Uncle Archie

My maternal grandfather was always proud that his family had been in this country almost since the Pilgrims. In fact, they came over from England and settled in the Salem, MA area about 10 years after the landing at Plymouth Rock. A framed certificate hung on his wall proclaiming his membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, through his descent from one Peter Dolliver. He regaled us with stories of life on the frontier during the early Indian wars when one of his forefathers, caught outside in a raid, was brought down on is doorstep when a tomahawk cleaved his skull. The stories often sounded like he was actually there. The stories of this era would always end by him telling us that we were also descended from the last man hanged for horse thievery in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Other stories included an uncle, a Wells Fargo man, who was killed during a train robbery. His widow and child, my grandfather’s cousin, had come back east after the tragic event, but later had returned to Colorado.
His own grandfather, one William Augustus Wright, owned a trading company which probably acted as middlemen, bringing goods from not only the US but the Carribbean to England where he had a partner in one Sir Francis Vernon, whence came my grandfather’s middle name, or so the story goes. My grandfather, Frank Vernon, graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1912, and after refusing a lieutenancy in the Philippine Constabulary, took a job as a civil engineer in Jamaica with the United Fruit Company.
In those days, there were no docking facilities in Kingston, and passengers were brought to shore in rowboats, propelled by native water men. As he and his trunk were safely aboard, the old man, about his father’s age, rowing the boat remarked about my grandfather’s name on his luggage. “That’s my name too,” he said.
“And what would your name be, then?” he asked to be polite.
“William Augustus Wright.”
Strangely, my grandfather’s stories, although he was fascinated with the Civil War, never included any relatives of his own. The family was wealthy enough for any male at the time to avoid service, and perhaps that’s what they did.
These stories left me, at the time, almost resentful that my father’s side of the family seemingly had no one, who participated in the great events of our nation’s history, as his father had arrived here in 1902, and having two children at the time, was exempt from service in World War I.
But then, as he grew older, and I had traveled back to Ireland to meet his family, Grand father Millar told me of his Uncle Archie. Uncle Archie arrived in the US at the time of the Civil War and was either drafted, enlisted or paid as a substitute to enlist in the Union Army, and as my grandfather told it, a cavalry regiment, as he was a superior horseman. Frustratingly, he knew little, if anything about his service, save that at the end of the war, he was suffering severely from rheumatism and being heartily sick of the United States, returned home. All he could remember was peeking into a trunk, when his uncle was an old man, and seeing a sword and a “peaked blue cap.”
Sadly only one of his sisters in Ireland had any first hand recollection of him, the others being too young to remember him when he died. They did remember a long lost sword and produced a picture of a handsome, self assured looking gentleman, and told me that local lore said that he was an avid bird hunter as well as horseman, and that, rather than hunt on foot, using a dog to flush his prey, he would gallop across the fields with the barrel of a shotgun resting between the ears of the horse. The poor animal must have suffered chronic headaches after a day of killing grouse. How much of this is true, I don’t know. What has fascinated me over the years, was that here was a man who returned to his native home after finding that the land of promise was not what he expected or even wanted to be a part of. It has never been part of what we were taught in school.