Uncle Dan rememembers our grandmother, Florence Estelle Bard Harden

Florence and Paul Harden with their seven children in 1942.

Here is the second part of Dan's family memories:



“Our mother was born in Topeka on February 1, 1899. Her parents were Daniel Elgin Bard (1866-1939) and Harriet (Hattie) Louisa Mills Bard (1866-1950). Elgin, her father, bought a farm in Clark County in 1906. The 1910 census shows the following family members living on the farm: Elgin, Hattie, Pearl, Glenn, Florence and Laura. Blanche and Clyde are missing from the list. I suppose they are married at this time.

Florence graduated from high school in Protection in 1918. Her father had built a house on Main Street in 1913. Florence attended “Normal,” a preparatory course for teachers. She taught Harmony school, east of Protection, the following year. Florence went to Lindsborg, where she studied music and sang in the Messiah. The community is still known for presenting the Messiah every year. Mom was the church pianist for 50 years, both at Bluff Creek and at the Ashland Church of God. My mother loved music. All seven of her children took piano lessons. She must have struggled to get those boys to practice.

Florence met Paul Harden before he was inducted into the Army. Paul was stationed at San Antonio, Texas. When the war was over, his parents, Charles and Agnes, took Florence and went to San Antonio. Paul and Florence were married Nov. 20, 1919. They went to Colorado Springs for their honeymoon. They went by car, all on dirt roads with no highway system. Mom told me they stopped along the way to get directions. When they returned, they moved into the farmhouse in Lexington. In the next 13 years, she gave birth to seven children.

My mother was very proud of her heritage. She often talked of her grandparents who lived in Topeka. They were members of the Congregational Church, where Charles Sheldon was pastor. He was remembered for writing In His Steps. Her grandmother, Alice Ann Mather, traced her origins back to Increase and Cotton Mather. I have found that the 1850 census of Mahoning County, Ohio, lists the Mather family. (Daniel Mather, 27, Rebecca Mather, 31, Alice Ann Mather, 10, Catherine Mather, 8, Rachel Mather, 6, and Hannah Mather, 2.) According to this census, Alice Ann would have been born in 1840.

I have a book, The Mathers, Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728. I have not been able to connect Alice Ann with the new England Mathers. But it was a family understanding that we are connected.

Grandmother Harden (Agnes) and her sister Ella attended the St. Louis World Fair in 1903. Grandmother and her daughter Laura went by train to Hot Springs, Ark., to take the baths around 1915. Somewhere she came in contact with the Church of God.

Agnes, along with Nancy Pike and Lydia Fox, began taking the Gospel Trumpet and sharing the teachings. Lexington had a Methodist Church where everyone worshipped. Mother Pike was the Sunday School superintendent. In 1931, my mother found out that she was pregnant again (with my brother Ray). She was near a break down. Mom was close to her mother-in-law, Agnes. That summer, Dad was convinced to take Mom to Colorado for a break. They returned by way of Liberal, where the Church of God was conducting a Camp Meeting. Mom stayed for the Camp Meeting with Agnes. There, she experienced transformation. It was a new beginning. Ray was born in December, and 16 months later, I was born.

Mom was so convinced in her new experience that she went to the Methodist preacher in Protection and told him to remove her name from the membership roll. She testified to her new faith. (Methodists don’t like to drop members; they were used to transferring members.) The Church of God message was spreading rapidly. Services were being held in Protection. Nellie Fields, later Snowden, held a revival in a storefront in Ashland. The people in Lexington were stirring the religious stew. Mother Nancy Pike took her Sunday School out of the Methodist church and began services at the Coyote School. The Methodist preacher became so angry that he said of the Methodist church building in Lexington, “I would rather see the church burn down than for the Church of God people to get it.”

That spring, lightning struck the church, and it burned to the ground. Ray and I watched the church burning while standing in the field north of the house (nearly a mile away). Duane dropped a barrel of water on his toe trying to stop the flames.

In 1939, Mother Nancy Pike and Aunt Lydia Fox led the people to build a church. I was at the dedication. A picture of the services can be found at the Ashland Museum.

Dad bought a house in Ashland in 1944 so that Ray and I could go to school. We went back to the farm on the weekends and for the summer. We continued driving to Lexington to attend church. Mom started prayer meetings in our home in 1947. In 1948, Bill Swagarty moved to Ashland to begin a church. We started worshipping at the Christian Camp south of town that fall.

That winter, Duane began building our new church. He and Bob were in the interlocking concrete block business. The blocks were used in the new building. My dad knew that he would be responsible for raising the money for the church building. It was to cost $12,000. He said, “I’ll give $5,000. He expected the congregation to raise $2,000, and he went to Charley Pike and asked him to donate $5,000. (Charley was the son of Mother Nancy Pike and had grown up in the Lexington community.) Charley said he couldn’t afford it. Dad was angry because he knew he could afford it.

A month later, Charley Pike sold some cattle to a man in Texas. Cattle trailers came for the cattle on Saturday, and the man gave Charley a check for $16,000. When Charley went to the bank on Monday, he found that the check was no good. The cattle disappeared, and Charley was out $16,000.

Dad always said, “It would have been cheaper to have given the $5,000. It pays to give God his share.” Dad came up with the other $5,000.”

Memories from Uncle Dan

Sorry it's been a while since I've posted, but luckily I just got a package from Uncle Dan, living the sweet life down in Palmetto Bay, Florida, where is retired from his ministry. He had some really interesting stories to tell. I never knew he had Perthes Disease, but that is because he had fully recovered and doesn't use the crutches shown in this photo that he sent me.

