The McWards had crossed the Atlantic from Donegal in the mid-nineteenth century, when Robert McWard left Ireland for the American Midwest. His story and that of his Irish forebears belong to the family's beginnings; this chapter picks up the line as it takes root in the black prairie soil of central Illinois, joins itself to the long-settled Lamb family through marriage, and becomes, in the fullest sense, an American family centered on Christian County and the town of Taylorville.
The Lamb Line
Long before the McWards reached Illinois, the Lambs had been moving steadily westward across the growing nation. Their American story began in Pennsylvania with Longshore Lamb, born in 1748 in Bucks County, who married Sarah Lee on 30 October 1779. Their life together carried them from the Northeast to Kentucky, where Longshore died in 1825 in Caldwell County.
From Kentucky and South Carolina the family pressed on toward the Illinois prairie. Martin Lamb, born in 1798 in Union, South Carolina, married Mary Gibson McElroy on 17 November 1819 and eventually settled in Christian County, Illinois, where he died on 12 November 1860. John M. Lamb, born in 1820 in Caldwell County, Kentucky, married Nancy Scott on 19 March 1839 and later made his home in Nevada, Livingston County, Illinois.
It was John M. Lamb's son Oscar who carried the line forward into the family of this chapter. Born about 1842 in Caldwell County, Kentucky, in the wooded, rolling country of the western part of that state, Oscar was still a boy when the pull of cheaper, flatter, more fertile land drew his parents north across the Ohio River into the prairies of central Illinois. The 1850 federal census found the family in Sangamon County, where young Oscar, about eight years old, grew up amid the daily labors of a farming household — his schooling, such as it was, fitted around the demands of planting and harvest. By 1860 they had moved southeast into Christian County, whose black prairie soil was among the richest in the state, and it was there that the central events of Oscar's short life would unfold.
On 13 December 1866, in Christian County, Oscar Lamb married Margaret Adeline Phenix. The Civil War had ended only the year before, and for young couples across Illinois the late 1860s were a season of rebuilding and beginning again. Margaret had come of age in the same prairie counties. Born about 1848 in Illinois to John T. Phenix and C. A. Clemens, she first appears clearly in Sangamon County in 1860, a girl of roughly twelve living in the county that surrounded Springfield. She was about eighteen when she married Oscar, and the move to Christian County placed her in the farming district where she would spend the remainder of her documented life.
Oscar and Margaret had at least two daughters, Luella L. Lamb and Annie Lamb. But Oscar's life was cut short: he died around 1878 in Illinois, a young man of some thirty-six years, the circumstances of his death and the place of his burial both unrecorded. His passing left Margaret a widow with young daughters. By 22 January 1879 she had married again, in Christian County, to Thomas T. Jones, with whom she had further children — Thomas and Frank — and her daughter Annie would carry the Jones surname into her own identity, a sign of how fully the blended household came together.
Margaret's life after her first marriage was one of remarkable rootedness. She appears in Christian County across four decades of census enumerations: at Ricks in 1880, at Palmer in 1900, and in Bear Creek Township in 1910, by then in her early sixties and more than forty years settled in the county. After the 1910 census her trail falls silent; the date and place of her death are not recorded.
Luella Lamb and R. J. McWard
Luella L. Lamb, Oscar and Margaret's elder daughter, was born on 14 November 1868 on a farm east of Palmer, in the rolling prairie country of Christian County. By 1880 the family was enumerated at Ricks, where she grew up amid the daily labors of a farm household — a life measured by the seasons, with schooling fitted around the demands of the land. Her half-brothers Frank and Thomas Jones would eventually scatter westward, Frank to Los Angeles and Thomas to Clinton, Iowa, but Luella would never leave the county of her birth.
On 4 May 1887, at the age of eighteen, Luella married Robert John McWard in Christian County. It was a union that joined the westering Lamb line to the Irish-descended McWards, and it would endure for more than half a century.
Robert John McWard — known throughout his life as "R. J." — was born on 12 June 1866 near Pawnee, in Sangamon County, the son of the immigrant Robert McWard and Margaret McIntosh. His father had come from Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century and settled to farm in the rich, level country of central Illinois. Young R. J. grew up in this world of new-broken farmland and immigrant striving; by 1870 the family was still recorded at Pawnee, and by 1880 they had moved to Ricks, in Christian County, the county that would remain his home for the whole of his life. He was twenty when he married Luella, who was eighteen.
