguish each of the 15 street
lamps.
Captain D. W. Lear, father of the late Mrs. Joseph T. Robinson, was seeking a
reliable young man to help him make some surveys in the county. This was a
challenge to Sol. He asked for the job and got it. Under Captain Lear's thorough
instructions and by his own application, he soon mastered surveying and became
one of the outstanding surveyors in the State of Arkansas.
Odus Smith relates that his father hired Mr. Moss to do some surveying for him
about 1906. The lands were pretty much of a wilderness. But Mr. Moss set up his
instruments, studied his notes briefly, and then told the youthful helper to
measure 250 feet to the southwest. There he would find large red oak tree. "Chop
into the south side of the tree, about three feet above the ground," Moss
instructed, "and there you will find the bench marks."
Doing as he was directed, Smith was very much astonished and
impressed when he cut into the tree, and about three inches beneath the bark of
the tree, he found the huge letters "B H."
For many years Mr. Moss served White County as surveyor, and
even today, after several years of retirement, he is often sought out in
problems of property boundaries and markings. His thorough knowledge of
surveying, of White County and its properties are still a very valuable asset to
the county. His more than 60 field books are on file in the County Clerk's
office and will keep his work and influence alive for many years to come.
As he reflected on his very full and useful life, his eyes twinkled as he said again, "Yes, the School of Experience is a very good teacher."