Ironton Sililoquy

Herald Dispatch –October 29,1965

Submitted by: Robert Kingrey

Tree experts are removing two large 80- foot poplar trees at the sidewalk curb in front of the Elks Home on Park Avenue. There are no records of how old the trees are, but it is everybody’s guess that the trees were there when the courthouse square was laid out in 1852, just across the street from the trees.

If the twin trees could speak, what stories they would tell. They would have exciting memories of the courthouse fire, March 22, 1875, when the belfry and the court bell fell about one o’clock in the morning. They could tell of that dark night on January 20, 1882, when a sister tree in the court yard, just across the street, she tears in shame as one of her limbs was used for a rope to hang a man by his neck until he was dead, as a mad mob broke into the jail and took a prisoner charged with murder, and strung him up.

Those trees growing where they did provided shade for the Nixon family shortly after the courthouse was built 113 years ago. Mr. Nixon came to Ironton in 1850 and opened a saddlery shop at Third and Railroad, now the Harmon Clothing location, and later moved to Center Street, now the Klein soda shop. I was a kid living next door to the Nixon home the year I started to the first grade at school.

On Halloween when the boys went out to ticktack and soap windows, mother saw us in the neighbor’s yard and called us in. The nice old lady we were annoying was Mr. Nixon’s mother and she was 98 and wore a wool shawl and fascinator when the weather was cold.

Mr. Nixon was a young man of 70 and the first person we kids, who sat on the fence in the back yard to watch, saw who could take his teeth out and put them back. He brushed after every meal without having to be reminded by a television program about 37 percent fewer cavities. Mr. Nixon, with tin cup and toothbrush in hand, went to the cistern and removed his denture, which was amusing to us kids who often got a reserved seat on the fence.

Strange what memories are recalled by the cutting down of old trees under which we saw ox carts with pig iron from old Helca Furnace pass on a cool autumn day. Since this is a story about the falling of a couple of trees, may we say that near those old trees during the gay 90’s were five apple trees, before the Elks Home was built.. Three in the Nixon yard and two in the yard where I played and that’s why these paragraphs about yesterday’s day’s poplar tree cutting by the Bartlett experts, which held up traffic, starts by calling ‘em "sentimental trees".