The early years of their marriage were spent in the rural townships of Christian County. R. J. farmed first in Greenwood Township, where the census of 1900 records the household, until 1906. By 1910 and 1911 the family was living in Bear Creek Township, just north of Palmer, where R. J. owned eighty acres. These were years of steady, unremarkable labor — raising crops, raising children, and building the modest security that would eventually allow a move to town.
R. J.'s working life traced the arc of a farmer who became a businessman. In 1906 he kept a grocery store in the firm of McWard & Bradley. His restless commercial instincts showed early: in February 1909 he and his partner James Bradley traded their entire stock of groceries and hardware for a 160-acre farm near Winfield, Kansas. But it was in Palmer that he found his true calling, opening a farm machinery store there in 1907, north of the bank, and operating it through 1915. He was also one of the organizers of the Palmer State Bank, and served as its president at his death.
In 1915 the family's circumstances changed with a move to Taylorville, the county seat, where R. J. organized the R. J. McWard Implement Company — the enterprise that would define the second half of his life. The shift from farm to town, and from farming to trade, was a common arc for successful rural families: a man who had worked the land turning instead to serving those who still did, selling the plows, harrows, and machinery on which the surrounding countryside depended. The Taylorville store opened in an old church building on Walnut Street and later moved to East Main Street, standing at 213 East Main by the time of his death. The firm handled the McCormick-Deering line from its beginning until 1934, then took on the Allis-Chalmers and Case agencies. His son Elmer joined the firm in 1916 and his son Alpha about 1924, making it a true family concern, and around 1923 R. J. formed a partnership with Arch Akers.
His business dealings extended beyond the store. In December 1922 he bought the W. W. Poor land north of Taylorville at a trustee sale for $236 an acre, purchasing it to protect a judgment he held. His life was not without its trials: in April 1917 he contracted smallpox and was quarantined, a serious matter in the days before the disease was conquered.
As the wife of an implement dealer, Luella took her place in the social and commercial life of Taylorville, and by 1920 and again in 1930 the household was firmly established there. The family made its home at 115 West Vine Street. Luella was a member of the Christian Church of Taylorville, where friendship, mutual aid, and the marking of life's passages all centered.
The McWard marriage produced four children, shaped by the fortunes and losses common to their era. A daughter, Fannie, died at the age of eleven, a loss of the kind that shadowed nearly every family of the age. Three sons grew to adulthood: Elmer Richard, Alpha Everett, and Lester Price McWard. Around Luella grew a network of grandchildren — Gail, Robert, and Lester Jr. among them — the widening branches of a family that had begun on a farm east of Palmer and now had its center in town.
Luella's final decade was marked by declining health; she had been failing for some ten years, and was confined to bed for six weeks before the end. She died at one o'clock in the morning on 15 September 1938 at her home on West Vine Street, aged sixty-nine. Her funeral was held on the afternoon of 17 September at the Christian Church in Taylorville, with the pastor, the Rev. Robert E. Henry, officiating. Her grandsons Robert and Gail McWard served as pallbearers alongside John, Howard, and Joseph McWard and Marvin Potts, while a group of younger women bore the flowers. She was laid to rest at Oak Hill Cemetery in Taylorville, in the county where she had been born, married, raised her family, and lived every year of her life.
R. J. was a widower for the last dozen years of his life. He made his home in Taylorville for its last thirty-five years, living at the corner of Washington and Vine Streets in 1917 and at 115 West Vine Street by 1938, and the censuses of 1920, 1930, 1935, 1940, and 1950 all find him settled in the town. He was a member of the First Presbyterian Church. Ill health forced his retirement from the affairs of the firm about 1948, after more than four decades in the machinery trade. In his final years he sought relief from the Illinois winters in the warmth of Arizona, and it was on his return from one such winter that he was injured in a car accident in 1950. After a long illness he died at 11:25 on the night of 7 August 1950 at St. Vincent's Hospital in Taylorville, aged eighty-four. His funeral was held on the afternoon of 10 August at the Chesnut-Pearce and Connolly funeral home, with the Rev. Ernest Harbaugh of the First Presbyterian Church officiating, and his pallbearers were six of his nephews — Howard, Allen, John, James, Raymond, and Donald McWard. He was buried beside Luella at Oak Hill Cemetery in Taylorville. At his death he was survived by four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
A Brother on the Land
R. J. was not the only McWard of his generation to make a life in Christian County. His brother Richard D. McWard grew up a farm boy on the same prairies, born on 14 January 1870 at Pawnee, a son of Robert McWard and Margaret McIntosh. His early years passed on his parents' farms in the Pawnee and Morrisonville districts.
