For well over a century the McWard, Hobson, and Logan families lived out their lives in Taylorville, the seat of Christian County in central Illinois — a town that began as a raw prairie settlement, matured into a prosperous farm center, and boomed into a coal town with all the wealth and strife that coal brought. It was a county-seat town of courthouses and church steeples, with a central square at its heart, where the same families served across the public offices for decades and where everyone seemed to know everyone else. In the marriage of Elmer Richard McWard and Helen Hobson, two of these long-settled lines came together, binding the McWard name to the Hobson-Logan union in a household at the very center of the county's civic life.
Two Lines Converge
Elmer Richard McWard was born on 19 December 1887 at Litchfield, in Montgomery County, Illinois, the eldest son of Robert John McWard and Luella L. Lamb. He was reared in the farming country east of Morrisonville, in Greenwood and later Bear Creek Township, where the McWard name was already established. Like many capable young men of his generation and place, his first path into public life ran through the schoolroom — he taught school in Johnson Township before turning to the more figured work of finance and commerce.
Helen Hobson came from an old Taylorville family. She was born on a Sunday morning in January 1897, a ten-pound infant who arrived at six o'clock, the eldest child of Truman E. Hobson and Zua Ella (Logan) Hobson. The Hobsons lived on West Market Street, in a home substantial enough to host a wedding and, in later years, to shelter three generations under one roof. As the eldest of the Hobson children, Helen carried the particular weight and privilege of that position — the first to be doted upon, the first to test her parents' expectations. That she tested them dramatically is a matter of record: in the summer of 1916, at the age of nineteen, she was at the center of a scandal that gripped the town when her father stabbed her sweetheart Virgil Merritt three times after she and Merritt returned from an attempted elopement. In the end she did not marry Merritt, and whatever passed between father and daughter after that violent evening, the reconciliation came quickly. Less than a year later she would be married from her parents' own home.
A Marriage and a Household
On the evening of 9 May 1917, Helen married Elmer R. McWard at the home of her parents on West Market Street. Elmer was ten years her senior and a man destined for public life. The Reverend Mr. Rounds, pastor of the Christian church, performed the ceremony before twenty guests, all immediate family, and Mrs. Tony Weitzel, a cousin of the bride's mother, played the wedding march. The couple left at midnight for a honeymoon in Chicago and at first made their home with the bridegroom's parents.
The marriage bound Helen to the civic and political life of the town in which she had grown up, and Elmer's career unfolded steadily through the years that followed. In 1912 he had been among those present at the opening of the Palmer State Bank, serving as a cashier and sitting on its board of directors. The bank held a distinguished place in local memory — the oldest state bank in Christian County, the only one that did not close during the Depression, and one that endured until 2006. Elmer served several years as its cashier and later as its president. In 1916 he left the bank to join his father in the family firm, R. J. McWard and Company, dealers in farm implements. Through the late 1920s and into the 1930s he worked at the McWard Implement Company in Taylorville, where the family had settled after moving from Palmer in 1915.
His public career advanced with evident competence. He served twelve years as assistant supervisor of Taylorville Township, and on 17 April 1941 was elected chairman of the Christian County board of supervisors — a choice made unanimous. A Democrat, he presided over a board that then stood fourteen Democrats to nine Republicans. In February 1942 the board created a Christian County defense council with him as its chairman, reflecting the wartime responsibilities that fell on county government in those years. He served as county treasurer from 1942 to 1946, keeping the county on a cash basis, owing nothing; under his stewardship the county tax rate was reduced to 17½ cents in 1944 and again to 15 cents in 1945. Christian was among the first counties to make use of the Scavenger act for properties long delinquent in their taxes, selling about a thousand such properties in 1944 for roughly $25,000, with ninety percent of those owners paying their taxes the following year. In January 1946 he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for sheriff, and he served as sheriff of Christian County from 1946 to 1950.
Meals by Dumbwaiter
The office of sheriff carried with it an unusual domestic arrangement, one preserved in the family's memory. The sheriff's office and the county jail were housed in the courthouse on the town square, and Elmer and Helen lived there, at 301 West Franklin Street, alongside the inmates — a fact the 1950 census recorded plainly. A grandson who spent time there recalled the daily rhythms of the place: food prepared by Helen and sent up to the prisoners on the top floor by dumbwaiter, and the four-cell jail overseen by a single deputy named George. He remembered too a jailbreak, when prisoners overcame the jailer and struck him on the head; deputies arrived quickly, and Helen and her grandson were taken by squad car up to the courthouse office while the situation was contained — the men unable to escape because the door could only be unlocked from within. The sheriff's home and jail were torn down in the 1960s.
Through all these years, Helen's life was one of remarkable geographic constancy. From the census of 1900 through those of 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950, she was recorded in Taylorville at every turn. As the wife of a public official, she knew the rhythms of a county-seat family — the visibility that came with her husband's offices, the social obligations, and the steady round of church and civic life that shaped the town's respectable households. The family lived at 314 West Poplar Street in the 1930s and later at 713 West Market Street by 1946. When her mother, Zua, died in August 1940, Helen and Elmer moved in with her widowed father, Truman, remaining with him until his own death in July 1943. It was a return, in a sense, to the family home and to the man whose knife had once flashed on East Palmer Street — a quiet reminder of how thoroughly the breach of 1916 had closed. In caring for her aging father, Helen fulfilled the role of the eldest daughter to its end.