Tomorrow, I will post more memories he had of his mother, Florence Harden. Here is the first part of what he wrote:


“I was born in the Lexington house. The doctor came out from Protection and I was delivered in the middle bedroom downstairs. I was the seventh child, the sixth son, of Paul and Florence Bard Harden. Since my mother did not know what to name me, she decided to name me for both of my grandfathers: Charles Harden and Daniel Bard. Thus I grew up as Danny. There was already a Charles (Coates) in the family, so I was known for my middle name.

When I was four, my mother noticed that I had a limp. She took me to Dr. Burkett. He examined me and diagnosed me with Perthes since he had a previous patient with that disease. But to be sure he sent me to Kansas City. Dr. Frank Dickson in KC agreed with the diagnosis, and I was placed in a cast, my shoe built up, and I was given a pair of crutches to walk on. That spring, a Church of God preacher by the name of Brinkman was holding revival services in Southwest Kansas. He was called to our home where I was anointed and prayed for. After the cast was removed, I showed no signs of a limp.

When my mother did not return to Dr. Burkett, he called her and said, “If you do not follow my instructions for Danny, I will not be your doctor.” My parents then started receiving medical care from Wichita. Dad was in the “trucking” business, and so mom would ride up in the truck to see the doctor in Wichita.

My mother always testified to my healing. My own memory was primarily what I had been told. However in 1978, I received confirmation of the miracle. I had come home to see my parents. Dad told me that Uncle Clarence was dying and he asked me if I would like to see him before I returned to Arkansas. Clarence was a patient at the Ashland hospital. When we went into the room, who should be there but Dr. Burkett. He was then in his 90s.

When my dad introduced me to the doctor, he said, “Paul, I know all of your boys, but I don’t remember Dan.” Then, looking me over, he said, “You aren’t the boy that was crippled, are you?” (Remember, this was 40 years later.)

I replied, “Yes, I am.”

He asked, “Do you ever have a problem?”

“NO,” I said.

He then replied, “Remarkable.”

It was then confirmed to me that, indeed, God had been gracious in healing me.

All seven of us kids slept upstairs in the Lexington house. Frances slept in the northeast bedroom. Duane, Willis, Bob and Lloyd were in the large southeast bedroom. Ray and I slept in the southwest bedroom. The only heat in the house was a big stove in the dining room. The living room was shut off. We slept in blanket sheets with heated bricks, wrapped in towels and placed at our feet. One year, Ray and I were fighting and one of us went through the bedroom window. It was terribly cold, but we had to sleep in the room until the window was fixed.

When I was six, we had a nice snow that covered everything. Ray and I were playing out north of the house where the sewer was located. Ray pointed to a depression and said, “That’s the sewer.” I disagreed, so he dared me to run across it. I did, and I fell into the sewer. Thankfully, it was not a deep sewer and the water was not too high. I remember my mother reaching down into the sewer and pulling me out. I was bathed in a wash tub and placed with my feet in the oven. We had a large wood-burning range in the kitchen.

We attended school at Lexington. Frances had married and the older boys were in high school at Protection. I understand that when they were in grade school, they rode in a buggy to school. The horse was kept in the little barn that was located on the school property. When I was in the fourth grade, Dad bought an old gray mare for Ray and me to ride to school. Since Ray was the elder, he got to ride in the saddle. Every day, I managed to get thrown off that horse. I was never a cowboy. When people ask why I left Kansas, I say, “I never learned to ride a horse, and I got chased out of Dodge.”

When Frances graduated from high school, she went to Dodge City to attend a business college. She and Junior eloped, and my parents did not find out about it until Christmas.

In January, my mother had a wedding shower for Frances at the house. It was a large party of women, and my mother did her best to make it nice. Unbeknownst to her, Duane and Willis had gone hunting and had killed quite a number of skunks, raccoons and other small animals. They had skinned them down by the creek, but they brought the hides back and attached them to boards so they would dry. (I believe they got a dollar a pelt.) When the hides were hung in the shed south of the shop, they produced a strong aroma right when the party was in full swing. I don’t think they were properly disciplined, but I remember my mother was extremely upset. She was already upset with my sister.

We raised pigs, and there were a couple of hog houses, one near the shop and another back near the field. One day, Ray and I started tearing the wood shingles off the hog house near the field. We had a lot of fun, but when Granddad Harden (Charlie) saw it, he was not amused. Dad was humiliated and he told his father that he had just raised a bunch of hoodlums. We never got a whipping for that.

We didn’t get toys for Christmas. We improvised for toys, but I do remember getting a set of Lincoln Logs, which I loved. We also had tinker toys, marbles and jacks. On cold or rainy days we played Monopoly, Chinese checkers and jacks. I remember that Granddad Harden gave each of us a silver dollar for Christmas. It was our most memorable gift. I saved mine up, and when Dad bought our house in Ashland in 1944, I saw a World Atlas at Ashcraft’s. I spent my five silver dollars for the Atlas. I still own it. That atlas showed all the ally and all the axis countries. It had all the military insignias.

Granddad Harden died in April 1945, just before VE Day. I remember Aunt Sue, his older sister, came for the funeral and stayed with us for a month. Aunt Sue had married Lewis, one of the original cowboys at the Weeks Ranch. He used to drive the cattle to Dodge for the market.

In the summertime, we moved our beds out into the yard to sleep. It was too hot in the house. Mom and Dad had their bed up on the front porch, but I remember sleeping in the yard and looking up in the sky and seeing the stars. When I return to Kansas, I always try to take one night and get out of town so I can see the stars. I spent my first 13 years growing up in that wonderful house that has been a home for five generations of Hardens.”

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(I never knew that Aunt Frances had eloped with Junior, but I guess it worked out.)