In 1904 Richard married Rose Agatha Cashen, daughter of Peter A. and Ellen Kelley Cashen, at St. Louis, Missouri. The couple set out for northeastern Oklahoma, farming near Vinita in Craig County, where their first three children were born between 1904 and January 1908. Their time on the frontier ended in January 1908, when the whole of their holding on the Frank Roper farm — seven teams of horses and mules, cattle, hogs, machinery, and household goods — was cried at public auction, the ladies of the Ottawa Aid Society furnishing the dinner. That spring, with the sickness of Richard's father, the family returned to Illinois.
Back home, Richard took up the McWard home place four miles east of Morrisonville, where he and Rose raised a family that would ultimately number ten children. The Monegan elementary school stood just across the corner from their door, and every child went on to graduate from Morrisonville High School. In an age before school buses, several of the young McWards rode to their lessons in a buggy pulled by "Old Milt," a faithful horse said to have traveled miles enough to circle the globe. Not all the children survived: an eleven-month-old son died of bronchial pneumonia in June 1921 and was buried from St. Maurice church, with interment at Morrisonville cemetery. The family's ties remained close — six of Richard's sons bore the pall at R. J.'s funeral in 1950. Richard himself lived his later years at Taylorville and died at Morrisonville on 4 September 1955, at the age of eighty-five. He was buried at Taylorville.
The Sons of R. J. and Luella
Of R. J. and Luella's three surviving sons, two followed paths that kept them within sight of the home county, though their lives diverged from the settled prosperity of their parents.
Alpha Everett McWard was born on 27 February 1892 in the countryside near Morrisonville. Known as "Alvy" in his youth and "A. E." in later years, he lived out the whole of his seventy-nine years in and around Taylorville. The First World War took him no farther than Camp Taylor, Kentucky, where he served in the field artillery and rose to corporal; his father visited him there in July 1918, and he returned home, discharged, on 11 January 1919. On 30 June 1921 he married Marie Lupton at the Catholic rectory in Taylorville, the Rev. J. J. Corcoran officiating. Marie, a lifelong resident and for several years one of the county's most successful teachers, was a daughter of C. K. Lupton. The couple settled on his farm ten miles south of Taylorville, but the marriage was dissolved in June 1944, Marie being granted a decree on a charge of desertion; there were no children.
Alpha's working life was restless and varied — farmer, Taylorville night policeman, county deputy sheriff, car salesman, and fifteen years with the R. J. McWard Implement Company, with a stretch of later life spent as a laborer. His record was marked by mishap: a 1924 fistfight at police headquarters that cost him his badge, a 1933 fall from his race horse Babe on West Main Street that fractured his skull, and several later collisions and citations. A member of Davis Memorial Christian Church, he died on the morning of 27 January 1972 at St. Vincent Memorial Hospital, having been a patient since the 18th, and was buried at Camp Butler National Cemetery in Springfield. His brother Lester survived him.
Lester Price McWard, the youngest of the sons, was born on 1 September 1900 at Palmer. His path diverged most sharply of all from the family's respectable prosperity; remembered within the family as its "black sheep," a man whose name and his bottle were spoken of in the same breath, he seems to have lived at some distance from the settled lives of his kin. He went into the coal mines as a young man, working at Peabody Mine No. 58 in the 1920s, where in September 1922 the bones of his right hand were broken when a car door fell on it. Later he became a locomotive engineer for the Chicago and Illinois Midland Railroad, from which he eventually retired — though not before breaking several toes from a falling connecting knuckle in the railway shops in 1939. Beyond his labor, he was a well-known figure in local baseball, elected president of the Illini Baseball League in 1933. On 1 July 1924 Lester married Mary Anne Mallonee at the Christian church in Taylorville, the Rev. L. G. Huff officiating, and two sons, Darrell and James Lester, were born to them. Mary died in 1969; Lester followed on 6 July 1973, and was buried at Taylorville.
The Next Generation
The eldest of R. J. and Luella's sons, Elmer Richard McWard, was born into this Christian County family and grew up a child of Palmer and Taylorville in the years when his father was building the implement business. He would come of age to join that business in 1916, and in time to serve the county as sheriff and treasurer — living, during those years, in the courthouse itself, with the jail sharing the same building and his wife preparing meals sent upstairs to the prisoners by dumbwaiter. But those chapters of his public life, and his own marriage, lay still ahead. In the family of R. J. and Luella McWard, rooted at last in the black soil of Christian County, Elmer Richard stood as the next generation.