Elmer himself was a member of the Morrisonville Masonic Lodge, the Taylorville Lions Club, and the Presbyterian Church.
The Crash and the Sheriff's Death
On the afternoon of 12 March 1950, Elmer was seriously injured in a head-on collision about twenty-five miles from Little Rock, Arkansas. The family had set out two weeks earlier to bring his father, R. J. McWard, home from a winter spent in Arizona. Helen was driving; when another car cut out of its lane to pass, it struck them head-on and demolished the McWard automobile. Elmer and his father were both hospitalized at Little Rock, the elder man believed to have suffered a broken vertebra. Helen sustained cracked ribs and bruises, while their grandson Robert Gail McWard escaped unhurt.
Elmer never fully recovered his health. After an illness of several months, and after being removed to the hospital from his home on West Market Street the previous Thursday, he died at half past eleven on the morning of 20 July 1952, at St. Vincent's Hospital in Taylorville, aged sixty-four. He was remembered in the local press as one of the county's most prominent citizens, long active in Democratic politics. Services were held at two o'clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, 22 July, at the Chesnut-Pearce and Connolly funeral home, with the Reverend Ernest Harbaugh, pastor of the Presbyterian Church, officiating. He was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Taylorville, leaving to Helen an estate of $40,000 in personal property and $30,000 in real estate.
Elmer's death left Helen a widow at fifty-five. By 1962 she was living at the Hotel Frisina in Taylorville, a common arrangement for a widow of means in a small city of that era, freed from the upkeep of a household and settled among the amenities of a downtown hotel. Helen Hobson died on 20 August 1975 in Taylorville, the town of her birth, at the age of seventy-eight, and was buried there the same year. Her life had traced a full circle within the boundaries of a single Illinois town: born there on a Sunday morning, married there, widowed there, and laid to rest there at last.
The Sons
Two sons were born to Elmer and Helen, both of whom rose in the professions and served their country in wartime. The elder, Gail Ellsworth McWard, became a circuit judge; the younger, Robert Darrel McWard, became a lawyer. Elmer's brothers, Lester P. and Alpha E. McWard, also made their homes in Taylorville.
Gail Ellsworth McWard was born on 19 December 1917 in Taylorville, and grew up entirely within the rhythms of the county-seat town, attending its elementary and high schools. It was on the football field that he first made his name. A standout lineman at Taylorville High School under coach Harold Johnson, he carried his athletic gifts to Illinois College in nearby Jacksonville, where he became a four-year fixture on the line and earned all-conference honors in the Little Nineteen for three seasons. He was named co-captain of the 1938 team and, in 1937, received a gold football from the college's board of athletic control. Yet he was no mere athlete: he served as president of his junior class, president of the "I" club of college lettermen, and president of the Sigma Pi literary society.
In the summer of 1939, Taylorville mounted a statewide petition drive to send him to the Chicago Tribune's College All-Star Game. Boy Scout troops circulated ballots, college girls staffed booths in the business district, and by late July the tally for Gail McWard had climbed past fifty thousand votes. In late June the Chicago Bears had signed the twenty-one-year-old guard to a contract, and central Illinois newspapers cooperated with the Tribune to boom him for a place on the collegiate all-star squad. Though he polled a great many votes, he did not win a berth on the team, and instead accepted a post as assistant to Coach Alf Lamb at Illinois College that autumn.
The war soon redirected his path. McWard entered the U.S. Army Signal Corps, training at Scott Field in Belleville and Camp Crowder, Missouri, before shipping overseas. For roughly two years he was stationed at Asmara, Eritrea, decoding war messages alongside the British signal corps in North Africa — a posting so remote that in August 1942 his parents went two months without word from him. After a stint in Cairo, he returned home on furlough in June 1944 to attend officers candidate school in New Jersey, rising to second lieutenant. While stationed at Camp Crowder he met Sara Kathryn Sauter of Oswego, Kansas, then employed as a secretary in the state's attorney's office at Parsons, and the two were married on 21 July 1945 at the First Presbyterian Church in Oswego. That December the couple survived a serious automobile accident west of Columbus, Kansas, when their car overturned several times; they escaped with only minor bruises. After settling briefly in Joplin, Missouri, they returned to Taylorville.
Back home, McWard earned his law degree from Lincoln College of Law and entered private practice alongside his brother Robert. He served as a city alderman and as city attorney for Taylorville before his election as county judge in 1958. In 1962 he sought re-election, and in time he ascended to the circuit bench of the Fourth Judicial Circuit, where he sat for twenty-one years until his retirement in December 1979. He was also a director of the Palmer Bank. A lifelong member of the First Presbyterian Church, where he served on the board of trustees, he belonged to the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Elks, Eagles, and Lions, and to the county, state, and national bar associations. He and Sara raised three daughters — Sharon, Linda, and Cynthia — at 1115 West Vine Street. Gail McWard died at St. John's Hospital in Springfield on 22 November 1985, at the age of sixty-seven. Having lived his entire life in Taylorville, he was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, survived by his wife, his three daughters, his brother Robert, and six grandchildren.
The younger son, Robert Darrel McWard, was born in 1919 and served five years as a navy pilot before taking up the law in Taylorville alongside his brother. His own marriage, and the generation of McWards that followed from it, belong to a later chapter.